Reading 'Sex at Dawn' in tandem with 'Pantagruel'

• The neat thing about being an aristocrat--I refer, of course, to my 'Mayflower Madam' status--is that you know what your whole family has been doing for the last five or six hundred years. It's strange, on the other hand, once you get used to it, to realize that most people's view of themselves and their progenitors fades into the mist at barely a hundred years or so--Well, like mine did, for all my deep reading and lifelong fascination with history, and even my memories of past lives, until I (just recently) discovered my Mayflower Descendance....(Descendance is a word I've borrowed from French maybe illicitly, but I just can't see my way to doing without it--Descent, for example, doesn't begin to cover the various things I mean by it).

But still, while a familial consciousness of half a millennium is inconceivable to the many, many many-headed, it's nothing compared to the vastness of the vista that has been evoked within me by reading Christopher Ryan's and (his wife) Cacilda Jethá's Sex at Dawn, the Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, or, as it might have been called, The Intellectual and Moral History of Mankind between the Invention of Language/Reason and the Invention of Agriculture (34,000 to approximately 10,000 B.C.E.). 'Cause it's not just about sex. I've read it a couple of times within the past five days, and paid particular attention to the sources and footnotes during the second perusal.

And then just yesterday and this afternoon I've been reading (really reading) Pantagruel for the first time--I know enough Latin and Old French that, by paying full attention to the footnotes, I'm getting it...though I am rarely, if ever, amused by it. And yet, oddly, nay bizarrely--Well, whatever--I was reading very closely, very attentively, very seriously the catalog of the Librairie de sainct Victor on the bus coming home this afternoon, and suddenly bark, bark, bark! at 'Les Lunettes de Romipètes' I was seized with strange guffawing. I can't explain it even now--but the rhyming of Lunettes and farting at Rome strikes me as hilarious. Or it did, anyway.

But what I'm getting to is this curiously congenial concept of partible paternity--how perfectly natural it seems, at first, and even at second blush. And my lovely mind, somehow, without having to stretch for it, pulled up the images of the wombs of Pasiphaë and Leda--teeming with the progeny of various fathers, and said "Yes! That's how we were meant to create new life!" Whoa. And in there somewhere--I can feel it--is the evolutionary explanation of the homosexualities. And that's why all the images of men (only one of whom, Sir Francis Bacon, is certainly gay) for this blog entry. What's lucky though, because I'm really not very adept at ordering the positioning of the pictures with which I try to illustrate the subject matter of my blogs, is that that's an excellent picture of Michel de Montaigne at the top--a mean, and rather snotty, heterosexual if ever there were one. I feel I know him too well, and resemble him too much, ever, without considerable reservations, to like him. But notice that he's holding forth, with particular suggestiveness, an image hanging by a gold chain around his neck. I'm going to go out on a limb here--because I know nothing of the history of this portrait of le Sieur de Montaigne--and declare that that image is a likeness of Étienne de la Boétie, Montaigne's one true love, and onliest, bestest friend--though both men were straight and almost certainly never had sex together. The point being that it wouldn't have mattered if they had.