We’ll get to her in a minute; first let’s talk about Lady Godiva. Remember her? She was an 11th-century Anglo-Saxon noblewoman and wife to Leofric, Earl of Mercia. Her name occurs in various charters and surveys, so she was an actual person, though the legend for which we remember her didn’t appear until a couple of centuries after her death, and no historian since has believed it to be factual. It’s a good story, though, so who cares?
According to the legend, Godiva begged Leofric again and again to lift the heavy taxes he had imposed on the people of Coventry, but Leofric obstinately refused. At last, weary of her pleading, he said he’d grant her wish if she’d ride naked on horseback through the streets of the town, which she agreed to do if the people would stay indoors, shut their windows, and not look as she passed by. Godiva upheld her part of the bargain, the townspeople upheld theirs, the taxes were lifted, and everyone was happy, with the almost certain exception of Leofric.
Lady Godiva's ride has endured as an archetype of womanly wit, courage, and the power of one person to relieve the suffering of many. To me, though, it rings truest as an illustration of the power of self-restraint, not only in life, but also in art.
It’s a commonplace to learn in acting classes that an actor fighting tears is much more moving than one who is crying. Consider the scene in Macbeth where Ross tells Macduff that his entire family has been slaughtered. Macduff is a general in the middle of a war and, in the moment, he can’t quite take in this terrible news. So he says to Ross, “All my pretty ones?” and then “Did you say all?” and gets ready to go back into battle. Watching Macduff stoically control himself is far more affecting than it would be if he sat on a rock and bawled.
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A few years ago, I served as a panelist at a writers’ conference in a workshop called "The Poem You’ll Write Tomorrow: How to Teach Vision.” There were three other panelists, all of them women who are poets of note. I was the last speaker, and when my turn came, I told the story of the beautiful theremin player. The year before, I’d been invited to read in the dead of winter at a university in a large Midwestern. Afterwards, there was a party with maybe sixty people, women and men in equal measure, all artists – painters, poets, filmmakers -- in a house that would’ve comfortably held twenty. There was loud music, of course, and food that disappeared quickly. As the vodka and boxed wine continued to flow, a Godiva-esque woman with long red hair offered to play the theremin for all of us.
Invented by a Russian physicist in 1920, the theremin is rare among musical instruments in that it is played without physical contact. The musician stands or sits or kneels in front of the electronic instrument and moves their hands in the vicinity of two metal antennas, one of which determines frequency or pitch and the other volume. The sounds that emerge are eerie, to say the least. People who say they’ve never heard a theremin probably have, and certainly have if they’ve listened to some later Beach Boys songs (think “Good Vibrations”), or ever heard the theme music of the original “Star Trek” television series. The music the beautiful theremin player made was a great deal more ethereal than either of those. Her song swooped and soared and changed key and tempo and fairly bewitched the spirits of a crowd already rendered vulnerable by cheap alcohol.
And here is where we get to the heart of the story. As the final notes fell out of the air and the crowd applauded and whistled wildly, a young guy standing next to me told me he’d seen her play the year before at a similar party – icy weather, arty people, lots of drinks -- with the difference being that at one point the beautiful theremin player had told her audience that if nobody objected and they all promised not to look, she’d prefer to play her theremin nude from the waist up. So everyone agreed and that was exactly what happened.
“And nobody looked?” I asked.
To which the guy replied, “Not as far as I was aware, but then I wasn't looking.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said, “I mean, it was a young crowd, right? And everyone had been drinking?”
To which he answered, “No, I honestly don't think anyone looked. You know, we’d promised her we wouldn’t…and her playing was so gorgeous nobody wanted her to stop.”
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There’s nothing new about such restraint for the sake of amelioration through art. Probably the most famous instance in western culture is Dante Alighieri’s distillation of his chivalric love for his childhood neighbor and friend, Beatrice Portinari, into the 14,233 lines of The Divine Comedy. Imagine how much poorer the world would be had the poet wooed and wed Beatrice instead of poetically pursuing her soul across the Medieval cosmos, through the realms of the damned, the chastised, and finally the redeemed and divine.
It was not long after Dante's time– following an interval of a thousand years– that western visual artists stepped away from the depiction of heavily-robed human figures and once again began to represent them in all their Classical fleshly splendor, albeit in ways acceptable to the faithful. One of the figures most frequently portrayed by Renaissance painters was St. Sebastian, who was martyred by archers. He is typically depicted as a beautiful youth leaning complacently against a tree, his body usually covered by little more fabric than would go into the manufacture of a handkerchief. The effect is overwhelmingly erotic, but who in their right mind would wolf-whistle at someone giving his life for Holy Mother Church? The whole point is that you are enticed to, but are concomitantly called upon to restrain yourself.
The Spanish mystic, St. Teresa of Ávila, is said to have rejected many a suitor before she took the veil, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t have the same desires as the other maidens of her city. Unlike them, however, she committed herself completely to a transformative act of self-overcoming in service of her divine calling. But this agapic restraint didn’t lessen her erotic desire. In The Interior Castle, her extended meditation on the journey of the soul through a many-chambered crystal palace as it seeks God, Teresa wrote: “My lord, I do not ask you for anything else in life but that You kiss me with the kiss of Your mouth.”
Three centuries later, Emily Dickinson likewise discovered the transmutative power of desire restrained. Something decisive happened to her around 1860. She began to write like a woman possessed, and in six years knocked out roughly a thousand poems, or more than half her total. Biographers point to her enamorment at the time with the married Samuel Bowles, to whom Dickinson sent a poem from that describes a wrenching conversion from physical love to spiritual; it begins, “Title divine -- is mine! / The Wife -- without the Sign!” Roughly twenty years later, Dickinson had a second chance at love when Judge Otis Phillips Lord asked her to marry him, but she turned him down, possibly concluding that she’d fare better as a poet if she remained ‘the nun of Amherst’.
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“Nobody wanted her to stop”: Those were the words that cemented the story of the beautiful theremin player into my mind. Suddenly a tale that seems destined to turn lascivious heads for high ground and ends, as the legend of Lady Godiva does, with a collective triumph, not lower taxes but shared participation in an aesthetic experience. In both cases, the audience behaved themselves and received, instead of a cheap thrill, a great and lasting reward.
You can see why, as a writer, I love this story so much. Beginning writers say too little or too much; mature ones say just enough and let the reader take it from there. I bet I’ve told the story of the beautiful theremin player a hundred times now, at dinner parties, or just taking a walk with a friend, or in class. So when I was asked to be part of a panel on "The Poem You’ll Write Tomorrow: How to Teach Vision,” I told it again and then underlined the story’s obvious message, which is that good writers bring their readers to the brink of vision and leave them there. I was the final speaker, and when I’d finished, the audience asked questions and then clapped loudly. Several people came up to me afterward and thanked and chatted with me. In the self-deceiving manner of speakers everywhere, I came away with the impression that everyone present had liked and agreed with what I’d said.
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How wrong I was. A few weeks after my presentation, I received an e-mail from the conference director saying that someone found my comments “insensitive.” Here is what my accuser said:
My complaint is about David Kirby's contribution. He began with a fictitious story, which I think was intended to be a parable about vision, about a woman who played the theremin at a cocktail party. He described her very enthusiastically as being "beautiful" and "curvy." As the story developed, he said that her specialty when she played at parties was taking her top off and playing the instrument with her breasts instead of her hands. In the story, other (presumably male) characters are titillated by the prospect. I know it's hard to communicate tone in a synopsis, but this was all recounted in a way that suggested DK thought the whole scenario was extremely amusing and expected the (predominantly female) audience to think so too.
This was how I replied to the conference director:
Your correspondent misrepresents and cheapens my story. It was not fictitious. The theremin player was not a tawdry person. The audience was not largely male. The story wasn't about looking at a naked woman; it was about not looking at a naked woman. It was neither a titillating nor an "extremely amusing" story and was not told in that manner by me. My theme was restraint, and I illustrated it with several examples, of which the theremin story was one.
During the Q & A part of the panel, an audience member asked me to say more about how a writer might actually go about putting restraint into practice, so I told another story, this one is a lot shorter than the other. It went: According to Coco Chanel, one should get dressed for the evening, look at oneself in a full-length mirror, and take off one thing. The thing isn’t specified, but clearly Chanel meant an accessory of some kind: a scarf that’s lovely in itself but doesn’t go with the outfit, a flashy brooch.
Here’s what my accuser had to say about that:
Later, DK actually made another comment about a woman's body in response to an audience question -- I don't remember exactly what it was but the tone was the same as when he told the story. At this point, another panel member did call him out mildly, saying "I think I see a theme emerging here."
Again, not the case. I said nothing about a woman’s body. My comment was about self-presentation, whether by a man or a woman. Moreover, as before, I wasn’t trying to titillate, but to make a point about artistic restraint. Nor did the other panel member, an old friend I’d worked with several times before “call me out.” Instead, she was eliciting the element my two stories had in common– practicing restraint, and doing so in a way that results in a stronger aesthetic impact.
In the interval between the conference director’s initial contact with me and my response, he had gotten a copy of my comments, which he found, as he said in his next e-mail, neither “derogatory, bullying, or troubling.” He continued that he was “sorry if I put you in a position where you felt you needed to defend yourself, that “normally I would let this stuff go but have found in the current social media climate that it is better to give people a heads up about these kinds of things.” Just as I was lucky to be at a certain party on a certain night standing next to a stranger who told me the story of the beautiful theremin player, I was twice lucky to be investigated by a conference director who’d been around the block a few times and knew that two people can have drastically different viewpoints on the same thing. His final word on the incident in light of its full context was that “the person who was upset by your remarks misunderstood what you were trying to say.”
A few years ago a director named Bruce Bouchard staged a run of David Mamet’s Oleanna, a prophetic play written a third of a century ago about a professor accused by a student of making inappropriate advances. Oleanna doesn’t wrap up as tidily as L’Affaire Musicienne Theremin does because neither accused nor accuser prevails, prompting Bouchard to say that Mamet’s play is “not about sexual harassment; it’s about how the world doesn't work.” The story of the story about the story of the beautiful theremin player is about neither veiled sexual harassment nor political correctness run amok. It's about how different members of the same audience can listen to the same narrative and, depending upon the prior experiences they bring along to it, hear a tale quite unlike the one that others do. So, the world doesn’t work then. That must be why we’ll never stop writing about it.
David Kirby teaches at Florida State University. His latest books are a poetry collection, The Winter Dance Party, Poems 1983-2023, and a textbook modestly entitled The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them. Kirby is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement described as “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” He is currently on the board of Alice James Books.
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