Eight hundred years. You sense their weight; feel them wrapped around each word like chainmail. I thought it would be easy and fun to read Georgia’s foremost national poem, but I was mistaken. Nobody can read The Knight in the Panther’s Skin at all.

Or you can read it, but from a great distance. It’s like staring through a telescope at a distant pulsar – you know the faint glow beating raggedly against the lens is not how the pulsar would look in reality, but that doesn’t bring you any closer to its light, and so it goes for old stories. The text sits in your hand, yet somehow isn’t there at all. It belongs somewhere (and to someone) else.

Jonathan Swift’s books from 300 years ago still hit hard, and so do Shakespeare’s plays. Maybe eight hundred years might be too far for a time capsule to travel. Empires have risen and fallen in that time, and so have literary movements. Everything is different – too different. The Knight in the Panther’s Skin is ultimately a book for interpretation and guesswork, not raw, sensual experience. That’s sad.

It tells the story of the knight Avt’handil, who is on a quest for the great knight Tariel, who is on a quest for the maid Nestan-Daredjan, who has (etc). Rustaveli’s tale unpacks itself like a sequence of matryoshka dolls, and there’s a cyclical element to the narratives within narratives.

Rustaveli’s eternal wayfarers encounter friends, enemies, visions. They fight battles, and discurse on philosophy. They hunt deer. Comparisons to Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur are easy, but there’s little sense of fate or destiny or divine providence. Instead, Rustaveli seems more interested in painting the emotional world of the characters.

It can be unexpectedly modern, even a little existential. Everybody, man or woman, is essentially their own person, doing things because they want to. There’s little sense of dry ecclesiasticism – it’s a warm and emotional work. There’s even some passages that now read imply things very at odds with what Rustaveli might have imagined (but who knows?)

Tariel met him. They were both fit to be ranked as suns, or as the moon in heaven, cloudless, spreading her rays on the plain beneath. Compared with them the aloe-tree was of no worth; they were like the seven planets; to what else shall I liken them?

They kissed each other, they were not bashful at being strangers; they opened the rose, from their lips their white teeth shone transparent. They embraced each other’s neck, together they wept; their jacinth, which was worth rubies, they turned into amber.

Quatrains 275 and 276

The plot is complicated, and the nested perspectives make it hard to keep track of who’s saying and doing what. But there are simple repetitive motifs that reoccur at every level. It’s less a story than an algorithm, like Conway’s Game of Life: it’s hard to understand by staring at the replicating cells, instead it’s better to learn the rules and let the details sort themselves out. Everyone’s questing, everyone’s unfulfilled, the roads wind on forever, etc.

I can only read things in English, and must use a translation. But The Knight in the Panther’s Skin was originally poetry: 1,600 quatrains (or four-line stanzas) in stylized Georgian verse. My 1912 English translation by Marjory Wardrop drops the poetic meter, turning it into a prose narrative. There’s a newer translation that preserves the rhymes, but I’m sure the text was further corrupted to make that happen. Even if I could read the original Georgian, I’d still be reading it with modern eyes and modern sensibilities. There’s a gap from here to the past that can’t really be crossed. And the book’s fey, dreamlike narrative may have been so idiosyncratic that only Rustaveli truly understood what he was saying.

The Knight in the Panther’s Skin is now regarded as a national epic, but Rustaveli’s vision extends far beyond Georgia’s borders. He has his characters exploring the entirety of the known world. We visit fictional versions Cathay, and India. It’s even theorized that the merchant city of Gulansharo that Avt’handil visits in quatrain 1309 might be Venice.

I don’t know if Rustaveli ever went to these places in real life. Certainly, his descriptions don’t seem particularly vivid. India (Tariel’s homeland) is described as a land with seven kingdoms, with one king holding sway over six. There’s no language barrier: Avt’handil and Tariel freely converse. It’s likely that Rustaveli treated India and China the way H. Rider Haggard treated inner Africa – an exotic locale for his heroes to have their adventures.

A sense of oneiric wonder prevails. The characters are like wind-sculpted smoke, endlessly changing to suit the story – in the opening quatrains, the king describes himself as aged, and at death’s door.

“My day is done; old age, most grievous of all ills, weighs on me; if not to-day, then to-morrow I die–this is the way of the world. What light is that on which darkness attends? Let us instate as sovereign my daughter, of whom the sun is not worthy.”

Quatrain 36

But soon after, he’s healthy enough to undertake a monumental hunting trip with Avt’handil.

The king commanded the twelve slaves: “Come, accompany us, bring us the swift bows, prepare the arrows, compare what is struck and keep count of the shots.” Game began to come in from every corner of the plain.

Herds of game, innumerable, flocked in: stags, goats, wild-asses, high-leaping chamois. Lord and vassal pursued them; what sight could be fairer! Behold the bow, the arrow, and the untiring arm!

The dust from their horses’ tracks cut off the sun’s rays. They slew, their arrows sped, blood flowed through the field; as the shafts were shot away the slaves brought more of them. The beasts wounded by them could not take another step.

They ran through that field; they drove the herd before them. They slew and exterminated, they made wroth the God of the heavens, the fields were dyed crimson with the blood they shed from the beasts. Those who watched Avt’handil said: “He is like an aloe-tree planted, in Eden.”

Quatrains 74-77

Was the king lying about his infirmity? Or did Rustaveli merely want to include a hunting scene and didn’t feel like revising what he’d written before? Answering that requires nothing less than a time machine back to medieval Georgia and a syringe of sodium pentothal.

Everything about the text exists on the same of shifting quicksand: you never know how you’re supposed to take anything. Even the title is unclear. Is it really a “panther”? Some translations render it as “tiger”. Is it meant as a meant as a pastiche? Don’t know. Who was Rustaveli? What did he achieve in life, and what did he experience? Was the book an attempt to win the favor of “King Tamar” (as quatrain 4 indicates), or is it more personal?

But maybe this ambiguity is fitting, because Georgia is an ambiguious country. It’s neither east nor west. It’s at the crossroads of people groups and faiths. Empires have warred over it. At the time of King Tamar (who was a queen!), it was a nascent empire in its own right.

As conquerors and Khans and and immigrants rolled across the country, each left their own stamp. Like the Balkans across the Black Sea, Georgia ended with up a gestalt, mongrelized identity, and an aesthetic outlook to match. If Christianity is red and Islam is green, Georgia’s religious makeup could be described as yellow (perhaps with a pinkish tinge), and that comes through in the book.

Rustaveli was probably a Christian. The book contains plenty of nods in that direction, and some phrasings seem drawn directly from the Bible (“gall of bitterness” in quatrain 99, for instance). But there’s also some references to Mohammed, Mecca, the Koran. The philosophical outlook is very Sufi – some of the odder asides could be dropped in from the tales of Nasruddin and you wouldn’t notice. Rustaveli has a very…cosmopolitan view on faith, and this apparently got copies of the book burned by ecclesiastical powers in the 18th century.

But how does it read?

Viewed as a historical text, Knight is fascinating. Viewed as literature, your ability to enjoy it depends on your willingness to let go of modernness. Some medieval literature is bloodless. But Panther has the opposite quality: it’s entirely blood. It’s a raging river of emotion and feeling that quickly drowns the senses. Nobody’s just handsome. They glow with such aureate splendour as to dim the sun. Nobody’s merely upset. They rend their faces and decant bitter wormwood tears.

He lay down on his bed, he weeps, it is difficult for him to wipe away the tears, he shivered and swayed, like an aspen in the wind; when he fell into slumber he dreamed his beloved was near, he starts, he cries out loud, his suffering increases twentyfold.

Quatrain 139

Rustaveli writes with a bludgeon, not a scalpel. This was the style of the time, I guess. But it makes you appreciate modernism, and its softer, lighter touches. After a few hundred quatrains of that, it has a deadening (or deafening) effect. When everything is turned up to 11, you lose track of what’s actually important. It’s like having a gong banged beside your head constantly as you read.

The book is rewarding, but it’s hard: I can’t stress that enough. Vast amounts of meaning have vanished from The Knight in the Panther’s Skin‘s core and cannot be recovered. You feel the loss, which resounds right through the text. It’s like wood that’s been subtly eaten from inside by termites – it still holds together, but it’s less weighty than it should be. Thousands of holes seem to be chewed in the book’s meaning.

Reading about turns us all into knights errant, seeking answers. It’s a story for a world that doesn’t exist anymore, but which still matters, because it lead directly to the world we have now.

It’s likely that parts of the Bible were intended to be humorous. Jonah’s travails are comically over-the-top; so’s his reaction when God spares the city at the end (“I’ve been through so much! Can’t you just kill some people, please?”). Saul’s pursuit of David is like a Wile E Coyote and Roadrunner chase. Even Jesus’s teachings have something of the tenor of George Carlin rants (and they’re illustrated with cute, memorable images, like planks stuck in eyes and camels trying to squeeze through the eyes of needles).

Whether it’s divinely inspired or not, the Bible wasn’t written by unfeeling robots or for unfeeling robots. It shouldn’t be sacrilege to wonder if we were supposed to smile at some of this stuff.

Life of Brian was the most heavily-banned movie of 1979 (with Caligula as competition, that’s saying something). Everyone from Mary Whitehouse to Malcolm Muggeridge lined up to participate in its honor-killing. Unfortunately for them, it might be truer to the Bible’s original spirit than we think.

The story follows the perpetually unlucky Brian Cohen (Graham Chapman), born on the same night and in the stable next door to Jesus. As he grows to adulthood, he is continually mistaken for the Messiah. The fact is, people need a savior, and he might have to fulfill that role whether he wants to or not.

The movie contains some fantastic scenes, and some of the strongest sustained performances the Pythons ever gave. Chapman spends the movie being politely baffled and indignant. Terry Gilliam is a slimy creep (he also plays roles in this movie, harr-de-harr). John Cleese is in full shouty bully mode. The set design (by Gilliam, I believe) is fantastic, and the country of Tunisia does its usual job in making everything look rough and sand-blasted.

Is the film really a satire of religion? In a common piece of Python lore, they attempted to dodge bans in Finland by claiming it was a parody of Golden Age Hollywood epics by DeMille, Mankiewicz, Kubrick, and so on. But that might actually be true! There’s a Spartacus parody, a Ben Hur parody, a gladiatorial battle that anticlimactically ends with a man having a heart attack, and more. The religious commentary is kind of incidental: the film’s true satirical target is the sword and sandals epics from a generation previously. The poster kind of goes mask-off.

These films were grand and stirring, but often very, very bloated (a critic described Ben Hur as making him feel “…like a motorist trapped at a railroad crossing while a long freight train slowly trundles by”) as well as artistically dubious (Roger Ebert referred to them as “big-budget B pictures”). In short, they offer a target for satirists that’s a mile wide. Caligula does the same thing in a different way: reimagining the glories of the Hollywood epics, just with the depravity and boy-sex left in. So there’s blasphemy here, but it’s directed more at Cecil B DeMille than at Christianity or Judaism.

Viewed as religious commentary, Life of Brian is halfhearted. The Pythons were Oxbridge unbelievers with little time for faith, and you have to really love something to know where to stab it to death.

They ask the same questions a lot of skeptics ask: how do we know Jesus really said all those things? Fair point: he spoke to 5,000 people at Bethesda without a microphone or amplification. If you were in the nosebleed seats, you probably couldn’t hear shit. But it’s the kind of commentary you make when you’re an outsider looking in on a world you don’t fully understand.

But I’m fine with that, because the Pythons had many other areas to fall back to. Such as mocking squabbling alphabet-soup revolutionary organizations. Or skewering the British educational system (there’s a great scene where John Cleese catches Graham Chapman graffiti’ing a wall with incorrect Latin, and forces him to write 100 lines on the walls as punishment).

The movie is flawed, and is less funny than Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Most of the good scenes and quotable lines (“blessed are the cheesemakers”, “what have the Romans ever done for us?”) are piled into the first half, leaving the movie’s latter half a bit of a barren desert. Basically, as soon as the aliens abduct Brian, the film becomes a chore.

Pythonesque comedy is notoriously hard to analyse. They sometimes try for jokes that simply do not work, and I’m at a loss to explain why. In the jail, Brian encounters a mistreated prisoner (played by Michael Palin) who’s developed Stockholm syndrome. The character doesn’t make any sense, and his nails-on-a-chalkboard screeching makes you suspect that John Cleese’s “shut up!” might be ad-libbed.

The movie feels longer than it is. All the scenes involving gourds and sandals and haggling are just boring and skipworthy. Again, this is a classic Monty Python writing trick: taking something absurdly small (like a character’s inability to pronounce “R”) and then exaggerating it until the film’s reality threatens to collapse around the thing’s sheer mass. But sometimes the trick works and sometimes it doesn’t. In this case, we get a lot of scenes where the end result is you’re saying “Alright, I get it. He can’t say R. Please move on.”

Miraculously, it does. Life of Brian regains its footing in its final scenes, and manages to be amusing and tragic. It really does capture the same frustrated, frustrating divine absurdity of the Jonah story. Brian is not the messiah, but he still suffers the fate of one. It might all be God’s plan, but His ways are not like our ways, and to Brian it simply appears cruel and random. He has at least five or six opportunities to walk free, but they all fail, for extremely stupid reasons. Here, as nowhere else, the Pythons are touching on something existential and profound.

I remember reading about Chris Gueffroy, an East German citizen who hatched a daring plot to cross the Berlin Wall. The Schießbefehl (or order to shoot on sight) was nominally still in effect, but Gueffroy did not believe he would actually be fired upon. On the 5th of February, 1989, he entered the Britz canal district, and tried to scale the metal lattice. On the last climb, he was spotted by a NVA border patrol and shot to death. The irony was that the wall was torn down just a few months later – Gueffroy could have walked into West Germany if he’d merely waited!

Is that story tragic? Yes. But is it also funny? Yes. However our own death comes, there will probably be an element of absurdity to it, and maybe we’ll even laugh at it. One of the worst mistakes you can make with fiction (and life) is to collapse it to a single mood, a single tone. There are no comedies or tragedies; life is a multiform jewel, glaring contradiction out of every facet. Life of Brian isn’t always a great movie, but in the moments when it is, it juxtaposes pathos with humor. Life’s a piece of shit, when you look at it. Life’s a laugh and death’s a joke, it’s true. You’ll see it’s all a show, keep ’em laughing as you go. Just remember that the last laugh is on you.

When you read early erotic novels (1748’s Fanny Hill, 1747’s Les Bijoux indiscrets, 1787’s Justine, etc), something sticks out. No, not that. Don’t be disgusting.

I’m talking about the authors: Cleland, Diderot, Sade, etc. They’re all men. Female-written erotic work in the Western canon literally crosses from Sappho’s poetry (~570 BC) to Pauline Réage’s Story of O (1957) in one step, with nobody in the intervening 2,527 years. Early erotica authors were literally all male.

Or were they? It’s possible (though unprovable) that one of the shadier early manuscripts was written by a woman, and either published anonymously or under a man’s name. Note that that the two prominent female erotica authors of the postmodern era – Réage and Anaïs Nin – both took active steps to conceal their identities. Réage was a pen name. Nin’s stories in Delta of Venus (which were written in the early 1940s and published posthumously in 1977) were intended for a private collection.

“Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret,” Stephen King wrote in one of his books. So is sex, at least where women are concerned. We accept with a shudder that they have sex (that’s where babies come from), but writing or reading about sex? That’s just too weird. Men are beasts and can’t help themselves, but why would a lady write about something that should be hidden?

Well, the hiddenness makes it attractive. The box you most want to look inside is the one you’re told to leave alone. It’s the censor’s paradox: people want forbidden fruit.

The increasingly explicit content of the mid 20th century ruined erotica, in books as well as film. It’s rather like Johnny Rotten’s observation that you demystify the swastika by wearing one: if everyone dressed in Nazi regalia, it wouldn’t trigger the cultural acceptance of fascist ideas: it might actually do the reverse. Could anyone feel awe at the sight of a sonnenrad, after seeing the lamest dork in the neighborhood wear one?

Anaïs Nin’s early writing actually has more shock value than modern porn; you can see her hands bleeding as she pulls walls down.

As I’ve said, we were never meant to read Delta of Venus. This adds the reader’s unintended voyeurism to sins on the page, which are legion: incest, buggery, rape, bestiality, and pedophilia. Nin writes about all of this with an praeternatural lack of judgment. She just documents human iniquity on the page, the way a camera obscura might.

It’s certainly diverse. One wonders what Nin’s collector (probably a heterosexual man) got out of stories like “The Boarding School” (“The experienced boys penetrated his anus to satisfy their desire, while the less experienced used friction between the legs of the boy, whose skin was as tender as a woman’s. They spat on their hands and rubbed saliva over their penises. The blond boy screamed and kicked and wept, but they all held him and used him until they were satiated.”). Sometimes the tales are gruesome and excessive. “Mathilde” and “The Ring” feature genital mutilation. Horrible stuff. You shouldn’t want to read it. I forbid that you read this book. Please don’t open the box.

It seems to me that erotic writing has gentrified itself. It now possesses rules about what subjects are okay, what subjects are off-limits, trigger warnings, and so forth. Some AO3 stories have lists of tags and disclaimers that are nearly as long as the stories themsevles. By contrast, Delta of Venus offers a look back at a weirder, wilder time: where erotica was so far from the pale it was almost in the black.

Nin, like Tolkien, was rediscovered in the 70s. She cuts a confusing figure: it’s hard to know what to make of her. She was of Hispanic descent, yet her settings of Brazil and Peru seldom rise above exoticism (her descriptions of Paris in “Marcel” are far more vivid). She rejected the Catholicism of her youth, yet it hangs across her writing like the Shroud of Turin (“The Boarding School”, for example, gets most of its punch from the emotional repression of its setting).

She’s hard to claim as a feminist figurehead. She lived under the shadow of men all her life: Henry Miller, DH Lawrence, her father, and the anonymous “collector” who made all of this possible. The stories are all written for male consumption, although with shards of her personality poking through the pornographic narrative like iceberg-tips. She stands in two epochs: old-fashioned yet modern. This make her captivating: she can’t be captured for some political cause.

“I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.”

Anais Nin, Henry & June

Even her descriptions of sex embody this contrast, with high romantic verbiage clashing with gutter crudeness.

“For the first time, the hunger that had been on the surface of her skin like an irritation, retreated into a deeper part of her body. It retreated and accumulated, and it became a core of fire that waited to be exploded by his time and his rhythm. His touching was like a dance in which the bodies turned and deformed themselves into new shapes, new arrangements, new designs. Now they were cupped like twins, spoon-fashion, his penis against her ass, her breasts undulating like waves under his hands, painfully awake, aware, sensitive. Now he was crouching over her prone body like some great lion, as she placed her two fists under her ass to raise herself to his penis. He entered her for the first time and filled her as none other had, touching the very depths of the womb.”

Artists and Models

The stories are mostly fast and short, thrashed out quickly, establishing a scenario that swiftly builds to an explosive climax (or climaxes). None take more than a few minutes to read. Nin was supposedly paid a dollar a page for this stuff: one admires her restraint in using so few paragraph breaks.

And while the stories seem bold and incredibly revealing, they’re nothing of the sort. Nin wrote this stuff for money. She was pushed at every turn by the “collector” to focus more on sex, more on body parts, more on the beast with two backs. Her natural inclination toward poetry was throttled. The introduction contains a letter, written by Nin to the Collector. It’s basically history’s first “men only want one thing, and it’s disgusting”.

Dear Collector: We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities. You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are the fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood. “If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent man in the world.

introduction

Delta of Venus is well-written, but its stories often have a note of cynicism, or contempt. “The Hungarian Adventurer” describes a man of incredible attractiveness, charm, and virility (perhaps how the Collector liked to imagine himself?) before turning him into a bloated, aging pig, abandoned by his children. “Lilith” involves a woman trying to spice up a marriage with Spanish fly. The ending is such a thudding anticlimax that I think this must have been the intended effect.

These little rebellions against form are as fascinating as the form itself. Like Nin, the book is complex, with many layers.

“There is a perfection in everything that cannot be owned,” he said. “I see it in fragments of cut marble, I see it in worn pieces of wood. There is a perfection in a woman’s body that can never be possessed, known completely, even in intercourse.”

Marcel

By her own standards, Nin was perfect. Worn, broken, weird; selling prose for a dollar a page.

Yet she could not be possessed.