#free love

Não me importa para quem ela tira a roupa, a quem ela concede a graça dos seus beijos ou a delícia do seu sexo: minha amada pode ter na cama o homem que desejar. A única coisa que realmente importa a mim é amar e por ela ser amado.

yummm i love itv when my girl gets me from the back

Valencia Volkswagen ☽ 

ig:@the.space.cadets

Eve Naming the Birds by William Blake, 1810.

Open marriage, sexual equality, gratification, free love: these are the Christian virtues that inspired William Blake (1757-1827).

Critics in his own time called him a lunatic, for his non-conformity and his visions, which included appearances by angels. Blake, in turn, thought he lived in a mad world, How else to explain the tendencies toward violence, cruelty, selfishness and repressive morality?

He was an engraver by profession and very accomplished. Someone who knew him as a young man might have assumed his fame would come from his art, not his poems. He was prolific in his writing, but his talent with words wasn’t appreciated by most of his contemporaries. Blake is read today because future generations of scholars rediscovered him. In his own time he was a silly eccentric, mostly harmless, though his radical political and religious views were cause enough for a charge of high treason. (He was acquitted.)

The rehabilitation of Blake is demonstrated in the idiosyncrasy that one of his poems (with music added by Hubert Parry in 1916) has become England’s unofficial national anthem. God Save the Queen is sung to represent the United Kingdom as a whole, but at events where athletes compete under St. George’s Cross (not the Union Jack), And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time plays in the background when England wins a gold medal (for example, at the Commonwealth Games.)

The poem, seen above as Blake originally published it, includes the biblical image of the Chariot of Fire, which was modified to become the name of the 1982 Oscar winner for Best Picture. Its rhyming partner, however, is a more interesting line: “Bring me my Arrows of desire.” For Blake, the liberation of sex from morality and the triumph of the imagination were preconditions for England becoming a new Jerusalem–essentially, heaven on earth.

Parry composed the music during World War I at the behest of a militarist group. Almost immediately, he had misgivings. In 1788, Blake had written a poetic essay with the title, All Religions Are One. On another occasion, he asserted “all men are alike (tho’ infinitely various.“) The poet would have been horrified by the slaughter in the trenches. When the song started to become popular, Parry gifted the rights to the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies in early 1918. Blake admired Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, so he probably would have been pleased with that outcome.

Though he advocated for sexual freedom, Blake was happily married to his wife Catherine for 35 years and by all accounts they were monogamous–though he did ask if she could be persuaded to try a threesome.

(Additional source: English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins.)

Pair in an Expressionist Dance by Gerhard Riebicke, 1930.

Riebicke chronicled the Lebensreform movement in Wiemar Germany. Created as a reaction against industrialization, proponents of Lebensreform (life reform) advocated a return to a more natural existence, encompassing vegetarianism, organic farming and nudism while refraining from substances such as alcohol and tobacco.

Those ideals may seem to belong to the left side of the political spectrum, aligned with the Green Party, for example. After Hitler was ceded power in 1933, many of the architects of Lebensreform instead embraced Nazism, finding echoes of their ideas in the rhetoric connecting blood and land and in policies to improve the purity and fitness of the German race. Lebensreform can still be found in the ideals of far-right groups in contemporary Europe and the United States, for example in the rejection of science and medicine which conflict with traditional beliefs.

Paradoxically, Lebensreform also inspired the hippies and free love advocates of the 1960s, some of whom “returned to the earth” to establish communes and break away from prevailing sexual norms.

Perhaps if the politics could be put aside to focus on the part about being naked in nature, Lebensreform might inform people about what they have in common instead of what makes them different.

Saturday strolls

Unicorn on the Cob

[19 Floffly Fwends]