Once in a great while, I come across a writer who employs footnotes in the same manner as those Spanish masons who built cathedrals: to "show how insane with God" they were. Angus Fletcher comes to mind. David Foster Wallace. There is an art of the footnote - sometimes a terse apothegm, other times a great beast that runs along several pages - the side creek threatening to swamp the river. So it was I was reading Ted Hughes' Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, which makes much of the Goddess and the Boar, and discovered one of the finest footnotes I have ever read. It is pure carnal poetry:
The Boar's peculiarly hermaphroditic nature is almost universally recognized in mythology. This presumably derives from our long and intimate acquaintance with the unique bodily character of this most impressive, dangerous, fascinating and human of the animals that are both domesticated and hunted. As a matriarch equally well known, the cow has been given the benign, spiritual role of the nursing mother. But the sow has attracted different associations. Her combination of gross whiskery nakedness and riotous carnality is seized by the mythic imagination, evidently, as a sort of uterus on the loose - upholstered with breasts, not so much many-breasted as a mobile tub entirely made of female sexual parts, a woman-sized, multiple udder on trotters. Most alarming of all is that elephantine, lolling mouth under her great ear-flaps, like a Breughelesque nightmare vagina, baggy with over-production, famous for gobbling her piglets, magnified and shameless, exuberantly omnivorous and insatiable, swamping the senses. This sow has supplanted all other beasts as the elemental mother (even Zeus was born of a sow, even Demeter, Mother of lacchos/Dionysus and Persephone, was a sow (ct.page 73)). But she fulfills an ambiguous lunar role. Her variable dark part is sinister, not only because she incorporates more shocking physical familiarity, more radical enterprise, more rapturous appetite, cruder travesties of infantile memory, wilder nostalgias, than the cow, but because she is inseparable from the lethal factor of the Boar, who carries the same vaginal grin yet is prodigiously virile - that same swinging, earth-searching, root-ripping mouth but equipped with moon-sickle tusks - and who incarnates the most determined, sudden and murderous temperament. (As a country boy, and the nephew of several farmers, Shakespeare enjoyed a familiarity with pigs that is not irrelevant to his myth. The imagination’s symbols are based on subliminal perception. The male, aphrodisiac, pheromone scent spray, sold in modern sex shops, is commonly based on a hormone extract from the wild boar.) This figure of the Boar has assimilated the magical birth-source of the Sow to create a symbol that emerges, in a man's eyes, from everything about female sexuality that is awesome, alien, terrifying and "beyond' the reaches of his soul. So the Boar becomes the animal form of the Queen of Hell, the Black Witch, the Terrible Mother, bringing the crippling wound in the thigh, wherever he enters man's fantasy. In his role in this myth of the god who dies for and by the Goddess, and who is reborn to destroy her, he appears at the centre of religious mysteries, and Shakespeare could have found him, in the same role, as easily in England (for instance, as the Twrch Trwyth, the terrible Boar King, who is hunted through the Celtic world in the great Welsh myth of Culhwch and Olwen) as in classical mythology (see page 465.)
Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Great Being, p 11.
