Date of publication : 11.7.20
And so it is that we draw towards the end of term. I can feel you straining at the leash. You believe you are ready to go out into the world and start kissing everyone and I understand where you're coming from - I have been just where you are now, when I was a student. But please stay focused for this - our final lesson.
Don’t forget there’s a test coming up!
I also have heard on the grapevine that some of you are frustrated that we seem to be stuck in the canon of the European kiss.
‘Jesus and Judas,’ you mutter, ‘Vampires. Venetian prostitutes. It’s all so boring and predictable.’
Well… yes. I’m afraid it is. But that’s why we call it ‘a course’ and not ‘fun’. Nevertheless, for the more adventurous students, today might be your day. For today, we follow the European kiss to the New World.
The Land of Liberty…
AMERICAN POEM
O
they say no
no one in america kissed
before the fall
before europe slithered across the ocean with her forked tongue and her
saliva and her
all a-licky shame
O SHAME !
what matter where if I be still the SAME?
said Lucifer in Eden
after the war
after the tyrant God crushed the Revolt and his Angel of Light fell to hell - OW !
he crawled back
up
up
up to the garden but he didn’t care
for the sweet air - NO!
he went straight for the pretty woman
underneath the apple tree -
O NEW AMERICANS !
were you of the Devil’s party without knowing it?
or did you know it all a-long?
O
they say no -
no american kissed before the fall
before europe brought Her GOD to these united states
in years long past - blast - blast
DISASTER !
wounds plastered over with nothing but a kiss? - O Lord -
And GOD said -
let me stay in Rome…
I’m old you go - no - you go - pilgrim child
I’m tired of the wild
but they said no doesn’t always mean no MY LORD and they dragged
old God
over the ocean,
and tucked him up on the porch so he could watch his sun sink slowly
but he missed his home
while the kids fought over New lands
just as they had fought over Nether lands
until eventually God said - you little devils
SHARE!
and they said OK we’ll have this bit and
you have that bit until there
was no bit left
for anyone else
O Lord
OK so what I’m doing here is experimenting with free verse. I’m basically just closing my eyes and tapping the keyboard and seeing what it teaches me about kissing. You’ll see what has happened. I’ve quite quickly gone off topic. Now this is what happens when we try to run before we can walk. To make conceptual art before we’ve sketched an aloe vera in charcoal. Of course I’m exaggerating to prove a point (none of you is doing exactly this, what I’ve just done!) but I hope this effectively demonstrates the dangers of throwing yourself at something without doing a lot of boring practice and research first.
So let’s start at the beginning.
Who found America?
First of all, it’s crucial to establish that some people didn’t find America. They were there already. Maybe that they is you. Maybe you were there already. If so, welcome to my course, American friend.
Secondly, these Americans were not kissers. My sources say it was not part of their culture. And my sources are normally right.
So maybe the question is not - Who found America?
But - When did kissing arrive in America?
To trace this thread, we find ourselves, I’m afraid, back in our text books. So put away your free verse and your LSD, pick up your notes on Middle English Kissing and let’s get down to it.
AN OLD WORLD
Our story begins, as is so often the case, ages ago.
It begins in Europe.
It begins with the osculum pax (or the lip-on-lip kiss) which I like to call the ‘kiss of equals’, because both people are equally likely to catch the plague from it. And also because both people are doing the same thing at the same time. You will have noticed that equality is often used to mean: two people doing the same thing at the same time without one of them getting upset. For example: fixing a car, sitting on a bus or running a country.
Now have a good look at these pictures of Medieval equality:
The people in these pictures are equal to each other. How do I know? Is it because they are doing the same thing as each other at the same time? Yes. That is part of it. But there’s a bit more to equality than just that.
Look again.
They are wearing the same hats.
(Or in the case of the osculum reversum, of course, no hat at all.)
Hats were codified by medieval Europeans to show who was equal to whom and all of these different levels of equality put together, were called hierarchy.
This system made sense within the medieval world view because if you were handy with paper and glue, or if you were very strong, or had a monarch as a parent, you could get yourself a special hat. This was The Medieval Dream. Muslims and Jews and prostitutes were of course asked to wear different shaped hats and there were laws to enforce exactly what hats you wore, which were called sumptuary laws. Diseases had special hats too. It was all very clear.
Now, when you see two people enacting the osculum pax (kissing each other on the lips) while wearing the same hat … this is a picture of Medieval European civilisation at its best.
The kiss demonstrates perfect equilibrium and a sharing of vulnerability and humanity.
If I have plague, I share it with you.
If you have plague, I take it upon myself.
Your sickness is my sickness.
My health is your health.
I see you as like unto myself as twere in a mirror.
The kiss says.
OK.
Now let’s see what happens when people attempted the lip-to-lip kiss while not wearing the same hat.
Oh dear.
THE END OF THE WORLD.
Or, of course, depending on your perspective:
Phew.
The end of the OLD WORLD.
A chance to build a NEW ONE.
…
OK. But what about America? I hear you ask.
Hold your horses. We’re getting to it.
We have established that in the thirteenth century, the Pope stopped Christians from exchanging the osculum pax at Mass and instead introduced the ritual of passing round a picture for people to kiss. Often it would be a picture of Jesus Christ on a bit of wood. However, kissing a simulation of lips is just not the same as kissing warm breathing lips so people grew to be frustrated and tensions escalated, specifically around who got to kiss the picture first. People with fancier hats naturally believed that they should have priority and often scuffles broke out as, for example, when Master John Browne of Essex smashed the pax board over the head of the holy-water clerk, Richard Pond, for giving it to Francis Hamden and his wife Margery before him. In this already rather fraught atmosphere, some nutter translated THE BIBLE and all hell broke loose.
For it was revealed unto them that THE BIBLE expressly forbade the kissing of pictures.
Henry VIII took his chance, threw caution to the wind, threw out his pax board and turned his lips to Anne Boleyn, which started the Church of England.
The end of an old world.
A NEW WORLD
The Protestors were thrilled with this result but now could not agree amongst themselves what to do next. Some wanted kissing to be accessible to all, some believed it needed state control and some wanted to stamp it out completely. These purest of the Protestors helpfully called themselves ‘Puritans’. They were hoping to make a new England with zero kissing but when they realised this wasn’t going to happen and that on top of everything they would be persecuted, they decided to go to Massachusetts and call it ‘New England’ instead.
That makes sense - you say - they must have meant to become friends with the people of Massachusetts who also didn’t kiss?
Oddly, no. The Puritans didn’t really want new friends. They liked their friends to look like this:
Which is not what the people of Massachusetts looked like. So the New Englanders called the people of Massachusetts, ‘strangers’ and then gave them smallpox, which caused ‘the utter destruction, devastation, and depopulation of that whole territory’.
Some called this disease The Red Plague.
Some called this disease The Wonderful Plague.
Some called this disease The Great Dying.
It killed they say nine of ten.
So the New Englanders were definitely not friends to the people of Massachusetts.
To top it all, in 1641, the New Englanders decided to start writing down laws in a new law book The Body of Liberties, but they chose slightly different liberties, depending on whether you were classified a friend or a stranger.
Things got confusing when two lady preachers turned up in Boston saying, ‘We are from The Society of Friends. Can we join in with your new country?’ and they nearly pulled it off, but the New Englanders were suspicious and so they stripped and searched the women in the town square. They found oldy worldy kisses on their bodies and threw them in gaol saying ‘you are not our friends!’. Then they made a law saying strangers were not allowed to move (1680). And they specified that African people were strangers. They they found loads more witches (1691). Then they outlawed kissing (1699).
Puritans.
What were they thinking.
Meanwhile, down in hazy Virginia, the colony was a bit more old school. Fewer Puritans. More Anglicans. A religion that sort of meant that you could kind of have pictures if you liked depending on well never mind we love the King. Kissing was much more OK down in the South, in fact the Virginians would turn out to love lots of things beginning with K - like Kittens and Keyboards.
But they knew that with kissing came the need for control. They remembered the havoc wrought by a kiss in King Arthur’s Albion. On the other hand, they had recently seen their own King in England beheaded by a bunch of radical Puritans, just like those tossers from Massachusetts who, if they had their way, would put a stop to the custom altogether.
The Virginians just wanted to keep kissing under their own noses.
It was a typical lazy afternoon in the General Assembly of Virginia and the Burgesses were once more sitting around, chatting about hats - a popular topic, for this was the late 17th century, and modern European philosophy was throwing all sorts of doubts upon the traditional method of using hats to distinguish the value of men. The gentlemen of Virginia spoke of John Locke’s Human Understanding. They spoke of notions of equality as outlined in the book of Genesis. They spoke of how much they liked their hats. They spoke of the scientific method. They spoke of skin.
And then they had an idea.
So it was, that on this lazy afternoon, in 1691, the Burgesses of Virginia wrote down a law proclaiming it a crime for people to marry each other if they had different colours of skin. Of course, it was a stupid law. Nevertheless, it happened. And what made it so very new was that it made no odds whether the bride or groom were bond or free. That is, hats no longer mattered. And freedom from chains no longer meant much. For what mattered was the colour of your skin.
The marriage contract was, of course, still sealed with a kiss (as it had been since Ancient Rome) and the Virginians believed this kiss to be a sacred thing, more sacred in its way than sex, which they of course enjoyed but admitted could easily get a bit sinful. But the kiss, lips touching lips, with its smack of — what was it? Humanity? Equality? - well…
If they were being totally honest, they would rather nobody else did it at all.
My sickness is your sickness.
Your health, my health.
I see you as like unto myself, as twere in a mirror.
The Burgesses of Virginia shook hands on the matter and as they got up to leave, one announced that he believed skin had even more legs than hats. It seemed, he said, far more modern.
‘Because,’ he said, ‘you can’t take it off.’
‘Ha. Yes. Indeed.’
And off they went to their homes, their work for the day, done.
‘Good night.’
‘Good night.’
‘Goodnight.’
‘God save the king.’
A DREAM OF LIBERTY
But God was snoozing on the porch so he didn’t hear. This meant he was totally unprepared to save the King when he was woken just after dawn on July 28th 1775, by a gunshot.
‘What in the name of all things holy are you doing now?’ he cried.
Oh dear.
Someone had told them about:
The French Kiss!
And they were OUT OF CONTROL…
In a frenzy of hope, they binned the idea of the ENGLISH KING.
They built a new REPUBLIC !
And dreamt of LIBERTY !!!
But Liberty . . .
took . . .
more than 100 years… !
to
to …
arrive …
and as soon as she arrived …
ta da !
she missed her home.
(La Pauvre Liberté)
AMERICA’S PALACE OF DREAMS
The Statue of Liberty would stand for many years on Ellis Island, dreaming of her home across the ocean, as her copper skin faded to a mystical pale green. But she was not the only American dreamer. For she brought with her from Paris a way of dreaming that would completely transform the imagination of the new world.
It was in the basement of a café in the Boulevard des Capucines (not so far from where Liberty grew up) that a new phenomenon was first enjoyed : Cinéma!
An in the 1880s, this phenomenon infected America. Pictures first started moving at fancy parties in Manhattan - then in peep-shows in boardwalk arcades in Atlantic City - and then, on 26th of July 1886, in the new Vitascope Hall in New Orleans, all the way from the Black Maria studio in New Jersey, Ladies and Gentlemen, kindly remove your hats, for :
THE KISS
Dir. Thomas Edison
Duration : 18 sec
Starring : May Irwin & John Rice
An instant hit!
America flocked to see THE KISS and soon, more kiss movies followed, such as (a favourite) :
SOMETHING GOOD (1898)
Dir. William Selig
Duration : 21 sec
Starring : Saint Suttle & Gertie Brown
So everything was going really well in the New World as the twentieth century dawned. There was no longer a mad English King and Liberty had arrived and seemed to be settling in and most importantly, the New Englanders had gotten over their stupid puritan anti-kiss nonsense - there was only one problem.
A black man kissing a white woman - on the screen in America. Ha. Huh. Wait a minute. We were not, by law, permitted to kiss. We were watched with great attention to make sure we were doing nothing that could offend Southern sensibilities. And so - many of us were always, continually inventing ways that would defy the rules of prejudice. That challenge carried with it in itself moments of great excitement. Like - the coconut. I remember that day very clearly. I handed Joan (Fontaine) the coconut. It was my rebellion to the idea that we couldn’t kiss. To fill the space of the ABSENCE OF A KISS. And making sure that the audience would - get it. And that was to take the coconut. Turn it slightly, for the camera’s benefit, so that my lips would come to exactly the same place that her lips had been. And by drinking from that, it kind of sent the message, through the lens, that we were - uh - that we were having an orgasm. It was a delightful moment.
Harry Belafonte speaking of the 1957 film - ISLAND IN THE SUN.
This kiss.
This coconut kiss glowed in the dream palaces of America and the segregationists of Virginia hated it. What’s more, it looked suspiciously like another cross-skin-kiss was going on in the same movie - between Dorothy Dandridge and John Justin. This was, according to the segregationists of Virginia, really NOT OK. For whatever stupid liberties had ripped into statute after the civil war, they certainly did not include ‘liberty to go around kissing people’. The segregationists were 100% clear about that. A law had, indeed, been written down in 1691.
They did everything they could under and over this law to keep these kisses out of their dream palaces and out of their lives for when they saw this magic conjured by Hally Belafonte and Joan Fontaine, the joints of their loins were loosed and their knees smote one against the other and they were sore afeared…
But the kisses still flickered …
The kisses flickered on the walls…
And in their dreams…
A LOVING POEM
O
they say the kiss was born in India -
they say it came to Europe with the Elephant
and went to America with the Pox …
a stowaway
sneaky old kiss
lip to lip
my health is your health
your sickness my sickness
let us drink each other to THAT
I see you as like myself
as twere in a mirror
…
1958 -
Mr. & Mrs. Loving married each other in Washington DC -
before travelling back to their home in Virginia -
there, they were arrested in their marriage bed -
stupid old cruel new world
Mrs. Loving declared herself Indian-Rappahannock
Mr. Loving declared himself White -
the couple pleaded guilty to felony -
’cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth’
for they could not be man and wife in Virginia -
the state had accepted no such marriage under the law -
since 1691 -
and they were sentenced to a year in jail for the crime so
they ran from Virginia back to Washington
seeking a new world -
will it never stop? -
and there they found some freedom to live but
after years away they missed their home so
they travelled to the Supreme Court and said:
will you please tell Virginia not to put us in jail?
Loving vs Virginia (1967)
the Supreme Court had to agree with Mr and Mrs Loving that the law of 1691 made no sense under the constitution -
so they told the State of Virginia to shut up -
and they said that the same must apply across all the United States of America -
all citizens must be free to marry whomsoever they wanted -
regardless of the color of their skin -
and kiss to seal it -
they said that was a human right -
they said that was the law of the land -
and so:
Mr & Mrs Loving went home.
The day of their victory is called Loving Day -
and that feels like a good place to -
STOP
.
END OF THE LESSON
And here we are at the end of term, but I must confess, I am not sure if this particular lesson ever really ends.
It is simply time for me to say goodbye and wish you luck.
I would very much like at this point to thank you all for your hard work over the past few weeks. I have enjoyed teaching you immensely and I feel that in many ways you have taught me as much as I have taught you. Nevertheless, if anyone would like to send me some soap or chocolates, or even a cheeky apple, then please just get in touch through the form below. If you wish to receive the prospectus for courses in the autumn, also leave your email. We shall be delving deeper into the history of our lips.
No exercise today. I’m sure you’re busy enough building a New World.
Good luck for the test!
Date of publication : 11.7.20