"I tickle his neck every evening with my sharp knife, which frightens him very much."
You know the scene in Animal Farm where Boxer tries to learn the whole alphabet but can't get beyond the letter D no matter how he tries? Tragic and affecting in the way that a horse trying to learn to read is always tragic and affecting, but the other reason it works on me so well — it has nothing to do with the Russian revolution — is because it's so like the part of The Snow Queen when the Snow Queen says to Kay that when he can find out how to spell the word Eternity with the little shards of ice that he forms figures with, “You shall be your own master, and I will give you the whole world and a new pair of skates.” But he cannot find it out.
(What if little Kay were a horse! Not Gerda, just little Kay, clomping and clipping through the echoing miles of the Snow Queen’s ice palace, eating piles of snow that look like sugar but never are, trying and trying to nose these shards of ice into figures he can figure and letters he can spell. That would cast a different light on things. You know at the end, when Gerda meets the little robber girl again, with her rescued Kay in hand, and the little robber girl appraises him and says, You’ve been such a lot of trouble to such a lot of people, I wonder if you were worth it—? If he were a horse, he’d have been worth it. Kay not being worth it is the dark anchor of the story, so I am not complaining. Only speculating.)
Animal fables are the only things concerning me right now, and I know why, and it’s not Animal Farm’s fault: It’s because I moved around a huge number of antique Beatrix Potterses the other month, true ones and false ones, real ones and pirate ones, ones I think I know and ones I know I never did know, and I read a few, some by accident and some on purpose. Because the Tales are books for children, meant to be read at such a young age that they sink into your pores and permanently alter your complexion, experienced less as books than as treatments; alterations—the P50 (1970) [1] of the written word—I can’t say whether I read or had them read to me as a child or whether they are just so powerful that any time you read them you feel like you are being recalled forcibly back to a primal time of life where the things you eat may also eat you (quod licet catto, licet ratto) and where another talking Beast won’t talk to you, will just get out the rolling pin and start buttering and flouring you there where you lie.
The Roly-Poly Pudding is the particular Beatrix Potter book I mean & the one I am thinking about whenever I make overwrought references, it has an evil hold on me. It’s so short a novel (can I call it a novel? yes) that I read it in the time it took to carry it from one side of a room to the other side, and so brutal I know I never read it before or I’d have been having pastry nightmares all my life instead of fire and drowning ones. It appeals to the most primal pairs of primal instincts, which are: the desire to eat and not be eaten, and the desire to run and hide and not be shut up in a cupboard. The heady nostalgia it plunges an adult reader into is real, but not literal: not nostalgia for a book read as a child, but for the time when blood and hunger, fear of punishment and fear of confinement, curiosity and dread, were everything there was in the world. A pre-verbal time, I would say, but there is no pre-verbal time, language invents memory and without words and memory there is no time. or so I have heard. Which is why Potter’s animals are not only spoken about, but speak themselves and exist in time.
In this book — full title THE TALE OF SAMUEL WHISKERS, OR THE ROLY POLY PUDDING, but it isn’t Samuel Whiskers’s tale or Anna Maria’s either, it’s the tale of the Pudding, which is Tom tied up in string en croute—in this book, Tom is singled out as the least obedient and most sinful of Kittens by the author, by his own mother, by a merciless God. His sisters too, both of them—Mittens AND Moppet!—wriggled out of the cupboard and set to making muffins as soon as their mother left them alone. But who is the prodigal, who is the guilty one, who is the one Cousin Ribby means when she says, “I will help you to find him; and whip him too!” This lesson in family relations isn’t a nightmare lesson like the one about rats in waistcoats who will eat you if they can, but it’s a cruel one and a true one. “He’s a bad kitten, Cousin Tabitha.”
Then:
Tom Kitten climbs up the chimney, first in curiosity and then in fear for his life as the fire lit below grows hotter; he pushes through the lonely dark sooty crevices that narrow as he goes, like poor Dallas in the ductwork of the Nostromo, knowing his death is hiding somewhere in there, having no choice but to move towards it. Then:
the rats! Samuel Whiskers and Anna Maria (are we to read this as Anna Maria (Whiskers), a wife or sister and not a housekeeper or celibate rat companion? probably, but I take Anna Maria to be her name and all of her name.)
What is most terrifying in this most terrifying of books is that when Tom first enters the attic, Samuel Whiskers shouts at him and Tom replies: but though these are not the last words spoken by either, it is the last interchange between them. They speak the same language as strangers, they speak the same language as antagonists, but once Tom is tied up knotted & secured, he is as a dumb animal to these talking rats; his cries and pleas are wordless in their ears and they think no more of answering him than you would answer a cup of coffee that begged you not to drink it. I believe there is even an implication that they do not hear him — that the decision to regard a creature as a pastry Ingredient and not a Person irrevocably severs the understanding between the two of you you, so that the rats cannot hear the words Potter writes for Tom to speak. Imagine a tin-can telephone, a long long wire stretched out between the two ends, and Snip! the wire is cut.
Here is some worse horror (if you are a rat): While the rats debate breadcrumbs or no breadcrumbs and butter or no butter (of course there is butter, it is right of Anna Maria to overrule Samuel Whiskers on this point), while Tom thrashes on the attic floor making a roly-poly noise heard below, Tom’s mother reminisces about her own dealings with rats: "I caught seven young ones out of one hole in the back kitchen, and we had them for dinner last Saturday.”
So: cats eat rats, why should rats not eat cats? The dark division, then, is not between rat and cat, not between the attic and the main floors, predator and prey in a species sense, but between child and adult, where your own parents are the only ones that may not eat you and where your own children are protected only as long as you watch them. Tom’s mother, we know, used to lose her kittens continually.
I stop here because if I think about it anymore you won’t hear from me until Spring, when the crocuses bloom and the swallows come back to Capistrano. For half a moment I thought about opening with an apology for forgetting January, and then I remembered January isn’t real and so I haven’t got anything to apologize for after all. There never was a January. Don’t look to me for apologies! I was busy thinking.
[1] speaking of this P50 (1970): although I am a woman and this is therefore a Woman’s magazine and all my concerns are necessarily Women’s concerns, this is not the kind of newsletter where I talk about skincare and wellness and the like. I hope you know that and I hope you believe it. But I won’t lie to you, from time to time I do wonder whether there isn’t still some profitability left in the whole Wellness endeavor, whether I oughtn’t to turn my hand to placing products and harvesting souls through my Influence. get in on something popular for a change, you know? so
this IS the kind of newsletter where once a year I break the seventh wall [2] and tell you how I recently got hold of a small sample of that above-named famous French spa death fluid that all rich women love so well, for with faithful use it makes your face a perfected palimpsest: at the close of each day you scrape off the crust of any Experiences that have crept onto you through the long hours, and each every morning you dissolve the cobwebbed threadlines of fear left on your face by your dreams, and if you do this faithfully for many days, in the end all your many years of writing on yourself will be erased and your face will be all smooth like an egg. You know how in Lafcadio Hearn’s Mujina, the woman keeps her face turned from him and turned from him until in an ecstasy of fear there in the darkness he seizes her by the shoulder and turns her to him and she has no nose, no eyes, no mouth, is all smooth like an egg? That’s when you know she’s been shopping at the most select retailers. You don’t get those results from drugstore products no matter what anyone wants to believe.
(Lafcadio Hearn is my reference because he is where I know that piece of folklore from, though I don’t know his source material well enough (or at all) to know how much of Kwaidan is just him recording and translating other people’s tales and how much is his own. However it may be, his Mujina is as good as The Roly-Poly Pudding for maximum volume of terror in small words on few pages. The ending especially—
"He! Was it anything like THIS that she showed you?" cried the soba-man, stroking his own face—which therewith became like unto an Egg... And, simultaneously, the light went out.
This is terrifying in the same way the final moments of Twin Peaks: The Return are terrifying. I almost said “and for the same reason” but I don’t know the reason, nobody knows the reason.
As a small side note, I am looking at an unreliable source right now and it says that Hearn got his nomenclature wrong and confused a noppera-bō with a mujina. That is unless you can be both of them at once, and I do not know if you can be, this is not an area I know well.)
Anyway, despite avidly (and faithfully!) using this sample of the Devil’s Elixir (From France), I still have features on my face and those who see me know me and call me by name. Which doesn’t mean it failed! the product’s promise is spiritual and symbolic; looking like I have a literal ostrich egg on my shoulders isn’t the point, as much as I would like it to be
—much as I would like to be sobbing on a bridge in the rain in the dark in the night when some good traveler passes by and says, But what is wrong? and taps my shoulder again and again until I turn slyly around and show him my face in the moonlight, smooth like an egg. Ha! how he screams!—How he runs into the night!—
—because these mystic substances aren’t about appearances or surfaces, skincare is bound up in some hermetic philosophy that I (even I) perceive only dimly. Initiates seek always to agitate the occult parts of the under-surfaces of the face, and the deeper a substance travels inwards through the flesh towards the skullbones, the better it is said to be. and if you are with me at this point we can both be reminded together of Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi who, crying out for an aesthetician,
Said he was a wolf, only the difference / Was, a wolf’s skin was hairy on the outside, / His on the inside; bade them take their swords, / Rip up his flesh, and try.
What a play that is! Anyhow, the reason this one product is legendary and the reason I, not a rich woman, enjoy it very much, is because it makes you cold and smooth and just a little numb like a polished marble statue. Like you know how in Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs Severin talks in the beginning about pressing his face to the cold pedestal of the statue of Venus in Florence? It’s like that, but you are the cold pedestal as well as the worshipful face. Some, describing it, say it burns on contact; and they say this because it is well known that very rich people like to feel their faces burning, for the holders of great wealth are for the most part dead to shame and can only remember the feeling of it through the decadent facsimile of this manufactured sensation. But it isn’t true, it doesn’t burn, it freezes. I want to say the it’s the formaldehyde does it but that would make light of a very serious subject (expensive consumer products) and it isn’t formaldehyde really, it’s phenol, a totally different corpse-preserver, that petrifies and freezes your face on contact like the wand of the White Witch, and that makes the experience so very exciting.
What it’s like is when, in The Snow Queen, the devil shatters his looking glass and little shards of glass pierce the eyes and hearts of people down in the world below, turning them wicked or quite cold respectively. And then again it feels like the Snow Queen’s kiss, “colder than ice; it went quite through to his heart, which was already almost a lump of ice; he felt as if he were going to die, but only for a moment; he soon seemed quite well again, and did not notice the cold around him.”
All that, in a bottle you can hold in your hand! Don’t go buying it, now.
—That is all for my pivot to Wellness. It was a great adventure and now I have pivoted all the way round to back where I used to be now, I think, which is the Arena of the Unwell, as they say in Withnail & I.
*the fourth wall is direct audience address, the fifth wall is mortality, the sixth wall is time, and the seventh wall is Propriety.