The Senator's birthday

Screenshot from "Emanuelle in America" (D'Amato 1976)
Only one m - from the cheap Italian imitations of the prestigious Emmanuelle originals.

Breath of bale

Thoughts about porn inspired by the Porn Symposium and the examples of Different Maps, The Measures Taken, InfiniteThought, Beyond the Implode, and K-Punk

Property porn: it's hardly the property which is being degraded by the glossy photo spreads, or the cars by those revealing open bonnet shots. Pornography is an opportunity for the viewer half-consciously to degrade himself, to feel both the rush and its short-lived inadequacy. Such material naturally incites violence. Gastronomy porn provokes daydreams of plunging one's fingers in cake and cream, smothering one's face in it. It's the rage parodied in a zombie film - images of the undead messing their hands in the entrails. It's the desire behind disaster movies, symbols of Capital lasered to rubble. Some films play out these fantasies of destruction, only rarely in fact to progressive effect, while others are content with the gloss image and unobtrusively stoke the aggression and anger which make us productive. Immersing oneself in the latter, one often feels disgusting. After watching a cannibal movie one can feel strangely cleansed.

Political pornography: Sometimes by watching exploitation films the apparent chaos of political relations starts to seem a bit clearer. Some political sources seek to clarify, others provide a more dirtying thrill. The pornography of dust-covered babies exhibited like holy relics on the one hand and revisionist photo analysis on the other. Could the child have been reburied? Is the dummy merely there for effect? Nazi girl band Prussian Blue is named for the cyanide deposits not found on the walls of the 'gas chambers' in Auschwitz. The very name is a smiling denial, clean and insolent.

Violent pornography: Joe D'Amato, whose horror films are notable for their childlike honesty and fearlessness, also made a vast number of porn films. He was the first to use fibre optic technology to develop the "snatch cam" and shoot the scene from inside his actresses. In "Trap Them and Kill Them" (aka Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals 1977) women's stomachs are slit open with knives and their guts pulled out and eaten (by Vietnamese asylum seekers in need of work). D'Amato isn't afraid to light the scene so that the rubber nature of the torsos is discernible. His method is always to switch on the lights, and if what gets revealed is banal and disillusioning, so much the better. Are the snatch cam and its sister the "butt cam" actually effective in turning on the punter? D'Amato follows the lust to reveal, to possess, or to disassemble to its final absurd (cf. Absurd (D'Amato, 1981)) , unerotic conclusion. Pornography, and violent pornography in particular, often foreground the desolation which succeeds the orgasm, the shadow of impotence which threatens even the moment of triumph. In real life, rapists often lose their erections when they try to penetrate. This may, of course, lead to a substitute form of aggression. The Japanese director of "pinku eiga" Koji Wakamatsu highlights this in such films as "Violated Woman in White" (Okasareta Byakui 1967) in which a young male intruder in a nurses' home, unable to relate or respond to the girls he finds there, and traumatised by the sight of two of the girls having sex, tortures and kills them. He is incapable of physically raping them - this is the case with many of Wakamatsu's male protagonists - and engages in acts of violence in order to break through the girls' apparently sealed self-containment, in the hope - I suppose - that it might efface his impotence. The film tracks the futility of his attempts. At the conclusion of the film, he curls up in the lap of the surviving girl, surrounded by corpses, crawling up the umbilical noose into pre-natal oblivion. Wakamatsu relates this to politics, the violence of the student Left being a product of political impotence - precisely impotence, and not merely powerlessness, an impotence provoked by the sight of stacked shelves in a supermarket or cheesecake photographs in a magazine. Impotence produces impotent rage, which stops far short of liberating parody. Joe D'Amato's films often engage with political subjects - with race and with social and political corruption in "Emanuelle in America" (1976) for example - but always in the form of parody. His touch is far lighter than Wakamatsu's, but the effect can paradoxically be heavier and more desolating. D'Amato's vulgar, inscrutable eye never imposes a vision, but simply presents things in the cheapest, most direct way possible, so the world's sordidness lies helplessly on display. He reminds me of the monkey smoking a cigarette in "Trap Them and Kill Them" as it contemplates a lesbian encounter in the jungle - it's a beautiful scene, and perhaps best understood as a self-portrait of the director.

Emotional pornography: That which tries to do the dirty on emotion, or keeps the emotion in a hutch like a guinea-pig or thinks it can lead it somewhere deserted and get it to stand on a chair with a noose round its neck and kick the chair away. I figure that when Tom Baker left, Doctor Who lost the ethical heart that made it valuable, a sensibility that only Baker himself was able to safeguard, and from that time on the programme evolved into cheaply manipulative showbiz. "Black Orchid" was the story that shocked me, that final scene where the display of the book neatly softens and cleanses all emotion, the Doctor smiles, and the 'sting' before the closing credits stabs home the episode's total cynicism.

Child pornography: A pornographic view of childhood revisits "lost innocence" and tries to infuse it with dirt. If you believe The News of the World, child sex-murderer Robert Black used to like wearing a child's swimming costume, as an act of paedophilial transvestism. It's curious how all the girl bands have their songs written, filmed and choreographed for them, for the most part by men. But how strange, always to write in the persona of a young girl, for an audience of young girls... I imagine them preparing to write, assuming an imaginary mask, inhabiting the part, living in that sound world. How scared and ridiculous they might feel if all the lights were suddenly switched on and there they were lying on the bed, jammed into the clothes of a nine year old. A pop sexuality is a paedophile sexuality, maybe - the same pattern of addiction, constantly tugging the sufferer back to that perfect light, that perfect hit, the one sunlit time. And then naturally enough one resents such perfection, one would like to make it filthy. Hence something dimly remembered from childhood gets "a new adult look". I remember seeing a girl sitting on a low wall, she must have been about nine, she looked like one of the All Saints. Except she made the All Saints look ragged and old, and I suddenly realised "Oh, you're the original!"

My porn name: it brings to mind the miseries of life at the call centre.

"How many hits have you had in the past hour?"
"five... "
"seven..."
(glumly) "three..."
"ELEVEN!"
"Well done. Keep it up".

The love of dolls

There was a puppet maker in 19th century Japan who lived with one of his dolls. They were effectively man and wife, and slept, ate and spent most of their leisure hours together. He was quite devoted to her, and on the puppet maker's death, they were buried in the same coffin. I'm not sure whether this is a rather noble story, or a pathetically sad one. But the latter seems the narrower judgement. I almost envy him. One could compare him to the sort of man whose wife dies young and who himself lives into old age, refusing to remarry or to break the hold that his memories have over him. Now I spoke about this to a friend of mine once, and she thought such an attitude was more akin to self-mummification than genuine love. And I don't myself believe that there is any afterlife in which such devotion could be honoured. A dead woman cannot return love any more than a doll. Or is there any possible world in which a machine, a puppet or a picture can reciprocate love? Every boy who falls in love with a girl on a poster wonders if there might not be some nobility, some glory to be had if they light a little candle in a special shrine devoted to her. Anyone who has seen Welcome to the Dollhouse remembers the shrine that Dawn makes with candles for the singer in her brother's band. Is there any philosophical plane on which prayers to this guy - in reality, loutish, smug and indifferent to her - might be answered? Or I wonder if someone will write a book called "What Your Computer Thinks About You", in the same style as those books which discuss the feelings which our dogs and cats are supposed to have for us.

Paul van Ostaijen

Belgian poet Paul van Ostaijen (1896 - 1928) described poetry as "a game of words, anchored in the metaphysical". I feel quite determinedly that the opposite is true, and would prefer to call it an investigation with language, anchored in the material. Van Ostaijen's poetry is sorrowful and delicate, and his description of the nature of poetry has so much more charm than mine. I think of a ship's anchor lodged in a cloud.

More charm, and also more desperate need. Van Ostaijen's experience of the Great War in occupied Belgium, from out of which he wrote Feasts of Fear and Pain and Occupied City, helped give rise to his yearning for the purely lyrical, a yearning which could never really be satisfied in the everyday world, except glancingly in poetry.

My hands feel for my hands / incessantly

This is one of my favourite poems of his, from The First Book of Schmoll -

GEOLOGY

Deep seas around the island
deep blue seas surround the island
You do not know
whether the island is of the stars overhead
you do not know
whether the island is on the axis of the earth
deep seas
deep blue seas
the plummet seeks
sinking it seeks and seeking sinks
seeking its own seeking
and goes on
sinking
and goes on
seeking
deep seas
blue seas
deep blue seas
deepblue seas
sinking
seeking
the upside-down stars
doubly blue
and doubly fathomless
When will the blue plummet
in the blue seas
find the green seaweed
and the coral reef

An animal that hunts life towards an imagined peace
- a delusion in a million millenial cells -
like an animal that hunts and finds on its blind fingers
nothing but repetition of enacted action
like an animal
the sailor's plummet
sinks
If this sinking were to settle past your eyes you could not know
a greater emptiness

translated from the Dutch by James S Holmes

That's so, too

from Eastern War Time by Adrienne Rich

4

What the grown-ups can't speak of would you push
onto children? and the deadweight of Leo Frank
thirty years lynched hangs heavy
: "this is what our parents were trying to spare us"
here in America but in terrible Europe
anything was possible surely?
: "But this is the twentieth century" :
what the grown-ups can't teach children must learn
how do you teach a child what you won't believe?
how do you say unfold, my flower, shine, my star
and we are hated, being what we are?


screenshot from The House is Black by Forough Farrokhzad

Poem

It was an icy day
we buried the cat
then took her box
and set match to it

in the back yard.
Those fleas that escaped
earth and fire
died by the cold.

William Carlos Williams

There is a rat rotting under my floorboards. We levered them up and discovered droppings and scratch marks. The rat man has put down some warfarin.

I remember seeing a dead cat. I was walking along the pavement into town one winter morning and saw a trail of blood leading from the kerb to a patch of grass. The cat had been knocked down - presumably by a car - and had staggered across the pavement to die. One of its eyes was hanging out, and I was astonished by how large it was. When I saw a human eye being removed, or "enucleated" at work, we kept it in a plastic pot and it was quite small. But when one looks at a cat skull, it is interesting to see how far back the socket goes. A cat needs to react far more quickly than a human, and its eyesight is doubtless a lot sharper.

photo courtesy of Forest & Kim Starr (USGS)

Blue is the colour

The dark spot, the beautiful blue bruise on Neptune, my favourite planet. A photo from Voyager 2 in 1989.

drawing by Vija Celmins

Those not live yet
Who doubt to live again -
"Again" is of a twice
But this - is one -

The Ship beneath the Draw
Aground - is he?
Death - so - the Hyphen of the Sea -
Deep is the Schedule
Of the Disk to be -
Costumeless Consciousness -
That is he -

Emily Dickinson 1879

"Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure" wrote Oscar Wilde and when I think of that quotation, I always think of this poem, and its weird depth. What is the draw? "The act of pulling, the bending of the bow, attractive power, anything having the power to attract a crowd..." Well, the Afterlife is fairly crowded. Is that "live" pronounced as in "alive", or as in "living"? The OED doesn't help. The disk must relate to that disk of snow in the last line of "Safe in their alabaster chambers" describing the soundlessness of the point of death and the vanity of riches,

Diadems drop, and doges surrender,
Soundless as dots on a disk of snow.

The hyphen of the sea, it feels to me, is what is inescapably linked to the sea, what the sea will always naturally represent - death, or mortality absorbed in infinity. Also the literal sea in its role as hyphen, linking and sundering, with this poem like a message signalled across the ocean and broken up in the transmission.

Empire

In 1964 Andy Warhol made an 8 hour film of the Empire State Building, a continuous shot of the same static image, broken only by the need for reel changes. A one hour excerpt is included on a compilation of short films by Warhol obtainable from Raro Video in Italy or Xploited Cinema in the US. The full 8 hours was projected onto a wall in the South Bank last September, but I missed it. Watching the hour-long version, I was surprised by the amount of activity on screen - I was actually hoping for large parts of the movie that the activity would settle down and I could simply look at the image without being distracted! There are so many processing errors or flaws in the film stock that the subject of the film is as much about the nature of recording and the beauty to be found in its imperfection as it is about the contemplation of commercial or political power. And because there is in spite of all this only one scene to look at, because the star of the film never moves or changes its expression, it is all the harder for the viewer to turn from the screen - I didn't want to miss a single frame unless I missed something important. The Empire State Building glows fiercely in the night, slightly over-exposed. My feelings towards it changed continually, but for the most part it seemed baleful. For the duration of the film its energy is contained within the frame and its power is held in stasis by the camera. The constant flares and laboratory marks seem to testify to the difficulty of keeping its power within bounds - it interferes with the attempt at recording like a ghost in a recorded séance.

Happy New Year

The Holy Family

by Poussin. The tree on the left is an orange tree, which blossoms and fruits at the same time, a symbol of fertility and blossoming purity, represented ideally in the Virgin Mary.

Employment

He that is weary, let him sit.
My soul would stir
And trade in courtesies and wit,
Quitting the fur
To cold complexions needing it.

Man is no star, but a quick coal
Of mortal fire:
Who blows it not, nor doth control
A faint desire,
Lets his own ashes choke his soul.

When th' elements did for place contest
With him, whose will
Ordain'd the highest to be best;
The earth sat still,
And by the others is opressed.

Life is a business, not good cheer;
Ever in wars.
The sun still shineth there or here,
Whereas the stars
Watch an advantage to appear.

O that I were an Orange-tree,
That busy plant!
Then should I ever laden be,
And never want
Some fruit for him that dressed me.

But we are still too young or old;
The man is gone,
Before we do our wares unfold:
So we freeze on,
Until the grave increase our cold.

George Herbert, 1633

Herbert's weariest poem. The brash confidence of the opening verse is trodden down as the poem progresses till it stops dead in the frozen earth. Life is a business, or "Life is Business", as our modern ears naturally hear it, although the use of "business" to mean specifically commercial transactions does not predate the 18th century, according to the OED, and that makes obvious historical sense. It was used in Herbert's time to refer to a person's occupation or daily activity, and that might include buying and selling. However prior to the 17th century, "business" seems also to have meant "anxiety" or "source of anxiety and concern", and this sense has perhaps survived in expressions like "it's a bad business..." or "what a terrible business!" (Expressions reminiscent of an Edwardian period drama - a murder-mystery probably - but perhaps people still use them.) That sense of "business" is the earliest cited in the OED, from 950, translated in the source as the Latin solicitudinem, but by the 17th century it seems to have to have been used in a more neutral sense: serious occupation or public affairs, as opposed to having a good time, or "cheer".

Whereas the stars/Watch an advantage to appear... again, one thinks of business in the modern sense, and in fact a sense of "advantage" as commercial advantage, or "pecuniary profit" was active in the 17th century. "Another fleet... had fallen upon the Molucca islands, bringing away great advantage" (Grotius's Low-Countrey Warrs, 1665, cited in the OED)

Festive erotic screenshots

from Mario Banana 1

from Emanuelle in America

from Throw Away Your Books, Let's Go Into the Streets

Art and Engagement

I heard Harold Pinter on the radio this evening describing the necessary antagonism that theatre creates between artist and audience. Part of him despises the audience - and the audience more than reciprocate with their sadistic shuffling and coughing. But Pinter pointed out that the duty of the performers is to rise to that challenge, to meet the audience in combat and overmaster them. Certainly, it is not good to flatter them, to offer to "entertain" them. Part of the viewer is resentful of art, and jealous of its self-containment; a part of the artist wishes to twist the viewer's hand right back until it hurts. What fun! The concept of the fight, or the engagement, kicks through the "entertainment" lie and allows people to verbalise their anger when confronted by genuine art. That's good for the artist too, who should never be flattered. It's dispiriting for flatterers to hear that an artist is irritated and made uncomfortable by praise; what artists long for is a passionately-felt attack on their work, a proof that their play or their film has wounded the heart of a sensitive critic.

And my thought all gone & the vanish of the sun

I think one can only capture The Dream Songs' lurches in tone if one reads them while half-drunk. Berryman does extraordinary violence to the language, dismembers his sentences with a theatrical wave of the knife. And in their stumbling and their turning bewildered back on themselves, his poems are already remorseful, conveying a distinctive self-conscious pathos.

The surly cop lookt out at me in sleep
insect-like. Guess, who was the insect.
I'd asked him in my robe
& hospital gown in the elevator politely
why someone saw so many police around,
and without speaking he looked.

A meathead, and of course he was armed, to creep
across my nervous system some time ago wrecked.
I saw the point of Loeb
at last, to give oneself over to crime wholly,
baffle, torment, roar laughter, or without sound
attend while he is cooked

until with trembling hands hoist I my true
& legal ax, to get at the brains. I never liked brains -
it's the texture & the thought -
but I will like them now, spooning at you,
my guardian, slowly, until at length the rains
lose heart and the sun flames out.

Dream Song 95, by John Berryman

Richard Loeb, along with his accomplice Nathan Leopold, became famous in the 1920s after murdering a 14 year-old boy with a chisel in an attempt to do something "Nietzschean". He was himself only 18 at the time, and the product of a respectable middle-class family. He was later killed in gaol by another inmate. The two friends were the inspiration for Rope.

Tea Rose Hybrid

Blank limits of Art

photo by Daido Moriyama

I was once invited outside for a fight by a fan of the Dead Kennedys for suggesting that the song Police Truck might be interpreted as pro-police. It documents a scene of police brutality accompanied by a pruriently righteous guitar part. It's an early song, and the Kennedys themselves evolved a more politically constructive lyrical and musical style. From the leering aggression of Saturday Night Holocaust to the fair-minded suggestions of Stars and Stripes of Corruption ("How about more art and theatre instead of sports?") the Dead Kennedys certainly made a rational political journey. But the music was somehow neutered, and everyone prefers the early work, rage and moral nihilism notwithstanding. The Kennedys ran up against the limitations of punk, of a restricted aesthetic. Unprepared to burst their musical boundaries, they gave up the ghost and disbanded. They had no tools to advance their style without diluting it. Kurt Cobain's suicide I interpret as a musical admission of defeat, among other things. There was nowhere else for Nirvana to go without abandoning the Seattle sound entirely. Despite his political engagement, he ended up trapped in his aesthetic graveyard; improvising freely at the end of a performance, "did you really pay to listen to this shit?" he asked the audience. But by decisively abndoning his fans and truly investigating the "shit" they resented, he might have saved his art.

Perhaps there is no rational political future. Perhaps there is only continued existence and grey variations of more of the same. The films of Lucio Fulci convey this philosophy with open-eyed horror. The drab grey hell of The Beyond is a symbolic representation of the non-possibility of any fundamental change in economic or social relations. Beyond this world, suggests Fulci, is a pale waste inhabited by homeless alcoholics. We are condemned, in this world and the next, merely to feed and to wander. His hero and heroine, abruptly transfered to the afterlife, find they have become blind. There will be no redemption or change. Fulci himself, as a Catholic and an anti-fascist, shrank from the horror of this, but despite himself he was unable to film happy endings.

If religion provides only illusory comfort, and if Marxism too is an illusion, if there is no religious or secular hope, one ends, in Art, with the repetitive and destructive emptiness depicted by Fulci, or the weary estrangement of this poem by Kipling, one of his Epitaphs of the War:

SALONIKAN GRAVE

I have watched a thousand days
Push out and crawl into night
Slowly as tortoises.
Now I, too, follow these.
It is fever, and not the fight -
Time, not battle - that slays.

Rudyard Kipling

Kim Longinotto, the truth, and the human

I've just come back from a screening of the documentary Sisters in Law, by Kim Longinotto, who also directed Divorce Iranian Style. Both are filmed without commentary, and follow the stories of various women trying to seek justice for themselves within a traditional legal system. Sisters in Law was filmed in Cameroon with Florence Ayisi, and follows a number of cases - for example that of a Muslim woman called Amina, who succesfully prosecutes and divorces her husband for beating and abusing her. She was the first woman to obtain such a prosecution in her area, and she was helped by a group of Cameroonian women lawyers, prosecutors and activists. It would be fatuous to call the film inspiring, since the stories were so sad and the lives they described were so harsh, and, besides, the fight belongs to them and not to well-meaning observers. But the film concluded with the first Cameroonian woman judge introducing Amina to her legal students - most of them women - and showing to them by inspiring example, how a brave stand by a single individual could force society to change.

Kim Longinotto was present at the screening to answer questions at the end. One criticism raised was that as a Western woman filming the proceedings, she was inevitably going to be intervening herself in the world that she films, and that she couldn't pretend to be some kind of 'neutral observer'. Longinotto readily conceded this, and made quite clear that she was engaged, as a film maker, in the struggles she documented. Amina was apparently very keen for her case to be filmed, and this was clearly, in part, in order to exert pressure on the judges, who would be conscious that their decision would be made "in the eyes of the world". On the other hand, it is strange, remarked Kim Longinotto, how soon people forget that the camera is present, and Amina, on returning home from court, was asked "Were there any other women there with you?", and she replied, quite unselfconsciously, "No! Only me!" It's interesting in that respect that Longinotto uses quite a large camera, and avoids using hidden cameras, and this may paradoxically result in more natural behaviour.

The film was made without commentary, and Longinotto was also criticised for this, for not contextualising the society which she filmed... "What is the ratio of Muslims to Christians in Cameroon?" "What are the various language and ethnic divisions?" But, in truth, no amount of contextual facts will force the viewer to perceive another society with a humane sensibility. Longinotto changes the world through her films by first altering bare perceptions, by appealing to conscience. And it is only on such a base that facts have much relevance or use. I saw Divorce Iranian Style in 1998 and it was the first time I had ever seen Iranians outside the Death to America pantomimes or war reporting. And any slight knowledge I have of Iran, based on books like Roy Mottahadeh's The Mantle of the Prophet, was founded on the first shock of human recognition. Talk of airstrikes on Iran with nuclear-tipped warheads is absolutely dependent on people never seeing films like Divorce Iranian Style, or Longinotto's other Iranian documentary Runaway. One of the most popular Iranian films in recent years was a satire on the clergy, called The Lizard. It has great popular appeal, but it was only ever shown in the UK at the ICA as far as I'm aware and is only commercially available on a wretched bootleg from iranian.com. When Iranian graphic artist Marjane Satrapi visited Utah to give a reading, someone asked her "Can you see the moon from Iran?" Artists like Longinotto and Satrapi have to build on a surface of almost complete ignorance, but the question is actually a rather sweetly poetic one - and the questioner at least had the interest to attend a talk by Satrapi. When al-Jazeera interviewed Israeli politicians, I believe it was the first time many in the region had heard an Israeli speak. There are actually very few Israeli films released in the West; while its news profile is very high, its cultural - its human - profile is almost non-existent. And if that is true in the West, it is probably all the more true in the Arab world. It helps aid the process of demonization. "Where are your horns?", my Israeli colleague was asked.

Longinotto prefers to film in medium shots, avoiding close-ups, rapid cutting or ostentatious camera-work. It is a very modest, unobtrusive style. That may in part be the reason for the immense emotional power of her work. Her films almost always bring tears to the eyes, tears of longing and of shame on the part of the viewer, not so much the smug tears of empathy. It is the longing to make a connection, to reach out an authentic hand. And the means by which Longinotto consistently achieves this is mysterious. To me, it is an alchemy produced by her engagement, by the value her art places on justice and truth. The greatest art is a moral challenge to the viewer and is itself the product of a moral sensibility. The alternative is amusing, but does no more than fiddle at the burning. I was reminded, watching Sisters in Law and listening to Longinotto, of Peter Watkins, of Culloden and Punishment Park ....and also of Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol.

Morrissey is quoted in Bob Colacello's memoir and biography of Warhol, Holy Terror, as saying to him, "I mean, what could be more ridiculous than the pompous, pseudointellectual notion that the director is the most important person on a movie? Everyone knows the most important person on a movie is the star!" Morrissey, Longinotto and Watkins are united by their determination to efface themselves as artists before what they film, for their moral commitment, unsparing and hostile to compromise, and by the mysterious power of their work, bestowed like a blessing upon the righteous, and impossible to fake or imitate. Aleister Crowley wrote in Liber AL vel Legis, "Every man and every woman is a star", and between the starry potential envisaged by Crowley and the grimy, abject starriness of a Morrissey subject, are the figures of Amina in Sisters in Law, or the little girl taking the place of her clerical father in Divorce Iranian Style, and dispensing satirical justice from his chair. They are stars, and Longinotto their committed observer.

The BrightLights Film Journal has an overview of Longinotto's work here

And Red Pepper has a very brief interview

A puzzle to hunters

So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear,
yet never to be caught,
the unicorn has been preserved
by an unmatched device
wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths -
this animal of that one horn
throwing itself upon which headforemost from a cliff,
it walks away unharmed;
proficient in this feat which, like Herodotus,
I have not seen except in pictures.
Thus this strange animal with its miraculous elusiveness,
has come to be unique,
"impossible to take alive,"
tamed only by a lady inoffensive like itself -
as curiously wild and gentle;
"as straight and slender as the crest,
or antlet of the one-beam'd beast."
Upon the printed page,
also by word of mouth,
we have a record of it all
and how, unfearful of deceit,
etched like an equine monster of an old celestial map,
beside a cloud or dress of Virgin-Mary blue,
improved "all over slightly with shakes of Venice gold,
and silver, and some O's,"
the unicorn "with pavon high," approaches eagerly;
until engrossed by what appears of this strange enemy,
upon the map, "upon her lap,"
its "mild wild head doth lie."

from Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns by Marianne Moore