Sun-Fucked (Extract)

Image by Zena McKeown (2012)

Strangely it always becomes necessary to speak about the phallus when thinking about the sun: for what is a hard-on other than the body of man declaring: I am the Sun. As Bataille writes, the verb to be and the integral erection tied to it is ultimately nothing other than an articulation of amorous solar frenzy.

For an erection, like the sun, is something that rises and falls and scandalizes, being equally obscene, equally demanding; a quasi-miraculous phenomenon resulting from a complex interaction of factors, often triggered by some form of sexual stimulation, though this need not always be the case.

Indeed, often the happiest of erections are ones that arise spontaneously and in all innocence and, interestingly, Lawrence explicitly reverses the idea that love calls potency into being. On the contrary, he suggests, it is power that gives rise to love; power that comes to us from outside and enters us from behind and below, where we are sightless and do not understand. And so, to be sun-fucked is, also, to be sodomised and some of us might once more think of Bataille and his notion of the solar anus.

Of course, however we get it, most of us want life and the feeling of power; although, ironically, the latter comes via the expenditure and exercise of power and not from its possession. When one is powerful, like the sun, one gives oneself away and life only comes to us when we dare to live and squander resources. For life does not mean length of days: "Poor old Queen Victoria had length of days. But Emily Brontë had life. She died of it."

That's a fantastic thought, isn’t it? Life kills! And energy eventually escapes its entrapment within form and is liberated back into the solar flux. For that’s all life is; a temporary arrest of sunlight. And death? Death is nothing but a release of power and what Nietzsche describes as a festive return to the actual.

Those who live with the greatest intensity and imitate the sun often die young, burning out like tiny stars. Those who go on and on into old age either lack vitality, or they are monsters of stamina - like Picasso. As a rule, it is better to live fast and die young than live like one who has never known the power of the sun; nor the love of another in whom the sun can be glimpsed.


Note: Line quoted is from D. H. Lawrence, 'Blessed are the Powerful', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (CUP, 1988), p. 322.

The Three Ducks (Donald, Daffy & Howard)

Donald Duck © The Walt Disney Company / Howard the Duck © Marvel Worldwide, Inc.

Daffy Duck © Warner Bros. Inc.

I have never been a great fan of Disney's Donald Duck. Partly, this is due to his choice of outfit consisting of blue sailor shirt, cap and red bow tie; not a look I much care for.

That said, he's clearly more interesting and more edgy than his friend and rival Mickey Mouse. For whereas the latter is simply irritating, the former is amusingly irritable and often seems at odds with those around him and in general conflict with life - a bit like a feathered George Costanza. Indeed, someone should write a comparative analysis of these two characters as they seem to share a wide range of personality traits.

Despite this retrospective Seinfeld connection, as a child I had much more time for Donald's Warner Bros. counterpart, Daffy Duck. Probably this has something to do with being part of a TV generation growing up on Looney Tunes, rather than being a regular movie-goer. Also, Daffy, created by Tex Avery, was, to me at least, simply funnier as well as a more contemporary-seeming, more savvy figure than Donald. Mel Blanc's brilliant vocal characterization doubtless played a large part in this. And, crucially, Daffy spurned the sailor suit and dared to go naked.

  

The third fictional bird to have played an active role in my imagination, is Howard the Duck, created by writer Steve Gerber and artist Val Mayerik for Marvel Comics in 1973. Like Donald and Daffy, Howard is often ill-tempered and foul-mouthed (no pun intended). But unlike them, his character lends itself more to nihilism and existential angst, rather than screwball comedy. 

For Howard reveals that life is joke. But it's an absurd and often cruel joke lacking in point or punchline. As Gerber once explained, via Howard he sought to demonstrate how the things, people, and events we value and take seriously are distinguishable from those things, people, and events we despise or think ludicrous only thanks to interpretation and perspectivism (i.e. personal prejudice and the contingency of viewpoint).

Unfortunately, Gerber and his publishers soon clashed over issues of 'creative control' and the writer was removed from his own series in 1978. The comic in its original format quickly folded. Around this time, Disney was also threatening to sue Marvel for copyright infringement, claiming that Howard looked too similar to Donald and insisting that the former put some pants on!

Today, now that Disney own Marvel, one can't help fearing that with or without trousers, Howard's days are sadly numbered.

On Van Gogh's Ear and the Dangers of Sungazing

Picture by Phischer: Van Gogh's Ear (2007)

www.worth1000.com

Although the facts of the case were disputed in 2009 by two revisionist art historians looking to pin the blame on Gauguin, we all know the story of Van Gogh's mutilated ear and how he carefully wrapped the piece of severed lobe in newspaper before presenting it to his favourite prostitute, Rachel, at a nearby brothel, with instructions to carefully look after it.  

Very few of us, however, have bothered to place this story in a wider context of meaning; and no one has managed to do a better job of this than Georges Bataille in his 1930 essay on acts of sacrificial atrocity and solar-induced madness.

Bataille persuasively argues that Van Gogh's violent act of self-disfigurement was the result not of a tiff with Gauguin, but due to an inhuman and ultimately overwhelming relationship maintained with the sun; a fatal form of worship that is only fully revealed in the painter's canvases produced during his stay at the mental hospital in Saint-Rémy in 1889 (i.e. following the Christmas Eve ear incident).

Vincent's letters to his brother Theo written during this period, also indicate how his solar obsession had reached its peak; he felt that he and the sun - at which he stared for dangerously long-periods at a time as if he himself were a sunflower drawing nourishment directly from the latter - were burning with the same vital intensity and magnificence.

After his departure from Saint-Rémy in January 1890, the sun doesn't simply fade or set within his artwork, but, crucially, almost entirely disappears. Six-months later, Van Gogh takes his own life, aged 37.

The point is this: it is impossible to maintain a personal or safe relationship with the sun; the attempt to do so might promise enlightenment and a healthy tan, but it ends with death and dismemberment. For just as sun-gazers risk solar retinopathy, sun-lovers risk being proved fatally mistaken in their anthropomorphic conceit if they believe that the sun loves them in return.


Note: See Georges Bataille, 'Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh', in Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl, (University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

The Case of Joyce McKinney

One of the figures who captivated my adolescent imagination and who has subsequently continued to shape my adult understanding of sexuality, was twenty-seven year old American beauty queen Joyce McKinney; a woman who achieved tabloid notoriety in the UK due to her unusual relationship with a young Mormon missionary, Kirk Anderson, in the summer of '77.  

Abducted with an imitation revolver from the steps of a Mormon meetinghouse in Surrey, Mr. Anderson reported to the police several days later subsequent to his escape, that he had been chloroformed and driven to a cottage in Devon, where he was fastened to a bed with a ten-foot chain and mink-lined handcuffs by Miss McKinney - with whom he had previously had a brief romantic relationship - and forced to be her sex slave (something he claimed to find extremely upsetting).    

Without wishing to make light of kidnap, false imprisonment, and indecent assault - or even to cast doubt on the veracity of Kirk Anderson's story - there were not many teenage boys in Britain at the time who didn't envy him and wish that they too could be subject to a crime of passion and perversity at the hands of a former Miss Wyoming.

Arrested on 19 September, McKinney denied all police charges, claiming her former lover had, in fact, fully consented to his part in this kinky escapade. Released on bail for health reasons, she fled the country with an illicitly obtained passport, disguised in a wig and glasses whilst pretending to be a deaf-mute. Two years later she was picked up by the FBI, having returned to the United States. Although not extradited, the McKinney case was eventually heard in a UK court and, having been found guilty of assault under the Sexual Offences Act of 1956, she was sentenced in absentia to a year in jail.

Coverage of events in the British press was extensive and highly sensational. The Daily Mirror famously published the above photo of McKinney, taken during her nude modelling days, on the front of one of their editions, causing a Church of Scotland working party on obscenity to object that this was the sort of image that would have only been sold to adults under plain sealed cover ten years earlier.

Such has been the continued fascination with this tale, that Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris recently directed a documentary about it - and the media circus surrounding it - entitled Tabloid (2010). Although made with McKinney's co-operation, she subsequently filed a lawsuit against Morris and his producer, Mark Lipson, on the grounds of defamation; claiming that the film portrayed her as a kinky prostitute and an insane sex offender. 

Whether the film does or does not do this and whether such a characterization does or does not constitute defamation of character, for me, Joyce McKinney - now living in Palm Springs with her cloned dogs - will always be an object of great affection. As I think J. G. Ballard once wrote, those events and those people which impress themselves upon the imagination of a boy in his fourteenth summer will stay with him for life.

On the Queer Love Affair at the Heart of Quetzalcoatl

Quetzalcoatl was Lawrence's first version of the novel that would be published after extensive rewriting as The Plumed Serpent three years later in 1926. Both works examine political, religious and racial issues and both feature an Anglo-Irish heroine called Kate whose ambivalence about the sort of life she is offered in Mexico reflects Lawrence's violent attraction-repulsion to a culture so profoundly alien to his own.

Whilst this is not the place to offer a full and serious reading of the text, there is nevertheless one aspect of the novel that I would like to comment on here; namely, the queer relationship between Ramón and Cipriano. 

Although described by Kate's cousin Owen as "a David and Jonathan couple without any love" [38], there is nevertheless a kind of perverse dynamic at play; Cipriano is clearly enthralled by Ramón and ultimately their hearts beat in unison. Lawrence writes: 

"The two had known each other for some years. ... But they had never been really intimate. They had kept aloof ... although all the time they knew there was some secret bond between them. A bond which must one day assert itself." [114]

And so it is that when not endlessly staring into one another's eyes and discussing the nature of their manhood, Ramón and Cipriano like to engage in homoerotic games of domination and submission. Thus the interesting scene in Chapter VII when Ramón presses his hands over Cipriano's eyes and the latter promises to obey him, having felt a dark fountain of life rise up within him. He then drops to his knees and kisses the bare feet of the other man - an act that causes Ramón's heart to stand still.   

Later, in Chapter XV, there is a far more explicit scene between the two. Ramón approaches Cipriano from behind and again places his hands over the younger man's eyes, pressing them shut. "Cipriano, startled, braced himself to resist", before relaxing beneath the "soft, firm pressure of the hands that darkened him". As Cipriano drifts into a state of blissful semi-consciousness, he allows Ramón to penetrate him in his depths. Keeping one hand held tightly over Cipriano's eyes, Ramón "pressed the middle finger of the other hand over a certain awake place at the base of Cipriano's spine", making his soul tremble, until, finally, Cipriano dissolves into the joy of complete surrender and felt himself passing into a kind of death that was "infinitely satisfying" [241].

I would concede that there is a certain Lawrentian vagueness about this scene, meaning we can never be entirely sure what has happened. In the explanatory notes provided by the Cambridge editor we are led to believe it's an esoteric passage to do with chakras and the serpent-power of kundalini. However, it sounds to me very much as if Ramón has simply finger-fucked Cipriano and treated him to a prostate massage. 

Either way, Cipriano is a different man afterwards and he has to reconcile himself to this and learn how to treasure what has passed between him and Ramón as his "innermost secret" [243]. If he still wants a woman - still wants Kate as a wife - nevertheless it is to Ramón he returns whenever he wants to rediscover his most impersonal and demonic self. 

Note: page references refer to the Cambridge University Press edition of Quetzalcoatl, (2011), ed. N. H. Reeve.

On Mannequins With Merkins

American Apparel (2014)

As regular readers of torpedo the ark will have gathered, I have a perverse critical interest in pygmalionism and female genitalia and in particular the manner in which culture determines the appearance of muffs and mannequins. And so, naturally, I feel obliged to say something about the latest window display from try-hard-to-be controversial retailer American Apparel. 

Sadly restricted (so far) to their store on East Houston Street, New York, the window features extremely beautiful mannequins wearing geeky glasses and revealing dark nipples beneath see-through bras and an unnatural natural abundance of dark pubic hair beneath see-through knickers. Indeed, so lavish is the bush on one model that it juts defiantly from the sides of her high-cut underwear.   

Some passers-by smile. Some look away in disgust. And some, of course, take photos. But the window has certainly aroused media attention and fed into a conversation about the need or non-need for women to obsessively remove all traces of body hair. One might even be tempted to speak of a growing backlash against the pornified ideal of a completely denuded cunt - an ideal which the fashion and cosmetic industries have long shared and eagerly promoted, so it's a wee bit disingenuous to say the least when a spokesperson for American Apparel tells us that they are a company that has always celebrated natural beauty and believed in keeping things real.    

Still, having said that, it's a qualified two cheers for the window display and for the visual merchandizing team of Sawyer Ballance, Julio Delgado and Molly Hatch - whatever the thinking or commercial consideration behind it. The campaign obviously continues to exploit female bodies, but perhaps it also opens up another option for young women who belong to a generation that has been obliged to wax and shave and deodorize relentlessly and who now have the ugly word labiaplasty in their vocabulary.  

Non-Racist Photo Sparks Mistaken Outrage

Photo of Dasha Zhukova copyright Buro 24/7

The above picture of fashion designer and magazine editor Dasha Zhukova, in which she sits looking somewhat awkward on an amusingly kitsch piece of human furniture by British pop artist Allen Jones, has, apparently, sparked outrage. 

Rather surprisingly, it's not the fact that the chair objectifies women by assigning them a sexually-submissive whilst decoratively functional role that has caused this storm of angry protest across various social networks and media outlets: it's the fact that the mannequin-sculpture happens to resemble a woman of colour.  

According to some, this makes the work not only misogynistic but racist and the photo of a privileged and extremely wealthy white woman sitting on the chair merely serves to emphasise this. The fact that it was published on Martin Luther King Day ironically - if unintentionally - adding further insult to injury.   

   

Should I bother to comment on this? I'm tempted to do so, obviously. Indeed, when I first glanced at the photo and the headline on the Yahoo news page I felt like a fish being offered bait on a hook.

But, to be perfectly honest, I'm tired today and my heart's simply not in it. So let me just say, for the record if you will, that of course racism, sexism and class hatred are realities that infect every aspect of our culture, society and politics. And of course these things should be questioned and critically challenged. But knee-jerk liberalism rooted in naive moral sentiment and humourless political puritanism rarely helps matters.

  

Welcome to Taiji Cove

Despite what I wrote in a recent post (Delphinophilia), some people neither wish to swim with dolphins, nor have sex with them. Rather, they wish to corral dolphins, kill dolphins, and eat dolphins: welcome to the blood-red waters of Taiji Cove.

Every year in this remote bay, thousands of wild dolphins are rounded up by fishermen. The cutest looking are sold into captivity and obliged to spend the rest of their lives performing in the entertainment industry. The rest are slaughtered with knives or by having a metal spike thrust into their spinal cord. When they have bled to death, they are then hauled to a harbour-side warehouse and prepared for exclusive Japanese dinner tables along with whale blubber and shark-fin soup.

This annual festival of cruelty came to public attention after the release of Oscar-winning documentary The Cove (dir. Louis Psihoyos, 2009). The film followed a group of eco-activists attempting to gain access to the the hunt. It met with predictable opposition in Japan from groups saying it was racist and an affront to an ancient way of life.  

And so, despite continuing international protest, the government of Japan staunchly defends the practice on the grounds of cultural tradition - a phrase that effectively functions as a moral release clause and which is used to justify all of those things which lack any other form of legitimacy, from badger baiting to female genital mutilation.

   

Taiji's mayor, Kazutaka Sangen, remains particularly defiant and almost belligerent as he reminds Western devils about the bombing of Hiroshima. This, of course, is insanely besides the point. But, on the other hand, it's certainly fair to question our eating of other warm-blooded and sentient mammals, such as cows, sheep, and pigs. 

For ultimately, as Morrissey says, all meat is murder and there's no easy way around the fact that the brutal and systematic exploitation and destruction of animals on an industrial scale (an aspect of what Derrida terms carnophallogocentrism) is a global phenomenon and not one peculiar to the Land of the Rising Sun.    

Delphinophilia

A lot of people claim to love dolphins and dream of swimming with them so that they too might experience something of the sheer joy and underwater togetherness displayed by these fleshy, warm-bodied, and intelligent creatures.   

But for a small number of delphinophiles, to simply swim with dolphins is insufficient and they desire some form of overtly sexual relation. As with other other types of zoosexual contact, however, fucking with Flipper is far from straightforward and requires a good deal of patience, commitment, and knowledge of animal anatomy and behaviour: get it wrong and perving on porpoises might well prove fatal; get it right, and fins can be wonderful.

The key seems to be establishing a bond of trust and familiarity between yourself and your bottle-nosed partner. In other words, adopting a code of erotic etiquette and sexual ethics is as crucial within cross-species relationships as within human-human love affairs. Abuse has no place within zoophilia.

And so whilst it's true - as critics like to point out - that dolphins cannot give explicit verbal consent, they nevertheless can and do make themselves available and amenable to sex play with human beings and have been known to initiate such. Indeed, recent research has shown that they - like other higher mammals - are polyamorous opportunists who use sex as a form of social bonding.

Arguments that exchanging a few simple pleasures with dolphins is harmful to their welfare simply don't hold up; arguments that it is unnatural or immoral and degrades the uniquely special status of the human are laughable as well as untenable. Torpedo the ark means rejecting the naturalistic fallacy and the dogma of human exceptionalism; it means proliferating forms of contact, affection, and affinity with other species.

 
Note: for those who wish to know more about dolphin-oriented zoosexuality the following blogs might interest:

Delphinophile.blogspot.com

http://blog.wetgoddess.net

Delphigirlwrites.blogspot.com

In Praise of Invisible Artworks

Tom Friedman: Untitled (A Curse), 1992

One of the nice things about having English-Lit scholar and TV star Dr Catherine Brown as a friend is that she raises so many interesting topics for discussion: such as invisible artworks, which, until two nights ago, I was completely unaware of, but am now a little obsessed by having seen them (or, rather, not seen them) for myself.

In particular, I'm fascinated with an untitled piece by Tom Friedman in which he commissioned a witch to place a curse in the space above an empty pedestal, thereby creating an enchanted work that makes us think not merely about that old chestnut of what does and does not constitute art and what roles imagination and belief might play in our understanding and appreciation of an object, but also about how sacred or - as in this case - accursed space is divided off from the secular and commercial space which surrounds it.

But what I really like about Friedman's piece is that, like other invisible works, it lends itself to crime: for one could arguably steal it without anyone knowing; or, more amusingly, one could employ a witch of one's own to cast a spell that would lift the curse, thereby destroying the work in an act of magical vandalism.

Even Wounded Books Remain Complicit With Evil

Wounded Book XIII, Bullet Holes on vintage publication,
©mitrentse, courtesy Nadine Feront Gallery Brussels

There are many ways to display one's love of literature, but until I came across the very wonderful series of works entitled Wounded Books by Greek-born, London-based artist and bibliophile Christina Mitrentse, I must admit that the idea of shooting Penguin paperbacks with a rifle never occurred to me.

Initially produced in response to the bombing of a street in Baghdad famous for its bookshops, Miss Mitrentse has powerfully and yet rather poignantly emphasized the vulnerability of ideas and bodies of knowledge and, in more general terms, the fragility of material objects. Nothing serves better than a bullet hole, it seems, to remind us of this.

And yet, having said that, literature is certainly not innocent and whilst books can be subject to violence, so too can they often incite, sanction, and justify violence (often in the name of Love). Ultimately, books are as complicit with evil as any other assemblage of power-knowledge and we shouldn't revere them, accept their authority without question, or believe them to contain eternal truths.

And this is why I have trouble with Anna McNay's recent interpretation of Wounded Books, posted on her blog, art-Corpus, in which she reads the work in terms of religious metaphor to do with the incarnation of the holy spirit, thereby turning bullet holes into stigmata and the book into the body of Christ. It's a reading that is both unconvincing and peculiarly offensive in its theological musing and psycho-sexual idealism.

For books, being mortal things, are not without sin and, arguably, they have caused more suffering and death - precisely when accorded divine status as sacred works - than all the weapons in the world.

Indeed, I rather hope that Miss Mitrentse will one day dare to fire bullets through the Bible, the Quran and all the other founding texts which root themselves in our heads and in our hearts until we can no longer think or feel outside of the binary logic that is their spiritual reality. Shoot these root-books Christina and allow a little fresh air to circulate between their pages. You'll be doing us all a great service if you do.

Notes:

Those interested in the work of Christina Mitrentse should visit christinamitrentse.com
Those who want to read Anna McNay's post should go to http://art-corpus.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/christina-mitrentses-wounded-books

On the Art of Sensation

Natasha Gouveia: Ripped Canvas 1 (2011)  
natashagouveia.org

Just as it is mistaken to imagine that the whiteness of the canvas is a virgin surface, so too is it naive to think the blank page is a pure and empty space that a writer must only fill with words. Both surfaces are already invested (virtually) with all kinds of cliché and belief.

And this is why it's difficult to be a painter or a poet: one who knows how to wipe, to scrape, and even to shred the surface. For Lawrence, this requires a certain purity of spirit. By which he doesn't mean being moral in a conventional sense, but rather having the ability to release new forces and figures from old forms with violent delight.

If you don't know how to work with a certain innocent joy in destruction, then you'll never discover what Deleuze terms the logic of sensation: i.e., "the opposite of the facile and the ready-made, the cliché - but also of the 'sensational', the spontaneous, etc."       

The young Canadian artist Natasha Gouveia seems to understand this and I smile everytime she uses the word gouge in the title of one her works.

Something Fishy

Lawrence wrote a very lovely poem about fish to whom so little matters as they live their wave-thrilled but essentially loveless lives in oneness with the water, beyond knowledge, beyond touch, beyond humanity. For fish move in other circles to our own and we are but many-fingered horrors of daylight in their strangely staring eyes.

Brilliantly coloured tropical fish, taken from amongst the coral reefs, are particularly fragile and ill-suited to aquarium life; drifting joylessly in a few cubic centimetres of water around toy divers and other plastic ornaments.

Over twenty million of these little splinters of sheer loveliness are captured annually to supply a multi-million dollar pet trade. Collectors stun the fish by dousing coral beds with cyanide, thereby making it easier to grab hold of them. Many die in the process and up to 40% who survive being captured fail to make it to their final destination. The poison, of course, also damages and eventually kills the coral.

Now, you might imagine that someone who passionately loved the poetry of D. H. Lawrence and raged against anthropocentrism and the crime against nature, would have abhorred the exotic fish trade. What a shock to discover, therefore, that recently deceased critic and scholar Keith Sagar once edited The World Encyclopaedia of Tropical Fish and had a collection of his very own!

Was he never tempted, like Lawrence, to ask his heart, who are these? and to admit that we can never know and thus never really own fish; even if we might catch them, kill them, or keep 'em in tanks - sulphurous sun-beasts of the upper-world that we are!

Panem et Pyrotechnics

To welcome in the new year, people all over the world like to watch fireworks, which, as Oscar Wilde pointed out, have one big advantage over the stars; namely, you always know precisely when they are going to appear in the sky.

But, having said that, public displays - no matter how spectacular - soon bore and disappoint and one can't help wondering at the politics of the event and the psychology of people who stand in the cold gazing upwards with their mouths open, fascinated by bright lights and loud bangs; content to obey their leaders for another twelve months thanks to the promise of panem et pyrotechnics.

New Year's Eve makes North Koreans of us all ...