Deirde’s Lotion Mitchell Miller In a previous study I examined the history, provenance and constitution of the Great Reformer’s Beard, and the labours of the woman Janet in its maintenance and continued survival. The excellent response this ground-breaking analysis received from peers, friends and tradesmen has emboldened me to enter the fray on another much more public debate – that of the Reformer’s gluteus maximus, more commonly referred to as his arse. Reformer studies are notoriously sectarian and none more so than the sub-discipline dedicated to historical causality. The theological and theocratic camps having been largely routed, the debate now lies with the remaining two: the arsonists and the barbarians. The barbers (from the Latin barba = beard) are the party to which I myself belong, and indeed staffed and founded. By far the smallest, we (I) attribute the Reformers’ extraordinary political success to a universal artificial-beard-cult of great antiquity found in every other country where beard cultivation is possible. But the arsonists see The Reformer’s personality cult as founded entirely upon indigenous morphology, and will entertain no other thesis. Their view is the academic standard; it was the extraordinary (and divinely transpired) epidermal development of the Reformer that accounts for his posterity via posteriori.1 He was, in general, thick skinned, but the extraordinary thickness of his buttock-hide is of course the most widely known and of most awful repute. An example of exactly how thick and exactly how awful (in its most classical sense) the posterior was is given us by an episode from his student days. When the Reformer and his fellow University Debating Club Members were dragging a Cardinal through the streets one Raison Night, the churchman attempted to free himself by sinking his teeth into the Reformer’s right cheek. The Cardinal was surprised to see that this elicited not the slightest reaction from the Reformer, who carried on the task of dispatching his Cardinal there and then, going on to polish off the whole rotten church hierarchy by Rag Week. Consequently, to this day, the heraldry of the debating club still bears in Latin, the Reformer’s words to Beaton (muttered simultaneously – as was his genius – in Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic and Scythian) ‘ego mordeo!’2 The consistency of his buttocks were analogous to the solidity of his faith – thus the Cardinal
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was doomed to quail. But it was actually the French who were actually responsible for this remarkably density of the buttocks (or to adopt Buchanan’s scientific terminology, hurdeus-hideous). Consult the records from late medieval times, and listen to your vinyl records of some of the finer ballads and it becomes quickly apparent that bottom hides among the native population were in those days, generally reported to be soft, even silken, and wobbled when pinched.3 This was because most people did not sit on church benches but on soft, yielding grass or heather, or on the plump eiderdown cushions that I believe Roman Catholics decorate their pews with. The arsonists have been guilty in potraying the elephantine nature of The Reformer’s bum as the exceptional development of a native or vernacular trait pertaining to the rabbling effect of the ‘democratic intellect’. It was in fact, entirely reliant on French intervention. Indeed, the unfortunate Cardinal was a karmic casualty of events his own organisation put into motion. Permit me to explain the roots of this irony and the basics of the French thesis, which you will find hard to refute. While still a young man, he was coerced onto a French re-education programme that involved young people in extended sailing trips around the Mediterranean. As explained in the Reformer’s obscure memoir A gap year on the galleys, his two buns, bare to a bench – the fire and spirit of Reformation – received their devotional solidity through the constant chafing against the surface. For this was hardwood – none of your fir or spruce, but unvarnished beech pews, lousy with woodworm and feathered with inch-long splinters. Consider that the average shift at the oars for a galerien in this premonition of hell was no less than 18 hours per day. Imagine, the two muscles of the bum, constantly pressed up against the bench as they rock back and forth with every stroke of the oar, tightening beat by stroke by beat. Conjecture the consistency of the skin as it grinded and burnished steadily into a yellowed rind, cell upon cell piling up in mitigation against the mercilessly solid surface of the bench. Then consider the great Reformer, later in life and his nights in cloaca,4 reading his devotional literature, considering the effluence of mere deeds and the next act of his great movement. Sure – it was hard native stone that refined that adamant surface into a glossy matter fit to
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keystone a temple, and Andrex toilet paper that polished it – but that was the Reformer’s own peculiar innovation on a foundation laid out and developed overseas. You are already, no doubt, in as much of a lather as I am at the thought of the stony backside – and so too were his contemporaries in the Movement! For the hardness of the Reformer’s bottom became the seat of national pride and general esprits de corps. Legends sprung up about the Reformer’s ability to break through solid wood with just a wiggle and a shake, or to crack stone when flopping down to sit on a low wall. It is also true that his life was saved from an assassin when his immutable exterior bent the dirk-blade as it thrust up the back of his good gown. Although non-scriptural, these apocrypha were quietly encouraged by the Inner Circle, who in honour of their leader’s endowment took to showing favour and agreement by applying a hearty, open-palmed slap to each others behinds. It became a point of honour not to cry out in pain, not to grimace, not shed a tear, but to follow the Reformer’s example and nod solemnly, towards Divine Providence and material miracles. The model demonstrated by the Reformer’s bahookie was furthermore, imposed upon the populace. Out with the heather – which was burned or sold wholesale to Little Egypt – and to Hell with the eiderdown cushions and all who plumped for them; every Godly church was outfitted with a hard pew of birch, upon which the God fearing were advised to sit for no less than three hours every day and five on Sunday. The congregations were also encouraged to rock back and forward in imitation of the Reformer’s earlier devotions, to cultivate their own posteriorial rinds during prayer. But none, of course, could quite match the refinement, the magnificence, the astonishing impervity of the Reformer’s ischial callosities. Yet, you have no doubt registered the difficulty here of this confusion of worldly magnificence with spiritual clarity. As with all worldly matters, there would emerge a flaw, an imperfection, a problem. It came to light at one of the regular public viewings of the Reformers buttocks, where a select band of parishioners were permitted to parade into his bedroom as he slept (on his belly, duly supplicating to Heaven whether conscious or not) as the head of the Assembly would gently lift the bottom portion of the bedsheets to permit them to gaze in wonder upon the
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– literally – adamant arse. The assembled parishioners – although afraid of the Popish practice of artistic appreciation – would be, nevertheless, visibly moved at the stark beauty of the Reformers pachydermatologically robust undulations. Ah, how I drift headlong into polysyllables! Let us get to the knub of the matter – namely, that the harder the arse, the more brittle it becomes. The rigid rump-skin of Reformer, due to the natural stretching, soon developed a series of small, hairline cracks. At first, these were not noticed, until one evening, after The Reformer returned from a day riding, and had flopped into bed, almost asleep before his head had hit the pillow. The customary viewing party was admitted into the chamber, a crosssection of some of the most remarkable personages of the Parish. These are worth noting. There was the mildly jaundiced James Rudiment, known accordingly as Lord Beige although he was in fact the Laird of Lenzie, infamous for his practice of cutting up servants into collops,5 the Judge Lord Ibrox, equally infamous for once hanging himself for moral intransigence, and Maxton the Lean, a baker of bread and distributor of butter. Lastly came the Soutars, a cobbling family of clean living and reputation.6 With Mr and Mrs Soutar were their six children including the renowned Miss Deirdre Soutar, an 11-year old ingénue, found outside of the Royal Palace in a warming pan and adopted by this God-fearing family. She was renowned for her extraordinary piety and powers of observation, particularly where it came to stating the obvious. All of these remarkable variables colluded that night, the first time the girl had been taken to admire the radical bottom. Gravely, Lord Beige, Ibrox and the others filed past the bed, each taking their turn to lift the flap of the sheets, appraise the posterior, then slowly lower the sheets and walk on, conventicling by the door. Like most children, Deirdre studiously acted the adult, her face expressionless as she lifted the hair-sheets. Her keen, scientific, empirical, fine-tuned gaze, premonition of national glories yet to come, scanned the yellowed surface of the Reformers backside. They coolly homed-in on the shape and appearance of the surface as it curved from coxic to the fullness of the bulge and the dip inwards. Her mind made the necessary interpretations, considerations and conclusions. Having carried out this rigorous process she then made her statement:
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‘There’s big cracks in his arse!’ Sure enough, the skin had ruptured into a canyon of cracks and abrasions, crevices and crannies, defiles and crennelations. What had once carried an immense, weighty and granite-like dignity now had all the gravity of a wet cookie. Flakes of skin had started to peel off the surface into white petals, leaving red patches of agitated, exposed under-skin that was already showing signs of surface rupture. The assembly looked to where her small finger pointed.
For some minutes he kneeled by the bedside, distraught, his nose dribbling onto his elbow, while everyone else shifted uncomfortably. ‘Damnit man,’ said Lord Beige, ‘action must be taken!’
Lord Beige coughed some Cathars out of his throat and turned back to the bed, his red-veined eyes sticking out, utterly enraged. ‘Don’t be daft!’ screamed her mother, hitting Deirdre over the head with the back of her hand and knocking the child out cold. ‘It’s just the light, or the way you’re screwing up your eyes, or ... or ...’
The Moderator looked up at that, and turning towards the waif, impetuously seized her in a tight, suffocating embrace. ‘Through a child’s eyes we cut the crap!’ yelled Maxton, who tended to get over-excited. ‘Can it be done?’ asked the Moderator, grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her back and forth. Silently wiping mucus from her shoulder, Deirdre was compelled to agree to the contract into which all, there and then, had agreed.
But there was no denying the facts of the matter. The arse was coming apart. ‘The child,’ said Lord Ibrox, plunging his face into his hands, ‘is correct.’ Remarkably, there was very little in the way of panic. The room was bolted and secured, and a messenger immediately sent to the Moderator, who they found in the midst of morally improving his household staff. The look of shock and grief on his face as the messenger told him the news ingrained itself on all who witnessed, and is immortalised in the painting by Van Hoijdonk; the Moderator, his entire six-foot-five frame erect, his fivefoot-six beard flowing before him, the housemaid in devotional position craning her neck around to look at us, horror on her face, while in the Moderator’s hand, stretched aloft to heaven, the wooden paddle, illuminated by lamplight. History has sorely misunderstood this artwork, forgetting the context of the scene in which the Moderator learns that the great exemplar (a facsimile of which he was attempting to replicate on the maid) is crumbling, seeing instead a generic scene of moral instruction during the theocratic era.7 On arriving at the bedchamber, the Moderator dropped to one knee as his eyes alighted on the disastrous scene; each buttock ravaged by craters of peeling skin. His fingers brushed the rough, flaked surface, with his thumb he pushed at portions of skin as if to force it back into shape. It was no good – a force
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greater than his hands could waylay was causing the rump to deteriorate.
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‘A solution must be found!’ said Maxton the Lean. ‘No. What you need,’ said young Deirdre, who had come to, ‘is a lotion.’
Nothing was said to the Reformer the next day. It had been agreed in sessions accumulating in the small hours that his performance could be adversely affected where he to realise the flaky nature of his own precious fundament. All would carry on as normal although, whether through tiredness from the early meeting, or some more worrisome general malaise, no backsides were cheerfully slapped in the inner chambers that day. Deirdre, meanwhile, had been set the task of concocting a lotion that would alleviate the Reformer’s condition, a choice that caused some alarm among the Cabinet. Such fears were assuaged by the Moderator; surely those very aspects they found troubling were actually the chief virtues of his chosen apothecary! Whether as child and female, because she amounted in whole to an invisible personage, therefore, there need be no issue of conscience with regard to making the scandal public, or to put it more bluntly, no tremor of guilt over concealing the truth. As for Dierdre, she too was a little perplexed. She had never made a lotion before, although her adopted grandmother had once inducted her into making a poultice for an inflamed ear. For the three allotted days she fretted over the problem, catching a tabby
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cat which she shaved and then applied solutions too. This early essay in cosmetic vivisection produced many results from many mixtures – hemp and heather, 80 shilling and Echinacea, liquefied aspidistra and hogweed, so that the cat’s arse resembled the Lanarkshire coalfields albeit with bright purple lumps where Wishaw would be. Not having this basis for comparison however did not affect Dierdre’s assessment of the results as ‘poor’ and she released the cat into the river Forth in a somewhat dejected state. It would be nice to report that there was some sort of happy ending, an Archimedean moment of revelation that provided Dierdre with a recipe for success. Indeed in the only other book to treat with the remedial practices connected to the arse, Sir Walter Scott’s The Crack and the Firmament (1857) is terse on this matter, stating simply that ‘A remedy was fownd’. But textual analysis of documents made possible by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the drop in house prices and www.ryanair.com have disinterred new and disturbing truths about the lotion, every bit as shattering as those pertaining to the hidden universalism of his beard. In her later life Deirdre emigrated to Poland where she married a merchant and invented Vodka. She also left her letters, diaries and an unfinished autobiography,8 which reveals much of the truth of it. After two and three quarter days of struggle she slumped in a state of occlusion onto her own, mean birchwood cloaca. Bereft of any ideas, hiding from the weight and sanctimony of the commonwealth, she gathered her brows almost angrily, hoping that emulation of the Reformer’s habits might dispel this unwanted burden. Just as her backside began to freeze against the cold wood, she was distrurbed by her mother who needed to wax her legs. Deirdre watching incloaca while Mrs Soutar applied blobs of hot wax to her fuzzy flesh, spreading it across the skin and then tearing it off with a reflexive bite at the bottom lip. The strip of skin that was revealed was livid pink, yet perfectly smooth. And here was Deirdre’s epiphany. She leapt from her seat, grabbed the bottle of wax and before her wincing mother could stop her, had ran out of the house. That night, Deirdre presented her lotion to an emergency presbytery of the Great and Good of the
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land, who had congregated around the Reformers bed, holding their nose to ward off some noxious and offensive smell. From behind a small screen, Deirdre, resplendent in thick rubber gloves, informed and announced that she was going to apply the lotion, but that the fumes were so abhorrent, she recommended that the parish remain at a safe distance. This caused no disagreement from the assembly, who huddled by the window sniffing for fresh air. And so, Deirdre added her last ingredient, some ash and fine gravel, then smeared the concoction over the Reformer’s buttocks. The Cabinet was then assailed by four loud, rending sounds and subsequent deep, reverberant moans from the Reformer, who doubtless thought it all a bad dream. ‘Hoak ess corpus’ said Deirdre, and whipped away the screen.9 There followed amazement and various expressions of approval in muted, reverent tones. While the heartening yellowness of the skin was gone, there was instead a bright pink and a plastic smoothness to the whole that everyone agreed was most pleasing. Deirdre was quietly rewarded for her work, and her family given a generous stipend on pain of absolute silence. For a few weeks, the nation returned to normal, crisis averted and true consistency restored – until the first crack reappeared. By the end of that year, Deirdre has reapplied the solution several times and had become the beneficiary of a general national pension. It became gradually apparent, however, that not only was the remedy stripping the national cleavage of its superbly impervious rind, but that the intervals between applications where shortening and the enlivening nightly sessions were increasingly being postponed. Soon, it would be apparent that the ‘lotion’ would have to be applied each night, all the while concealing the truth from the father of the nation and his guileless children. Certainly, the outward signs of this slow decline were apparent – the Reformer had attempted to chastise a backslider with a waggle, only to do himself an injury. Many lies and distortions had been necessary to persuade him it had been purely aberrant and that his bum was as big and magnificent as ever, so much that secretly certain Cabinet members wished that confession would be restored, for just a little bit of
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absolution.
1968. 2 . Loosely translated as ‘bite me’.
It was clear that not only should the policy relating to the buttocks change, but to some degree the guiding spirit of the Reformed Commonwealth.
. See – ‘The Milky Mounds o’ Muckhart’ a 14th Century Ballad that gives the only vernacular description of skinny dipping in the midst of winter, or the famous line of Court Poetry dedicated to the Queen’s hips ‘That yield to the finger/like lard to a candle’ or ‘The Chronycles of old Shottes’ written by an anonymous Parish priest who took particular interest in the consistency of his congregation. 4 . Algebraic term for the aggregate of numbers 1 or 2. 5 . Collop – Archaic scientific term for a portion of meat. 6 . James Cathcart Soutar, Patriarch of the Family, was known to his friends as ‘Cathy the Carbolic’. 7 . ‘The Moderaytor is learned of the great disruptione’ (van Hoijdonk, 1598) is the original title of the painting, but was mistitled – ‘A Pastor demonstraytes salvaytion thro epidermal agitaytione’. During the Victorian era, this painting was mistitled as ‘Errant Housemaydes IX, starring Tom de Spankz and Helga’. 8 . Deirdre entitled the manuscript ‘In mine owne words’ by Deirdre Smirnoff, the year of our Lorde 1632. 9 . Harry Houdini is said to have used an abbreviated form of this phrase on stage after being told the story by Conan Doyle, who was something of an expert on fairies. 10 . Although in the time of the Dutch King, there was something of a revival in Quietist Anocentrism.
In short, no longer should it be driven by a cloacophilic movement as had buttressed the Reformer’s initial successes. A new mojo had to be found, and it is at this point that we find the beard rising to greater prominence in the chronicles, as the parish was slowly encouraged to forget the arse and focus evermore on the dancing chin.10 Gradually, the nocturnal viewings stopped altogether so that eventually curates of the church would deny they had ever happened. The Cabinet paid off Deirdre and let the whole matter drop, the cracks never being mentioned to the Reformer who, after all, could hardly see his buttocks and was never known to touch them. No longer did elders playfully smack each other’s arses in public and, slowly, the backside disappeared from national consciousness along with a rich vein of custom and ritual. Public cloaca, once proud buildings where citizens were encouraged to gather, talk, read or think, were gradually sunk into the ground, a process much assisted by the creation of a proper sewer system.
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When asked in the last year of his life, of the small girl he had once wiped his nose on in joy, the Moderator merely sniffed – ‘Adam,’ he said laconically, ‘had no daughters.’ So why do the arsonists insist still on their muchdiscredited and moribund discourse? The answer surely lies in the cosiness of their world and their ‘school’ of thought. There is little real hope for accommodation between the sides – arsonists + barbers = mankind, and there is no need to set aside common ground. But it remains the case that it is the beard, not the bum, that we should remember, and why Deirdre Soutar’s soft-soaping is no more than a historical footnote. Footnotes 1 . The classic argument for this is made by Professor Eamon Bovine in his From the Bottom Up – Religious Reformation as Seated in Sixteenth Century Class Warfare. Pelican Originals,
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