Awkward x 2

The Lapdog and the Pussy

He thinks he’s being loved for himself, but actually he’s being loved for his usefulness.    Imagining himself a star in the sky, actually he’s a vibrator in a crotch.  He is not special, as he is being led to believe.  On the contrary he could be any little dog that wriggled.[1]  He’s there to pass on the excitement he thinks is all for him.

 

The niceties in the room, encapsulating this jest of a single perfect and loyal attention, are not seemingly luxurious, but they do appear to occupy a plush environment. The impersonal sheets on the soft bed for repositioning oneself yet again after a day spent in the fetish of objects; the robust yellow drapes frame this private space for one, who incidentally likes to be tickled.

Chinese ladies loved the Pekinese because it was quite harmless but would entertain them by flying into yapping rages, and being harmless could be taken a way by a servant without any difficulty when the yaps became tedious.  We have come to think of it as the Serra condition. 

White puffy sleeves are held up by elastic which stretches only as far as needed around the flesh in order to keep the shirt in order. This area of white touches the flesh, pinches at its circumference, an oval around her arm, a band making a mark. The fabric of the shirt dress touches her skin, tangling her up in it where it may be twisted under her moving figure. She is clothed in this white fabric, covered, she can know her exterior skin and body, feel it, through the way the shirt dress covers her skin, or pulls from her hip to her shoulder underneath her, though that we could not tell by looking, if that were happening.  Whatever is complex about how she feels in her shirtdress is not available for us, we can only imagine it.

A very private moment, unless, like Giorgioni’s Venus of Urbino the painting is an advertisement for a marriageable young woman.  Everybody wondered for years why the young woman in Giorgioni’s painting appeared to be masturbating.  What could be going on?  Then it turned out that she was (is) masturbating.  Her dad commissioned the painting and it’s supposed to tell the world that she’d be a good wife and potentially a good mother because she likes sex.

Likewise we may wonder what is the complex touching that we can see is the back and forth of the hairy hindmost part of the canine’s (shitz-u? Pomeranian? Mutt?) body, the part prolonged beyond the rest. Is it, indeed, complex?  Its movements (a reaction to being stimulated by the young lady with fleshy arms and a puffy sleeve shirt that has a white puffy hat with a blue ribbon that accompanies her outfit that is now on her pillow having been tasseled off her head by the playful acts occurring in her bed) are being directed by the lady’s feet. They help to create a seat for the wiggle furry living toy, and in an opening between her ankles the tail falls, the wagging that usually has no direction except through physiological limitations, is being given an aim guided for her personal pleasure.  If she’s just some nice kid who posed for Fragonard that’s one thing.  If she’s some Comptesse whose father is looking to put her out on the market we might read the painting a little differently, but let’s leave that aside for a moment.  Except to note that the court of Versailles was a place where there was not private moment, kind of like the art world, where the private moment is also a public opportunity, or statement.

It’s very important that the pleasure the tail provides is both incidental to the dog’s pleasure and, conceivably, the only reason for the dog’s existence from the girl’s point of view.  How like the public figure who is not quite an intellectual but, rather, the not quite an intellectual who assures the rich they need not bother too much with intellectuals.  He (it’s usually a he) says dismissive things about work he will never grasp.  He thinks he sounds clever and witty.  And perhaps he does.  But what his audience likes is not what he says but the little tickle of relief that comes from knowing they don’t actually have to read Derrida or anything else that is or seems, well, difficult.  Or that the Occupy Wall Street people are just bohemians, likeable but not really people we have to worry about.  He kisses the rich audience’s ass, and thinks they’re smiling because they worship him.  They are smiling because he is jerking them off and they like it.

 

She has him, he her wiggling friend, he is what she has thrown her passions onto, fondling the young playful hairy living panting breathing barking tail wagging creature.[2] Even, in regards his specific nose, if we could say that she has been guided to it for it is oddly shaped like hers, and makes her think that you may be as extreme as Freud’s Emma, well at least then we could say she has gone somewhere, driven by a specific object that directly ties to her, and his, more sensual sexually charged parts.

It’s hard to judge this lady and her pet, but I think, if she was drawn towards the nose, she would not need that tail. She would already be getting off.

Wouldn’t he, this young wiggly lass, rather remain a wild creature? But what can he know about being a wild creature when he is a breed born into a cultivated role, to be a pet. And to be adorned just as a lady’s hat, with a blue bow?

And never to be as direct and aggressive as a pushy black snout, but rather to be discrete, in fact so discrete as to not know oneself that that’s what’s going on.  It is not you intellect but your flimsiness that she finds useful, not your wriggly body—although that has a certain charm to be sure—but the wispy air-filled tickling it makes available, it’s not holding you up that’s so much fun—as you stupidly imagine—it’s what hangs off you and that you can’t control.  It really isn’t what you say about art, or about people smarter than you but whom you tell us we need not read, it’s just that we need someone around who will tickle us a little while reassuring us that everything we once thought forceful is actually just a little tickle, for our benefit whatever those making the tickling mean to do.  Especially when they didn’t mean to just tickle.  But our official and favorite Versailles near-intellectuals do mean just to tickle.  They do not wish to be a nuisance.  They know that the price of admission is to be a Pekinese.  There aren’t any paintings of Versailles with Irish Wolfhounds sitting under the table.   Andy Warhol had all sorts of people around, except intellectuals.  No black snout he, and not eager to have any around either, they just scare off the clients.  She must like to masturbate, but not be too pushy about the real thing… who knows what the mother can actually manage, if anything, could be her best friend is always going to be a little dog, pleased with itself and quite unaware of how silly it has to be in order to be lovable, no wonder it is eager to reassure everyone who will listen that it’s silly to be serious… it is what they want to hear and what he has to believe if he is to believe in his own, well, seriousness…

(even better- is it a hat, or are they panties, that lay behind her head?)

If she took off her knickers before picking up the dog we’d really know where we were…

The things that are not alive in this room can entertain her- it could be the satin sheets, being brushed up between her thighs, her hands massaging her fleshy pink bits with a cool, silky finish of fine fabrics; wrapped up in the yellow drapes, a naked flesh holding itself within the feeling of another kind of surface on her being.   And you so fond of being a whim that you do not even see yourself as being as her sheets, white sheets like your white tail, perfect clean naïve innocence, tickling her, making her laugh while you keep panting… everything like your tail, a whole room imitating your anterior extension’s lack of substance and plenitude of softness, satin sheets, silk drapes, perfectly clean—by eighteenth-century standards at least—maybe perfectly naïve maybe not an innocence which is quite that a this is taking place in Versailles, where innocence is not really an option on account of everything has to do with power… Lucky her if she is just some nice girl that has a model’s job.   Fat chance of that, she’s much more likely to be a nice young woman having a bit of fun being able to do what she actually likes, by herself, for once, before dad introduces her to another fucking Marquis…

Who is she? When she waxes and wanes and dismays in loud bellows, aloud for all to hear, aloud and insincere, aloud she calls out her own hypocrisy but turns her blind eye to her part in her cries, when she does this will you come to her side with the tail wagging and will you begin to bark in unison with her? She does no wrong to you, you say, as long as your food bowl stays full. And you do her no wrong, as long as you remain by her side, letting her hand rest on your head, on your back.

You are an interesting wiggling toy, with no desire to spit out your world but rather a happy acquiescence in being fed by it. With no desire but to be, for her, an impersonal equalizing of the world she owns…  Impersonal but so full of character.  The servants take you out and bring you back, you thinking your indispensable, them never knowing when the mistress might or might not feel like having you around, it’s entirely a matter of whimsy.  You so aware of how cute you are.  Them thinking you’re kind of funny-looking, but then you’d expect that from a person who spent all his time thinking about art while hanging around people who think of nothing but power.  I am so wonderful thinks the little doggie, and write such easy and undemanding prose, light and tickly and no kind of threat and not aggressive like a snout.  He is so funny, she thinks, I’ll keep him around for when I want my pussy tickled, which is quite often, actually, and it’s nice the way that he tells me I don’t have to read anything that’s hard or demanding.  I’ll leave hard for when I want to get serious, for which I’ll need something more snout than tail, more Derrida than dumb dog, more hunter than happy little fellow, but for now why the fuck should I want to get serious?  It’s a bit of a commitment.  I prefer these little fellows who know how Versailles works and never make me have to do anything but decide whether I want to be tickled or not. 

He thinks he’s wonderful and that she loves him because he is so wonderful.  She does love him, sort of.  It’s because he is simply lovable.  Because he is very loyal, being a dog, and his tail tickles her pussy.  Actually the latter is the important part.  Of course he’s loyal, she feeds him and takes him for walks.  It’s the bi-product of what he can’t control that makes him really useful.  Not admirable, as he foolishly imagines.  Useful. Everything an aristocrat despises, to be valued for what you can do rather than for what you are.  A little bourgeois dog being taken advantage of by an aristocratic situation he thought he was there to impress.  They will clap when he trashes his own class or the Occupy Wall Street people or anyone who’s clever.  It’s what they want to hear, it tickles their fancy, it’s what lapdogs are for.  Their coats need a lot of brushing but it pays off and they can be carried out of the dining room whenever they make a fuss.  And trained to come when one whistles.