Going Down for Air by Derek Sayer Charles C. Lemert

Author:Derek Sayer, Charles C. Lemert [Derek Sayer, Charles C. Lemert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594510410
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2004-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

Seconds away. King’s Cross, London, 2001.

Why do these photographs suck me in? It is the swish of a rattan cane across my own behind—a cane wielded by a feminine hand—that I dream of, not the other way around. Yet photographs of men’s backsides being caned would not, for me, have any of the attraction of these pictures. Is it just a matter of aesthetics: that perfect curvature, that sheer dimensional beauty of which Hamilton so lovingly writes? The female bottom as a signifier, in this matter, for my sex as well as her own? The dust dances in the sunbeams pouring through the windows of the library of McKean House, where I wait for an eternity in anticipation of being asked to Bend over—the cigarette smoke mingles with the steam from the showers and the dappled sunlight of an autumn afternoon, when we were very young. She sounds just like a boy.

Who can fathom the ways of a metaphor?

Signifiers float. That is why we can play with them—and they with us.

With slightly trembling hands, I buy the book. Woman, it is called. Later I discover that the last photograph in the collection is of a naked woman lying on her back in exactly the same posture as in Gustave Courbet’s Origine du monde. Her labia look for all the world like a trunk leading to the branches and foliage that are her pubic hair.

Tree of Life.

Just a woman’s genitalia. Real, symbolic, imaginary: imaginary, symbolic, real.

This one I will not leave on a railway station. Il faut confronter des idées vagues, says Jean-Luc Godard, avec des images claires.

MUM GAVE AWAY MY ROCK COLLECTION long after I had left home and such childish obsessions, I thought, behind me. I cannot blame her, though I was unaccountably miffed when I found out, years afterwards in Durham. She had passed it on to some deserving young boy who probably reminded her of me as I was then. Or maybe it was just cluttering the house, gathering dust.

Thief, thief! Baggins! We hates it for ever!

The collection was housed, as I said, in an old four-drawer document cabinet my father had filched from work. He covered the pressed cardboard with Contac, which came in rolls like wallpaper and could miraculously transform plywood into mahogany. All that was needed was faith. He had partitioned each drawer into fifteen sections, giving me space for sixty specimens in all. There was just enough room to scotchtape the name and provenance of each sample on the wooden slats that separated the compartments.

You must make sure to record exactly where each specimen was found, the Curator had impressed upon me. I was never quite sure why I should follow this scholarly obeisance, but I dutifully went through the motions.

(Bibliography?—the sole comment on my first undergraduate essay at Essex, scrawled in angry red.)

I was secretly disappointed when Grandad sent me the minerals from New Zealand, tiny slivers glued to a card, with no clue as to whence they came. Souvenirs bought in a shop, sullied by money.

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