Arc of Feeling: The History of the Swing 1789146933, 9781789146936

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A rc of Feeling



ARC OF FEELING

The History of the Swing JAV IER MOSCOSO

Reaktion Books

For my mother For my sisters For my brothers

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2023 Copyright © Javier Moscoso 2023 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn  978 1 78914 693 6

CONTENTS

Introduction 9 1 Emotions 18 2 The Gallows 56 3 The Yoke 77 4 A Thousand Autumns 110 5 The Garden 149 6 The Remedy 172 7 Sex 194

Conclusion 219 References 225 Acknowledgements 249 photo acknowledgements 251 Index 253

‘The swing gets wet with the fine rain of twilight.’ Li Qingzhao

‘In the mire of your contempt lay the statue: but its law is precisely that out of contempt it should bring life and living beauty to life.’ Friedrich Nietzsche

1  Relief of the raising of the god Osiris by the goddess Isis, temple of Seti i, Abydos, Egypt, 19th Dynasty, 1292–1189 bce.

Introduction

I

n Spain, the swing came to the children’s playground in the post-war period, although it became popular only after Franco’s death.1 The squeaking of its hooks, its comings and goings, formed part of the landscape of a country that moved between developmentalism and poverty. Many children of the late Franco era queued up to have their turn on the swings, knowing that they would be able to enjoy that feeling of lightness for only a few minutes. While the little ones had to be pushed, the older children learned to bend and stretch their legs to the rhythm of the march, so that their bodily movement would allow them to gain height and increase their speed. The most daring even managed to pos­ ition the saddle almost perpendicular to the ground, as is still the case in some Korean ­rituals or Estonian competitions. The hustle and bustle made accidents inevitable. In the most serious cases, the swing would hit the toddlers hard as they ran around, oblivious to the danger. Among the boys, there was also no shortage of furtive glances underneath the girls’ skirts lifted by the wind, more out of curiosity than impudence. The few scrapes and bruises grew smaller over the years. In the Madrid of the 1980s, as the mayor encouraged cannabis consumption from the balcony of the town hall, the authorities began to improve security systems. Later, it just so happened that the ground, once made of sand with its eternal puddle, was now covered with a material capable of cushioning the blows. A structure for the legs was also added to the chairs, which, like a harness, made it much more difficult to fall out. These modi­fications did not alter 9

arc of feeling

the essence of an experience that had rested since time immemorial on the excitation of the vestibular system. The history of the swing is the story of a resignification. This artefact has suffered the fate of so many things despised by adults: to end up in the hands of children. Its mythological origins – are there other origins? – go back to the time when the goddess Isis swung on the penis of her dead husband, who was also her brother, in the winged form of a kite. We know this story from the Book of the Dead and some other papyri of Nineteenth-Dynasty Egypt. More than 5,000 years ago, elements of this legend were immortalized in the Pyramid Texts. Thrown into the air by the force of love – and by Osiris’s penis, whose ejaculation caused the river to rise, thereby fertilizing the earth – the goddess of a thousand names reached the regions of the upper and lower Nile (illus. 1). From there she crossed the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf to the ancient kingdom of Kalinga on the Indian Sea, where her cult was merged with Brahmanic religions. It was in Hindustan, in northern India, in the thirteenth century, that King Narasingha Deva i commissioned a portrait of himself swinging. Much earlier, some time in the fifth century, in the caves of Ajanta in Maharashtra, the hand of another artist painted Nāga Irandati swaying on a swing. From the old region of Orissa, the instrument spread to Southeast Asia, and it also reached the lands of the Nilotic societies in what is now South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya and northern Tanzania. Before being associated with the playground, the swing was trad­ itionally related to sex and death. Its carnal connotations reached Rome in the time of Tiberius, at the beginning of the first century ce. From those decadent years dates the erotic coin that the painter and collector Pirro Ligorio used to model his illustration for his edition of one of the most important medical texts of the Renaissance: De arte gymnastica (1569) by Girolamo Mercuriale. To add to the confusion, the same image of a woman swinging was used to decorate the games room in the Castello Estense, in Ferrara. The artefact that Renaissance physicians knew as petaurus, and which the Latin poet Martial had compared to a penis, was kept away from European humanism and left little trace in literary sources. 10

Introduction

2  Meeting of the Nāga princess Irandati (on a swing) and the Yaksha g­ eneral Purnaka, Ajanta Cave no. 2, Maharashtra, India, 5th century, mural.

In Europe, the swing survived for centuries in the margins of medieval manuscripts, often associated with the world of acrobatics, where it had probably arrived via Central Asia, transported by Indo-Iranian communities. Modern European nobles rediscovered it through the porcelain of the Chinese Ming dynasty.2 The motifs on vases and pearl boxes often included the qiū qiān, the instrument that for centuries entertained the wives, concubines and servants of the Middle 11

arc of feeling

Kingdom.3 On the other side of the Atlantic, the American colonists turned the swing into another symbol of their new patriotism: against the rigidity of the Windsor chair, they defended the freedom of the Quaker rocking chair. Some centuries earlier, Christopher Columbus had rediscovered the hammock on his first voyage to the Indies, and the Catholic king Ferdinand ii of Aragon regulated its use in the Laws of Burgos of 1512. The swing arrived in the public park in the nineteenth century, mainly as entertainment for adults. As might be expected, children had to wait patiently for their turn.

This is a book not about childhood, but humanity. It is obviously not a history of humanity, but about humanity. It traces the history of an object that, to a greater or lesser extent, has accompanied us since the stories of pre-imperial China or the legends of classical Greece. Strictly speaking, this is not a single book, but two books that have been bound together so they can be read at the same time. On the one hand, the history of the swing concerns the study of a perfectly recognizable object.4 Some classical works in the history of art well reflect this basic form of an artefact that, by the twentieth century, would be made from the unserviceable tyres of the growing automotive industry, especially in the United States. Because the thing is well known, it is not a question of unearthing buried treasures in the sand, but of explaining what is hidden in plain sight.5 Our study is located in what we might call an archaeology of the visible: a discipline that explores the transcendence of everyday objects, the circumstances that determine their use, their abuse and their neglect.6 But this is also the story of an experience: one that depends on the alteration of the anatomical structures responsible for our senses of orientation and balance. From that point of view, this book aims to explain the general use of the artefact, the obstinacy with which it appears in such distant places and times. From the Gulf of Mexico to Southeast Asia, from the Hudson Valley to the Yellow River, from sub-Saharan Africa to the Baltic, the swing connects the Navajo sun dance with the Totonac seesaw, and the legends of ancient Greece with Brahmanical religions. In the wake of other scholars, we want to 12

Introduction

know why very different cultures share similar mythologies and rituals that involve, in many cases, the manufacture of functionally identical objects. To shed light on a similar problem, the contemporary histor­ ian Carlo Ginzburg began by asserting that the universal elements of culture cannot be separated from the bodily qualities from which they are elaborated. Following in part the intuition of the early twentieth­ century philosopher Walter Benjamin, for whom the quality of the story depended on its anchoring in the experience, Ginzburg wondered about the formal similarities shared by various Eurasian rites related to the journey to the underworld.7 In order to access the elements of modern witchcraft, before its reconceptualization by the inquisitors, this famous historian was forced to make a historical and anthropological journey through the most varied sources of shamanism. He ended up acknowledging a Nietzschean debt: for Ginzburg, the solution was in the body, in the narrated experience of the body.8 The history of the swing poses a similar problem. Here, too, we want to know what makes this confluence of symbolic expressions possible. We begin by acknowledging that these transcultural qualities cannot be explained by biology alone. This book starts where Ginzburg’s books on witchcraft ended: in the experience of the body; or rather, in the acceptance of the Nietzschean idea that culture, in its most primary aspects, is a symptom of the body. Just as for Ginzburg, the binding element of witchcraft was the journey to the underworld, or the narrated experience of death, so the integument of the story of the swing is the experience of the physical and social limitation that the body feels as injustice. By this ‘feeling of injustice’ I mean an aesthetic or sensory experience that emerges, as do all culturally significant experiences, through the contest and mediation of the social rule and the communitarian norm. This book was born out of previous research into the history of human passions. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the history of emotions has established itself as an academic discipline and colonized other branches of knowledge, such as political philoso­ phy, sociology, social psychology, and the histories of literature and art. This expansion has taken three paths. First, it has been directed towards the study of complex emotional groups that, like mourning, 13

arc of feeling

love, grief or loneliness, involve the mobilization of a large number of affective resources, capable even of modifying sensory thresholds.9 Second, and partly as a result of this process, we have come to recognize that it is not possible to distinguish between a history of the emotions, on the one hand, and a history of the senses, on the other.10 On the contrary, the historical study of human passions had to take the corporeality of experience seriously, seeking the relationship between the psychological dimension and the somatic expression of affection.11 Finally, long-term studies appear to be interested both in tracing the same emotion in different cultural contexts and in ­understanding its historical modulations over the centuries.12 This research is situated at the crossroads of these three developments: it claims to be a history of experience, it seeks to shed light on the history of the inner senses and, finally, it does so from a historical and cross-cultural point of view. As in the case of previous studies on the history of anger, loneliness, ambition or love, we wanted to clarify the conditions that make it possible to compare psychophysical experiences that, although very distant in time or space, have common elements that cannot be explained by appealing to a biological condition alone. It is important to understand this before proceeding further, for, in the case of human beings, cultural history without a body is as useless as natural history without a soul. On the one hand, it would be unthinkable not to associate the oscillation impulse with an evolutionary past that humans share with many other animal species, including North Atlantic sardines and Mediterranean dolphins. The excitation of the vestibular system may well be part of an adaptive training dependent on biological inheritance. Perhaps swinging is the vestige of a remote past, the emotional remnant of our animal condition. Modern ethologists are well aware of the penchant many animals have for swinging – starting, of course, with primates. Old Europeans knew this already, so that, from the seventeenth century onwards, manufacturers of birdcages added a small rocker, perhaps with the intention of softening the rigours of captivity. Out of an awareness of the famous saying that a bird in a cage sings not out of joy but out of rage, swings proliferated in the cages of absolutism. 14

Introduction

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, swaying began to be related to so-called brainwaves and, more particularly, to neuronal oscillation. Science, which sometimes has no other function than to confirm what everyone already knows, has shown that the same type of movement that allows the brain to pulse in synchrony with the heartbeat produces a form of lethargy very similar to that triggered by the ingestion of narcotic substances. The increase in so-called alpha waves – those brainwaves associated with rest and meditation – explains why children, and many adults, fall asleep with gentle movement, why autism spectrum disorder is soothed by rocking, and why swaying has worked as a form of therapy for the treatment of dementia. The fact is, however, that neither neuroscience nor ethology can explain the cultural elements of oscillation. The human body is a rhythmic structure, but that does not mean that the history of music has been entirely determined by this biological circumstance. Music, like the swing, soothes or excites through the bodily imbrication of rhythm. But no one can infer from that circumstance – far from it – that rhythm alone determines the artistic content of a symphonic concert. By the same token, it may well be that some human beings swing like monkeys, but so far neither monkeys nor sardines have built up a mythology of swinging. They have no rituals associated with that practice, nor have they been able to compose a sonata. ‘The custom of swinging has been practised as a religious, or better still, magical rite in various parts of the world, but it seems impossible to explain them all in the same way,’ wrote the anthropologist James George Frazer in the third edition of The Golden Bough, first published in 1890.13 In the eight pages he devoted to the subject, this Scottish scholar examined 21 different cases of ritual swinging, mostly from Nepal, Indonesia, Pakistan, Borneo and India. With a few references to Estonian and Lithuanian swings – from the region then known as Livonia – as well as to traditional festivals in Greece, Italy and Spain (Cádiz) and to the Dano festival in Korea, Frazer explained these rituals through three principles or functions. The simplest of all was the use of sympathetic magic, according to which the higher you swing, the higher the grain will grow. Second was the expiatory use of swinging, serving to ward off evil, whether in the form of demon, 15

arc of feeling

spirit or disease. Finally came the celebration of the arrival of harvests or rains through swinging.14 Over the next sixty years, Frazer’s opuscule was joined by the work of a number of other cultural scholars who, in one way or another, tried to shed light on the nature of human swinging.15 But the difficulties remained unanswered. This book argues that, from a cultural point of view, the swing is first and foremost a symbolic artefact. While swinging, we may believe ourselves to be another or to be somewhere else. The oscillatory movement allows the creation of a false consciousness to such an extent that most of its uses are related to the figuration of those who believe themselves to be someone else or in a different location. The swing, of course, is neither a boat nor a car, nor a river, nor a penis, but it can take on the character of all these objects. Anyone who has ever driven in a car or sailed on a boat knows this. Its movement can simulate both the cradling of a child and the trotting of a horse. In both its playful and ritualized aspects, the swing is also an emotional refuge. The contemporary historian William M. Reddy, who coined the concept, defines it as ‘a relationship, ritual, or organization that provides a safe release from prevailing emotional norms; that allows for the relaxation of emotional strivings, with or without ideological justification; and that may set aside or threaten the existing emotional regime’.16 The universal history of the swing, at least as far as it is possible to trace it, suggests that the artefact had a splintered existence, alternating its play-related uses, essentially masculine, with its largely ritual-related functions, mainly feminine. This is something into which Frazer did not delve. Even though most cases referred to in The Golden Bough featured women, the matter went entirely un­­ noticed in his writings. And this is not a minor detail. As an emotional refuge, the swing provides a release from physical limitation and social bondage. Before it was relegated to the playground, oscillation questioned the regime of hierarchy and opened a crack in emotionally oppressive situations. Similarly to the solace that some find in poetry, swaying provides a space of refuge from political inclemency, community ties and personal tragedy. At the same time, this refuge allows us to tighten the 16

Introduction

rope, to stretch the scenic options, to imagine another possible world or to denounce the abuses of this one. It is a relational space, open to improvisation, where we can say openly that we do not accept social convention, that we do not want to love as our parents did, or that we will not follow the teachings of Confucius. The trench from which to organize resistance affects personal preferences, of course, and is undoubtedly the result of social asphyxiation. In the most primary cases, it questions the most basic forms of ordering the world, those on which such elementary things as ‘up and down’ or ‘inside and o­ utside’ depend.17 This book begins by outlining the main features of the anthropology of oscillation, the physical-biological conditions of the experience of swaying. Vertigo, disorientation, anguish, suspension and impulse are some of these characteristics. The history of the swing can be examined from the point of view of complementary fields, such as philology, anthropology or archaeology. We look at some of the answers that these three sciences have given to the use and representation of swings in classical Greece in Chapter Two. In Chapter Three we examine the uses of the swing in India and Southeast Asia. This is the first time in this book that our instrument appears linked to rituals of reversal of status, including those related to the transfer between gods and monarchs. At the same time, it is the moment to raise some theoretical issues about the relationship between the regime of truth and what I have called here, partly following Michel Foucault, the ‘regime of relevance’. Chapter Four is devoted to the history and representation of the swing in China, where women again take centre stage. The garden in which the instrument is placed allows emancipation and refuge. In Chapter Five, we look at the relationship between the swing and children, especially with regard to the history of European and Asian art. We also explore the specific context in which the swing is placed in the realm of play, if it is at all possible to distinguish between play and ritual. In Chapter Six, we return to the medical or sanitary uses of the swing, and we end, in Chapter Seven, with a discussion of the sexual symbolism of the swing in both its structural and functional aspects.

17

1

Emotions

T

he sense of balance – the sense that allows us to stand upright and adjust our gait to the conditions of the terrain; the sense that shapes our position in space – was ignored in the treatises of antiquity, as well as in the dozens of Renaissance and Baroque representations and allegories of the senses. For centuries the body’s relationship to the world was thought to be mediated only by our ability to smell, see, hear, taste or touch.1 The claim that we have five senses, and only those, was prevalent in Europe, America and much of Asia. This is partly owing to the fact that the distinction between up and down or right and left seems so obvious to us that we appreciate its importance only when we feel dizzy or lose ground.2 As with friends we speak well of only after they are dead, we recognize the goodness of our more integrative senses when we miss them. We do so not on a whim, but because the regulating principle of our vital clock, like that of our internal compass, cannot be perceived except through the intervention of a dissonance, through the natural or artificial p­ roduction of an unbalancing bodily phenomenon.3 From the beginning of the nineteenth century, theories of perception began to deal with sensory qualities other than the classical senses. The sensation of pain, for example, which later became known as nociception, was associated with the sense of touch, while thirst, hunger and the urge to urinate were some of the subjects of endocrin­ ology. To some extent, medicine and physiology began to distinguish between ways of accessing the outside world and the perception of 18

Emotions

processes occurring, as it were, from the skin inwards. However, when it came to the sense related to the passage of time or that of equilibrium – two of the most closely related to our study – it was not very clear to what extent these sensations referred to ‘the outside’ or ‘the inside’. Nor did it seem obvious that they were purely individual ­sensations, or that they could not vary according to habit or custom.4

Vertigo Among historians of science there is almost unanimous agreement that the development of a physiology of orientation took place at the beginning of the nineteenth century, introduced by Jan Evangelista Purkyně, a professor at the University of Prague.5 Like so many other scientists of the time, Purkyně reached many of his conclusions through the always heroic exercise of self-experimentation. Whether by subjecting himself to galvanic currents, ingesting narcotic substances, exposing himself to great heights or interrupting his bloodstream, or through active or passive movements, Purkyně delved into the labyrinth of the inner ear by deliberately producing dizziness. We know from his own testimony that, after swinging for an hour and a half, he suffered from a nervous condition that he himself described as unbearable, with the systematic presence of nausea.6 The Czech sage set up a rotating chair suspended by a rope, a device not unlike those used at the time for the treatment of various forms of insanity, and very similar to the machines that were becoming popular in the parks and fairs of Bohemia.7 About a hundred years before Purkyně’s experiments, the phys­ ician and philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie tried to elucidate the reasons for and causes of vertigo, a condition concomitant of so many ailments and for which so few remedies were available. He began his study by describing the symptoms. Those who suffer from vertigo, he reasoned, are subject to the illusion of what is not happening and perceive what does not exist: ‘they believe themselves to fall from heaven to earth or to rise to the clouds, to whirl like a tornado in the air and then plunge with the whole universe into the deepest of abysses.’8 Some people see two objects where they should see only one; others imagine that the colours are more vivid than they really are. The 19

arc of feeling

hallucinatory character of this terrible condition is noticed in sight, of course, but it also affects the other senses. Hearing is altered as much as smell or taste. ‘The muscles relax, the knees and the rest of the limbs tremble; the fear is then so great that it attacks the most intrepid warrior or the most unyielding philosopher.’9 Sufferers fall to the ground, vomit and do not recognize themselves or those closest to them; their eyelids rise and fall rapidly. In the most severe cases, breathing is ­disturbed and the body becomes agitated with violent convulsions. Although La Mettrie confuses vertigo and dizziness with drunken­ ness, epilepsy and apoplexy, he attempts to trace the aetiology of the disease in all its variants. His research explores physical symptomatology, but it focuses above all on disorders of a cognitive nature. This alteration of consciousness is caused by an emotional reaction in which the patient’s fear is the determining factor. In other words, dizziness and vertigo may be triggered by a physical cause, but the state of confusion in the mind is generated by an emotional condition: fear.10 Before La Mettrie’s work, the hallucinatory effects of oscillation involved the presence of the so-called animal spirits, vital entities that supposedly connected the sensations of the body with the contents of consciousness. In 1672 Thomas Willis devoted an entire chapter to them in his treatise on the souls of brutes.11 In this pioneering work (the title of which seems so strange to us today), this English anatomist considered vertigo as a passion or discomfort occurring in the brain. Long before twentieth-century philosophers came up with the gentle idea that human beings were nothing more than brains submerged in vats, Willis used the same image to explain the effects of oscillatory or rotational motion. If we shake a bucket full of water, he reasoned, and bring it to a sudden stop, the water will continue to rotate inside the container, even after the motion of the bucket has ceased. Since, as we rotate or sway, the animal spirits no longer flow into the nerves but remain spinning in the brain, the vertigo sufferer mistakenly perceives objects as whirling, when it is nothing more than the animal spirits revolving in their head. The confusion, Willis concluded, is so rad­ ical that the sufferer ends up falling, covered in darkness. In a curious play on words, he explained that when the faculties fail, the sufferers fall.12 They fall, so to speak, twice. They fall physically, of course, but 20

Emotions

their intellectual faculties, which also fail, make them fall into the error of thinking that it is external objects that move, when it is only the inside of their disturbed brain that is shaking. Willis and La Mettrie had many differences. The Englishman was a founding member of the Royal Society, a reputed physician who has gone down in history for his contributions to the field of brain anatomy, as well as for his direct knowledge of the sweet taste of diabetic urine. La Mettrie, on the other hand, spent much of his life taking the physiological evidence needed to construct a materialistic philosoph­ ical system from here and there, much of it plagiarized. Both made use of the study of vertigo in order to understand the connection between physical and psychic phenomena, but where Willis considered vertigo to be the result of a disturbance of a nervous nature, La Mettrie made it depend on a passion, specifically fear, triggered by a material cause. From a clinical point of view, there is perhaps no more complete study of the effects of oscillation than the one we owe to Joseph Frank. This German physician, who spent a good part of his life in Vilnius, devoted an entire chapter to vertigo in the corresponding volume of his monumental treatise on internal medicine, originally published in Latin in 1821.13 Vertigo, for Frank, was ‘an erroneous, transient perception, whereby objects, although still and motionless, seem to change place and move’.14 The causes of this malady lie in the most unlikely places, such as onanism, coitus, retention of sperm, hunger or prolonged sleep. Sudden changes in the atmosphere could produce it, as could the midday wind or mountain air. Sunstroke could have the same consequences as pregnancy, and haemorrhage could produce the same dizzy effects as diarrhoea. Certain foods – among them clams, chestnuts, parsley and garlic – were also responsible, as was wine, especially if it was adulterated, sulphurous or sweet. Coffee or beer could also bring on vertigo, as could farting, hot springs and worms. In an almost endless list of causes, Frank included coal, lime or tobacco smoke, narcotic poisons, imagination, studies and vigils, as well as watching spinning things, such as whirling water or jumping frogs. Of course, the same effects could be achieved by subjecting the body to the motions of sailing or swinging, or others equally strange, such as violent sneezing, falling and blows. 21

arc of feeling

But if the aetiology of vertigo or its nosological variations surprises us, so might its remedies. The solution to so-called inflammatory vertigo, for example, involved cupping the back of the neck or applying leeches to the anus. If the person who gets dizzy is bald, Frank explained, he should not go out without a wig. In the case of nervous vertigo, he recommended the use of alcoholic sulphuric ether, cinchona bark, valerian root, black mustard seed, Pyrmont waters in warm milk, electricity or magnetism. The great doctor François Boissier de Sauvages himself, Frank adds in a footnote, relied on peacock droppings for these purposes. Yet another physician, a certain Dr Amelunken, considered that there was nothing better than the powdered stool of red squirrels, better female than male, up to the weight of a shield coin, to be taken every morning in wine or beer. Frank also refers to a case of vertigo cured by the sound of trumpets.15 When Frank published his encyclopaedia, vertigo and seasickness had become unusually prominent, especially as a result of the exponential increase in travel by boat, horse and carriage. Somewhat later, the problems of motion sickness on the railways and in motor cars began to appear. However, since not everyone suffered the same unpleasant consequences in the same circumstances, many authors conjectured that the feeling of imbalance must have its origin in some habit or acquired custom. It was above all the English scholar Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century who considered vertigo to be a natural expression of life, a physiological condition that became pathological only in extreme cases. In learning to walk, he wrote, we learn to judge the distances of objects. Similarly, we become aware of our perpendicularity only by observing the upright position of the things around us.16 The sense of orientation, Darwin reasoned, depends so much on the way we learn to relate visually to objects that no one can walk a hundred straight steps blindfolded. For the same reason, many people get dizzy when they look at things from great heights or when they observe small objects that, like the diamonds decorating a papered wall, might give the appearance of movement. If our sense of balance depends on our ability to view fixed objects, it is not surprising that we doubt our verticality when we see moving objects. This is what happens to those who become dizzy 22

Emotions

at the sight of a spinning wheel or while contemplating the fluctuations of a river.17 The same phenomenon occurs when we are the ones moving. Only learning and daily practice enable us to recognize that the oscillation of objects when we ride is merely apparent. Those who lack the habit of horsemanship, Darwin concluded, will never cease to be confused. They will suffer from the same ills that afflicted Napoleon’s army when he mounted his troops on camels: When first an European mounts an elephant sixteen feet high, and whose mode of motion he is not accustomed to, the objects seem to undulate, as he passes, and he frequently becomes sick and vertiginous, as I am well informed. Any other unusual movement of our bodies has the same effect, as riding backwards in a coach, swinging on a rope, turning round swiftly on one leg, skating on the ice, and a thousand others.18 The sense of habituation is so important that when a patient has been bedridden for a long time and tries to get up, he or she will usually fall down. Finally, vertigo can also occur as a combination of the patient’s own movement and that of surrounding objects. This is what happens in sailing, where the lapping of the waves and the rocking of the ship occur unpredictably. The eighteenth-century Prussian phil­ osopher Immanuel Kant, himself a rather sedentary man, included in his Anthropology (1798) some reflections on the symptoms he had suffered while sailing from Pillau to Königsberg (now Baltiysk and Kaliningrad) on the Vistula Lagoon, which he attributed, like many of his contemporaries, to the oscillating movement of the eyes caused by the waves.19 Erasmus Darwin considered that there were two ways to alleviate these effects. Since dizziness was the result of ‘movements unpredictable to a distracted soul’, it could be avoided through attention and, more particularly, through the concentration of the gaze on a fixed point.20 He who swings in order to be distracted concentrates in order not to get dizzy.21 In his opinion, therefore, the best thing to do to avoid seasickness, vomiting and the symptoms that followed this form of vertigo was to get used to the swaying. The solution to seasickness, 23

arc of feeling

as we shall see later, was s’amariner, to become accustomed, by dancing or swinging, to the tossing and turning of the waves and the movement of the ship. Before embarking, he wrote, it would be necessary to swing regularly for a week or two to prevent the effects. Even more radically, and if this gentle swaying were not enough, Darwin went so far as to design a contraption that could be used for such an undertaking.22 Embroiled in a bitter controversy over post-rotational vertigo, he never put his idea into practice, but it was later used for the treatment of some contemporaneous mental illnesses. We do not know whether or not his grandson, the famous naturalist Charles Darwin, swung before boarding the Beagle, the ship on which he would make the voyage that forever changed ideas about the origin of species. What we do know is that, in a letter addressed to his father, the creator of evolutionary theory wrote that, on his passage through the Bay of Biscay, ‘the misery I endured from sea-sickness is far beyond what I ever guessed at.’23 As we have seen, whereas for La Mettrie vertigo was caused by fear, Thomas Willis considered it to be the result of a nervous affliction. While Joseph Frank interpreted it either as a disease in and of itself or as the symptom of many other ailments, Erasmus Darwin – and here one cannot be more Romantic – characterized it as the effect that unpredictable movements produce in a distracted soul. In all cases, the swing was part either of the mechanical procedures cap­ able of producing it or of the equally mechanical ways of attenuating it. Beyond its physiological study, vertigo was presented as a psychophysical condition that could produce fear or vomiting, affecting both the body and the intellectual faculties. As the story of the swing confirms, those who get dizzy feel what does not exist and believe in what is not real.

Disorientation Immanuel Kant’s thought has been placed in relation to the work of one of his most prominent disciples, Markus Herz. Historians of phil­ osophy are especially familiar with the correspondence between the two of them concerning the foundations of so-called critical philosophy: that which seeks to establish the legitimate limits of knowledge. 24

Emotions

Much less well known is the fact that Herz was the author of a huge treatise on vertigo, which was published for the first time in 1786 and again in 1791.24 Although Kant received the manuscript with some disdain, arguing that he did not suffer from vertigo, Herz considered the text to have emerged from conversations with his mentor, some of whose more programmatic concepts did seem to have a bearing on the subject-matter of the book. In particular, Kant used the idea of ‘orientation’ as one of the guiding principles of his thought, as was evident in a text also published in 1786 in which he asked what it meant to ‘orientate oneself in thought’.25 At the end of the eighteenth century Kant favoured the idea that it was necessary in any order of life, including religion and politics, to be guided by the speculative use of reason in order not to fall into the irrational enthusiasm of those who try to solve by faith what should be a matter of thought. In other words, in an unfamiliar neighbourhood, it is not enough for our companion to tell us, ‘I think it’s that way,’ but we must have an adequate guide who can lead our steps with rigour. In keeping with his analytical vein, Kant started from the simplest case of orientation – geographical orientation – and progressed to the more complex situation, in which not only do familiar objects disappear, but concepts no longer correspond to any sensible intuition. The objective information provided by a map, for example, will not be of much use unless we know our initial and relative positions in relation to the specifications of the map. We come out of an underground station in an unfamiliar city and, although we have the street names in sight, written on the map, we must first determine whether the street we are looking for, and which we see clearly on the city plan, is to our right or our left. ‘Even with all the objective data of the sky, I orientate myself geographically only by means of a subjective basis of differentiation,’ writes Kant.26 Lest readers without philosophical training get lost and become disorientated, it is worth explaining this in a little more detail before we return to the subject of the swing. We should begin by clarifying that this ‘subjective basis of differentiation’ of which Kant speaks is nothing more than a feeling that allows us to distinguish right from left and bottom from top in our own bodies. In order to reach this interesting conclusion, the 25

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German philosopher uses two mental experiments that are very simi­lar in their design. In the first, he asks what would happen if the celestial vault suddenly changed its position so that all the stars in the east moved to the west and vice versa. In that circumstance, he writes, even the best of astronomers, if guided only by what they see and not by what they feel, would become hopelessly disorientated. The same reasoning applies to the kind of orientation that Kant calls mathematical, referring to that which locates us in any space in general and not in a geographically determined space. Let us imagine in this case, Kant again reasons, a completely dark room. In such a situ­ation, we should be able to orientate ourselves by touch if we can find a familiar object whose relative position we remember within the room. Everyone understands this concept to some extent. For example, if I walk through my house in the dark, by bumping into the coffee table in the living room, I can determine my position and easily find my way out. Suppose, however, that someone, in order to play a practical joke, has changed the placement of all the objects in the room so that what was previously on the right is now on the left, and vice versa. In this case, as in the previous one, orientation will be possible only on the basis of a feeling of bodily differentiation, capable of distinguishing right from left. I bump into the same table, but I feel that it is now on my right and not on my left, as it used to be. Thus, if I were to conduct my movements solely according to what I perceive – and, in this case, that perception is tactile – I would never find my way out. Nature, however, has endowed me with the ability to orientate myself in relation to my own body. Just as, when I look in a mirror, I feel that my right is not to my left (which is what I see), so too my sense of space rests on this natural feeling of orientation. Even if Kant does not enter into a discussion of the subjective basis of the passage of time, the problem remains the same. Either we consider that we are sleepy because it is night, and thus interpret our waking rhythm as the result of contextual conditions, or we consider, on the contrary, that we have an inner clock, a circadian rhythm, that explains, for ex-­­ ample, why we dislike the variations of standard clock times or why we suffer from jet lag – something Kant could never have experienced, for obvious reasons. 26

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Here, as in other cases, Kant follows an ascending path: from orientation in familiar contexts – and nothing more familiar in those days than orientation by the stars – to the less familiar, passing through that merely spatial orientation, similar to that of those who played the then fashionable game blind man’s buff. Blindfolded, having turned around several times, and guided only by our sense of space and, at least in part, the distant sounds of our playmates, we must find a way to hit them with a spoon. Very popular during the Modern Age and the Enlightenment, this game of disorientation was given different names in Europe: gallinita ciega in Spain, mosca cieca in Italy, colin-maillard in France, cabra-cega in Portugal. As in the case of swinging, the aim is also to force sensory imbalance and produce a disturbance of consciousness, accompanied perhaps by dizziness if the rotation has been very rapid. Players must then try to reorientate themselves without visual references. We should add that, as in the case of the swing, this pastime also includes an erotic dimension. It is not for children. Becoming dizzy and disorientated, losing one’s footing and looking for one’s playmates so as to hit them with a spoon or stick may seem innocent, but perhaps it is not. Let us return to Kant. Finding God or any other entity of which we have only a speculative idea is much more difficult than finding the elusive playmate of blind man’s buff. In the case of God, there is no clapping, no sound, no laughter. There is no spoon, either. But this kind of orientation, which the philosopher calls logical – that which concerns our ability to determine our path in thought – must adhere to the same subjective principle of orientation, which is none other than the strictly felt need to presuppose and assume what cannot be presupposed or assumed on the basis of objective criteria. According to Kant, this feeling of orientation has been ‘implanted by nature and made habitual through frequent practice’.27 In other words, what we call the ‘sense of orientation’ is partly innate and partly acquired. It is given to us by nature, but it is also learned and cultivated by habit. The feeling of orientation is not knowledge, of course. It is not neces­ sary to know the names of the streets in order not to get lost, nor is it necessary to remember the position of the trees in a forest or their botanical typology in order to find one’s way. It is a subjective 27

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foundation that allows us to distinguish right from left and up from down, neither of which is a mean feat. But this sense of orientation is also surprising for a different reason. Not only is it halfway between nature and culture, but it is also on the border of what we might consider the split character of the modern subject. Again, one must appeal to the patience of the untrained philosophical reader if one is not to get lost. The secrets of the swing are not inscrutable, but they require, as Erasmus Darwin suggested, a certain attentiveness incompatible with a distracted soul. The path we are about to embark on is intended not to swamp the reader with philosophers’ jargon but to delve into the secrets of the swing. So let us take it one step at a time. By the split character of the modern subject, we mean that, according to Kant, our guide, we would have to take into consideration on the one hand the human being as the object of empirical investigation, and on the other the human being as the ground of experience. While the former – the empirical, determinate self – can be the object of study in anthro­ pology, psychology, law or any other of the human sciences, the latter – the determinant subject, which Kant calls the ‘transcendental self ’ – cannot be the object of any knowledge, since it is itself the found­ ation of all knowledge. This transcendental self cannot be represented, since it is itself the scaffolding on which any representation rests. In Foucault’s reading of this problem, he was quick to point out that it is not that the Kantian subject of knowledge has, so to speak, a split personality, but rather that there is an irresolvable duality between two different forms of subjectivity. The first, which is much more prosaic, refers to the knowledge that we have of ourselves insofar as we breathe, eat or love. The second, which is much more elevated, refers to a merely intellectual self-awareness. This transcendental self is not and cannot be the object of any science precisely because it is the unifying foundation of all knowledge. Nor can we have direct knowledge of this unifying principle of our consciousness, since it is what enables us to be conscious of our own perceptions. But, the reader may ask, what does all this have to do with vertigo, dizziness and swinging? The answer is very simple: the same oscillatory and swaying movements that open the door to the bodily 28

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schemas that determine our orientation in space also shed light on the way in which we can access our most integrative subjectivity. We have seen how Kant distinguished between an empirical self and a transcendental self. The latter did not occur in experience, since it was the condition of all possible experience. Herz’s position, however, is that the swing – or any other inducer of vertigo – allows us to have empirical knowledge of the transcendental self. So, whoever wonders at this point why human beings like to swing can always consider that it might be because swinging allows us to perceive the Kantian ­transcendental self. Let us look at this idea in more detail. Since Herz was one of Kant’s disciples, it is not surprising that his most important book was about disorientation. This medical doctor opened a discussion that dealt with the same problem as his mentor, yet approached it from an entirely different angle. Instead of being interested in the forms of orientation, Herz focused on the opposite phenomenon.28 He began by doing something new. In contrast to all those who had defined dizziness and vertigo in relation to the movement of things in space, he decided to study the problem in its temporal dimension. The disturbed consciousness was not the result of animal spirits whirling around inside the brain like water swirling in a bucket, but the effect of a lack of connection between the perception of objects and the time required to become aware of them. Contrary to Willis, who understood vertigo as an essentially physical phenomenon, Herz considered it, as had La Mettrie, to be a disease of the soul, although he did not agree that it was triggered by fear. Vertigo, he wrote, was ‘a state of confusion caused by the too rapid representation of sensations’.29 If the processing of this information, Herz reasoned, takes place too slowly, the soul becomes bored. If, on the other hand, the pace is too fast, the soul becomes dizzy. As part of a sensualist theory, Herz argued that every psychic representation required a time or, rather, a rhythm of processing. In other words, through the study of vertigo, the soul began to be understood as a processor or, more precisely, a synchronizer. The object of research was still the human soul, but while Kant understood that the condition of possibility of all experience could not be the object 29

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of any objective knowledge, Herz argued – in diametric opposition – that these same properties could be intuited through inner sense.30 In doing so, he contradicted one of the aporias of Kantian thought, which suggested that the foundation of all representation, the principle of individuation, could not be known. Nor was Herz alone in this attempt. By the end of the eighteenth century Europe was populated by literary commentaries and graphic representations of vertigo, which became one of the attributes of so-called modernity.31 Long before the advent of the cinematograph in 1895, improvements in transportation made this pathological condition one of the features of the new space of civility. From the last years of the eighteenth century onwards, ‘vertigo’ acquired three different meanings, all of which had to do with Herz’s reading of this state and could be produced ­artificially by means of the swing or other mechanical procedure. First, vertigo began to be related to time and, more particularly, to speed. Whatever its triggering effect might be, dizziness seemed to be the result of the accumulation of sensory impressions that the soul could not process. It was the recollection of these same impressions, rather than the swaying of the body, that forced the consciousness to struggle to maintain its attention, to the point where it could eventually lose its balance.32 Vertigo could be associated with concussion, but it had to be interpreted primarily in psychic terms, by means of a theory of cognition that linked representations to the time needed to process them. Not only did the movements of the train seem to be involved in the production of nervous diseases but, it was argued, the changing distance of objects during the journey led inexorably and unconsciously to the destruction of organic matter.33 The effects of this new condition were felt, above all, in the United States. The same nation that had popularized the rocking chair as a way of soothing the spirits was plunged into a general weariness that came to be known as neurasthenia. Second, fear alone may make us dizzy, as La Mettrie suggested, but the mere fact of a consciousness altered by vertigo also inspires terror. In other words, fear makes us dizzy, but dizziness also terrifies us. Vertigo therefore is a doubly phantasmagorical experience. On the one hand, since the soul is not capable of processing all sensible 30

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perceptions, vertigo suggests the existence of non-conscious sensory experiences. It is unsurprising that the psychoanalytic tradition found a landmine in the problem of vertigo, and that Sigmund Freud himself made use of the swing in his studies of sexuality. The vomiting caused by dizziness was, for the father of psychoanalysis, nothing more than the physical effect of the transference mechanism by which the un­­ noticed elements of consciousness at the time of cradling were made present in adulthood. We will return to this later. On the other hand, vertigo was always accompanied by ghosts and other invisible beings. While its history and mythology relate it to death, science relates it to the strange figures that appear as a result of the excitation of the optic nerve.34 In his discussion of the involuntary movement of the eyes in the direction opposite to the course of rotation, once rotation has ceased, Erasmus Darwin considered the eye to be launched in search of spectra, the name he gave to the flying shadows that the retina pursues without ever being able to reach them. As with the vertigo one feels on land after a long journey by boat or in a carriage, the undulating movement bewitches us.35 The German word Schwindel (dizziness), used by Herz, is etymologically related to the word for deception and, more generally, to the meaning of seeing ghosts or making others believe in their existence, which is what Schwindler still meant in the eighteenth century.36 Today, social networks are overflowing with videos in which people from all over the world have recorded swings that move by themselves. The story of the haunted swing, however, is as old as the history of the afterlife itself. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the famous detective Sherlock Holmes, included one in his history of spiritualism, just as Victorian photographers – so inclined to portraits of the dead – depicted apparently dead girls on swings.37 Last but not least, vertigo was related to self-deception. We have already seen how this alteration of consciousness was described in terms of cognitive imbalance. Those who are dizzy see what does not exist and believe themselves to be what they are not. All studies on dizziness before Herz’s work refer to it in this way. It is a phenomenon linked to appearances, in which we think we are going up when we are going down, and vice versa.38 In parallel to the times of Homer’s 31

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Odyssey, personal identity appears to be linked to the movement of the waves: ‘As on the raging sea, which, boundless on all sides, rises and sinks, howling, mountains of water, sits a sailor in his boat, so sits the individual, calmly, in the midst of a world of sorrows, relying and trusting on the principle of individuation,’ wrote the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.39 Later, Friedrich Nietzsche would see in this trust in personal identity the Apollonian dream of life, the harmonious limit­ ation of a passion that reflects the pleasure and wisdom of appearance. Kant, for his part, did not take his disciple’s views too ­seriously. In fact, it was more than two months before he replied to Herz.

Anguish Room 216 of the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, the largest of the city’s art galleries, is devoted to the work of the nineteenth­century German painter Caspar David Friedrich and the art of Romanticism.40 Three pictures hang on the same wall. Between a glacier and a volcano, two of the most frequently recurring themes of Romantic painting, we find a small canvas by the famous Danish artist Jens Juel (see illus. 19 and 20). This country scene also nourishes the feeling of the sublime. The museum curators could equally well have placed it next to a shipwreck or a moonlit scene. Although the central motif is a swing, Juel preferred that the title refer to the promontory of Sorgenfri Castle, 13 kilometres (8 mi.) north of Copenhagen and one of the leisure centres of the local bourgeoisie. The artist, a close friend of the Genevan natur­alist Charles Bonnet, with whom he shared a taste for the study of the passions of the soul, was interested in fear as a form of recreation. In the painting, the length of the rope on which a young woman swings while seated on what appears to be no more than a four-legged chair, whose normal use was probably different, is striking. As was common at the time, the impulse comes from another rope, the end of which rests in the hands of a gentleman who hides behind a tree. Under the watchful eye of a girl and her governess, the swinging girl clings tightly to the arms of the chair. Her apprehension is understandable, because of the instability of the device and the length of the rope. As the eighteenth century progressed, European painting began to explore the Dionysian qualities of the swing. Fear, for example – what 32

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the previous century had defined as anticipation of pain and death – also became a pastime. Hubert Robert, the great painter of imaginary ruins, placed a swinging girl in such a high position that everyone present, including the sculpture of Hercules that decorates the garden, had to strain to see her (see illus. 21). In a similar work by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (see illus. 23), the height the young girl reaches on the swing is so excessive that her companions use a spyglass to follow her flight. In both cases, the use of the artefact is invested with Romantic qualities that, like the cliffs and ghosts of Gothic ­literature, entertain the consciousness through the evocation of danger. Perhaps no European artist was able to explore these fears better than the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya. His canvases and drawings reveal a thematic evolution that ranges from the fête galante to unconscious desire, and from witchcraft to barefaced sex. His most famous work on the swing is an oil painting of 1779 that was to serve as the basis for a tapestry designed for the Palacio Real de El Pardo in Madrid. As in many other similar pieces, this oil on canvas (now in the Museo del Prado in the same city; illus. 22) re-creates the dangerous intermingling of aristocratic children with their maids as well as, at the extreme, with the shepherds, who serve to give meaning to this form of topsy-turvy carnival. In this scene, the nobles disguise themselves as peasants, amuse themselves as peasants and swing as peasants. The painting is marked by a social inversion of meaning, by a form of transvestism whereby those in the upper echelons of the social hier­ archy – in this case aristocratic – entertain themselves by pretending to be working-class women, under the distant but perhaps threatening gaze of the real shepherds, who observe them from afar. In 1787 Goya painted a different version of the same subject to adorn the country house of the noble Osuna family. In his description of the work, he pointed out that those looking from afar ‘were gypsies’, a comment that emphasized the way in which this instrument was conducive to confusion and, in accordance with the prejudices of the time, also to the possibility of a fatal outcome. To accentuate this, Goya did not hesitate to introduce a disruptive element: the knot in the rope holding the young woman, perhaps a metaphor for her ­virginity, appears to be on the verge of breaking. 33

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All these images relate to some of the psychic characteristics of swaying, such as the fear produced by vertigo or the fear of falling. Goya’s paintings, like those of Juel and Robert, refer to the dramatic elements of oscillation produced by using the swing. This is a type of fear that can be considered geographical, at least insofar as it depends on the physical conditions under which the swing is installed or the momentum it acquires during its flight. Perhaps, in the case of Goya’s painting, we could even speak of a mathematical fear: that in which the social referents have been maliciously interchanged so that the aristocrats look like shepherds, who in turn look like aristocrats. The fear of losing one’s virginity would then be as justified as the fear of falling. To these two types of fear, we could add a logical fear, which is brought about only by the repetition of the movement itself. There is nothing strange in the fact that each of the Kantian forms of orientation we saw earlier are related to different forms of fear. In all three cases, disorientation is accompanied by a panic of being lost, be it geographically, morally or ethically. On the one hand, it is true that the feeling of orientation, partly innate, is shared by many other animal species. On the other, the very experience of disorientation is profoundly human, and the more human the experience, the more we advance into its abstract qualities and the less we can refer to its contextual conditions. In other words, while the fear of falling still shares elements of animal atavism, the fear of moral loss or the fear of losing ethical referents (the fear of losing God, in Kantian jargon) is profoundly human. Anchored in the body, yes, in the experience of the body, but profoundly human. This last idea is not difficult to understand, but it is difficult to represent. To account for the emotional features of this unproductive movement, we will have to explore the limits of figurative represent­ ation, as complex as it may be, and encounter the pain that arises from indeterminacy and anguish. This latter word, ‘anguish’, is the most appropriate expression for the fear that I have here called (paraphrasing Kant) logical: that which results from the very qualities of oscillation, regardless of the length of the rope, the strength of the impulse or the fear of losing face. 34

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Let us begin by recognizing that in the swing there is no plan and therefore nothing like the realization of an idea. It is a fruitless movement that does not end when a goal is reached. In the game of swinging, there are no points to be scored or orgasms to be attained. Our lives are neither more nor less fulfilled by its use, nor does it give meaning to our experiences. The absence of a middle ground to solve the problem (of finding oneself alternately up and down repeatedly) suggests a form of anxiety different from the fear produced by geographical or social disorientation. In contrast to dialectical or analogical reasoning, oscillation – which cannot decide between this and that, and which maintains this indecision repeatedly – produces a peculiar form of distress that we call ‘anguish’. This emotion, the illustrious predecessor of our contemporary ‘anxiety’, was studied extensively in the mid-nineteenth century by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, for whom life was like a pendulum that swings back and forth without finding rest.41 For Kierkegaard, the feeling of anguish was based on two apparently contradictory conditions. On the one hand, those who return remember themselves, but on the other, they know that they are no longer the same. The recognition of that sublime instant in which we are coming back from what we were and facing what we are not yet can occur only in the gloomiest of places. For this reason the exercise of repetition is also related to all kinds of phantasmagorical visions and melancholic landscapes.42 In his view, it was a question of knowing if and how it was possible to chew again what we had already swallowed. Repetition confirmed the value of a happiness that can be maintained only as long as the link that unites us with the past does not exhaust us and the desire for the future does not consume us. To ride the swing of life, the swing of experience, requires courage above all: ‘But he who does not comprehend that life is a repetition, and that this is the beauty of life, has condemned himself and deserves nothing better than what is sure to befall him, namely, to perish,’ the philosopher wrote solemnly.43 Let no one look for a digression on the swing in Kierkegaard’s work. That is not the idea. What we do find in his books is a phil­ osophy of experience, understood as the reiteration of an oscillating 35

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movement, be it the swell of the sea or the movement of a horse-drawn carriage: ‘Repetition is the reality and seriousness of existence.’44 In his eclectic texts, he plays with philosophy and life in equal parts, deploying a tangle of metaphors, farces and poses related to the swing: the movement of the boat, the carriage and the train, but also the mist, the forest and the transitional moment between maturity and childhood are all gathered around a philosophy of oscillation. In the place of the swing we find a ‘melancholic ambivalence’, a suffering without object – so typical of adolescence, but also of Romantic poetry – in which thought cannot stop but is subjected to a continuous swaying, to a deep, internalized, ‘reflected’ affliction: that which is not easily caught by a concept because it does not abate. Like the very movement of the sea, like the swell of the passions, ‘like the pendulum in a clock, which swings back and forth and cannot find rest’, this deep sadness produces vertigo and uneasiness; it makes the blood flow from within until the skin turns the pale tone of farewell. ‘What excludes reflective sorrow as the subject for artistic depiction is that it lacks repose, is not at one with itself, does not come to rest in any one defin­ ite expression,’ Kierkegaard tells us.45 Hence the illusory movement acquires a therapeutic figuration based on reiteration, like ‘the uniform whirring of a spinning wheel, and the monotonous sound of a man pacing back and forth with measured steps on the floor above’. He could have added the swaying of the cradle, the rocking chair or the swing. In all these cases, the iterative movement produces a form of anaesthesia, a chemical reaction capable of lulling the consciousness of misfortune into a false representation of the affliction, like a prisoner in a dungeon year after year who never tires of pacing the short length of his cell. Although Kierkegaard uses three love stories and three women in his essay ‘Silhouettes’, in the first part of Either/Or (1843), to reflect on the restlessness of anguish, he is interested neither in love nor in women. At least not essentially. The drama is not revealed through what today would pompously be called ‘the gender perspective’ but concerns a much more primal drive, occupied less with a caricature of femininity than with an imperfect painting of uneasiness. Whoever looks at Kierkegaard’s philosophy and sees only women is like 36

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someone horrified by the ornaments of an Empire-style clock without paying attention to the mechanism that allows it to keep time. These mechanical pendulums are neither feminine nor masculine. The drama of Marie de Beaumarchais (one of the essay’s protagonists) is not about women but about humanity: inside this blurred figure – whom the narrator does not care to reveal whether she is tall or short, important or insignificant, beautiful or not so much – we find the kind of affliction that cannot identify its object, that feeds on the paradoxes of the will. Marie wants and does not want, knows and does not know; she shipwrecks herself, over and over again, in an ocean of uncertainty.46 Let us look at it in some detail. Set in the context of bourgeois drama, the more or less true story of Marie (the sister of the French writer Pierre Beaumarchais) revolves around the circumstances in which the Spaniard José Clavijo y Fajardo first becomes betrothed to and then abandons her, just as, notoriously, Kierkegaard himself did with the young Regine Olsen. The drama of Marie is easy to summarize: Clavijo promises her marriage, then abandons her. Yet the affliction is difficult to depict, for such inner suffering consists precisely in an agitation that constantly seeks its object without finding rest. Marie loves and despises him. The pain comes from constant fluctuation, from a succession of images that are tossed like a boat on the waves. Like the second hand of a clock, the external expression m ­ anifests the p­ erpetual movement of an inner world that never stands still. For Kierkegaard’s and Juel’s compatriot the painter Vilhelm Hammershøi, it was also a matter of making the invisible visible, of expressing the interiority of the soul’s oscillating movement. Hammershøi, who studied with one of Kierkegaard’s cousins at the end of the nineteenth century, began by reducing his colour palette in order to immerse himself in the possibility of representing the pain of indeterminacy. Although there are no swings in his work either, his figures – female and usually with their backs turned – face a scene of half-open doors, of doubts and shadows. The domestic interior is presented as a mirror image of the soul that takes on the tints of uncertainty and anguish. A reader of Kierkegaard, Hammershøi explores the same problem that was present in Herz’s work. In this case, it is 37

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a matter not just of having knowledge – even if only sensory – of the transcendental self, but of visualizing the storm that occurs, as it were, from the skin inwards.47 The artist must face the difficult task of representing oscillating movement on a static stage, such as that which occurs when love for the loved one and the pain caused by his abandonment converge. In the manner of the game of silhouettes with which Kierkegaard tried to construct his ‘psychological pastime’, so that the interior could be recognized only, partially, through the reflected shadow of its outline, Hammershøi seeks the forms of the interior in the chiaroscuro of the exterior, through the reiteration of a female figure that appears and disappears, leaving behind a shadow of melancholy (see illus. 24). Some of the most conspicuous thinkers of the twentieth century took up this idea. For both Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel, the philosophy of culture depended on the position of a distracted observer who strolled through alleyways to kill time.48 Both authors emphasized fin de siècle culture and each in his own way sought to relate subjective experiences to the emotions produced by cities such as Berlin or Paris. Able to blend in with the crowd, their identities were determined by the ambulatory space between boredom and vertigo. The roots of the flanêurs, those spectators who spend their time observing the oscillation of consciousness, are to be found in the context of Romantic literature. It was then, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, that the melancholic stroller who had to choose between anguish and tedium appeared. The writer Charles Nodier had used the image to describe mal du siècle. Chateaubriand employed the same idea to explain the vague des passions, an expression by which he meant the physical and emotional states in which the faculties of the soul are left when they are locked up, as it were, exerting their power only on themselves, without purpose and without object. Le vague des passions, like the wave of the sea (la vague), like the swing, like logical fear, beats without purpose. It is a surge that reflects a state of passion resulting from a mismatch between a heart full of life and an empty world. Mixing the hysterical movement of the waves with the melancholy of the sea, Chateaubriand described it as a state of emotional confusion or uncertainty. Alfred de Musset used the same metaphors: 38

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these were times when ‘the mistresses had betrayed us, when we were slandered by our friends and ignored by our c­ ompatriots. So we felt emptiness in our hearts, and death before our eyes.’49

Suspension Before being set in motion and undergoing the bustle of oscillating, the body must leave the ground. Whether it is a voluntary action or not, the image of a human being suspended from ropes provokes no small amount of uncertainty. For just as dominion is manifested through the gesture that drives the cross, sword or banner into the ground, so legs in the air suggest a form of lightness that, in a literal sense, detracts from gravity. In a way familiar to all those whose feet do not reach the ground when they sit in an armchair, expatriate legs have (paradoxically) found a seat as another instance of the ridiculous. Those who find themselves in this situation can easily feel humiliated. Apart from its more dramatic character – of which the gallows is the most definite expression, but not the only one – the suspended person lives, and sometimes dies, at the mercy of others. He or she can be the object of derision or commiseration. For this reason hanging has played a very important role in many ritual processes related to re-education through mockery and dishonour. Before becoming a children’s game, the swing was an instrument of torture. The suspension of the body has always been part of the material tools with which to dehumanize the enemy and punish the guilty.50 One of the first descriptions of this form of punishment takes place in the Odyssey, Homer’s famous epic poem. After killing the ­suitors, Odysseus asks Telemachus to dispose of the maidservants who had outraged him. Instead of executing them with the sword, the young man ties a cable to a long column and tightens it so that a knot constricts each neck until the maidservants are given the most grievous end. The poet tells us that they find their deaths after a brief and convulsive fluttering of their feet in the air, as if they were doves that, in search of rest, find their deathbed.51 This comparison of the victims to doves, the Latin translation of which uses precisely the word, columba, from which both columbarium and columpio (Spanish for swing) are derived, cannot go unnoticed. The connection 39

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between swings and doves that first appears in the hexameters of the Odyssey reappears in classical Greece, in the Roman world and in the Renaissance. We have both philological and archaeological evidence of rituals of oscillation linked to the cult of death. However, what interests us now is not the gallows as a form of suicide. We are less concerned by its punitive character than by its symbolic qualities. There is no more radical form of banishment. Using a rope, Telemachus can execute the maidservants without spilling a single drop of their blood, without any part of them, not even their feet, touching anything of ours. They will die kicking in the air like doves. He is going to take away their life and their humanity and place them in a desolate territory where they will no longer be able to share anything with anyone. Odysseus’ son could just as easily have hung them by the hands, feet or waist. He could have left them swaying in the air, as a warning. If he had wanted to torture them, he would have done the same: he would have suspended them from a rope and let their bodies shake as his weight tore at their joints. He might even have tied them to a beam or nailed them to a log. Long before the swing came to the playground, the body had been subjected to very different forms of suspension, either as part of a ritual process or as a torture session. Among the latter, one of the cruel­lest practices was known in Europe as strappato, garrucha or tratto di corda. It consisted of hanging the prisoner from a pulley by means of a rope passed through his hands tied behind his back. Owing to the force of his own weight, the accused’s head was irremedi­ably bent down, so that to the pain of dislocation of the shoulders was added the logic of derision. The Inquisition frequently practised this form of interrogation, alternating it with other forms of reverse suspension, in which the heretic was hung upside down by the feet. For women, the so-called witch’s cradle, known in North America and England as the ducking or cucking stool, consisted of a coarse cloth sack into which the accused was placed and suspended from a tree branch by means of a rope. On some occasions, the sack would be swung over a riverbed, increasing the sensation of drowning.52 The history of European art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries contains numerous examples of these wavering bodies in the 40

Emotions

context of court proceedings as well as, more often, in the underworld of preparatory drawing. Many great European Baroque artists paid attention to these suspended and swaying bodies, dead or alive, hanged or bound. We find the same practices in China and the Pacific, whose punitive forms reached Europe in the early nineteenth century through detailed and often embellished descriptions by European travellers. In one of the best known of these, the explorer George Henry Mason described 22 different forms of punishment for minor crimes that he claimed to have witnessed at first hand. In order not to disturb the sensibilities of his readers, he did not include the bloodiest ones, but he had no problem with listing the mildest. His text was illustrated by the engraver John Dadley, and plate number 6, which Mason calls ‘the punishment of the swing’, shows the accused suspended by the shoulders and ankles. To prevent exhaustion, two officers periodically raised the convict’s body by means of a bamboo pole. Along with these punitive forms, Europeans also heard about aerial purification rituals through the testimony of explorers returning from the East and the Americas.53 In his account of his travels, the seventeenth-century explorer Jean-Baptiste Tavernier described for the first time the action of hanging oneself by means of hooks, known

3  J. Dadley, ‘Punishment of the swing’, illustration from George Henry Mason, The Punishments of China (1801).

41

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4  ‘The Churuk Puja [Charak-puja] or Swinging Ceremony’, engraving from E. H. Nolan, The Illustrated History of the British Empire in India and the East (1858), vol. i.

in India as charak-puja. It is related to the so-called initiatory deaths, and it was not difficult to find similarities with the sun dances of the Navajo and other North American populations.54 Much earlier, the demonologist Pierre Le Loyer, Monsieur de la Brosse, also referred to the swing in these terms. In his Histories of the Spectres (1605), he considered that the word brandelle, used for example by François Rabelais, related to the masks employed by the ancients at their banquets, but also to their swings and pendants.55 This scholar explained that in both classical antiquity and in the Chinese world, purification or aerial atonement was carried out using swings on which either those to be purified or the masks on their faces were suspended.56 In contrast to the gallows or the strappato, which are not funny at all, other forms of suspension often appear at festive events.57 Legs out to one side, flying through space like a being who has lost the last trace of solvency: this is how Goya depicted the figure of the pelele in a work from the end of the eighteenth century. Modern ethnography has explained the way in which this life-size straw doll served 42

Emotions

as entertainment for young Madrilenian girls during the time of Carnival. Like the swing itself, the manteamiento (tossing in a blanket) was part of a licensing ritual in which the (female) population gave the (male) puppet the same humiliating treatment that was given to dogs at the time. In addition to the deep-rooted custom in modern Spain of tossing dogs in blanket immediately before Lent, in the period known as Carnestolendas, from the eighteenth century onwards the tradition of tossing a Judas puppet (dressed in the dour black costume of the previous century) in a blanket was added. Both in its secular and religious aspects, the festival was clearly intended to denigrate the male sex and was often accompanied by satirical songs with a highly sexual content: There it is, the poor male doll, He tempts his thing, but it has it dull. He touches it with his finger; he wants it to ignite. And the poor male doll only wants to die.58 In a different version of the scene, part of the series known as the Disparates, Goya not only depicts two monigotes (rag doll-like male figures, altar servers specifically) shaken by five majas (young women from the popular classes of Madrid), but shows inside the blanket a crouching man embracing a donkey. Since the toss in a blanket has served as both punishment and reward (the latter for sporting heroes, for example), there is no doubt about the plurality of the emotional referents of a practice whose meaning depends on context. The sporting toss in a blanket coincides with that of the Carnival in that, in both cases, the person who is placed in the air represents and holds authority. The players toss the coach as the majas toss the court official or, in a more extreme ­interpretation, their fathers, sons and husbands. The same profusion of references can be found in the field of sexu­ ality. After the first publication of Malleus Maleficarum, the most influential treatise on witchcraft published in the modern world, in 1487, the image of a woman riding a goat, a pitchfork or a broom became popular. The witches’ ability to take to the air on the Sabbath 43

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was part of their supernatural prerogatives and covenants. In one of the earliest illustrations of what has become commonplace in the history of Satanism, Hans Baldung Grien, a disciple of the celebrated painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer, depicts one of these witches astride a flying goat with a gallows pole between her legs.59 Both details are important. First, the position of the woman on top of the goat will become a defining image of ritual swinging across the globe. The history of the swing would be incomprehensible without this unforced detail, this apparently insignificant singularity. Adopting the position of incubus (on top) and not succubus, the woman abandons herself to a sexuality without purpose or restraint. She is not the object but the agent of her own pleasure. Later we will study in more detail this posture – which in the Latin world came to be known as Venus pendula conversa – and its relation to the history of the swing. Let us now focus on the second element of interest: the stick between her legs. Whether it is a broom or a pitchfork matters little. In the 1970s the anthropologist and writer Michael Harner suggested that the arrival of the stick in the witch’s crotch had much less psychoanalytic significance than might at first be thought. It could be the result, he argued, of the use of narcotic substances and other hallucinogenic ointments, especially atropine (a chemical found in plants of the nightshade family), which some women smeared on their bodies.60 If so, the function of the stick would be to facilitate the application of the drug to the sensitive vaginal membranes, to provide the suggestion of riding on a steed, an illusion typical of the witches’ journey to the Sabbath. Perhaps Harner was right. Functional anthropology, which has always sought a rational explanation for the most extravagant human behaviour, interpreted it in this way, without making the slightest reference to the more than probable use of the stick as an instrument of sexual enervation (a matter of interest for nineteenth-century sexologists dealing with the gardens of heterodox passion, as we shall see later). Whether the stick served as an applicator or as a dildo – or, more likely, as both – there were more than a few women who claimed to fly, or believed they were flying, after using it. In modern Europe, the most emblematic representation of the flight of the witches on their broomsticks was also the work of Goya, 44

Emotions

5  Francisco de Goya, Old Woman on a Swing, 1824–8, etching.

45

6  Francisco de Goya, Beautiful Teacher!, 1797–8, Los Caprichos series 68, etching and aquatint.

Emotions 7  Francisco de Goya, Swinging of Witches, c. 1797, red chalk on laid paper.

who showed two such women astride a broom in one of his Caprichos. The witch flies because she swings – that is, because she believes she is what she is not and imagines what is not happening. It is, however, a prerogative that appears to be linked to other signs of witchcraft, including the journey to and from the world of the dead.

Impulse Some of the experiences of swinging, such as vertigo, disorientation, suspension or anguish, depend on the length of the rope or the frequency and rhythm of the oscillation. But nothing would be the same in the history of the swing without the impulse, without that stroke from which the swing gets its name. Two of the greatest Chinese novels of all time, written during the Ming dynasty, can serve here as a starting point. In a work that experts consider to be the greatest 47

arc of feeling

in all Chinese literature, Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber (first published in 1791 and sometimes known by the title Story of the Stone), two concubines are amused by a swing. The protagonist, Baoyu, turns to one of them and tells her that he can ‘push’ them both. The young woman angrily refuses and says that she already knows how he ‘pushes’.61 At the same time, the one who was already swinging, Xieluan, asks not to be made to laugh, because she is afraid of falling and breaking like an egg. At that moment the scene is interrupted by news of the death of the old man Jia Zhen. In the erotic novel Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase) of 1610, the swing is also presented as an instrument for women’s use. Lady Moon has had one installed in the garden to take advantage of her husband’s absence, and she invites all her sisters there to recover from the tiredness that spring sometimes brings. As in the previous case, laughter is discouraged: ‘Do not laugh while you are swinging. Laughter weakens the legs and catastrophe is inevitable.’ It is a prophetic comment, for in addition to the story of the young girl who fell off the swing and, mysteriously, lost her virginity, there is the misfortune that befalls one of the maids. Glycinia, as her Chinese name would translate into English, takes advantage of her turn on the swing to show her companions the different ways in which a young girl can ‘push’ herself. ‘That’s what you call swinging!’ shouts Lady Moon enthusiastically. Soon afterwards, her jealous husband beats her in anger.62 In these two novels, the use of the swing is mediated by impulse. In both cases, although much more explicitly in the scene featuring Glycinia, the swing is associated with a desire that can be realized in different ways. On the one hand, Baoyu does not lack the strength (as we know from many other circumstances in the novel) to ‘push’ the family’s concubines and servants. On the other hand, Glycinia is also quite capable of ‘pushing’ herself, to the point of arousing the admiration of Lady Moon and the disapproval of her brutal and ­jealous husband. Similar scenes appear frequently in novels and short stories in European literature. In many cases, as in Clarín’s La Regenta (1884–5) and Guy de Maupassant’s short story ‘A Day in the Country’ (1881), 48

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the quality of the oscillation depends on the excess or absence of that initial movement that sets the machine in motion. In the latter case, as in Jean Renoir’s film adaptation (Partie de campagne, 1936), the Norman author associates different forms of oscillation with the initial need for momentum. Contrasting young Henriette’s grace with Madame Dufour’s blandness, Maupassant dwells on the bourgeois conventions of love, so that while Henriette happens to swing alone, the latter manages only to call plaintively to her husband, who, in the end, consents to satisfy her, more out of obligation than conviction. ‘Cipriano, come and push me, come and push me, Cipriano,’ demands Madame Dufour, to which the husband (the narrator tells us) ‘finally agreed with infinite regret’.63 For a man like Maupassant – who was nicknamed the ‘Norman bull’ because of his fondness for sex, and who protested angrily that his compatriots did not know how to ‘push’ women (not for nothing did he himself receive them already naked and with an erect penis) – there was no sex without an impulse.64 In Clarín’s case, too, the swing appears in the context of a sentimental dispute with highly symbolic content. In Chapter Thirteen of La Regenta – one of the masterpieces of Spanish-language literature – the swing serves to settle the rivalry between Fermín de Pas and Álvaro Mesías for the love of Ana Ozores. This literary evidence points to the erotic nature of swinging. In nineteenth-century Europe the swing became popular as an instrument of sexual arousal, linked in part to the symbolism and paraphernalia of heterodox passions. We find it in literature as well as in the visual arts, often wrapped in double meanings and strange metonymies. The Anglo-American painter John George Brown, who used it as a central motif in his paintings on several occasions, gave one of them the suggestive title Give Me a Swing? (1882) (see illus. 25). We get the same impression from some of the erotic photographs that the Biederer brothers developed in their Paris studio in the 1920s and ’30s, linking the swing especially to practices of submission and domin­ ation. In Europe at the end of the nineteenth century and during the first decades of the twentieth, the same swings that already hung in the cabarets of Paris also appear frequently in photographs, either of little girls or, more frequently, of enraptured, ecstatic or angry young 49

arc of feeling 8  Woman with stockings on a swing, erotic postcard by Biederer Brothers, Ostra Studio, Paris, 1920–30.

women. The Symbolist painter and sculptor Max Klinger joined the trend and produced a magnificent drawing of a swinging woman, driven, like Goya’s witches, by her own vitality. The initial impetus for the swing has always been linked to this disguised form of promiscuity. The industry of the twentieth century often used it as an advertising gimmick. Images of women swaying in insinuating attitudes and postures flooded cigarette packets, calendars and posters, and biscuit and coffee packaging. As in Jin Ping Mei or Maupassant’s fairy tale, the swinging young woman does nothing more than show, at least from the male point of view, her sexual disposition, her desire to mate. The story goes back a long way. In a text known as The Disease of Virgins (c. late fifth century bce), this corres­ pondence between swinging and desire, which later became known as 50

9  Max Klinger, Swing, 1879, etching and aquatint on paper.

arc of feeling

hysteria, was described for the first time.65 According to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, it was a condition mainly related to the retention of menstrual blood after the first period, and which produced such great terrors that sufferers ‘find themselves beside themselves, and seem to see spirits so hostile . . . that they sometimes hang themselves, more the women than the men’.66 The pressure that the victims of hysteria were thought to feel in their numbed hearts made them long for the noose of the gallows. This is precisely what happens to Phaedra in Euripides’ well-known tragedy Hippolytus (428 bce). But the version that history has handed down to us was not the Greek playwright’s first; he had produced another much earlier, which he called Hippolytus Veiled. The title of this first version alluded to the fact that the young man covers his face upon receiving the shameless declaration of his stepmother, who openly expresses her carnal desire to him. Phaedra’s love comes to her suddenly, in the manner of a curse or, rather, an immoderate and ungovernable passion. In Seneca’s first-century version, the fury of the love that burns within her rises to the surface like the steam rising from Mount Etna: ‘Neither night’s rest nor deep slumber can free me from my anguish,’ says Phaedra.67 Apart from the remarkable fact that both Euripides and Seneca built their tragedies on the (later forgotten) desire of women, the sexual drive is represented in both cases as an imposition that cannot be resisted. The force that roars inside Phaedra, burning her insides – and which leads her to (falsely) denounce her stepson for rape – cannot be resisted with gestures nor fought with words. Far from being obstinate behaviour, desire leads her without the possibility of resistance, ending her life as a result.68 There is nothing remarkable in the fact that the great cultural theorists of the early twentieth century found sex drive and the desire for death in their studies on the symbolism of swinging. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, first published in German in 1905, Sigmund Freud associated swaying with a sexless sexuality that, once repressed or sublimated, manifested itself in the nausea and vomiting that many adults feel when travelling by train or boat. Freud was convinced that the amnesia that prevents us from remembering the sexual drive of childhood leaves traces in the emotional life of adults.69 52

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Railway anxiety, according to him, is nothing more than a symptomatic expression of a neurotic type. Like sucking, rocking is so close to sexual arousal that boys and girls seek it out almost instinctively. These activities, both of which have a numbing effect – as anyone who has rocked a child to sleep after giving them a dummy knows – seek a form of pleasure that is devoid of sexual reference and moral connotation. However, Freud theorizes that both rocking and sucking fulfil the three essential characteristics of (pure) sexual arousal (without sex). First, they are initially born as a bodily function related to survival; second, they do not know a sexual object, so they are not directed towards a particular form of sexuality. Finally, their goal is related to an erogenous zone, in this case, to the pleasure produced by the excitation of the vestibular system.70 When delving into the psychology of modesty, the British sexologist Havelock Ellis at the turn of the twentieth century placed the swing alongside the so-called bride snatch, or lovers’ bite. Like the marks left by lovers’ teeth on the skin of their partners, a practice already discussed in the fifteenth-century Islamic sex manual The Perfumed Garden, the Kama Sutra and many other compilations of sexual education, the joys of suspension and swinging were, in Ellis’s view, part of the deep history of love.71 The swing was the physical manifestation of the autoerotic impulse, the term Ellis used to refer to all spontaneous sexual activity, from mere fantasies or dreams to real onanism.72 In the study of this type of phenomenon, he argued, it was not enough just to look at the visible behaviour, because it could very well be that – as in the case of the woman who discovered she had been masturbating for years without knowing it – there was a dissociation between the activity and the conscious interpretation. Nor could this study be approached in the context of the then widely accepted puritanical morality that linked masturbation to the excesses of civilization. Ellis then began to point out the universality of the phenomenon, not only in all cultures and in both sexes but in the animal kingdom: in monkeys, of course, but also horses, ponies, bulls­and goats, as well as sheep, elephants and bears. Among the different p­ eoples of the world, it seemed to him that the greatest achievements in the 53

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art of masturbation were the work of the women of Japan, who had invented balls to be inserted into the vagina. Known as rin-no-tama, they consist of a hollow ball with a smaller, heavier ball inside, which, when moved, produces a vibrating effect that can be increased by swinging, whether in a rocking chair or on a swing. As a masturbatory instrument, the swing was part of the set of everyday objects that had colonized sexual life. Ellis distinguished between those that resemble the organ they replace and those that serve only to produce a sexual drive of an amnesiac nature. Among the former, surgical – yes, surgical – sources report dozens of objects recovered from the urethra, the bladder, the uterus and the vagina. In addition to the bananas that (according to Ellis) the women of Hawaii had made a religion out of, there were also the vegetables used by the girls of the countryside. Ellis was echoing the ever enigmatic Comte de Mirabeau, who mentioned in his Erotika Biblion (1783) an enormous quantity of utensils. Along with pencils and sealing­-wax sticks, the surgeons of Europe recovered hairpins of various thicknesses, knitting and crochet needles, needle cases, toothbrushes, ointment jars, candles and candlesticks of varying thicknesses and sizes, corks and glasses. ‘In one recent English case,’ wrote Ellis, ‘a full-sized hen’s egg was removed from the vagina of a middle-aged married woman.’73 Curiously, no lost objects appear in the depths of the rectum. In e­ xtremis (an apt phrase), anything can become an instrument of pleasure. Girls in France, Ellis explains, love to climb on wooden hobby horses, less for play than for the implicit pleasure of arousal. The stick they hold between their legs, he reasons, is the same one on which witches sat in the late Middle Ages. The same kind of practice takes place in some temples in India, where men and women swing in pairs until they reach sexual arousal. It also happens that, at times when the men in these villages must be absent, the women set up swings ‘to console themselves for the absence of their husbands’.74 Among the latter type, those instruments that seek to produce a sexual drive, it will suffice to recall briefly here the relationship of many swinging machines to the history of sexual practices. Many swinging devices clearly had this function, very similar to the eroti­ cization of the motorbike in the twentieth century. The so-called 54

Emotions

chamber horse – a portable horse recommended since the end of the eighteenth century to alleviate all kinds of ailment – was nothing more than the material counterpart of the hobby horse.75 But although this last term referred, at least initially, to the broomstick with a horse’s head that has served for centuries as a toy for children in all known equestrian societies and, by extension, to any way of keeping the mind distracted (a hobby), by the seventeenth century it was also being used with clear erotic connotations. It appears with sensual intent in many pages of one of the most famous novels of the Enlightenment: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67). For this satirical author, who spent half his life dizzy, ‘riding a hobby horse’ meant, of course, getting on a wooden horse, but the expression is used in his work more in its metaphorical sense, that of not dis­ engaging from an idea, of remaining obsessed with an opinion. Such a mania was not infrequently connected with unbridled sexual activity, as the influential early twentieth-century writer D. H. Lawrence later revealed in some of his short stories.76 In all cases, these are imitative instruments that are structurally or functionally related to the possibility of substituting the ride of a beast, the trot of an equine, the motion of the waves or the thrusts of sex. The way in which the swinging of the flesh promotes the entertainment of the spirit is also reflected in the medical work of Bernard de Mandeville in the early eighteenth century, who was famous for having vindicated private vices as contributers to public virtues. In the case of the patient to whom he recommended swinging ‘until her skin blushes and her flesh glows’, the young woman’s father humbly asked him whether marriage would not be preferable.77 In colloquial French, the sexual connotation of swinging is much more explicit, since se branler means not only to swing but to masturbate.78 In peninsular Spanish, the vulgar expression matarse a pajas is related to the hope of escaping from tedium and boredom, to a ‘hobby’ that, at least in principle, benefits only those who practise it. And in Mandarin Chinese, the ideogram for the swinging impulse, dang, has the same pronunciation as part of the term that means ‘slut’: dang fu.79

55

2

The Gallows

T

he first person to swing in the Mediterranean region was a woman. And it was no game. Desolate before the remains of her father, the young Erigone stretched a rope in the branches of a tree and took her own life. In its mythological itinerary, the swing goes through a Dionysian moment related to violence and death. The great compilation of myths and fables of antiquity, the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus – an author who wrote in the first and second centuries ce – tells us how the god Dionysus gave Erigone’s father, Icarius, the art of making wine, and how the gen­ erosity of this Attic oxherd cost him his life.1 According to the most widespread version of this legend, the shepherds with whom Icarius shared the wine drank so much of it that, believing themselves poisoned, they killed their host and buried his body at the foot of a tree. Horrified, the young Erigone took her own life. In one of the few known cases of suicidal animals, Erigone’s dog followed suit.2 It was then that either Dionysus, according to some versions, or Erigone herself, according to others, cast an evil spell on the virgins of the city, who began to commit suicide by hanging themselves. According to Gaius Julius Hyginus, a first­-century Hispanic Latin writer, to avoid such a sad epidemic the Athenians ‘instituted the practice of swinging themselves with ropes to which they added some wooden planks, so that they could sway in the wind’.3 They called this practice alétis, after the young girl who went out in search of her father.4 Alétis, which in Greek means ‘wanderer’, was Erigone’s nickname, at least in some 56

The Gallows

versions of the myth. In classical Greek, erigone means ‘born at dawn’. At the same time, the Greek word aiora, swing, also refers to the noose of the gallows, the same noose used by our protagonist.

The myth Were we to believe the version of Hyginus, who after all lived some five hundred years after the Athenian festivals he discusses, the swing would have had what anthropologists call today an apotropaic function, that is, the power to avert misfortune. Long before the emergence of functional anthropology, Hyginus was in favour of explaining human behaviour through a mythical story. In the context of popu­lar culture, there is no lack of examples of objects or gestures to which r­ itualized practices confer a similar power. Crossing fingers or touching wood to ward off misfortune are apotropaic gestures, as is exclaiming ‘Bless you!’ when someone sneezes. At least according to Hyginus’ interpretation, the swing was first and foremost a magical object, a machine to counteract the pernicious effects of a curse. The device that today serves to entertain children is not a gallows, but it was like one. The swinging is not death, but it served to prevent death. In line with this legend, we may conclude that the swing appears in Mediterranean culture as an instrument related to the basic principles of sympathetic magic; it was part of a ritualized practice capable of conjuring a punishment by means of deception. What we know of Hyginus’ version of the Erigone story comes from several other textual sources that, to a greater or lesser extent, refer to the same person: the scholar Eratosthenes of Cyrene, who wrote a poem on Erigone in the third century bce in which he related the protagonists to the constellations of the sky. Historians of science are familiar with his work because we owe the first approxi­ mate calculation of the perimeter of the Earth to his ingenuity. The sad circumstance that his poem was lost in the fire in the Library of Alexandria, of which Eratosthenes was also in charge, means that we can reconstruct it only from the testimonies and fragments of other authors and commentators.5 Perhaps written during the reign of Ptolemy iv Philopator (who had been Eratosthenes’ student) at some point between 222 and 204 bce, this poem – which the first-century 57

arc of feeling

Greek literary critic Pseudo-Longinus describes in his treatise on the sublime as a masterpiece without fault – leads us through an exegetical trail to two fictional spaces.6 On the one hand, it refers to what the ancients called ‘the fixed stars’. On the other, it approaches what the Romantics called ‘the original texts’. Although neither of these two things exists, both are of equal interest to us. Let us begin with the stars. Absorbed in the events of the Earth as much as those of the sky, and apparently influenced by the Platonic doctrines of the Timaeus, Eratosthenes places the protagonists of his poem in some of the most important constellations of the celestial vault: Icarius in the Herdsman, right next to the congregation of stars known as the Charioteer; Erigone in Virgo (the Maiden) and her dog Mera in Canis Major. This is the tradition later taken up by other authors, such as Hyginus: ‘By the will of the gods, they appear among the stars. Erigone is the constellation Virgo, which we call Justice; Icarius is called Arthur among the stars, and the dog Mera is called Canicula.’7 The protagonists take their place in the zodiacal pantheon and will remain there until the Renaissance. In the Villa Farnesina in Rome, for example, Baldassare Peruzzi painted an extraordinary fresco of Diana and Erigone on the ceiling of the Loggia di Galatea at the beginning of the sixteenth century, which was nothing more than a journey through the figures of the zodiac. Walking on a cloud, accompanied by her faithful animal, her dress damp with tears, the young woman still holds the piece of cloth she used to take her own life. But let us return to Earth. By the time these frescoes were painted, Renaissance humanists were fully aware of the impossibility of associating the legend of Erigone with a single story. They knew that, alongside the lost version of Eratosthenes, there was a different version according to which Erigone, instead of being the daughter of Icarius of Athens, was the half-sister of Orestes, the son of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon. According to this latter story, partly popularized by a tragedy (also lost) by Sophocles, Erigone pursues Orestes to Athens in search of justice. After all, Orestes has not only taken the life of Clytemnestra, his own mother. He has also murdered her lover Aegisthus, who was, to everyone’s misfortune, Erigone’s 58

10  Baldassare Peruzzi, Diana and Erigone (Moon in Virgo), c. 1510–11, fresco, Loggia di Galatea, Villa Farnesina, Rome.

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father. In the first denouement of this story of murder, adultery and half­-siblinghood, the young woman hangs herself when Orestes is exonerated by the court of the Areopagus. In the second, she is ­consecrated to the goddess Artemis.8 Humanists referred to the legend of Erigone, in either of its two versions, to explain the origins of the swing. But they also added other possibilities. The sixteenth-century Spaniard Rodrigo Caro, for example, referred to Macrobius, a fourth-century writer and grammarian who, himself quoting the first-century bce author Quintus Cornificius, mentioned that the swing originated not in Greece but in Italy. According to this version, when the Latin king disappeared in his fight against the Cerites, his slaves searched for him for six days on the ground and in the sky and, unable to find him, invented swings. Not content with Macrobius’ version, Caro also conjectured that the swing could be an exemplification of the wheel of fortune, so that by its intervention one could contemplate the instability of human affairs, ‘which rise and soar, and fall with speed and im­­petus, and what we saw raised up, we soon see fallen and humiliated’,9 a view that was, at least in part, suggested by the description of the petaurus, a Roman swing, by the Latin writer Juvenal in one of his Satires.10 Erigone is not the only heroine of antiquity to be associated with the swing. In his Greek Questions, the first-century ce philosopher Plutarch tells the story of Charila, and other sources relate it to the heroine Aspalis.11 In a small oil cup or lekythos preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the young woman swinging has been identified as Helle, sister of Phrixus.12 Nor is Erigone’s death by hanging unique.13 On the contrary, the lives of many other legendary women of the ancient world ended with this sinister form of swinging. Phaedra, as we have seen, takes her life in this way in the version of the tragedy left to us by Euripides. The same happens in the case of Oedipus of Thebes’ mother (and wife), Jocasta. As if it ran in the family, Antigone, their daughter, also hangs herself from a tree, as does Helen of Troy in at least one version of the story. In these and other cases, the noose was a form of death that, while dishonourable for men, was often resorted to by women. 60

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Graeco-Latin sources provide us with many examples. Diogenes Laërtius, the celebrated third-century compiler of the works of the Cynics, noted how some of the most famous adherents of that school walked past a bunch of hanged young women without paying the slightest attention to their corpses; perhaps they showed the same indifference that a passer-by would today to a group of beggars huddled on the pavement.14 In his treatise extolling the virtues of women, Plutarch also explained that there had been an epidemic of hangings among the young women of the Greek city of Miletus. According to his testimony, the air of the city, which for some reason had acquired a poisonous quality, caused the maidens to lose their reason and, desiring death in the most extreme manner, to make the greatest efforts to hang themselves.15 In all these cases, the body swaying while hanging from the tree is accompanied by the restless wandering of the soul, as a result of the absence of a dignified burial. The tree, for its part, was cursed forever. It joined the class of arbor infelix, those that will never produce fruit and whose shade will never form part of any paradise. The myth of the swing suggests what the scholar Aby Warburg called an ‘emotional formula’ or what the historian Johan Huizinga called, following the sociologist Georg Simmel, a ‘form of life’.16 The survival of their common features cannot be resolved by appealing to an original history from which the others would be mere derivatives. The origins of the swing cannot be fixed in any record, since they are situated in the nebula of the legendary, long before there was any concern about inscribing events in a chronology. The variations of their mythemes (the constant elements of a myth) not only do not refer to a single primitive source but show an extraordinary chronolog­ ical and geographical diversity. In the case of the legend of Erigone, to the seven hundred years that separate Eratosthenes, who wrote in the third century bce, from Nonnus of Panopolis, who wrote in the fifth century ce, should be added the fact that this story, origin­ ally Athenian, extends from the coasts of Roman Hispania (where Hyginus probably lived) to the upper Egypt of Pseudo-Apollodorus of Alexandria.17 The myth takes place on the Attic peninsula, but Eratosthenes, to whom we owe the first full account, spent most of his life on the other side of the Mediterranean, in North Africa. 61

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But the different versions of the legend do share common features. In all of them, murder and suicide, drunkenness and abundance appear. Whether as the daughter of Icarius or Aegisthus, Erigone must dramatically confront the death of her father. Her story refers above all to an aesthetic, bodily experience of injustice. Innocence is maintained through the various mythemes and, as an emotional formula, the oscillation allows the evil spell to be averted. In other words, the myth can have variations not because there is an original, legendary story, of which the others would be interpretations or corruptions, but because there is a shared experience that is expressed through a common gestured language conditioned by the body. It is not the story that comes from a previous, original one but the experience that is configured according to schemes that are, like the sense of balance itself, partly learned and partly innate. When we face the same fears, we generally express them through similar gestural forms.18 Hence we can find variations of the legend of Erigone in many other places, some of them unexpected. The Latin word oscillatio, for example, has always been associated with objects called oscilla, which were decorated with reliefs on both sides and were hung from hooks on the peristyles of houses or on trees in gardens. The Romans used them above all during Saturnalia (the predecessor of our Christmas), but also for the festivities that took place in Rome under the name Feriae Latinae (Latin Festival). These objects, some five hundred of which are preserved in various ­museums in Europe and the United States, were very popular, especially in the first century ce.19 As in the case of the legend of Erigone and the practice instituted to avoid the curse of suicide, the oscilla also seem to have an apotropaic function, perhaps to ward off the evil eye or to keep malign spirits away from dwellings. Their relationship with Bacchus (the Roman equivalent of Dionysus) is also inevitable, and is explicitly mentioned in Book ii of Virgil’s Georgics, which dates from the first century bce. The same Latin poet who convinced the Romans of their Greek origins explained how the colonists who had emigrated from Troy amused themselves by making masks with which they invoked Bacchus while suspending small terracotta figures from trees.20 The guilt that was normally cleansed by water or fire could also 62

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be eliminated by air. According to Virgil, the souls of the ancestors, the manes, were suspended in the antechamber of the underworld, exposed to the winds, while others washed the stains of their past life into the deep abyss.21 The apotropaic function of the oscillating movement, both in the legend of Erigone and in the Roman oscilla, exhibits a paradoxical nature. After all, the same gesture that frees us from evil also forces us to be aware of it. Whoever touches wood to ward off misfortune does not know why they do so, but is sure that at some point the wood must have served to avert the same danger that threatens us today. In this way, the instrument that allows us to ward off fear and that, in principle, keeps us away from danger also fulfils a function that could be considered historical. It is a paradoxical function insofar as it nourishes the memory of an event that, strictly speaking, we would like to forget. This particular temporal dimension of the swing and, by extension, of mythical time, which is properly a time outside chronology, would seem to be the antithesis of history, that discipline concerned with fixing singular events on a timeline. First it was this; then it was that. At best, ‘this’ and ‘that’ are related to a subjectivity that is affected by both events. That subjectivity can be ‘me’; it can be ‘you’; it can be a social class, a tribe, a people, the nation or the absolute spirit. It doesn’t matter. The historical interpretation of myth is always subject to these interpretative ups and downs, at least insofar as we try to introduce into a linear dimension what clearly does not fit into that scheme. By the same token, myth, unlike history, is not intended to force the remembrance of what we would prefer to forget.

The rite While in the previous section we tried to unravel the arcana of a mythical story, we will now examine to what extent the swing is related to a ritualized action. Historians of religions have often taken this approach: if we cannot explain behaviour through beliefs, perhaps we can, on the contrary, account for beliefs from behaviour. From a single commentary by the Cyrenaic poet Callimachus in the third century bce, it has become customary to situate the practice of 63

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swinging in classical Athens within the framework of certain festiv­ ities of a Dionysian character known as anthesterias, the same ones that Hyginus discussed, in order to explain the origin of the swing.22 The swinging ritual, called aiora, for which Hyginus had found an apotropaic function, took place on the second or third day of this spring festival, around 12 February. Taking a red-figured vase from the third quarter of the fifth century bce as a point of reference, the religious historian Walter Burkert explained that ‘what for us is a recreation without any mystery, for the Athenians . . . had a solemn character.’23 As in many other geographical areas around the world, in classical Greece swinging was a highly ritualized activity that could be carried out only at certain times of the year and after appropriate sanctions. In the small jar (chous) Burkert refers to, two young women cover a swing with dresses and ornaments while pouring perfumes and potions on a seemingly sacrificial fire (see illus. 27). All these preparations alert us to the fact that we are dealing with a practice of some importance, even if its profound significance escapes us. The archaeological material is not only limited but has particular attributes that complicate its meaning. Archaeologists have managed to unearth some ten or twelve vases decorated with swings, painted in both red- and black-figure, crafted between the sixth and the third centuries bce (see illus. 11, 27 and 28). Although all the images are similar, each has its own characteristics. To take one e­ xample of such an artefact, a small jar in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, not pictured here, coincides with the one we have just discussed in that both provide information about the moments just before the swinging ritual, but the similarities end there. In the one from Athens two young people, a boy and a young girl, walk towards a swing on which a child is resting, accompanied by a male figure.24 This is, incidentally, the only Greek vase in which a child, and more specifically a boy, sits on a swing (which is immobile). Between the two sets of figures is an object that some researchers have suggested is a pythos, a type of vase in which wine was preserved before consumption.25 Other scholars have pointed out that the gesture of placing the child on the swing serves to assuage the fear the young girl, who is in fact leaning on her companion, seems to feel.26 64

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Intentionally or accidentally, the ritual of the aiora is set in the context of Dionysian festivals in which the different days are named after the vessels used to deposit the wine. On the first day, known as pithoigia, the pithoi (the vases in which the wort had fermented throughout the year) were opened. On the second day the festival of choes took place, named after small vessels that were also given to children. Many of these jars (chous) are still preserved, and the smaller ones contain representations of childhood games. On this second day there was also a procession of the god Dionysus on a boat to which wheels had been added, as well as a drinking contest.27 The day’s cele­ brations culminated in a ceremony depicting the god’s marriage to a virgin, as well as a family celebration in which it was customary for everyone not only to bring their own wine but to drink it in silence. That practice was partly inspired by the legend of Orestes, who ended up in Athens after murdering his mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Erigone’s father (according to one version of the myth). Since no one wanted to share their table with a murderer, nor to expel him from their home, the authorities ordered everyone to drink their own wine without a word. Finally, the third day of the festival, the day of the chytroi (pots), began with the offering of a meal to the inhabitants of the underworld. During this day the spirits of the afterlife roamed freely around the city, to the extent that, once the festivities were over, the Athenians used the phrase, ‘Get out of here, you demons [keres], the anthesterias are over!’28 The three days coincided with the celebration of the new harvest, a procession linked to the Eleusinian Mysteries, as well as a cult of death very similar to those found in similar festivities, such as that of the Qingming festival in China, which we will discuss later.29 The fact that we do not know on exactly which of these three days the swinging took place raises some difficulties.30 The distinction between days is important, for if it took place on the second day, the day of the choes, the swinging might be associated with a calendrical ritual of fecund­ ity or fertility. Many of the ritual uses of the swing across the globe take place in a similar context: as part of a spring or harvest festival. If, on the other hand, it were to have taken place on the third day, 65

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the swing would seem to be part of a festival of worship intended to honour the dead. If we look only at classical Greece, the textual and archaeological evidence in favour of both options is equally indirect. In support of the first possibility, it is worth mentioning that some versions of the story of Erigone consider that the relationship between Dionysus and the young woman was much closer than the ancient lexicographers were willing to admit. Ovid, for example – the same Latin poet who recommended that in order to flirt in the amphitheatre in Rome, one should shake the dust off the dresses of Roman women, and who ended his days in exile for writing precisely about love – was less interested in the constellations of the sky than in the mutations of the body. From his pen came the idea, so dear to European Mannerist painting, that the god, in order to possess Erigone, had taken the form of grapes so that he could enter the young woman imperceptibly (at least to her), through her mouth.31 The union between Erigone and Dionysus could also be represented in the sacred wedding at the culmination of the god’s procession. In 1933 the scholar Ludwig Deubner argued that the bowl-shaped vessel used for libations and known as the skyphos by the Penelope Painter (to whom we shall refer below), which on one side depicts a young woman swinging, could represent on the other side a basilinna, a sort of sacrificial bride, accompanied by a crowned satyr who protects her with a parasol.32 The modest pose of the young woman, with her head slightly inclined downwards, covered with a cloak, perhaps suggested a processional act in which the priestess was united to the god in a hierogamy, or sacred wedding. Other researchers argued, however, that there were some elements that made Deubner’s interpretation difficult to follow. For one thing, Greek brides did not walk to the altar as today’s brides do, but instead rode in a chariot. Stranger still is the parasol – an instrument imported from the East – which, in the month of February, the month of the anthesterias, may not have been of much use in Athens.33 In this skyphos, which is now in the Altes Museum in Berlin, a bearded satyr pushes a young woman on a swing, and an inscription on the vase itself reads ‘Up, beautiful!’34 The ‘Penelope Painter’ has succeeded in suggesting movement through a dynamic composition, 66

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11 Detail of vessel (skyphos) decorated with red paintings, Chiusi (Tuscany), attributed to the Penelope Painter, 450–400 bce, ceramic.

so that the girl’s legs are stretched forwards while her long hair falls forcefully backwards. The erotic nature of the piece is emphasized through the gesture of the young woman, who clings to the ropes of the swing, surrounded by strange phallic blooms. The flower of this plant, the lily, was widely represented in antiquity and spread throughout the Mediterranean with both funerary and sexual signi­ ficance.35 All these indications suggest that the ritual use of the swing may have taken place as part of a calendrical festivity related to the cycle of life and, indirectly, to the celebration of drunkenness and love. The second option, which links swinging with death, is also logical. The relationship between Erigone and the underworld was first established by Nonnus of Panopolis. This Egyptian writer, who lived in the fifth century ce, devoted the last canto of his Dionysiaca to a different version of the legend.36 The spirit of Icarius, as in a Shakespearean tragedy, awakens his daughter to tell her of the crime that has just taken place, and to sympathize with both their fates: the one unjustly murdered; the other deprived of her father. Nor is there any lack of archaeological evidence to support the relationship between the swing and death in both classical Greece and the 67

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Hellenistic world. To begin with, we have an Attic amphora decor­ ated with black paintings, one side of which depicts a young woman on a swing, while the other represents a scene of Alceste returning from Hades, accompanied by Heracles and Hermes.37 In this case, the most beautiful of Pelias’ daughters, the very one who gave her life in exchange for her husband’s, lifts her veil so that he can recognize her. Equally disturbing is the so-called ‘swinging metope’, a scene executed between 323 and 331 bce (see illus. 29). This piece, taken from the friezes of a Cyrenean tomb in present-day Libya, is part of a series in which the life of the deceased is narrated through a succession of scenes that culminate in a conversation between the dead girl herself and one of her mourners. There, in Cyrene – the site of the most important school of sensualist thought in the ancient world, in the place where Eratosthenes managed to measure the perimeter of the Earth for the first time, and in the city that is today part of a country devastated by war – appeared this extraordinary image that links, as few others do, the swing with death.38 Scholars of the ancient world may not reach a definitive conclusion as to the exact day on which the aiora took place, so we may not be able to resolve the debate about the nature of the ritual. However, the difficulty in classifying the balancing within a certain taxonomy – determining, for example, whether it is a calendrical ritual or a ritual of passage, or a ritual of status reversal, or one related to sympathetic magic or to an apotropaic or atonement function – should not make us lose sight of the fact that the ritualization of experience presupposes, above all, the need to accommodate actions, whatever they may be, to the logic of collective symbolism. For just as myth keeps in memory what we would like to have forgotten, so too ritual confronts us with an action that is only apparently voluntary. By its very structure, the rite obliges its participants to submit to a mandate, to constrain their freedom according to the rules of the social process to which they contribute, starting with the manner in which it must be carried out. Like play, which we will discuss later, this type of experience takes place in a differentiated space and time. This is what we observe in the uses of the swing in countless popular festivals that are still widespread in Asia and Europe today. The ceremony 68

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of the Akha, for example – a people originally from the province of Yunnan, in southern China, who now live mainly in northern Thailand – and the festival of swings of Ubrique in Cádiz, Spain, perhaps do not share the same objectives, nor can they be conceptualized in the same way.39 In both cases, however, swinging implies suspension or liberation from the circumstances, even physical ones, of everyday life. Those who swing place themselves beyond the confines of the social structure in which they normally live, only to fall into the bondage of ritual action. We know little about the rite of the aiora. We should not even assume that it was a playful or pleasurable experience. What we do know is that the swinging was designed to make the body feel what had to be (mythologically) remembered. Those who must know must first believe, no doubt. But even before that, they must feel. The distance that separates doubt from certainty is travelled with greater ease when we are able to associate our beliefs with a visceral economy. Not coincidentally, the most important religious symbols are those related to our physical, social or moral orientations. Before authority can be imposed by force or argued by reason, before it even depends on the personality of a charismatic leader, there is a source of sensory authority – an ‘aesthetic authority’, we might call it – that allows us to locate ourselves in the ‘really real’. Since the publication in 1973 of Clifford Geertz’s The Inter­ pretation of Cultures, studies of ritual processes have multiplied in at least three directions.40 To begin with there has been a proliferation of research into forms of ritualization, especially the dynamics of mourning. Second, projects aimed at unravelling the very structure of ritual – its dramatic character – as part of the theatricalization of experience spread. Finally, cultural history turned ritual processes into an object of study, with the intention of deciphering not only ways of feeling and thinking but ways of acting. Much of the research into what his­torians of emotions call ‘emotional standards’, including the pion­ eering work of Norbert Elias, is nothing more than ­studies of ritual processes. In the case at hand, some of the philological or archaeological uncertainties related to balancing in the classical world can be illuminated through three aspects of the anthropology of symbolic 69

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ritual. First, whatever its function or mythopoetic justification, balancing is inscribed in the context of an aesthetic authority that allows the internalization of the physical, social and moral order. The history of emotions can never do without the body, but even less so in cases where viscerality is used as an instrument of memory. The function of the swing may be apotropaic, but it is above all mnemonic. Through swinging, the body remembers what the consciousness has forgotten. Second, swinging mobilizes all elements of the physiology of oscillation, starting with physical, communal and social disorientation. Last but not least, swinging has the character of a voluntary activity only in appearance.

The artefact One of the best ways to learn the meanings of words and the value of objects is through their mutual relationships, by paying attention to their place in the classification system of which they are a part. ‘The real problem’, wrote the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘is not whether the touch of a woodpecker’s beak cures diseases of the teeth, but whether it is possible, from a certain point of view, for a woodpecker’s beak and a human being’s tooth to go together.’41 The same is true in the case of the swing. We may not know the details, but at least we know that the swing, sex and death ‘go together’. The problem starts at the moment we recognize that this taxonomic order seems as unusual as the one that relates a bird’s beak to a wisdom tooth. We can digress; we can address our doubts to an anthropologist; we may even know someone who believes that human teeth and birds’ beaks are somehow related. We can ask her and take her explanation seriously (or not), if we can understand it. But the answer will most likely not be enough to remove doubt. Parents who take their children to the playground to play on the swings will find it hard to believe that such primal passions can coexist within such a contraption. They will not think, even for a moment, that the toy is impregnated with the moisture of sex or the scent of death. To explain this remarkable extravagance, it will be useful to begin by recalling that legendary tales are assembled from scraps and leftovers. In order to understand the mythopoetic logic behind the 70

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creation of a given myth, one has to get used to the contiguity of diverse, often disruptive experiences: murder and incest; jealousy and betrayal; birds and teeth; swings, sex and death. Long before contemporary artists invented trash art, but long after sylphs began feeding on corpses, we humans learned to build things, even beautiful things, out of waste. From the point of view of its construction materials, myth is a dunghill that has aesthetic value and, precisely for that reason, shares some elements with art. Children may not know that when they get on the swing, they mobilize ancestral gestures and expressions. Like a used bed, the toy is still warm and, for those who know how to look at it carefully, it still holds traces of forgotten experiences. Structural anthropology offered valuable clues to understanding that myths were the result of bricolage, composed of elements that, at least in principle, had been designed for other purposes. If anyone had any doubts, one would have only to go to an archaeological site. There, too, objects are part of improbable taxonomies, starting with the one that considers as a priceless object the same piece of stuff that until recently was mixed in with the cattle pasture. What archaeologists call ‘the chain of value’ begins not with the unearthing of the piece but with the re-signification of an abandoned stone that is transformed, almost magically, into a museum piece. This was, for example, the reflection of the famous historian Edward Gibbon at the end of the monumental history of the Roman Empire that he wrote in the mid-eighteenth century. He found it hard to believe that the Colosseum, then entirely taken over by goats, had once been the epicentre of the Roman circus. In the storerooms of the Science Museum in London – a place at least as interesting as the museum itself – we can experience similar sensations. The collections of the former Bank of England are kept there in rooms upon rooms full of things that, like the dozens of fire extinguishers preserved there, have completely lost their use value. Transformed into fetishes, these extinguishers carry invisible properties that create serious taxonomic difficulties. In the room where they are stored, the one that is actually to be used in the event of a fire carries a large sign confirming that ‘this is not an object’.42 71

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The ruins we are interested in were also abandoned for centuries and contain improbable taxonomies and meanings. In 1903 in Hagia Triada in the southern part of the island of Crete, the Italian archaeologist Roberto Paribeni found, in the so-called Tomba degli Ori, a figurine of a woman and two columns decorated with birds. Since a seal of Queen Tiyi, wife of the pharaoh Amenhotep iii, was also found there, it was assumed that the pieces dated from the fourteenth century bce. Although they were found in separate rooms, Paribeni, following the indications of the Swiss restorer Émile Gilliéron Sr, concluded that the figurine and the columns must have been part of the same structure. A few years later the three pieces were joined together by Émile Gilliéron Jr, giving rise to what was then the oldest swing in Europe. In 1928 Charles Picard, a French classicist, suggested that the Hagia Triada swing was related to the fresco painted in the mid-fifth century bce by Polygnotus of Thasos, now lost, of which remains only

12  Clay model of a Minoan swinging female figurine from the site of Hagia Triada, 1500–1450 bce.

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the second-century ce description by the Greek traveller Pausanias. In other words, some six hundred years after it was painted, a geographer probably born in Lydia in Asia Minor but writing in Greek in Roman times described in great detail a fresco by Polygnotus in the ruins of Delphi that no longer exists today. As for the description of Hades, Pausanias explained that ‘Phaedra stands on a swing, grasping the ropes with both hands, which suggests to us, in an elegant fashion, the manner of her death.’43 Pausanias’ Description of Greece was indeed a widely read text during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it was the basis of the modern world’s rediscovery of antiquity, as well as the origins of archaeology. This was the work used by James George Frazer in 1898 to connect the Polygnotus fresco with the festival of the aiora. It was also used by Picard to conjecture that the object found at Hagia Triada was what he called a ‘proto-Mycenaean Phaedra’, which is not at all surprising since Phaedra was, after all, the daughter of Minos and Pasiphae, the same Pasiphae who had relations with a bull. Nowhere better to find Phaedra than on the island of Crete, near the palace of Knossos, where these imaginary beings seem to have lived. All these discontinuous elements served to construct an object, still visible today in the archaeological museum of Heraklion, that was also used to interpret other archaeological discoveries. Following Picard’s reading of the Hagia Triada piece, swings appeared everywhere, including the figure of a woman sitting on a chair from the third millennium bce, which was found at the site of Mari in presentday Pakistan in 1938. With some minor modifications, Picard’s ­interpretation also served as a source of inspiration for many other scholars. Some of them insisted on the relationship between the aiora and fertility rites, while others were mainly concerned with its relationship to the world of death.44 In some cases, there was no reason to believe in any kind of confluence between the aiora and calendrical or purification rituals. Of course, there were also those who outright denied that the aiora was part of the anthesterias.45 Almost from the beginning, but especially since the middle of the twentieth century, the restoration of the object and the reconstruction of its history have undergone a reverse process of unpacking. Things that seemed to belong together began to fall apart, exposing 73

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the traces of not only the craftsman on the artefact of the swing, but the narrator on the story. When this happens, when objects fall apart and stories lose their aura of authenticity, we must adjust to living with the uncertainty of signs. The world’s lack of objectivity has the advantage of allowing us to see the hand of the creator. As Walter Benjamin wrote: ‘The traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to a clay vessel.’46 The vision of ancient Crete bequeathed to posterity by the team led by the famous archaeologist Arthur Evans has been seriously questioned.47 To begin with, the similarity of Minoan archaeology to some of the principles of aesthetic taste of the 1920s suggested that the discovery of Knossos had been driven by a desire for grandeur rather than historical verisimilitude. Evans’s team of restorers, who also worked on the Hagia Triada swing, played a major role in the reconstruction of the paintings of Minoan art. The famous women in blue, for example, came from their hands, as did one of the most emblematic objects of ancient art: the so-called Mask of Agamemnon, which is now on display in the National Museum of Athens. The Gilliérons, astute businessmen, made a fortune with the reproduction of many of these Cretan objects, which, by the vagaries of history, showed a remarkable formal coincidence with the aesthetic trend of the time: Art Nouveau.48 So it happened that suddenly those who found influences from preclassical Greek art in the paintings of Gustav Klimt or Alphonse Mucha, or who were seduced by the relationship between the floral motifs of the Jugendstil and the Minoan frescoes, had to look for the inverse relationship: to ask whether the Cretan art of the second millennium bce was, perhaps, too much inspired by the aesthetic criteria of the restorers of the beginning of the twentieth century. The same deconstructive process took place in relation to Picard’s account. With the same ease with which the arm had been reconstructed, the seat attached and a rope passed through the hands of a Phaedra figure, the pieces now began to fall apart, casting doubt not only on the way they had been reconstructed but on the manner in which they had been interpreted. In 1998 the Greek archaeologist George Rethemiotakis struck the first blow by questioning whether the Hagia Triada figure was a proto-Mycenaean Phaedra.49 The figure, 74

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the archaeologist reasoned, does not represent a legendary being. She is not the daughter of Pasiphae, nor the lover of Hippolytus, but a Minoan goddess. In the history of the swing, many objects are exhibited in European and American museums even though they are genuine fakes. The figure of Hagia Triada is not a fake, but, far from being a Phaedra swinging in Hades, it more closely resembles the main figure in an epiphany scene. Surrounded by other dancing women, she recalls the image of the Nativity, where a winged angel proclaims the good news. From this point of view, the figure would in principle be related neither to the aiora, as Frazer claimed, nor to Phaedra’s death, as Picard maintained. This re-signification of the figure of Hagia Triada has a number of advantages. First, it is based on a wider body of archaeological and iconographic evidence. Second, the new interpretation does not make the mistake of explaining the earlier using the later, as in Picard’s case, but places the scene in the context of the few clues we have to understand the basic elements of Minoan religion. The fact that Crete was devastated by several volcanic eruptions and tsunamis before it became part of Mycenaean culture meant that much of its archaeological record and all written sources disappeared. The few archaeological remains available indicate that its religion was centred on the cult of a female deity. And here again the conjecture begins. The researchers Anne Baring and Jules Cashford explain in a now classic book that the same bird-shaped Neolithic goddess reappeared in the Minoan cults in the form of a goddess whose wings had been replaced by raised arms.50 This gesture – the same one that appears in the image of the Knossos goddess, dated between 1400 and 1200 bce – is the one we find in Egyptian deities related to death, as well as in the hieroglyph in the form of raised arms representing the soul (the Ba). It is also the gesture we find in the Hagia Triada figure, and the gesture of any child who climbs on to a swing and holds the ropes in their hands. Since what we know of the Minoan religion has come down to us only through archaeological evidence and through the Mycenaean and later Doric filter, we can but conjecture at the identity of this goddess. Perhaps she is the Cretan Demeter, the same one who appears in some images holding ears of wheat in both hands, the same one who 75

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goes back and forth from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead to find her daughter Persephone. This possibility has been suggested by some scholars based on a comparative study of this epiphany scene with other similar representations. The relationship between Demeter and Persephone, two different forms of the same divinity, which gives mythical significance to the seasonal cycles, also finds a place in the dramatic wandering that she shares with Isis and which, in classical Greece, will be one of the features of young Erigone. The descent (to hell) and return (to earth), the kathodos and the anodos, which would later form part of the Eleusinian Mysteries, constitute one of the pairings typical of the ritual use of the swing. It is not for nothing that the swing is the procedure used by the gods of the Brahmanical religions to return to earth. Historians of religions have often been caught between two schools of interpretation. On the one hand, it seems tempting to indulge in the romantic image of a single original myth, with its corres­ ponding primitive deities relegating the rest to being merely diffused versions of the first. From Isis to the Virgin Mary, the same goddess seemed to evolve through all her local variations. On the other hand, the possibilities of essentialist readings were opened up, as if we could unravel the very nature of the myth, in this case referring to a psychological archetype. Our problem is somewhat different, though. The Hagia Triada swing still stands, even if it still seems to be made of beaks and teeth. Perhaps ‘swing’ and ‘gallows’ do not go together, as Picard intended, following Hyginus, but why should ‘swing’ and ‘divinity’ be side by side? The story of the swing, in its strange simpli­ city, forces us to distance ourselves so that we can reach a height from which we can see correspondences between far-removed regions. In the next chapter, we will have the opportunity to point out some of the uses of the swing linked to the presence and arrival of divinities in Brahmanical rituals and performances. But geographical distance is not the only kind that matters. Equally relevant is distance in relation to truth. It will be necessary to accept that many of the elements of our story are literary fictions or ritual actions to which no single referent corresponds.

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qual in status only perhaps to the famous Emerald Buddha, the Giant Swing in Bangkok has remained the spiritual icon of the Thai nation since the establishment of the present Chakri dynasty in the late eighteenth century.1 It was built on the advent of the new dynastic order, after the previous capital had been razed to the ground. After the Burmese–Siamese War of 1765–8 – which resulted in the murder or abduction of some 90,000 people, including the royal family – the reconstruction of the so-called Venice of the East, the city that had for centuries been one of the most important centres of power on the Malay Peninsula, attempted to restore a sense of national identity through old ritual practices. The new Siamese monarch had the swing, the Sao Chingcha, built in 1784, at about the same time that in faraway Europe the French painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard had finished his famous painting and the philosopher Denis Diderot had sold for fifty louis d’or his Indiscreet Jewels, a libertine work set on the Malay Peninsula itself. While in France swinging was gaining popularity in the philosophy of the health sector and in the sex trades, in Southeast Asia it was part of a ritual of the highest political signi­ficance. In dealing with the loss of the old kingdom, a wound that is still part of the complex diplomatic relations between Thailand and Myanmar, the new dynasty did not erect a memorial to victims or a monument of military exaltation.2 Surprisingly, it raised a swing more than 20 metres (65 ft) high. Its pillars were replaced in the twentieth century after the originals 77

arc of feeling 13  Giant swing, Bangkok.

were damaged by weather; they now rest in the National Museum in Bangkok.

The king The earliest record of the origins of ritual swinging in Southeast Asia is in an account by the seventeenth-century Dutch merchant Jeremias van Vliet. This employee of the Dutch East India Company wrote several books on the history of Siam during his four-year stay in the region between 1638 and 1642. From him, we learn that two Brahmans from India had presented a swing to the eleventh king of Siam, Phrachao Ramathibodi ii, who occupied the throne from about 1491 to 1529.3 According to the testimony of Van Vliet, who had apparently managed to learn the local language, Ramathibodi ii was credited with such incredible feats that the merchant was unsure 78

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whether to mention them or not. As with the story that circulated in the late seventeenth century, echoed by the English philosopher John Locke, among others, that the king of Siam distrusted the Dutch ambassador when he had told him of the existence of frozen water, the story of the swing adds to the universal history of scepticism.4 Just as a phenomenon as unknown in the tropics as ice provoked the monarch’s disbelief, so Van Vliet was more than cautious about the circumstances supposedly surrounding the origins of the swing. Fortunately, although the story seemed improbable to him, he decided to pass it on anyway.5 This ‘improbable’ story begins when the more fortunate king of Siam became involved, against his will, in a dispute with another monarch, who according to some versions reigned in Ramaradt, a city imagined to be on the Coromandel Coast in southern India and which, according to others, was in Benares, in the north of the subcontinent.6 This second monarch, who had the same name and titles as the first, was convinced that he alone could hold such honours: ‘Under heaven I alone am worthy of this dignity, and I will kill anyone who dares to steal it from me,’ he said. He then hurled an assegai (a narrow, javelin-like spear), saying, ‘Go and kill the King of Siam.’ After covering a great distance – as great, to be exact, as the entire Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea – the spear fell at the feet of the king of Siam, who asked someone to bring it to him. As no one seemed able to do so, he got up himself and, taking it in his hands, found a letter written in the Brahmic language – that is, in the Devanagari script used to write some Nepali languages, as well as Sanskrit. The letter read: ‘The gods have made no other under the heavens to be my equal. Since you, King of Siam, have taken my name, I am angry and have sent you this spear with my own hand to take your life.’ The king then took the spear and threw it back with force after having written the following message: ‘The gods have made you the greatest in your land and me in mine. If you think you are greater than me, choose a place where we can make war. The victor will then be the greatest and the loser his subject.’ The other king, amazed at the return of the spear and the message it contained, decided to put an end to his rival’s life by other means 79

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and spells. He had a large wooden figure made in the shape of a bird, and ordered four of his bravest soldiers to go to Siam to kill the king, aided by the bewitched sculpture. The spell worked to reduce the guard, but when the first three soldiers entered the monarch’s room, they were paralysed, unable to move forwards or backwards. When the fourth drew his sword, he too was petrified. The next morning, the king was surprised to find a motionless soldier pointing a knife at him, as well as the other three members of this curious retinue. To interrogate them, he sent each man to the gates of the city, in what is now the Ayutthaya temple complex so popular with tourists.7 This second defeat did not daunt the king of Ramaradt, who sought a different way to put an end to his rival’s life. He looked for the best barbers in his kingdom and sent them to Siam to cut the king’s throat. When, after some years of calculated positioning, one of them was about to carry out his shady commission, he began to tremble so much that he could not do it. The soldiers’ paralysis and the barber’s trembling are part of a mythology of movement in which Siamese kings, equal in name and honour, strove for the privilege of sole command, one through lies, deceit and enchantment, and the other through bravery, sincerity and nobility. Convinced at last that his counterpart was immune to his curses, the king of Ramaradt gave up his efforts. As a sign of goodwill, he sent his antagonist gifts that were unknown in Siam. In a letter sent by two Brahmans, he asked the king of Siam to forget his past conduct and henceforth to regard him as a brother. It was through this correspondence that the Brahmans instructed the Siamese in the practice of schoppen and schongelen, the Dutch terms for various forms of swinging. According to Van Vliet, this continued during his own time, in designated places.8 Written in the seventeenth century but set in the late fifteenth century, at the very time when Christopher Columbus thought he had reached the Kingdom of Cipango, this story about the origins of the swing in Southeast Asia forces us to question not only its truth but its relevance. In a world in which journalism repeats the same news ad nauseam, leaving out others that might also be of public interest, it is strange to come across a story that seems not merely imaginary but 80

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even irrelevant. Whereas in the case of the legend of Erigone, philologists have struggled to unravel the truth of the myth, the problem now is not only to judge the distance of Van Vliet’s account from the facts but to determine whether those same facts – possibly false – are even worth considering, whether they are relevant to the case at hand and whether they matter to anyone at all. Truth can take on different expressions, including those that are considered mythological but that bring us closer to what Clifford Geertz called ‘the really real’, or to the (non-verbalized, sometimes unconscious) illness that hides behind the symptom, as Freud claimed. In one of his most sophisticated books, Michel Foucault began his study of the juridical forms of truth with a digression on Sophocles’ Oedipus.9 To Foucault, these narratives, even if false, must be inscribed in a regime of truth governed by power relations. He did not consider the relevance of the story itself, nor did he pay attention to the circumstance that after all (or rather, before anything else), the story of Oedipus is a piece of gossip to which we initially listen as one who hears the lurid details of others’ lives. This French philosopher forgot that before the regime of truth consolidates its strategies of power, whether through proof, testimony or evidence, it must start from a divide that separates the relevant from the infertile. As with the case of the student who has just presented their doctoral thesis, to which the old professor remarks that everything they have said is all very well, but ‘So what?’ – that is, ‘who cares?’ – it may well happen that some essential details in this story would not matter to anyone or, even worse, would not even have a name. The history of objectivity, and by extension the history of objectivity in history, has been written in relation to the resources available to transform indications into evidence through the use of heuristic techniques. In this way, we have learned to distinguish true stories from false ones, as well as to differentiate proven facts from imaginary or improbable reports. However, once we add to the regime of truth its possible relevance or irrelevance – its regime of relevance – it will be inevitable to conclude that, along with true stories about insubstantial matters (the quintessence of journalistic objectivity in our contemporary world), we must also pay attention to relevant 81

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misrepresentations, that is, to those stories, probably false, about ­matters of interest. The story of the swing in Southeast Asia gives food for thought not only about the truth regime of a story but about the way in which we negotiate its relevance. When the old professor turns in her chair and says to the doctoral student, ‘So what?’ she is in fact saying, ‘Why should I care?’ or, somewhat more elegantly: ‘Why should we care about what you have just said? How does it help us to address our problem?’ The point to stress here is the ‘me’, the ‘we’, the ‘our problem’. The regime of (objective) relevance is just as much affected by (subjective) interests as the regime of truth, although these interests, many times unspeakable, often go unnoticed. This is partly because the possession of truth, as Foucault rightly points out, is a disguised form of power. The biggest problem with Van Vliet’s story is not that it may seem false but that it may seem irrelevant. This is an aspect to which the history of emotions has not given enough thought. On most occasions the history of experience is built on privileged cases, each chosen according to the ease of access to the document or the language in which it is written. It is therefore often the case that, while some supposedly universal stories are too local when looked at closely, it also happens, on the contrary, that others are as trapped in their regionalism as the factory employee who is allowed to speak only on his own behalf. Thus we discover that the history of fear is nothing more than the history of fear in, say, England, or that the history of happiness has too many French overtones. The lesson of globality concerns us not only in order to account for an increasingly smaller world, but as we try to understand how to solve the problem of parallel lives and similar experiences among those who do not even belong to the same geographical area.10 Thailand’s Giant Swing is, like the one at Hagia Triada, a re-creation of which only the structure remains, at least partially reconstructed. Like many similar instruments found in the ruins of some of India’s most famous temples, the object is indicative of the ritual of which it was a part. To illuminate that experience, we have only improbable stories collected by ethnography. It is high time we brought them to history. The Trīyampawāi-Trīppawāi ceremony is of historical interest for two reasons. First, the accessible documents describe it as a type of 82

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ritual action related to the theatricality of the state, to the way in which political power uses spectacle to endow itself with authority. Until the use of the Giant Swing was cancelled in 1937, it involved the highest state institutions.11 Second, it is a clearly religious event based on the belief that once a year the gods Śiva and Vis.n.u visit the Earth on swings.12 There is nothing new in drawing attention to the ­relationship that religion and politics have always had with show business. According to the Directory of the India Company published in 1914, the ritual of the great Bangkok swing took place during the annual visit of the god Śiva, just before the arrival of Vis.n.u. On designated days, a man in the guise of Śiva would march in procession to a place called Lao Chingcha, which literally translates as ‘the pillars of the swing’. The king of Siam chose for that role a nobleman who would have virtually unlimited power during the ceremony. For a long time, perhaps because of the distinctly agrarian character of the ritual, it was the minister of agriculture, but later, during the reign of Mongkut (1851–68) – the monarch known as Rāma iv and popularized in the West by the film The King and I (1956) – the minister was replaced by a person of lower rank. At Lao Chingcha he sat on a bamboo chair, with one foot on his knee. Assisted by four Brahmans, he had to remain motionless and balanced in this strange posture for a few hours, until the ritual actions of the swing ceased. If by mistake or carelessness he ventured to put both feet on the ground, the Brahmans were to deprive him of his possessions and authority. While he played the role of the god, monks took turns to go on the great swing with the intention of grasping a purse placed on a bamboo pole between their teeth, all while suspended some 20 metres (65 ft) above the ground. Once this dangerous task was completed, three groups of four nāga (semi-divine entities from Hindu mythology) would pay homage to the god. Those who took the role of the nāga performed various circular dances, called senan. At the same time, each swung a buffalo horn filled with water from a large metal bucket that was used only on ritual occasions: the khan sagara. The twentieth-century British Orientalist H. G. Quaritch Wales argued that the great Bangkok swing originated from solar cults of the Indian subcontinent. He cites four pieces of evidence to defend 83

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this theory. First among them are the Rig-Veda texts, in which the sun is described as ‘the golden swing of heaven’; this is also the case in other Siamese sources of Vedic rituals, taken from Frazer, in which a Brahman swings while asserting that ‘the great Lord has joined the great Lady’, that ‘the god [sun] has joined the goddess [moon]’.13 Second, the fact that the swinging took place from east to west (in a solar direction) at the time of the winter solstice seemed to him further evidence that the ceremony was somehow connected with the return of light and the Brahmanical new year, the Makara Sankrānti. Third, the circular dances of the nāga – so similar to those of the Turkish dervishes – also suggested to him the solar revolution.14 Finally, again drawing on Frazer’s observations, Quaritch Wales argued that the same Indian ceremonies in which the gods were pushed on swings three times a day – at dawn, noon and dusk – had a clear solar origin, comparable to the rocking of the images of Vis.n.u and Śiva in the Brahmanical temples of Bangkok.15 For Quaritch Wales, writing shortly before the Siamese revolution of 1932, the great swing was part of the Southeast Asian ceremonies that so impressed European travellers before and after the colonial period. Like many other scholars of that part of the world, this Orientalist, the son of a wealthy London bookseller, was interested in explaining the ritual actions of the present through their historical antecedents. Following the conventions of the time, Quaritch Wales endorsed the theory of the Indianization of Southeast Asia that is so heavily debated today. For him, the ritual forms of the Kingdom of Siam may have had connections with surrounding countries such as Cambodia, Burma or Malaysia, but much of the rituals of Thailand before and after the Ayutthayan period (1351–1767) seemed to have their roots in the south of the Indian subcontinent. Understood as part of what was then called Greater India, the Trīyampawāi-Trīppawāi seemed to be related to similar ceremonies performed in the state of Tamil Nadu.16 In other words, Van Vliet’s improbable story might have placed the Siamese king’s enemy in an imaginary city, but the swing seemed to have come from a very real South India after all.17 It was much more difficult to explain the swing’s function without falling under the spell of the exotic. Given the paucity of sources and 84

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the limited access to archaeological material, the idea of a Great India as the common root and origin of local variations in the whole of what the French called Indochina was more wishful thinking than reality. Inspired by the then recent work of Bronisław Malinowski, Quaritch Wales wanted to understand how the sacralization of tradition guaranteed the survival of the monarchy. The work of the latter, like that of the nineteenth-century travel writer Anna Harriette Leonowens, was highly controversial, especially with regard to the idealized description of the taboos surrounding the figure of the king.18 The privileged position of Quaritch Wales and Leonowens within the court – both had been hired by Rāma iv as part of the country’s modernization programme – led them to fall into simplifications aimed either at their audience in England or at their commitments to the local authorities. Thus, while Leonowens promoted a Westernized view of the harem, Quaritch Wales sought to understand it in terms of its public utility. By maintaining ties with the daughters of the most important families in the country, he argued, the harem avoided social revolt, in much the same way that moving the nobles to Versailles had done in ancien régime France. The same concerns apply to the ritual actions of the TrīyampawāiTrīppawāi. Quaritch Wales was able to observe that the Sao Chingcha was a spectacle used by the king of Siam to assert his political power. As in the great coronation ceremony, which the West was able to follow on Rāma x’s ascension to the throne in 2019, the Hindu gods were part of the divine nature of the monarch, not because the king was an incarnation or avatar of the god but because he legitimized his authority through the spell of spectacle. Long before Geertz understood ceremonial life as an argument used by political power to underline the cosmic foundation of inequality, Quaritch Wales described royal extravagance as part of a symbolic exercise of power. His work did not assess the country’s profound difficulties, nor did it discuss the absence of an education or health system. From the pos­ition afforded by the colour of his skin and his attachment to the court, his description of state rituals as a way of perpetuating the monarchy did not and could not foresee the revolution of 1932 which, led by Paris-educated Thais, set the stage for a constitutional system that 85

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ultimately put an end to absolutism, although not to the monarchy. The latter was never sustained by the exemplary conduct of kings, even if they were Buddhist monks, nor, it seems, by the magic of their ceremonial symbols.19 However, the change of regime coincided with a reform of the court’s expenses and duties, including the suspension of the Sao Chingcha ceremony.

Women The great Bangkok swing may not have been the result of a gift from the king of Ramaradt, as Van Vliet explained, but we cannot ignore its Hindu roots. The acrobatic use of the Sao Chingcha may come from China, but the custom of balancing the gods on a platform or ham. sa is observed in many parts of India.20 The same instrument with which people refresh themselves by circulating air plays a crucial role in numerous religious rituals and public celebrations stretching from Rajasthan and Punjab to Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.21 Despite their differences, these festivals share some common qualities. First, they all feature different deities, or the same deities under different names. Second, they are part of seasonal cycles. Finally, in most cases, but especially in the Teej festivals of northern India (see illus. 30 and 31), the use of the swing is essentially restricted to and intended for women. It is the young Indian girls who – like the virgins of classical Greece or the young women of Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, as well as the semi-immortal girls of China or the young women of Cádiz or Vietnam – adorn themselves, dress in saris (especially green ones), cover their hands with henna, and swing. The swing has always been related to the emotional landscape of women. From Marian worship to the invocation of Pārvatī, Demeter, Rādhā, Isis or the goddess Hārītī, swinging has fostered various forms of sisterhood. Many of these festivities can clearly be described as rituals of social inversion. In the Akha ceremony in northern Thailand, for example, it is the women who adorn themselves and swing. For at least a few days a year, while they dress up and enjoy themselves, they will not feed the pigs, work the land or fetch water. In contrast to an initiatory rite of elevation – such as the defence of a doctoral thesis – this kind of ritual process presupposes an unequal and rigid 86

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14  Children on a swing celebrating Eid al-Fitr, Baghdad, 2007.

social structure. Women who swing start from a structurally inferior position in relation to work or property. The roots of the rite, like those of inequality, are deep: at least some of the practices of the anthesterias were clearly of this nature. For a limited time and under prescribed conditions, women and the dead – or slaves, depending on the translation of keres – could move freely around the polis. The same applies to the rituals associated with the cult of Demeter, which were, like the Eleusinian Mysteries, rit­uals of licence.22 In the Korean festival of Dano, the custom of women swinging standing on platforms suspended from tall wooden structures, called kune, still survives.23 Although the first references to the uses of the swing in this region are related to skill contests between men, from the beginning of the Joseon dynasty, in the fourteenth century, it became, as in China, an exclusive pastime for women who could free themselves temporarily from their daily obligations and acquire a relative prominence. Anthropologists became interested in these ritual processes after the publication in 1890 of The Golden Bough by Frazer. He devoted an entire section of his most important book to portraying the symbolic death of the king, which, in many parts of the world, took place in a cyclical manner, coinciding with the celebration of the coming 87

15  Kim Jun-geun (Kisan), ‘Korean Swinging’, 1886, watercolour painting reproduced in Stewart Culin, Korean Games (1895).

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of the light or of harvest time. There were countless examples. Frazer refers to a Babylonian festival called Sacaea during which masters and slaves exchanged places for five days. Sometimes a prisoner would occupy the throne, until he was stripped of his monarch’s robes, to be first flogged and then crucified.24 Leaving aside these cruel extremes, Frazer examined the role played by these surrogates who, as in the case of the Thai minister of agriculture, temporarily took the place of the monarch.25 In the Persian New Year, Nowruz, for example, the occasional reversal of the social hierarchy has also been customary. Still practised in Kurdistan and described in the late nineteenth century by various European travellers, the ritual involved arranging for a person to reign for a few days. This false monarch was provided with a throne, a court of officials and a small number of soldiers. At the end of his mandate, he was dethroned, sometimes beaten, and forced to leave the city.26 Chroniclers of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries describe not only this reversal of social status, but the ritual use of the swing.27 The twentieth-century anthropologist Max Gluckman devoted one of his so-called Frazer Lectures to extending the idea of the king’s death to other forms of social conflict, in particular those resulting from different gender roles. From the (symbolic) death of the king (of the country) to the (provisional) dethronement of the king (of the house), the distance is smaller than it might seem. Frazer had already explained how, in many Mediterranean and Near Eastern societies, seasonal cycles were associated with the death of a king or a god, who was often resurrected through the mediation of the love of a goddess: Osiris and Isis; Dionysus and Demeter; Adonis and Aphrodite; Tammuz and Astarte. In connection with the story of the swing, he could have added Erigone and Icarius or, in the case of the Indian subcontinent, Pārvatī and Śiva. In any case, where Frazer had wanted to account for ritual action in relation to seasonal cycles, mid­-twentiethcentury anthropology sought to explain these processes in terms of the human groups concerned, their social organization, their living conditions and their belief systems. ‘Rituals of rebellion’, as Gluckman called them in 1954, could be related to the fertility of the land, as Frazer claimed, but they took 89

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place above all as prescribed forms of social transgression.28 On the appointed days, Zulu women put on some men’s clothes, milked the cattle – an exclusively male activity the rest of the year – and went half naked through the village, dancing and singing obscene songs, while the men and boys remained hidden in their houses. Such actions were common in many other African societies. The Tsonga women of Mozambique, the Swazi and the Transkeian Thembu practised similar rituals, which, although they might be (psychologically) associated with the presence of a female deity – as might be the case with the goddess Nomkhubulwane of the Zulu religion – were merely the physical expression of a social conflict. Those in a subordinate position could humiliate their oppressors or behave provocatively. Inspired by Euripides’ tragedy, Gluckman called these rituals ‘­ bacchantic’, in the sense that women behaved like the protagonists of the Greek tragedy and roamed the fields and mountains ‘driven . . . from their homes in a frenzy . . . out of their minds’.29 In the same way that Frazer’s work was criticized for deficient empirical data, Gluckman’s work was discussed because of the static character of his theory. His fieldwork in southeastern Africa allowed him to explain the social structure as a hydraulic machine that, in order not to overheat, had to release steam at least once a year. Far from allowing a modification of the unequal starting conditions, the ritual took place as a form of perpetuating the status quo. The Bacchae could turn the world upside down, but, when the party was over, they picked up their toys and returned to life as normal. Victor W. Turner, a disciple of Gluckman, began by renaming the rituals of rebellion – after all, it seemed too much name for so little war – but his position received the same criticism as his mentor’s.30 This great theorist of experience, who wrote most of his books during the glory years of the hippie movement, wanted to understand egalitarian human groupings. His books, although very valuable, retain the fascination that many young people of those years felt with psycho­ tropic experiences and pilgrimages to India. The ‘rituals of status reversal’, as he came to call them, left no room for improvisation, let alone class or gender struggle. Turner was interested in the structural elements of the process, although, unlike his predecessors, he did not 90

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enter into an assessment of its cathartic character (as did Gluckman) or its relation to mythology or agrarian cycles (like Frazer). Rather than questioning the social function of ritual, he concentrated on the emergence of extraordinary, borderline or, in his terminology, ‘liminal’ life experiences.31 To that end, he began by relating rituals of rebellion to rituals of passage in order to unravel the mechanisms that made possible the formation of those groups that Gluckman had called ‘bacchantic’ and that Turner called, in Latin, communitas. By ‘liminal’, Turner referred to those people who, for a time, group together without regard to their previous social position. Far from operating as an expression of structural inequality, rituals of inversion favoured the alternation between hierarchical and homogeneous forms of social organization. This deserves a little more explanation before we return to the swing. In the manner of the applause that follows the performance of a piece of music in a concert hall, pent-up emotion can be released through the profusion of gestures that were clearly inappropriate only seconds before. The applause may serve to communicate to the musicians the emotions evoked by their talent and dedication, but the immediate effect is the disappearance of distinctions based on ticket price or seat location. Those who entered the hall through different doors intermix and become twinned. The collective applause, which in principle serves to exalt the orchestra, also fosters a feeling of satis­ faction and survival close to the autoerotic drive, a borderline (or liminal) experience that temporarily eliminates hierarchy. In addition, those who applaud like one another. There may therefore be looks of reprobation towards those who do not applaud enough or those who applaud too much, as the two great dangers that newly formed community faces: on the one hand its transformation, through new leadership, into a hierarchical society; on the other the decay of the newly established bonds of brotherhood. (Obviously, the community that responds to music has no desire to take the place of the orchestra, let alone to tear the conductor to pieces.) This alternation between order and noise is the same we find in more complex ritual processes, especially depending on the temporary suspension of the rules that govern social behaviour. The relationship 91

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between the orchestra (with its scores, its ensembles, its norms and its conductor) and the applauding audience is very similar to that between the hierarchical social structure and the communitas. The formation of similar communities has come to occupy a central place in the history of emotions, especially in the work of the medievalist Barbara H. Rosenwein, who began to trace them in the monastic groupings of the late Middle Ages, and then tried to include other social phenomena under this dual concept.32 This historiographical approach is indebted to the work of other authors interested in the so-called emotional standards, that is to say, the set of rules relating to the circumstances under which certain expressions (such as laughing or crying) should be restricted, permitted or prohibited. The best-known author in this respect is the twentieth-century sociologist Norbert Elias, whose work on the court society and the process of civilization sought to unravel the set of norms progressively imposed in the European culture of the modern world: from sprezzatura – the quality of dissimulation – to decorum, or from respect to disgust. The idea of communitas, however, is much more primal and much less like the emotional community (in Rosenwein’s sense) than what William M. Reddy called an ‘emotional refuge’: that simultaneously intimate and shared space in which social norms and hierarchies have been temporarily cancelled.33 But let us return to women and the swing. Of the examples Turner points out, the most famous is Halloween, a holiday in which both children and the dead take centre stage. Curiously, there are no swings on Halloween (although we have already seen the close relationship between the dead and the swing in the anthesterias, and we will find it again in imperial China), but the swing is present in the other two festivities that Turner examines as transposition rituals. The first takes place in Ghana and the other in India. It is strange that Turner did not notice (or mention) the presence of the swing in either of them. Thus, while Frazer rightly observed that swinging was related to seasonal rites but failed to see its connection with rituals of status reversal, Turner, who studied the latter, neglected to mention the role of the swing in two of his most significant examples. Despite this paradox of having, on the one hand, swings without rites and, on the other, 92

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rites without swings, the fact is that the two elements, like teeth and beaks, go together. The Ashanti and the Techiman people in Ghana, like the Makonde in Tanzania, include references to the swing in their trad­itional dances and songs, often in relation to the symbolism of sexual activity: ‘On the swing there in our house/ Nyapule got hurt/ But she doesn’t feel the pain/ There in our house.’34 The presence of the swing is even more emblematic in the Hindu festival of love, Holi. Turner assumes that during the festival the destruction and renewal, pollution and purification of the world occur not only on an abstract level but in each of the participants: ‘Under the tutelage of Krishna, each person will for a time adopt and experience the role of his opposite: the subservient wife will act as the dominant husband, and vice versa.’ This is why in the province of Braj (which we will encounter in the following ­section), women can (play at) beating up men.35 But the experience of oscillation is not only lived in the context of a game of inversion. The very presence of the swing guarantees that the movement is physical, not simply symbolic. In the case of India, this is especially clear in the monsoon festival, Teej. Here, too, women adorn themselves, gather, dance, sing and swing.36 They could just as well ride on brooms, goats or sticks. At least temporarily, those who are structurally subordinate, and not just occasionally inferior – as in the case of initiation rites – will experience the joy of liberation, especially in societies where the kinship structure is based on a rigid patrilineal system. Oscillation is thus placed in the context of a festival of licence that, while not posing a real threat to the way in which hierarchical relationships are negotiated (quite the contrary), never­ theless makes it possible to cross the border of permissiveness and to modify, at least provisionally, the value of objects and the relative position of community members. In India, the visual representations of such festivities are innumerable.37 The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, and the British Museum in London hold two extraordinary images on this subject. In the first, an unknown painter shows the eighteenth-century maharaja Abhai Singh on a white horse, accompanied by his guard, contemplating the swaying of two young women (illus. 31). Produced around 1740 in the 93

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Rajput kingdom of Jodhpur, this image focuses on the displacement of political power. In contrast to the homo viator – the knight who, as in Dürer’s famous engraving, makes his way to fortune – the scene exalts the values of the mulier oscillantis, of the feminine swaying that takes place at the expense of power and against it. More particularly, the theme could be related to the movement initiated by Amrita Devi, a local woman who in 1730 sacrificed her life to protect the trees of the region. Her protest led to the murder of more than three hundred inhabitants of Khejarli, who died embracing the same variety of ­leguminous plant (Prosopis cineraria) on which the young women in the picture have installed their swing. The image in the British Museum also places the swing at the very centre of an action that is, at least in principle, emancipatory. In this watercolour on an opaque background, a miniature within a series, a young woman swings vigorously under the shade of a variety of sacred fig tree (Ficus religiosa) (illus. 33). This is the same type of tree beneath which the Buddha meditated, and around which religious walking known as parikrama takes place. Here, the swing replaces ritual prayer, which is recited when circling the trunk, with an oscillating movement. At the top of the image, written in Devanagari script, a phrase in the Braj Bhasa language (a variety of Hindi) states that the woman swings ‘neither hesitant nor afraid; Her waist nearly snaps and the tree creaks, but bends lithely and survives.’38 The connection of this last image with some variety of the Teej leaves no room for doubt. Originally associated with oncoming monsoons, these festivals celebrate the goddess Pārvatī, who is taken in procession to commemorate her departure from her mother’s house and her marriage to the god Śiva.39 As the second reincarnation of Satī – Vis.n.u’s first wife, who took her own life because of an affront her husband received from her family – Pārvatī is entrusted with the task of removing the god from his spiritual retreat and making him share in the responsibilities of his offspring. Some of the ascetic disciplines (called tapas) she underwent in the Himalayas to gain the attention of her future husband, including fasting, are part of the Teej celebration and are still practised by many women in various parts of the subcontinent.40 94

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These visual representations tell us something about women’s lives, but they are not images produced by women. They are created by men for their own pleasure. We will return to this distinction later. For the time being, we must recall that when looking for the real voice of the protagonists of status reversal rituals, we should forget the eyes and use our ears. The swing is a transposition machine, a solid metaphor that ­mobilizes experiences as human as vertigo, disorientation and anguish. It is also a metronome to which a mantra can be recited. From anthesterias to Livonian festivals, ritual swinging is often accompanied by chanting and dancing. This connection is so explicit that the pre­ Columbian (perhaps Totonac) swing in the Museo de Antropología de Xalapa (max) in Veracruz, Mexico, is itself a musical instrument (see illus. 46). In the present case, many of these ‘swing songs’ – passed on by oral tradition, but in principle related to religious affairs – leave room for the gradual introduction of socially dissonant elements. Like the recitatives accompanying the gods’ rocking, the songs of the swing’s activities also have a monotonous and repetitive character: On the branch of the magnolia tree, I have placed a swing; its rope is made of silk, I have placed a swing. On the branch of the magnolia tree, I have placed a swing; its seat is made of sandalwood, I have placed a swing. The sun and the moon have come to swing on my swing; they have brought their queens to swing on my swing. Brahma has come to swing on my swing; he has brought his queens to swing on my swing. To swing on my swing has Śiva come; he has brought his queens to swing on my swing.41 And so on and so forth. The combined action of music and movement produces a kind of spell very similar to the lullaby that, since time immemorial, mothers everywhere have used to lull their children to sleep, as Plato knew very well. What the famous Greek philosopher did not know is that this same lullaby is also used by young Indian girls (and others) to air their fears. While these songs may refer to the coming of 95

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the gods, they also openly question the expectations of fathers, brothers and husbands. Using the cadence of the swaying movement, the music discusses the unequal distribution of inheritance or work. These songs express the young women’s fear of being mistreated by their future partners, or of the conditions under which their marriages have been arranged. They are songs of love and of terror, sung at times of freedom or release. They have a festive character, but some of them are linked, as in the case of the aiora, to the threat of suicide.42 Curiously, these songs of the young Indian girls during Teej are not very different from the popular songs still heard at the Festival of Swings in the small town of Ubrique in southern Spain: In that you see me small and you, little girl, see me don’t think I have to be a broom that with me you will sweep.43 Along with the illusion of love, we also find the fear of betrayal, ­humiliation or abandonment: Come over here, you false and re-false, false I tell you again. The night you sold me out, how much did you get for me?44 In a world of restriction and of illusion so often broken, the symbolism of flowers reappears, intermingled, as in medieval Chinese literature, with the absence of freedom: A rosebush blooms a rose and a pot, a carnation; a father raises a daughter without knowing who she is for.45 In contrast to the fear of men and political families, communitas also appears as the most basic expression of sorority: 96

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The one on the swing, the one with the apron, is my brother’s girlfriend, soon to be my sister-in-law.46 The ritual also serves the purpose of proclaiming the desire for ­freedom, the wish to impose one’s own order on one’s own life: My mother loved a pear, and I want an apple. My mother loved my father, and I whoever I want.47 And, once more, sex and death: Already the soldiers are parting, mum, the good lads are leaving. Now the girls stay with the filthy old men.

The deity As important as the Teej festival itself is the frequency with which Hindustani painting has depicted Krishna on a swing. The sources available for interpreting the vicissitudes of this god are essentially two: the Bhagavad Gītā (Song of the Lord), one of the most important fragments of the Mahābhārata, and the Bhāgavata Purān.a (Ancient Stories of God), Book x of which is devoted almost exclusively to Krishna’s childhood. To these two sources, both literary and devotional, we should add the extraordinary twelfth-century poem Gītā-govinda by Jayadeva, a poet from Odisha. Krishna’s portrayal in the Mahābhārata and in the Purān.a is very different. In the former, the god makes his appearance as a sage who advises the warrior Arjuna before battle. The Purān.a, on the other hand, concentrates on the details of his childhood and early youth. Both characterizations have had an effect on ethical and religious practices. For, just as the Bhagavad Gītā has given rise to a philosophy of dharma (virtue), so the Purān.a has been at the 97

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root of an asceticism and practical religiosity linked to a devotional form known as bhakti, as well as to a variety of yoga of the same name. In terms of iconographic representation, scholars estimate that about seven out of ten representations of Krishna refer to the image of the god conveyed by the Purān.a. The same applies to the performing arts, given that these texts were written to be recited and danced to, accompanied by music.48 It is therefore essential to examine them if we are to understand the omnipresence of the swing both in ritual practice and in the iconographic representation of the god. The question is: what do these texts tell us about the swing in Krishna’s earthly life? The answer is: nothing. And then? Why is Krishna represented so often on a swing, if there are no references to this instrument in the Purān.a or in other religious texts? Largely unknown in the West, Book x of the Bhāgavata Purān.a is of overwhelming beauty.49 The text was set around the year 1000, but the story’s origins are much earlier. To a large extent, the development of a divine conception of Krishna himself, who in some regions of India attained the status of supreme deity, depends on this text.50 The lives of this mischievous god, who loves to steal butter and yoghurt and who hides the gopīs’ clothes as they bathe in the Yamuna River, pass under a spell in which innocence and divinity coexist in complete harmony. The women of the tribe (referred to in the text as gopī, cowherds), in their eagerness to protect the child Krishna, wave a cow’s tail around him and bathe him in the urine and excrement of this sacred animal, also using it to write the names of the god Vis.n.u on twelve different parts of his body.51 His adoptive mother, Yashoda, will twice see the sky, earth, stars, sun and moon, as well as fire, air, the oceans, the continents, the mountains, rivers, forests, all that moves and all that does not move in young Krishna’s half-open mouth.52 One of the basic concepts of the Bhāgavata Purān.a is that of līlā: a Sanskrit word usually translated as ‘play’. The līlā is a game, of course, but also an aesthetic and ascetic exercise, a re-creation of the world sometimes linked to a kind of ritual dance called Rāsa.53 The origins of the word līlā, the most accurate translation of which would perhaps be ‘pastime’, can be traced to the Vedantasūtra, a text written in the third century in which Hindu theogony asked what necessity a 98

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god who lacks nothing could have to create a world, unless it be for his own entertainment. Far removed from the semantic context with which we normally associate the word ‘play’, līlā refers to an action that does not depend on any need. The god is reincarnated and takes on human form as part of a recreational and expansive principle that involves all human and non-human beings: the gopī, but also the cows, monkeys, birds, elephants and trees. The jasmine, which against all odds blooms in autumn, is as important as the moon that illuminates the horizon. The dance of love, the Rāsa līlā, begins with an uncontrollable impulse. The sound of the flute is so rapturous that the gopī will instantly abandon sons and husbands and stop milking cows and stoking fires. Everything will be left half done, suspended between sky and ground. The call of the ‘God of a Thousand Names’ places them outside themselves and their possessions.54 Like the Bacchae, they are ‘driven from their homes in a frenzy, out of their minds’. Those who cannot go out to physically meet the ‘supreme lover’ seek him through meditation. Book x of the Bhāgavata Purān.a is also a text of remarkable synaesthesia, where divinity itself dyes what it touches, and where whoever reads or listens to it is also possessed by a drama in which people and things, plants and animals, gods and humans are equally involved. In Lee Siegel’s beautiful English translation, the end of Canto i warns us that when the young Krishna plays, he embodies the very feeling of love.55 Like the earrings of the gopī, swaying with urgency, the Rāsa takes place in the overall context of an autumn that brings rains and fertility to the fields, renewing the pastures and removing ‘the impurities of water, the mud of the earth, the mingling of the elements and the clouds of the sky’.56 Before reaching its climax, the story goes through different phases of acceptance and abandonment. Initially rejected by the god, the gopī find no solace. Their pain, the text tells us, is physical and moral. Their lament leaves traces on their faces and bodies. The red of their lips blanches with their sighs, just as the vermilion of their breasts is darkened by the make-up their tears carry. Compassionate, even though there is nothing that can increase or decrease his own satisfaction, the god pleases them. Of course, he will abandon them again as soon as he 99

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sees pride and vanity bursting from their bodies. Like ‘cow elephants without a bull’, intoxicated by what they have seen and experienced, the gopī begin to imitate the gestures of the god: his smiles, his looks, his voices and his games. Dancing and shouting ‘I am he!’ they ask the trees and the beasts for the whereabouts of the one who is inside and outside every living creature. Each one of them performs the god’s deeds, his various games or līlā. One sucks the breast of another, as Krishna did to free himself from the sorceress Putana; another, disguised as a demon, tries to abduct a third, who pretends to be the baby Krishna; yet another beats a companion whom she believes to be a demon. There are those who call the cows as the god would have done, and those who imitate the playing of his flute. All make their way to the banks of the Yamuna at nightfall. They go into the forest as far as the moonlight can reach, their minds absorbed, chanting and pleading for the return of the Lord of Autumn. There they speak incoherently and weep inconsolably until the Rāsa begins. With arms intertwined in a circle, the Lord of all Yogis stands between each pair of gopī and stretches his arms around their necks. The mys­ tical union provided by music, song and dance not only affects the gopī but extends to the abode of the gods, reaching to the stars. In the context of this animated universe, while the dancers’ senses overflow with pleasure upon contact with Krishna, the women of the celestial orb also succumb to desire. The moon itself and the stars marvel. As for the Lord of All Souls, he is like a child possessed by his own reflection.57 Tired from the dance, the women bathe in the waters of the Yamuna while the bees sing of their deeds. There the god is again stained with the turmeric of their breasts. In contact with their bodies, he looks like the bull elephant who has lost all inhibition towards his cows. Under this love spell, each of the women believes she is the only one, even though the god is able to dance with them all. It also seems to them that the dance has lasted only one night, when in fact it has lasted more than 4 billion years. Last, but not least, although some might consider that the Supreme Being has broken the laws of dharma by touching others’ women, the text reminds us that ‘the truth of fire is not defiled by what it burns.’ On the contrary, the Rāsa līlā will free those who have faith from lust, ‘the disease of the heart’.58 100

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The relationship between the Rāsa līlā and the swing is complex. From an iconographic point of view, one of the earliest images in which the God of a Thousand Names swings with one of the gopī, perhaps Rādhā, comes from an illuminated manuscript of the fifteenth century. The text, written in the eleventh century by Bilvamangala Swami, better known as Lilasuka, was expertly illustrated and is now in the library of the Wellcome Collection in London.59 The Balagopalastuti, as this text is called, does not include explicit reference to a swing, but the accompanying images do. As in other cases, the swing’s presence is felt above all in the context of its iconographic representation. It is the images that obsessively show the god’s swing, even though the swing does not appear anywhere in the written texts. To understand this paradox, it will be necessary to take a short detour through the Hindu theory of feelings and their artistic mani­ festations. It will also be necessary to place ourselves between the third century bce and the third century ce, which is the imprecise date of the most important text on dramatic or aesthetic theory in the Asian subcontinent. Attributed to the sage Bharata Muni, the Nāt. yaśāstra contains one of the most important theatrical doctrines ever written.60 It is a treatise on rhetoric that includes the first major systematization of the doctrine of rasa (not to be confused with Rāsa), a Sanskrit word that is also difficult to translate. Its initial meaning was similar to ‘essence’ or, more sensorially, ‘juice’. The rasa is so embedded in the physi­ ology of the body that its early uses related it to the ability to taste or to perceive a certain flavour. It appears in this way in some of the oldest Indian texts, such as the Rig-Veda and the set of the Upanishad. For Bharata Muni, rasa was little more than a condiment or, from a visual point of view, a colouring of the experience, which allowed a certain dramatic piece to be tasted. The rasa (plural) – for Bharata distinguished a set of them – were not genuine emotions but feelings evoked in the context of dramatic performance. That is, the action that imitates fear (as in a horror film), for example, allows us to taste that emotion through the delight triggered by the performance. We are afraid, yes, but our fear is only evoked and not real. The evalu­ations we can make of the fear we feel in real life and in the theatre are hence 101

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16 Krishna on a swing with Rādhā, balanced by two gopī, miniature from a manuscript of the Balagopalastuti, ascribed to Bilvamangala, 15th century.

very different. The second, the one we feel in the theatre, at viewing the representation of a crime, the one we savour through a dramatic action (the rasa), is based on an ethical and aesthetic experience of astonishment, very distinct from the terror we would feel outside the theatre if we were witnesses to a real murder. In the original work, the number of rasa or aesthetic feelings is eight: erotic, comic, pathetic or compassionate, furious, heroic, terrible, hateful and marvellous.61 Later, a ninth rasa was added: peace or tranquillity of mind. Of course, the rasa are evocations of states of mind, temperaments or moods. This is an important point, as Bharata explains, for just as the dish, once cooked, allows the connoisseur to distinguish its ingredients but is different from the sum of its parts – a chicken is not the same as a chicken stew, nor is a crime the same as the representation of a crime – the emotional appreciation of the work of art and the feelings it arouses do not correspond to the emotions used to evoke it, in the same sense that the taste of salt in a stew is not the same as that of the salt used to cook it. The Sanskrit word for emotional states is bhava. These bhava, which are very close to what we call passions, emotions or vibes, are used to ‘cook’ those forms of tasting or aesthetic feelings called rasa. The manner in which these ingredients are to be arranged is established through the rāga, another word of somewhat complex meaning, but 102

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which nevertheless occupies an essential place in our story. This is all the more so because one of these rāga is precisely the hindola rāga, or swing rāga. But what is a rāga? In ancient Sanskrit, the word rāga simply meant love or passion, although the term was also related to the colour with which something was dyed. In the context of the performing arts and dramaturgical theory, it came to describe a set of structures or fixed modes to be used by performers to colour emotions (to dye them) and evoke corresponding feelings in their audience. If we were to continue with Bharata Muni’s own image from the world of cooking, the rāga would be the various culinary arts, the established ways of cooking a dish, those procedures that give meaning to the emotional representation so as to produce the corresponding aesthetic feeling. Those in the Western world would say that the rāga would be the persuasive procedures, the topics that Aristotle spoke of in his Rhetoric, which make it possible to give meaning to a non-demonstrative discourse. It was during the fifteenth century that rāga came to be associated with various types of divine and human figure. At the same time, they gave rise to a kind of painting known as rāgamala, in which the various rāga appeared in a series or, more literally, a ‘garland’. Each of the images that made up these garlands represented a different way of evoking emotional experiences, including those, such as love, that are associated with the presence of the swing.62 From the second half of the fifteenth century onwards, the genre spread to courts and zenanas. It just so happened that the rāga began to include a male and a female character (nayaka and nayika), while the series as a whole also referred to the six seasons: autumn, early winter, winter, spring, summer and, especially relevant to our discussion, the monsoons: the season of the hindola rāga, which is often evoked through the love affairs between Krishna and Rādhā on a swing.63 Of the dozens of rāgamala that have survived, scholars do not agree on how their images depict the evocation of particular feelings. It seems clear, however, that the image does not literally represent a story contained in a text, but rather suggests the activities of a season in which certain feelings were to be aroused. In the case of the swing, this was equivalent to the celebration of the Teej festivals at the arrival of monsoon season. 103

17  Hindola rāga, Krishna and Rādhā on a swing, Himachal Pradesh, c. 1790–1800, tempera and gold on paper.

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As part of court entertainments, the rāgamala circulated widely in the regions ruled by Rajput monarchs, especially in Rajasthan. But their influence was felt much further afield. The hindola rāga, as well as some of the scenes of the divine dance, are found not only in Hindustani painting. Especially from the nineteenth century onwards, European art began to add a male figure next to the young girl on the swing. The most famous painting on this subject, now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, is by the nineteenth­ century French classicist painter Pierre-Auguste Cot and is called, u­ nsurprisingly, Springtime (illus. 26).

The seat The first references we have to yoga come from the texts known as the Vedas, as well as the Upanishads. Written in Sanskrit, these books are at the basis of Hinduism, Brahmanical religions and Jainism. Before the spread of Buddhism in the sixth century, the Vedas formed the basis of the religions of the subcontinent, along with the verses of the Bhagavad Gītā. In all these texts, the word yoga has a very different meaning from the one conferred on it today, although it is not unrelated either to the contemporary semantic field or to the world of the swing. At its root, the word yoga refers to the yoke: the same yoke that was used to bind animals to chariots, to keep them on the road and prevent them from being distracted. The Katha Upanishad, one of the most beautiful philosophical texts ever written, offers us one of the first testimonies of this primitive meaning. The scene presents a child named Nachiketas in conversation with the god of death.64 In the manner of a fairy tale, the teaching is poured out in reiterative prose that shares imagery with Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, written about a hundred years later, in the fourth century bce. Sitting close to each other – for that is the literal meaning of upani­shad – the child and Death question each other. The child wishes only to die. Convinced that the sacrifices his father makes to the gods, of cows too old to give milk, can lead only to a world of sorrow and bitterness, he wants to sacrifice himself instead of the cattle. The father, angry, replies: ‘I will give you to Death.’ And so he 105

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goes to die, ‘as the very first of many and as the middlemost of many others’. As he approaches his meeting, Nachiketas thinks of all the men of the past and all those of the future. The cyclical quality of existence is thus reinforced by the reiterative character of the text, expressed in a recitative form, as in the lullaby or a mantra.65 After three days of fasting, Nachiketas is granted three wishes by Yama, the god of death. First, the little boy asks that his father’s anger be assuaged. Then he asks to be shown the sacred fire that leads to that heaven where there is no cause for fear, where neither old age nor death dwells. Finally, he wants to know the truth, to be set free from the pain of doubt. When a man dies, he says, some say he is and some say he is not. Therein lies the doubt. Yama, however, is unwilling to share his secrets and begs the boy to ask for something different. He offers him horses and gold, cattle and elephants, children and grandchildren who will live for a hundred years, vast tracts of land and long life. He offers the boy anything he could treasure in the mortal world. As in the legend of little Siddhartha Gautama, Nachiketas rejects the passing pleasures that weaken the power of life: ‘Keep your horses, your dances and your songs!’ Aware that Nachiketas despises the chain of possessions with which men bind themselves and under which they sink, Death opens to him the way to wisdom, to the bliss of a knowledge that, although it cannot be taught by reasoning, can be transmitted in such a way that as the ephemeral burns away, the eternal is attained. Yama explains that the small, indeed the smallest, can be big, the biggest even, and can occupy the vastest spaces; that it moves and does not move; that it is both far and near; that it is within and yet outside everything. Contrary to the tripartite division of the soul that Plato expounded later in Phaedrus, Death explains to the child that the atman (the human soul) is the lord of a chariot, and that the body is the chariot itself. He tells him that reason is the charioteer and the mind the reins, that the horses are the senses and their roads the objects of the senses. Even though both dialogues – Plato’s and those in the Upanishads – are governed by the need to attain truth, and although both use the same imagery, there are some important differences. Where in the Hindu world the body is like a chariot, 106

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in the Greek world, the soul is like a yoke of two horses driven by a charioteer. More importantly, in the sacred texts of Hinduism, the problem is to break the principle of individuation. The lord of the chariot is not the reason that governs the senses with the mind, but the principle of life that is without sound and form, without taste and perfume, that has neither beginning nor end: the principle that is above all reasoning and that, when it manifests itself, frees man from the clutches of Death. The lesson that Death gives to little Nachiketas is based on a phil­ osophy of renunciation, in which the movement of the chariot must pass through different stages. First, we must reject speech, then the mind and the self. Finally, we must also renounce the spirit of the universe in exchange for the spirit of peace. The true sages, who do not seek the eternal in passing things, have realized not only the communion of our being in the Supreme Being, but the presence of the Supreme Being in what we are and in what we perceive, whether it be colours or sounds, perfumes or kisses. Since the smallest is also That, the greatest, the assassin who kills is as much mistaken as the assassin­ ated who thinks he dies, for the eternal in man can neither kill nor die. That spirit, that fire that dwells in the heart, goes far when it rests and everywhere when it sleeps. What is here is also there, and what is there is also here. Therefore, he who sees the many, and not the One, wanders endlessly from death to death. To attain this supreme truth, the Upanishads mention an ascetic practice, yoga, which later became popular in Buddhism and entered the West at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The supreme path of wisdom must begin at the moment when reason holds the reins of the mind over the five senses: ‘When senses are firmly reined in’.66 Like the very swaying of the swing, yoga is also subject to oscillation: ‘Yoga comes and goes,’ says the Katha Upanishad. Far from being the result of a moment of enlightenment, supreme wisdom is obtained through an oscillating movement, an experience of the swing that enables one to understand That through This. It would serve no purpose to understand that This is That, the Supreme Spirit, without understanding that That is This: the body in which the atman dwells, the heart in which the flame of truth is hidden. Mystical intuition is 107

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attained only through a ritualized exercise in which reason – beginning by stilling the senses and understanding its own breaths and inspirations as the expression of the fiery spirit within – eventually accepts that the wind, although one, takes many forms in all things in which it lives, or that fire, although one, also merges with that which burns. At the foot of a large plane tree that grew on the banks of the River Ilissus, near a small stream that the progressive expansion of Athens has condemned to canalization and burial, Socrates and Phaedrus also discuss the immortality of the soul, whether to reciprocate love and repent, or to act in accordance with one’s own benefit, and not do so. As in the text of the Upanishad, which most probably served as his source of inspiration, Plato favours the use of images from the world of riding, in relation not only to his vision of the soul, which he would later develop in the Republic, but to the uses of rhet­oric. In the context of a theory of transmigration, Plato argues through Socrates that the soul behaves, from the outset, like a cha­ riot. The charioteer who struggles to drive the two horses that pull the chariot, as well as these two horses – the one a lover of glory and a follower of truth, the other a fiery-blooded friend of excess – should not make us forget the material structure in which this struggle takes place. The soul, the source of all life, is like a yoke: a ζεῦγος (zeugos), a winged instrument that seeks the balance between the two beasts it harnesses, neither being able to free itself from the other. Subject to their mutual dependence, both horses behave like an unwieldy chariot. The word Plato uses to describe this yoke is the same word that Herodotus used to describe a pair of inseparable things and which Theophrastus would later employ to refer to the single mouthpiece of a double flute.67 As far as the passions of the soul are concerned, the noble and the ignoble are forced to coexist as if they are conjoined twins. Like in the case of the Upanishad, the source of subjection is also the source of salvation. The practice of the yoke, or yoga, which is the word by which this exercise of free submission is known in the West today, allows the interruption of the cycle of death and life in the teachings of the Vedic tradition, and of the pain of appearance, in Greek philosophy. 108

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First, and in contrast to those who gallop by words, Socrates advocates a philosophy of oscillation that, starting from a primordial impulse – none other than love – leads to either the satisfaction of pleasure or the attainment of good. This tension between the heaviness of the body and the lightness of the soul configures a celestial psychology in which the horizon, far from remaining stable, moves alternately up and down. The soul – which sometimes sinks and sometimes rises without at any time being able to reach the plain of truth (rather, only remembering it) – resembles a horse-drawn carriage not only because of its internal organization but as a result of its oscillating movement. The figuration of its instability matters much more than the catalogue of its parts, at least insofar as these serve only to explain the unsteady form of its swinging movements. Second, the allegory refers to two elements of a psychological nature that arise as a result of the to-ing and fro-ing between the one who drives the chariot with difficulty and the horses that are inclined towards different paths. The oscillation not only occurs in its spatial dimension but affects the circumstances of the experience itself, which moves between two extreme forms: disturbance and enthusiasm. In both cases, the impulse that moves the chariot of the soul leads to different forms of madness. Plato tells us that whoever has been initiated into the ceremonies of oscillation and makes proper use of such reminders will find themselves not only removed from human affairs but turned towards the divine and branded as disturbed. Finally, the oscillating chariot also produces an alteration in the ritualized elements of memory. The ceremonial swaying occurs to remember, of course, but also to forget. The immortality of the soul depends not on its particular constitution, avoiding any form of corporeality, but on the very circumstance of its oscillating movement, for ‘that which always moves is immortal.’68

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A

lmost everything about the history of the swing in China is false, starting with the word, qiūqiān (秋千, in simplified Chinese characters), which names the device. While the last of the characters, qiān, 千, means ‘thousand’, the initial ideogram, 秋, refers to autumn. The qiū was (and is) the time of ripe grain, of harvest. The qiūqiān, therefore, could literally mean ‘a thousand autumns’, the eternity of what always returns, the long life that the first emperor of China so vehemently desired and which has always been the basis of this country’s dream of immortality. The original word is said to have been not qiūqiān, but qiānqiū, 千秋. Since the expression ‘eternity’ was outlawed during the Han dynasty, the swing was able to circumvent the taboo by reversing its terms, so that the qiānqiū became the qiūqiān.1 But this is not entirely true either.

The story The history of the swing in China has two sources of interpretation, both incomplete and somewhat corrupt.2 The first comes from a now lost text, the Guyin yishu tu (古今藝術圖; Ancient and Modern Arts), written between the third and fifth centuries ce. It explained (apparently) how swinging was an activity practised in the northern regions with the aim of acquiring bodily lightness and agility. These northern peoples, known as Bei Rong, inhabited the banks of the Luan River in present-day Hebei Province, not far from Beijing. They may have been peoples of Iranian origin, but in any case, they 110

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were attacked and subdued by Qi Huan Gong, Duke Huan of the Qi dynasty, in 664 bce. The swing’s arrival in China would then have taken place in what Westerners call the Bronze Age and what early Chinese historians named, according to a world view much more anchored in the seasonal cycle, the Spring and Autumn period. This era, from 722 to 481 bce, coincides with the formation of the phil­ osophy of the learned, especially the system of the master Kongzi, originally Qiu (‘autumn’), whose name was later Latinized by Jesuit missionaries as Confucius. The Records of the Grand Historian, the Shĭjì, a text by Sima Qian completed around the first century bce and one of the primary sources for the history of ancient (pre-Han) China, does indeed give an account of Duke Huan’s incursion into the northern lands, although it does not mention that his officers brought any swings with them.3 Perhaps for the great Chinese historian, castrated at the emperor’s behest for disputing his authority, memory was much more concerned with ascribing moral values to actions considered just, than with compiling data that might serve to enhance the traditions of the present. Over the centuries, the Guyin yishu tu was repeatedly cited as evidence of the barbarian origins of the swing. As might be expected, successive references introduced variations and additions. These new sources underlined the simultaneous use of the swing and the celebration of the Cold Food Festival, an occasion for the veneration of ancestors, which is still hugely popular in China today and without which we would not be able to enjoy some of its culinary wonders. Since the Cold Food Festival merged with the Qingming (Spring) festival from the sixth century onwards, the swing also became associated, even visually, with this latter celebration. As with the classical Greek anthesterias, we do not know the role the swing played in these celebrations. In the thirteenth-century book known as Suishi guangji (Extensive Records of the Yearly Festivals), we read: The swing, used on Cold Food days, was originally a sport of the Jung people in the mountains of the northern region, who used it to gain bodily lightness and agility. The following generations took it over and every day during the Cold Food days 111

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they have fun with this game. Later on, the young Chinese girls learned it. They stretched coloured ropes from a tree and called it qiūqiān, swing.4 The earliest reference we have to the Cold Food Festival is in Huan Tan’s first-century treatise Xinlun (New Theory). This philoso­pher and politician describes how, in what is now Shanxi Province in the northeast of the country, there was a custom of not eating anything cooked for five days. Huan informs us that they even maintained this prohibition in case of severe illness, and that the tradition memor­ ializes the seventh-century bce aristocrat Jie Zhitui.5 It was said that in the period leading up to 635 bce, Jìn Wén Gōng, Duke Wen of Jin, suffered nineteen years of exile in the company of his advisor Jie and other followers. We know this story from the Zuo Zhuan, the first narrative chronicle of Chinese history, which was written in the fifth century bce in the form of commentaries on the Chunqiu, or Spring and Autumn Annals.6 Supposedly, one day, when Duke Wen was starving and suffering from heatstroke, Jie offered him a meat stew. When asked where he had been able to obtain the ingredients for the stew, the loyal servant showed the duke that he had used a piece of his own flesh. Once Duke Wen was restored to the throne, the faithful Jie renounced all rewards and, far from pretending to distinguish himself by his honours, wished to begin a life of righteous retirement with his mother in the forests of Mount Mian. In order to bring him out of his hermitic life, and in one of the most ungrateful gestures ever known, Duke Wen set the forest on fire so that mother and son were burned to death. By way of atonement, he then established that once a year, for five days, it would be forbidden to set any kind of fire. He also founded the town of Jiexiu ( Jie’s Rest) in Jie’s honour, from where tourist visits to the mountain are organized today. In the middle of the Han dynasty (202 bce–220 ce), at a time roughly coinciding with the arrival of Christianity, Jie began to be regarded as a deity, and by the second century ce the ban on eating anything cooked had been extended from five days to a full month.7 The history of the swing in China therefore begins with two initially unconnected stories, both to some extent legendary and both, 112

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we must add, precisely dated. Duke Huan’s invasion of the northern lands in 664 bce and Jie’s death in 634 bce are related. In the first case, we can trace some of the claims of a lost text in official documents and histories that only partly confirm the legend but say nothing about the swing. In the second, we have an inconclusive history in which the swing does not appear either, although the origins of the festival in which the ritual swinging took place are explained, at least from the turn of the first millennium onwards. What seems clear is that during the four hundred years that the Han dynasty reigned in China, the swing was linked to the Cold Food Festival. At the same time as Confucianism began to penetrate the state structure, Emperor Wudi, who ruled the empire in 141–87 bce, also had time to introduce the swing as a medical and festive instrument. Apparently, wishing to have a life that would last ‘a thousand autumns’, this emperor, a contemporary of the Roman Republic, came to associate the word with an instrument that, in a real or symbolic way, could lengthen existence. Since most games in China have military origins, he also stipulated that it should be used during the spring. In this he followed the first-century bce Book of Rites, the Lĭjì, one of the five books that make up the Confucian canon, according to which ‘while the military arts were to be practised in spring and summer, the ­literary arts were to be practised in autumn and winter.’8 It is difficult to understand how the swing went from its origins as a physical exercise practised by men and desired by monarchs, to being considered an essentially feminine activity. The twentieth­ century sinologist Berthold Laufer argued that, unlike in Greece or Central Asia, the swing in China was not related to a purification ritual.9 And he was right. Yet, like many other scholars who became interested in the swing in the first decades of the twentieth century, he overlooked its feminine character. Both in China and in neighbouring Korea, the swing always maintained this tension between its sporting or military uses, essentially related to men, and the game with which women distracted themselves during the Cold Food Festival.10 As in the paradisiacal Andaman Islands in Southeast Asia, or in the Baltic states as well as Nordic countries such as Norway, Sweden and above all Finland, in China, the swing has been linked to the world 113

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of acrobatics, partly as a predecessor of the trapeze. The regulations in the Book of Rites on education, those related to the ‘six arts’ – rituals and music for religious services, archery and horsemanship for military office, writing and arithmetic for public service – concerned only males of the wealthier classes. From the point of view of sustaining social and family order, Confucianism saw no need to teach girls anything that might divert them from their position of subservience to fathers, brothers, sons and husbands. Nor, for the same reason, did women participate in games or sports relating to education or prepar­ation for public service.11 On the contrary, the Confucian norm required that boys and girls remain (at least in principle) in separate rooms and realms from the age of seven. The identification of the swing with femininity came much later. Around the year 750, some 1,300 years after the first reference to the swing, the sources describing the Cold Food Festival comment on how the officials’ daughters, either sitting or standing on the rope, pushed themselves back and forth on a swing. One of the historical sources of the period, the collection of texts known as Forgotten Events of the Kaiyuan and Tianbao Reigns (Kaiyuan Tianbao yishi), notes that during the Cold Food Festival swings were built in the palace so that the ladies of the court had the opportunity for enjoyment and diversion.12 It was in fact during the Tang dynasty (618–907 ce) that the swing became known as a ‘female pastime’.13 The eighth-century emperor Xuanzong, more generally known as ‘Illustrious August’, dubbed it the ‘semi-immortal game’, an expression adopted by the educated and other people of the capital.14 Some of the most important cultural events in Chinese history took place during his reign. In the long-time capital of the empire, the city of Chang’an (now Xi’an), poetry and painting, decorative arts and theatre flourished. Buddhism also penetrated the territory, threatening the Confucian hierarchy. Devoted to his famous mistress Yang Guifei, who is still revered as one of China’s all-time great beauties, Xuanzong was also respon­ sible for forcing hundreds of women into the palace to serve, in one way or another, as court entertainers.15 He called them ‘half­-faeries’ or ‘semi-immortals’ when they got on the swing. In keeping with the Taoist belief that, through various ascetic practices, eight souls 114

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had attained immortality and ascended to the heavens, the emperor seemed to imagine that the swing was able to imitate that upward movement – at least until its return to earth (see illus. 32 and 34). Some of the most famous poets of the Tang dynasty mention the swing explicitly in their texts, most often in the context of the Qingming Festival. The eighth-century poet and historian Du Fu (sometimes written Tu Fu) echoed an activity that, in his opinion, was already everywhere.16 The much more famous Bai Juyi in the ninth century also refers frequently to the swing, always linking its use to female reveries. In the poetry of Han Wo a little later, the sensuality of oscillation appears repeatedly, often associated to a certain sexual advance: Getting tired from playing on the swing, She untied her silk shirt; pointing at the wine, she asked for a cup; Seeing the guest enter, she left in a smile; rubbing a plum in her hand, she beamed by the central door.17 The swing was fully established in the social life of the Song dynasty (960–1279).18 There is evidence of its use in literature, of course, but also in painting in various forms. So-called theatrical sweets were even made in its shape.19 The eleventh-century poet and cook Su Shi, who has gone down in history for having given his name, or rather his nickname, to the recipe for Dongpo pork (a dish of braised pork), wrote a poem about the swing in which most of its symbolic elements that later appear in the Cult of Qing (love) – a social movement of the late Ming period (seventeenth century) that vindicated individual sentiments and passions in opposition to social rules and communitarian norms – were already present. ‘Again the feast of cold delicacies and there are swings everywhere,’ wrote Li Qingzhao, the great poetess of the Song dynasty.20 Inspired much more by Taoism than by the iron doctrines of neo­ Confucianism, this most renowned of all Chinese poets considers that human beings are limited by their partial understanding of the 115

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world. For just as the mushroom that lives for only one morning does not know the cycle of the moon, so the cicada that sings in the summer does not know about eternity. Contrary to the exhortation of the Platonic Allegory of the Cave, the solution to our uncer­tainties does not lie in leaving the cave so that we are blinded by the sun of truth, but in going back and forth from one to the other. It will not be enough to leave one’s own perspective. We will have to find a way to change the rules that govern identities. Like the Kun fish that transforms into the Peng bird, the true sage is not the one who walks proudly in the sky of truth, but the one who humbly understands that the same tears that fall from the eyes ascend from the heart. For this faithful representative of the lyrical style known as cí, which consists of the deliberate restriction of emotions, the swing presents itself as a borderline instrument. In the world of the orchid and the jade, between chrysanthemums, peonies and flying geese, the the instrument allows the opening of intermediate spaces: Stepping down from the swing Languidly she smooths her soft, slender hands Her flimsy dress wet with light perspiration A slim flower trembling with heavy dew Spying a stranger, she walks hastily away in shyness: Her feet in bare socks, Her gold hairpin fallen Then she stops to lean against a gate, And looking back Makes as if sniffing a green plum.21 The harsh rules of Chinese metrics do not restrict but rather favour the song as an ode to the love (for her husband) that moved Li all her life and that runs like a river through the portion of her work that has come down to us: from passion to solitude, from the smell of spring to the withered leaves of autumn, from the lightness of flight to the swing moistened by the fine rain of twilight.

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Geography Human emotions are also shared by things.22 When asked, ‘What do you feel? the answer may be ‘That the sky is grey’, since sadness, far from being a merely subjective quality, is an element of the ­natural ­aesthetics of which we are all a part. It is not, therefore, that the weather causes us grief, but that emotions have a spatial dimension that permeates everything.23 In the always surprising Pillow Book, written by the Japanese author Sei Shōnagon at the end of the first millennium, emotional states are associated with a world flooded by subjectivity. She finds the dog howling in the daytime as depressing as a plum-­coloured dress, and the old man warming his hands over a brazier as hateful as speaking ill of others. Shōnagon’s emotions are not either on the outside or the inside of one’s consciousness, but in both places at the same time. Together, they form a landscape that colours the individual’s passions and feelings. The same happens in the aesthetic theory of rasa (as we saw in the previous chapter), where the same palate that serves to taste the food also confers flavour to the dish. In this reciprocal intertwining of the physical space and the emotional state, the location of the swing is as important as the length of its use. In China, the feminization and confinement of the swing went hand in hand. For just as swinging could take place only at a certain time, so a woman could not swing in just any location. Today it may seem strange that such a primal activity should be so heavily regulated. And yet play, like ritual, has its rules; like any other game, it had to take place at the right time and in the right place. To ensure privacy, the garden in which the swing was installed was surrounded by a wall, fence or other enclosure. In the manner of the hortus conclusus (walled garden) of European religious imagery, the swing stood in a partially enclosed space in which women and flowers were cultivated at the same time – the two, not by chance, often even sharing the same name. Cultural historians and sociologists have reflected on the role of architecture in the economy of emotions. They have also sought to clarify the relationship of emotional states to environment or space, 117

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be it a café, a city or a nation.24 For the most part, the efforts of social scientists have been aimed at highlighting the way in which the conditions of a shop influence our consumerist impulses, for example, or how and why migrants might feel better as soon as they cross the border back to their country of origin. But along with the emotional dimension of space, we should also investigate the spatial dimension of emotions: the ways in which the landscapes of the heart and those of the world coincide in an essential way. Here we will distinguish three ways of experiencing space: personal, communal and social. By the last, I mean that which can occur only through information provided by experts, using techniques that often require the use of sophisticated scientific instruments. The relationship that most of us have with our city or country depends on this type of data. We may feel British and modern, but it is clear that we have no direct experience of Britain or Modernity. We may know we are inhabitants of a city of several million people, but obviously we cannot know them all. In spite of these limitations, the tourist who has spent two days in Beijing is able to say without blushing that she has been in China, and the citizen who has never left his village claims to love his country. Communal experience is also mediated, but it differs from social experience in that our passions, feelings and affections are informed by our relatives, friends and acquaintances. Communal experience is the experience of those who learn about war from their grandparents or who practise the religion they have inherited from their relatives. Unlike the experience I have called social, communal experience comes from people who are guided by memory (rather than by history) or by opinion (rather than by information provided, for example, by demography). In contrast to these two forms of mediated experience, and similar to what performativity theorists call ‘archival memory’ or ‘inscription practices’, the personal experience of space seems to be much more basic. ‘How dare you talk to me about London when you’ve never been there!’ protests the eyewitness, who in Greek was, etymologic­ ally, a martyr. This experience is based on the ability to bear witness, often through the testimony of our own body. ‘I don’t need anyone!’ we exclaim. ‘Leave me alone!’ we cry, as if that were even possible. 118

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Even if the personal experience seems to precede communal and social experiences, it cannot come about without the help of the other two. Our most intimate way of interpreting the world is forged through education and habit, so that when the time comes to enjoy, say, Paris, we already carry all the emotional baggage of the social and communal experiences that have preceded us. We love our partners with borrowed phrases, we hate them with ancestral expressions, and we gesticulate in unknowing imitation of the hands of many who are no longer with us. Just as we look at Venice with the palette of Giovanni Bellini and experience the sublimity of the Alps through the poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, so we confront the exotic through others’ judgements, just as we perceive the strange by seeking the approval of the idols of our own tribe. The experience of oscillation may be personal, but it is also social and communal. In the case at hand – the history of China between the Song and Qing dynasties (from the tenth to the nineteenth century ce) – the swing’s location is criss-crossed by this dense network of spatial experiences. The inner garden where the women swing, those whom Emperor Xuanzong called ‘semi-immortal’, is surrounded by an architectural structure that is at once physical, moral and political. The wall operates as a boundary that separates, from a personal point of view, inside from outside; from a communal point of view, men from women; and from a social point of view, play from ritual. There is no point in showing the garden or the wall if we are not able to look at that strange trinity that forms the experience of space: that of one, that of a few, that of all. As in the famous games invented by gestalt psychology, where we are asked to see alternatively the young girl or the witch, the duck or the rabbit, even though both images are composed with the same strokes, the study of emotional experience always requires training the gaze to be able to see three superimposed figures. This type of trinocular vision, typical of arthropods and reptiles, is most suitable for the historian. In contrast to the monocular vision of the martyr and the binocular vision of the friend, historians of emotions do not orientate themselves in the emotional landscape by means of a subjective feeling, as Kant intended, but with a third eye in their forehead. 119

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There is perhaps no better way to understand this idea than to take some of the great icons of Chinese history and look at them through trinocular lenses. The handscroll known as Along the River during the Qingming Festival, by the twelfth-century artist Zhang Zeduan, constitutes an exceptional document for the understanding of daily life in the capital of the empire during the Song dynasty (at least in principle). Both its title and the place it depicts have been called into question, which is like saying that Goya’s painting of the Third of May shootings neither depicts Madrid nor is about shootings.25 The historian Valerie Hansen of Yale University has argued that this famous panorama represents not the capital of the empire but an idealized city, free of moral conflict and physical defects. To reach this conclusion, she not only compared the image of the handscroll with the archaeological remains of the Song capital, present-day Kaifeng, but used the evidence provided by those things and people that should be present in the image but are not. If the city were real, she reasoned, there would be dead or crippled people, but there are not. Nor is there any trace of festivity. There are no swings, and, ­conspicuously, there are hardly any women. This famous hand scroll, which has been compared to some of the most emblematic works of European art (it has even been called the ‘Chinese Mona Lisa’), is one of China’s great icons. It was intended to unroll progressively from right to left, revealing a panoramic view, in the same way that a fixed-plane camera would make what filmmakers call a travelling shot. Little by little, an unfathomable landscape unfolds before the eyes, as in a graphic novel. In this more than 5-metre-long (16 ft) work, Zhang presents personal and collective life. Utopian or not, the scroll represents a scene that has been retold repeatedly over the subsequent centuries. In contrast to the original, which is now in the National Museum in Beijing, later versions introduced elements of unpleasant reality, which is another way of saying that the landscape was gradually refined. In the Ming dynasty copy by Qiu Ying, as well as in the copy from 1736 by court painters – known as the ‘Qing court version’ – the swing, finally present, appears enclosed in the inner garden, between walls.26 This last scroll, which is more than 11 metres (36 ft) 120

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long and 35 centimetres (just over 1 ft) wide, depicts more than 4,000 people. However, we are interested only in those in the immediate vicinity of a garden in which a dozen women are swinging. The passing of a chariot pulled by more than twenty horses and dragging a large stone causes many onlookers to pause before this strange procession. Whereas Zhang’s original had focused on the passage of a large boat along the river, these later painters concentrate on the overland transport of this huge stone. In both cases, passers-by stop and comment. On both sides of the street are shops of all kinds: coopers, shoemakers and potters share space with food shops where, then as now, a few lacquered ducks hang. Among the groups of people are beggars and clerks, children, and ladies with parasols. At the gates of the big house, a group seems to be listening to the teachings of a philosopher. Halfway along, almost in the middle of the road, a man points to a young woman swinging on the other side of the wall. At least two other members of the group of philosophers also raise their heads to contemplate her flight, indifferent both to the philosopher’s ­preaching and to the progress of the stone. The illustrations of women swinging in imperial China can be understood perfectly well as a rupture of interior space, like someone spying through a keyhole.27 This image holds true, but with one important difference: in this case the one being spied on knows it and encourages it, like an exhibitionist. By its transgressive character, the swing can cross physical spaces and moral boundaries. Its upward movement makes it possible to circumvent the physical wall, of course, but also the moral barrier and the symbolic distance. Armed with our trinocular glasses, we can not only look alternately at both sides of the fence but descend, in a matter of seconds, from a national icon to a crossing of gazes. In the manner of a tracking shot – that movement of the camera that progressively approaches a detail – we access individual experiences from the heights of the utopian city. To understand the former, the emotional experience of the here and now, we must, of course, start from the rules of the latter. So, let us start with the most general. From a social point of view, it was women who dragged the swing into the walled garden. Or rather, not women as such, but the social regulations related to their 121

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behaviour. Lock up the woman, lock up the swing. It is not that there are no women in Zhang’s original scroll; it is simply that we cannot see them. They are there, hidden, inside the dwellings. ‘From the age of ten, a girl does not go out of the house, which means that she stays indoors,’ wrote the eleventh-century scholar Sima Guang.28 Famous, above all, for his work as a historian, this Sima (not to be confused with Sima Qian) has also gone down in history for his neo-Confucian precepts. In the context of the rules regulating their conduct, women were called to occupy a place of seclusion: ‘Men do not talk about what is inside; women do not talk about what is outside,’ read the chapter on interior rules in the Book of Rites.29 ‘Women do not look through the walls or slip outside the enclosure. If they go out, they must cover their faces and hide their forms,’ we read in the Nü Sishu, the collection of four Confucian-inspired books on female education (written, incidentally, by women).30 The same form of segregation also took place in the sphere of what I have called here ‘communal experience’. The historian Patricia Buckley Ebrey acknowledges some legislative improvements relating to the economic and social position of women, especially concerning dowries, partly with the idea of arranging marriages with good candidates for official examinations, but these measures did not prevent the feminine principle of things, the yin, being clearly subjected to the yang in the neo-Confucian doctrine that took hold in Song China. Some of the routines that most surprised European travellers about the world of women come from this period. The custom of binding the feet of young Chinese women, for example, set a canon of beauty that clearly depended on the restriction of physical mobility. The deliberate malformation of the foot reinforced the idea of a woman with a fragile body and a melancholic attitude, who could barely walk with short, silent steps and who was cultivated like a garden flower. In a complementary manner, Sima Guang also advocated the veiling of women, a custom that, although it did not become widespread, was associated with other restrictive norms, such as the obligation that they should go out into the street only in a palanquin with curtains. One of the few women visible in Zhang’s handscroll is portrayed in such a way. 122

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18  Qing Court Painters, detail of Along the River during the Qingming Festival, 1736, handscroll, ink and colour on silk.

These ideas of physical and emotional control applied equally to morals and manners. Since social harmony depended on individual virtue, women found themselves ensconced in an iron patrilineal, patrilocal and patriarchal system. A virtuous woman married not only a man but her husband’s family, her husband’s space and her husband’s possessions, including his other wives and concubines, with whom she was to live without jealousy or reproach.31 Our ideas of these social forms of domination must be supplemented by other sources. The techniques used to inscribe male control over women’s bodies have very short legs when explained with Western monofocal glasses. The historians (most of whom are women) who have sensed in the crude image of Chinese women (regardless of social status, age or family situation) a neo-colonial aftertaste, a romanticized and abusive idea that disregards empirical research in favour of a political slogan, are absolutely right. As in the days when anthropology consisted of the study of ‘primitive’ peoples, feminist sinology has too often been marked by the instrumental use of the exotic, which has served to denounce Western precepts rather 123

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than to understand Eastern behaviour. At the same time, from the fact that the social norm is not only inscribed but incorporated or made flesh in the experience of life, we should not overlook the fact that there are forms of improvisation that can circumvent it.32

Love Swaying incites courtship. Movie lovers will be familiar with the homage the filmmaker Jean Renoir paid to his father in Partie de campagne, a forty-minute film based on the short story by Maupassant (discussed in Chapter One). The movement of young Henriette attracts the attention of the children, priests and many other onlookers. The camera triangulates between the girl’s face, the observer’s gaze and the flight of her petticoat. The same scene comes up in stories and films conceived and shot on the other side of the world.33 In one of the most popular Korean fairy tales of all time, ‘The Story of C ­ hun-hyang’, Yi Mong-ryong also falls in love with the protagonist the day he sees her on a swing.34 The story has been made into several films, including the version shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000, directed by Im Kwon-taek. Examples also abound in Chinese literature. In the thirty-chapter novel Later Dream of the Red Chamber (Hou honglou meng) of 1796, the use of the swing is related to the self-exhibition of those who are inside and the curiosity of those who are outside the garden walls. Since the latter can see the young girls swinging inside, the family’s maids decide that it would be better to call in the town’s actresses and other women of dubious reputation.35 The idea was not new. In a story by the seventeenth-century Chinese writer Ling Mengchu, love comes naturally as Baizhu, the protagonist, spies on the young women swinging in the Apricot Garden.36 In all cases, the swing operates as a liminal machine, capable of satisfying the imagination of those on either side of the fence. Historians of love have often pointed out that the opposition between love and desire is not a global characteristic but specifically Western way of conceptualizing true love, romantic love, which has been understood (at least since the twelfth century) as the governance of sexual appetites. Despite the criticism it receives today, romantic love in the West is still far removed from carnal desire. ¿Por qué lo 124

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llaman amor cuando quieren decir sexo? (Why Do They Call It Love When They Mean Sex?) is the title of a Spanish film from the 1990s. Here, as in other cases, the problem arises in understanding not only the locally situated forms of the passions but also their common elements. It may well be that the Western criminalization of desire is the result of Gregorian ideology, popularized and transmitted by the ideal of courtly love, but it will nevertheless be necessary to explain the transcultural character of this longing for association that we call ‘love’. The global history of this passion maintains some common features that cannot be explained in biological (adaptive or functional) terms. One of them, and not the least, is the way in which love has functioned as a transgressive emotion. There is no genuine love story, in the East or in the West, that is not established around forbidden love between unequals. Lovers may be mismatched by profession or class, by status, gender or fortune, but the same motif occurs time and again, from the legends of Majnun and Layla to Romeo and Juliet, or from Abelard and Héloïse to the tales collected in the great compendium of love stories known in China as the Qingshi, which we shall come to shortly. In all cases, love transgresses the boundaries of the licit. ‘Love equals,’ wrote Madame de Staël, and she was right. It equalizes the improperly matched, the classless, the dissimilar, the different; it makes the impossible possible; it opens up a horizon of expectations that questions the community norm; it uses the same ritual forms that govern social conduct to question them, transforming private sentiments into public laws. In love, as in music, one improvises. Far from seeing the world as dictated by social regulations, lovers do not (entirely) conform to accepted patterns of behaviour, nor are they (always) governed by socially sanctioned expectations. They often refuse to sleep in used beds. They do not want to and cannot see the world through the eyes of others, whether close relatives or unknown, distant figures. On the contrary, they claim their own personal experi­ence as the new norm on which the social order must be built. The force that springs from within them makes them contentious, dis­obedient, troubled, absent, inscrutable, lost, obsessed or undisciplined. It is therefore not difficult to attribute to them an 125

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eccentric or marginal character. The lover is an infantile and immature madman, a sick and suicidal dreamer, an alienated artist and an utter fool. The swing facilitates courtship as an element of transgression. Literature and the visual arts have widely recorded its amatory uses, and there is no shortage of examples. As in France and Korea, many local or national festivities around the world include some form of incitement to love through swinging. The poet Li Shanfu’s expression ‘The swing carries young women over the wall’ extends far beyond China.37 In Turkmenistan, for example, Kurban Bayram, a version of the Muslim festival of sacrifice, is celebrated by the installation and use of swings. Publicity for the festivities often includes a comical figure of a goat – the sacrificial animal – on top of one. In this case, as in many others in Central Asia, the device may be part of a religious festival, but its use mainly affects young girls, who dress up and swing.38 In Ribnovo, a small town in southern Bulgaria described for the first time by Ottoman chroniclers and nowadays relatively well known for the particular way in which brides wear make-up on their wedding day, young Muslim girls celebrate Gergiovden, a spring festival related to St George, by using swings.39 In the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Iran and Turkey, the celebration of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, would be unthinkable without swings. Similarly, on Midsummer’s Eve swinging takes centre stage among Estonians. Young girls in particular swing all night long. The name by which the summer solstice was celebrated before the Christianization of the Baltic, Ligho Day, may be derived from the Estonian verb ligot, ‘to swing’. As an instrument of courtship, the swing questions the political order. That is why its use has been restricted and why it is still regarded with suspicion in many parts of the world. Like the bird swinging inside the cage, not actually flying but perhaps feeling as though it were, the oscillatory movement of the swing awakens a projective imagination that political power may perceive as a threat. Prudish social convention may lock feelings in the iron cell of moral scrutiny, but lovers will seek each other in the shadows of a garden or among the trees of a forest. There is no doubt that the interweaving of love 126

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is made up of cultural values, moral conventions and ritual processes. As with any other emotional experience, lovers see the world – their world – through the lenses provided by the shared values in which they have been educated. They cannot help it. Thus they learn to discern the times and spaces, the gestures, words and conventions of their sentimental lives. Social rules will help them to construct their feelings, even their desires, through archetypes of beauty; they will seek to clarify their emotions in the songs they know or in the poems they have learned, whether romances or boleros, novels or films. To understand their way of life, they will have to look simultaneously at the sincerity of their hearts (which they do not doubt), the dramat­ ization of their gestures (which they can fake), and their loyalty to the rule that governs their behaviour (which they can break). Like any other emotional experience, love also has a triple intimate, communal and social dimension, where the first, which comes from the sincerity of the heart, is built with the elements provided by the other two. But there is an essential nuance. For although the collective experience on which our desires are based points us towards acceptable ways of loving, it does not determine to whom we should direct our feelings. In fact, love exhibits its greatest power where it collides with authority. Genuine love stories do not end well (when they do end well) because the lovers marry, but because the sincerity of their hearts turns their feelings into law. The strength of love depends on these two complementary circumstances. First, love takes the form of a story. Of all emotions, it is perhaps the most genuinely historical. Second, and more importantly for the topic at hand, love reverses (sometimes even perverts) the order of acculturation, so that it is not the community that governs lovers’ behaviour, but, on the contrary, it is their subjectivity that strenuously seeks collective ­sanction, respect and acceptance. In China, as in the rest of the world, lovers seek each other at the frontiers of the lawful.40 Here, too, love slips through the garden fence and gaps in the wall. The normative system conditions but does not determine experience. The swinging ritual of love takes place in a specific space and time, in which it is possible to play with physical, moral and symbolic disorientation, in which the anguish of indeterminacy 127

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is permitted and the norm is as suspended as the body, subject to the sway of its own impulse. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China, the writer Feng Menglong was ready to replace a religion based on ritual with one based on love. His History of Love (Qingshi; 1620–30) was a great compendium of stories, true or not, that aspired to replace neo-Confucian loyalty with sincerity of heart: ‘A Confucian only knows that reason subdues passion, but he does not know that passion sustains reason.’41 The more than 850 stories of the Qingshi are categorized into 24 sections, further divided into subsections that, taken together, examine the sentimental relationship from an enormous variety of viewpoints. The protagonists of the various stories come from all social strata. They may be alive or dead or take on human or animal forms. In the hundreds of stories contained in this encyclopaedia, love appears in dreams, between species, between people not only of different status but of different and same sexes. Relationships can be adulterous or unrequited; they can be known or secret, fecund or infertile, consensual or violent, sweet or bitter. The variety has an inflection point, however: the ability to question the communal norm, to challenge the (Confucian) logic of conduct. The swing – the very object that allows us to move between physical, moral and social spaces – is both an emotional refuge and an instrument of transgression. Some thirty years before Feng wrote his History of Love, the author of The Peony Pavilion (1598), Tang Xianzu, explained that Du Liniang spent her idle moments ‘painting one day a “garden scene with swing”’.42 For the protagonist of this dramatic work, one of the most beautiful in world literature, the swing is the great instrument of reverie, the machine that allows us to imagine, even without words or concepts, a future of hope. We do not know where love comes from, says the author in his preface, but we do know that the living can die of love and that the dead are reborn for love. The force of this passion can break all social norms and material conditions. It is in the Garden of the Moon, in The Peony Pavilion, that the young Liniang dreams that her beloved laid her on the ground and, as a mist of jade dust rose, took her, spreading flowers over her skirt, until they were both lying on the grass, fearful that the sky would 128

19  Jens Juel, The Dancing Glade at Sorgenfri, North of Copenhagen, 1800, oil on canvas.

20  Jens Juel, The Dancing Glade at Sorgenfri, North of Copenhagen, detail.

21  Hubert Robert, The Swing, 1781–2, oil on canvas.

22  Francisco de Goya, The Swing, 1779, oil on canvas.

23  Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing, c. 1775–80, oil on canvas.

24 Vilhelm Hammershøi, Open Doors, 1905, oil on canvas.

25  John George Brown, Give Me a Swing?, 1882, oil on canvas.

26  Pierre-Auguste Cot, Springtime, 1873, oil on canvas.

27  Attic jug (chous) decorated with red figures attributed to the Meidias Painter, c. 420–410 bce, terracotta.

29  Doric frieze fragment with a woman on a swing in a metope, Altalena Tomb, Cyrene (Libya), c. 225–175 bce, limestone.

28  Two-handled Attic amphora featuring a woman on a swing, Vulci (Lazio), attributed to the Swing Painter, c. 525–520 bce, ceramic.

30  Women celebrating the Teej festival in Chandigarh, 2009.

31  Maharaja Abhai Singh of Marwar gazes at a group of women swinging during the Teej festival, c. 1740, tempera and gold on paper.

32  Jiao Bingzhen, L ­ iuyuan Swing, from the album ­‘Paintings of Ladies’, 1692–1722, ink and colour on silk.

33  Woman on a swing, Rajasthan, 1680–1700, opaque watercolour on paper in the style of Manohar of Mewar. .

34  Women swinging in the shade of the willow tree in March, part of an album titled Ladies’ Seasonal Activities of Twelve Months (Yueman Qingyou), 18th century, based on drawings by Chen Mei, ivory, mother-of-pearl and semi-precious stones.

35  William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Nymphaeum, 1878, oil on canvas.

36  Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, The Russian Cradle, c. 1764–5, oil on canvas.

37  Simone Martini, ‘Child falling out of his cradle’, also known as the Paganelli Miracle, detail from the Blessed Agostino Novello altarpiece, c. 1324, tempera on wood.

38  Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Les hasards heureux de l’escarpolette (The Swing), c. 1767–8, oil on canvas.

39  Norbert Grund, Lady on a Swing – Gallant Scene in the Park i, c. 1760, oil on limewood.

40  Jean-Antoine Watteau, The Shepherds, c. 1717, oil on canvas.

41  Scene with a swing, Qing dynasty, part of a set of 29 erotic paintings, 18th–19th century.

42  Couple making love on a swing, Rajasthan, c. 1690, painting on paper.

43  Thomas Rowlandson, The Swing, mid-1810s, coloured etching and aquatint.

44  Detail of fresco in the Hall of Games, Castello Estense, Ferrara, by Sebastiano Filippi (known as Bastianino), Ludovico Settevecchi and Leonardo da Brescia, after a design by Pirro Ligorio, c. 1573.

45  Lilly Martin Spencer, The Artist and Her Family on a Fourth of July Picnic, c. 1864, oil on canvas.

46  Whistle figurine of a young woman on a swing, probably Totonac, 300–900 ce, clay.

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see them. The presence of the swing in this garden of flowers that wither before they bloom allows communion between inhabitants of different worlds: those of the inside and those of the outside, but also the awake and the dreamers, the living and the dead. Liniang, who has died of love, can still return to the world of the living, if only to grieve for the state of the objects that died with her. There she will encounter the sentences she did not pronounce, the letters she did not finish, and a motionless swing.43 On the inside of the wall remains an empty and inert swing as the ultimate expression of unfulfilled desire and lost childhood. In his study of late Ming iconographic models, the art historian J. P. Park includes a wonderful image by the mid-seventeenth-century painter Gu Zhengyi, illustrating a poem about a woman who sadly contemplates a swing abandoned by a parrot.44 The universal history of art abounds with this idea of a woman absorbed in the contemplation of a motionless swing. Park points out that the iconic female models of the late Ming, and especially those in the painting manual known as Heavenly Models and Exemplary Manners, portray women as enraptured by an absent love, which may take the form of a bird. This combination of women and birds is also common in European painting. In all cases, including those relating Mary’s virginity to a dove, the bird seems to represent an emotional state. It is a symptom and an expression of opposing emotions: fear and hope, loss and abundance, freedom and confinement. Instances include The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries (c. 1500) and Gustave Courbet’s famous painting Woman with a Parrot (1866). There is perhaps no better example than Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s fascinating canvas A Girl with a Dead Canary (1765), in which it is almost impossible not to associate the bird with fading childhood, virginity being lost and beauty waning. The Peony Pavilion is not the only dramatic piece pierced by a swing, whether at rest or in motion. The swing’s presence is felt in many other works of Chinese sentimental literature, including the version of the text translated into English as Mistress and Maid.45 Long before Meng Chengshun’s version, this story of Jiaoniang and Feihong, the golden boy and the jade girl, known as Jiaohong ji, included a swing in its earliest editions in the mid-fifteenth century.46 145

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On both sides of the fence, the swing allows us to question the community norm and the social rule; it is an instrument of transgression capable of triggering dreams and fantasies. Hence, drawing them, as the young Liniang does, is an evocation of freedom, a visual manifestation of the desire for independence. As a symbolic artefact, the swing mobilizes all the elements of the theatrical logic by which it is possible to imagine oneself as another person and feel oneself in another place. As an instrument of courtship, it also allows the interaction of those who are separated, either by physical obstacles or by moral conventions. The swing, unlike love, does not erase the inequalities of the lovers, but brings the distant closer. Our trinocular glasses have allowed us to understand it as an emotional refuge in which desires, even those not sanctioned by authority or regulated by trad­ ition, can become part of the emotional landscape. And this applies to women, of course, but also, to some extent, to men. For them, too, the swing is an instrument of reverie. Now, the content of these dreams is very different on both sides of the fence, for while young girls’ dreams are made of desires of freedom and liberation, young males’ are made of longings of collecting and possession. Feng Menglong, for example, collected not only stories but women. Fond of gambling houses and brothels, he was also the compiler of The Hundred Beauties of Nanjin, a work listing and describing the city’s one hundred most famous concubines. We should keep in mind that the iconography of the swing has its origins in an essentially masculine claim, having been made by men for their own delight. In the case of China, some of these illustrations were commissioned and commented on by the Qianlong Emperor himself in 1741. The ori­ginal drawings for Feng’s album, which was initially called Paintings of the Hundred Beauties (Baimei tu), came from the court painter Chen Mei. The result was a series of images combining painting with the use of semi-precious materials: ivory for the figures and trees, jade and agate for the ornamental objects. Scholars have divided such archetypal images of women into two classes: those that refer to idealized beauty (meiren hua or shinü hua) and those that emphasize idealized behaviour (gongxun tu).47 As if it were true that all handsome people look alike while the unpleasant ones are each ugly in their own way, 146

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47  Garden of Sa’dabad at Kâğıthane, Istanbul, c. 1720s, miniature from the manuscript Zenannâme (Book of Women) by Enderûnlu Fâzıl, 1801. ­

the canon of beauty is inscribed to such an extent in bodily configur­ ation that the iconography merely repeats the same aesthetic patterns over and over again. The same collector’s zeal can be observed beyond Chinese art. In the case of the miniatures of Indian Rajput painting, for example, the swinging women participate in an idealized aesthetic in which it is often the case that the same pattern of beauty extends to them all. At about the same time that Jean-Honoré Fragonard was painting his famous Wallace Collection picture, the Pahari artist Nainsukh was striving to depict, again and again, the ideal woman, so that on closer inspection, all the women in his paintings share the same features. They resemble one another, or rather, they are more or less imperfect iterations of the same woman.48 Perhaps Krishna’s gopī lovers think of themselves differently, but they are all the same from the god’s point of view. In Europe, there is perhaps no better example of both forms of representation – that which idealizes the female body to the point of representing the same figure in different positions, and that which makes use of the voyeuristic idea of observing a space that is in principle forbidden to the male gaze – than The Nymphaeum (1878) by the French painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau (illus. 35). The same 147

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applies to the work by the unknown artist depicting the swinging scene in Kağıthane Park in Istanbul (illus. 47). The representation of this modern gynaeceum is based on the physical and moral distance that separates the space of women from that of men. The compos­ ition, however, allows us to observe a closed space, which places the ­viewer’s gaze into an inner world to which, in principle, men’s entrance is limited.

148

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C

hildren are much more elusive than the dead. In one of the most iconic images of childhood play in the modern world, Pieter Bruegel the Elder provided a catalogue of different forms of juvenile play. Painted in 1560 and preserved in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Children’s Games depicts more than eighty activities, from jumping games to the childish (but not exclusively childish) habit of stirring the shit. Except for the presence of a few adults, this painting is surprising for the way in which about 240 children amuse themselves. In its encyclopaedic character, the canvas resembles and recalls Chapter 22 of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1530s), the famous work by François Rabelais, in which Gargantua’s tutor lists the different activities to which leisure can be devoted.1 Both in Bruegel’s painting and in Rabelais’ work, which must have circulated in the Netherlands from its first publication in 1532, the swing appears only tangentially.2 It is present, but not in the central place it came to occupy after the creation of the playground at the beginning of the twentieth century. On the contrary, Bruegel places it inside a house, where it can be seen only through a window, and Rabelais associates it indirectly with the world of magic.3

Children Many European art historians vindicated Bruegel’s work on children for what they considered an absence of antecedents, that is, his work was the first of the genre.4 This was clearly a false theory in terms of 149

48  Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Children’s Games, 1560, oil on wood.

49 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Children’s Games, detail of the swing.

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the history of painting in the East, and debatable in the context of European visual culture. It was a ground-breaking thesis, indebted to that now classic work in which the twentieth-century French histor­ ian Philippe Ariès put forward the idea of the absence of filial love in the Middle Ages.5 According to Ariès’ argument, as famous as it is now refuted, childhood became visible only at the beginning of the modern world, and did not attain full autonomy until the development of the bourgeois family. In the specific case of the history of religious painting, Ariès’ followers were right to argue that most images of children up to the end of the fifteenth century depicted the Christ Child seated on his mother’s lap in a hieratic position with a Gothic expression, with features and gestures more akin to those of a miniature adult than to what we might expect of a newborn. In secular contexts, and in the almost complete absence of archaeological material, information about children’s games before the sixteenth century appears, above all, in the margins of medieval manuscripts.6 In the illustrations contained in some of these books, the objects and attitudes of childhood games have come to light, from hunting birds and climbing trees to jumping rope or playing ring-aring-o’-roses.7 For example, in the Ango family’s Book of Hours, a manuscript produced in Rouen, France, at the end of the fifteenth century, children’s games are ubiquitous. Scatological scenes abound, as do activities of dexterity and balance. Duelling with broomsticks mixes with hide-and-seek, horses with soap bubbles, stone wars, ­spinning tops and, of course, the swing. The copy of the Roman d’Alexandre preserved in the Bodleian Library in Oxford (dated between 1338 and 1344) also provides valuable evidence of everyday life in the Middle Ages.8 In this work, five young people are engaged in various balancing exercises. One of the figures pushes another on a swing supported by a pulley. Of the other three, the first holds a sword resting on its tip in the palm of his hand, the second supports a wheel with his shoulder, and a third appears to be putting on his stockings while sitting on a stool. From these and many similar sources, we may conclude that the swing occupied a secondary place in the overall catalogue of children’s leisure activities of the Middle Ages.9 In the Oxford manuscript, 151

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50  Equilibrium games, decorative marginalia from the Roman d’Alexandre, c. 1338–44.

swinging seems to be related to other balancing games, played by adolescents rather than by smaller children. In no case does the swing have the privileged position that it acquired on the children’s playground from the second half of the twentieth century onwards. On the contrary, balancing seems to have been reserved for femininity or mediated by show business, that is, by the entertainment spectacle of hawkers, actors and acrobats. To this doubly marginal character of the swing in medieval children’s culture – it appears on the margins of the margins, used by the most irrelevant of children and the most dangerous of puppeteers – we should add that the swing was, for a long time, a device for the sick. In his immense Canon of Medicine, the early eleventh-century Persian physician known in Europe as Avicenna had already discussed at length the benefits of swinging for health. From his point of view, rocking was a very valuable movement for all those who were weakened by fever, whether children, adults or the elderly. When you rock someone gently, he explained, you induce sleep, disperse flatulence, remedy some head disorders, such as stupor or forgetfulness, while provoking appetite and encouraging bowel movements. The same benefits can be had from swinging in a litter or a palanquin, riding on horse or on camel, or in the sailing of a boat, which, the Persian sage maintained, was beneficial for ‘leprosy, dropsy, apoplexy, ­dilatation or cooling of the stomach’.10 Specifically regarding children, this idea was not new. Plato had argued in the fourth century bce that the disconsolate child’s 152

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crying could be controlled by imitating as much as possible the rocking of waves. There he found the reason why mothers rock children who cannot fall asleep. Instead of promoting silence, they ‘bewitch’ them, Plato wrote, through the combined action of movement and cooing, just as priestesses do with the followers of Dionysus.11 For him, the same movement could tranquillize either children or fanatics. Mothers and wet nurses, he wrote, should do as bird breeders do, who carry their birds around under their arms.12 Convinced of the virtues of swinging, whether to preserve health or to recover intelligence dulled by enthusiasm, Plato recommended, as did Avicenna later, movement without fatigue.13 Many other authors of antiquity reflected on the healing virtues of these passive exercises. The best known of them all was Hippocrates, in the fifth century bce, to whom we also owe the theory of illness as a form of internal imbalance. The second-century Roman physician known as Galen incorporated these teachings into his writings, and the combined influence of both remained prominent at least up to the eighteenth century. Throughout much of the Middle Ages and the Modern Age, many voices were willing to acknowledge the virtues of these exercises, which, because of their similarity to a pregnant woman taking her foetus for an involuntary stroll, were termed ‘gestational’ and which, after childbirth, continued with the age-old practice of cradling. At the same time, and far from being a pastime, rocking was one of the remedies required to restore health. Renaissance humanists attributed the idea of rocking the sick as if they were children (and children as if they were sick) to the second-century bce phys­ician Asclepiades of Bithynia. The sixteenth-century Spanish humanist Cristóbal Méndez considered that rocking should be especially prescribed for children who were too skinny, and for adults suffering from phlegmatic fevers, gout and kidney pains.14 Despite Plato’s recommendations and the relevance that gestational movements have maintained in medical literature to the present day, there were also warnings relating to the dangers of excessive abruptness when rocking the cradle, whether for children or convalescents. One of the most instructive illustrations of this is in an altarpiece dedicated to the cult of Blessed Agostino Novello and 153

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originally designed for the church of St Augustine in Siena, Italy. The painting, by Simone Martini and dated circa 1324, explores childhood vulnerability (see illus. 37).15 It is painted in tempera on wood and examines the various accidents that a child can suffer, such as falling off a balcony or being bitten by a dog. In the image, which is also the only one that actually depicts one of the miracles attributed to this religious figure – known as the ‘Paganelli Miracle’ after the family featured – the blessed Agostino appears as though fallen from heaven, ready to tend to a child who has suffered a grave injury as a result of the excessive force with which the housekeeper pushed his litter, which is seen suspended from the ceiling by means of four ropes. In the upper right-hand corner, the child, who has been cata­ pulted out of the window, lies with a broken skull, attended by his grandmother while his mother invokes the priest’s intervention. In the lower part of the panel, the women of the family are in procession with the child, now healed and dressed in the garb of the order of the eremitani ­(hermits), to whom he is to be entrusted. The story of the Paganelli Miracle reveals that, although the hanging bed could be used as a palliative remedy for a number of ailments, it was by no means without its dangers and detractors. In the Dictionnaire de la conservation de l’homme, a pedagogical work published in 1796, a former naval doctor by the name of LouisCharles-Henri Macquart states that ‘the swing is a very dangerous game which has cost the lives, more than once, of those who risk climbing on it.’ According to Macquart, it is necessary to take into account, first of all, that the materials of which these swings are made – the ropes, the wood or the iron – may be in poor condition. At the same time, attention must be paid to other dangers of a moral nature. In a severe tone, Macquart warns that people who swing inscribe a semicircle in the air and, going up and down alternately and at extreme speed, experience such great acceleration that the direction of their blood circulation could be reversed. He explains that the fear of falling and the instinctive efforts made to prevent it forcefully direct the blood to the brain, causing dizziness and light-headedness. The nerves are thus subjected to such violent impressions that they sometimes go into convulsions, followed by nausea and vomiting. 154

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Breathing becomes difficult. The air is forced into the lungs, preventing the chest from expanding. This, he concludes, is often followed by the rupture of blood vessels.16 Macquart was not alone in his crusade against the alleged virtues of rocking. For his contemporary Alexander Hamilton of the University of Edinburgh, cradle rocking was a type of exercise that, despite its presence since ancient times, should be avoided. Its use was justified only in large cities and during the winter, that is, in those places or circumstances where there was scarcely any possibility of going out with the little ones.17 Since children during their first moments of life remain in a torpid state almost all the time, Hamilton writes, they should not be shaken violently or in such a way as to p­ rovoke vomiting. Although Immanuel Kant listed rocking among the physical activities that could improve health, he also pointed out that one had to take good care to ensure that the swinging movement never reached excessive speed.18 For reasons that are not without a certain classism, he was also opposed to rocking, which, in his opinion, was mainly practised by the lower strata of society. Some peasants, he says, ‘hang the cradle by a rope from a beam . . . But rocking is not good at all. For swinging back and forth is harmful to the child. It is seen even in grown-ups that swinging induces vomiting and dizziness.’19 The custom of rocking children or singing to them so that they do not scream is widespread, says Kant, among the ‘common’ social classes, who ‘play with their children, like monkeys do’ (see illus. 36).20 But let us return to Bruegel. In his painting, we find three types of swinging game. The first is the eternal hobby horse, a device that has served as a children’s game in all known equestrian societies. In the second, two adults rock a little girl sitting in their intertwined arms forming a chair, perhaps the most primal form of swinging except for cradling. While in English this game is called ‘the Pope’s seat’, in Spanish it is called la sillita de la reina, the queen’s little chair. There it is played by swinging a girl to the rhythm of the lines, ‘A la sillita de la reina, que nunca se peina, un día se peinó y la silla se rompió’ (To the queen’s little chair, who never does her hair, one day she fixed her hair, and the chair fell into disrepair).21 This is, moreover, one of the few 155

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instances in Bruegel’s work in which the children are accom­panied by adults. Finally, the only scene in which we can glimpse the presence of a swing takes place not outside, but inside a house, where it is used by an adolescent girl. The evidence suggests that during the Middle Ages and throughout much of the modern European world, the swing was for girls, acrobats and the sick. Its uses depended on conceptions of illness, exercise and play that are very different from our own, but also on a phenomenology of swaying that today, in general, is alien to us. Most of the sensations relating to speed or height, which are commonplace today, were then completely unknown. There was no greater sensation of lightness than the gallop of a horse, for those who could ride it, and no more intense swaying motion than the rattle of a chariot or the rocking of a ship. The medieval and modern worlds were largely rural and fundamentally pedestrian. The experience of movement was delimited in a bodily sense by a way of life that occurred mostly on foot and at ground level. We cannot even be sure that the swing’s effects were not felt with fear, or that its use did not produce many of the consequences described by its detractors. After all, we have no notion of the length of rope to which the chair might be attached, nor do we know the emotional regime of vertigo and dizziness before the revolution in transport. Opinions against rocking were aimed both at regulating leisure time and at preventing the excesses to which the body could be subjected. Many of these opinions, such as those that recommended rocking as a way of curbing various ailments, may seem laughable today. There is no joke, however, where distance and height are measured in feet and where most people are unaware of the effects of velocity or height. The same problem arises in relation to the regime of visibility, which may also suffer from a notable and anachronistic presentism. The Bruegel painting with which we began this chapter is, in its own way, a repository of children’s games. As such, it is an extraordinary source of information for the historian, as well as a source of pleasure for the lover of fine art. It should go without saying, however, that the canvas was painted neither to serve as food for the former nor as entertainment for the latter. It is a painting of games, yes, but the one 156

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it really conceals was not for children, but for those adults who could afford to pay for a work of such size and entertain themselves in their leisure hours by identifying games on the canvas. Bruegel did something similar in the case of proverbs, and he was not without sense for producing images of these pastimes, which catered so much to the taste of the new bourgeoisie. We find a similar example of historical sleight of hand, where children appear to be protagonists without being so, on the other side of the world. Researchers have pointed out that the iconic representation of children came to China from Central Asia and the Mediterranean through the trade routes of the early Middle Ages, transforming the putto of the Roman sarcophagus into an ideal model of the Chinese child. During the Tang dynasty interest shifted from depicting aristocratic women and their children at the imperial court to giving full prominence to the latter. What was then one of the most important and cosmopolitan cities in the world saw the flourishing not only of poetry, as is well known, but of humanist painting. Two painters in particular, Zhang Xuan and Zhou Fang, both of whom flourished in the eighth century, devoted themselves to the depiction of scenes of maternal–filial love, very different in emotional intensity from those that took place on the other side of the Urals.22 Between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries, during the Song dynasty, the depiction of children was already a genre in its own right. Known as yingxitu (children at play) or baizitu (the hundred children), such images were used to decorate fabric and porcelain, although we also find many examples in painting, usually in handscrolls. The celebrated painter Su Hanchen produced some of the most significant images of childhood in China in the first half of the twelfth century.23 Along with his contemporary Li Song, Su has gone down in history for his extraordinary depictions of children absorbed in play, immersed in gardens and surrounded by some of the toys that, subject to logical local variation, have been used by children all over the world. The development of the image of children in China during the Tang and Song dynasties cannot be understood without taking a few facts into account. First, the baizitu paintings take place in a 157

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dreamlike garden, devoid of conflict. This arrival of the child in paradise shares features with Buddhist and Roman representations, which entered China around the third century. The chubby children who accompany Bacchus in countless pagan festivals, who reappear on sarcophagi and who later form part of the heavenly choir have many formal similarities with the equally chubby, half-naked children of the Tang paradise. Second, and more importantly here, in these depictions as in Bruegel’s painting, the documentary value of the image is merely an irrelevant addition. The baizitu genre, of which there are notable examples up to the seventeenth century and beyond, cannot be separated from the family’s desire to increase its progeny, especially through the birth of sons. The images of these children operate, in this respect, as a material representation of wishful thinking. They may be a literal figuration of childhood games, but above all they are images that relate to the fears and hopes of parents. The handscrolled children

51 Su Hanchen School, One Hundred Children at Play, 1100s–1200s, album leaf, ink and colour on silk.

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are not unlike the youthful wax figurines that were floated in cuckoos on the rivers for the Festival of the Heavenly Lovers (Qixi). Known in Japan as Tanabata (the Star Festival), and exported from China during the Tang period, the festival, still celebrated today, commemorates not only love but the yearning for prosperity through offspring. Finally, in the ‘hundred children’ paintings, swings appear only a few times. Of Su’s series of paintings of children and their various seasonal games, only the painting of the Long Spring includes a swing. This handscroll, housed at the National Palace in Taipei, is more than 4 metres (13 ft) long and 25 centimetres (10 in.) high. The scene takes place, as is almost always the case, in a confined garden separated from adulthood by a small river and linked by a bridge. A couple has let their daughter, who turns to look at them, go with the rest of the children. The first of all the games is a swing on which a small child rocks before the rapt eyes of her parents. The games then follow one after the other, from the hobby horse to hide-and-seek and from board games to fishing games. There are also games with animals, children bathing naked in a river and others playing at chasing one another. Towards the middle of the scroll, we also find a variant of blind man’s buff, as well as the game of football, invented in China and played in this case by young women.

The game In 1938 Johan Huizinga published a text that made play one of the conditions of civilization, a determining characteristic of human sens­ ibility. Like any good philologist, he took as his source of inspiration the early texts of Friedrich Nietzsche, the studies of the sociologist Marcel Granet of the culture of archaic China, and his own training as a Sanskritist.24 That book, Homo Ludens, contained elements that are still relevant today. As with the Sanskrit word līlā – which we have translated as ‘play’ and which Huizinga obviously knew – it has never been easy to clarify the characteristics that a human activity must fulfil in order to be considered ‘playful’. To begin with, Huizinga believed that play could not be understood by appealing to instinct. Insofar as social life was endowed with what he himself called ‘supra-biological forms’, one could not 159

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simply invoke studies of animal behaviour to explain the complexity of human experience.25 In common with so many other intellectuals of the early twentieth century, this Dutch scholar was convinced that the solution to the enigmas of culture lay not in biology but in the human sciences. Nor did he want to study play from a perspective that could be considered functionalist. As a cultural historian, he understood his task to trace the common elements of playful experience. Since play was not merely a mechanical, instinctive or physiological act, it had to possess a culturally meaningful and not merely adaptive function.26 As opposed to the view that interpreted it as an instrument for a purpose, be it the regulation of bodily energy or learning for adult life, Huizinga related play to much more primal qualities, such as expansive passion, exhilaration, madness and recollection. To the playful experience corresponds an English word, fun, which has hardly any place in other languages. This intrinsic characteristic of play refers to an intense emotion, which may be accompanied by shouting and racket, but which also suggests a state of contemplation that is rare in the animal kingdom. The ‘fun’ component of play is not a joke; it is a way of life that cannot be reduced either to its biological or adaptive aspects, or to its social function as part of the learning process. Huizinga attributed to play a number of features that are worth examining before we return to the swing. To begin with, as with any other culturally meaningful experience – a journey, for example – play has a beginning and an end. It is an interlude that occurs in the middle of our daily activities and that, therefore, cannot be proposed at the wrong time. By the same token, play also has its adequate place (as anyone who deals with children knows). Whether in the playground, the street or the ball pit, play takes place, in a literal sense, in a space that is different from that where the monotony of existence resides.27 In both its temporal and spatial dimensions, play also possesses an inertia whereby it tends to extend over time and beyond its physical borders, to the point of posing a threat to the moral and social order. A significant example of this playful impulse occurred around 1770, when the famous French artist Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun surprised her students by using the swing that the young women had made in 160

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the studio by suspending a rope from the ceiling beams. Despite her disapproval, the teacher, then only fifteen years old, could not resist the temptation and decided to try it herself. From then on, it was so difficult to keep order that she was forced to close her business. This scene was popularized in France through the covers of famous textbooks entitled Les Héroïnes du travail (The Heroines of Work), which served as study material in primary schools at the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, play marks a hiatus in the rules governing social behaviour. In this, too, it resembles many ritualized actions, such as those of Carnival.28 After all, neither ritual nor play can do without this theatrical, performative or dramatic character. Most European languages have found ample reason to use the same word to signify this ambivalence between the universes of game, music and theatre. ‘To play a role’ is an expression that underlines the dramatic element of any playful experience. Those who play believe themselves to be someone else, in another world and with other rules. Play, like theatre, questions reality. Unlike those who take it either too seriously or too frivolously, the good player is well aware of the paradox in which they participate. For Huizinga, as for the anthropologists of experience, the game is a performance, a dromenon, that represents a drama.29 Nietzsche’s great interpreter the twentieth-century philosopher Eugen Fink explored in depth this split consciousness of those who play at being others.30 Under the evocative power of theatre, he found the world populated by illusions and phantasmagorias. The fetish­ ization of play and, more particularly, the sacralization of the game – whether it be football, a doll or the swing – are no more than the consequences of this detached quality of any playful experience.31 In the case of the swing, the object carries the connotations of its ritual uses; it is a magnificent example of what the Victorian anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor called a ‘survival’ of culture: one of those old trinkets that we leave to our children for them to amuse themselves with. But play is not only an out-of-the-ordinary experience, nor one that is detached from social normativity under the spell of its dramatic qualities. If it were so, nothing would distinguish it from sacramental 161

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liturgies, for instance. The greatest difficulty lies in distinguishing it from other ritual acts whose protagonists are also known to be part of a theatrical action. In this sense, Huizinga considers that, unlike ritual, play is a voluntary and superfluous activity, which can be abandoned or postponed.32 He adds, moreover, that while play is, at least in appearance, ‘disjunctive’, culminating in the creation of opposing teams, ritual seems to be ‘conjunctive’, in the sense that it institutes a union between initially dissociated groups.33 Thus arises his claim that all games are ultimately competitive, even though many playful activities, such as dance or music, lack antagonistic players, at least in principle. The main characteristics that Huizinga attributed to play (its spatial­-temporal circumscription and its dramatic character) seem much less problematic than the claim that all games involve an element of competition. This latter difficulty can be resolved, however, if we stick to the basic rule of play that divides the people involved, whether adults or children, into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ players. The real antagonism is not between members of opposing teams, but between those who abide by the rules and those who break them, between those who take the game too seriously or too frivolously and those who, on the contrary, allow themselves to be captivated by it. From this point of view, play, and not simply tradition and ritual, also produces communities, potentially even the (ideal) community of those who play solitaire without cheating. In other words, even before we may talk about winners and losers, the game must be played properly. The initial rivalry separates the good players from the bad: those who play by the rules and those who question, complain about or break them. Fun therefore always includes an element of tension, a fear that something might go wrong. On the one hand, the game opens such a parenthesis in the social norms of ordinary life that players know that ‘what happens on the field stays on the field.’ On the other, good players know that not everything goes, and that every game has rules. As a diversion and distraction from everyday life, play is an emotional refuge that for a time allows us to loosen what was tied up and free what was imprisoned. At the same time, this refuge spontaneously generates a communitas, an egalitarian grouping, regulated by a single 162

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obligatory rule: one must know how to play, or, in other words, one must be aware at the same time of two elements as apparently contradictory as believing oneself to be other and knowing oneself to be the same. What distinguishes ritual from play is therefore not the formation of communities, but the experience of fun itself. Play is ritualized, but not every ritual is playful because, among other things, play is an experi­ence of distraction also (but not exclusively) linked to happiness. Those who play ‘have fun’, ‘have a good time’, ‘enjoy themselves’. The emotional community born of play, like the one begotten of applause (and what is applauding an orchestra but a game?), is also embedded in an autoerotic drive, in the desire to extend oneself ­indefinitely through time and to colonize other spaces. Until the arrival of the swing in the playground, the history of this object had been linked to different forms of regulated behaviour. We have already discussed how the swing fulfilled a clearly supra­ biological function, to use Huizinga’s expression. It may be difficult to understand its rules, but there is nothing closer to the ritualized character of play than the swing itself. Its balancing interrupts social normativity, promoting the formation of communities of resistance, generally made up of the dead, children and, above all, women. The idea, typical of developmental psychology, that swinging is one of the most primitive of activities, requiring nothing more than oneself and presupposing no rules, is completely unfounded.34 As a playful action, swinging is a curious chicken-and-egg experiment, in which the game seems to precede the very rules that make it possible.35 Throughout the history of thought, more than a few philosophers have spoken of the seriousness of the game or even established a phil­ osophy of the game on which the whole of society is built. Marcel Granet and the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset were both interested in exploring the ludic foundation of society, even to the point of talking about the sporting origin of the state.36 It was Nietzsche (whose ideas inspired them both to a degree) who argued that the elements on which the entire edifice of culture was built were nothing more than two different types of play and, by extension, two different forms of art.37 In the style Nietzsche called ‘Apollonian’, the 163

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artist plays with dreams, which in turn are nothing more than a play with the real; in the Dionysian style, on the other hand, the starting point is the play of drunkenness, of intoxication, so that nature plays with the artist. This second style can be understood, if not directly experienced, in a symbolic way. In other words, it is necessary to find a way for drunkenness and serenity to coexist. For just as someone in the act of dreaming is simultaneously cognizant of the fact that they are dreaming, those absorbed in play also know that they are playing. And in the same way that harmony and beauty conceal but cannot remove the pain of existence, so does drunkenness dissolve ­individuality, even if that very individuality remains present. Nietzsche’s reflections on the Apollonian and Dionysian characters of culture are of interest to us not only regarding play in general but with respect to the history of the swing. After all, it was Nietzsche himself who used, as did so many other Romantic writers, the image of the swing as a metaphor for life.38 In Chapter Four of his master­ piece Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–5), ‘The Other Song of the Dance’, the philosopher engages in a conversation with Life, happily personified in the figure of a beautiful woman. Speaking to her in the first person, he tells her that in her eyes, in the eyes of life, he has seen a golden swing sparkling on the water at night. Intoxicated by the meta­ phor of the swaying of a golden gondola, the philosopher plays, or rather dances, with the contradictions of the coming and going of a life personified in the body of a woman: ‘I fear thee near, I love thee far; thy flight allureth me, thy seeking secureth me.’ Everything in the text refers to the coldness that inflames, the hatred that seduces, the flight that binds, the mockery that moves: ‘Who would not love thee, thou innocent, impatient, windswift, childeyed sinner?’ The same life that drags us down also flees from us; as it comes, it goes. ‘I dance after thee,’ writes Nietzsche. ‘Where art thou?’ he asks. ‘Give me thy hand!’39 This metaphor of the rocking boat, of the schwankende Kahn, in which the individual contemplates the need for pain and beauty, for sleep and drunkenness amid the sea, had already appeared in The Birth of Tragedy of 1872. Nietzsche takes up its constituent elements in the metamorphoses of the spirit, linked in this case to the vindication 164

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of play. In contrast to the camel that obeys and the lion that desires, ‘innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea.’40 The child constructs his own world outside of time and history. It is a world where freedom is not constrained by the resentment of what was, nor is the will directed towards the fragments of what is past. What is important in this case is not so much whether or not the swing appears in Nietzsche’s work, but the relevance of his thought in understanding its playful and ritualized character. In Chapter Two, we witnessed the extent to which the ritual swinging of the aiora constituted an expression of Dionysian forces, an outburst of nat­ ural effervescence, that for a moment breaks all social bonds. At the same time, the Apollonian forms of art are felt in the presence of the rhythm with which the swing is transformed into a lullaby. The swing brings together all the elements of life’s play. Those who swing might become dizzy involuntarily, but they submit voluntarily to the dizziness; they lose consciousness of themselves, but they know that it is just a game. As a Dionysian activity, swinging participates in all the prerogatives of instinct, including sexual desire, but it also coexists with rhythm and harmony, with order and beauty. The illusion of riding on a steed or sailing a boat can very well distract us from the pain of existence, including that primal pain that forces us to think of ourselves as free subjects. Whoever plays with the rules of the Apollonian, such as rhythm, for example, knows that they can let themself go; they can delude themselves with the pos­ sibility of being another, in other circumstances, but they also know that it is just a game and that the primordial pain of their existence is still lurking over their shoulder, vigilant. The ecstasy of the Dionysian state, the state of intoxication or drunkenness, ‘contains, for as long as it lasts, a lethargic element in which all personal experiences from the past are submerged. This gulf of oblivion separates the worlds of everyday life and Dionysiac experience. But as soon as daily reality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as such with a sense of revulsion.’41 Ultimately, the Dionysiac experience of the world, like the oscillation of the swing itself, can free us for a limited time from the bonds and horrors of ordinary experience, but the forgetfulness 165

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of self, the suspension of the principle of individuation and, consequently, the forgetfulness of the pain of existence cannot last forever. Upon awakening, there will be retching.

The virgin Swinging and virgins go together. From the festivals of classical Greece to Japanese manga, the visual representation of femininity has always been linked to oscillating movement, above all through the representation of a young woman either rocking on the moon itself or swinging while gazing melancholically at it. Popular culture seems to recognize in this correlation not only a symbolic but a physical relationship between menstrual cycles and lunar phases. The Internet abounds with Japanese illustrations of young girls, sometimes in erotic poses, swinging in the moonlight. In China, Japan and Southeast Asia, such images herald the celebration of the so-called Mid-Autumn Festival, held in late September or early October. Of Chinese origin, this festival commemorates the ascent of the goddess Chang’e to the moon, a celebration that even today involves the use of swings. In the West, from the promulgation of the dogma of Mary’s virginity at the Council of Ephesus in 431 ce, the association between virginity and the moon spread throughout Christendom. Meanwhile, the iconographic representation of the mother of God also gradually changed. The few images of a haloed woman suckling a child among the clouds, of which we already find examples in the catacombs beneath Rome, began to be combined with other, equally unusual scenes. The hieratic Romanesque style that spread throughout the Western Roman Empire – in which the Virgin herself serves as a seat and throne for a child Saviour in the same way that the Egyptian goddess Isis held her son Horus – would gradually give way to elements of mobility, typical of Byzantine art, both in the figure and in the circumstances of its representation. In contrast to the Romanesque static style, Gothic gestures not only reflect a greater sentimentality but give the figure greater dynamism and even, as in some late medi­ eval sculptures, a certain ‘swing’. The asymmetrical position of her hips and the inclination of her trunk suggest a dancing Mary, not unlike the postures of the Hindu pantheon. 166

52  Unknown artist (Master of 1456, Cologne), Madonna on a Crescent Moon in Hortus Conclusus, c. 1450, oil on oak wood.

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The image of the Virgin Mary on the moon has different origins.42 The most evident comes from the Book of Revelation, written by the apostle John. Here we learn of a lady clothed by the sun, stepping on the moon and crowned with twelve stars. The roots of this icon of Christianity, however, go much deeper. We should not forget that the moon is one of the most constant attributes of Western feminine divinities.43 For, just as kings and gods have often clothed themselves with solar authority, so female divinities have demonstrated a predilection for the moon since at least the Venus of Laussel, carved between 22,000 and 18,000 bce, a figure of a woman holding a crescent­-shaped bison horn marked with thirteen notches representing the lunar cycle. This correlation between the phases of the moon, its swings and the measurement of time relies on an orderly reiteration of menstrual periods. The words ‘moon’ and ‘measure’, of Indo-European root, have the same origin: the Sanskrit mas, from which both ‘month’ and ‘menstruation’ are derived. When it comes to the formation of this triangle between virginity, the moon and oscillation, we must refer to Isis, mother of all goddesses. The cult of this deity, widespread in Egypt since at least the third millennium bce and which survived in the Hellenistic-Roman world until at least the fourth century ce, slowly but gradually became associated with the moon. In his second-century Metamorphoses, the Roman writer Lucius Apuleius already compares Isis to the moon, as well as to the image of a young astral maiden with golden hair falling over her shoulders, which was popularized in the Baroque period. The goddess whose very name means ‘queen of the throne’ was the archetype of the wandering woman, long before young Erigone set out in search of the remains of her dead father. The same woman whom the Greeks called ‘of a thousand names’ has been a source of inspiration for many of the emblematic images of the goddesses of virginity, on the one hand, and motherhood on the other. Isis is not only the wife and sister of Osiris, to whom she has restored life; she is also the star that manifests itself in the constellation Canis Major; the one who invented navigation; the one who taught the Sun its way; the one who united Man and Woman. The Hymn of Cyme, like many similar texts composed in the first and second centuries ce, revels in this idea of 168

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a deity exalted in her generosity and unequalled in her power.44 Isis is the one who put an end to tyrants, who abolished anthropophagy, who defends what is just, who arranged for women to be loved by men, who is mistress of storm and war. Her power is absolute. What she thinks is done. The myth of Osiris, whom Plutarch described in the first century as the ‘Egyptian Dionysus’, reaches its climax in the efforts of his wife-sister to bring him back to life once Seth, the personification of envy, jealousy and disorder – Typhon, Plutarch calls him – has torn his body to pieces and thrown it into the Nile.45 Unable to find his genitalia, which have been devoured by fish, Isis orders a mould to be made and gives it the name Phallus. This strange piece became the object of a cult not unlike that of the lingam, the sexual organ of Śiva, which, in stone form, appears in many temples in India. The Papyrus of Ani (c. 1250 bce), where we find the Book of the Dead, explains how Isis ‘caused the inactive limb of the one whose heart was dead [Osiris] to stand upright and extracted its essence, from which she conceived an heir’.46 Thus, through the intervention of his sister and wife, Osiris became the god of the dead, whose destiny and hope of resurrection are rooted in ancient Egypt but whose mythological foothills reach and merge with the Roman world and with the first Egyptian Christians, the Copts, through the teachings of the apostle Mark in Alexandria in 69 ce. Associated with the cult of nature, Isis is one of those incarnate ideas that, despite their formal instability, retain recognizable features throughout her historical variations. The first-century bce Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily described her as the equivalent of the moon and explained that ‘the Egyptians represent her with horns to show the form the celestial body takes in its monthly revolution.’47 How Christian Neoplatonism appropriated these astrological divinities remains a matter of debate, although it seems more or less clear that the association of the Virgin Mary with the moon, responsible for life and death, was the result of a complex and continuous process of syncretization. The identification of the sun with Jesus Christ ended with the establishment of the birthday of the Messiah on the day of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun – the Roman festival celebrating 169

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the moment when the sun comes out of darkness (25 December), the day on which the sun, the same star that the Egyptians associated with Osiris, begins its springtime ascent, illuminating a moon that, in turn, illuminates the world. In just the same way, the Christian incarnation of virginity adopted, in a convoluted way, some of the trappings of Isis, especially regarding the relationship of sacred females to both the moon and, more importantly for our purposes, orientation. The association of the Virgin Mary with the moon is therefore rooted in more than one spiritual tradition. First of all, the depiction of the woman rocking on a crescent moon undoubtedly comes from the Book of Revelation, where John relates one of the most mournful and esoteric visions of the Apocalypse. Second, the relationship derives from that of both Virgin and moon to the sea. The historian Marina Warner argues that this identification stems from the error of a medieval copyist who, instead of writing stilla maris (drop of the sea) to refer to Mary – as the fourth-century historian St Jerome had translated the equivalent of her Hebrew name into Latin – wrote stella maris, star of the sea, so that from the eighth century onwards the Virgin Mary began to be identified with the North Star, becoming the patron saint of lighthouse keepers and, by extension, the embodiment of the sense of naval but also spiritual orientation in the world: ‘If the winds of temptation arise, if you are diving upon the rocks of tribulation, look to the star, invoke Mary. If you are tossed upon the waves of pride, of ambition, or envy, or rivalry, look to the star, invoke Mary.’48 Later, although still in the fourth century, St Ambrose iden­ tified the suffering Church with the moon, a role that was increasingly adopted by Mary, who came to be called ‘Mother Moon’, ‘Moon of the Church’, ‘Queen of Heaven’ or simply ‘Notre Dame’ (Our Lady), which was the form used in medieval France to refer to the moon.49 The identification of the Virgin Mary with the moon gives her all the characteristics and symbolism of that celestial body: its power over the waters, over human behaviour, over ways of measuring time. Seated on her lunar throne, she served as the subject of some of the most famous artists of the Renaissance. The skilled hand of the early sixteenth-century engraver and painter Albrecht Dürer placed her on a crescent moon while her newborn child appeared to reach for her 170

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breast with his hand. In this case, Dürer did not depict the Virgin resting on a wooden bench or leaning against a tree or wall. He replaced the quotidian elements with a visionary representation of the end of time. Although the image may be indebted to the Book of Revelation, Mary is not standing on the moon. The Dutch landscape has been turned into an undefined and indeterminate space. In addition to the Child swaying in his mother’s arms, the two of them swing together on the die-cut surface of a satellite that, at that time and until the triumph of Copernican astronomy, continued to have the same status as any planet, revolving around a motionless Earth that occupied the centre of a finite universe. Dürer, who produced a considerable number of drawings and plates on the subject, was inspired on this occasion by the work of the Alsatian engraver and painter Martin Schongauer, who, in the second half of the sixteenth century, depicted the Virgin seated on a grassy bench with her child in her arms.50 There is no longer any need to place the Virgin on a throne, since she herself is the throne on which the salvation of mankind rests.51 As in the polychrome wood carving of 1510 attributed to Niklaus Weckmann the Elder, Mary can remain on her throne, but the throne itself can in turn be placed on the carving of a crescent moon. In a fifteenth-century polychrome stone relief in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, the Virgin and Child are resting on a moon that in turn rests on a schooner. Only very astute mathematicians will be able to determine the equation governing the pendulum motion of a ship that, sailing at a constant speed, swings a virgin who, in turn, is rocking a child.

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T

he shift in urban life, especially with the industrialization of Europe, led to a reform of the rules of equilibrium in line with the new means of transport. The rigidity of the ancien régime gradually gave way to a dynamic society characterized by exchange, movement and trade. The history of the rocking chair shows the extent to which the absolutist and centralized state was rejected not only because of the demands of its tax system but because of the hardness of its structures and the discomfort of its seats. The rocking chair’s popularity, for example, was driven by the political and religious demand to replace the aesthetics of opulence with the economy of functionality. Although it was present in Europe, its use spread mainly across the Atlantic. Along with their demands for ­independence, the American colonists sought freedom for their bottoms.1

Dizziness While the rocking chair seemed to be a device designed to counteract the unbridled pace of modern life, the ancien régime also saw the birth of another set of machines designed to combat the excesses of sedentary life. By the early eighteenth century, the wealthier classes in England already had a chamber horse or indoor horse used (at least in principle) for this purpose. This predecessor of our exercise bikes, examples of which are still preserved in some museums in Europe and the United States, could reproduce an equine’s trot. The early eighteenth-century English physician George Cheyne recommended 172

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it to his patients, and one of them, the writer Samuel Richardson, used it to treat his hypochondria.2 Like other similar instruments, the psychic cradling of the soul combined intense physical exercise with a form of emotional relaxation, effectively a hobby, which enabled one to endure the passing of the hours. Both the rocking chair and the chamber horse were, like the swing itself, instruments of substitution. In 1817 the Dictionnaire des ­sciences médicales had already explained the countless ways of replacing the gait of a horse: ‘Someone has proposed the simple swinging of a saddle, so that the weight of the body is directed alternately from the forelegs to the hind legs.’3 In the previous century Bernard de Mandeville found strong reasons to defend the therapeutic benefits of the swing. As a treatment for melancholia, he recommended swinging for an hour and a half at dawn, then riding a horse for at least two hours, and repeating the same exercises in the evening. Since the quality of the swinging was far more important than the procedure used to produce it, Mandeville considered that this swaying could be carried out in different ways: The Swing I speak of may be made after what manner your Daughter Fancies most, that which they call a Flying Horse [today’s swings] makes a very agreeable motion, but if she be apt to be giddy, she may swing in a Chair, or other Seat to which she is fastened, otherwise a Rope tied with both ends to a Beam is sufficient.4 From the second half of the eighteenth century, the swing became part of different forms of health policy. While the traveller Charles Marie de La Condamine used one to treat his gout, the philosopher Voltaire swung in an artificial chair, apparently with very satisfactory results. For the Scottish obstetrician Stephen Freeman, the swing could be used to get the rickety child used to movement. It was enough to place the patient in a position contrary to the natural inclination of their bones.5 The French physician and naturalist Nicolas Andry advocated the same treatment in his mid-eighteenth-century treatise on orthopaedics.6 The physician Étienne Tourtelle also recommended 173

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swinging. Convinced that laziness and idleness had been the cause of the revolutions that ravaged the continent towards the end of the eighteenth century, he suggested (along with walking, horse riding, hunting and dancing) the therapeutic use of the escarpolette (swing).7 The device’s physical benefits added to its moral advantages.8 In a letter to the president of the Royal Society in 1787, Dr James Carmichael Smyth explained how he had had one of these machines installed at the Middlesex Hospital in London to treat pulmonary tuberculosis and hectic fever. The medical records accompanying his work leave no doubt as to its perceived therapeutic virtues. When one William Sprang entered the hospital on 16 June 1781 he was emaciated, with agitated breathing, constant coughing and purulent expectorations. His pulse had risen steeply, with bouts of fever and sweating, especially at night. Within two weeks his heart rate had slowed, and three days later, after swinging for ten minutes, his fever also dropped. From 3 July he swung twice a day, for half an hour each time. He then began to feel lighter; he breathed and coughed more easily. His symptoms continued to subside to the point that by 15 July there was no longer any sign of fever or perspiring. On 26 July he was discharged, and by 30 August he had made a full recovery.9 Smyth’s reasoning was part of an established belief at the time that tuberculosis sufferers, in whatever form or diagnosis, experienced significant improvements when travelling by ship. Many thus embarked with the express intention of inducing seasickness. As late as 1881, the neurologist George Miller Beard claimed to have encountered a passenger on a North Atlantic voyage who made every effort to get seasick and thus enjoy what he considered to be the health benefits of the journey included in the price of his ticket.10 Smyth’s research at the Middlesex Hospital seemed to confirm that his patients’ improvement depended solely on the sedative powers of the oscillatory movement, capable of counteracting the effects of organic irritation. It was not the sea, nor the air, nor the change of residence, but the consequences of oscillation that could be successfully used to combat not only tuberculosis and fever but headaches, diarrhoea and haemorrhages.11 Anchored in the central courtyard of the hospital, the swing eliminated the superfluous and 174

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dispensed with the accessory. For a start, it lacked all the dangers of sailing, including unhealthy air, winter cold, vomiting and dietary difficulties. There were no storms or tempests here, and no chance of running aground or being attacked by any sea beasts. The swing could be used in summer as well as in winter, and it could be set up anywhere, whether in the drawing room or one’s own bedroom.12 It was also available to everyone, rich or poor. Its use could be recommended both to those who were tied to the ground where they were born and to those who could take up residence wherever they pleased. Far from being a material structure of static construction, the machine can vary its meaning according to circumstances. In the manner of a game of transpositions and equivocations, its activity is subject to the vicissitudes of other forms of movement that the instrument allows us to evoke, but which do not actually take place. At least from the point of view of the history of medicine, the children who once thought they were rocked by the waves or imagined themselves riding on a beautiful steed may have been partly right. Those who swing experience all the advantages of the imaginary without the disadvantages of the real: they sail without waves, they ride without falling, they travel in the comfort of their bedroom. Of course, they may also become dizzy. The remedy sometimes produces unwanted physical consequences. According to Beard, who was famous for having introduced the term ‘neurasthenia’ into the history of medicine, such a voyage could alleviate the symptoms of many illnesses but also induce tragic and well-known side effects. The motion sickness caused by the movement of the ship – whether from bow to stern (rocking) or from port to starboard (rolling) – was one of the great drawbacks of sailing that people of all times and conditions have stoically endured throughout history. By the end of the nineteenth century there had been a marked shift in the appreciation of this primitive ‘rocking and rolling’. Naupathia, as it came to be named, was recognized as a disease to be prevented and combated. The old morbo marino or morbo navigatium, about which a few treatises were written in the modern period, acquired a new prominence.13 Since sea travel was one of the most frequently recommended formulas for the treatment of neurasthenia, Beard considered 175

53  Eusebio Planas, lithograph of a nude woman with a belt on a swing, from the series Academias de mujer, 1883.

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it a priority to provide symptomatic remedies and hygienic recommendations to avoid the most undesirable of its effects. His treatise had some precedents. The physician Michel Nelken, for example, had joined the American Eagle in London on 10 September 1853 as ship’s surgeon, with the added intention of studying the behaviour of her 560 passengers, who disembarked in New York on 28 October after a gruelling voyage. Nelken found that the symptomatology did not affect everyone equally, nor did it remain constant in its incidence; instead it seemed to depend on random factors such as the state of the sea, habit, diet or predisposition. It seemed to him that the lack of effective remedies stemmed from a misunderstanding of the disease. Thus while some doctors thought seasickness was caused by a kind of miasma – a form of intoxication – others attributed it to congestion of the brain caused by a change in the centre of gravity. Still others believed it was brought about by the rocking motion of the ship itself and, more particularly, the centrifugal forces to which the blood v­ essels were subjected.14 Known since ancient times, naupathia was still understood and studied in the nineteenth century according to much older prin­ ciples of classical medicine. To Cristóbal Méndez, for example, the seasickness produced by the movement of ships on the high seas seemed extraordinarily useful for provoking vomiting and ‘expelling many superfluities that undoubtedly bring much harm and damage’.15 Guided by this peculiar interpretation of humoral medi­ cine, he managed to convince one of his patients, who was suffering from a stomach ailment, to travel to another location by boat during a stay on the island of La Palma in the Canaries. The patient replied that there were three types of penance to which he was not happy to submit: learning something new every day, confessing his secrets to women, and travelling by sea when he could travel by land. However, Méndez was so insistent that they ended up taking a skiff. The doctor instructed the crew not to stray too far from the shore, so that the motion of the water would be felt even more strongly. The already dizzy patient finally fainted with such trembling that Méndez thought him dead. The physician then put a feather dipped in oil into the patient’s mouth. Upon contact with the quill, the sickly patient 177

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expelled ‘more than two plates of a glassy phlegm as sticky as grease’, to which our author added: ‘it pleases God, although I bore part of the vomit (which was of little use to me), that the Portuguese man recovered his health.’16 Imperial Chinese physicians also distinguished between different forms of motion sickness depending on the means of transport. In the case of ships, they recommended drinking children’s urine, swallowing syrup made from white sand, or sipping raindrops collected on a bamboo reed.17 From the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, con­fusion over the origin of the disease multiplied the remedies. In Europe, the consumption of champagne was joined by the ingestion of chilli peppers, calomel – a toxic substance made from mercury – and emetics, as well as fasting or overeating. Along with the use of acids and blistering agents, belts that held the stomach in place still formed part of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century trapeze artists’ equipment (illus. 53).18 Morphine helped, of course, as did chloroform and strychnine, although, depending on the ship’s movement, the relief of symptoms did not last more than 24 hours. What did seem to be an established fact was that those suffering from seasickness got better by rocking in their bunk, so that the motion of the hammock could compensate for the motion of the waves. In terms of prevention, many authors claimed that the propensity for motion sickness depended on how passengers related to movement throughout their lives. ‘Those who cannot dance a waltz, ride a seesaw or swing without experiencing dizziness; those who feel uncomfortable even with the motion of carts or carriages, are more liable to suffer from the fatigues of that malady,’ the physician Constantin Gaudon wrote in 1832.19 Although the entry on mal de mer in the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales began by recommending compression of the stomach, the author went on to advocate for the use of the swing as a habituation practice.20 Almost a hundred years later, the members of the Ligue Contre le Mal de Mer, an association of doctors and ship owners who published a complete hygienic guide to preventing, curing and treating seasickness in 1906, echoed the procedure. According to François Madeuf, the treatise’s editor, the only effective remedy for seasickness was to become used to it artificially 178

The Remedy

by controlled production of a movement similar to that experienced on a ship. Swinging was one of the most effective means of acquiring the sailor’s resistance to sea conditions.21

Madness In his treatise of 1812 on diseases of the mind, the physician and American Founding Father Benjamin Rush explained how to distract the minds of those obsessed with fixed ideas.22 As soon as the disease began to subside, he explained, the patient should come out of confinement and solitude to enjoy fresh air and moderate exercise. In common with many authors, Rush made no precise distinction between the movement of a carriage and the rocking of a swing. Both forms of exercise were to be combined with baths and showers and a proper diet, as well as, in cases of hysterical symptoms or convulsions, other remedies such as asafoetida or amber oil. In the case of mania, which Rush calls ‘manalgia’ – a form of catatonic schizophrenia described as an obsessive melancholia – treatment included a ‘cordial diet’, hot baths and cold showers, the artificial production of diarrhoea and the application of caustic substances to the skin, especially on the neck and between the shoulders. Salivation, he wrote alarmingly, should also be increased by ingesting mercury. Finally, Rush added the swing, the see-saw or any other form of rotation that would forcefully agitate the blood in the brain.23 Following the instructions of the eighteenth-century English physician Joseph Mason Cox, Rush built a machine that, rather than swinging, allowed the ‘madman’ to be centrifuged. The gyrator (or spinner) easily produced vertigo and nausea. It also increased perspir­ ation, which was achieved all the more easily the further the patient’s head was from the centre of rotation.24 The machine was inspired by Erasmus Darwin, who (as we saw in Chapter One) devoted an entire section of his Zoonomia to the study of vertigo, which he considered to be one of the recurrent symptoms of almost any form of disease.25 This was the procedure Cox had used with a 34-year-old patient of melancholic temperament and reserved disposition who, having been indulged in all his desires since childhood, had developed a character prone to suspicion, impatience and revenge. When he arrived at the 179

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hospital, his countenance showed a ‘Saturnian blackness’. His eyes, bathed in bile, remained motionless, his gaze fixed on the floor. With no movement in his limbs and slowed action of his lungs and circulatory system, he showed no signs of life except for deep sighs. Because all remedies had so far proved ineffective, Cox decided to subject him to the properties of the swing. He was placed there two hours after being fed a pint of porridge made with water and milk. He had apparently not evacuated his bowels for six days and had not urinated for the last 24 hours. Once secured, they began to rock him. As the swaying became more and more intense, he began to experience some uncomfortable sensations and to make unsuccessful attempts to free himself. He turned pale and begged for the machine to be stopped; he complained of dizziness and nausea; he seemed exhausted, as if on the verge of fainting. Shortly afterwards he fell asleep for three hours. The operation was repeated several times, until he vomited. He then cried out that he would rather submit entirely to the doctor’s wishes than repeat ‘the ordeal of the merry-go-round’, as he called it. Thus, with a few more attempts, he was seen to improve progressively until, it seems, he reached a perfectly healthy state of reason.26 We can find the same pattern in many other case histories. The maniac afflicted with amorous disappointment enjoyed the swing for the first five minutes but turned pale as soon as the aides increased the motion, whereupon he urinated on himself and, complaining bitterly, begged to be released. The ‘long-necked, flat-chested’ young woman, as Cox himself described her, seemed at first to be gratified, but before long nausea and vomiting set in. In all cases, the miseries of the body led to the recovery of reason. Like a tightrope walker, m ­ aniacs must learn the value of the relative, the futility of obfuscation and the advantages of a decentralized world. The swing condemns them to bend through an imaginary wheel that places them alternately on one side and then the other of their own logic. As in the late medi­ eval representation of pride that decorates the frescoes depicting the Inferno in European cathedrals, the movement does not give them a break. On the contrary, the swing, Cox writes, allows reason to regain its own rhythm.27 In the simplest case, it is sufficient to suspend a Windsor chair from the ceiling and move it by means of two parallel 180

The Remedy

ropes attached to the back legs and by two others that, attached to the front legs, can regulate the patient’s elevation. In the more complex version of this therapy, a variation on Erasmus Darwin’s description, the machine produces a turning movement, with the patient either sitting in a chair (perpendicular rotation) or lying on a bed (­ horizontal rotation).28 Unfortunately, Cox’s book contains no illustrations. To get a full picture of the procedure, we have to wait for Practical Observations on the Causes and Cure of Insanity (1818), the second edition of a book by the Irish physician William Saunders Hallaran, who introduced the swing as a technique for treating mania in Ireland.29 He argued not only that the circulatory swing had helped him to achieve supreme authority over the most unruly patients, but that, having more time for his other occupations, he had seen an increase in tranquillity and order in the institution.30 For its advocates, the new therapy was part of the utilitarian logic linked to the philosophy of progress. As in the case of the Middlesex Hospital, Hallaran was concerned about the equitable social distribution of this remedy. There was, in his view, no reason why a machine could not be made accessible to all social classes and all pockets. Unlike boat trips or carriage rides, the swing was attainable for the poor. In the most unfavourable circumstances, and if they lacked any other means, the insane could make use of those installed in parks. As Rush pointed out, ‘If they are unhappy, these entertainments will suspend their miseries. If they are in a torpid state, these devices will serve to produce a transient feeling of pleasure which may help them to remember that the chain which binds them to the rest of mankind has not yet been broken.’31 The therapeutic virtues of the swing were felt in three distinct areas. First, the treatment favoured the most radical forms of evacuation. Vomiting was added to the list of emetics and enemas widely used to redeem maniacs from their delusions through the expulsion of all putrid substances.32 The liberation of ideas that clung to their minds was the counterpart to the cleansing of the filth that adhered to their bodies. Second, the rotary motion of Hallaran and others, capable of up to a hundred revolutions per minute, allowed the blood 181

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in the brain to be redistributed, avoiding congestion. Poor reasoning and stubbornness in judgement may have remote causes, but they always seemed to be accompanied by intracranial blood pressure that could be at least partly resolved by rotation. Not least, proponents of swing therapy for the treatment of mental illnesses shared with many other physicians the conviction that swaying induced sleep. The swinging motion forced the patient into a form of narcolepsy not unlike that obtained through the use of other chemical substances. It was a ‘mechanical anodyne’ that produced dizziness and fainting, as any opiate would do. Third, to these remedies of a physical nature were added others of a moral nature. The treatment of mental illness had to mobilize all those passions capable of altering the damaged intellect.33 As in similar cases, authority over patients was achieved, through intimidation, by producing passions even more vehement than those that had initially triggered the disorder. Cox wrote: ‘Fear is excited by firmness, and menaces producing strong impressions on both mind and body.’34 Subjected to continuous rotation and sick with dizziness, vertigo and fainting, the maniacs accepted a commitment to obedience that bent their strength and humiliated their ideas. When swaying took place in the dark, strange noises and smells increased their fears. Through the reciprocal and simultaneous action between body and mind, the swing combined anguish and terror, causing fatigue, exhaustion, sensations of creepiness and vertigo.35 For the Boston physician George Parkman, fear could be induced by both cold showers and the swing. In some cases, he adds, it will be possible to calm the most excited patients by putting them into a boat and rocking them with more and less intensity.36 For them, at least, far from being a mere game, the swing was more like an instrument of torture. Thomas Denman, the author of a treatise on obstetrics that appeared in several editions in the last decades of the eighteenth century, also recommended it for women in labour. He claimed to have seen many unhappy women die as a result of the vehemence of their thoughts and the muscular contortions of their bodies, and he considered that both symptoms could be relieved by swinging in a hammock or a suspended bed.37 The same benefits could also be produced by rotational movement 182

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in the case of uterine obstructions, in the treatment of women who allow themselves to die of starvation, or to remedy epileptic seizures.38 After 1804 the procedure spread throughout Europe and the United States. In Berlin, the doctors Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland and George Horn used a different version of the machine at the Charité hospital. In Geneva, too, Louis Odier was able to observe its effects. In Lyon, France, at the Hôpital de l’Antiquaille, a certain Dr Martin also used it with limited success.39 Back in Germany, someone named Von Hirsch believed he had improved on both Darwin’s and Cox’s designs by suspending the patient on a sailing litter.40 This time, however, it was a wooden cradle ‘similar to that used by peasants for their young children’.41 Halfway between ‘medical remedies’ and ‘moral treatments’, the rocking or rotating practices found various uses among distinct schools of thought. Christian August Fürchtegott Hayner, director of the Lunatic Institution in Waldheim in the early nineteenth century and famous for having proposed the use of the whip in the treatment of mania, was also an advocate of the swing. Convinced that the benefits of the machine could not have gone unnoticed by the ancients, the Flemish physician Joseph Guislain explained that its use had been mentioned by Caelius Aurelianus, a physician from Sicca, in present-day Tunisia, in the fifth century. According to Guislain, Aurelianus recommended ‘rocking the sick in a suspended bed in order to diminish the exaltation of his cerebral functions’.42 Very similar were the theories of Aëtius of Amida, a Byzantine physician of the fifth or sixth century (to whom Guislain attributes the most thorough and detailed description of this pro­ cedure), and the first-century Roman encyclopaedist Aulus Cornelius Celsus, who recommended a suspended bed to calm maniacs.43 Despite its many advocates, the therapeutic use of the swing became less popular as the nineteenth century progressed. The alienist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol, who mentioned it in the first edition of his treatise on mental illness, stated some years later that the procedure had been abandoned everywhere.44 Its effects were not unlike seasickness, with copious evacuations and vomiting. Cox’s or Horn’s machine, wrote the military doctor Jean Vincent François Vaidy in 1815, is very much like the little horses on the carousel. 183

54  Illustrations from Joseph Guislain, Traité sur l’aliénation mentale et sur les hospices des aliénés (1826), vol. i.

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He added: When the movement is too rapid, the patient experiences dizzi­ ness, vertigo, nausea, great difficulty in breathing, a manifest congestion in the head, a tinkling in the ears, haemorrhages from the eyes, ears, nostrils . . . I doubt very much whether this method has ever cured a single alienated person, but I think it is very suitable to make a healthy man insane in body and spirit.45

Vibration While, in treating mania or tuberculosis, the swing was used to suggest the movements of navigation or the age-old practice of cradling, in other circumstances it evoked the gait of a horse, a railway journey or a carriage ride. Its mimetic capacity comes from the simplicity of its design, to which modifications can always be made. Much less studied than rocking or swaying, ‘vibratory medicine’ included the movements involved in travelling in a buggy or carriage, as well as those produced when riding various animals. In some cases, such as the bed that rests on uneven feet, the procedure could not be more rustic. After all, it was a matter of getting the chair’s feet to hit the ground successively from left to right or right to left, so that the sick person could experience what the doctors of the time described as a ‘sanitary blow’.46 This idea was not new. Francis Fuller the Younger, a famous English physician who seems to have recovered from profound hypochondria by combining the practice of horse riding and the use of enemas – we do not know in what order – was already recommending the virtues of passive movement at the beginning of the eighteenth century.47 In his estimation, equestrian activity seemed to be par­ ticularly effective in combating scurvy. Pains in the back, shoulders or hips could be eased or made to disappear altogether ‘by the movements of a boat, a bed, a chair, a swing or the like’.48 Nor did he think it unlikely that a skilled mechanic would be able to invent some kind of machine that, in the manner of the petaurus or the great swing of the ancients, could be used to treat gout. After all, he reasoned, if the self-indulgent and depraved Romans had been able to rock themselves 185

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to sleep on hanging beds, anyone could use the same procedure to lessen their own torments. Across the English Channel, Fuller’s dreams began to take shape. In 1761 the Paris press announced a new mechanical invention: the riding stool. It was the ‘most daring and simple exercise machine yet imagined’, declared the poster. The instrument consisted of two ash-wood poles crossed by a rotating shaft suspended from the ceiling. From the ends of the rods descended straps that supported two stirrups on which a stool raised to a convenient height was placed for seating. The user could start the apparatus by pulling the cords attached to the poles by means of pulleys. According to the advertisers, the device could imitate all the movements of a horse. It was possible to walk, trot or gallop, depending on the circumstances. It was also possible to imitate leaping forwards and kicking backwards, as well as other types of pirouette and buck. As did the spinner and other health-related devices, the riding stool shared many elements with the swing, of which it was actually only an improved version. More important than their formal similarities, both devices served to evoke other forms of movement. They were replacement machines that, each in its own way, made it possible to enjoy boat trips or the trot of a horse in the warmth and predictability of the home. Like the swing, the riding stool could be installed inside the house and dismantled after use. It was also equipped with a large number of accessories, so that the elderly or the sick could use it with only the help of their domestic servants. Its practice was recommended to those who needed to improve their ability to perspire, to people suffering from gout – as La Condamine was well aware – as well as to all those sedentary people who needed to dissipate their internal obstructions, facilitate the expulsion of wind, circulate blood and lymph, and more generally regain happiness, appetite and health.49 The inventor of the riding stool, an engineer by the name of Genetté, sometimes used an artificial horse for the same purpose. He recommended the latter especially for children, because the more rhythmic movement of this machine made falling more difficult. Nor was he the first to devise such an instrument. The post chair and the 186

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riding stool were improvements on the trémoussoir, the trembler (or vibrator) machine designed in the 1730s by Charles-Irénée Castel, abbé de Saint-Pierre, after King Louis xv’s doctor informed him of the prodigious recovery of an English patient who had been freed from his melancholy after having been transported in a palanquin.50 Although Saint-Pierre has gone down in history as one of the proponents of the Peace of Utrecht, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), as well as for his ideas on European politics, his oeuvre resides more in the context of the origins of liberal thought. His major contribution to the laws of equilibrium was published in 1735 under the title Observations on Sobriety. In it, he argued that equilibrium, far from being an absolute value, was nothing but the result of an equation between what is ingested and what is consumed, between the excess of blood and the need for exercise. The only appropriate procedure to counteract the inevitable vices of civilization was therefore to increase the body’s perspiration.51 In the context of the dissipated virtues of a society prone to inertia, Saint-Pierre favoured increasing French sweat as much as possible. If they could not forgo their large meals and dissolute lives, at least let them perspire; let them move, let them walk; and if they did not want to or could not use their legs, let them ride horses, ride in carriages or on swings, let them submit to the benefits of passive movements until their bodies sweated out by day the excesses accumulated during the night. Saint-Pierre was aware of the impossibility of the entire French populace being able to submit to the benefits of transport, and the idea that Parisians should spend the day riding around in rented carriages for the sole purpose of improving their humoral balance seemed impracticable to him. Even if people could afford to pay the fares, the cities would collapse with this absurd spectacle of carriages driving around and coachmen concerned only with the worst-paved streets or the most potholed promenades. To avoid such nonsense, he designed an easy chair that would ostensibly be within everyone’s reach, mounting a chair on a mobile chassis capable of producing the jolts that any carriage rider might feel.52 Unlike Cox’s spinner, which was particularly suitable for maniacs (but could also be used to entertain idiots), the trembler was intended for the benefit of the 187

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sickly as well as the enjoyment of the healthy. In both cases, it was sufficient to use it two or three times a week, for two or three hours at a time. For their comfort, ministers could go about their business, have letters and memoirs read to them, and consider other matters of urgency while receiving more or less vigorous shocks. Those living in warmer climates and therefore more prone to perspiration, SaintPierre maintained, would have less need of the device than those in colder regions. The English especially, so prone to melancholy, would find more than ample reason to submit to it. In the early eighteenth century the influential physician Jean Astruc was keen to write about the virtues of the swing. In a text included as an addendum to Saint-Pierre’s treatise on sobriety, Astruc began by acknowledging the virtues of humoral balance, which had been proclaimed since the time of Hippocrates and Celsus. Also adopting as his own the principles of economic freedom advocated by mercantilists, Astruc understood that because health depended on the proper circulation of nutrients in the blood – just as the economy depended on the free circulation of goods – excess in the diet should be compensated for by shaking, swinging, jostling and compressing the various parts of the body.53 Along with walking, he especially recommended riding exercises, as well as carriage rides, especially when they took place on uneven ground so that the shaking would be more frequent, livelier and jerkier. Aware that not everyone had the same economic means, Astruc considered it fortunate that human ingenu­ ity had found alternative procedures capable of compensating for the lack of resources. Since ancient times, doctors had made use of the swing, then known as petaurus or doscelle.54 Equally useful were the mobile beds in the form of cradles that Oribasius, physician to the emperor Julian, claimed had been used by such illustrious phys­ icians as Celsus and Aëtius. The beds suspended by their four corners, known as lecti pensiles, whose discovery is attributed to Asclepiades, also achieved a great reputation in Pompeii’s heyday. A good reader of classical literature, Astruc uses the accounts of Pliny and Caelius Aurelianus of Sicca to place the story of the swing in the context of an enlightened programme capable of counteracting abuse of the body through vigorous rocking.55 188

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The use of these remedies was discussed in many places in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth. Panckoucke’s famous Dictionnaire des sciences médicales devoted a whole section to these so-called gestation exercises, in which the body received from the outside sufficient movement to agitate its internal organs.56 Unlike such activities as dancing, walking or running, these exercises did not involve active displacement of the locomotor system, yet the body was subjected to jolts and shocks. It was therefore a type of passive exercise capable of producing a toning effect on the tissues without the constraints of ‘active’ exercises. It is a ‘reflexive’ movement, Panckoucke explains, which is introduced ‘blow by blow into our being; a diffuse matter which spreads through our body, penetrates our organs, shaking their mass’.57 By the time Saint-Pierre’s text was published in 1735, a similar machine, designed by an engineer named Du Quet, had already been presented to the public. In April that year the Mercure de France, one of the most important periodicals of the time, explained that those who wanted to rent the apparatus would have to pay 3 pounds the first day and 25 sols (a quarter of a pound) for each subsequent day.58 Between 1734 and the development of vibratory medicine by JeanMartin Charcot and Georges Gilles de la Tourette at the end of the nineteenth century, there was no shortage of voices defending the use of these machines in one way or another. There is probably no reader of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) who does not remember the last encounter between Emma and her lover Léon in Rouen, near the end of the novel. Distressed by a rendezvous that had been intended as a sentimental reunion but which has turned into a tour of the cathedral’s treasures, the young man grabs her arm and, at the door of the church, calls for a carriage. When the driver asks him where they are going, he simply replies: ‘Wherever you want!’ The car then drives down the rue Grand-Pont, crosses the Place des Arts, the Quai Napoleon and the Pont-Neuf, and stops in front of the statue of Pierre Corneille. At that moment, Léon’s imperative voice comes from within: ‘Keep going!’ The car sets off again and, crossing the La Fayette intersection, gallops into the railway station. ‘No, straight on!’ exclaims the same voice. The coachman does not understand what 189

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madness is driving these people to refuse to stop. In the streets, in the guardhouses, the people of the town are astonished by that thing so rare in the provinces, a carriage with the curtains drawn and which keeps reappearing, ‘sealed tighter than a tomb and tossing like a ship’.59 Whereas Stendhal had managed to sum up a night of love in a semicolon, Flaubert turned passion into an act of aimless, haphazard and exhausting wandering. We do not know to what extent the bodies of Emma and Léon were taking part in any form of active exercise; we cannot know whether their pulses rose or their perspiration increased, but Flaubert leaves us in no doubt about the hygienic treatment to which they subjected themselves for hours. Everything in the description of the scene is reminiscent of a movement of gestation likely to appease both his anger and her melancholy. The thrusts and lunges of desire inside the car can only be imagined, but not the shocks or jolts resulting from the oscillating movement, from the pressure of the cobbles against the wheels, from the penetration of the protrusions of the ground into the tissues through the abrupt and continuous movements of the carriage. Perhaps Emma was shouting ‘Don’t stop!’ but it is Léon who addresses the driver in those terms. Of that there is no doubt. ‘Keep going!’ he orders. In his repetitive rattling, Flaubert plays with all forms of passive movement. Perhaps the absence of light inside the carriage was a concession to modesty, but it is certain that the oscillating movement multiplied its effects in the dark, as someone would experience when sailing at night, or when subjected to Cox’s circulatory chair, Hallaran’s device, Saint-Pierre’s trembler or Charcot’s trepidant armchair, of which we shall say few words below. Flaubert himself, who never left anything to chance, did not hesitate to mock the trembler in his unfinished work Bouvard et Pécuchet. At that time, the treatment of certain nervous disorders by means of passive gymnastics was back in vogue and counted no less a person than the famous psychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot among its advocates. The weekly illustrated publication La Joie de la maison echoed, not without irony, the illustrious doctor’s latest invention: the trepi­ dant armchair. Charcot had apparently come up with the idea after observing that some patients seemed to improve in health after prolonged journeys by carriage or rail. Like Saint-Pierre before him, he 190

55  Advertisement for an English version of a riding stool, in the Illustrated London News, 28 December 1895.

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56  Advertisement for a swinging bathtub, in Truth, 24 September 1891. The design promises a unique experience.

had an armchair made that, driven by an electric motor, was capable of producing energetic movements and gave the sensation of sitting on a train. This is how this ingenious ‘instrument of torture’ came to be known as a ‘trepidant armchair’.60 In both the popular press and the scientific literature, it was clear that this new form of vibratory medicine was part of a long tradition dating back to Saint-Pierre’s trembler in the previous century, and which extended to both sides of the Atlantic. Objects of use by the rising bourgeoisie, various forms of equestrian replacement device were publicized in the newspapers and magazines of the time. The ‘Health Jolting Chair’ was advertised in New York, while in London the ‘Vigor’s Horse-Action Saddle’, which was said to have satisfied none other than the Duchess of Aberdeen, was all the rage. In the second half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, the market was flooded with these unusual devices, which combined a dubious medical theory with many other advantages, the first of which was their price. As with today’s gym treadmills, exercise bikes and massage chairs, the device is expensive only in absolute terms, but not in terms of what it promises or what it replaces. Moreover, compared to boat trips or rickshaw rides, swinging was cheap, even more so since the machine could also be rented by the hour or the day. One could even try out its virtues on the spot.61 Second, these devices had the advantage of portability. They could be set up anywhere, without the inconvenience of keeping a horse clean or riding a carriage in winter. To this very bourgeois idea of bringing the outside world into the home, the swing added other virtues. Like shells collected on the beach, the instrument allowed the hoarding of experiences. It allowed travel at home, whether by horse, 192

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camel, carriage, boat or rail. Like the visitors to the pavilions of the world’s fairs in Paris, London, St Louis or Chicago, the world seemed to fit into limited enclosures that could nevertheless be transported and possessed, as a mark of prestige and a status symbol. The bathtub that promised an immersion in Niagara Falls, without spilling a single drop of water in the bathroom, seems little different from the machine that claimed to provide the benefits of horseback riding without the hassle of the horse. Last among its advantages, the swing – like Cox’s spinner, SaintPierre’s trembler and Charcot’s trepidant armchair – was a replacement machine. It substituted for another activity. Its function was effective in all cases, the publicity asserted, but the experience was all the more gratifying when the device allowed the patient to believe that they were in another place and in other circumstances. The machine not only produced a physical shock or jolt but, as advocates for the maniac spinner were well aware, affected the configuration of the experience. The mad were said to abandon their obstinacy to the same extent that the sane abandoned theirs. The same machine that served to invigorate the neurasthenic might also soothe hysterical fits. The act of swinging non-discriminately forced everyone to modify their point of view, to play the game of disorientation, of course, but also to inflame the imagination and dislocate the conscience. In the frame of reference of Victorian society, the swing was installed as part of other evocative games, including all those that were assembled and disassembled in the world’s fairs. As an ante­ cedent to modern amusement parks, it made the improbable possible. Experience swelled and moved towards the imaginary. In keeping with dreams of Roman hanging beds, with boat trips across oceans, with the air hitting the made-up face in a carriage ride, the machine revealed its evocative power, its ability to place the user in another time and in other circumstances. The obvious sexual connotation present in many of the advertisements for the Saint-Pierre trembler or for the post chair in any of its variants should not make us lose sight of the fact that the power of the swing lay not only in its mechanical force but in its capacity to produce a sensorial expansion that freed users from the tyranny of their world.62 193

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T

here is perhaps no better example in Europe of the sexual symbolism of the swing than the painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard that is now in the Wallace Collection, London. The painter agreed to transfer to the canvas, at least in part, the commissioner’s requirements: ‘I should like you to paint Madame’, said the nobleman, apparently pointing to his mistress, ‘on a swing driven by a bishop. I shall place myself so that I can see the legs of this beautiful girl. And if you would also like to embellish the play with other things, well, you know . . .’.1 Fragonard fulfilled these requests to the letter, using elements of old eroticism and of libertine literature. His work – an emblem of the Rococo style – happens to be the most iconic representation of the swing in the West, as well as one of the most representative figures of the economy of seduction. To the viewer’s left, in the shadows, a ‘menacing Cupid’ (a sculpture by Fragonard’s contemporary ÉtienneMaurice Falconet) is about to be whacked with a shoe, like a dog. To hell with love! Because this painting is not about feelings but about the relative position of the lovers: the woman on top, riding and radiant; the man below, lying on his back, crouching, uncomfortable and diminished. The light she emanates is reflected on his face, giving it a pinkish cast that matches her dress. Fragonard, who studied in Rome in 1756–60 at the suggestion of his teacher François Boucher, does not conceal the relationship between the goddess’s foot and the man’s hand. Like a Creation scene similar to Michelangelo’s in the Sistine 194

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Chapel, the painting does not disregard the earthly circumstances of the new Adam, who literally grovels at the sight of the luminescent beauty of his goddess’s legs.

Oscillation Very much in keeping with the taste of the time, Fragonard’s famous painting (illus. 38) echoed an instrument that was enjoying enormous popularity. ‘Since some women have decided to renounce the use of their legs, the escarpolette has become very fashionable,’ wrote Panckoucke in 1815.2 A century earlier, many documents on the decor of palace and castle gardens included a description of such a device. Various sources suggest that the French word escarpolette may derive from écharpe (shawl) and refer to the most basic form of seat on which to build a swing.3 In France, it was also often called balançoire. Whatever its name, the swing conquered the European cultural landscape in many different ways. Wallpaper often included images of it, as did fans, card sets and tea services. In many cases, the design reproduced famous paintings, but others were more or less

57  Girl-in-a-Swing, made at Charles Gouyn’s Factory, London, c. 1752, porcelain.

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58  L’Escarpolette (The Swing), tapestry by the Beauvais Manufactory, after a design by Jean-Baptiste Huet, c. 1780.

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original productions. The English porcelain factory known as Girlin-a-Swing, for example, took its name from what became its most emblematic piece. In many European salons, images of the swing acquired the cobaltblue tones with which the great porcelain fountains were decor­ated, or the yellows that served as a backdrop to the oriental scenes so popular at the time. The intellectual and commercial ferment of those days, linked to the improvement in economic conditions and the end of the Little Ice Age of the seventeenth century, enabled the taste for the swing to reach the nobility and the wealthier classes in European cities (illus. 58). Fragonard’s painting is only the best-known example of a fashion that spread from Istanbul to Lisbon and from Copenhagen to Madrid (see illus. 39). In France, in the gardens of the Château de Chantilly, Henri Jules de Bourbon, prince de Condé, had one installed in which at least four adults could sway simultan­ eously. The same happened at the Château de Marly, a sanctuary to which Louis xiv used to retreat from Versailles. According to Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, the most striking attraction was a giant boat-shaped swing that the monarch ordered to be removed in 1704, fearing that Philippe, Duke of Anjou, then 21 years old, would break his head. The history of Spain would have been very different if the future Philip v had died on that swing, thus avoiding the famous War of the Spanish Succession, at least as we know it. Nevertheless, Madame de Pompadour, the most famous of all Louis xv’s mistresses, installed another one in Versailles a few years later.4 Fragonard’s famous painting was not the only one he devoted to the theme, nor was it by any means the only one of its kind. On the contrary, from the second half of the seventeenth century onwards, the swing occupied a prominent place in the arts. Europeans’ taste for the fête galante had arrived above all through the work of JeanAntoine Watteau, who laid the foundations for the glorification of an activity that, associated with the popular classes and festivals, began to delight the nobility and the bourgeoisie. In one of his best-known paintings, The Shepherds (c. 1717), Watteau deliberately plays with confusion, starting with the very title of the canvas (see illus. 40).5 First, the protagonists are not the peasants who appear tangentially 197

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and diffusely at the margins of the painting, but the nobles who entertain themselves disguised as shepherds. More important, the gathering seems innocent, but it is not devoid of lewd elements. While a couple dances a minuet, a young man appears to grope his companion’s cleavage. In the distance, in the background of the scene, a young woman seated on a swing awaits what could be the impulse of her lover, while a dog licks his own genitals with enthusiasm. The painters Nicolas Lancret and Jean-Baptiste Pater produced several versions of the same subject in the 1730s. The former painted no fewer than ten canvases.6 The latter, a direct disciple of Watteau, had learned from his master the art of combining solemnity of form with ephemerality of content. For both of these painters, the fête galante was part of the masquerade of love, of the imaginary journey to the idealized life of the countryside. The swing was the instrument that could be used to return to natural passions by abandoning the excesses of the fictitious emotions of urban life. Nor was this an exclusively French phenomenon. From the 1730s onwards, the representation of the swing spread throughout the European courts. From the forests of Habsburg Prague to the fields of Denmark, the whole of Europe was nourished by a subject that enjoyed extraordinary popularity, partly as a combined result of three independent reasons. First, the swing was redefined as entertainment for the elite. Adopted by the nobility and claimed by the bourgeoisie, it lost its vulgar connotation. Second, it was a game of physical and symbolic disorientation, through which it was possible to free oneself from the constraints of social convention. Finally, as did similar games, the swing introduced an indisputably erotic element. While it could be beneficial to health, it also facilitated the m ­ isunderstandings of courtship. The collector and scholar Eduard Fuchs (who was mentioned by Walter Benjamin in his Illuminations) devoted a few pages to the swing in his monumental Illustrated History of Customs and Moral Practices (1909–12).7 As the Folies-Bergère – the famous Paris cabaret – would later make fashionable, the movement of the swing allows spectators to peep at what is hidden underneath the skirt. In the context of the history of women’s bodies, praising the leg has been part 198

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of the rhetoric of seduction since at least the mid-sixteenth century. The scholar and libertine Pierre de Brantôme, for example, con­sidered that there was no other justification for women to hold their legs in such high esteem than the desire to show them off, while he saw no greater pleasure, on the part of men, than to look at them. His ‘Discourse on the Beauty of the Female Leg’, written in 1699, is one of the best examples of sensory exaltation of this part of the body before n ­ ineteenth-century fetishism.8 Like Feng Menglong’s History of Love, which we encountered in Chapter Four, Brantôme’s text is built on a collection of anecdotes. Dozens of short stories, most of them apocryphal, evidence the universal appreciation of a woman’s legs, feet and shoes. There are many testimonies that suggest a strong tie between love and footwear, among them that of the unwary man who falls madly in love after helping, dozens of times, to put on and take off the shoes of the young female passenger who was indisposed on a sea voyage. Brantôme may find odious the popular French expression that relates the size of a woman’s foot to the generosity of her sex – the smaller the foot, the greater the vulva – but he seems to have no doubt about the lubricity aroused in men by the mere silhouette of a woman’s leg, even more so clothed than naked. And his case is not isolated. Throughout the modern world, women’s legs operate to such an extent as a sexual taboo that, in his Essays, Moral and Political (1741–2), the Scottish philosopher David Hume echoes the story told of the seventeenth-century queen Mariana of Austria, second wife of Philip iv of Spain: when a local dignitary tried to present her with a pair of stockings, he received an angry response from the butler, who claimed that a queen of Spain was not permitted to have legs.9 Like the Asian courtship games in which the movement of the swing allowed glimpses over the wall, the representation of the instrument in European painting encouraged the furtive gaze underneath the skirt. In both cases, desire is configured as a voyeuristic exercise capable of breaking into intimacy. Furthermore, the instrument with which the nobles entertained themselves and which became increasingly fashionable among the bourgeoisie also appeared frequently on the doors of brothels. In the anonymous text Lettres à un 199

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père de famille (Letters to a Family Man) of 1789, the main character addresses his father in these terms: ‘I have not spoken to you at all of the Redoutés of the Vauxhalls [places of prostitution in Paris], real places of bad living from which it is impossible to emerge chaste. There are the swings on which public women sway.’10 The history of erotic art abounds in the exhibition of the foot, leg or thigh as a form of sexual incitement. The evocative power of the swing in Fragonard’s painting draws some of its strength from this fact, but it also relies on other forms of arousal that, contrary to what Fuchs thought, are not related to the sense of sight. Fortunately for all of us, the factory of desire is not composed only of eyes and legs. To address the question, also brought up by Brantôme, of which of all the senses would be the most likely to facilitate love, it is not enough to mention the five classic ones. Sight, touch, hearing, smell and taste certainly play their roles in the comedy of seduction, but they are not the only ones upon which the tragedy of desire rests. The relationship between swinging and sexuality is much more primal. Through the voluntary excitation of the vestibular system, swaying mobilizes joy, but also vertigo, disorientation and anguish. As in a rider on a fairground attraction, sexual desire is embedded in the combination of fear and fun. Its aesthetic authority questions the physical, moral and social orders. The sexual connotations of the swing hardly need explanation. It has always had amatory uses and is still well represented in the adult toy market. Some of Europe’s erotic museums preserve the antecedents of these modern instruments of copulation, much closer to cultural masochism or aerial yoga than to the children’s playground. The one on display in Amsterdam’s Erotic Museum, for example, retains the leather straps and silver rings: two of the most common accessories with which domination games are recognized in the West. Many other erotic collections around the world contain numerous examples of these sexual and oscillatory practices, whether from Ming China, Hindustani painting or Japanese manga (see illus. 41 and 42). The idea is always the same: swinging may also serve to facilitate coitus. As an instrument of substitution, the swing was not only capable of replicating the movement of the horse (as we saw in the previous chapter), 200

59  Thomas Rowlandson, Rural Felicity; or, Love in a Chaise, c. 1800, hand-coloured etching with stipple.

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but could also help copulation at the pace of a walk, trot or gallop, depending on the circumstances. At the same time that medicine recommended the use of the swing to counterbalance the inconveniences of sedentary life, other authors considered it suitable to combat impotence. Like those who boast of having made love in an aeroplane or on a train, the caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson devoted himself to the hustle and bustle of oscillating sexuality. Nor did he miss an opportunity to show the pleasures of transport and its ability to produce or enhance sexual potency. Love can be made in a carriage, on a horse or on a bicycle. It can also be made on a swing. At the end of the eighteenth century, poverty-stricken, he made at least three versions of the device, relating it to as many other amatory arts.11 The idea was not new. Partly a result of a mechanistic conception of nature, sexual activity began to be described in Europe through dynamic metaphors in which swinging could accentuate or stop the expulsion or retention of physical fluids. Hence it could also facilitate erections and ejaculations, in exactly the same way as, say, the use of the whip. The small, anonymous physical and experimental manual Amors experimentalphysikalisches

60  Thomas Rowlandson, Erotic Scene with a Swing, c. 1790–1810, hand-coloured etching with stipple, aquatint border.

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61  Illustration from Amors experimentalphysikalisches Taschenbuch (1798).

Taschenbuch (1798), one of the most explicit pornographic writings of the German Enlightenment, included an extraordinary image in which a gentleman and a lady are swaying on swings.12 While she stretches out her arms towards him, bare-breasted, his lowered ­trousers reveal his erect penis, clear proof of the therapy’s success. There is perhaps no better example of the mechanical uses of the swing than some of the scenes in Juliette; or, The Prosperities of Vice (1797–1801), the novel by the Marquis de Sade that served as a sequel to Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791). In the manuscript copy of this strange novel still preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, Sade crossed out the first of the subtitles – The Successes of Bad Behaviour – to accentuate, in the second version, the even more marked parallelism in the story of these two sisters whose lives were divided between the pains of virtue and the pleasures of vice. Thus, while Justine will fail in her attempts to remain virtuous, Juliette will be rewarded for her decision to throw herself into the arms of prostitution. The rehabilitation of this famous libertine author, who was committed to a mental sanatorium suffering from erotomania, culmin­ated in the extraordinary exhibition that the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, devoted to his work at the end of 2014. A faithful representative 203

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of the dark night, Sade has gone down in Western academic history as the writer of the unnameable, of the instinct that pulses behind moral convention. Some of the greatest writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries considered him a source of inspiration, either for his supposed indifference to the events narrated in his works, like Flaubert, or for his philosophy of cruelty, like Tolstoy. Surrealism linked him to the visual culture of disproportion, while the French Bibliothèque Nationale placed his works in a special section, appropriately named ‘Inferno’. In the pages of his works, brutality, selfish desire and unrestricted and unrestrained pleasure were expressed through a delirious verbosity. Almost all the lessons in this new form of exercise operate in the same way. First the words penetrate. Then the organs. The sentences travel so far through the body that one could say that the text advances because the words ejaculate. This interplay between things that enter and fluids that leave establishes a regime of activity based on the very simple logic of the inside and the outside. Between licentiousness and delicacy, between modesty and shamelessness, the lesson elimin­ ates the prejudices of conscience and the defences of remorse to the point of turning depravity into a habit. Described as an electric fluid – which is where, according to Sade, the principle of life resides – sexual desire reaches the nerves until there is nothing that can drown out the echo of its impetuosity. Although there are various examples of suspension and oscillation in Sade’s work, the sexual machination that interests us here comes from one woman, Princess Olympe, and is directed at another woman, Juliette, who is willing to satisfy the former’s desires. Olympe’s proposal involves five young maidens who, each in her own way, must engage in a kind of sexual activity that, in this context, can only be considered ‘elevated’. The swing takes on a central role for two reasons. First, because Juliette will have to sit on one that consists of nothing more than a cloth, a shawl, an escarpolette (swing), held in place by three ropes.13 While the first two of these ropes hold it to the ceiling, the end of the third is in the hands of the princess, whose greatest and almost single desire is to watch without intervening, only transmitting with one hand a slight back-and-forth movement to her obedient 204

Sex 62 Illustration from Marquis de Sade, La Nouvelle Justine, ou Les malheurs de la vertu; suivie de L’histoire de Juliette, sa soeur (1797), vol. viii.

and compliant lover, while she uses the other hand to masturbate. The relationship between Juliette and Olympe is not only homosexual, it is homonymous, for at the same time as Juliette swings (se branle), Olympe masturbates (se branle). There is nothing strange in this confluence between swinging and masturbation, because the same verb (se branler) can refer both to the autoerotic drive and to the swinging movement: both lead to intoxication, both are the result of an oscillatory movement and both take place through a repetitive action that, to paraphrase Bernard de Mandeville, finds satisfaction when ‘the skin blushes and the flesh glows’ (see Chapter One).

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Reversal Even though swinging may facilitate copulation, the sexual uses of the swing do not depend so much on the horizontal movement of the lovers as they do on their relative positions. As with jumping or tossing in a blanket, swinging brings into play not only the alternation between inside and outside, but the much more radical relationship between above and below. The coming and going of the pram affects hierarchy and encourages the exchange of clothes, postures and gestures. This reversal of the generally accepted order already appears in the fête galante, with the nobles disguised as shepherds, but also in the sexual position where the woman vindicates her pleasure at the expense of the ridicule and scorn of the male who serves as her saddle. The swing is a dangerous machine because it questions the subjective feeling of differentiation: that which allows us to orientate ourselves in the physical, moral and social space. In Fragonard’s famous painting, for example, the artist places the commissioner below, in the sexual position that the European erotic tradition reserved for women, while a third figure pushes the woman from behind, like a vulgar sodomite. Different sexual positions have begun to receive attention from cultural historians. After all, human flesh is not without social conventions. During the Renaissance, it was Raphael’s disciple Giulio Romano who gave new impetus to the classification system inherited from antiquity. Despite working for Pope Clement vii, this painter submitted to the press sixteen erotic designs that corresponded to the decorations of the rooms in Pompeii known as apodyteria (the changing rooms where the Romans left their clothes in large baskets before entering the baths).14 The common source of the apodyterium and Romano’s designs was the teachings of Elephantis, a poetess of the first century bce famous for having written a book on sexual positions. Romano’s modi – as they came to be called – were finally distributed as prints in 1524 and, despite the scandal, were soon accompanied by equally obscene sonnets written by Pietro Aretino, the most famous Renaissance pornographer.15 Before delving into the modi, we must take a short detour through a text that at first glance appears far removed from our subject. We 206

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must begin our study of the history of sexual oscillation with the comments of Girolamo Mercuriale in his De arte gymnastica of 1569. While discussing the movements of gestation, this famous Paduan physician acknowledged that he did not know what the ancients might have meant by the word petaurus: ‘all we can say is that it is a kind of wooden machine that threw people into the air by means of a wheel.’ The etymology seemed to him to correspond to this idea: pet, which seeks, aurum, the air, he wrote. To reinforce his theory, he echoed a text from Juvenal’s Satires (c. 100–127 ce), in which, again according to Mercuriale, the Roman poet wondered whether there was perhaps a greater pleasure than being thrown through the air on a petaurus.16 He understood that this object must be like the game known in antiquity as oscellarum (or, in its nominative form, ­oscillum) and wondered whether it was not this machine that

63 Girolamo ­Mercuriale, ­‘Oscellae vel ­petaurum’, ­illustration in De arte gymnastica libri sex (1573).

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Avicenna recommended to stop perspiration.17 Shrouded in doubt, he then added that ‘some coins minted in the time of Augustus and Tiberius show this type of swinging game (oscellarum ludus), in which it is not clear whether it is a practice of swinging, despite the name, or of swinging with the intention of throwing the petaurist into the air, which can also be carried out by means of a simple blanket, as some other authors, such as Martial or Suetonius, recognize.’18 What is interesting in this quotation is not the difference between a swinging machine and a trampoline – to which we will return later – but the sources Mercuriale uses to trace the origins of the device. The references to Martial and Suetonius, two first-century writers, are fascinating, for they both mention the petaurus in the context of digressions of a highly sexual nature. In one of the most sycophantic epigrams of the Spanish-Roman author Martial, he compares the petaurus not only to the trampoline that the acrobats use to improve their jumps, but to the penis. Since the jumper is also called a petaurus, or a petaurist, Martial’s epigram, according to which ‘Lydia is as open as the ass of a bronze horse, as the hoop that rings its copper jewels, as the wheel that the petaurus so often crosses and strikes’, reflects well the similarity between the male sexual organ that not only propels, but also moves back and forth.19 To understand the looseness of the prostitute Lydia’s sex – the object of Martial’s mockery – nothing better than to look at the image that accompanies a text from 1599 by the acrobat Arcangelo Tuccaro in which a jumper, a petaurist, jumps through hoops.20 Used as a trampoline, the petaurus allowed complex manoeuvres to be performed where the head and feet temporarily exchanged their relative positions, either by leaping over the sharp points of swords or by jumping through a set of large hoops arranged in a row for the purpose.21 Sometimes compared to the wooden ramp used by hens, it was associated with various objects, described in a thousand ways and depicted on very few occasions.22 The image that accompanies Mercuriale’s text in the edition of 1573 leaves no doubt as to the nature of the device. Probably inspired by an earlier drawing by the Neapolitan painter and landscape painter Pirro Ligorio, the print depicts a stool suspended by a rope that can be swung by means of a pulley. The fact that those involved in the 208

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64 Illustration from Arcangelo Tuccaro, Trois dialogues de l’exercice de sauter et voltiger en l’air (1599).

exercise are young women reflects the extent to which Ligorio, or Mercuriale himself, linked the exercise of the swing to the festivals of classical Greece. The design and composition of the engraving are also very similar to those of a tessera (a coin or token) identified in one of the great numismatic compendia of the mid-nineteenth century.23 The corresponding volume of the Trésor de numismatique et de g­ lyptique (1843) included a photograph of a Roman coin from the reign of Emperor Tiberius (14–37 ce), in which two people were swinging a woman, in the same posture and with the same arrangement as the image that accompanied Mercuriale’s text.24 In his treatise on archaeology, Ligorio himself acknowledges that he collected these coins, and we cannot rule out the possibility that the one now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris was once his own. More importantly for our purposes, the Thesaurus considered that this was not a normal coin but one of those known as spintriae, the same type of tessera ­discussed by Ligorio in his writings on archaeology.25 The function of these coins, which showed an image of a sexual nature on the obverse and a figure surrounded by laurels on the reverse, has not yet been clarified.26 The enigma began with the sixteenth­-century Italian scholar Sebastiano Erizzo, who, following the opinions of Tacitus and Suetonius, associated them with the sexual 209

arc of feeling 65 Roman coin, 1st century, imperial bronze coin collection.

acts that took place on the island of Capri at the request of Tiberius.27 Since each scene on the coins was accompanied by a number, Erizzo assumed, following Suetonius, that this number referred to the room in which the different sexual exchanges took place.28 Almost a century later, in 1664, Ezechiel Spanheim assumed that the number on each coin represented the price to be paid in Roman brothels, depending on the service demanded. Echoing Ligorio’s writings, Spanheim, a diplomat by profession, used the term spintriae to denote these coins. But the etymology of the word was as unclear as the use of the tessera. For some authors, the name was derived from the Greek word for sphincter. Apparently, that was also the (humiliating) nickname Tiberius gave to his lover Vitellius, later emperor. For others, it came from the term spinter: the bracelet worn by some Roman prostitutes on the forearm. Whatever the case, Ligorio may have seen these coins in Naples and begun to hoard them.29 The representation of a swing on this type of tessera causes perplexity. The petaurus seems to interrupt a series ranging from fellatio to sodomy via a seemingly limited number of sexual practices. The late nineteenth-century historian of gambling Louis Becq de Fouquières found unjustified the consideration of this coin as one of the spintriae.30 In his own drawing of the tessera, he noted the 210

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similarity of the design to the engraving of the Arte gymnastica, but also reinforced its position by blurring the erect penis, clearly visible in the original. From our point of view, the coin, on the obverse of which was a number xi surrounded by laurels, could indeed find a cultural location in the geography of sexual practices. After all, the image could refer either to the deflowering of a virgin or, even more likely, to the sexual position known since antiquity as ‘Hector’s horse’ or, since the time of Apuleius, as Venus pendula. In no other position is it more evident what the history of sexuality owes to the mount of Venus: to the circumstance both physical and political that it is Venus who rides, who oscillates, who swings, who places herself in a position to control the impulse of her desire. The journey of this tessera from the time of Tiberius, perhaps lost on the island of Capri, to appear in Ligorio’s hands in the mid­ sixteenth century, does not end with the illustration accompanying Mercuriale’s text on the virtues of passive physical exercise. The same image reappears in the frescoes in the games room of the Castello Estense in Ferrara (illus. 44). Made in about 1573 from sketches by Ligorio himself, these paintings reposition the swing in a playful space. Sex, health and play come together in this icon of swinging that circulates through a variety of practices. Whatever the use to which the spintriae were put, the petaurus had a sexual significance related to one of the sixteen classical positions: the same position that appeared in the modi of Romano, the apodyterium of Pompeii and the verses of Elephantis. On the obverse of the coin, there was an xi. But why?

Venus pendula The expression Venus pendula appears for the first time in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. This work, written around the middle of the second century ce and known since the time of Augustine of Hippo as The Golden Ass or Asinus aureus, tells how the young Lucius became an ass, how he was used as a saddle, and how he found comfort and healing under the protection of the goddess Isis.31 In the scene that interests us here, the young Pothis, posing as Venus and enhancing the idea of amor militaris, climbs on top of him and, in rapid and lascivious agitation, gives full satisfaction to love with her swaying. 211

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According to the nineteenth-century scholar Friedrich Karl Forberg’s manual of classical erotology, this sexual position in which the roles are exchanged, ‘so that the woman takes the role of the rider and the man the horse’, was called ‘Hector’s horse’ in antiquity, not in the sense that Hector had a horse, but in the much less obvious sense that he himself could serve as a mount.32 Both iconographic and textual evidence long pre-dates Apuleius’ novel.33 In his Art of Love (c. 2 ce), Ovid disputed the widely held view that attributed to Andromache a strange predilection for equines. Given the height and length of her legs, Ovid concluded that she could never really ride her husband that way.34 The comedian Aristophanes also referred to this sexual position at the beginning of his comedy Lysistrata (c. 412 bce). Clonice, one of the protagonists, explains that the Theban women will all be late, for ‘at dawn they have parted their legs to get on to the ships.’35 Actually, it is not only on to the ships. The Greek word keles, which initially refers to a saddle and, by extension, to everything related to riding, including boats, also has a clear sexual connotation. The Theban women will be late because they were already swinging in the morning, with their legs wide open. According to Forberg, horseback riding was also the favourite posture of Lysidicé, the famous harlot who liked to dominate men by straddling them. Of her, Asclepiades wrote in one of his epigrams that ‘she had mounted many a stallion without ever reddening her thighs with the swinging.’36 All these stories suggest that the redistribution of roles occurs on different levels and generally involves a reversal of rank and hierarchy. The dominant position of women, described in the manner of a ­struggle of a military nature, has as its counterpart the redemption of those who find through this game of disguises a way to regain humanity, like Lucius in Apuleius’ Golden Ass, or manhood, like Encolpius in the Satyricon. The latter novel, attributed to the Roman writer Gaius Petronius and written in the time of Emperor Nero, in the first century ce, focuses on the search for a remedy against the imissio penis (or impotence) to which the god Priapus condemned Encolpius. Near the end of the book, Encolpius watches a young woman make love to an old man in the swinging posture. The scene explains how 212

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Philomena, a fortune hunter, uses the beauty of her children to charm Eumolpus, another of the protagonists. Despite his age, he invites the young woman to a ‘love match’, but as he has presented himself in the city as gouty and half paralysed, and not wanting his deception to be discovered, he asks her to take the role of the man and throw herself on him. He then orders his servant Corax to get on all fours under the bed to sway him with his back. The young man, writes Petronius, begins to rock him with slow, regular movements in line with those of the young woman, but as the moment of enjoyment approaches, the old man begins to shout like a madman, asking Corax to redouble his speed: ‘And thus, swaying between the girl and the slave, the old man would have been said to be swinging.’37 This scene, which makes the audience laugh, also marks the recovery of Encolpius’ sexual potency. Far from being a Roman story alone, the position known as Venus pendula or mulier super virum (woman on top of the male) finds its founding myth in the Isiac religions. Upon learning that the body of Osiris had been torn to pieces, ‘Isis searched for him by sailing across the marshes in a papyrus boat.’38 When she found his penis, and saw that it retained a modicum of life, she perched on it and tucked it inside herself while adopting the shape of a kite. In a papyrus preserved in the Louvre, Paris, this form of conception is described in the following words: ‘I am your sister Isis. No other god or goddess has done what I have done. I have taken the position of the male, being a woman, so that your name might live on earth, so that your divine seed might enter my body.’39 To understand this image in its entirety, it should be emphasized that Isis sits in a dominant position not only over the penis of her dead husband but also over Osiris, whose name means precisely ‘he who makes seats’.40 By the time Apuleius wrote his Metamorphoses, the festival in honour of Isis known as navigium isidis (Navigation of Isis) was in full force in the Roman world. The procession of the goddess emulates the movements of the sea, but also her sexual oscillation as she rests on the penis of Osiris. The image is not only found in ancient Egypt but attributed by the Romans to the societies of the upper Nile.41 There is no shortage of visual evidence that history has bequeathed us in which the celebration of the rising of the river is accompanied by sexual 213

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rituals relating to the sexual position of the swing. One of the most interesting appears in the frescoes adorning the walls of the columbarium of the Villa Pamphili in Rome, painted during the reign of Emperor Augustus and now in the collection of the National Roman Museum, in the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme. In Romano’s modi, what we call the ‘cowgirl’ position today contains many interesting elements, beginning with the presence of a small Cupid who brazenly shows his buttocks to the two lovers. It is also the only one of all the positions in which the lovers make use of a movable platform that would allow them to move around the room, that is to say, a pram or a swing. Through the use of the machine, the lovers swing, so to speak, twice. On the one hand, it is the male body that serves as a mount, as in Petronius’ Satyricon and Martial’s epigrams. On the other hand, it is Cupid himself who provides the impetus to the carriage. Forming an inverted plank with his body, supported by his feet and hands, the man offers his sex to the woman, who introduces it into her body with one hand while the other holds a harness that comes out of her lover’s neck. The sexual act takes place against a geometric background, with a floor and platform composed of squares. Just as Renaissance painters were beginning to understand the laws of perspective, Romano played with this disturbance of order, to which the poet Pietro Aretino later added the following lines: Don’t give the swing anymore, you Cupid bastard. Stop it now and don’t be a mule because this one who holds my cock while I’m laughing I want to fuck her in the pussy and not in the ass.42 In this strange correspondence between positions and verses, Aretino introduces a touch of humour when the male complains about the awkwardness of his posture. While begging Cupid not to pull the cart any further, for he prefers ‘fotter in potta, e non in culo’ (to fuck her in the pussy and not in the ass), he also complains that not even the most stubborn of horses could withstand the damage of leaning on its hands and feet. The sight of his beloved’s buttocks, however, 214

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66 Woodcut from Sonetti lussuriosi (c. 1527), illustrated by Giulio Romano and engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi.

allows the operation. For the male in the sonnet, the ass is the mirror of his being, the beautiful white-and-pink-tinted ass without which no erection would be possible: Magenta and milky ass If it weren’t for the fact that looking at you warms me up my dick wouldn’t be stiff for a moment.43 Romano’s positions found a place in many other expressive forms of Renaissance visual culture. Among them we have the fresco of the Camera delle Aquile in the Palazzo del Te in Mantua, where Romano arrived at the suggestion of the diplomat Balthasar Castiglione to decorate the rooms of the Gonzaga family. Mixing the ancient with the modern, the painter returns to the pose of the Venus pendula. Although the male has been replaced by a goat, the approach is the 215

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same: the woman, astride the goat, clings tightly to her lover’s horns so as not to fall off. The obsession with the mulier equitans, with the equestrienne, the horsewoman or horsebreaker, with the modern Cuban ­jinetera (female jockey) or the American cowgirl, is burgeoning in the modern world. For Michael Harrison, a scholar of prostitution in the Victorian world, for example, a good nineteenth-century prostitute had to do two things well: mount her clients and clean them out.44 It is curious that scholars of Carnival, even those inspired by the anthropology of bacchantic rituals, failed to realize that games of inversion produce not only a change of dress, but a more primal dramatization guided by aesthetic authority: ‘Sometimes inversion involved simply adopting certain roles or forms of behaviour characteristic of the opposite sex. Women played at being men; men played at being women; men played at being women who played at being men,’ wrote the famous historian of the modern world Natalie Zemon Davis.45 The posture of the swing has also received attention in other cultures and times. It appears globally, whether explicitly or symbolically, from the South China Sea to the Americas. We have already seen how in Jin Ping Mei, a work first published in 1610, some of the young girls in the novel are shown swinging during spring festivals. In the case of the love-making between Krishna and Rādhā described by Jayadeva, we can identify the sexual postures involved by the different sounds of the shepherdess’s bracelets or anklets: ‘He made love to me in various positions/ First my anklets rang in the air/ Then did the bells of my hip-belt.’46 The poet has no qualms about describing the lovers’ passions or exploring their feelings, including the god’s fixation with Rādhā breasts, which he considers more delicious than coconut fruit. His great fear, however, begins when, in the throes of rapturous passion and in an attempt to win his love, the young woman does something that the poet judges reckless: ‘She climbed on top of him!’47 Like the Venus who restores Lucius’ humanity in The Golden Ass, Rādhā appears in this scene as a warrior of love. And as in Aretino’s verses, here the male – a god in this case – protests at the discomfort of the position. Chained by her arms, crushed by the weight of 216

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her breasts, lacerated by her nails, with his lips trapped and bitten by her teeth, the lover has somehow felt pleasure. ‘Paradoxical indeed is the way of love,’ explains the poet.48 Of course, the brilliance and strength of the encounter have also left Rādhā with visible signs of fatigue. Her hips stop moving, her arms feel heavy, her chest heaves and her eyes close. Her breasts are scratched, her eyes reddened, her lipstick smeared, her hair dishevelled and her skirt separated from its golden lace. The effects of love are so violently dramatic that the last of the poem’s cantos is justly dedicated to the restitution of the order that had been suspended. After passion, peace returns to the bodily

67 Bartolomeo Pinelli, after Giulio Romano, etching for the series La scuola di Priapo, 1810.

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expression of the exhausted body. Rādhā asks Krishna to repaint her eyes, to restore the erased lipstick, to reattach her earrings and to ­rearrange her curls, the votives on her breast and the flowers in her hair. The history of sexual positions can be known only through indir­ ect evidence. What we know of the ‘swing’ position has come to us through literary clues, iconographic sources and health treatises. The text written by a Spanish Moor exiled in Tunisia, and which the Puerto Rican scholar Luce López-Baralt has described, for lack of a better title, as a ‘Spanish Kama Sutra’, warns against the practice of this position for both hygienic and moral reasons.49 The view is also present in other classics of erotic literature, such as The Perfumed Garden, an Arabic treatise from the early fifteenth century, written in what is now Tunisia. Its author, echoing Avicenna, advises his readers not to allow the woman to perform intercourse while mounted on top, because ‘in this position, some drops of her seminal fluid may enter the canal of your cock and cause acute urethritis.’ Later on, he also insists that ‘If you perform coitus with a woman raised above you, your spine will suffer and your heart will be affected; and if, being in this position the slightest drop of the usual secretions of the vagina enters the canal of your urethra, a painful constriction may come upon you.’50 The same idea appeared even more dramatically in the pages of Boccaccio’s Decameron. In the third tale of the ninth day, the husband believes he has been left in a state of conception because of his wife’s habit of riding on top of him during intercourse.51

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A

ccording to the legend narrated by the Persian poet Ferdowsi in his epic poem Shahnameh (1010), Jamshid, one of the two sons of the sun god, has an aerial throne built from which he can contemplate the benefits of his reign. A great benefactor of mankind, the king, who watches his work from on high, institutes the feast of the new day, Nowruz, which many of his subjects celebrate by imitating his flight by means of swings.1 Sitting in mid-air, on a throne suspended by demons called dívs, Jamshid loses his head, believing himself to be a god. In the grip of vanity, his throne is occupied by Zahhák, an evil spirit who brings black magic, snake worship, human sacrifices and idolatry to the country for a thousand years. Throughout this book, we have come across the swing in the most unexpected places: from the Buddhist caves of Maharashtra to the handscrolls of imperial China, and from the red-and-black vessels of classical Greece to the very centre of the city of Bangkok. Readers’ prejudices were challenged with respect to the cultural value of an instrument that today seems irrelevant in its function and puerile in its performance. And yet, the swing appears insistently in the global history of humankind, whether in Totonac figures or Baroque representations (illus. 46). Its historical uses cover such disparate things as the cure of physical and moral illnesses, the treatment of various forms of impotence and the avoidance of suicidal behaviour. Long before it was relegated to the playground, it served to expel ideas or bodily matters through the production of fear, retching and vomiting. 219

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Present in Persian legends as much as in classical mythology, its story can be told in two different ways, whether we choose the object or the experience as a point of reference. As far as experience is concerned, we have emphasized in this book those zones of confluence: those collective passions and communal feelings that allow us to trace a global history of the human. Vertigo, disorientation, anguish, but also amusement, fun, exalt­ ation and self-absorption constitute the anthropological minimum upon which the same values and emotional standards can be shared by diverse human groups. In all cases, swaying presents itself as an occasion for the controlled production of cognitive and sensorial disorders. The former appear in any alteration of consciousness in which we believe we are what we are not, or think we are where we are not. In the latter, sensations are accompanied by phantasmagorical effluvia in which the body perceives what the mind is unable to process, as suggested for different reasons by both Markus Herz and Sigmund Freud. Illusion, hallucination, fear, discomfort or terror accompany the phenomenon of disorientation, just as anguish arises from the s­ uspension of the body and the iteration of the same kind of movement. There is not, however, only one form of disorientation, but at least three. Following Kant’s interesting doctrine, we have suggested in this book that the history of experience must be approached with trifocal glasses: those that allow us to pass from personal to communal and social experiences. A phenomenology of swinging that attends only to the testimony of the person principally affected, leaving aside his or her community ties or social context, would be of little use. Those who swing do so according to shared values, mythologies, practices, rituals and beliefs. The swing reflects very well this collective character of the different ways in which we may become disorientated or play with disorientation. Whether through equivocation, pulsation, imposition, distraction, melancholy or excitement, the history of the swing cannot be separated from the tripartite character of the different ways in which the excitation of the vestibular system may trigger a culturally significant experience. From a social point of view, the history of the swing is also traversed by legendary stories and ritual processes. Whether we speak 220

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of the mythology of classical Greece or of the folk tales relating to the emergence of swings in ancient Persia or pre-imperial China, our history is permeated by emotional formulas, by ways of life characterized by the perseverance of common traits and shared myths. In the history of the swing, drunkenness, of course, but also murder, suicide and ambition always revolve around an inevitable impulse, whether it be that of the shepherdesses who set out in search of the ‘god of all yogis’, that of Erigone in search of her father’s corpse, that of Phaedra in pursuit of Hippolytus, or that of Duke Wen of Jin ready to set fire to the forest in which the most loyal of all his advisors hides. The coming and going of the Siamese spear across the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal are combined with fear and trembling, with enemy paralysis and infertile movement. In all cases, swaying goes along with trickery and incantations, with sympathetic magic or, as in the case of the aiora of classical Greece, with apotropaic formulas. But these legends and stories would be nothing without the social processes in which they are inscribed, without the collective, ritualized forms that allow the telling and retelling of very similar stories. Far from being a mere pastime, the ritual action is inscribed in a festival of licence and, more particularly, in a process of social reversal. For a while at least, the Thai minister of agriculture plays the role of the god, while the concubines of the great families of the Middle Kingdom are able to look over the fence. The Akha women, as much as the girls of Tamil Nadu or Ubrique in Cádiz, will be able to put an end to their gender obligations and, at least for some time, climb on swings with the illusion of freedom and emancipation. All these rituals invert the hierarchical regime, allowing the transposition of estates, classes and genders. Whoever is at the bottom will be at the top, and whoever is at the top will enjoy being at the bottom. Social transvestism is also linked to the symbolic power of sex, through the consummation of a practice that places women, at least for a time, in a dominant position. The painter Lilly Martin Spencer, of French descent, who emigrated to the United States after the Revolution of 1830, bequeathed to us one of the most significant images of these forms of transposition (illus. 45). In a large-format picture made in 1864, she painted a family scene of Fourth of July celebrations, during 221

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which her own husband had fallen to the ground, unable to support his weight on the device on which he was trying to swing. The history of the swing is also the history of an object, which is today practically insignificant. Our relationship with the remains of these shipwrecks, with these objects that, like the zombies, continue on after death, is elusive. Composed of and armed with things as different as beaks and teeth, inside them we find forms and figures, mater­ials and structures that appear in an obsessive, reiterative, in­­ decent way, in very different territories and cultures. Present in some of the most emblematic handscrolls of Chinese culture, a faithful reminder of the restoration of the Chakri dynasty in Thailand, over­ represented in Hindustani painting or responsible for the Persian New Year, the swing comes about in the most unexpected places, whether it be Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Freud’s work, Frazer’s anthropology or Huizinga’s game theory. Here, too, it is worth asking what must have happened for history to be able to exercise its magisterium. What I have called in these pages the ‘regime of relevance’, what confers authority on the anecdote, what makes it possible to transform a local story into a shared experience or a personal experience into an appreciable testimony, is at the very root of the exercise of all history, but it is inevitable when we are dealing with experiences and objects that have remained, so to speak, hidden and abandoned in plain view. The emotional landscape of the swing, that mixture of things and feelings, of people, of groups and laws, could always be pushed into a corner; there could always be a voice from beyond shouting ‘Who cares?’, ‘So what?’ The answer is simple, though. It matters to us all, not of course as far as the value of the anecdote is concerned, but as the possibility of tracing the conditions of shared experience, of the ways in which communal culture and social rule are inscribed, ­ritualistically, ­imperceptibly, into the body. The story of the swing does indeed still affect us for two other ­reasons. The first concerns love, the universal capacity of human beings to transform their feeling into law, to invert, at times, the order of acculturation, so that improvisation replaces norm, freedom replaces rule, will replaces convention and memory replaces oblivion. The experience of oscillation is part of a visceral economy, of an 222

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aesthetic authority, hardly conceptualized, in which the body feels liberated from the social and communal forms of ordering the world. The second reason pertains to the way in which we interpret our ­leisure time, perhaps forgetting that most of its constituent elements, its emotional components, are nothing more than ritualized ways of favouring self-deception. Both issues haunt us in the first decades of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, we see new fanaticisms flourishing, built on the milestone of the ‘I feel’. On the other, we still do not understand the spontaneous formation of homogeneous communities, sometimes transformed into powerful media groups. The history of the swing is a forgotten chapter in the history of humanity. It is a feature of our collective story, one that unites us, culturally, as a species. Hidden in its comings and goings are some of the most basic ways in which it is possible to rise above the animal condition, to throw off the yoke of the present, our physical limitations and our social conventions. The swing is more than a charming amusement; its ubiquitous presence across our past is evidence of its importance to us and an ever-recognizable display of humanity’s boundless pursuit of joy and freedom.

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All translations are my own, unless otherwise specified. Introduction 1 On 18 October 1940 the Parks and Gardens section of the Madrid City Council, through the head gardener, made a request to introduce some changes to the gardens of the Villa of Madrid. Madrid, Archives, File 16-382–423. 2 See Hans Wentzel, ‘Jean-Honoré Fragonards “Schaukel”: Bemerkungen zur Ikonographie der Schaukel in der Bildenden Kunst’, Wallraf-RichartzJahrbuch, 26 (1964), pp. 187–218, and Donald Posner, ‘The Swinging Women of Watteau and Fragonard’, Art Bulletin, lxiv/1 (March 1982), pp. 75–88. 3 R. L. Hobson, The Wares of the Ming Dynasty (London, 1962). 4 On this subject, see Colleen Becker, ‘Aby Warburg’s Pathosformel as Methodological Paradigm’, Journal of Art Historiography, ix (December 2013), pp. 1–25. 5 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science’, in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, ca, 1999), pp. 89–103. 6 Giovanni Careri, ‘Aby Warburg’, L’Homme, 165 ( January–March 2003), www.lhomme.revues.org. 7 Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath [1989] (New York, 1991). 8 Ibid., p. 242. 9 Javier Moscoso, ‘Emotional Experiences’, History of Psychology, xxiv/2 (2021), pp. 136–41. 10 Javier Moscoso, ‘From the History of Emotions to the History of Experience’, in Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History (Eighteenth Century to the Present), ed. Elena Delgado, Pura Fernández and Jo Labanyi (Nashville, tn, 2016), pp. 171–95; and Rob Boddice and Mark Smith, Emotion, Sense, Experience (Cambridge, 2020). 11 Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (London, 2007). 12 Barbara H. Rosenwein, Anger: The Conflicted History of an Emotion (New Haven, ct, 2020). 13 James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 3rd edn, Part iii: The Dying God (New York, London, Toronto, 1911), pp. 277–85.

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arc of feeling 14 Tangentially, Frazer mentioned the Muslim festival in Dardistan. In Islam, indeed, the swing has been and still is used in two major events. The first is the festival of Eid al-Fitr, which ends the fasting month of Ramadan. The second is at the ritual swinging associated with the return of pilgrims from Mecca, which takes place in the north of Yemen, including the capital, Sana’a. This hajj celebration is performed with swings known as al-mahdra. 15 Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy [1951], trans. William R. Trask (London, 1964), especially ‘Magical Flight’, pp. 477–81. 16 William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001), p. 129. 17 See Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Sediments of Time’, in Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, trans. and ed. Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Stanford, ca, 2018), pp. 3–10. 1 Emotions 1 Aristotle, De Anima, Book iii, ch. 1. 2 See Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago, il, and London, 1987). 3 See Nicholas J. Wade, Perception and Illusion: Historical Perspectives (New York, 2005), especially pp. 89–96. 4 Rob Boddice, A History of Feelings (London, 2019). 5 Rebekka Ladewig, Schwindel: Eine Epistemologie der Orientierung (Tübingen, 2012). 6 Jan Evangelista Purkyně, ‘Beiträge zur Kenntnis des Schwindels aus heautognostischen Daten’ [1820], in Opera Omnia, vol. ii (Prague, 1937), pp. 15–37. 7 See Michael Hagner, ‘Psychophysiologie und Selbsterfahrung: Metamorphosen des Schwindels und der Aufmerksamkeit des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Aufmerksamkeiten: Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation vii, ed. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann (Munich, 2001), pp. 241–64; as well as Ladewig, Schwindel, pp. 245–76. 8 Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Traité du vertige (Paris, 1737), p. 8. 9 Ibid., pp. 9–10. 10 Ian Hacking, ‘La Mettrie’s Soul: Vertigo, Fever, Massacre, and The Natural History’, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, xxvi/1 (2009), pp. 179–202. 11 Thomas Willis, ‘Of the Vertigo, or a Turning Around in the Head’, in Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes [1672], available at https://wellcomecollection.org, pp. 145–53. 12 Ibid., p. 145. 13 Joseph Frank, ‘De vertigine’, in Praxeos medicae universae praecepta, Part ii, vol. i, Book 1, De morbis systematis nervorum (Leipzig, 1826–43), available at https://wellcomecollection.org. 14 Ibid., p. 575. 15 J. Lanzoni, Tubarum sonus remedium vertiginis, in Acta physico-medica Academiae Caesareae Leopoldino-Carolinae naturae curiosorum (Nuremberg, 1727), vol. i, p. 88. 16 Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life, 2nd edn (London, 1794), vol. i, p. 279.

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References 17 Ibid., p. 282. 18 Ibid. 19 Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht [1798] (Berlin, 1869), p. 62. 20 For a history of attention in particular, see Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (London, 1999). 21 Darwin, Zoonomia, p. 284. 22 Ibid., p. 301. 23 Charles Darwin to Robert Waring Darwin, 1 March 1832, in Correspondence See Darwin Project, www.darwinproject.ac.uk. 24 Markus Herz, Versuch über den Schwindel (Berlin, 1791). For a discussion of Herz’s work in relation to Kant, see Jason M. Peck, ‘Vertigo Ergo Sum: Kant, his Jewish “Students” and the Origins of Romanticism’, European Romantic Review, xxvi/1 ( January 2015), pp. 29–41. For a good introduction to Herz’s thought, see Martin L. Davies, Identity or History? Markus Herz and the End of the Enlightenment (Detroit, mi, 1995). 25 Immanuel Kant, Was Heisst; Sich im Denken Orientieren? [1786], in Werke, vol. iv, ed. Artur Buchenau and Ernst Cassirer (Berlin, 1913). 26 Ibid., p. 353. 27 Ibid. 28 See Peck, ‘Vertigo Ergo Sum’. 29 Herz, Versuch, p. xliv. 30 Ibid., pp. xl–xli. 31 The best reference on the central place of vertigo at the end of the Enlightenment is Rolf-Peter Janz, ‘Enleitung’, in Schwindelerfahrungen: Zur kulturhistorischen Diagnose eines vieldeutigen Symptoms, ed. Rolf-Peter Jans et al. (Leiden, 2003). 32 Herz, Versuch, pp. 107–15. 33 The Lancet, 11 January 1862, p. 151. 34 Darwin, Zoonomia, p. 286. 35 ‘After having travelled some days in a stage coach, and particularly when we lie down in bed, and compose ourselves to sleep; in this case it is observable, that the rattling noise of the coach, as well as the undulatory motion, haunts us.’ Ibid., p. 285 (emphasis mine). 36 The English word ‘swindler’ has the same origin. See Jans et al., Schwindelerfahrungen, p. 10. 37 Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism [1926] (San Diego, ca, 1929), p. 248. 38 Jan Evangelista Purkyně, ‘Beiträge zur näheren Kenntnis des Schwindels aus Heautognotischen Daten’, Medicinische Jahrbücher des kaiserlichköniglichen österreichischen Staates, vi/2 (1820), p. 89. 39 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, quoted by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. See Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, eds, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 16–17. 40 The arrangement of the paintings in the room may have changed since my last visit, in 2018.

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arc of feeling 41 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or [1843], trans. Howard V. Hon and Edna H. Hon (Princeton, nj, 1987), Part i, p. 289. 42 Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition [1843], English trans. by Walter Lowrie (Princeton, nj, 1946). 43 Ibid., p. 5. 44 Ibid., p. 6. 45 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, pp. 288–9. 46 Ibid., p. 299. 47 On the relationship between Hammershøi’s work and Kierkegaard’s philosophy, see Bridget Alsdorf, ‘Hammershøi’s Either/Or’, Critical Inquiry, xlii/2 (2016), pp. 268–305. More generally, see Kasper Monrad, ed., Hammershøi and Europe (Munich, London and New York, 2012). 48 See Ramón del Castillo, Filósofos de paseo (Madrid, 2020). 49 Alfred de Musset, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (Paris, 2010), p. 73. 50 On the history of the gallows, see Jack Shuler, The Thirteenth Turn: A History of the Noose (New York, 2014). 51 Homer, Odyssey, Book xxii, 465–75, English trans. Emily Wilson, The Odyssey (London, 2017), p. 770: As doves or thrushes spread their wings to fly home to their nests, but someone sets a trap – they crash into a net, a bitter bedtime; just so the girls, their heads all in a row, were strung up with the noose around their necks to make their death an agony. They gasped, feet twitching for a while, but not for long. 52 See E. D. Underdown, ‘The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England’, in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 116–37. 53 Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India (London, 1889), vol. ii, pp. 254–5. See also Geoffrey A. Oddie, Popular Religion, Elites and Reform: HookSwinging and Its Prohibition in Colonial India, 1800–1894 (New Delhi, 1995); and Francesco Brighenti, ‘Hindu Devotional Ordeals and their Shamanic Parallels’, Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies, xix/4 (2012), pp. 103–75. 54 Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities, trans. Philip Mairet (London, 1960), pp. 85–7, 207–9. 55 Pierre Le Loyer, Histoires des spectres (Paris, 1605), p. 104. 56 Ibid., pp. 865, 550. 57 V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770– 1868 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 90–105. See also Thomas W. Laqueur, ‘Crowds, Carnivals and the English States in English Executions’, in The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, ed. A.R.L Beier et al. (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 305–99.

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References 58 See José Manuel Fraile Gil, ‘Peleles y coplas de carnaval madrileño’, Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares, lxii/2 ( July–December 2007), pp. 207–28. Quotation at p. 225: ‘Estaba el pelele muy empelelao/ se tienta lo suyo, lo tiene arrugao/ le da con el dedo, lo quiere bullir/ y el pobre pelele se quiere morir’. 59 Jane Schuyler, ‘The “Malleus Maleficarum” and Baldung’s Witches’ Sabbath’, Notes in the History of Art, vi/3 (Spring 1987), pp. 20–26. 60 Michael Harner, ‘The Role of Hallucinogenic Plants in European Witchcraft’, in Hallucinogens and Shamanism, ed. Michael Harner (New York, 1972), pp. 127–50. 61 Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone [1791], trans. David Hawkes (London, 1986), vol. iii, ch. 63. 62 I have used the English edition in The Plum in the Golden Vase; or, Chin P’ing Mei, 5 vols, trans. David Tod Roy (Princeton, nj, 2001), vol. ii, ch. 25. 63 Guy de Maupassant, ‘Une Partie de campagne’, in Contes divers (Paris, 1988), p. 213. 64 See Laure Murat, La Maison du docteur Blanche: Histoire d’un asile et de ses pensionnaires, de Nerval à Maupassant (Paris, 2013). 65 Eva Cantarella, ‘Dangling Virgins: Myth, Ritual and the Place of Women in Ancient Greece’, in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, ma, 1986), pp. 57–68. 66 On the quotation from the Corpus Hippocraticum, see book viii. I have used the translation by Rebecca Flemming and Ann Ellis Hanson, ‘Hippocrates’ Peri Partheniôn (“Diseases of Young Girls”): Text and Translation’, Early Science and Medicine, iii/3 (1998), pp. 241–52. 67 Seneca, Phaedra, 100–103. 68 Servius, Commentarii in Vergilii Georgica, 2, 389. 69 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality [1905], trans. Ulrike Kistner, ed. Philippe Van Haute and Herman Westerink (London and New York, 2016). 70 Ibid., pp. 94–5. 71 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. i: The Evolution of Modesty, the Phenomenon of Sexual Periodicity, Auto-Erotism (Philadelphia, pa, 1901). See, especially, in this volume, ‘Auto-Erotism: A Study of the Spontaneous Manifestations of the Sexual Impulse’, pp. 110–38. 72 Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. i. 73 Ibid., p. 118. 74 Ibid., p. 120. 75 The term ‘hobby horse’ was also used during the seventeenth century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, with clear sexual connotations. On this subject, see the interesting book by Michael DePorte, Nightmares and Hobbyhorses: Swift, Sterne and Augustan Ideas of Madness (San Marino, ca, 1974). 76 See, for example, D. H. Lawrence, ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’, in Selected Stories, with an introduction by Louise Welsh (London, 2007). 77 Bernard de Mandeville, A Treatise of the Hypochondriak and Hysterick Diseases in Three Dialogues [1711], 3rd edn (London, 1730), pp. 305, 307.

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arc of feeling 78 See the corresponding entries in the dictionaries of Trévoux and Furetière. The former, for example, considers Branleur, euse, ‘il n’est guère en usage qu’un sens oideux et obscene.’ (‘It is rarely used, except in a vicious and obscene sense.’) Trévoux, Lorraine edition, Nancy, 1738–42. 79 Naifei Ding, Obscene Things: Sexual Politics in Jin Ping Mei (Durham, nc, 2002), especially ch. 6: ‘Red Shoes, Foot Binding and the Swing’, pp. 165–95. On the relationship between dang and dang fu, see p. 179. 2  The Gallows 1 Pseudo Apollodorus, Library, book 3, ch. 14, section 7. I have used the English translation by James George Frazer, available online at www.perseus.tufts.edu. 2 Claudius Elianus, De natura animalium, book vii, 28. 3 On this subject, see Federica Doria and Marco M. Guiman, ‘The Swinging Woman: Phaedra and Swing in Classical Greece’, Medea, ii/1 (2016), pp. 1–34. See also Claude Picard, ‘“Phèdre à la balançoire”, et le symbolisme des pendaisons’, Revue d’archeologie, 28 (1928), pp. 47–64. 4 Hyginus, Astronomy, 2, 4–5. 5 The reconstruction of the poem, and the critical revision of the few surviving fragments, comes mainly from Alexandra Rosokoki, Die Erigone des Eratosthenes: Eine kommentierte Ausgabe der Fragmente (Heidelberg, 1995), and Friedrich Solmsen, ‘Eratosthenes’ Erigone: A Reconstruction’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, lxxviii (1947), pp. 252–75. 6 Longinus, De sublimitate, 33.5. 7 Gaius Julius Hyginus, Fables, fable cxxx. See also Hyginus, Astronomy, 2.2.1. 8 Callimachus, Fragment 178, Aetia. See the edition by Susan Stephens, Callimachus: Aetia (Carlisle, 2015). 9 The story is referenced in Rodrigo Caro’s treatise on games, Días geniales y lúdricos [1626] (La Coruña, 2016), p. 294. 10 The text of Juvenal, Satire 14, reads exactly, ‘An magis oblectant animum iactata petauro/ corpora quique solent rectum descendere funem’. On the petaurus as a swing, see below, Chapter Seven. 11 On both, see Lowell Edmunds, Stealing Helen: The Myth of the Abducted Wife in Historical Perspective (Princeton, nj, 2020). 12 Michalis Tiverius, ‘Phryxos’ Self-Sacrifice and his “Euphenia”’, in Approaching the Ancient Artifact, ed. Amalia Avramidou and Denise Demetrou (Berlin, 2014), pp. 106–17. 13 See Eva Cantarella, Los Suplicios capitales en Grecia y Roma: Orígenes y funciones de la pena de muerte en la antigüedad clásica (Madrid, 1996); and Nicole Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, trans. Anthony Forster (Cambridge, ma, 1987). 14 Diogenes Laërtius, Lives, Opinions of Diogenes the Cynic, epigraph 24. 15 Plutarch, Plutarch’s Morals, ed. William W. Goodwin (Boston, ma, 1874), book 1, exempla 11, Of the Virtues of the Milesians. 16 See Colleen Becker, ‘Aby Warburg’s Pathosformel as Methodological Paradigm’, Journal of Art Historiography, ix (December 2013), pp. 1–25.

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References 17 On the reconstruction of Eratosthenes’ work, see Solmsen, ‘Eratosthenes’ Erigone’. On the aiora and the legend of Erigone, see Sarah Iles Johnston, Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece (Berkeley, ca, 1999), pp. 219ff. 18 Michael Diers et al., ‘Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition of Cultural History’, New German Critique, 65 (1995), pp. 59–73. 19 See Jean-Marie Peillier, Les Mots de Bacchus (Toulouse, 2009). On the plurality of meanings of oscilla, see Rabun Taylor, ‘Roman Oscilla: An Assessment’, res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, xlviii (Autumn 2005), pp. 83–105, and Eugene J. Dwyer, Pompeian Oscilla Collection (Mainz, 1981). 20 Virgil, Georgics, book ii, 378–84: ‘et te, Bacche, vocant per carmina laeta, tibique/ Oscilla ex alta suspendunt molli a pinu.’ (‘It is for you, Bacchus, that they sign joyful songs; and it is in your honor that they hang oscillating figurines from the branches of pine trees.’) 21 Virgil, Aeneid, book vi, 740–42: ‘Some, suspended in space, are exposed to the vain winds; others wash in the deep abyss the stains with which they are infested, or purify themselves in fire.’ 22 Callimachus, Aetia, t56. 23 Walter Burkert, Homo necans: Interpretations of Sacrificial Rites and Myths of Ancient Greece, trans. Peter Bing (Berkeley, ca, 1983). See also S. C. Humphreys et al., The Strangeness of Gods: Historical Perspectives on the Interpretation of Athenian Religion (Oxford, 2004), pp. 223–76. And, more generally, Philippe Borgeraud, ‘Dyonysos, the Wine and Ikarus: Hospitality and Danger’, in Dionysos and Ancient Polytheism, ed. Renate Schlesier (Berlin, 2011), pp. 161–73. 24 Not everyone agrees that it is a young woman. Lesley A. Beaumont, for example, considers that it is two young boys on the left of the image. See Beaumont, Childhood in Ancient Athens: Iconography and Social History (New York, 2012), p. 83. 25 Again, see ibid., p. 84. Beaumont, considers that it is not a pythos, but a child’s seat, a lasanon or potty high chair. 26 This is the interpretation of Doria and Giuman, ‘The Swinging Woman’. It was previously defended by Matthew Dillon, Girls and Women in Classical Greek Religion (London and New York, 2002), pp. 70–71. 27 See H. W. Parke, Festivals of the Athenians (London, 1977), p. 109. 28 See Richard Hamilton, Choes and Anthesteria: Athenian Iconography and Ritual (Ann Arbor, mi, 1992). 29 See Olympia Bobou, Children in the Hellenistic World: Statues and Representations (Oxford, 2015), pp. 31–4. 30 For some scholars, such as Ludwig Deubner, the aiora took place on the third day of the anthesterien; for others, such as Martin P. Nilsson, it coincided with the festival of the choes. Nilsson, ‘Die Anthesterien und die Aiôra’, Eranos, 15 (1916), pp. 180–97. 31 The story of Erigone and Bacchus is referenced in Ovid, Metamorphoses, vi, 125. 32 Ludwig Deubner, Attische Feste (Berlin, 1932). 33 Parke, Festivals of the Athenians, p. 113.

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arc of feeling 34 The inscription is also difficult to interpret. The letters above the satyr are ‘E(u)a[n](z)eia [k]ale’. For some scholars these last three letters below the young woman, ale, may refer to Aletis, the nickname of Erigone. 35 Riklef Kandeler and Wolfram R. Ullrich, ‘Symbolism of Plants: Examples from European-Mediterranean Culture Presented with Biology and History of Art’, Journal of Experimental Botany, lx/4 (2009), pp. 1067–8. 36 Nonnus narrates the legend in Dionysiaca, 47, 40, without referring to the aioras. 37 Erwin Rohde, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks (London, 2000). 38 Lidiano Bacchielli, ‘Le pitture dalla “Tomba dell’Altalena” di Cirene nel Museo del Louvre’, in Cirene e la Grecia, ed. Sandro Stucchi (Rome, 1976), pp. 355–88. 39 On the Akha, see Chob Kacha-ananda, ‘The Akha Swinging Ceremony’, Journal of the Siam Society, lix (1971), pp. 119–28. On the swings of Ubrique, see M. Castro Rodríguez, Ubrique de los columpios (Cádiz, 2017). 40 Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice [1992] (New York, 2009). 41 Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage (Paris, 1962), p. 16. 42 The arrangement of these objects may have changed since my last visit, in 2014. 43 Pausanias, Description of Greece, Book x, 29. 44 Jean Hani, ‘La Fête athénienne de l’Aiora et le symbolisme de la balançoire’, Revue des Études Grecques, xci/432–3 (1978), pp. 107–22. 45 Jan Bremmer, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul (Princeton, nj, 1983), pp. 109–22, and, by the same author, Greek Religion (Oxford, 1994), pp. 46–50. 46 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’ [1936], in Selected Writings 3: 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, ma, 2006), p. 149. 47 See, for example, Nicoletta Momigliano and Alexandre Farmoux, eds, Cretomania: Modern Desires for the Minoan Past (New York, 2016), and, in it, especially Fritz Blakolmer, ‘The Artistic Reception of Minoan Crete in the Period of Art Deco: The Reconstruction of the Palace at Knossos and Why Arthur Evans Was Right’, pp. 39–71. 48 On this subject, see Barthélémy De Craene, ‘Les Fresques du Palais de Cnossos: Art Minoen ou Art Nouveau?’, Crete Antica, 9 (2008), pp. 47–71. 49 Nicola Cucuzza, ‘Minoan Nativity Scene? The Ayia Triada Swing Model and the Three-Dimensional Representation of Minoan Divine Epiphany’, Annuario della Scuola Archeologica di Atene, xci (2013), pp. 175–207. 50 Jules Cashford and Anne Baring, The Myth of the Goddess: The Evolution of an Image (London, 1993), p. 123. 3  The Yoke 1 Willard G. Van De Bogart, ‘The Giant Swing (Lo Ching Cha): Brahamanical Origins and its Significance to the Religious Culture of Thailand’, in Contemporary Socio-Cultural and Political Perspectives in Thailand, ed. P. Liamputtong (London, 2014), pp. 23–47.

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References 2 After the military coup in 1989, the country was officially renamed Myanmar, a name that, although recognized by the United Nations, has its detractors. The United States, for example, continues officially to use the name Burma. On the history of Thailand, see Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, ‘Before Bangkok’, in A History of Thailand (Cambridge, 2014), ch. 1. See also David K. Wyatt, Thailand: A Short History (New Haven, ct, and London, 2003). 3 Chris Baker, Dhiravat Na Pombejra et al., Van Vliet’s Siam (Amsterdam, 2005). This book contains an English translation of the most important texts written by the Dutch traveller Jeremias van Vliet between 1636 and 1640. The history of the swing appears in Van Vliet, The Short History of Occurrences in the Past and the Succession of the Kings of Siam as Far as Is Known from the Old Histories, pp. 209ff. of the edition cited above. 4 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1695), Book iii, Chapter xv, section 6. 5 Van Vliet, Short History, p. 209. 6 In the Thai version of the story, the king of Siam is Ramathibodi i. 7 A map of the old city can be found in Tri Amatayakul, Guide to Ayudhya and Bang Pa-In (Bangkok, 1957). 8 On the Thai swing ceremony, see H. G. Quaritch Wales, Siamese State Ceremonies (London, 1931), pp. 238–47. 9 Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’, trans. Lawrence Williams with Catherine Merlen, Social Identities, ii/3 (1996), pp. 327–42. 10 Some of the most important authors in the history of emotions have reflected on this. See, for example, Peter N. Stearns, ‘A New History for a Global World’, Introduction to his World History: The Basics (London, 2010), as well as William M. Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia and Japan, 900–1200 ce (Chicago, il, and London, 2012). 11 On the relationship of Thai ceremony to the Hindu Brahmans, see Nathan McGovern, ‘Balancing the Foreign and the Familiar in the Articulation of Kingship: The Royal Court Brahmans of Thailand’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, xlviii/2 ( June 2017), pp. 283–303. 12 Quaritch Wales, Siamese State Ceremonies, p. 238. 13 Ibid., p. 244. 14 Still today, in the town of Nakhon Si Thammarat in southeastern Thailand, a similar ceremony is practised with a slightly smaller swing. 15 Quaritch Wales, Siamese State Ceremonies, pp. 244–5. 16 Nathan McGovern, ‘The Trīyampawāi-Trīppawāi of Thailand and the Tamil Traditions of Mārkali, Journal of the Siam Society, cviii/2 (2020), pp. 123–48. 17 See David Russell Lawrence, In Search of Greater India. H. G. Quaritch Wales: Pioneer Archaeologist, Art Historian and War Correspondent (Canberra, 2019). 18 Anna Harriette Leonowens, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (Boston, ma, 1870). 19 Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, nj, 1980). For a critique of Geertz’s positions, see Graeme

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arc of feeling MacRae, ‘Negara Ubud: The Theatre-State in Twenty-First-Century Bali’, History and Anthropology, xvi/4 (2005), pp. 393–413. 20 Nirmal Kumar Bose, Culture and Society in India (Bombay, 1967), especially pp. 51–82. 21 The six most important festivals are the Krishna Jamastani, commemorating the birth of the god Krishna; the Oonjal, a marriage ritual, in which the bride and groom swing on a lavishly decorated swing; the Jhulan-Yatra, celebrating the love affair between Krishna and Rādhā; the Teej, a celebration in honour of the goddess Pārvatī, which has numerous local variations; the Jhulan-ustav, also a Krishnaist ritual; and the famous Holi, a festival of spring and love, whose cultural ramifications already extend far beyond India. Finally, in the Vraj region, images of Subhadra, a reincarnation of Yogamaya, Krishna’s sister, and Jaganath – Krishna himself as the supreme deity – are placed and rocked on swings. 22 Sarah Iles Johnston, ‘Demeter, Myths, and the Polyvalence of Festivals’, History of Religions, lii/4 (May 2013), pp. 370–401. 23 Gwak Won, a Chinese traveller from the Song dynasty who visited the eleventh-century kingdom of Goryeo, reported that it was customary there to use swings during the Dano festival. In Lee E-Wha, Korea’s Pastimes and Customs: A Social History, trans. Ju-Hee Park (Paramus, nj, 2006), p. 90. On the Dano festival, see Hyun-key Kim Hogarth, ‘The Gangneung Dano Festival: The Folklorization of the Korean Shamanistic Heritage’, Korea Journal, xli/3 (Autumn 2001), pp. 254–84. 24 James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 3rd edn, Part iii: The Dying God (New York, London and Toronto, 1911), p. 228. The reference to the Babylonian festival of Sacaea is on pp. 113–15. 25 Ibid., pp. 156–7. 26 S. G. Wilson, Persian Life and Customs (Edinburgh and London, 1895), pp. 236–8, 243–52. 27 Jean de Thévenot, Rélation d’un voyage fait au Levante (Paris, 1665), p. 87. 28 Max Gluckman, Rituals of Rebellion in South-East Africa (Cambridge, 1954). Some of the criticisms, especially those relating to the static quality of these rituals, were incorporated into his Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa (New York, 1963). 29 Euripides, Bacchae, trans. Ian Johnston (Nanaimo, 2014), available at http://johnstoniatexts.x10host.com. 30 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York, 1966), ch. 5. 31 For a critique of Turner’s notions of ‘liminality’, especially from Renato Rosaldo’s work, see Donald Weber, ‘From Limen to Border: A Meditation on the Legacy of Victor Turner for American Cultural Studies’, American Quarterly, xlvii/3 (September 1995), pp. 525–36. 32 Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (New York, 2006). 33 William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001), p. 128. 34 The original, in the Makonde language, reads: ‘Namkogoya akule kwetu akule anyoke/ Nyapule aliulele mwene/ kupweteka nanga/ Akule kwetu

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References akula.’ Quoted in Siri Lange, From Nation-Building to Popular Culture: The Modernization of Performance in Tanzania (Bergen, 1995), p. 78. 35 McKim Marriott, ‘The Feast of Love’, in Krishna, Myths, Rites and Attitudes, ed. Milton B. Singer (Honolulu, hi, 1966), pp. 210–12: ‘Under the tutelage of Krishna, each person plays and for the moment may experience the role of his opposite; the servile wife acts the domineering husband, and vice versa; the ravisher acts the ravished; the menial acts the master; the enemy acts the friend, the structured youth acts the ruler of the republic.’ 36 Manju Bhatnagar, ‘The Monsoon Festival Teej in Rajasthan’, Asian Folklore Studies, xlvii/1 (1988), pp. 63–72. 37 On the history of pictorial representation in India, see J. C. Harle, The Art and Architecture of the Indian Subcontinent (London, 1986), especially chs 25–9. Especially useful for this research has been Terence McInerney et al., Divine Pleasures: Painting from India’s Rajput Courts – The Kronos Collections (New York, 2016). 38 This is the translation provided by the British Museum. 39 Edward C. Dimock Jr, ‘Doctrine and Practice among the Vaisnavas of Bengal’, in Singer, Krishna, pp. 106–27. 40 Bhatnagar, ‘The Monsoon Festival Teej’, pp. 63–72. 41 Quoted ibid., p. 70. 42 On this subject, see the excellent article by Debra Skinner, Dorothy Holland and G. B. Adhikari, ‘The Songs of Teej: A Genre of Critical Commentary for Women in Nepal’, Asian Folklore Studies, liii/2 (1994), pp. 259–305. 43 Miguel Ángel Peña Díaz, Coplas de columpio de la tradición oral de Ubrique (Cádiz) (Mexico City, 2013), p. 60. On the swings of Ubrique, see M. Castro Rodríguez, Ubrique de los columpios (Cádiz, 2017). 44 Peña Díaz, Coplas, p. 65. 45 Ibid., p. 112. 46 Ibid., pp. 106, 109. 47 Ibid., p. 113. 48 Jayadeva, Gita-Govínda: Love Songs of Rādhā and Kr. s. n. a, trans. Lee Siegel (New York, 2009). 49 Graham M. Schweig, Dance of Divine Love: The Rāsa Līlā of Kr. s. n. a from the Bhāgavata Purān. a, India’s Classic Sacred Love Story (Princeton, nj, 2005). 50 Edwin F. Bryant, trans., Kr. s. n. a: The Beautiful Legend of God (Śrīmad Bhāgavata Purān. a Book x) (London, 2003), p. 25. 51 Ibid., p. 33. 52 Ibid., p. 43. 53 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Elements in Culture [1938] (London, 1970), p. 32. The relationship between līlā and swing is determined from the moment we know that the verbal form of līlā, līlāyati, has also been translated as ‘rocking’ or ‘swinging’. At the same time, the dramatic characteristics of līlā are also perceived in other contexts, where the word comes to mean ‘in the manner of ’, as in gajalīlāyā, which means ‘like an elephant’. In other words, by its own semantic qualities, the līlā

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arc of feeling refers to oscillation as well as to theatre and performance. At the same time, we have the word Rāsa, which we write with a capital R and which is generally translated as a certain type of dance. In this case, the dance of the god or of divine love (the Rāsa līlā) should not be confused with the word rasa, to which we will refer later and which constitutes a fundamental concept in the aesthetic doctrine of Hinduism. 54 Bryant, Kr. s. n. a: The Beautiful Legend, p. 125. 55 Jayadeva, Gita-Govínda, p. 27: ‘When, in the springtime, young Kr.s.n.a plays, my friend,/ he incarnates the sentiment of love itself.’ 56 Ibid., p. 98. 57 Bryant, Kr. s. n. a: The Beautiful Legend, p. 141. 58 Ibid., p. 143. 59 On the text known as Bilvamangastala, see the translation and critical edition by F. Wilson, Bilvamangastala (Leiden, 1973). For a study of the illuminated text in the Wellcome Collection, London, see Elinor W. Gadon, ‘An Iconographical Analysis of the Bālagopālastuti: Early Kr.s.n.abhakti in Gujarat’, PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 1984. 60 Wallace Dace, ‘The Concept of Rasa in Sanskrit Dramatic Theory’, Educational Theatre Journal, xv/3 (October 1963), pp. 249–54. Dace, by the way, dates the Nāt. yaśāstra between the fifth century bce and the fifth century ce. See also Susan L. Schwartz, Rasa: Performing the Divine in India (New York, 2004). 61 Bharata Muni, Nāt. yaśāstra, trans. Manomohan Ghosh (Calcutta, 1951), chapter vi, p. 102. 62 John Andrew Greig, ‘Ragmala Painting’, and George Rucket and Richard Widdes, ‘Hindustani Ragas’, in South Asia: The Indian Subcontinent, ed. Alison Arnold (London, 2000). 63 J. C. Harle, ‘Painting in Rajasthan, Malwa and Central India’, in Art and Architecture of the Indian Subcontinent, pp. 384–99. On the particular subject of the rāgamala, the canonical book is Klaus Ebeling, Ragamala Painting (Basel, 1973). Parts of Ebeling’s collections are available online at https://digital.library.cornell.edu/collections/ragamala. 64 Patrick Olivelle, trans., The Early Upanis. ad (Oxford, 1998). 65 Ibid., p. 372. 66 Ibid., p. 401. 67 See the corresponding entry in the Perseus Project, Tufts University, at www.perseus.tufts.edu. 68 Plato, Phaedrus, 245d. 4  A Thousand Autumns 1 In traditional, non-simplified writing, the Chinese character for this same word, qiu, also included another element that referred to the forest and, more particularly, to ropes made of lianas, 鞦. One of the Chinese words for swing, 摆动, băi dòng, was also originally an instrument associated with the female sex. 2 The reference text for the history of the swing in China is Berthold Laufer, ‘The Swing in China’, Extrait des Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne, lvii (1933), pp. 212–23.

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References 3 Sima Qian, Shĭjì, 5, 32, 1488. English translation in The Grand Scribe’s Records, vol. v, part 1: The Hereditary Houses of Pre-Han China, ed. William H. Nienhauser (Bloomington, in, 2006). 4 Quoted in Laufer, ‘The Swing in China’, p. 214. 5 Timotheus Pokora, Hsin-Lun (New Treatise) and Other Writings by Huan T’an (43 bc–28 ad), Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies, 20 (Ann Arbor, mi, 1975), pp. 122, 136–7. 6 This legend is referenced by the philosopher Huan Tan (43 bce–28 ce) in his book Xinlun (Hsin Lun). See Pokora, Hsin-lun, p. 122. The story of Jie Zhitui first appears in the Zuozhuan, the first narrative chronicle of Chinese history. See James Legge, The Chinese Classics, 5 vols (Hong Kong, 1960), vol. v, pp. 191–2. 7 Donald Holzman, ‘The Cold Food Festival in Early Medieval China’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, xlvi/1 ( June 1986), pp. 51–79. 8 Quoted in Kohsuke Sasajima, ‘Early Chinese Physical Education and Sport’, in Physical Education and Sport to 1900, ed. Earle F. Ziegler (Champaign, il, 1973), p. 38. 9 Laufer, ‘The Swing in China’, p. 222. 10 Without providing sources, Mike Speak notes that the swing was introduced in central China between 770 and 476 bce, while the rotating swing was introduced between 475 and 22 bce. Mike Speak, ‘Recreation and Sport in Ancient China’, in Sport and Physical Education in China, ed. Jim Riordan (London and New York, 1999), pp. 20–44. Citations are from p. 32. 11 On these matters, see Ch’en Tung Yuan, History of Woman’s Life in China (Shanghai, 1937). 12 Kaiyuan Tianbao yishi, 開元天寶遺事 (Forgotten Events of the Kaiyuan [713–41] and Tianbao [742–56] Reigns), compiled by Wang Renyu (880–942). Included in Kaiyuan tianbao yishi shizhong, 開元天寶遺事十 種 (Ten Works Dealing with Forgotten Events of the Kaiyuan and Tianbao Reigns), ed. Ding Ruming (Shanghai, 1985). 13 Sasajima, ‘Early Chinese Physical Education’, pp. 35–4. 14 See Wang Renyu, Forgotten Events of the Kaiyuan (Shanghai, 1985), ch. B, p. 19b. Quoted by Laufer, ‘The Swing in China’, p. 219: ‘In the period T’ienpao, whenever the festival of cold provisions arrived, the vied in the palace to erect swings, so that the ladies of the seraglio might have an occasion for pleasure and rejoicing. The emperor called it the “game or play of the half fairies”, an expression adopted by the literati and people of the capital.’ 15 On everyday life during the Tang dynasty, see Charles Benn, China’s Golden Age: Everyday Life in the Tang Dynasty (Oxford, 2002). 16 Cited in Junli Yu, ‘Research on the Customs of Festival Sports Entertainment in Tang Dynasty from Angles of Poems and Proses’, Proceedings of the International Academic Workshop on Social Science (Amsterdam, 2013), p. 589. 17 Yuming Luo, A Concise History of Chinese Literature (Leiden, 2011), vol. i, p. 373. 18 See Ruixin Zhu et al., eds, A Social History of Medieval China (Cambridge, 2016), p. 467.

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arc of feeling 19 Ibid., p. 84. 20 Jiaosheng Wang, The Complete Ci-poems of Li Qingzhao: A New English Translation, Sino-Platonic Papers, 13 (October 1989), p. 71, www.sinoplatonic.org. On Li Qingzhao, see Li Yu-Ning, Images of Women in Chinese Literature (Franklin, in, 1994), pp. 73–97. 21 Jiaosheng Wang, The Complete Ci-poems of Li Qingzhao, p. 3. 22 Professor Ling Hon Lam of the University of Hong Kong defends this idea for medieval China, but in our view, the theory can be clearly generalized. See Ling Hon Lam, The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China: From Dreamscapes to Theatricality (New York, 2018). 23 See on this subject, for example, the popular title by Elena Janvier, Au Japon, ceux qui s’aiment ne disent pas je t’aime (Paris, 2011), p. 1: ‘In Japan, those who love each other do not say “I love you” but “there is love”, like someone who says that it is snowing or that it is good.’ 24 See Susan Broomhall, ed., Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities in Britain, 1650–1850 (Abingdon and New York, 2015). 25 Valerie Hansen, ‘The Mystery of the Qingming Scroll and Its Subject: The Case against Kaifeng’, Journal of Sung-Yuang Studies, 26 (1996), pp. 183–200. 26 On the topos of the swing in Chinese painting, see James Cahill, ‘Three Recurring Themes in the Part-Erotic Albums’, www.jamescahill.info, 2012. See Cahill’s Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Vernacular Painting in High Qing China (Berkeley, ca, 2010), especially ch. 5, on the painting of ideal women or meiren hua. 27 On women in China, see Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Women and the Family in Chinese History (London and New York, 2004). 28 Quoted in Buckley Ebrey, Women and the Family, p. 25. See also Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley, ca, 1993), ch. 1, ‘Separating the Sexes’. 29 Cited in Jessica Dvorak Moyer, Woman Rules Within: Domestic Space and Genre in Qing Vernacular Literature (Leiden, 2020), p. 1. 30 Ann A. Pang-White, ed. and trans., The Confucian Four Books for Women: A New Translation of the Nü Sishu (Oxford, 2018), pp. 83–4: ‘Women do not peek through the walls, nor step into the outer courtyard. If they go out, they must cover their faces. If they look out, they conceal their forms.’ 31 Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Cambridge Illustrated History of China (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 158–61. 32 See Ann A. Pang-White, ‘Uncovering the Confucian Four Books for Women. Why Nü sishu? Why Now?’, in The Confucian Four Books for Women, pp. 1–31; Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford, ca, 1994), and Joan Kelly, ‘Double Vision in Feminist Theory’, in Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago, il, 1984). 33 On the role of the swing in avant-garde cinema, see Alain Bergala, ‘El columpio’, in Motivos visuales del cine, ed. Jordi Balló and Alain Bergala (Barcelona, 2016). 34 The story of Chun-hyang (Perfume of Spring) has been translated into various literary genres, but the most interesting of these has been

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References the pansori, a form of recitative chant accompanied by a drum. There is a novelized French version of the folk story in Le chant de la fidèle Chun’hyang (Paris, 2008). 35 The English translation of this excerpt can be found in Dvorak Moyer, Woman Rules Within, pp. 138–41. 36 Ling Mengchu, Slapping the Table in Amazement: A Ming Dynasty Story Collection, trans. Shuhui Yang and Yunquin Yang (Seattle, wa, and London, 2018), story 9. 37 Quoted in Yu, ‘Research on the Customs of Festival Sports’, p. 589. 38 See Mary Boyce, ‘Nowruz in the Pre-Islamic Period’, in Encyclopædia Iranica, digital edition, 2016, www.iranicaonline.org. 39 Magdalena Lubanska, Muslims and Christians in the Bulgarian Rhodopes: Studies in Religious (Anti)Syncretism (Berlin and Boston, ma, 2015). 40 On love, see Barbara H. Rosenwein, Love: A History in Five Fantasies (Cambridge, 2021); William M. Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia and Japan, 900–1200 ce (Chicago, il, and London, 2012); and Javier Moscoso, Promesas Incumplidas: Una historia política de las pasiones (Madrid, 2016). The problem that arises is to determine how the intellectual categories of love evolve in different times and cultures. See, for example, Paolo Santangelo and Gábor Boros, The Culture of Love in China and Europe (Leiden, 2019). On the cult of qing, love, in China, see Maram Epstein, Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction (Cambridge, 2001); Martin W. Huang, Desire and Fictions of Love in China (Cambridge, 2001); Wai-Yee Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature (Princeton, nj, 1993); and Paolo Santangelo, Sentimental Education in Chinese History: An Interdisciplinary Textual Research on Ming and Qing Sources (Leiden and Boston, ma, 2003). 41 The only (albeit incomplete) translation I know of the Qingshi is Mowry Hua-yuan Li, Chinese Love Stories from Ch’ing-shih (Hamden, ct, 1983). Other stories have been translated in other compilations. In this case, the quotation is on p. 38. 42 Tang Xiangzu, The Peony Pavilion, trans. Cyril Birch (Bloomington, in, 1980), p. 10. On p. 29, she will reprimand her maid by telling her that her feet will never again tread the garden path nor her hands touch the swing. 43 Ibid., p. 137. 44 J. P. Park, Art by the Book: Painting Manuals and the Leisure Life in Late Ming China (Seattle, wa, 2012), p. 172. 45 Meng Chengshun, Mistress and Maid (Jiaohong ji), ed. and trans. Cyril Birch (New York, 2001). 46 See Michela Bussotti, Gravures de Hui: Étude du livre illustré chinois de la fin du xvie siècle à la première moitié du xviie siècle (Paris, 2001). 47 See Wen-chien Cheng, ‘Idealized Portraits of Women for the Qing Imperial Court’, Orientations, xlv/4 (May 2014), pp. 87–99. 48 See Terence McInerney et al., Divine Pleasures: Painting from India’s Rajput Courts – The Kronos Collections (New York, 2016), pp. 200–201.

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arc of feeling

5  The Garden

1 On Bruegel’s painting, see Amy Orrock, ‘Homo Ludens: Pieter Bruegel’s Children’s Games and the Humanist Educators’, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, iv/2 (Summer 2012), pp. 1–42. 2 On the relationship between Rabelais and Bruegel, see Philippe Ariès and Jean-Claude Margolin, Jeux à la Renaissance (Paris, 1982), especially J. P. Vanden Branden’s chapter ‘Les Jeux d’enfants de Pierre Bruegel’, pp. 499–524. 3 In Rabelais’ work, the swing is called brandelle (or brandilloire). On this word, see Achille Delboulle, ‘Brandelle, Brande’, Romania, xvii/66 (1888), pp. 286–7. 4 See Orrock, ‘Homo Ludens’, p. 2: ‘The subject matter of Children’s Games is unprecedented; its only precursors being the tiny images of children playing seasonal games found in the margins of a number of Ghent-Bruges manuscripts.’ 5 Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (London, 1966). For a critical summary of positions after the publication of Ariès’ book, see, for example, Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood (London, 2001), ch. 1, ‘Conceptions of Childhood in the Middle Ages’. 6 See Danièle Alexandre-Bidon and Didier Lett, Les Enfants au Moyen Âge, ve–xve siècles (Paris, 2004); Pierre Riché, Être enfant au Moyen Âge: Anthologie des textes consacrés à la vie de l’enfant du ve au xv siècle (Paris, 2010). 7 Silvia Alfonso Cabrera, ‘Juegos y juguetes en el arte medieval’, Revista Digital de Iconografía Medieval, viii/15 (2016), pp. 51–65. 8 On this manuscript, see Mark Cruse, Illuminating the ‘Roman d’Alexandre’: Oxford, Bodleian Library, ms Bodleian 264: The Manuscript as Monument (Cambridge, 2011). 9 In the extraordinary Peter Burke, Play in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 2021), the swing only appears once, cited in the context of recommended exercises for young women (p. 96). 10 Avicenna, The Canon of Medicine of Avicenna, ed. Cameron Gruner (New York, 1973), epigraph 741. 11 Plato, Laws, Book vii, 90d–e. 12 Ibid., 789c. 13 Plato, Timaeus, 88b–89c. 14 Cristóbal Méndez, Libro del ejercicio corporal y de sus provechos [1533] (León, 1996), p. 353. 15 On this topic, see Erika Langmuir, Imagining Childhood (New Haven, ct, 2006), pp. 18–20. 16 Louis-Charles-Henri Macquart, Dictionnaire de la conservation de l’homme, ou d’hygiène et d’éducation, physique et morale (Paris, 1796), pp. 405–6. 17 Alexander Hamilton, A Treatise of Midwifery, Comprehending the Whole Management of Female Complaints, and the Treatment of Children in Early Infancy (Edinburgh, 1781), pp. 388–9.

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References 18 Immanuel Kant, ‘Lectures on Pedagogy (1803)’, trans. Robert B. Louden, in Anthropology, History and Education, ed. and trans. Robert B. Louden and Günter Zöller (Cambridge, 2013). 19 Ibid., p. 451. 20 Ibid., p. 452. 21 Ricardo Navacerrada Peñas, ‘El mundo lúdico en la literatura de Rabelais: La obra Gargantúa y el repertorio de juegos del capítulo xxii de la edición 1542’, PhD thesis, University Complutense, Madrid, 2012. 22 Richard Barnhart and Catherine Barnhart, ‘Images of Children in Song Painting and Poetry’, in Children in Chinese Art, ed. Ann Barrott Wicks (Honolulu, hi, 2002). 23 See Terese Tse Bartholomew, ‘One Hundred Children: From Boys at Play to Icons of Good Fortune’, in Children in Chinese Art, ed. Wicks, pp. 57–83. 24 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Elements in Culture [1938] (London, 1970). 25 Ibid., p. 46. 26 Ibid., pp. 2–3: ‘Yet in this intensity, this absorption, this power of maddening, lies the very essence, the primordial quality of play.’ 27 This is also discussed by Karl Kerényi, ‘Vom Wesen des Festes: Antike Religion und ethnologische Religionsforschung’, Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde, i/2 (1938), pp. 59–74. 28 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, p. 10. 29 Ibid., p. 15. 30 Eugen Fink, ‘The Oasis of Happiness: Toward an Ontology of Play’, Yale French Studies, 41 (1968), p. 20. 31 Ibid., p. 28. 32 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, p. 56. 33 Ibid., p. 58. 34 See J. S. Searle, ‘Collective Intentions and Actions’, in Intentions in Communication, ed. Philip R. Cohen, Jerry Morgan and Martha E. Pollack (Cambridge, ma, 1990), pp. 401–15. 35 Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York, 1986); see also Edward Bruner, ed., Text, Play, and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society (Washington, dc, 1984). 36 José Ortega y Gasset, ‘El origen deportivo del Estado’, El Espectador, vii (1930), pp. 103–43. 37 Lawrence M. Hinman, ‘Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Play’, PhD thesis, Loyola University Chicago, 1975. 38 The metaphor of the swinging boat, of the rocking gondola, appears in the work of many authors before Nietzsche. Particularly notable is the case of Goethe’s poem ‘Abschied’ [Farewell, 1797], in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gesamtausgabe der Werke und Schriften in zweiundzwanzig Bänden. Poetische Werke (Stuttgart, 1949–60), vol. 1, pp. 49–50. 39 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Alexander Tylle (London, 1898), p. 336. The term Nietzsche uses for the swinging boat is Schaukel-Kahn. 40 Ibid., p. 27.

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arc of feeling 41 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Works, trans. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge, 2007), p. 40 (emphasis in original). 42 On the iconography of the Virgin Mary, see Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary [1976] (London, 1990), especially the chapter ‘The Moon and the Stars’, pp. 255–73. See also Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Throughout the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven, ct, and London, 1996), and Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (London, 2010). 43 Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, p. 256. 44 See a translation of this and other Isis Hymns at www.attalus.org/poetry/ isis_hymns. 45 Geraldine Pinch, Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt (Oxford, 2002). 46 The Papyrus of Ani, trans. E. A. Wallis Budge (New York and London, 1913), vol. i, p. 61. 47 Diodorus of Sicily, Bibliotheca Historica, Book i, 11.4. 48 Homily of St Bernard, quoted in Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, p. 263. 49 All these references are from Jules Cashford, The Moon: Symbol of Transformation (Carterton, Oxfordshire, 2016), p. 182. 50 On this subject, see Fritz Saxl, A Heritage of Images: A Selection of Lectures [1957] (London, 1970), especially ‘Continuity and Variation in the Meaning of Images’, pp. 13–26. The main idea is that ‘images with a meaning peculiar to their own time and place, once created, have a magnetic power to attract other ideas into their sphere . . . they can suddenly be forgotten and remembered again after centuries of oblivion’ (p. 14). 51 Willi Kurth, ed., The Complete Woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer (New York, 1963). 6  The Remedy 1 Clive D. Edwards, Eighteenth-Century Furniture (Manchester, 1996). 2 Letter from George Cheyne to Samuel Richardson, 20 April 1740, in Samuel Richardson, Correspondence with George Cheyne and Thomas Edwards, ed. David Shuttleton and John A. Dussinger (Cambridge, 2013), p. 55. 3 ‘Gestation’, in Dictionnaire de sciences médicales, ed. Charles-Louis-Fleury Panckoucke, vol. xviii (Paris, 1815), p. 301. 4 Bernard de Mandeville, A Treatise of the Hypochondriak and Hysterick Diseases in Three Dialogues [1711] (London, 1715), p. 236. 5 Stephen Freeman, The Ladies Friend; or, Complete Physical Library (London, 1785), pp. 279–80. 6 Nicolas Andry, Orthopédie, ou l’art de prévenir et corriger dans les enfans, le difformités du corps (Brussels, 1743), vol. i, p. 143. 7 Étienne Tourtelle, Élémens d’hygiène (Strasbourg, 1815), vol. ii, p. 220. 8 Jean Baptiste Théodore Baumes, Traité de la phthisie pulmonaire (Paris, 1805), vol. ii, p. 181. The text by Smyth to which I refer is An Account of the Effects of Swinging Employed as a Remedy in Pulmonary Consumption (London, 1787). 9 Smyth, An Account, pp. 25–6.

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References 10 G. M. Beard, A Practical Treatise on Sea-Sickness: Its Symptoms, Nature and Treatment (New York, 1881), p. 11: ‘I once met a literary gentleman, who, on a voyage across the Northern Atlantic, tried every means to make himself sea-sick, in order that he might get the benefit of the trip, and failed, and was utterly disappointed. He smoked strong cigars in great excess, exposed himself in every way, and sought eagerly the symptoms that most people dread and flee from.’ On the therapeutic value of sea voyages, see Ebenezer Gilchrist, The Use of Sea Voyages in Medicine: and Particularly in a Consumption, with Observations on that Disease (London, 1771). 11 Smyth, An Account, p. 50. 12 Ibid., p. 52. 13 One of the most important texts on the benefits of ship travel was Gilchrist’s The Use of Sea Voyages. 14 Michel Nelken, Sea-Sickness: Its Cause, Nature, Symptoms, and Treatment, Derived from Experience and Strict Observation (New York, 1856). 15 Cristóbal Méndez, Libro del ejercicio corporal y de sus provechos [1533] (León, 1996), p. 353. 16 Ibid., p. 356. 17 Doreen Huppert, Judy Benson and Thomas Brandt, ‘A Historical View of Motion Sickness: A Plague at Sea and on Land, also with Military Impact’, Frontiers in Neurology, viii/114 (April 2017), pp. 1–15. 18 Beard, Practical Treatise, p. 13. 19 Constantin Gaudon, Dissertation sur le mal de mer (Paris, 1832), p. 12. 20 Keraudren (sometimes written Kerauderen), ‘Mal de Mer’, in Dictionnaire de sciences médicales, ed. Charles-Louis-Fleury Panckoucke, vol. xxx (Paris, 1818), p. 135. 21 François Madeuf, ed., ‘Le Mal de Mer: Comment on s’en préserve, comment on en guérit, comment on le soigne. Guide hygiénique complet’, Paris, 1906 (unpublished). 22 Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind (Philadelphia, pa, 1812). 23 Ibid., p. 203. 24 Ibid., pp. 224–6. 25 Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life, 2nd edn (London, 1794), vol. i, chapter 20, pp. 227–39. 26 Joseph Mason Cox, Practical Observations on Insanity [1806] (London, 1813), pp. 145–8. 27 Cox’s expression is ‘till reason again resumed her sway, and both mind and body became perfectly re-established.’ Ibid., p. 155. 28 Ibid., pp. 137–9. 29 William Saunders Hallaran, Practical Observations on the Causes and Cure of Insanity (London, 1818). On Hallaran, see B. D. Kelly, ‘Dr William Saunders Hallaran and Psychiatric Practice in Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, Irish Journal of Medical Sciences, clxxvii/1 (March 2008), pp. 79–84, and Caoimhghín S. Breathnach, ‘Hallaran’s Circulating Swing’, History of Psychiatry, xxi/81 (pt 1) (March 2010), pp. 79–84. 30 William Saunders Hallaran, An Enquiry into the Causes Producing the Extraordinary Addition of the Number of the Insane (Cork, 1810), p. 60.

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arc of feeling 31 Rush, Medical Inquiries, p. 226. 32 On the history of vomiting, see Rachel Russell, ‘Nausea and Vomiting: A History of Signs, Symptoms and Sickness in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2012. 33 Cox, Practical Observations, p. 38. 34 Ibid., p. 43. 35 Ibid., p. 165. 36 George Parkman, Management of Lunatics with Illustrations of Insanity (Boston, ma, 1817), pp. 25–6. 37 See Cox, Practical Observations, p. 169. 38 Ibid., pp. 172–6. 39 Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol, Des maladies mentales, considerées sous les rapports médical, hygiénique et médico-légal (Paris, 1838), vol. i, p. 156. 40 Joseph Guislain, Traité sur l’aliénation mentale et sur les hospices des aliénés (Amsterdam, 1826), vol. i, p. 376. 41 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 378. 42 Caelius Aurelianus, On Acute Diseases and On Chronic Diseases, bilingual edn, ed. and trans. I. E. Drabkin (Chicago, il, 1950), p. 547. 43 Mary de Young, Encyclopedia of Asylum Therapeutics, 1750–1950s ( Jefferson, nc, 2015), p. 297. 44 Esquirol, Des maladies mentales, vol. i, p. 156. 45 Jean Vincent François Vaidy, ‘Escarpolette’, in Dictionnaire de sciences médicales, ed. Charles-Louis-Fleury Panckoucke, vol. xvi (Paris, 1815), p. 271. 46 ‘Gestation’, in Panckoucke, Dictionnaire, vol. xviii, p. 302. The expression he uses is secousse salutaire. 47 Francis Fuller, Medicina Gymnastica; or, A Treatise Concerning the Power of Exercise [1704] (London, 1711), pp. 262–70. 48 Ibid., p. 262. 49 Ibid., p. 186. 50 On the history of the tremoussoir, see Augustin Cabanès, Remèdes d’autrefois: Comment se soignaient nos pères (Paris, 1913). 51 Charles-Irénée Castel de Saint-Pierre, Observations sur la sobriété (Paris, 1735), p. 18. 52 Ibid., p. 27. 53 Jean Astruc, ‘Observations de M. Astruc sur la machine appellée fauteüil de poste’, in Castel de Saint-Pierre, Observations sur la sobriété, pp. 40–57. 54 On the petaurus and its sexual connotations, see Chapter Seven. 55 Aurelian made use of a machine that he called the macron sparfon, or instrumentum rapsorium (both massage instruments), of which only a vague description has survived. 56 Panckoucke, Dictionnaire, vol. xviii, pp. 292–329. 57 Ibid., p. 294. 58 Castel de Saint-Pierre, Observations sur la sobriété, pp. 36–40. 59 Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford, 2004), p. 217. 60 Augustin Cabanès, ‘Un Précurseur du Dr Charcot au xviiie siècle: L’abbé de Saint-Pierre et son trémoussoir’, Revue Internationale d’électrothérapie, 5 (1892), p. 146.

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References 61 See La Joie de la maison: Journal hebdomadaire illustré, 22 September 1892, p. 587. 62 See, for example, La Grande Vie, illustrée par la photographie d’après nature vol. xxii (Paris, 1900). 7 Sex 1 The commission was originally intended for Gabriel-François Doyen, who turned it down and proposed Fragonard instead. See Charles Collé, Journal historique, ou Mémoires critiques et littéraires, vol. iii (Paris, 1807), entry for October 1767, pp. 165–6. On Fragonard, see Andrei Molotiu, Fragonard’s Allegories of Love (Los Angeles, ca, 2007). 2 ‘Escarpolette’, in Dictionnaire de sciences médicales, ed. Charles-LouisFleury Panckoucke, vol. xvi (Paris, 1815), p. 271. 3 This is the opinion declared in the Dictionnaire étymologique de la Langue Française, ed. Gilles Ménage (Paris, 1750), p. 546. 4 Ian Thompson, The Sun King’s Garden: Louis xiv, André Le Nôtre, and the Creation of the Gardens of Versailles (New York, 2006), pp. 264–5. 5 For the problems relating to the attribution of this work, see Jean Ferré, ed., Watteau: Catalogue: Ouvrage publié sous la direction de Jean Ferré (Madrid, 1972), pp. 975–9. The latest major work on the painter of which I am aware, Guillaume Glorieux, Watteau (Paris, 2011), accepts the attribution of this painting to Watteau, although it locates it in Potsdam, at the Palace of Sanssouci (pp. 90–91). For a discussion on this and other Watteau paintings, see Dr Martin Eidelberg’s website: http://watteau-abecedario. org. I am grateful to both Dr Eidelberg and Yuriko Yakall (Wallace Collection, London) for their help with all the Watteaus’ issues of attribution. 6 See Georges Wildenstein, Lancret (Paris, 1924), pp. 86–7. On Pater, see Florence Ingersoll-Smouse, Pater (Paris, 1928), especially pp. 58–9. 7 Eduard Fuchs, Illustrierte Sittengeschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 1909), vol. ii, pp. 201–2. 8 Pierre de Brantôme, Vies des dames galantes [1699] (Paris, 1880), especially ‘Discours troisième: sur la beauté de la belle jambe et la vertu qu’elle a’, pp. 167–78. 9 David Hume, ‘On Polygamy and Divorces’ [1777], in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, in, 1987), pp. 186–7. 10 Anon., Lettres à un père de famille sur les petits spectacles de Paris, par un honnête homme (Paris, 1789), p. 42. 11 On Rowlandson, see Kate Heard, High Spirits: The Comic Art of Thomas Rowlandson (York, 2013). See also Amelia Rauser, Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints (Newark, de, 2008). 12 [Anon.], Amors experimentalphysikalishes Taschenbuch: Erstes Bändchen, mit Kuppern (n.p., 1798), British Library, London, Private Case, 31.i.12, sect. 8, pp. 211–12, 260. 13 Marquis de Sade, Juliette, ou les prospérités du vice, in Sade, La nouvelle Justine . . . suivie de l’histoire de Juliette, sa soeur (1797), vol. viii, p. 110 et seq.

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arc of feeling 14 Luciana Jacobelli, La pitture erotiche delle Terme suburbane di Pompei (Rome, 1995). See also Otto J. Brendel, ‘The Scope and Temperament of Erotic Art in the Greco-Roman World’, in Studies in Erotic Art, ed. Theodore Robert Bowie and Cornelia V. Christenson (New York and London, 1970), pp. 3–109. 15 See Friedrich Karl Forberg’s classic Manual of Classical Erotology (De figuris veneris) (Manchester, 1884). Forberg is a romantic who claims to know from experience nothing of what he writes, but who seeks to bring order to the thousand ways in which the art of love has been represented. See also Bette Talvacchia’s excellent Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton, nj, 1999). 16 Juvenal’s Satire 14, v. 265 reads exactly: ‘What’s better entertainment, the trampoline acrobat, the funambulist showing his skill at tightrope walking, or you, spending half a lifetime aboard your merchantman, forever exposed to each hurricane gale that blows[?].’ Juvenal, Satires, ed. and trans. Peter Green (London, 1998), p. 401. Mercuriale, therefore, reads the text losing sight of its irony, in the same way that contemporary translations are usually unaware of its erotic connotations. 17 Girolamo Mercuriale, De arte gymnastica, ed. Concetta Pennuto, trans. Vivian Nutton (Florence, 2008), pp. 373ff. 18 Ibid., p. 376. 19 Martial, Epigrams: ‘Lydia tam laxa est equitis quam culus aeni quam celer arguto qui sonat aere trochus/ quam rota transmissu o totiens impacta petauro’. For a full English version, see Martial, Epigrams, trans. Walter C. A. Ker, Loeb Classical Library (London and New York, 1920), pp. 252–5. 20 Arcangelo Tuccaro, Trois dialogues de l’exercise de sauter et voltiger en l’air (Paris, 1599). 21 Ibid., pp. 146–50. 22 The comparison of the woman to the hen has a long history, but it occurs above all in the misogynist literature of the fifteenth century. See, for example, Les xv Joies de mariage [c. 1390–1410] (Paris, 1853), pp. 57–8. 23 Louis Becq de Fouquières, Les Jeux des anciens (Paris, 1869), pp. 54–5. 24 See Paul Delaroche, ed., Trésor de numismatique et de glyptique. Iconographie des empereurs romains et de leurs familles (Paris, 1843), plate x. 25 Pirro Ligorio, Antichità romane, vol. xxi, book 28, 168. Manuscript in the Archives of Turin, Cod. a ii.8. Probably written between 1571 and 1583. See transcription and translation in Talvacchia, Taking Positions, Appendix A. Quotations are from this edition, p. 195. 26 On Ligorio, see David R. Coffin, Pirro Ligorio, The Renaissance Artist, Architect, and Antiquarian. With a Checklist of Drawings (University Park, pa, 2003). 27 Sebastiano Erizzo, Discorso sopra la medaglie degli antichi (Venice, 1559). 28 See Suetonius, Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Book iii, ch. 43. 29 See, for example, Tacitus, in Book vi of his Annals: ‘Hitherto unknown terms were then for the first time invented, derived from the abominations of the place and the endless phases of sensuality.’ Moses Hadas, ed, The Complete Works of Tacitus, trans. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (New York, 1942), p. 195.

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References 30 Becq de Fouquières, Les Jeux des anciens, pp. 54–5. 31 Lucius Apuleius, Metamorphoses, trans. E. J. Kenney (London, 2004), book ii, 17, pp. 131–2: ‘Then climbing on the bed she let herself down slowly on top of me; and rising and falling at a brisk trot and sinuously rocking her supple body backwards and forwards she regaled me to repletion with the delights of Venus in the saddle, until exhausted and totally drained in body and soul alike we simultaneously collapsed, panting for breath, in each other’s arms.’ 32 Forberg, Classical Erotology, p. 25: ‘We now come to the manner, in which the man lying on his back has connection with the woman face downwards. The parts are interchanged; the woman plays the rider and the man the horse. This figure was called the horse of Hector.’ 33 See Claudia Teixeira, ‘The Cult of Isis in Rome: Some Aspects of Its Reception and the Testimony of Apuleius’ Asinus Aureus’, in Alexandrea ad Aegyptum: The Legacy of Multiculturalism in Antiquity, ed. Rogério Sousa et al. (Évora, 2018), pp. 271–82. 34 Ovid, Art of Love, iii, v, 777–8. 35 Aristophanes, Lysistrata, v. 60. 36 I follow here the translation of Alan Cameron, ‘Asclepiades’ Girlfriends’, in Reflections on Women in Antiquity, ed. Helene P. Foley (New York, 1992), pp. 275–302. For a discussion of this epigram, see Luis Arturo Guichard, Asclepiades of Samos: Epigrams and Fragments (Berlin, 2004), pp. 183ff. The translation proposed by Guichard is: ‘Lysidice dedicated to you, Cipires, the equestrian spur/ Golden sting of her well-shoed foot,/ With it she exercised the flanks of many horses without/ Her gently moving thigh reddening/ For she reached the goal without a sting, therefore/ She hung her golden weapon before your gates.’ 37 Gaius Petronius, Satyricon. Apocolocyntosis, trans. Michael Heseltine and W.H.D. Rouse, ed. E. H. Warmington (Cambridge, ma, 1913), p. 373. 38 Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris, 358a. 39 On Papyrus Louvre 3017, see Wilhelm Spiegelberg, ‘varia’, in Zeitschrifft für Áegyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde, liii/1 (1917), pp. 91–115. Quoted by Lise Manniche, Sexual Life in Ancient Egypt (London and New York, 1987), p. 59: ‘I am your sister Isis. There is no other god or goddess who has done what I have done. I played the part of a man, although I am a woman, to let your name live on earth, for your divine seed was in my body.’ Manniche refers to some much earlier texts, from 1400 bce, and other imagery on the subject, including the relief from the temple of Sethos i at Abydos, from the Nineteenth Dynasty (thirteenth century bce). 40 The hieroglyphic name of this deified king whom the Greeks christened Osiris was composed of two signs. The first represents a seat, perhaps a throne; the second an eye. The fact that the first sign was also the one adopted to name his wife, Isis, has made interpretation difficult. 41 Laurent Bricault, Miguel John Versluys and Paul G. P. Meyboom, Nile into Tiber: Egypt in the Roman World: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Isis Studies (Leiden, 2005), especially the chapter by Meyboom and Versluys, ‘The Meaning of Dwarfs in Nilotic Scenes’, pp. 170–208.

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arc of feeling 42 The original reads: ‘Non tirar futtutelo di Cupido/ la carriola, firmati, bismulo/ vo’ fotter in potta, e non in culo/ Costei, che mi to’ ’l cazzo, e me ne rido.’ The Italian word carriola referred not only to a wheelbarrow but also to a hanging bed. 43 The original reads: ‘O, cul di latte, e d’ostro/ Se non ch’io ch’io son per mirarti di vena/ Non mi starebbe il cazzo dritto a pena.’ 44 Michael Harrison, Fanfare of Strumpets (London, 1971), especially pp. 13ff. 45 Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women on Top’, in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, ca, 1975), p. 129. 46 Jayadeva, Gita-Govínda: Love Songs of Rādhā and Kr. s. n. a, trans. Lee Siegel (New York, 2009), p. 41. 47 Ibid., p. 179. 48 Ibid. 49 For a discussion of the work known as the ‘Spanish Kama Sutra’, see Luce López-Baralt, Un Kama Sutra español (Madrid, 2017), and for the subject at hand, see pp. 456–8. 50 Umar Alnafzawi [Al-Nefzawi], The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaou (London, 1876), p. 66. 51 Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, book i, 4, 18. Conclusion 1 Arthur George Warner and Edmond Warner, trans., The Shánáma of Firdausí (London, 1905), vol. i, p. 133: ‘These works achieved, Jamshíd ambitioned/ Rank loftier still, and by his royal Grace/ Made him a throne, with what a wealth of gems/ Inlaid! which when he willed the dívs [demons] took up/ And bare from earth to heaven. There the Sháh,/ Whose word was law, sat sunlike in mid air.’ The association between the throne and the swings was established by the sage Al-Bîrûnî in his Chronology. See Edward Sachau, ed. and trans., The Chronology of Ancient Nations: An English Version of the Arabic Text of the Athâr-ul-Bákiya of Albírúní, or ‘Vestiges of the Past’ (London, 1879), p. 200: ‘Another account of the reason why it was made a feast day is this, that Jamshîd, on having obtained the carriage, ascended it on this day, and the Jinns and Dêws carried him in one day through the air from Dabâwand to Babel. Now people made this day a feast day on account of the wonder which they had seen during it, and they amused themselves with swinging in order to imitate Jamshîd.’

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Acknowledgements

A book like this is the work of many. The bulk of this research was completed in Berlin under the auspices of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, first during the winter of 2018 and later during the winter of 2019. I am grateful to professors Lorraine Daston and Dagmar Schäffer for their hospitality, as well as to the members of Departments ii and iii for their comments and ­criticisms of drafts of some chapters during various seminars. The same applies to the Université de Paris i, Sorbonne, which welcomed me as a visiting professor in June 2021. My thanks go to Professor Bertrand Tillier and many other colleagues and friends of the sadly deceased Dominique Kalifa. Over the almost six years it has taken me to write this book, I have been indebted to many different people, starting with my publishers, Elena Martinez Bavière (Penguin Random House) and Michael Leaman (Reaktion Books). Both supported this project from the beginning and have been generous enough to give me the time I needed to finish it. My colleague and friend Sofia Torallas of the University of Chicago and Raquel Martinez have been of enormous support as far as the Greek world is concerned. Juan Arnau also reviewed the chapters on Southeast Asia. Many colleagues also read drafts of this research: Fernando Rodríguez-Mediano, Mercedes GarcíaArenal, Fernando Aguiar, Eduardo Manzano, Manuel Lucena, James Amelang, Antonio Sánchez and Saúl Martínez of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, as well as, more recently, Antonio Calvo of the Universidad de Málaga. It was my friend from the Universidad de Los Andes, Mauricio Nieto, who first introduced me to the history of the hammock. On the other side of the Atlantic, I have benefited from comments and critiques by Nuria Godón, Mauricio Sánchez-Menchero, Estela Rosellón, Susana Sosenski, Sandra Gayol, Maria Bjerg and Jimena Canales, among many others. I received generous comments on Ming and Qing porcelain from Kevin McLoughlin of the University of Hong Kong. Egyptologist Maria Rosa Valdesogo gave me a lot of help in finding the perfect copulation of Isis with Osiris, in the form of a kite. I have been able to exchange views on the universal history of love with Paolo Santangelo and Barbara Rosenwein, as well as discuss preliminary versions of this text with colleagues from the History of Experience group in Tampere, Finland. In Spain, the History of Experience group itself con­tinues to show signs of dynamism. My thanks to Diego Garrocho, Francisco Ortega, Juan Manuzel Zaragoza, Alberto Fragio, Josefa Ros, Ruth Somalo, Nike Fakiner,

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arc of feeling Vicente Palop, Patricia Roth, Mónica Portillo, Pamela Lorea, Fernando Vidal, Ramón del Castillo, Inmaculada Hoyos, Alicia García, Marina Núñez and Ana González Mozo, as well as my friends Angie Fernández, Alfredo Menéndez, Olga Falco, Victoria Diehl, Belén Rosa de Egea, Eva Fernández, Rafael Segura and Ana Melgosa, among many others. My beautiful son, Arturo, continues to be the great joy of my life.

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Photo Acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it. Some locations of artworks are also given below, in the interest of brevity: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris: 65; Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford: 50 (ms Bodl. 264, fol. 78v); The British Museum, London: 33, 42, 59, 60; © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images: 66; The Cleveland Museum of Art, oh: 17, 31, 51; from Stewart Culin, Korean Games, with Notes on the Corresponding Games of China and Japan (Philadelphia, pa, 1895), photo Penn Museum, Philadelphia: 15; The David Collection, Copenhagen: 24; Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: 52; Godong/Alamy Stock Photo: 10; from Joseph Guislain, Traité sur l’aliénation mentale et sur les hospices des aliénés (Amsterdam, 1826), vol. i, photo Wellcome Library, London: 54; Haggin Museum, Stockton, ca: 35; from the Illustrated London News, cvii/2958 (28 December 1895): 55; İstanbul Üniversitesi Nadir Eserler Kütüphanesi: 47 (ms Ty 5502, fol. 78v); The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles: 36; Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images: 14; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna: 48, 49; from George Henry Mason, The Punishments of China (London, 1801), photo Thomas J. Watson Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: 3; from Girolamo Mercuriale, De arte gymnastica libri sex (Venice, 1573): 63; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: 21, 26, 27; Minneapolis Institute of Art, mn: 6; Musée du Louvre, Paris: 58; Musée du Louvre, Paris, photos © 2023 rmn-Grand Palais/Dist. Photos scala, Florence: 28 (Stéphane Maréchalle), 29 (Hervé Lewandowski); Museo de Antropología de Xalapa, photo Alfredo M. Hernández: 46; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid: 5, 7, 22; Museo del Romanticismo, Madrid: 53; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: 57; National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc: 23; National Gallery Prague: 39; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, dc: 45; National Palace Museum, Taipei: 18, 32; from E. H. Nolan, The Illustrated History of the British Empire in India and the East (London, 1858), vol. i, photo Robarts Library, University of Toronto: 4; The Palace Museum, Beijing: 34; Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena, photo DeAgostini/Getty Images: 37; private collection: 25, 41, 67; Prasong Putichanchai/Shutterstock. com: 13; Reuters/Ajay Verma/Alamy Stock Photo: 30; from Marquis de Sade, La nouvelle Justine, ou Les malheurs de la vertu; suivie de L’histoire de Juliette, sa

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arc of feeling soeur (Holland, 1797), vol. viii, photo Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris: 62; Kuntal Saha/iStock.com: 2; Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin: 40; Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe: 9; Statens Museum for Kunst (smk), Copenhagen: 19, 20; from Arcangelo Tuccaro, Trois dialogues de l’exercice de sauter et voltiger en l’air (Paris, 1599), photo Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris: 64; from Truth, xxx/769 (24 September 1891): 56; Victoria and Albert Museum, London: 43; The Wallace Collection, London: 38; Wellcome Collection, London (cc by 4.0): 16; Wikimedia Commons: 1 (photo Olaf Tausch, cc by 3.0), 11 (photo ArchaiOptix, cc by-sa 4.0 – Altes Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), 12 (photo Jebulon, public domain – Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete), 44 (photo Francesco Bini/Sailko, cc by-sa 4.0).

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Index

Illustration numbers are indicated by italics Aberdeen, Duchess of  192 Abhai Singh, maharaja  93, 31 Abydos  1 Adam 195 Adonis 89 Aegisthus  58, 62 aesthetic authority  13, 62, 69–70, 200, 216 Aëtius of Amida  183, 188 Afghanistan 126 Africa  12, 61, 90 Agamemnon  58, 74 Agostino Novello  153 Ajanta (Maharashtra), caves of  10, 2 Alceste 68 Alétis see Erigone Alexandria 169 library of  57 Along the River during the Qingming Festival 120–21, 18 Ambrose, St  170 Amenhotep iii 72 America 18 Americas 41 North America  40 Amors experimentalphysikalisches Taschenbuch 202–3, 61 Amsterdam 200 ancien régime  85, 172 Andaman Islands  113 Andaman, Sea of  79 Andromache 212

Andry, Nicolas  173 Ango, family  151 anguish  17, 32–8, 47, 52, 95, 127, 182, 200, 220 Anjou, Duke of  197 anthesterias, festival  65–6, 73, 87, 92, 95, 111 Antigone 60 antiquity  18, 42, 56, 60, 67, 73, 153, 206–7, 211–12 Apollodorus (Pseudo) of Alexandria 56, 67 Apuleius, Lucius  168, 211–13 Golden Ass, The (Asinus Aureus) 211–12, 216 Aretino, Pietro  206, 214, 216 Aristophanes 212 Aristotle 103 Artemis 60 Asclepiades of Bithynia, physician 153, 188 Asclepiades of Samos, writer  212 Asia  18, 68, 199 Asia Minor  73 Central Asia  11, 86, 113, 126, 157 Southeast Asia  10, 12, 17, 77, 78, 80, 82, 84, 113, 166 Aspalis 60 Astarte 89 Astruc, Jean  188 Athens  58, 64, 74, 108 classical 64–6

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arc of feeling Atlantic Ocean  12, 14, 172, 174, 178, 192 Augustine of Hippo  211 Augustus, emperor  208, 214 Aurelianus, Caelius  183, 188 Avicenna (Ibn Sina)  152–3, 208, 218 Ayutthaya, temple  80 Ayutthayan period  84 Azerbaijan 126 Ba, the (the Egyptian soul)  75 Bacchus  62, 158 Bai Yuyi  115 balance, sense of  12, 18, 22, 27, 30–31, 62, 83, 108, 151, 153 humoral balance  187–8 Baltic sea  12, 113, 126 Bangkok  77–8, 78, 83–4, 86, 219, 13 Baring, Anne  75 Baroque  18, 41, 168, 219 Beard, George Miller  174–5 Beaumarchais, Marie Louise de  37 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin de  37 Beijing  110, 118, 120 Bellini, Giovanni  119 Benares 79 Benjamin, Walter  13, 38, 74, 198 Berlin  38, 66, 183 Bhagavad Gītā  97, 105 Bhāgavata Purān.a 97–9 Bharata Muni  101–3 Natysasastra 101 Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris  203–4, 209 Biederer, brothers  40, 50, 8 Bilvamangala Swami see Lilasuka Bodleian Library  151 Bohemia 19 Bonnet, Charles  32 Borneo 15 Boston 182 Boucher, François  194 Bouguereau, William-Adolphe, Nymphaeum  35 Brahma 91 brahmans  78, 80, 83 Braj Bhasa  94 Braj province  93

Brantôme, Pierre de  199–200 Brown, John George  49, 25 Bruegel, Pieter the Elder  149, 155, 48, 49 Buckley Ebrey, Patricia  122 Buddha 94 Bulgaria 126 Burgos, Laws of  12 Burkert, Walter  64 Burma 84 Cádiz  69, 86, 221 Callimachus 63 Cambodia 84 Camera della Aquile, Palazzo Te (Mantua) 215 Capri 210–11 Carnival  33, 43, 161, 216 Caro, Rodrigo  60 Cashford, Jules  75 Castel, Abbé de Saint-Pierre, CharlesIrénée 187 Observations on Sobriety 187–9 Castello Estense (Ferrara)  10, 211, 44 Castiglione, Balthasar  215 Celsus, Aulus Cornelius  183, 188 Chang’an (Xi’an)  114 Chang’e 166 Chantilly, Château de  197 Charcot, Jean-Martin  189–90, 193 Charila 60 charuk puja, ritual  42, 4 Chateaubriand, François-René de  38 Chen Mei  34 Paintings of the Hundred Beauties (Baimei tu) 146 Cheyne, George  172 Chicago 193 China  17, 41, 65, 69, 86, 87, 92, 110–14, 117–22, 125–8, 146, 157–9, 166, 200, 216, 219, 221, 17 pre-imperial 12 Clarín, Leopoldo Alas La Regenta 48–9 Clavijo y Fajardo, José  37 Cold Food Festival  111–15 Columbus, Cristopher  12, 80 communitas  91–2, 96, 162

254

Index Conan Doyle, Arthur  31 Confucius  17, 111 Book of Rites  113–14, 122 Spring and Autumn Annals 112 Copenhagen  32, 197, 19, 20 Coromandel, coast of  79 Cot, Pierre-Auguste  105 Springtime  26 Courbet, Gustave  145 Cox, Joseph Mason  179–83, 187, 190, 193 cradle, cradling  16, 31, 36, 40, 153, 155, 173, 183, 185, 188, 36, 37 Crete 72–5 Cupid  194, 214 Cyrene  57, 68, 29

East India Company (voc)  78, 83 Egypt  10, 61, 166, 168–70, 213, 1 Book of the Dead 10 Eid al-Fitr, festival of  87, 14 Elephantis  206, 211 Elias, Norbert  69, 92 Ellis, Havelock  53–4 emotional refuge  16–17, 92, 128, 146, 162 England  40, 71, 85, 172 Ephesus, Council of  166 Eratosthenes  57–8, 61, 68 Erigone  56–63, 65–7, 76, 81, 89, 168, 221, 10 Erizzo, Sebastiano  209–10 erotic, erotism  10, 27, 48–50, 54–5, 67, 102, 166, 194, 200, 206, 218 auto-erotic drive  53, 91, 163, 205 Esquirol, Jean-Étienne Dominique  183 Etna, Mount  52 Euripides  52, 60, 90 Hippolytus Veiled 52 Europe  10–11, 14, 17–18, 23, 27, 30, 32–3, 40, 41, 44, 48–9, 54, 62, 66, 68, 72, 75, 77, 84, 92, 105, 117, 120, 122, 145, 147, 149, 151–2, 156, 161, 172, 178, 180, 183, 187, 194–5, 197–200, 202, 206 Evans, Arthur John  74 experience  10, 12–14, 17, 26, 28–31, 34–5, 38, 47, 68–9, 71, 82, 90–91, 93, 95, 101–3, 107, 109, 118–24, 125, 127, 156, 160–61, 163–5, 174–5, 179, 185, 190, 192–3, 220, 222 of injustice  13, 62 dramatic elements of oscillation 34, 39 dramatic elements of play  161–2 dramatic elements of ritual  69, 161 dramatic theory  101–2 shared  62, 222

Dadley, John  41, 3 Dano, festival of  15, 87 Darwin, Charles  24 Darwin, Erasmus  22–4, 28, 31, 179, 181, 183 Delphi 73 Demeter  75–6, 86–7, 89 Denman, Thomas  182 Denmark 198 Deubner, Ludwig  66 Devi, Amrita  94 desire  33, 35, 48, 50, 52, 74, 91, 97, 100, 110, 113, 124–5, 127, 145–6, 158, 163, 165, 179, 190, 199–200, 204, 211 auto-erotic impulse, masturbation, onanism  53 immoderate passion  52 in the Purana  99–100 Diderot, Denis  77 Diogenes Laërtius  61 Dionysus  56, 62, 65–6, 89, 153, 164–5, 169 disorientation  17, 24, 27, 29, 34–5, 47, 70, 95, 127, 193, 198, 220 dream  32, 53, 110, 126, 128, 145–6, 164, 193 Dream of the Red Chamber  48 Du Fu  115 Du Quet, engineer  189 Dürer, Albert  44, 94, 170–71

255

arc of feeling Falconet, Étienne-Maurice  194 fear  20–21, 24, 29–30, 32–5, 38, 62–4, 82, 95–6, 101, 106, 128, 145, 154, 156, 162, 164, 182, 197, 200, 219, 221 as a pastime  33 Feng Menglong  128, 146 The Hundred Beauties of Nanjin 146 Love Story (Qingshi) 128 Ferdowsi 219 Feriae Latinae (Latin Festival)  62 Ferrara  10, 211, 44 Ficus religiosa 94 Fink, Eugen  161 Finland 113 Flaubert, Gustave  189–90, 204 Folies-Bergère 198 Forberg, Friedrich Karl  212 Foucault, Michel  17, 28, 81–2 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré  33, 77, 147, 194–5, 197, 200, 206, 23, 38 France  27, 54, 77, 85, 126, 151, 161, 170, 183, 189, 195, 197 Frank, Joseph  21–2, 24 Frazer, James G.  15–16, 73, 75, 84, 87, 89–92, 222 Freeman, Stephen  173 Freud, Sigmund  31, 52–3, 81, 220, 222 Friedrich, Caspar David  32 Fuchs, Eduard  198, 200 Fuller, Francis  185–6 fun (experience of )  160, 162–3, 200, 220 Galen 153 Gaudon, Constantin  178 Geertz, Clifford  69, 81, 85 Genetté, engineer  186 Geneva  32, 183 Gergyovden, Bulgarian Spring festival 126 Germany 183 Gestalt 119 gestational movements  153, 189–90, 207 gestures  52, 57, 71, 91, 100, 127, 151, 166, 206

Ghana 92–3 Gibbon, Edward  71 Gilliéron, Émile Jr  72, 47 Gilliéron, Émile Sr  72, 74 Ginzburg, Carlo  13 Giovanni Boccacio, Decameron 218 Gita Govinda see Jayadeva Gluckman, Max  89–91 Gonzaga family  215 Goya, Francisco de  33–4, 42–5, 50, 120, 5, 7, 22 Granet, Marcel  159, 163 Great Bangkok Swing see Sao Chingcha Greece 15 classical  12, 17, 40, 60, 64, 66–7, 73, 76, 83, 113, 166, 209, 219, 221 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste  145 Grien, Hans Baldung  44 Guislain, Josephy  183, 54 Gu Zhengyi  145 Guyin yishu tu 110–11 Hagia Triada  72, 73–6, 82, 12 Hallaran, William Saunders  181, 190 Halloween 92 Hamilton, Alexander  155 Hammershøi, Vilhelm  24 Han dynasty  110, 112–13 Hansen, Valerie  120 Hariti 86 Harner, Michael  44 Harrison, Michael  216 Hawaii 54 Hayner, Christian August  183 Health Jolting Chair  192 Heavenly Lovers Festival (Qixi)  159 Hebei (China)  110 Hector 211 Helen of Troy  60 Helle 60 Heracles 68 Heraklion, Archaeological Museum 73 Hercules 33 Hermes 68 Herodotus 108 Herz, Markus  24–5, 29–32, 37, 220

256

Index hindola raga  103, 105, 17 Hindustan 10 Hindustani painting  97, 105, 200 Hippocrates  52, 153, 188 Hispania 61 Hölderlin, Friedrich  119 Holi, Indian festivity of love  93 Homer  31–2, 39 Huan (of the Qi dynasty), Duke (Qi Huan Gong)  111, 113 Huan Tan  112 Huizinga, Johan  61, 222 Homo ludens 159–63 Hume, David  199 Hyginus, Gaius Julius  56–8, 61, 64, 76

Jiexiu 112 Jie Zhitiu  112–13 Jin Ping Mei  48, 50, 216 Jin Wen Gong  112 Jocasta 60 Jodhpur 94 John, apostle  168, 170 Book of Revelation 168 Joseon dynasty  87 Juel, Jens  32, 34, 37, 19, 20 Julian, emperor  188 Juvenal, Satires  60, 207 Kagithane, park of  147–8, 47 Kaifeng 120 Kalinga 10 Kama Sutra 53 Spanish Kama Sutra 218 Kant, Immanuel  29–30, 32, 34, 118, 155, 220 Katha Upanishad  105, 107 Kenya 10 Khejarli 94 Kierkegaard, Soren  35–8 Klimt, Gustav  74 Klinger, Max  50, 9 Knossos, Palace of  73–5 Kongzi see Confucius Königsberg 23 Korea  9, 15, 87, 113, 124, 126, 15 Krishna  93, 97–100, 103, 147, 216, 218, 16, 17 Kune 87 Kurban Bayram, festival  126 Kurdistan 89 Kyrgyzstan (Kyrgyz Republic)  86, 126

Icarius of Athens  56, 58, 62, 67, 89 Illustrious August see Xuanzong Im Kwon-taek  124 India  10–11, 15, 17, 42, 54, 78–9, 82–6, 89–90, 92–3, 95–6, 98, 101, 147, 169, 2, 4 Greater India  84 Indian Ocean  178 Indian Sea  10 Indochina 85 Indonesia 15 Inquisition 40 Iran 126 Indo-Iranian 11 Iranian 110 Irandati, Naga  10, 11, 2 Ireland 181 Isis, goddess  10, 76, 86, 89, 166, 168–70, 211, 213, 1 Hymn of Cyme 168 Istanbul  148, 197, 47 Italy  15, 27, 60, 154

La Condamine, Charles-Marie de 173, 186 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de  19–21, 24, 29–30 Lancret, Nicolas  198 Lao Chingcha  83 Later Dream of the Red Chamber  124 Laufer, Berthold  113 Lawrence, D. H.  55

Jamshid 219 Japan  54, 117, 159 manga  166, 200 Jayadeva, Gita-Govinda  97, 216 Jerome, St  170 Jesus Christ  169 Jhulan-ustav, ritual  234 Jhulan-Yatra, festival  234

257

arc of feeling Maharashtra, caves  10, 219, 2 Makara Sankranti  84 Malaysia 84 mal de mer see seasickness Malinowski, Bronisław  85 Malleus Maleficarum 43 Mandeville, Bernard de  55, 173, 205 mantra see lullaby Mariana of Austria  199 Mark, apostle  169 Marly, Château de  197 Martial (Marcus Valerius Martialis) 10, 208, 214 Martin Spencer, Lilly  221, 45 Mason, George Henry  41, 3 Maupassant, Guy de  48–50, 124 Mediterranean Sea  10, 14, 56–7, 61, 67, 89, 157 Méndez, Cristóbal  153, 177 Mercure de France 189 Mercuriale, Girolamo  10, 207, 208–9, 211, 63 Mexico 95 Gulf of Mexico  12 Mian, Mt  112 Michelangelo 184 Mid-Autumn Festival  166 Middle Ages  54, 92, 151, 153, 157 Middlesex (London), hospital of  174, 181 Ming dynasty  11, 47, 115, 120, 145, 200 Minos 73 Mirabeau, Count of  54 Mongkut see Rama iv Moon, the  32, 48, 84, 95, 98–100, 116, 128, 166, 168–71, 10, 52 Mozambique 90 Mucha, Alfons  74 museums and collections Altes Museum  66 Amsterdam Erotic Museum  200 Bangkok National Museum  78 British Museum  93–4 Cleveland Museum of Art  93 Heraklion Archeological Museum, Crete  73 Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna) 149

Le Loyer, Pierre (Monsieur de la Brosse) 42 Leonowens, Anne Harriette  85 Levi-Strauss, Claude  70 Li Qingzhao  115 Li Shanfu  157 Li Song  157 liberation, freedom, emancipation (feeling of )  12, 68–9, 93, 96–7, 145–6, 165, 172, 181, 221–3 Libya 68, 19 Ligho Day  126 Ligorio, Pirro  10, 208–11, 44 līlā  98–101, 159 Lilasuka 101 Ling Mengchu  124 Lisbon 197 Livonia  15, 95 Loggia di Galatea 58 London  71, 84, 93, 101, 118, 174, 177, 192–5, 55, 57 López-Baralt, Luce  218 Louis xiv 197 Louis xv  187, 197 love  10, 14, 28, 36–8, 49, 52–4, 66–7, 103, 108–9, 116, 124–8, 145–7, 164, 190, 194 198–200, 202, 211–16, 222 as an illusion  100 Holi, festival of love  93 love songs  96 parental love  151, 157 The Dance of Love see Rāsa līlā The Supreme Lover see Krishna in China see Qing in Hinduism see raga Luan, river  110 lullaby  95, 106, 165 Lydia 73 Lyon  171, 183 Lysidicé  212 Macquart, Louis-Charles-Henri  154–5 Macrobius 60 Madrid 197 Mahabharata 97

258

Index

London Science Museum  71 Louvre Museum  213 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York  60, 105 Musée de Beaux-Arts de Lyon  171 Musée d’Orsay  203 National Archaeological Museum, Athens  64, 74 National Museum of Beijing  120 National Palace, Taipei  159 National Roman Museum  214 Prado Museum  33 Statens Museum for Kunst (Copenhagen) 32 Wallace Collection  147, 194 Wellcome Collection (London) 101 Musset, Alfred de  38 Myanmar 77 myth, mythology  10, 13, 15, 31, 56–7, 61–3, 68–71, 76, 80, 81, 83, 91, 169, 213, 220–21 mythemes 61 Nainsukh 147 Nakhon Si Thammarat (Thailand)  233 Naples 210 Napoleon  23, 189 Narasingha Deva i 10 naupathia see seasickness navigium isidis 213 Nepal  15, 79 Nero 212 Netherlands, the  149 New York  60, 105, 177, 192 Nietzsche, Friedrich  13, 32, 159, 161, 163–5, 222 Nile, river  10, 169, 213 Nodier, Charles  38 Nomkhuwulbane, goddess  90 Nonnus of Panopolis  61, 67 norms and rules  16, 68, 91–2, 115–17, 121–2, 127–8, 161–3, 165, 172 Norway 113 Notre Dame see Virgin Mary

Nowruz  89, 126, 222 Nü Sishu 122 Oedipus of Thebes  60, 81 Orestes  58, 60, 65 Oribasius 188 Orissa 10 Ortega y Gasset, José  163, 241, 36 Osiris  10, 89, 168–70, 213, 1 Ottoman Empire  89, 126 Ovid  66, 212 Oxford 151 Pacific 41 Paganelli, miracle  154, 37 Pakistan  15, 73 Palazzo Massimo alle Terme  214 Panckoucke, Charles-Louis-Fleury 189, 195 El Pardo, Royal Palace of (Madrid)  33 Paribeni, Roberto  72 Parikrama 94 Paris  38, 49, 85, 119, 186–7, 193, 198, 200, 203, 209, 213 Parvati  86, 89, 94 Pasiphae  73, 75 passions  13, 20–21, 32, 38, 44, 48–9, 52, 70, 102, 108, 115–18, 125, 128, 160, 182, 190, 198, 216–17 collective passions  220 vague de passions 38 pastime  27, 33, 38, 87, 98, 114, 153, 157 hobby-horse  155, 159, 173 see also līlā Pater, Jean-Baptiste  198 Pausanias 73 Pelias 68 Penelope Painter  66, 11 performance  76, 91, 101, 161, 219 Perfumed Garden, The 218 Persephone 76 Persia  152, 219–21 Persian Gulf  10 Persian New Year see Nowruz Peruzzi, Baldassare  58, 10 Petronius, Satyricon 212–14 Phaedra  52, 60, 73–5, 221 Philip iv 199

259

arc of feeling Philip v 197 Phrachao Ramathibodi ii 78 Phrixus 60 Picard, Charles  72–6 Plato  58, 95, 105–6, 108–9, 116, 153 Phaedrus  105–6, 108 Timaeus 58 play, playfulness children’s play  149–51, 152, 155–9 Huizinga on play  160–63 Nietzsche on play  164–6 playful impulse  160 play the game of disorientation 27, 193, 220 play and Greek swing rituals 68–70 play and līlā 98–9 play and rites  115–19 play and sex  211–16, 220 play and sexual roles  93 play and swing  16–17 Pliny 188 Plutarch of Chaeronea  60–61, 169 Polygnotus of Thasos  72–3 Pompadour, Madame de  197 Pompeii  188, 206, 211 Portugal 27 Prague  19, 198 Priapus 212 Prussia 23 Pseudo-Apollodorus  56, 61 Pseudo-Longinus 58 Ptolemy iv Philopator  57 Punjab 86 Purkyně, Jan Evangeliste  19 Pyramid Texts 10 Pyrmont waters  22 Qi dynasty  111 Qianlong Emperor  146 Qing (love), cult of  115 Qing dynasty  119, 120, 18, 41 Qingshi  125, 128 Qingming festival  65, 111, 115, 120, 123, 18 Qiu Ying  120 Quaritch Wales, H. G.  83–5

Rabelais, François  42, 149 Radha  86, 101–2, 103, 216–18, 16, 17 raga 102–3 hindola raga  103–5 ragamala  103, 105 Rajasthan  86, 105, 35, 42 Rama iv  83, 85 Rama x 85 Ramaradt  79–80, 86 Ramathibodi ii 78 Raphael of Urbino  206 rasa  101–2, 117 Rasa, dance  98, 100, 101 Rāsa līlā, dance of divine love  99, 100–101 Red Sea  10 Reddy, William  16, 92 Renoir, Jean  49, 124 Rethemiotakis, George  74 rhythm  9, 15, 26, 29, 47, 155, 165, 180, 186 Ribnovo (Bulgaria)  126 Richardson, Samuel  173 Rig-Veda  84, 101 ritual, rite  9, 13, 15–16, 39–41, 43, 57, 63–5, 67–70, 76–7, 82–92, 95–7, 98, 108–9, 113–14, 117, 119, 125, 127–8, 161–3, 165, 170, 214, 216, 220–22 aerial atonement  42 bacchantic rituals  90 purification rituals  41–2, 73, 93, 113 rite of elevation  86 rites of initiation  93 ritual memory  69 ritual prayer  94 rituals of passage  68, 91 rituals of rebellion  89–90 rituals of status reversal  17, 68, 90, 92, 95, 206, 212, 221 state ritual  85 Robert, Hubert  33, 21 rocking chair  12, 30, 36, 54, 172–3 Roman d’Alexandre 151, 50 Romano, Giulio  214–15, 66, 67

260

Index Rome  10, 58, 62, 66, 153, 157–8, 166, 168–9, 183, 185, 194, 206–10, 212–14, 10, 65 Rosenwein, Barbara H.  92 Rowlandson, Thomas  202, 43, 60 Rouen  151, 189 Rush, Benjamin  179, 181 Sabbath 43–4 Sacaea, Babylonian festival  89 Sade, Marquis de  203–5, 62 Saint-Pierre, Abbé see Castel, CharlesIrénée Saint-Simon, duc de  197 Saint Augustine (Siena), church of  154 Sao Chingcha  77, 83, 85–6 Saturnalia 62 Sauvages, François Boissier de  22 Schongauer, Martin  171 seasickness  24, 148, 175–8 Sei Shonagon  117 self-deception  31, 47, 223 Seneca 52 Seth 169 Shanameh 219 Shiji see Sima Qian Siam  78–80, 83–5 Sicca (Tunisia)  183 Siddhartha Gautama see Buddha Siegel, Lee  99 Siena 154 Sima Guang  122 Sima Qian  111, 122 Simmel, Georg  38, 61 Simone Martini  154, 37 Siva  83–4, 89, 94–5, 169 Smyth, James C.  174 Socrates 108–9 Sophocles  58, 81 Sol Invictus, festival of  169 Song, dynasty  115, 119–20, 122, 157 Sorgrenfri (Copenhagen), castle of  32 South Sudan  10 Spain  9, 15, 27, 43, 69, 96, 197, 199 Spanheim, Ezechiel  210 Staël, Madame de  125

Stendhal (Henri Beyle)  190 Su Hanchen  157–8, 51 Su Shi  115 Suetonius 208–10 Suishi guang ji 111 Sweden 113 swing as an emotional refuge  16, 128, 146 as a game of disorientation  198 as an instrument of courtship 124 as an instrument of reverie  146 as a liminal machine  124 as a mechanical anodyne  182 as a metronome  95 as a mimetic instrument  185–6 as a riding stool  186 as a symbolic artefact  16, 146 as a transposition machine  95, 173, 221 as a transgressive instrument  121 origins  10, 60–62, 78–80, 111–13, 146, 219 swing songs  90, 93, 95–6, 106 Tacitus 209 Tamil Nadu  84, 86, 225 Tammuz 89 Tanabata, Japanese festival  89 Tang, dynasty  114–15, 128, 157–9 Tang Xianzu  128 Tanzania  10, 93 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste  41 Teej, festival of  86, 93–4, 96–7, 103, 30, 31 Telemachus 39–40 Thailand  69, 77, 82, 84, 86, 222 Theophrastus 108 Tiberius  10, 208–11 Tolstoy, Leo  204 Tourette, Gilles de la  189 Tourtelle, Étienne  173 Triyampawai-Trippawai  82, 84–5 Troy  60, 62 Tu Fu see Du Fu Tuccaro, Arcangelo  108, 64 Tunisia  183, 218

261

arc of feeling Turkey 126 Turkmenistan 126 Turner, Victor W.  90–93 Tylor, Edward B.  161 Ubrique, Cádiz (Spain)  69, 96, 221 Uganda 10 uncertainty  37–9, 74, 116 United States  12, 30, 62, 172, 183, 221 Urals mountains  157 Utrecht, Peace of  187 Uttar Pradesh  86 Van Vliet, Jeremiah  78–82, 84, 86 Vedantasutra 98 Vedas, the  195 Venice 119 Venus of Laussel  168 Venus pendula  44, 211, 213, 215–16 Veracruz 95 Versailles  85, 147 Vienna 149 Vietnam 86 Vigée-Lebrun, Marie-LouiseÉlisabeth 160 Villa Farnesina (Rome)  58, 10 Villa Pamphili (Rome)  214 Vilnius 21 Virgin Mary  76, 166, 168–71 Nôtre Dame  170 Virgil  62, 63 visceral economy/memory  70, 222 Vis.n.u  83–4, 94, 98

Vistula Lagoon  23 Vitellius 210 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)  173 Warburg, Aby  61 Warner, Marina  170 Watteau, Antoine  197–8 The Shepherds  40 Weckmann, the Elder, Nicklaus  171 Willis, Thomas  20–21, 24, 29 Windsor chair  12, 180 witch, witchcraft, bewitchment  13, 31, 33, 40, 43–4, 47, 50, 54, 119, 153, 7 Wudi 113 Xi’an 114 Xinlun 112 Xuanzong, emperor  114, 119 Yama 106 Yamuna river  98, 100 Yang Guifei  114 Yashoda 98 Yellow River  12 yoga  98, 105, 107–8, 200 Yunnan 69 Zemon Davis, Natalie  216 Zhang Xuan  157 Zhang Zéduan  120–22 Zhou Fang  157 Zuo zhuan 112

262