Blood, Milk, Knives and Wool

I've resolved to put more writing on this website. I'm starting a project that takes me to France to discover the sensuous body of Mardi Gras' pagan basis. Among other things.

“Le sang et le lait coulèrent”

                                                -Arthur Rimbaud, Après le Déluge

           

            What wonders find me this night. For a week I have had Rimbaud’s imagery in my vision- blood and milk flowing together. On the weekends I empty wine from used glasses into a dump-bucket, full with creamer. Red wine hits the surface of white dairy and spreads as it greys. I see milk and wine in the dump-bucket at the dish pit of the restaurant and I’m remarking,

            “Le sang et le lait coulèrant.”

            Patti Smith raves about Arthur Rimbaud. She adores the dark viens of  his poetry, the words that sinew and snip over the ornate and the physical. His blood, his life work, Illuminations, translated into English by John Ashbury, opens with a quote from Patti.

            “John Ashbury had gifted us with an exquisite, untainted translation of Rimbaud: A transmission as pure as a winged dove driven by snow.” (front cover)

            John Ashbury has provided the pure, in his translation of Rimbaud. The French poet’s images are the blood,- his words pulse out of open wounds. The milk and blood spread together on the page. I wondered, had the two liquids flowed together outside of metaphor?

            Lent is a period of purification and cleansing of the spirit. “Lent’s original purpose was to prepare catechumens for Easter, at which time they were baptized.” (Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans, 26). Mardi Gras is the next holiday on my radar. It served as a marker to the French Catholics of the 16^th century between carnal reverie and the purification of the spiritual soul.

            “Carnival celebrations recalled the gastronomic masquerades of the Saturnalia, Lupercalia and other winter feasts of pagan Rome, now remade to order for Catholocism.” (26)

            The festival called Lupercalia celebrated the She-Wolf, who, in her cave, nursed Romulus and Remus. The brothers later founded the city of Rome around the She-Wolf’s cave. The festival was celebrated in the cave each year between the 13^th and 15^th of February, which is when modern day Mardi Gras tends to fall.

            Two wolves and one dog were sacrificed on Lupercalia.  The animal skin was cut into strips used to whip the revelers. With the knife covered in the blood of the sacrifice, young men rubbed their foreheads on the blade and laughed. The men cleaned the blood off of the knife with milk on a tuft of wool.

            Did Rimbaud know of the mixing blood and milk on the Lupercalia altar? Did Patti Smith gather the mythic wool that cleansed the saber? In her childhood she claims to have known them, invisible people who worked with the sheep.

            “And the images of woolgathers in that sleepy field drew me to sleep as well. And I wandered among them, through thistle and thorn, with no task more exceptional than to rescue a fleeting thought, as a tuft of wool from the comb of the wind.” (Patti Smith, The Woolgathers, page 12)

            Perhaps she rescued this idea from the ether- the weaving of raw wool into human ritual. I look to the places where textile manufacturing merges with human traditions. 

            “The principal craft in Romans was clothmaking,..” (Ladurie, 13)  “Their (the drapers of Romans’) very small output was sold for a very small profit to the wealthy dealers of Romans and Lyons who sold unprocessed wool and bought up cloth. Jean Serve, called Paumier, leader of the 1580 protest of his fellow drapers, was doubtless far more humble than Étienne Marcel, the wealthy merchant-draper who led the Parisian revolution of the fourteenth century.”

            Here, the connection is draw between the occupation of Draper and the instigation of revolution. Wool creates a social hierarchy by which people feel empowered and dis-empowered. In the town of Romans in South Eastern France, “they were small manufacturers fighting the wealthy dealer’s monopoly.” Le Roy Ladurie’s historiography melds together social change with cloth.

            How has the use of cloth changed during France’s history to determine the social standing of people who work with it? The drapers of Romans felt they had the power to stand up to the wealthy, in part because their work was central to the rhythm of daily life.  How has cloth gone from a raw material necessity to an aesthetic frivolity in France? And does it still carry the mythical sponging powers of the Lupercalia ritual? With wool and milk can we wipe clean the blood of carnage from the weapon? Does wearing clothing in 2013 symbolically cleanse its wearer of the bloodline and genetic inheritance?  Are acryllics, nylons, wedge heels, aprons and business suits laden with milk?

                        As I look to these talismans, the Blood, the Milk, the Wool and the Knife, I sense their convergence. In the breasts of new mothers, veins and arteries are centimeters from the flowing milk to the mouth of an infant, whose umbilical chord was snipped by steel and who shall be called the lamb of God.