Pubes from the Distant Past
A unique archive containing the private letters of some of the greatest British writers of the past three centuries has been reduced in price to allow the National Library of Scotland to secure it for the nation… One of the most bizarre articles in the collection is a snuff-box owned by the famous poet and libertine Lord Byron, which contains cuttings of his lover’s pubic hair… Professor David Hewitt, an expert on the Scottish Romantics at Aberdeen University, described the collection as ‘an archive of superb quality.’ He added: ‘The most important single part of the archive is the Byron collection.’” — Sunday Herald (UK)
There used to be an artist here in New York who would collect the hairballs from the drain in his shower and make them into little sculptures. The joke — and it wasn’t much more than a joke — was that it lent art’s power of eternity to the most ephemeral of waste products. For what is more ephemeral than stray hairs, fingernail clippings, flecks of skin, peeled scabs? When you see a random pube stuck to a bar of soap, you hardly imagine it persisting through the centuries to end up in a museum somewhere — lovers of literature coming along to see it and say, “Yes, pubic hair wasn’t much different in those days…”
You have to wonder what the line is between common sense and curatorial zeal. Maybe these pube trimmings had a sentimental value to Byron, but what value could they possibly have today? Are they to be preserved simply because the tumultous poet himself once esteemed them? Or should they just be tossed in the trash, like the trimmings from anybody else’s old rag? What use are the tokens of passion when the passionate themselves have long since turned to dust?
I shook the hand that shook the hand of….
This stuff is worth money, given the right provenance. Imagine what DNA analysis might show.
Of more interest
Byron’s carcass, which was pickled in a barrel and shipped from Greece to England, interred near Nottingham, disinterred in 1938
“His sexual organ shewed quite abnormal development.”
&
whatever happened to Shelley’s heart?
http://www.magick.net/mlworden/shelley.htm
I think there is something to be said for saving the shavings.
“The exhibit of Byron’s letters was a tedious affair…’til I got to the part with the public hair…”
That’s one way to liven things up.
Certainly, it would primarily arouse prurient interest. But as a kind of sexual reliquary – it creates a very “real” corporeal connection with the past that might add a lot to a display of Byron’s work and/or effects. It is one thing to read that Byron was a bit of a perv. It is something different to have a first hand look at “Exhibit A”.
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