Loose Living (11 page)

O
F ALL
the thoughts of Montaigne, it is this which has kept me bewitched the longest: ‘I wear silk hose and nothing more…'

I think, however, I know what he means. I also have been known to wear only silk stockings (after someone has Slipped Something Into My Drink). And, I am sure that Montaigne was hinting at
that sort of thing.

I think he would argue, as I would, that there are occasions where only silk stockings, and silk stockings and nothing else, are the befitting attire. One should live in such a way that these occasions are presented, at least now and then, in the course of a busy, unambiguous and otherwise circumscribed life.

For the master's agreement on this I rely on another quotation from Book Three, Chapter Thirteen:

 

A young man ought to break his rules in order to stir up his energy, and keep it from getting mouldy and weak. And there is no way of life so foolish as one that is carried
out by rule and discipline … The most perverse quality in a well-bred person is fastidiousness and attachment to particular ways; and ways are particular if they are not yielding and pliable.

 

This, I would argue, when read together with the opening quotation, elucidates the matter of the silk stockings.

I have been asked by Dr Des Habille, who worries about Disorders of Apparel and Costume, to look into the current status of the wearing of jeans.

As Des points out (a little too frequently), the French invented denim. Denim is a word for the cloth of Nimes, as in,
de Nîmes.

On my part, I enjoy reminding him that the word jeans itself comes from the Italian word ‘
gene
'—a cloth similar to denim but from Genoa. The cloth of Genoa.

It is an opportunity to introduce that hopelessly ideologically dated nightclub gag (circa. 1930):

First man: ‘Did Genoa?'

Second man: ‘Know her? I didn't even sleep with her.'

I happily recall my first pair of jeans. I was about twelve and I passionately desired them—against my parents' wishes.

My mother felt that they had a delinquent cast to them, as in fact they did. Marlon Brando in
The Wild One
wore a leather jacket and jeans and he was very louche.

It was years before I had my first leather jacket and I have never managed to be louche. Nor, as a child,
did I wish to be a ‘juvenile delinquent'—the outcome which my mother feared most.

I seem to recollect that the jeans were my first self-chosen piece of clothing (apart from a brass roller buckled US naval webbing belt).

Jeans were the first piece of clothing which expressed my sense of myself rather than being that which my mother thought I should wear.

Back then, I wore the jeans with the excess denim of the legs turned up to make a large loose contrasting cuff. The way American sailors wore them.

I certainly wanted them for their Americana mystique. They were of the US Navy and of the wild west but more, they were the insignia of the American movie teenager.

Come to think of it, the naval webbing belt was related to the jeans. I was later to know some American sailors but that was after someone Slipped Something Into My Drink.

As a boy I was somewhat preoccupied with gender. I was acutely aware that the word ‘jeans' in English was a female possessive and that girls also wore jeans.

Now, when wearing them, I am still aware that it is only in the near-forgotten past that they were a definitively masculine garment.

Today they are the most uni-sexual of all the items of clothing. Jeans designed especially for women did not appear until the seventies.

I am pleased to learn that Oscar Wilde admired jeans when he first saw them on miners in Colorado
during his visit to the US in the last century (or was it ‘minors'?).

Maybe he was just using flattery with the miners following the well-known Wildean saying, ‘That flattery inevitably leads to buggery.'

The silk stockings and knickerbockers which Oscar wore on that trip must have beguiled the miners.

Jeans were designed to avoid binding and constriction to the lower body, to allow squatting to cook at the camp fire and bending and horse riding, and to have more than enough room in the seat and crotch.

Women have from time to time reversed this feature by wearing jeans that are skin-tight.

In the sixties, a friend of mine had herself sewn into her jeans on special occasions, and the lower legs of the jeans had then to be unstitched for the jeans to be taken off.

For a time in the seventies there was a practice of putting on new unshrunken jeans and lying in the bath until they shrank to the contours of your body.

This was a way of displaying the shape of buttocks, crotch, hips and legs. It also perhaps yielded the bliss of being corseted as well, although this may be going too far in the Wildean direction.

Many Australian men only feel comfortable in jeans or in shorts and T-shirts. In a story by Anamari Beligan called ‘A Few More Minutes with Monica Vitti', the male narrator describes himself as wearing ‘crusty jeans'.

I suppose it is because these rudimentary garments release them from the demands of tasteful choice in clothing and decisive self-presentation.

Many Australian men are so insecure about dress that the buying and selection of clothing is an ordeal for them and is often delegated to wives or women friends.

Good clothing and good taste also yield this affective condition without abandoning the pleasure of clothing.

It is the condition achieved when the clothing feels familiar and so well-fitting as to be ‘part of oneself'—and good clothing does this more successfully and appropriately than basic casual clothing ever could and, moreover, offers the possibilities of aesthetic nuance and permutation.

To modify this slightly, I find that a certain sporadic awareness of one's clothes and their beauty is not a bad thing during the course of the evening. Once, when in Washington, I had trouble with over-consciousness when I wore an Italian-made white linen suit which, inexplicably, made me feel like a small-town Southern lawyer.

Sartorial insecurity results in the appearance of jeans in all sorts of social situations in Australia, including at the opera, for heaven's sake.

It is an abandonment of the
significance
of occasion, a failure to salute the event, and a failure to express respect for one's fellow audience members or the performers. But more than that, it is a failure to honour
one's own presence
at the event.

I know that some people have their ‘good jeans' for special occasions but usually they alone know that
they are their ‘good jeans'. One of my young American informants told me that she owns seventeen pairs of jeans that, in her mind, are graded from best to whatever.

Jeans are still
de rigueur
for male and female college students in the US. There was once an Australian junior male academic fashion for ‘ironed jeans' with dark shirt and wool tie.

It was a nice transitional style from graduate to adult professional.

There is a San Francisco style of wearing tweed sports-jackets, wool ties and jeans, which tries to raise the jeans from the casual to the informal. I rather like that style but it is limited.

I do not like the affluent jeans style of frayed cuffs and split knees, or jeans cut down to be shorts, or pre-worn tattered jeans (available at normal prices in specialty stores).

This is a stylised poverty and within a society where poverty does exist it shows a certain social numbness by the affluent who adopt this style.

Maybe it is defensible as a ‘vagabond' look, but I do not think so.

I do, however, rather like the split at the back of jeans which shows the crease of the buttock cheek and the leg. I can't explain this exception in the short space of this chapter.

In the US, jeans (designer or not) are not ‘classy' in the sense of showing or claiming upper-class identity.

I do not agree that the wearing of jeans is an example of ‘low status assertion' any more than the wearing of
camos is identification with the potency of the military (although in the rougher sub-cultures it might be). Jeans have never had working-class associations for me.

Chinos or ‘khakis' are what you wear if you want to signal stylishness and an affiliation with the educated middle class (khaki, officer-quality cotton).

We don't wear jeans when we visit the Hamptons. We wear chinos.

Hence, the series of advertisements running in the
New Yorker
by Gap.

I quote the advertisement copy: ‘Legendary: the drama of simplicity. Actors, dancers, entertainers, who dared to challenge expectation, all in those cotton khakis made with style. Casual. Elegant. Just like those we make for you. Gap khakis, Traditional. Easy fit, Classic fit, Slim fit.'

The punch line of the advertisement is ‘Balanchine wore khakis', and it displays a photograph on the facing page of the advertisement of a nonchalant, meditative Balanchine, legs crossed, in what appears to be khakis, loose blouse, and ballet shoes, sitting outdoors. Perhaps resting between … well, between whatever.

By the way, chinos are
not
the same as the wearing of army greens trousers or ‘camos'.

In western culture, people with the inclination to cultivate an interest in clothing and style will take from any sub-group or class or occupation or culture, once they recognise the stylishness or pleasantness of a garment or once their attention is directed to the garment by the perceptive originality of those in the fashion business.

But I wish to honour the pleasure of jeans, to celebrate the aesthetic of jeans.

They have a solid cotton density which subconsciously fortifies us against the winds of the world and snags of nature (toughens our outer shell).

Yet the blue of the traditional jeans is as self-composed and as calming as the blue of the sea and sky.

The texture of the cloth imparts to us its soft historical murmurs and the strength of the rustic life.

After laundering, jeans tease us by being tightened by water and seeming for a short time to be
too small
, but then, on wearing, they quickly resume our comfortable personal shape.

And let's face it, retrieving coins from the pockets of jeans is always a pain.

Jeans sales have been declining since the eighties. My hunch is that exercise clothing has replaced jeans as lower-status cheap clothing.

I am amazed at the places where I see people dressed in tracksuits. I have even glimpsed them being worn in Australian and US households (when I have looked through windows) as housewear!

If there is one place where special care should be taken with appearance it is
in the home
, I would have thought. But then, I am no expert on Cohabitation.

The rise of exercise clothing sales is especially true of the US, where, statistically, one in three people are overweight and, by impression, about one in twenty is startlingly overweight.

A recent study blames Mexican restaurants (there are twice as many in the US as there are Italian restaurants), although movie theatre popcorn is also blamed.

At the Clinic we would, of course, tirelessly look for some deeper disorder of the culture.

The looseness of tracksuits is admirably suited to an overweight society which needs ‘fat clothes', and the wearing of these clothes displays a delightful visual paradox: the unfit wear the clothes of fitness. The unfit have also appropriated the footwear of the athlete!

And the affluent appropriate the clothing of the poor. What a strange species we are.

I do not see a connection between loose clothing and loose living. I see the tracksuit in the home as a resignation from sensuality.

The oversized T-shirt also has become the basic item of cheap clothing often emblazoned with a ‘statement', as in ‘Don't ask me 4 SHIT' which I saw a woman wearing in Washington.

I have then to report that jeans are giving way to chinos on the upper end of the social scale and tracksuits on the other end.

I wear both chinos and jeans. I once mused whether, when I turned forty, I would have to give up jeans. I now see them as ageless (although I did feel that John Wayne in his seventies seemed hobbled by his jeans—perhaps they were the wrong kind, or perhaps he had fallen off too many horses in his life).

But the recommendation I will make to the Clinic is this: wearing jeans must be given—nay, requires—as
much consideration, discretion and heed as does the wearing of evening dress.

Jeans are only acceptable when they are consciously worn.

Silk stockings, however, as an entire costume, may be worn any time, consciously or when unconscious.

I
WAS
asked by the Clinic to examine the grave and widespread disorder of giving admiration to people who claim ‘to need little sleep' and how this related to the expressions of geopolitical nationalism in our present world.

The Clinic staff know that I am preoccupied with boundaries now that I ‘live nowhere' except, perhaps, in a portable office.

They also know that I use sleep creatively and that I carefully employ the Dormouse method, which I think works for me.

My sleep pattern is named after the Dormouse from
Alice in Wonderland.
I work on the postulate that you should get as much sleep as you can whenever you can.

I have never, though, slept in a teapot spout.

A feeling exists among those who
live urgently
that if one could have less sleep, one would have a ‘fuller' life.

It is based on the erroneous premise that sleep is ‘not living'.

I celebrate sleep as an activity. Ultimate passivity. Camille Paglia thinks that in Keats, the nature mother, or the beloved, lives most vividly by sleeping.

I am inclined to agree.

I don't only mean rapid eye movement (REM), which indicates the bursts of nervous activity at the top of the spinal cord (or rapid movement at any end of the spinal cord, for that matter).

I tell my French colleagues that if they'd ever been taken in their sleep they might understand. They laugh uproariously, believing all Anglos to be open to that suggestion and not only when Something Has Been Slipped Into Their Drinks.

I sing, ‘Mr Sandman, bring me a dream, Please turn on your magic screen', etc. My French colleagues laugh.

The false distinction between living and sleeping is similar to that false distinction made by advocates of participatory theatre who cannot understand that a quiet, passive, listening audience, is ‘participating'. They cannot understand that there does not always have to be a demonstrative physical expression of participation in life.

When I was teaching Passive Sex (the soft option in the Hermaphroditics Course) at the Ecole des Beaux
Arts Perdus I would point out that it was often by no means passive for the person being passive—ask any buggeree (‘
Et habet tristis quoque turba cynaedos'—
Virgil, trans., ‘And buggers too are found in groups of serious men', or something like that).

Quickly, to get some of the more obvious things out of the way: rest is as ‘real' and as important as ‘exercise'.

However, it is not true that the body heals faster during sleep. Cell reproduction in wounds when we are asleep occurs at the same rate as when we are awake.

The supposition that sleep is not living is also belied by the common experience of going to sleep with a problem and awakening with an answer (not
that
common, however, I agree).

Some people, when staying at expensive resorts, feel that they are ‘wasting money' if they sleep.

Passive input is as valuable to creativity as active input. And we dream. The sleeping mind is actively engaged in great enterprises of the imagination even if the ‘purpose' of the dreams is still a matter for speculation.

Sleep and waking are the two dramatically vivid ‘states' of existence—with a clear-cut border. There is that foolish Chinese proverb about the man who dreamed he was a butterfly, then when he awoke feared that he was a butterfly dreaming he were a man.

The nonsense of this is that we do feel
and live
as if there is a clear difference between being asleep and being awake. We rarely confuse the states and when we do there are abnormal reasons causing that confusion.

I think we all sometimes ask, ‘Did I say that to you or did I dream I said it to you?' But in this essay I am not speaking of dreams so much, but of the general condition of sleep.

Which brings me to the nature of trespass, excursion and infraction of what we see as our boundaries and borders.

At the Clinic, as in every work situation in the western world, we are at present especially concerned with the primary human border: our skin—the first border, the border between us and the external world.

The skin and outside-the-skin, along with sleep and waking, are the two divisions of our biological self which are inherent.

Salvador Dali, one of the honoured founders of the Clinic, once came to a realisation that he was listening to himself ‘from the outside instead of continuing to listen to myself from within'. He felt that his boundaries with the external world were dissolving. But that was Salvador Dali.

The new laws about sexual harassment are attempts to establish and police the fundamental border of self, especially the skin, against infraction, as are the different codes different cultures have for different parts of the skin, e.g. lips, noses, breasts, genitals, left hand/right hand.

The skin can signal four key border crossings which are observed in complicated and elaborate ways by the world—gender, age, colour and race.

These are then extended outwards to identify larger boundaries at the national, private, privileged and cultural zones.

There are parallels between contemporary perceptions of gender borders and perceptions of national borders. This is called ‘making a lateral leap'. At the Clinic we are at present advertising for ‘linear thinkers', having now too many lateral thinkers on the staff.

My dear and valued colleague Dr Morte is fond of saying that, in the end, lateral thinkers we all become.

Those concerned with gender borders are moving in two opposite directions. And taking me with them.

Firstly, there are those who are demarking the boundaries of ‘male' and ‘female' both genetically, culturally and politically, rigidly defining the nature of the female and the nature of male (conservatives, male and female, and some streams of radical feminists share this position).

These radical feminists and conservatives part ways when the feminists proclaim the separateness and difference between the genders as alien or hostile, or at least remote, ways of knowing and experiencing the world, and even that the needs, sexual and emotional, of both genders are distinctive, if not incompatible. Although it is interesting that some conservative folklore also demarks the female and male as separate epistimological universes—an attitude evident in expressions such as ‘woman's reasoning', which ‘can't be fathomed'; and ‘to change her mind is a woman's privilege', etc.

Curiously this recognition of radical differences in make-up was commonly the position of sexual guidance manuals which called for heroic ‘consideration' of the needs of the other gender during lovemaking.

It seems unfair that there should be a great deal of difference between the sexual needs of a man and woman. It sure as hell points to marriage as we understand it being not altogether the perfect arrangement.

When I read some of the generalisations (all generalisations about gender are sexist, except the physiological, I suppose) about male gender, I wonder why we bother mating.

A recent example from the
Australian
newspaper: ‘…men are unwilling to expose themselves in any emotional conflict or even to admit such conflicts occur, but so easily communicate with each other through the medium of sport'.

Those men and women who find the opposite sex such a trial should perhaps try their own.

Or, as an extension of this position, some assert the ‘sovereignty' of yet other proclaimed sub-gender zones—sub-gender sovereignty (gay rights, for example) is an expression of territories other than the simple heterosexual male or female.

In Sydney the territorial borders of the gay and heterosexual worlds are argued because of the possible exclusion of heterosexuals from Gay Mardis Gras parties and from gay bars. The Balkanisation of gender is beginning.

The other theoretical movement in gender goes in the opposite direction. It is intent on downplaying, if not erasing, the distinctions between male and female.

This position argues that gender is not simply male and female but a single spectrum. That along this spectrum are displayed whatever other hues and categories of sexual use the bodies of males and females might be put. Along with sexual practices go other tribal-like codes of conduct and affiliations which form around these categories of sexual body-use.

Those who argue this single-spectrum position promote the transgendered states as the preferable norm, and urge the lowering of the gender border. To reduce the argument somewhat, they want men to be more ‘womanly', and women to display more of the so-called positive masculine traits.

They want less gender in our lives.

Although Georg Simmel did once complain that there should be more sexes. You were a card, Georg.

In her book
Transsexual Empire
, Janice Raymond nicely puts the spectrum position: ‘The notion that gender has a continuum, a fluid range of possibilities, seems to produce such anxious rigidity in many of us that we ignore everything we've learned … about the complexities of men and women.'

There is another lovely but dreamy position, that all of us have all potentials within us. We only need the right social encouragement to flower. So to speak.

And so it is with national borders.

In the European Union we have the fading of national borders.

Yet in the Balkans we have warring to
bloodily establish
suppressed borders.

In Africa we have strife from borders
falsely created—
inexact borders.

The US and Australia are preoccupied with illegal immigration—the infringement of borders. In the US there is an effective and felt political position against international organisations which is based on the fear of loss of sovereignty.

Border disputes this century have so far cost sixty-five million lives.

In geopolitical terms those who proclaim distinctive sovereignty of the genders are akin to nationalists and states' rights-ists and the one-spectrumists are akin, in geopolitics, to the internationalists who say we inhabit one world and that oneness should be predominant in our identities.

I rush to say that I raise these distinctions not to argue them in this essay, simply to identify them.

‘But what,' the Clinic cried out, ‘is your position?'

‘I am willing to entertain the complexities of all men and women, in a world that is not doing so well.'

‘Dodge! Dodge!' my colleagues shout, slapping the lunch table with their hands.

These ideological positions, as with all reformist ideologies, view the present or contemporary world as an imperfect and unfinished version of the future.

The better life or the more perfect state is for most of us now depicted by the agendas of conferences such as the Global Cities in a Global World, or the Commission of the Future, or the National Strategies Conference—all truly producing great works of the imagination.

Indeed, the Clinic for Civilised Disorders may, itself, be a disorder of this kind.

Despite the feasibility of improvement and reform, we are never purely arrived in the Globalised World or the Global Village or in the Post-Modern World or the Liberated Society or the Information Superhighway.

We are forever living the incomplete and imperfect revolution—in the incomplete and imperfect present—in our working lives and maybe, even, in our gender as well, and certainly in the interpersonal relationships between the sexes—one of the revolutions still seen by some as in a state of high imperfection.

At the Clinic we are developing ‘strategies' for enjoying this ‘imperfect present' to the hilt.

The present should not be seen only as disgustingly deficient but, instead, these ‘deficiencies' should be seen also as disgustingly enjoyable while we are working to change them.