The great Karl Lagerfeld speaks of romantic satisfactions in the contemporary era thus: 'not everyone one can have, of course, expensive friends or mistresses, but this is the best way...'
From Karl I have learned many things. I must say I do not completely understand him, and nor do I agree with him on every single point, but he does have this nasty habit of consistently being utterly sane whilst appearing ineffable! He lives in a kind of cloud castle world, certainly, but then he all of a sudden says things like this: 'I take people as I find them; with their flaws and imperfections.' This is a great, noble and philosophical statement. I must say I learned something from that statement.
So for those of the Epicure mind then, let us proceed onwards to the grist of our important matters...
Firstly as to morality, one should realise that in today's world there are many people who never had the luxury of a marriage of their own choosing! They are innocently caught thereby in the conflict between natural human respect versus the fuller - and wilder - forces of Eros. There are people who have left zones of great turmoil and conflict, and who were married at sixteen in their original cultures, and who have now made the leap into successful lives in the Western World. As mature adults – perhaps with children too – they have faced the issue with their apparent spouses of this matter of forced marriage and its consequences in a liberal Western culture. Some stay rooted to their cultural origins in every respect; some do not.
And the fact is, one need not take so strained a view and point to this extreme item of the cultural disparity only, since there are many subtle ways in which ordinary modern liaisons resulting in offspring or attachment are also not really about careful and highly qualified, fully-conscious decisions. Gender orientation, gender equity questions, even perhaps inability to conceive – these are all questions that impinge unfairly upon partnerships and relating. And there are many others too.
Old Money knows things are not so simple as 'having a mistress' or, in reverse, seducing the houseboy or gary-driver. In spite of the number of times these themes feature in Victorian fiction!
Logically, the purely dogmatic moral issue alone - when realistically and fully addressed - divides into actual questions of physical consequences, questions of social and psychological esteem, questions of potential harmful effects on others, and the inadequacy of too-rapid judgements based on what might only be appearance and illusion or delusion, or bio-chemical transitory imperatives.
Professional opinions, in the crucial seminal civilizing times of Plato and Socrates, were looked down upon as sophistry, and yet today they are fervidly promoted by the general media, academia and establishment politics, as ranking higher than anything else. They would have it that the professional is the moral code. This is the thinking that has allowed professional accountants to come to rule the world of the politician, the judge, the teacher, the doctor, the citizen... This is not healthy. And the tsunami demonstrates it. Dinosaurs go the way of all dinosaurs. They can be rid of no other way. Patience and the tsunami deals with them.
The dinosaur effect is this recurring force, this theme, in human history, of something valuable and useful being almost inevitably taken over by a rapacious and insensible and unintelligent thing; a thing which brooks no opposition and no argument and dominates. A thing that feeds only itself, mimics its host and is in fact a gigantic parasite.
So let us proceed directly then, to our ideal; that is - ideal for the epicure, not the opinionated professional.
The top-floor kitchen (for this is what haute cuisine means) produces refinement of tastes, elegant food, sometimes hearty fare, but always careful preparation, design, artistry, substance, beautiful presentation... It is classical. It is old-fashioned. What is new in it is exceptional, tested, and surely provocative – it is confident and self-assured.
The top-floor of sex may be applied to the partner of marriage, to the liaison privàt, to the liaison le non dit, in short to any circumstance in which sex is occasionable. The repetitiousness of an ordinary normal working household, in which there may be children too, prevails usually against any top-floor sensibility. One must strive to be 'not ordinary.' Such a thing must be worked at, time found for it, energy found for it.
The top-floor of sex is a power... What is strongly sexually evocative certainly opens doorways of supercharged energy, but of course one must also know to develop and marshal one's own core energy sources and supplies by taking care of one's self regardless. Because otherwise this is what is called 'burning the candle at both ends.' Taking energy forcefully from a tired body results only in exhaustion.
Because the top-floor of sex is a worked-at skill, it fulfills the definition of 'mechanical equilibrium' – or balance. Energy into mechanical balance equals power.
But we must distill this vision even further and aim for a yet higher target still of what constitutes 'high sex.' Taking one of the best definitions of the word 'lust' that I have seen – to seek for unrestrained gratification – we should combine this with the additional understanding that these hypothetical people of whom we speak must certainly not be artless. Indeed, we must assume they are full of knowledge about the matter in which they are concerned together. It is my contention that in order for a partner to unequivocally honour the sexual and erotic desires of another, they must be able to deliver a superlative physical performance! To have lust provoked in one is therefore a good thing, in the event the other person is going to welcome and appreciate the ensuing physical performance, once things get to that. Many people already know this...
And so let us retrace our story at this point though, and return to the haute cuisine analogy: there, all the ingredients – the best ingredients – lie upon the counter of this hypothetically magnificently appointed epicure's kitchen. The bottle of some famous, consistent and said-to-be luscious wine is waiting to be decanted into its silver-necked, crystal bodied flacon on the sideboard silver tray.
As the artisan of this food practices their alchemy, transforms the fruit of the vine, and the work of human hands, and the meat, game or fish of the hunter or the husbandsman – at the point almost of final assemblage, sensations of satisfaction arise in them. So far no one has partaken of the final result. And the feast lies still not yet enjoyed in the mouth or in the stomach...
A knock on the door... Or a ring on the bell. The seat is at last taken, the dishes at last brought out, presented, served. A la Russee.
For the epicure this is all a deliberate, an intelligently-conscious, aforethought-out, act of enjoyment with a view to gratification. The satisfaction, however, came at the point when the mind has decided its undertakings are virtually certain to fall into the definitions and standards of the perfection that one has set beforehand. And there is nothing haphazard, or accidental, about it.
We know this cut of beef is range-raised, grass-finished, natural, organic prime sirloin. But we dress it with pimentin and juniper berry-laced sauce and whole black peppercorns, and arrange the way it is plated. And we sit the glass of luscious red Penfolds Hermitage next to it because it all looks so good that way and silently screams its promise of the plangent, bodily sensations to come.
Some dresses are cut and panelled and shaped in such ways that a woman possesses a Juno-esque figure when she stands, and tightened vicious curves when she sits. Some stilettos are like the flagged little wood piquettes that show whether the steak is rare or medium-rare...
Some women cannot wear the civet musk perfume of the bespoke artisanal perfumier, or the real bourbon vanilla pod-scented French lace panties underneath the frou-frou, and the heavy and glossy-wet look scarlet lipstick, and the signature purple and gold heavy Baranasi silk brocade jacket of the bi-sexual rich-bitch who possesses a compliant eastern European maid who does anything for little money and a place to stay while she studies for her certificate course at a reasonably respected institute. One day, as it always is, she will 'own her own pushcart' - like it says in the original Moulin Rouge film.
But these things take masses of money, because for one thing they take masses of time to engage in.
A woman with a shaved pussy and five different credit cards belonging to five different men is one thing.
The fact is though that a married woman from the suburbs who looks after a house and children may look easily as good and inspire as much lust, if not more, with the same clothing and all the extravagant grooming and attitude. It is afterall, such a little slip, if done only now and again, and afterall who can afford for any money to leave the demands of the household for more than a few hours. So much more comfortable in any case to leave the stage lights of the performance, no matter how lowered for the secret liaisons, and sleep with oneself in one's own bed, and actually sleep, mouth open, dry breath, unconcerned with all this 'perfection,' worrying antiseptic mindfulness and human-contrived animalism, and necessarily twitching genitalia whenever near the paramour.
The common idea and attitude to adultery or being a mistress is that one lives an inevitably lonely life in which there will never be the final comfort of the growing old and the dying together of the lovers. Growing old and dying, however, is not, unless it is to do with smoked meat or fish, and air dried, aged steak, especially noted as some pinnacle of haute cuisine. There is charcuterie, of course. And this simply means that for some people it is suitable and possible for the marriage to be entirely monogamous and intense and satisfying. But it is not a rule and only adamently enjoined in any case by those people who know least of all about such matters!
This then is the verdict of Old Money. Two people who are absolutely equal in power and position can truly give equivalent consent to an honest and faithful marriage - fidelio. And such a situation is either rare or non-existent in the ordinary material world of Mankind. But that the angels themselves have sex is attested to in the infamous Fall thereof – and once again, the sin is in the abuse of power, not in the act of sex itself. Marriage is not wrong, nor is mere imprecise vowing wrong between two ordinary humans! But for our purposes we are commenting for the high and the mighty here, living in a world of the merely mortal and humanly flawed. And of the very learned and the devilishly wise and clever too. There are such as these - on the face of this planet. Have no doubt thereof. For them (i.e. us!) it is the sonata, not the fidelio. And we have our eyes wide open. Wherever is the point of our starting from, we are always the old money in the end. The intelligent wise, is the supreme, in the end.
Salut!
(Old Money Savoir Faire)
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