I am a proud fifty year old bacchante, brazenly determined to triumph over the negative forces which batter the mature woman. I celebrate Dionysus, whom the ancient Greeks sometimes called the "womanly one" because his entire existence was permeated by love. I live to seduce, enchant and engender a state of ecstasy akin to madness. Like the Theban women clad in fawn skins who harked to the "far flinging hallowed ring of the flutes," and abandoned home and husband to rampage on mountaintops, who became strong enough to uproot trees and "tear calf's to crimson shreds," I affirm the older woman's power to transcend time. I drink holy wine to induce a state of visionary eroticism.
In all Greek mythology Dionysus was the single god who did not exploit women. Instead, he exhorted them to spill wine, be bacchante and deck themselves out in vine leaves. Gradually, a female cult became attached to the androgynous divinity crowned with "essenced hair in golden tresses, with graces in his eyes." Legend attributes the invention of wine to Dionysus, who traveled around initiating his devotees in methods of vinoculture. Ground on which his handmaidens trod spontaneously flowed with milk and honey. The renewal of the vine in spring signaled his rebirth. Dionysus was associated with fertility, brought good luck to a feast and, in conjunction with the muses, blessed poets and musicians.
The Greeks with their innate sense of proportion realized the peril of denying human instincts. Euripides, The Bacchae (405 B.C.), provides an archetypal illustration of the extremes women are capable of when their erotic nature, or Dionysian side, is inhibited. This drama of bloody revenge revolves around Pentheus, King of Thebes, who refused to allow his female subjects to worship the "girl faced stranger." He barred Dionysus from Thebes and forbade his followers from drinking wine and honoring him in ecstatic dances, which originated in the "orgies of Cybele mystery-folder of the Mother olden."
Ultimately, the stiff-necked King's intransigence results in his being torn limb from limb by his own mother--leader of the bacchantes. In the throes of frenzied intoxication, she mistakes him for a mountain lion. The wine god's votaries follow her and "brush away rosy sleep . . . young wives, old matrons, maidens yet unwed"; all join together to punish the bullheaded tyrant.
I decry the perversion of love in our bourgeois context. Like Hermann Goring who once growled: "When I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver"; I bellow when love in our traditional, restrictive context is exalted as the goal of woman's life. Our emotions overflow at the sight of a ruddy newborn. Romeo and Juliet's mooncalf fumblings make us sigh romantically. Yet all odds are against the mature female past her "biological prime," involved with a younger man. What will her children say? Will her friends laugh at her for being a dirty old woman? I refuse to cringe like a slave at the sight of a lash and short circuit my pleasurable impulses to placate either an outer or inner censor.
Bacchantes loom out of the past and beckon to me. A favorite, the Princess Metternich, a witty bulwark of Napoleon III's court, knew how to silence tongue cluckers intent on putting strictures on her libido. When asked at what age a woman ceases to feel the desires of the flesh, she responded": I do: not know, I am only sixty five." Another inspiration, Colette, who wrote a raft of amatory novels which examined the battle of the sexes from a woman's perspective, carried the torch of bacchanthood from fiction into her life.
At fifty her magnetism was as evident as the nimbus of mauve tinted hair which ballooned out from her triangular shaped face. Her devilish eyes challenged both sexes. Paul Leautaud, a fellow author, attempted to define her appeal. He wrote": She is still very pretty—no, pretty is not the word. It would be truer to say she radiates voluptuousness, love and passion." Alas, I have met few females of "a certain age" who emulate her. American society expects femme fatales to be wrapped in youthful, skinny packages.
If I had a dollar for each time I¹ve heard a mature man described as "distinguished," even "elegant," I could retire. Conversely, I would starve if I waited for such prestigious adjectives, couched in a sexually desirable context, to be used in connection with his female counterpart. I keep my thrysus (pole with a pine cone tip which celebrants of Dionysus carried in their revels) clutched tight to avoid striking out in vexation when a female friend declines to visit a bar or other entertainment spot because the crowd is "too young."
I want to shake my chum Vivian and pelt her with vine leaves. The ninny, a green eyed blonde, has not made love in three years. She blames younger women for snapping up the men "her own age." Roberta, who crunches numbers for a large corporation and makes over six figures per year, promises to actively seek lovers after she has her "eyes tucked." I doubt it! Like so many unattached older women she fears rejection and sublimates by watching romance on her VCR.
By example in life and art, I exhort martyrs to jump down from the shelf and stop acting like blue haired ladies. Occasionally, I call upon other authors to buttress my point of view. Elizabeth Barret Browning, a Victorian bacchante, wrote "The Dead Pan" lamenting the absence of Eros from her world. We might invoke the gods in a similar manner today, even though "The Dead Pan" was written for a repressed society. Gods of Hellas, gods of Hellas, Can ye listen in your silence? Can your mystic voices tell us Where ye hide? In floating islands, With a wind that evermore Keeps you out of sight of shore? Pan Pan is dead.
My search for Pan has lured me into bedrooms on several continents. At fifty I cannot ignore grey hairs, cellulite and other symptoms of maturity. The bacchante in me refuses to "act my age, that is, perceive myself as a matron unworthy of male attention. Low necks and short skirts still flatter and, when they do not, obstinately I'll concoct fetching outfits which play up my strong points. I must be a "procurer for the serpent²~-a sex crazed vixen, one of those Jezebels whom divines over the centuries have ranted against as though retaliating in perpetuity against Eve for seducing Adam. Some moralistic tracts give me a tummy ache, others a hearty chuckle.
One of the freshest, which could have been written yesterday, emanated from Philo of Alexandria (130 B.C.50 A.D.), a Hellenistic philosopher. My sort seems to have abounded in the early Christian era, for Philo described women of similar propensities to a T: Her gait has a looseness bred of excessive indulgence and luxury, asserted the Jewish Plato. The voluptuous movements of her eyes is a bait to draw the spirits of the young; her gaze is bold and shameless, her neck held high, her posture unnatural to her; she grins and giggles. Her hair is in extraordinary and complicated plaits, she has lines drawn under her eyes, and painted eyebrows. She constantly indulges in warm baths and has contrived her flushed coloring.
Personally, I prefer showers, the lack of which, in retrospect I am convinced, precipitated my breakup with Peter--an Englishman I met at a poetry reading. Peter was twenty years younger than I--a bagatelle among our set of Greenwich Villagers. Six months of his caresses hooked me on this reincarnation of Lord Byron, who recited couplets as he made love. My friends envied me for attracting a romantic poet whose dash was a throwback to the age when men dueled over love.
Meanwhile, his buns were so shapely Praxiteles would have ached to sculpt them. Inseparable, we decided to vacation in Roma. Pilgrimages to bejeweled apses and Bernini fountains transmuted our tourism into magic. That summer, on my fortieth birthday snug in Peter's arms, I was certain our affair would be as eternal as Roma herself.
I had lived in the holy city for extensive periods and could show Peter its contradictions. Little did I know, while I was showing Peter round the Protestant cemetery, the burial ground of Keats and Shelley, that this trip would dig the grave of our relationship. Surprisingly, after one week Peter became fidgety. "The food stinks of garlic, the waiters cheat, the traffic's death dealing," he complained.
I attributed his surliness to his finicky English habits. Our pension's shower seldom worked and, when it did, others used up the water. This contretemps no doubt contributed to Peter's caddish behavior. One afternoon, returning from a flea market in the Trastevre section, my golden haired Eros exploded: "Why were you eyeing that greasy gigolo who sold You the cameo?" he demanded, sweat making his golden curls spaghetti.
Peter's accusations plummeted from the crude to the untrue. I wondered if he had seen too many Fellini movies? His accusations were building a case against me, a ploy to ruin our relationship. One remark startled me into scrutinizing my self image. "I've never seen a woman of your age flirt so outrageously," he sniped. "My age," I gagged, tempted to toss him into the Tiber.
Goethe's observation that "old age takes hold of us by surprise" was an understatement in my case. That my lover perceived me as older than himself and, worse yet, lumped me with a species called "older women" whom he patronized, floored me. I resisted getting rid of him the way Romulus did Remus. Instead, we split our lire, paid our hotel bill and separated. I moved to a room near the Piazza di Spagna, hoping other tourists would distract me.
The idea of myself as an "older woman" made me slouch, even contemplate trading in my high heels for oxfords. Pathetically, my gaze fastened on male Italian pedestrians. I wanted someone to pinch me, or had my sex appeal withered away? I spent hours in the American Library reading about hopeless love affairs trying to find consolation.
One Wednesday afternoon, while the Romans were eating and drinking with their usual gusto, I picked up Ovid's Tristia which contained a passage meant to wound Perilla, his mistress. Lo and behold, the Latin poet was playing Peter's game, conjuring the bogeyman of the aging process to make her tremble.
The years will wear away those charming features. This forehead, time withered, will be crossed with wrinkles, this beauty will become the prey of pitiless old age, which is creeping up silently, step by step. They will say she was beautiful and you will be utterly wretched: you will say your mirror lies.
Que Bestia ! I growled, waking up a student dozing in the next chair. Ovid's classic put down, if remote in time, made the wellsprings of Peter's savagery clear. He had attempted to find my weak spot and, knowing that I valued male attention, exploited my fears of being tossed on the junk heap. Ovid's warning may have devastated Perilla, but Peter's made me defiant. I began to ponder images of the mature woman and search among the American Library's shelves to uncover authors who presented them positively.
I discovered a complete set of Erasmus, the Renaissance humanist who championed personal freedom. Perhaps he had addressed the subject? A few seldom quoted lines made me put aside his works and cross him off my reading list. Erasmus chastised "these broken down women, these walking corpses, stinking bodies surrounded by the reek of the charnel house. Sometimes they display their flaccid breasts and sometimes they try to stimulate their lovers vigor with quavering yelps." What had made this clergyman erupt like Vesuvius over ripened women obtaining sexual satisfaction? I wondered.
Disgusted with misogyny, I turned to a 19th century author closer to my own time and point of view. Margaret Fuller, the early feminist, shared my fascination with Rome where she found the romance denied her in Boston. Her outspoken intelligence shocked her contemporaries. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, deploring Fuller's socialist beliefs, called her an "out and out red."
The mature spinster caused consternation among the American community in Rome by having the child of an Italian ten years her junior. Friends doubted that she had married Count Ossoli, and Fuller kept back the proof. The Boston Brahmins, irate that she had given into her "strong and coarse nature," censored her for indulging her late blooming sensuality.
Ironically, they lost their opportunity to snub her. She was drowned at sea, almost within sight of America¹s shore. While thumbing through a biography of Fuller, I discovered a letter written to a friend before she sailed, evincing neither regret nor repentance--rather trumpeting her paganism. "We have had much joy together," reminisced Fuller. I do not know whether he (Ossoli) will always love me so well for I am the elder and the difference will become in a few years more perceptible than now. You are a Christian. I never pretended to be except in dabs and sparkles here and there.
Between forty and fifty I reached the pinnacle of my own bacchanthood. My poems recreate nights during which I danced to the piped tune of the wine god on city pavements, remote beaches and myriad locations amenable to revelry. I wouldn't trade these experiences for all the sables in Russia. Maturity has become a badge of honor rather than a blemish to camouflage.
Lovers have added spice--occasionally Dionysiac rapture. Animal rights activists would snub me if I wore fawn skins. I'd be arrested if I draped snakes in my hair. Nevertheless, fellow bacchantes, both male and female, recognize me by telltale signs: skin aglow with moonbeams, a winged walk reminiscent of the goddess Diana's, an initiated glance that could stare down the priests of Baal.
Meanwhile, I keep my conventional friends. Marilyn, a chum dating back to high school days and a jazz buff, cultivates the unisex look. She makes fun of my flashy clothes and spiky hairdos. Some weeks ago, we treated ourselves to a1940's style big band at a popular jazz club. Seated at the bar chatting, Marilyn noticed a fellow in his thirties several stools down staring in our direction.
The stranger was seated next to a woman his own age, but seldom looked at her. "Why is that man making eyes at us?" inquired Marilyn mystified. "So what if he is," I shot back. "We're attractive!" Marilyn, swaying to the rhythmic sound which brought Lindy Hoppers to their feet, looked as though she could not believe my naiveté. At intermission she lectured me and the drift went: "Now don't start that carpe diem stuff, or trot out banalities like old wine tastes better. Save the clichés Bella, face it, we live in a youth culture.
I avoid men who try to involve me in negative scenarios but sometimes fall into their net. Lately, my mood has been heavier than a London fog since Greg, my latest romance, left me for an L.A type his age who uses crystals to repair her car. I let our affair drag on too long and regretted it. Wallowing in self-pity, I cursed myself for being bacchante in an era that worships computer data and downplays human emotion. These days the AID's crisis makes every new sexual encounter a game of Russian Roulette. Although Greg believed that Kahlil Gibran was a greater poet than Shakespeare, he had his virtues--downstairs if not upstairs.
Meanwhile, rather than rush into a new affair I open my bible: Cheri and the Last of Cheri. Colette's heroine Lea, an aging woman of pleasure attached to a callow youth, resonates with me. Wearing black garters and a Parisian negligee, I imagine myself standing beside Lea, sharing her frisson of trepidation as she greets Cheri, who returns after his marriage to a younger woman proves unsatisfying.
I flinch in pain for Lea watching the look on Cheri’s face change from anticipation to dismay. Colette allows us to read his mind and witness his confusion at his ax mistresses metamorphosis. "Where is she? Where is she, "he wonders? This old woman is hiding her from me." Ever the jaybird, unaccustomed to self-examination, he acts as though Lea's loss of glamour were a mean joke on him, typically flattering himself that he caused her decline. "How in the world did old age come upon her? All of a sudden upon waking up in the morning or little by little? And this surplus fat under the weight of which armchairs groan. Was it some sudden shock that brought about this change and unsexed her? Could it perhaps be grief on my account?
I have chosen bacchanthood over serenity. Invariably, like Aphrodite who rose from the sea, I emerge from despondency to love again - open to the "someone" meant to teach me another refinement in the oldest game on our planet. Whether he dials my number tomorrow or next year is not critical. In a lighter mood, my reading veers toward amusing authors--often French. Traditionally, the adult female has been a desirable species in Parisian society. Her worldly experience acted like an aphrodisiac on raw youths desiring a "sentimental education." Pierre de Bourdelles Brantome, the 16th century author of La vie de dames galantes, in his scandalous memoir which records the customs of the French court, wrote favorably of certain old ladies who take as much pleasure in love as young ones. Whereas men of a certain age are no longer capable of an erection, woman, at no matter what age, is endowed with a furnace. All fire and fuel within."
I hope my flame will illuminate the path of Dionysiacs of both sexes, in business suits or sequined gowns who celebrate the power of the Divine Female. The subversive power of the feminine, like water, is mighty enough to erode rocks. Enter with me the labyrinth of spirit to perform an orgiastic rite. We are in sacred time, which is identical with the now. You will fathom my design. I am neither choreographer nor leader. Dionysus, the supreme dance master, dictates the pattern that will open the door to "deathly quiet pandemonium."
An equinox or solstice is not mandatory. Night is! A new moon, which looks fondly on revivifying rituals, or a full one about to burst into the heavens, are trusty handmaidens. A pair of golden sandals, plus a desire to purge all unhealthy aspects of civilization from the system and dance back into harmony with the cosmos, make my feet move automatically.
I turn in a full flowing whirl, enter each house of the Zodiac. Fire breathing stars singe away the dross that induces torpor. My heart picks up the earth's palpitations. Don't mistake my dazed smile or tipsy look. I dance to a tune composed at the time of creation. I place heliotrope and lotuses on an altar to the muses, thanking them for making me nimble of foot and metaphor.
I wear garb sacred to the Priestesses of Isis: a linen robe of purple (Dionysus' favorite color), atop a fringed cloak lined with lamb's fleece. My head is shaved, my eyes are rimmed with kohl from the sea of Marmora, my white face glistens beneath rice powder. Antimony pigment tints my lips and cheeks the hue of Persian earth. I spin in concentric circles, ever east, over stones, rivers, woods and trees, atop Himalayan peaks, descend to rivers where sea monsters hibernate. A passionate virility uniting sound, rhythm and movement vanquishes the "infernal ones."
I clasp my hands, stomp my feet and slap my thighs. Soaring beyond the flickering shadows of duality, I pay homage to rain, the harvest, all living and dying creatures. In one hand I carry a slit drum, made from a hollow trunk cut lengthwise, a female symbol; in the other, a flute representing the phallus. Egged on by Dionysus, known as "the roarer,'" I strum the lyre, bang the tambour, clash cymbals and rattle bones--clamor loud enough to wake satyrs from their drunken sleep.
Phantoms invade my deserted grove. Processions of bacchantes carrying the sacred serpent form. Graceful and splendid, savage and bloodthirsty, they have crossed time and space to reveal their paradoxical nature. The mark of the sphinx upon their foreheads solves the riddle of the pyramids.
We blend into a single stream, then form circles measuring the circumference of the universe. We circumambulate temples, shrines, pagodas, basilicas; chant mantras, utter invocations, turn prayer wheels, light incense. Owls hoot, wolves growl and goats bleat. Drugged, we execute spirals within spirals, plumb worlds within worlds.
Individual bacchantes leap into the center and unveil themselves. Torchlight emanating from a burning pine tree, rich sap oozing from its trunk, illuminates visages contorted in bacchic rapture. I recognize Sappho of Lesbos, carrying a basket of figs. Her lyrics are improvised in the Aeolian vernacular. Songs of love and weddings summon the mighty Eros, dark eyed nymphs and violet eyed Aphrodite. They anoint Sappho's lips with dying goat's blood and paint her upon a red figured vase, safe from satyrs who lustfully nip at her heels.
Cleopatra sails up the Nile on her barge. She disembarks and does a belly dance. Her jeweled dagger and silver bells cling-clang, her folds of flesh jiggle until the treasure rooms of Byzantium disgorge their booty. Even the asp sucking at her swollen breast wears a moonstone torque. Isadora arrives and the rhythm changes to a stirring polonaise. Her disheveled hair is indistinguishable from the scarf sewn for her by the fifty Pallantid priestesses from Athens who, in the age of woman power, rather than be ruled by a patriarchy, jumped off cliffs to drown in the ocean. Reverential, we tie the gossamer thongs of Isadora's sandals, weaving ourselves into her legend.
An asses bray, a puff of hashish smoke, signals the departure of these insubordinate spirits who rebel unto the nether world. Persephone, Queen of the Dead, escorts them back to the bottomless lake of Lerna. Emptied, the ritual ended, I have escaped the narrow prison of my body and soared to realms normally spoken of in a whisper. I am no longer in the wine god's thrall. Before I bathe in the Pierian spring, a verse from the Tao Te Ching: The Valley Spirit never dies It is named the Mysterious Female And the doorway of the Mysterious Female is The base from which heaven and earth spring.
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