Sir Richard
I have few heroes in my life. When I was younger,
I was sufficiently ambitious to view any practtioner of excellence as someone to
be surpassed. Influences? I had many works of art which stimulated me, which
wrapped me up to the extent that I was immersed in them. Jack Kirby. Cordwainer
Smith. J.R.R. Tolkien. Robert Graves. Philip K. Dick. Jimi Hendrix. Bill Evans.
E.R. Eddison. J.G. Ballard. William Blake.
Yes.
But heroes? Folks whose lives, as
opposed to their products, I looked upon with awe, and who, more than being
admirable, were mine in some sense? The great heroic adventure that gripped me
as a kid--man's reach into space--was done without Heroes in that sense: the
Mercury Seven were this strange mixture of real heroism, imposed colorlessness,
upon which was thinly spread an even weirder half-hearted Henry-Luce-induced
glamour. I knew all their names and the order in which they went up: Shepard,
Grissom, Glenn, Carpenter, Schirra, Cooper and with a twinge, poor grounded Deke
Slayton. But none had that glow--and it just would not do to have Yuri Gagarin
(who did) as one's personal hero.
So it was
that it wasn't until later in life that I really discovered th few folks who I
could just cock my head back and admire the hell out of-- and whom I had that
special sympathy with.
They're a peculiar
bunch, I'll admit: Abraham Lincoln; Friedrich Schiller; Samuel Johnson, to name
three--but first and foremost is the estimable Sir Richard Francis
Burton.
No, not the Elizabeth Taylor guy--the
translator of the Arabian Nights; the discoverer of Lake Tanganyika; and one of
the few westerners to travel to Mecca and
Medina.
Burton was a man completely out of
his time: an Elizabethan adventurer stuck in the world of Queen Victoria--A
complete outsider who genuinely didn't care what his fellows thought of him--a
greedy intellect who when undisciplined largely because there was no one on
Earth who could give him the necessary discipline--and a solitary demon who was
kept from absolute magnificence by the lack of any kindred sprits--except for
his just-about-as-crazy, brave, and brilliant
wife.
I've just started reading what's sort
of a peculiar artifact: an old Ballantine paperback called Love, War and
Fancy--marketed in the mid-Sixties in a half-assed attempt to make out like it's
the Kama Sutra, except for Moslems, or something. (The cover blurb is "Only a
prude could be shocked by this survey of Oriental customs, pleasures and
malpractices." Yeah, man, some of that Evergreen Press Henry Miller action! Woo
hoo!) What it is, is a snipped-down version of Burton's concluding essay to the
Arabian Nights. (I have a few volumes picked up at book sales of the Burton
Society's edition of the Nights, but not that one.) Whatever: it's prime Burton,
and in the first few pages it's just a
treasure-house.
So a few
gleanings:
Three wonderful words that I
wish I could use in everyday
company:
phthisic--tubercular,
or possessed of a similar systemic progressive
disease.
tribadism--the
subspecies of lesbianism in which the positions and motions of heterosexual
copulation are
imitated.
and
pinacothek--an
art museum restricted to the display of paintings. (These days used in
Germany.)
A
vignette
of the ultimate Victorian wedding night: the
bride drugs herself, and pins a note to her pillow reading "Mamma says to do
what you like."
And a deadly
characterization:
"Worst of all, the
three handsome volumes are rendered unreadable...by their anglicized Latin,
their sesquipedalian un-English words, and the stiff and stilted style of half a
century ago when our prose was, perhaps, the worst in
Europe."
What can I say? He's teh
shizzle.
Posted: Sunday - January 15, 2006 at 01:39 PM