09/06/2024
There was an interesting response to part one of this essay on s*x, thanks for chiming in on such a volatile subject. In this second section I’m going to turn to a fairy tale.
There are many versions of The Red Shoes, but it basically tells of a young girl without much money who is entranced by a pair of red shoes she sees a princess wearing. They are so different to the heavy black shoes that everyone tramps in and out of church with. They all seem so serious, so weighed down. Through various kindnesses she gets a similar pair of red shoes.
One day outside the church she meets a man returning from a great war, far away. He has a long white beard and very bright eyes. He starts to play a fiddle. While others disapprove, he coos and simpers over the girl’s shoes, even asking her to give him a little twirl, a little dance. Feeling shamed by the churchgoers and affirmed by his gaze, she starts to dance. For a while it’s quite wonderful, even liberating. She twirls past the villagers, round the graves, laughing and in wild excitement. She hollers and pirouettes, all the time with the old man playing his fiddle and making her feel seen. For a few minutes this is quite the spectacle, but after a while, the crowd grow bored, gather their kids and go home for Sunday dinner.
Point made, the laughing girl tries to stop dancing and finds she can’t. As the panic grows in her eyes, this excites the old man even more. He starts to play faster and leads her out of the graveyard and onto the moors and through the woods. For many hours she splashes through streams and over hills, growing more and more crazed, more exhausted. Under a full moon she spasms and twists as the fiddling man keeps pace. The ecstasy has descended into nightmare, the passion into enchantment. Her feet are bleeding and somehow twined to the shoes.
Finally she dances into the arms of an angel who frees her from the ghastly parade and liberates her feet. The old man melts away into the trees. The angel washes her feet in a stream and over time she recovers. She is never going to wear those big heavy black shoes of the others, but she finds gentler, sweeter rhythms to move to. When she wants to stop, she simply sits down and takes her handmade shoes off.
*
This story has several clear messages. One is that a church that’s too leaden, lacks curiosity or any sense of wonder is always going to cause a reverse response, a red shoes move. A log tends to float to the surface, no matter how many times you push it underwater. Some of us have attended churches with little playfulness and plenty of judgement. There’s only so many tuts, sighs and scoldings a young soul can tolerate before those red shoes may look awfully tempting. The second message of the story is the clear peril of putting on the shoes. With a rebel yell we commit to whatever the thrill is and wherever it may be taking us. It would display almost a lack of character not to do so. It likely has no particular malice to it but suddenly we are swimming into waters with far deeper currents than we may imagine.
My early life as a musician enabled almost unlimited contact with people swept up in a red shoes life. Dancing to the tune often had you dead before thirty, and in some ghastly fashion that was seen as rather credible. Rock’n’roll eats its young. There but for the grace of God go I. Before I started to write this, I dug out a photograph of my first proper band––one that toured and made records. All dead apart from one guy and me, and men that would only be in their early fifties had they survived. Chaos is fetishized, disorder iconized, and we wonder why life seems so terribly combustible. And yes, into the confused and sometimes thrilling environment was plenty of s*x, plenty of drugs, plenty of attempts at some florid form of ecstasy. In more brutal versions of the story, the girl meets not an angel but villagers, who, at her prompting, cut her feet off to stop the dance. She is now crippled but safe, being wheeled in and out of church for the rest of her life, chastened but wiser. This grotesque scenario just exaggerates further the juxtaposition of rabid licentiousness and morbid ideas of purity. There is a distinct lack of imagination in both forms of acting out.
In old Christian language red shoes would indicate what’s called the passions. Passion can be a confusing word. In this context it’s not so much an abiding enthusiasm, but something addictive. The passions tend to have us, not the other way around. The passions could be gluttony, pride or promiscuity, laziness or envy, that kind of thing. In their way they pull us from the kind of reality God offers. They stop us from being free. Some of the passions enable us a sense of drama and excitement, whilst others function as a sedative, but all are enchantments. Food of itself can be a wonder, intimacy a joy, a sense of accomplishment worthy, but what we then do with them is where we need to be watchful.
A passion for music can harden into an addiction to applause, a passion for lo******ng can cheapen into addiction for s*xual relief. From a mythic way of looking at it, an overriding addiction would be a demon. A demon being something that wants us to not to be liberated, not to cleave to heaven in this life. It’s a word for an energy that does not wish you well. And a very wily thing to do is to make us think we are ever freer as our addictions get an even further hold.
So what do we do?...
https://martinshaw.substack.com/p/on-s*x-dancing-with-the-passions
Part Two
