A thousand and one

Sweating, fucking, sleeping, dreaming.

Blue and green butterflies hover above the archipelago of sweat and semen stains on the soiled mattress whose pale pink material has faded only slightly. The mattress is a dumb object, mute witness to the actions that once took place over it and the people who occupied it. It bears the dirty traces of the mingling of blood and sweat and semen as well as more mundane bodily functions. The itinerant artist, a Brazilian by the name of Eduardo Padilha, has stitched some words into the fabric like clumsy handwriting scrawled onto a hasty note

From a distance, it reads:

Abstinence conundrum.
Sweating, fucking, sleeping, waking up to a nightmare.

I remember him pacing up and down, from Marble Arch to Oxford Circus handing out his leaflets for eleven pence each, ‘Less Protein for Less Lust’, ‘Less Meat, Eggs, Nuts’.

A man with a mission carrying his handmade plaque, day in and day out, come rain or shine. Was he the last Christian soldier taking the battle onwards up Oxford Street?

Continued abstinence

But if everyone had abstained, the race would have been wiped out a long time ago. Pure desire mixed up the races to produce a motley but happy breed.

‘The progeny of a white and negro is a mulatto, or half and half,’ explained Frederick Marryat’s Peter Simple at a fancy-dress ball in Barbados in the early nineteenth century:

Of a white and mulatto, a quadroon, or one-quarter black, and of this class the company were chiefly composed. I believe a quadroon and white make the mustee or one-eight black, and the mustee and white the mustafina, or one-sixteenth black. After that, they are whitewashed, and considered as Europeans [. . .] The quadroons are certainly the handsomest race of the whole; some of the women are really beautiful [. . .] I must acknowledge, at the risk of losing the good opinion of my fair country-women, that I never saw before so many pretty figures and faces.

Back at home, Jane Austen’s heroines were travelling from one corner of the South-east to the other, beginning and ending their narratives in one or another of a handful of home counties. This is England. No Ireland, no Scotland, no Wales or any Celtic fringe. This is England but only a small corner of our sceptred isle. A map of parochialism and denial. The filthy grime of industrialization does not sully the picnics on Box Hill and Mansfield Park can manage perfectly well [albeit in an uncontrolled way] while Sir Thomas Bertram sees to business in far-away Antigua. Back to basics and to Englishness now that we have shrugged off our Celtic fringe. We are as pure as Normandy butter. This island should be called, ‘New Normandy like New York,’ said Jimmie Durham. It could be the semantic badge of our origins if not our originality.

pure adj. 1 Unmixed unadulterated. 2 of unmixed descent. 3 mere, simple, nothing but. 4 not corrupt

‘Stranger rests in a strange land,’ reads another mattress text. Dispersed across the floor, Padilha’s mattresses map a makeshift, unmade landscape. They bear the traces of countless couplings. They have borne witness to a thousand and one dreams, and nightmares endlessly repeating: sleeping, waking, sleeping, waking, sleeping, waking, sleeping. Unlike Kuitca’s mattresses imprinted with the maps of real places and false names, these mattresses guard their anonymity. Second- or third- or even fourth-hand hand-me-downs, they are a million miles away from the pristine down-at-heel designer chic of Habitat home style, sampling other cultures like they were going out of fashion.

‘Will you be the stranger to my native?’ she said. ‘Pretend that I’m Kuchuk Hanem and you’re my Flaubert.’ Dallying in Oriental robes, Flaubert smoked his hookah and wrote home from Cairo in the winter of 1850:

‘The little bells on the dromedaries are tinkling in your ears, and great flocks of black goats are making their way along the street, bleating at the horses, the donkeys and the merchants. There is jostling, there is argument, there is sweating of all kinds, there is shouting in a dozen languages. The raucous Semitic syllables clatter in the air like the sound of a whiplash [. . .] it is delightful.’ Having tasted the delights of Cairo, Flaubert sailed up the Nile to Upper Egypt, where he met his priestess in the flesh, Kuchuk Hanem, a dancer exiled from the capital.

She gave him Salammbo. He gave her syphilis.

Swamping, flooding, swamping, flooding

Like a swarm of locusts, a plague of refugees.

Swamping and flooding Brixton, Soho, Brick Lane.

What was he thinking of, London’s lone bomber with his sad plastic bag

exploding with hatred?

Did he think he could wipe the slate clean and make England pure again?

Did he think he could turn back the clock with his deadly ticking device?

Pure white. Pure cube. Pure white cube. Pure modern. Pure.

But England was never a green and pleasant land.

And the English have always been a mixed-up race.

First published in Adrian Heathfield (ed.), Small Acts: Performance, the Millennium and the Making of Time, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2000. I invited Eduardo Padilha to be artist-in-residence at Iniva, London, in Spring 2000. The residency resulted in the installation Dark Habits (work in progress), which was exhibited at TheSpace@inIVA, 22 June–7 July 2000.

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