Seductions

As I mentioned not too long ago, I woke up from my millennia of death in a body that was not only alien to me, but rather - shall we say - lived in. One not especially careful owner; mileage unknown, but large. Did I mention then how horrified I was by the sagging white flesh around the middle? By the hairs that sprouted in delicate pairs from the nostrils? By the spindly arms and failing eyes? In my day, we understood that the body is the image of the soul, and took these things with the seriousness they deserve! Even in my advancing years I managed to keep my chest broad and brown and my waist narrow, and my beard (a kingly affectation) was always oiled into the neatest little curls.

It won't surprise you then that my charms did not go un-noticed by the various girl-folk of my palaces and villas. And the young men too were powerless to resist me, though the barbarian morals of my ghastly subjects prevented me from straying in that direction over-much. Un-charitable indeed to think that my success was a consequence of my rank! Quite the contrary - I was a most accomplished seducer, winking and insinuating myself into more beds than anyone else in Tiberias. There was one young man who was my rival, but after I (quite humourously!) threated to cut his nose off, he left town. Cowardly swine!

Alas, those days are gone now. This morning I directed my sweetest and most saucy stare at a passing beauty, and received the most aweful grimmace in return. I was quite shattered! It seems that the science of sex has advanced in the years that I've been gone, so I've spent the evening catching up by reading poetry. Poets always had all the girls in the old days; a few anapaests and a sad look and the girls would eat from their hands. Now I've learnt the way things are done these days - and as soon as I can get this scruffy, horrible body into some sort of shape - I'll be unstoppable. Mark but this flea!

Misunderestimations

I'm sad that I arrived too late for George Bush. He had a certain verbal panache that you moderns are sadly missing. Why not make up words I say, and mash up grammar. Ambrose Bierce (whose works my predecessor in this body appears to have read) had the following definition in his dictionary:

GRAMMAR, n. A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet for the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to distinction.

Very nice I think. Not that old George seems to have done a great deal of self-making, but still - to be mean about a man's grammar betrays a paucity of spirit.

Or maybe it doesn't. I'm having an indecisive day today (probably because of my new job, which is exhausting). I used to have indecisive days back in Galilee too - generally while trying to manage my horrid little armies. I thoroughly applaud the coming of the new age, when all wars will be conducted by robot. Actually, even Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles are a significant step up from soldiers. Military men are always so self important. And they smell terrible, or did in my day at any rate. Always chewing onions and shitting and swaggering about. Yes, my wars would have ben much more fun if I'd been able to wage them via video uplink, sitting in some highly technogized command chair and pressing big red buttons, rather than strapped to that very hoity-toity and over-sexed white stallion that the stable-men dug out for me. How I hated the brute, swaying around in my absurd armour. I had my revenge on his prancing highness in the end though. Had the horse killed and ate him in a stew. Hah! Take that quadruped! Teach the stupid donkey to misunderestimate me!

I know I've been being coy about the job. The truth is I can hardly think about it. Maybe tomorrow.

Feet

What a lot of drinking I've done this last two days! This evening I've been drinking whiskey. An extraordinary idea, may I say, to make a drink that's essentially flavoured by mud, and yet it's curiously pleasant. Bravo.

I deserved it too. Spent today walking by the Thames - many miles of stinking river slime thrown up by floods onto the bank, and half naked men in bushes, and brave rowers sweating through the haze. Now my feet hurt, and they're occupying much more of my attention than they deserve. On the upside - I've been thinking about Ella's feet too, which are lovely. Knobbled like a pair of elaborate cakes.

Oh don't mind me. I'm off to bed anyhow. Good-night good-night!

Post Scriptum

I found this nice picture of a party on your marvellous internet. Reminded me of old times, though I was horrified to discover incidentally what happened to Pompeii! I have some happy memories of parties in the bay of Naples - we young men never were allowed to go to Baiae, but I made it there once, and I never saw anything like it before or since. Parties aren't bad these days - like I said, good wine - but to get up to proper Campanian standards there really needs to be a lot more nudity. That's my two sestercii worth at any rate. Good night good night!

Stumblings

A brief and hobbledy update this evening. I've been a-making party, and drinking wine. The wine has definitely got better over the last two millennia by the way. I've been dancing, very merrily, with some friends who have promised that they'll be saying hello here soon. A happy note on which to leave, and stumble toward my familiar, unfamiliar bed...

Before I disappear, a juicy nugget of information that I've picked up: the legendary Mahatma Ghandi used to sleep nakedly in bed with teenage girls in order to test his piety and holy resolve. What are we to think?! This I read in a rather nice book I've been absorbed in. Lots of history been going on while I've been away, so I thought I ought to start somewhere and ended up reading a history of the end of the British Raj in India. Fascinating stuff. May I say that as imperialists, you (we?!) Brits might even have taught the Romans a thing or two.

But this all by the by. Must shuffle onward. Buenas noches...

Failings

My father (who was, as I think I've mentioned, a violent and unpleasant man) always told me I was a born failure. It's true that my reign as Tetrarch wasn't without its hiccups. I got into a terrible fight with the King of Nabataea over a girl (typical me!) and did rather come off the worse. And I suppose I can't help but admit that my dealings with early Christians haven't exactly covered me in glory - who knew that those hairy prophets would have such global appeal?! I tell you, even on a silver platter, John the Baptist's head wasn't much to look at. All that outdoor living had been most unkind to his skin.

And I suppose that in a way, one could say that I failed at dieing. The details are still hazy in my memory. I remember hurling a last curse at my horrid ceiling, thrashing about a bit, and then nothing. Then it's like a dream, and yet I had a sense of time passing - of the years and centuries that passed as I was who knows where. Then a great blank, until all of a sudden, I wake up in a ground-floor flat in North London, speaking a language not my own, with a girl beside me with whom I'm clearly entagled, and around me the various trappings of a life that has nothing to do with Herod Antipas, but of which I am clearly the new - what shall I say - director?

My body is similarly alien, all pale and flabby and outlandishly tall (though so is everyone else these days it seems), and my mind, though still recognizably my own, is full of strange furniture, as if psychic squatters had taken posession while I was out, and left in a hurry when they heard me coming back. I'm now, it appears, afraid of spiders, which is very irritating. On the upside, I do now seem to be able to play the violin.

But this is all distraction. Failure is on my mind today, because it appears I may have a job. Today we'll see, but the practicalities of rent and eating and money - and generally no longer having an army of servants and slaves to attend on me and cook me dinner and all that - have made it clear to me that this, at least, is something at which I must not fail.

Exigencies

"You can't take it with you", they say, and they're right. When I died, in the dreary Gaulish villa where I spent my exile, I had saved up a neat little stash of silver talents (I'm old fashioned about money) in a secret hole under the hearth in my bedroom. I remember quite clearly how, in between coughings up of blood and feverish deliriums, I felt terribly cross that I hadn't invested some of that stash in something attractive for the ceiling. One doesn't realise, when one is well, quite how important a companion a ceiling can become over the course of a nice sustained final illness. I spent hours staring at mine - which was rather mouldy, and low enough that as the weeks passed it was covered with the bloody spatterings of lung that I vented every night. It squatted over me like a toad, crushing the last life out of me with its mottled vile underbelly. How I cursed my lack of forethought, that I had hoarded my wealth uselessly rather than investing it in some pleasant bucolic scene which could have eased my passing!

That then was a lesson learnt in the virtues of extravagance - but one that alas I can't, as I am, put into practice. For I find myself, not only adrift in a time that's not my own, but also entirely without the wherewithal to support myself. Therefore today's musings are cut short - I'm off to the job centre. Let's see what a King of Galilee can turn his hand to!

blogging

The blog may be the finest invention of the last two thousand years. In my youth I was full of ideas and opinions - after all, I'd grown up in Rome, been taught by philosophers. We young men would walk the gardens of Lucullus discussing poetry and art, recalling the latest theatrical show, quoting the Amores and trying to pick up girls. We were educated, my brothers and I.

You can imagine then that it was a shock to return to my native land, even as tetrarch. I had been used to society, and suddenly there I was, stranded in a dusty backwater, surrounded by beards and scowls. And nobody in Galilee cared a hoot for my opinions on Ovid or Virgil, for my deep understanding of fashion, for my appreciation of the latest trends in painting and mosaic, for my penetrating insights into the complexities of the politics of the Senate and the Palatine.

If only the internet had existed then. How I would have liked to have poked old Augustus on facebook, or flirted with Roman maidens via webcam! And with a blog I could have shared my opinions with the world, rather than mouldering in my half-built capital, starting ill-advised wars and antagonizing the locals.

Anyway - today's news is that I've invited some new friends to be my co-authors. That's all by way of introduction - I shall let them speak for themselves.

Salome

Salome. Never has anyone been so captivating, never before nor in these twenty centuries since. She was shorter than average, and fatty like a seal - her surface smooth and firm and uniform, without the hillocks and crenellations of bone and wrinkle and crease. Her body, as she moved, never betrayed the workings of the architecture within, the creaking levering joints and gripping tendons. Salome had no parts. Her being was unitary, undifferentiated like a slug or a flame, and like a flame she moved altogether, spontaneously and un-urged. With Salome there was no ghost in the machine. She was a singular lump of spinning, writhing, mesmerising flesh.

I remember her today because of her vanity. It wasn't naturally hers, but people taught it her with their admiration. I taught it her. She was the incarnation of the erotic (you would have agreed with me S. I'm sure), and she captured men everywhere. Even the eunuchs with their juiceless loins would follow her about, hiding behind columns and round corners, slavishly panting. When she appeared in the room, as I was settling some petty thing, some mean quarrel between two nobodies, I would fall silent, open mouthed and slack, entirely abstracted. The plaintiff and his opponent could settle their fight with swords for all I cared.

You all know how she had her way with me. That was the zenith of her power, and it was after that famous dance that she became vain, mistakenly assuming that since she was captivating, she must also have been beautiful. She decided that she was perfect - delicate and seductive, a new Helen of Troy, the equal of Cleopatra. She began to think of herself as an agent, a person, a character. She had found her part in life's drama, and began to play it.

That was what destroyed her magic. When she became self-conscious, she created the distinction between mind and body, between ghost and machine, that she had lacked, and so she lost the quality that had made her so unique. All of a sudden, the workings of her mind were laid bare to me. Her vanities stood out like levers for anyone to push or pull, and by tweaking them this way and that, I could make Salome dance like a marionette. From that moment, she had no more hold over me.

I myself am vain. Everybody is - it's the inescabable consequence of having a personality at all. But I have learnt from her - vanity is a weakness. I try to keep mine hid.

Naked ladies

I've always liked paintings. Those horrible Roman generals thought it most effeminate of me, and so did the hardliners, the Zealots, the priests - all that nasty lot. But two figs for them I say, and anyway, they're all dead now, so it looks like I win.

I've also always liked girls. So - I went to an exhibition: Waterhouse, he painted girls - some naked. He even painted Mariamne, though there was no trace of likeness of course. At any rate, I thought the exhibition a great lark, though very crowded. I did miss my burly Egyptian bodyguards, as the oldies (how old everyone gets these days!) jostled gently around me.

But just as I was feeling pleased with myself, and everything, and John William Waterhouse in particular, I recieved a message from a new friend which made me think twice. It's his account of a visit to the exhibition - is he right to be so harsh?

Mon Cher M. Ant,

I was interested to hear that you were visiting the Waterhouse exhibition this week. I went some days ago, and jotted down my thoughts and impressions of the occasion, which I have copied below. I wonder if my sentiments tally with your own.

Amitiés,

S.

- - - - -

The three rooms at the top of London's Royal Academy were crammed with nodding heads - heads which sprouted the black tendrils of the audio-guide, which, like an invasive parasite, was feeding a bland poison of mild and scholarly approval into its contented hosts. The heads drifted around the room like melons in a stream, bunching into groups and then breaking apart, and all the time bobbing up and down in appreciation.

Which was all wrong. Wrong, because on the wall were paintings whose superficial prettiness and skillful execution should not have masked for a second the fact that they were deeply deeply corrupt. The early works, which aspired to the glossy orientalism of Alma-Tadema, and which were alright as far as they went, soon gave way to a parade of pubescent Victorian virgins that chilled the blood. They were nymphs, and sorceresses and sirens, here a Naiad, there a Circe or Penelope, and of course a doleful Lady of Shalott scowling from a boat on the end wall, but they were also all the same - young, pale, entirely without expression, they projected an overwhelming vacancy that betrayed an artist who had fatally failed to connect with womankind.

In one, St Cecilia, 12 years old, lay exposed on the snow. The story goes that god sent a blizzard to restore the modesty of her martyred and ravaged corpse - better than nothing one supposes - but not here. Rather, the child had been given the milky, budding breasts that could be seen peeping out of smocks and togas on every canvas. All the women on the walls, with their personas and mythologies and rich layers of story, had been transfigured by the painter's eye and brush into the same blank-eyed late-victorian masturbatory vision, a figure painted with endless lust, but also entirely without any of the character of an actual woman.

Of course we're still doing it. The gulf between the feminine and the erotic in public life is always being opened wider by the latest size-zero, or the impossible glow of the airbrushed glamour model. The real eroticism - of a sweating gripping hand, or the smell of the nape of someone's neck, first thing in the morning, or the crease of a belly hugged tight - is something we're still losing. It's something that the great artists understood. While Waterhouse was painting his necrophiliac kiddie porn in London, people like Bonnard, or Toulouse-Lautrec were making art that pulses with erotic charge. Waterhouse's nymphets become so much less forgivable when one remembers that the man was painting at the same time as Picasso.

A bright new morning

No-one likes mornings more than I do. That's one of the things you take from two thousand years of being dead - a sound appreciation of sun, and fresh air. Especially angled watery sun that slants through dewy windows onto pillows crumpled by a girlish head of tawny hair.

In the old days, we were less specific about colour - why else did Homer (whose works, being an educated man, I naturally knew by heart) call the sea "wine-dark"? The sea looks nothing like wine, and I've drunk a lot of wine in my life, so I ought to know. But back then we weren't so pedantically gripped by facts, and by the chilly dictates of empiricism, so I shan't be ashamed to say that Ella's hair was the colour of grass, in this morning's light, and her bitten nails were like sprouting mushrooms, and her curved back was a sack of golden grain, spilling toward my eyes.

This is the morning of my new life - far from my beloved East, my cypresses and scented chambers, my fortresses and sea-ports and incense and fineries and dancing-girls and galley-slaves. But far too from Nabatean kings and angry daughters and the imperious Romans everywhere with their military sandals and constant demands.

This now, this damp and faraway life, this is the place to be. I don't look back. This is a bright new morning and the omens are fine!