In the Press Yard of the Tower of London, inmates congregated over pints of ale and gin from the prison distillery and sold for several guineas apiece. In his previous Arrests, Jack had always been confin’d to the Condemned hold. Now he was allow’d to mingle with the other prisoners. Some strategy of the wardens to inflict Fear on the population. The Gaolbreaker General locked up like any other piece of riff-raff.
The Yard was packed with inmates. The dirt was peppered with shite, piss and vomit. It was near sundown. Oaks overhung the walls, their branches thinned and darkened into silhouettes against a dirty cherry-colored sky. In the far corner, thieves prepared for a mock trial, schooling one another in the art of legal Logic.
Fires were going up in small piles of kindling, flickering orange against the Gloom of the yard. Ruby sparkles shattered into the dirt, and bangers sizzl’d in pans, adding smoke to the already thick air.
Jack was present’d a chicken leg.
“Jones,” a crooked, bird-thin inmate said.
“Sheppard,” Jack mumbl’d.
And now Jones was bowing—flourishing the chicken leg—while booming, “Hear ye, Denizens of the Tower Hold, we have amongst us the eminent Jack Sheppard, Thief of Thieves, Breaker of Latches, Nabber of Horses, Watches, Guineas, and Pence. Son of Eternal Night. The House-Breaker General. No gaol can hold him, so pay your respects!”
The Condemned Birds rais’d their glasses; beer and gin sloshed into the dirt.
“All hail the Gaolbreaker, House-Breaker, Doxy-Lover General Jack Sheppard!”
But the usual rounds of Praise and hailing weren’t able to rouse Jack. His heart was racing. The ring of admirers was a wall of stares. And he was somewhere else—unscrolling before him all the occasions he and Bess had reach’d for each other. The way she woke his Something into life. She had never been afraid of his strangeness, had pett’d between his legs like she loved—no, hunger’d for—his wild Part—the thing that swelled and reddened at the sight of her, quite beyond his control. He could not help but show her how much he loved and desir’d her. She had rewritten his Body, after all. Images of the way they were together were stamp’d on his brain like silver nitrate blooming against chalk tablets. Etched in shadow, frozen in aching memory.*1
“Have any of you g-got a pint for a man newly nabbed?” he squawk’d. The crowd was graying to a kind of blur, and his chest was getting that fluttery feeling that reminded him of his bandages—the bird-breath gasping he used to do—and then one of ’em was putting something in his hand and he was drinking back deep, letting himself remember that first time he saw her. That day with the deadcart in Lamb’s Conduit Alley when she called him handsome boy, and he was mercifully losing his grasp on sobriety, dropping into some otherworld of memory where all his being—all his intention and longing—was spinning towards that now long-lost Horizon that lived between her legs.*2
*1 To return to an earlier discussion: I am now considering the possibility that “a wolf dripping fire from its teeth like blood” (see this page) was added by what I have learned was a “chimera caucus” that formed in 1969 at the communist psychoanalytic institute with which Felix Guattari was affiliated, La Borde.
La Borde, where the patients ran free, where schizophrenia was a communiqué from the verso side of our cruel reality: some flicker of liberation. At La Borde the patients produced plays with the doctors, schemed together on capitalism’s overthrow.
Note to self: investigate whether the chimera caucus at La Borde ever mounted a play titled Confessions of the Fox.
*2 On the manuscript’s continual theme of Spread Legs. Well, this obsession I frankly postulate to be an inversion of Marcel Duchamp’s genius/sick-fuck masterpiece, Étant Donnés, which aimed to be the last word on spread legs. Thankfully it is not.
If you’re not familiar with this piece, go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Or don’t. I’ll just tell you about it.
You must pass through the larger Duchamp exhibit, where you will find all his major works—the urinal and the massive Bride Stripped Bare (heterosexual union depicted as a severed window, with “the men”—a cluster of spidery machines—lurking in the bottom frame, and the big shit-like log of the “woman” hovering in the upper frame, a taunting zeppelin). Don’t stop in this room. Go past the urinal and the violent window of sexual difference. Beyond these is a room even further back, a hidden abode within the museum. There you will find a thick wooden door with a tiny window set in its upper region at approximately eye-level. Only one museumgoer can look through the peephole at a time. When you do, you will find the cast of a woman spread, Black Dahlia–style in a field, naked, holding out a lantern, beckoning you like some Virgil or Beatrice. And you’re looking straight at her pussy.
It’s like a bombed-out building, this pussy. Tortured rubble. The hole is shorn of any hair, any color. Ash-white vagina against a ruined picturesque—torn brown weeds, bright sky, some shy clouds and shining, erect trunks of fir, maple and oaks festooned with dun and silver winter colors. Duchamp’s peephole is a dastardly portal birthed in violence, dripping sawdust and splinters. And, god help us, desire.
Well, I mean, desire as that whole Bataillian Erotism shtick. Eros as the birth of consciousness—fucking as synonymous with the shame of fucking.
’Course, the only subject with this version of consciousness, shame or desire in Duchamp’s scenario is the (cis)man. This point is so obvious it hardly needs stating.
So let them have Étant Donnés. And The Bride Stripped Bare and all of it. Good fucking riddance.
You do know there’s another room, don’t you? Back behind Étant Donnés. The museum guards built it, of course.
Or, in any case, so says the book I found on the top floor of the Stretches, which takes its title directly from Duchamp’s Green Box—which, if you are not familiar, contains his notes on artworks as a shadow cast from a fourth dimension. (FYI, that dimension is time.)
The full title of the book I’ve found is too long to explain to you. I’ll just call it Make a Picture of Shadows Cast.
In Make a Picture of Shadows Cast, we learn about this back room. A room for study, contemplation and—perhaps?—the occasional revision of an apocryphal manuscript titled Confessions of the Fox. Could the guards have made some alterations to the Confessions? A procession of spread legs to rival Duchamp’s?
What better place to do such a thing than in this back room—this living diorama of flesh worship. The kind that only queers truly understand. We who have given our lives for the love of flesh.
In the museum guards’ room, or so I have read, you do not stand and watch. You do not ogle through a peephole. You drop to your knees. A woman’s hand presses the back of your head to her “quim” (as the rogues say!). And you take it in your mouth and pray.