Week 10 (25)
The Spouse checked out Sex and Real Estate, which, since she’s busy with Altered Egos, I get to read first. It begins with a bang that’s nonetheless steeped in more than a little bubble nostalgia: New Yorkers blowing upwards of the mid-six figures a year on rent. —They still do, of course, but it’s not quite the same, somehow. (Not to worry, though: the recession is over. Don’t all the Yanks in the audience feel much better now?)
But that’s on the nightstand, barely begun. Bus reading and office reading (this week’s gainful employment: answering phones for a suite of small offices) is Richard Calder’s Dead Girls, Dead Boys, and Dead Things, which jumpstarts with an electrifyingly ugly, nasty premise of dangerous murderous anarchic adolescent sexuality, and a gender “war” gone seriously fucked, and it’s unwinding giddily from there. (The quantum mechanical hooliganry has its reasons, I suppose, but it’s still a bit much; rather like his prose in places, really.) (Some further poking about his curriculum vitæ raises doubts as to where he’s going with all this—but we retain an open mind, for now.) (And by the way: no. It isn’t cyberpunk. Jesus.) —What it’s got me thinking of in a larger sense is the terrifying danger sex represents to some people, and how some of the laws we erect to protect ourselves from that fear merely exacerbate the problem. Specifically, I’m thinking of Trots and Bonnie, Shary Flenniken’s outrageously delightful strip for National Lampoon from ’72 to ’90 or thereabouts. It’s hard to imagine such a strip running anywhere with any prominence today—given that it involves (in part) pubescent girls dealing with and coming to terms with the wild and woolly world of sex. As far as I can tell, some of her strips are now illegal to distribute or possess in (at least) Ohio, and could be illegal nationwide (certainly on the web) if the Supreme Court upholds COPA.
We would not be allowed to show anything resembling a minor engaged in any sexual act by the standards of these various laws, which, depending on who does the reading and how, could make illegal such works as Kubrick’s (or Lyne’s) adaptation of Lolita and this episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Prosecutors argue we need it because the current state of image manipulation technology renders it possible to create photorealistic images of minors having sex without actually involving any physical minors; without this sort of emendation to our laws, they say, it would be impossible to prosecute the production of pornography that exploits actual minors. (The jurisprudential novices among you, I think, can easily drive a truck through the hole in that argument.) Moralists (to sully an otherwise admirable, if badly mis-used, word) claim we need these sorts of laws because it is wrong to risk inflaming the lusts of the depraved and perverted out there with any such imagery; we must, after all, protect the children. (And thus live out our lives in a world padded and pared down to the lowest of common denominators, it would seem.)
The problem being that this reading is privileged by the law and by the constant state of hypervigilance that law encourages, and it comes to supplant every other possible reading in the public’s mind. Instead of a humorous or true-to-life depiction of what kids all over the world (and all of us, remember, were [or are] once kids, in our own ways) deal with every goddamn day, instead of being a valuable way to talk about and come to terms with and (for those of us who are no longer kids) reminesce over our first encounters with sex, the sexual, and sexuality, such images become merely signs of danger, perversity, evil thoughts and harmful attitudes. Soon (rather, now), the only possible way to read an image of a teenager playing with sexualized roles is as a trigger to depraved lust (or, of course, in a state of utter, willful, blind denial of any possible sexual intent or content; hi, Britney). —As anyone under a burqa can tell you, it’s a terribly slippery slope from concern to fear to demonization. (...Calder’s images of girls in the throes of the doll disease being impaled on spikes by minions of the Human Front, the shocking riff on “Page Three Girl” copy he uses to describe it—an outré example, perhaps, but that’s what fiction’s for. Danger, Will Robinson...)
But I’m freewheeling, pinwheeling, Ferris wheeling again. And losing the ostensible subject. Being that I picked up the Calder omnibus (argosy? nah: omnibus) at the frickin’ Borders which is in the bottom of the building in which I’m currently answering phones; breaks are dangerous. A couple of blocks away is Looking Glass Books, though, which I should have gone to first: they’ve got copies of Hogg and Equinox, and if you’ve been paying any attention at all, you can guess how eager I am to get my hands on these babies. Next week, perhaps. But: an amusing side-note, to wrap it all up together: Equinox (this edition, rather than its original publication under the title Tides of Lust, giggle, tee hee) contains an snerky publisher’s note which explains the book was originally published in a much more promiscuous and permissive age; thus, the prophylactic measure of adding a hundred years to the age of every minor that appears has been taken, so that a 6-year-old would (therefore) become a 106-year-old, thereby precluding any possible arousal on the part of the reader at the idea of unspeakable acts performed (in the imagination, in the mind, in fantasy, which LeGuin points out children never get mixed up with reality, while adults almost always do) on a minor.
Oh, the games we play...
Bring
on the pitchforks and torches.
Thursday, 21:58
Snagged from Flutterby, who’s almost speechless with fury: an angry mob accosts and ultimately drives out the owner of an adult store which, well, hadn’t even opened yet.
What, exactly, have “the children” been saved from? Cheap packaging? Tawdry color schemes? Shitty production values?
Assholes.
(If you were expecting a more articulate response, we here at “...inexplicably fancy trash” do then apologize for the rather surprising amount of a delightful Barbera d’Asti we drank with dinner, which was a variant of spaghetti carbonera with [fake] bacon and red peppers, and anyway, we’re sitting here half-gloomy at the idea of living in an America where we will greet every new day with cleansing, wholesome spiritual anthems from the pen of John “Bazooms” Ashcroft, Attorney General, Chaplain in Chief.)
Why, yes. The typing of tennis “bowl” rather than “ball” was, indeed, an ironic twist in a piece on word processors and writing. (Do note the careful excision of the word “intentional.”)
And I do indeed intend to comment on Amber, and good and evil, and Michael Dalton (scroll down to “The Good, the Bad, and the Gang-Banged,” Wednesday’s first entry; let me just say I’m amused at reconciling the concept of evil with the draft sermon I posted on Sunday; hee), but yeesh. I’m tired. I just delivered 300 words in a silly wager to alt.sex.stories.moderated (if you know anything about Thomas Beers’ almost utterly fraudulent biography of Stephen Crane, or rather, the bits he made up and left out, you’ll recognize the source of the piece). I have an introduction to write for a friend, a website long overdue, an article and an essay both hanging fire, and a piece of criticism I’m itching to write for no good reason I can see other than that I should really try to focus more on writing about writing about sex, you know?
So. Um. Whelmed overly. (Besides: I need to re-read Amber first, and who knows? Attempting to quote Barthes from memory: “Those who do not re-read are doomed to read the same story over and over again.” We shall see, shan’t we.) —Full disclosure: Amber is available from Ruthie’s Club, and if you pay them money to see it, I’ll see a (tiny) portion at the end of the day. So.
The sad truth is, there’s very little that’s creative in creativity. The vast majority is submission—submission to the laws of grammar, to the possibilities of rhetoric, to the grammar of the narrative, to narrative’s various and possible structurings. And in a democratic society that privileges individuality, self-reliance, and mastery, submission is a frightening thing.
Trust an author to see art in terms of power when he deals so extensively with slaves and slavery. (Naturally, one could be drawn to slaves and slavery precisely because one sees the world in terms of power.) —What I’m thinking of right now: the idea of a word processor novel; the idea, that is, that the novel is taking on new shapes and structures made possible by the malleability of text within the computer. (Do I have a link? No, I do not have a link. I read the phrase somewhere, but Google is staggeringly unhelpful for once, so maybe I didn’t. But oosh once told the story of Jesus Lizt: deciding, you see, that she’d rename Chris to Liz, and doing a global find-and-replace—you see? And—oh, just keep reading.) —It’s not, mind you, that I think the novel is taking on strange new hothouse shapes out there. But I’m reminded of the one time I tried to read Robert Jordan: When I got to the chapter that opened with a scene fixating on a borrowed scarf for the second time (exact same wording; I checked), I gave up. If he couldn’t be bothered to keep track of where he’d used something, the book as a whole certainly wasn’t encouraging me to do it for him. (And no one can afford good copy-editors these days. Have you noticed?)
Now, this sort of error isn’t impossible without the word processor, the computer, the copying and cutting and pasting of great gobs of text at the click of a key. But the word processor makes it easier, to be sure. —Terribly easy to write at a flying speed, fingers clicking faster than the bit of the brain in charge of critical analysis can sometimes keep up.
I’m thinking about this because I had to use a typewriter today. Remember those? Big, bulky, and it has this massive foam pad under it so it doesn’t make too much noise when in use. (It’s louder than the computer under the desk, and it rattles, sometimes.) You don’t tap. You don’t brush the F12 key accidentally on your way to hitting backspace and then have to sit there as Dreamweaver calls up Explorer to preview the page you just tried to delete something from. You punch. Each keystroke is definite. You damn well mean it, because you aren’t going to get anything done if you don’t. It brought back a visceral, gut level memory (and writing is basically a physical activity—why do you think we’re always so particular about where and when and how we go about it? If it were just, you know, mental, we could just, you know, write it down, whenever) of sitting at the counter in the back room of that apartment, the IBM humming next to the fish tank, punching those keys, rolling the paper out and setting it on the slowly (too slowly) growing stack to the right, the feel of the paper, sitting back to read through what I’d read, carefully, the physical memory of having typed each word still lodged in my fingertips (well, an aggreggate, really; I exaggerate, but only slightly), picking up a pen and marking something, then and there—
Compared with now: skating over the slightly compressed feel of the iBook keyboard, the keys a little crunchy under my fingers, typing into a narrow window. Cutting and pasting, leaving a blotchy paragraph at the bottom and referring to it from time to time as I re-write it. A long piece, I’ll force myself to think more about it by physically re-typing it, word for word, even if the revision changes maybe only a paragraph in toto.
Obviously, I’m not saying the one is better than the other. (It was obvious. Right?) The question rather is this: What am I surrendering to, in either case? The typewriter, with its focus on physicality, the very act of writing, forcing the writer to always keep that in mind; the computer, with its ability to subsume all that and get it out of the way, so the writer isn’t distracted from—well, the act, I suppose, of writing—
Gack. The similarities, I think, greatly outweigh the vast differences. —I mean, I wrote most of that sermon longhand on a legal pad while on hold with various very busy people who didn’t want to answer my technical questions about wireless LAN applications. Every now and then, a dog would tumble into the office with a tennis bowl in its mouth, hey, throw it, I want to play fetch! (It was one of those dot-com ’90s hey-day holdovers. God bless ’em, every one.)
Maybe writing qua writing isn’t so much a physical activity. And yet—
The
Mark of Cain.
(demo tape for a sermon)
Sunday, 22:58
There is a Mark on all our foreheads: prostitutes, pornographers, all. Delicately carved or crudely etched, as you fancy it; a bright and flaming dangerous red—#FF0000 on my web palette: the red light channel turned up to full and lurid bore, the blood, the heat, the raw meaty need of it unmitigated by cool leafy green or quiet watery blue, both dialed down to zero. You are free to imagine the Mark as an A or a P or an X, as you like, and if you close your eyes and think of flesh (chocolate peachy creamy pale and smooth blue-veined indigo highlit café con leche flesh), of lips, of a cock or a cunt (or more than one of both, or either), fingertips slick with spit or sweat or piss or Cowper’s fluid or lubricous come, think of photographs much creased from being folded in a wallet, words badly printed in a cheap and grimy paperback—think, and feel it start to burn your forehead, too. A slow itch inscribes itself, insinuates warm tendrils under the skin of your face, smolders, fills with blood and catches fire. (You don’t feel it yet? Keep going. Dig more deeply. Root about the foundations of your desire, for there is something—some one thing, at least, that you want, and want not to want; that you need, even as you know you must not need it. Thus, the nature of desire and boundaries.) —Look to the grass on the other side of the fence; console yourself with the supposed bitterness of the grapes kept out of reach; talk earnestly with others about how it’s the wanting of the thing and not the thing itself, the image, idea, eidolon of the thing desired, and never the thing itself; no, no, that would never do, it would only disappoint— Just know this: there are those things the desire for which puts you in danger, and it doesn’t matter what it is or why you want it or what might happen if someone finds out or what you can’t help but think might happen yet know would not, and it doesn’t matter if it’s known what you want, and why. What matters is the desire for this thing will push you, urge you to do or say things you would not otherwise do or say; it makes your body react, physically, in ways you have difficulty controlling (blood sloshes suddenly from here to there, the heart squeezes, adrenaline is flushed from glands into the overall system like a klaxon, nerves and muscles tuned to a higher pitch tremble fingers and stumble words; seize or flee, seize or flee). Desire makes you open and vulnerable (or puts you on the edge, in desperate danger of becoming so); you are broadcasting signals you may not want to broadcast (or just about to do so, watch your step): information you may want kept secret; noise rudely overlaying or interrupting other, more important signals. And it doesn’t matter what it is you want, or why, or whether you’re ever likely to achieve it, in this world or the next—the secret of the Mark of Cain is in that loss of control (or the imminence thereof): that moment when you are forcibly reminded you are contingent. You are, in the end, not the boss of you. —It is so very simple, then: you are embarrassed by your shame, and ashamed of your embarrassment. And that’s the secret of the Mark of Cain.
•
Some years ago on an expedition to the local mall (come to think of it, it was at least an hour away, but decent malls were thin on the ground in those parts, at that time), some obscure impulse compelled me to discuss with the Classicist what I’d seen, browsing the magazine rack at Waldenbooks. Since I’d be hard-pressed to recall what I ate for dinner last night, had I not made it myself, and I therefore have no memory of the words that were actually spoken, let’s imagine something cringingly awkward:
“I just don’t get it.”
“What’s not to get?”
“Well, if you had a sister—a twin—would you do something like that?”
“Depends. How much are they paying us?”
“But—to take something like that. I mean, whether you feel it or not, that’s neither here nor there, but I think actually it might even be worse if you fake it—but to take something like that and put it on display—”
“Honestly,” sighed the Classicist, “worse things happen at sea.”
—But she was wise, and knew much more then than I do now of human nature. (Was? Then? Well, she was always so adamant not to live up to her potential...) It was clear as glass to her that my Mark had been enflamed by what I’d seen on the cover of the Playboy magazine (why else pick it up?), and in my shame had tried to cover my Mark by speaking so disparagingly of it and against it, like a cat whose enthusiastic scratchings let all and sundry know where it has been. —Thus do we all of us carry around inside a little Comstock, a miniature Ashcroft ostentatiously swaddling half-naked statues in expensive blue drapes before searingly bright television lights, so that later, when all is dark again, it is so much more delicious to slip beneath those drapes and run our eager hands over aluminum smooth like tautened flesh, and none the wiser.
But that? That is really the Mark we all must bear, every one of us. Prostitutes, pornographers: we bear another Mark, as well as, in addition to.
•
“All of it?” I say.
“All of it,” he says.
We didn’t really meet in a bar, but since I’m going to reconstruct most of this exchange, I might as well set it in a good one (the Horse Brass, say) and not within email correspondence, and I might as well go ahead and cast him as a younger but still avuncular John Spencer. Me? Richard Schiff. —It’s sweet of you to say I remind you more of Bradley Whitford, but trust me, the mood I was in? Schiff.
“All of it,” I say, shaking my head.
“Every bit.”
A popular and even respected net eroticist has just told me he’s done the equivalent of burning almost every copy of his books ever published: he’s pulled down his web archives. He’s written other archivists asking them to do the same for whatever they might have of his stuff (and they have complied), and sent automatic messages through the arcane back-channels that maintain Usenet, hunting and killing everything he ever posted that might be archived on a server somewhere, in Sacramento or San Diego or San Jose, Chicago, New York, Dubuque.
All of it. Gone.
“Why?” I am agog, aghast, a-twitter; I want to bellow, pound my fist on something, rail. Instead, I manage a single flat “Why?” with that dangerous rising interrogative arc whipping the very end of it.
“It was becoming a business,” he says. “It wasn’t a hobby anymore.”
“But that’s good. Right?” (I mean, I’m wishing I could say that...)
But he shakes his head, and I’m suddenly thinking about the people I do know who can say that, and what little I know of them and how their lives work, and I’m looking at him, and what I know of him, and I’m realizing, you know, if he were to tell me, then and there, something like “That just isn’t who I am,” I wouldn’t cry bullshit. (Besides. He’s buying the beers.) —Instead, he pulls out a wallet-sized photo of a kid maybe two years old in some adorable coordinated kid’s outfit looking glum for the camera, and he drops it on the table between us. “I just,” he says, and he sighs, “I just couldn’t see myself ever telling him where the money came from. You know?”
I don’t. —Then, I don’t have kids. (Remember that. You can use it against me, later, if you are so inclined.) But: and if I may be so bold as to extrapolate, here (and you should be aware I’ve said nothing of this to him): I don’t think it’s the kid. I think it’s what other people will think of the kid, or what they will think of the kid being supported by money with such a—taint; and it’s not even so much what other people will think as what the writer thinks other people will think, and what his spouse thinks other people will think, and while it’s all well and good to say what other people think about us shouldn’t matter, and we shouldn’t worry over it, the truth is it does matter. And trust me: from what I know of the people who have made this a business (not the dilettantes and day-trippers, like yours truly), from the crap they have to put up with, day in and day out—heck, from the craziness this writer (much more popular and widely read than yours truly) had to deal with when it was still “just a hobby”—I know. He’s right to worry. He’s right to be concerned.
To do what he did, though? I don’t know so much about that.
But I’m going to respect how he went about it, and why, and his basic right to have done it.
Still—all of it?
•
Anyway, that’s the other Mark that we must bear.
•
But the loss of control: the things we can be urged or driven to do (or think about doing); these desires bodied forth by porn, by art. Should we all worry?
Well, in a word: yes. —I shan’t be so ingenuous as to claim there is no meaningful effect that can be traced to art and to expression—why say anything, if listening does nothing to the listener?—but you in turn must agree to not be so naïve as to insist it is the only cause. But I find myself in an awkward position nonetheless:
I do not subscribe to the specious logic that insists “Guns do not kill people; people kill people.” And yet—it’s not the logic I object to; change the subject, tweak the predicate lightly, and suddenly I agree: “Art does not hurt people; people hurt people.” (Yes, art does make it easier for people to be hurt, offended, outraged, stupid, to go too far. But I don’t see cops wielding copies of Lolita or Fresh Meat or Torrid Tushie II.)
I freely admit that when in a darkened upstairs room at a fraternity house a young man licks his lips and gazes at a young woman passed out on a rumpled bed, one of the many contributing factors that tip his hand to reach for the button of her jeans may well be an image lodged in his mind of glossy ecstatic triumph from a pornographic film. It is no less likely that when a man glares at a woman for taking another breadstick (he may even mutter something darkly about how she does not take the time or trouble to look good for him), it could well be in part because some portion of his brain is warmed by turning over and over the idea of clasping to himself the slim sleek well-tuned body of the supermodel he’d seen on the cover of a magazine, her bare smooth skin interrupted here and there only by the rough crinkle of her lingerie. —Of course, one must also concede that this man, whose heart remains large and even tender in spite of the rejections he faces night after night, and the oddly brusque nature of those liaisons he does manage to secure, must someday come to realize his face must bear some responsibility, for it unfortunately resembles in its doughy brokenness some ur-face made up of countless fictional Russian hit-men, heavies and thugs; one must also admit the hollow ache in the heart of the girl with a red streak in her hair who grimly chases other girls whose heads are shaved, and who wear thick-rimmed geek-chic glasses, only to discard them one by one as they fail to live up to the incandescent promise of the music video she saw when she was twelve. (Who could?)
—But I do you a disservice and my argument no favors by so precipitously greasing the slope. To sum up: the crimes under discussion—the hurts art can facilitate—are the violences of RAPE (my ostensible subject is pornography, and so we must sexualize it; you may, as you like, construct a shadow argument, dealing with race or class, perhaps, as you like, and their depictions in art); then the colder and more patient outrages of ABUSE; and last and least of all, OBJECTIFICATION and its sidekick PREJUDICE. The Question, then: Is it not worth the banning of certain images (whose complicity we have ascertained), and a silence on certain topics, if these prohibitions will mitigate these admittedly awful crimes, and erase that burning Mark from all our foreheads?
No.
First, I would rather prosaically cite the Betamax defense, which no less an unimpeachable authority than the Supreme Court of the United States upheld: it does not matter what ill a technology can be turned to do, nor does it matter that its ill-use far outweighs the good it does—that it is capable of doing good at all, of being of benefit, means that it itself cannot arbitrarily be outlawed to crack down on the crimes it coincidentally makes more possible. What legal protections we can afford VCRs, I think, we should readily extend to art.
Second, and philosophically, I would cite the futility of this course of action; I would question its utilitarian value. After all: people have raped and abused and objectified each other before television and movies and mass culture and pornographic magazines; we are, at best, dealing with a proximate cause. (These crimes, like the poor, we will always have with us.) As well, there are so many other factors involved: one might also ban alcohol, fraternities, belly shirts, lingerie, baggy jeans, breadsticks, the patriarchal ritual of dating, bad action-adventure movies, the shaving of girls’ heads—all with more or less the same success. (One might even think of making it illegal to decide something based solely on someone else’s appearance—this is the real crime, is it not?)
Third, and poetically, I would cite King Canute. Not the one I know and adore, the affable rogue whose people loved him so much they thought he could do no wrong, and was infallible in the majesty of his rule; to prove them wrong, the enthusiastic scamps, he went one fine morning to the strand and stood there, light-struck, his feet comfortably cool in the damp sand, and he raised one hand and cried out to the onrushing tide, “King Canute commands you: halt!” and waited, arm outstretched, a faint smile touching his lips, until the salt water lapped at his calves, and then he cried, “Halt, I say!” once more, for good measure, but his subjects had gotten the point, and told him so, sheepishly, and later on they laughed about it over beer. Did you ever? —No, the King Canute I’d cite in this case is wild-eyed, disheveled, no less dangerous for all the basic decency of his stated intentions. The tide is rising, and with it a horrible storm. If only, if only—half-dressed, desperate, already drenched, he rages through the howling wind that drives the rain into his teeth in horizontal sheets, and there on the strand where waves tear themselves to shreds of foam—oh, if only—he throws up his hand at the onrushing wall of all the things six and a half billion people could possibly think or say or draw or act out or write, and behind that wave, taller, darker, fearsomer by far, the unthinkable onrushing myriad of ways each of those six and a half billion could read any one of those billions of utterances—oh, if only he can keep track of them all and weed out the bad ones, the hurtful ones, the wrong ones—why, he could save the world—!
Of course, Canute can now drain estuaries, build great tidal pools, set tidal power generators to suck the force of the tide and turn it into electricity, he can erect implacable seawalls and jetties; he can mitigate the tide, if not halt it completely. —My metaphor is flawed. No matter, I’ve a trump card: I know the secret of King Canute, and now you do, as well. Stop and think and you’ll see why it is that when a woman’s hit in the face or breaks a rib when tumbled over a tombstone in the service of a popular television show, it’s but art, yet when a woman allows herself to be punched in the gut in the service of a pornographic film, it’s a crime. Stop and think and you’ll realize why when a camera films the act of inserting four fingers into an orifice, Canute shrugs—yet insert a thumb as well, and the LA County district attorney leaps into action at Canute’s bidding, a jury is empanelled (sternly instructed not to titter as lawyers earn their keep with stentorious proclamations of this or that before the fleshy backdrop of Exhibit A), and people find themselves on trial for a crime that’s hurt no one directly, that’s merely depicted a practice enjoyed vociferously by men and women of all stripes throughout this land—
Stop and think. Would King Canute really choose to save the world, or not, over the width of a thumb?
(The surreality of what we call justice is this: lines must needs be drawn, and sometimes they are so arbitrary as to take the might of all the granite and black robes and briefcases and power ties and fine print in this country to give them meaning whatsoever. Nonetheless: and with all the evil in this world: the first obscenity case in nearly ten years to be brought to trial in LA County—home of the porn industry—hinges on nothing more than a fist, and a fist hinges on a thumb.)
King Canute isn’t trying to save the world.
No, the thing that drives Canute into the wind to howl at the onrushing tide like a power-tied Lear is this:
The Mark of Cain.
It doesn’t matter if his (or hers) is any heavier than the one I bear, or you. It doesn’t matter if it burns more painfully. —Such things are relative. (It doesn’t matter what you want, or why, or why it is you think you shouldn’t want it.) What matters is she (or he) can’t bear the weight or the heat of it, and so shifts the burden onto someone else—and then attacks them for daring to sport the Mark. Thus do our inner Comstocks and Ashcrofts body themselves forth, to wreak their havoc on the real world.
•
“But—to take something like that. I mean, whether you feel it or not, that’s neither here nor there, but I think actually it might even be worse if you fake it—but to take something like that and put it on display—”
•
But now, perhaps, it’s time to admit this whole conceit of the Mark of Cain is flawed. —The Mark, after all, was a sign of God’s backhanded protection, reserving Cain for the tender mercies of His judgment. Our Mark, on the other hand, highlights us and calls us out; the Mark the Comstocks and the Ashcrofts put on us make it easier for them to destroy us. (They, perhaps, would claim it’s because they are God’s judgment; I would state rather that it proves they sin against the very will of God. But no metaphor can withstand the weight of such fanatical extremisms.) So let’s discard the Mark of Cain, and let him rest; he’s been overworked these days as it is.
Instead, let’s put on clean white robes and mix some clay with dust and purified water, until we get an easily malleable substance, like a firm bread dough. With nothing but our bare hands, we’ll shape and mold the clay into a human form, carefully and meticulously or quickly and expressively, as is our wont. (Sprinkle some more water on the figure if it’s too stiff to work, but not so much it can no longer hold its form.) —When the sculpting is finished, we’ll let the statue stand in the sun for a few hours to dry, but not so long it is no longer workable, for then we’ll take a stylus in our hands (careful of those white robes) and reach up to write upon its forehead, tongue between our teeth, the Hebrew letters signing EMETH, the word for truth. And watch! See that Mark fill now with red light, as with a groan our golem lifts its hand, and takes a breath, and opens its eyes—!
(We are further advised to cover the golem with a damp cloth when not in use, to prevent its surface cracking and flaking away; also, we are admonished to maintain our purity of purpose for the duration of our golem’s life. But I trust this is self-evident.)
And it’s a powerful and frightening golem, yes; think of how even a few ill-chosen words or a badly shot photograph can set the Mark to tingling in a moment. (Think also of one of the ways we deal with things that frighten or shame us: we make it a joke, disparage it, laugh at it. Drown out the noise. Cover the Mark. Porn with a group of friends is something funny, yes—but the same piece alone, or with a friend, or friends, even the same friends, in a different context, becomes something else, entirely.) Yet it’s nothing we can’t handle, really, given a little care, consideration, forethought, artistry.
Mind you’re not misled by my metaphor—the clean white robes, the purity of purpose. Remember that robes are whitened by the most caustic and noxious of chemicals, and that purity of purpose describes any focussed effort; even the amoral are pure, after their fashion. Do not make the mistake of assuming you can judge, that this one who bears the Mark is worthy, and that is not; that this one is “erotica,” say, and that one merely “porn.” We can say this golem is well-made, that one ill; we can say this one admirably serves its purpose, and that is hopelessly muddled, like my poor conceit. —But when we take up the Mark knowingly, we must take in everyone who bears it, rent-boys and exotic dancers, phone-sex operators and camgirls, writers and models, painters and poets, prostitutes and pornographers, all. Any other course is madness: it’s the first step in shifting some burden of the Mark from ourselves to someone else. (See how Canute stirs, and licks his lips—)
W.H. Auden once said a writer should eschew the pornographic, as physical arousal detracts from a rich and complex æsthetic response; myself, I say Auden was a chickenshit. (A stunning poet, don’t get me wrong. But on this topic—rather, in this sentiment, right here—he was a lily-livered coward.) —As artists, writers, readers, punters in the audience, pornographers and prostitutes—as adults, we should not eschew the pornographic. Hide it away. Swaddle it in drapes and hope no one ever notices.
No! It’s a challenge, by God: to take up the Mark and do something with it, to encounter that Mark in ourselves and speak the truth of what we see there: how we feel, and why, because of what, and when, and who. To bring the state of arousal—as human a reaction as any other—into the fold of æsthetic and critical response; to learn from it, even as it grows and takes its shape from us.
Am I saying shame is good? No. It is inescapable, perhaps necessary, but it is only as good as any aspect of human nature can be. But know this: wipe that Mark away and our golems slump back to lifelessness. We slump back to lifelessness—and that’s our secret.
The secret of pornography.
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(Well, of course it’s highfalutin’. I mean, I suppose I could just have stood upon a stool and bellowed “Free speech or die!” till I was hoarse. Wouldn’t have had quite the same effect, though.)
nicholas urfé
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