"
Cockaigne," the whipped cream fragrance, was handed out by young girls in tutus and cotton candy hairpieces, while other similarly garbed girls made cotton candy and filled champagne flutes.
The recorded song is a Depression-era vagrant's version of the medieval concept of
Cockaigne, the land of milk and honey, for it speaks of trees on which cigarettes dangle like autumn leaves about to fall, of "streams of alcohol" trickling down through the mountain crevices, and of a lake of whiskey that greets the always-parched pilgrim like oases amid a desert.
Similarly, "I love the haunts of old
Cockaigne," declares the speaker of Locker-Lampson's "St.
The situation in the countryside had become so bad by the early 1890s that popular imagination began to idealize the pre-Emancipation era as the Land of
Cockaigne. According to official statistics that Drutskoi-Sokolninskii reviewed, the peasantry's overall quality of living declined steadily between 1866 and 1891, while state revenues rose.
His genius was in recognizing capitalism's potential for realizing something like a modern
Cockaigne, the mythical land of plenty that beguiled the suffering masses in the Middle Ages.
The Blessed Mother will not permit him to falsely impersonate her loyal servant, and confuse the ushering in of the Kingdom of God with a return to the Land of
Cockaigne. (20)
Dreaming of
Cockaigne: Medieval fantasies of the perfect life.
For now, the photographs in Gayle Chong Kwan's Veduta Romantica and
Cockaigne exhibitions are well worth a look in the Public Space Galleries.
I and 2, Introduction and Allegro, Elegy, Sospiri, Falstaff,
Cockaigne, Froissart, Enigma Variations, Pomp & Circumstance Marches Nos.
From early versions of the legend of
Cockaigne to the country house poems of Jonson and Carew and beyond, utopian fantasies manifest themselves through the "food of wishes" (118), offering readers a symbolic satisfaction of primal demands that more often than not went brutally unrequited in reality.
ED OCHESTER'S most recent books are The Land of
Cockaigne(73) Rather than a political utopia, Schlaraffenland, like its counterparts cocagne in French,
cockaigne in English, or cuccagna in Italian, is above all a land of plenty, where all of one's physical needs are met, and hunger is easily satisfied--the overriding daily concern in most peasant communities.
