Sunday, March 3, 2002

The birds and the bees, final installment of the moment. From online.ie, (Jan 31), further proof that shock and anger about chickens quashes the exploration of human desire (for initial evidence, see 3/2, quote from museum catalog): "Live chickens have been strangled during a performance at Bonn's opera house. Audience members watching Rossini's The Barber of Seville were shocked when they realised the birds killed in act two were real. An opera house spokeswoman says they've been surprised by the response. Reports claim the mayor said: 'I'm convinced the opera has able props people who can easily make some fake chickens.' Opera spokeswoman Cornelia Nattermann said: 'We haven't yet decided whether we will stop using chickens from a local farmer and fall back on fake ones.' Bonn's opera may face criminal charges, prosecutor Fred Apostel said. Under German animal protection rights, animals must only be killed for understandable reasons." 11:22:31 AM

The birds and the bees (see 3/2) part three: the bees themselves. n 1947, a Scot named Frank Stuart wrote "City of the Bees," which Stuart describes as an "imaginative fantasy" of a year in the life of a bee colony, based on his seven year's experience as a beekeeper. The book was quite popular. The bees themselves are alternately joyfully royalist and unabashadely fascist. And when Stuart describes them having sex, he writes what might be the most purple sex scenes ever written. In the following excerpt, a queen emerges and prepares to mate. First, however, she first needs to destroy all of her rivals, the other larval queens: ..."proudly, she cut away the seal and raised the lid of the first waxen coffin. Inside, pale and perfect, lay her own lovely sister. She was alive: her eyes, wide open, watched her own destruction...while her people crouched and the very air grew cold, she reached within, tore off her living sister's head, stepped back, held it Medusa-like on high to turn all onlookers to stone, then cast that exquisite mask from her, and moved towards the next of the temples..." When she's got that out of the way, the queen heads straight upwards, followed by a sea of drones. Soon, they are "almost a mile up in the air" and most of the drones have dropped out of the running. Stuart then imagines the final encounter, when a single drone mates with the queen: "Folding their wings about each other, brother and goddess sister locked in a searing flame of rose over the Elysian blue, and hurtled earthward over and over while he throbbed out his life. The lambency of that divine maidenhead consumed his spirit, as it always does, and as she fell, she cast away his spent body down the gulf of the air. Like Icarus flying drunk with glory into the very heart of the sun, passion burned his wings away, but the spirit that had served the air unwavering as an altar flame did not fall, but rushed on in triumph across the sunlit, silent vastness of the universe, with all its stinging stars, into that happiness whose dim foreknowledge had comforted him always during his puny life on earth, and which enveloped him now in joy and glory ineffable and everlasting." 11:02:15 AM

© Copyright 2002 Lisa Lynch.