Sinister Writings 3: I Never Knew a Man Falling Was Such a Wonderful Thing

Richard Drew/AP (2001)

 

 

I. 

 

Richard Drew's photograph of a man falling from the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, is an image that retains a deep fascination. But the nature of that fascination, however, is ambiguous ...

 

For if most people view it empathetically, with hands pressed over their mouth and nose in a gesture combining shock, horror and shame, there are undoubtedly others who take a macabre and even perverse pleasure in it. Ultimately, we are all ethically obliged to examine our own reasons for finding it almost impossible to look away from the image ...*

 

 

II.

 

Hands up if you know of the baron des Adrets ... It's okay if you don't; I didn't either until I read an account of his life given in the sinister writings of Abel Tiffauges ...**

"'His name was François de Beaumont, and he had a château at La Frette in the Dauphiné. He lived in the sixteenth century, when the wars of religion bespattered the country with blood and strong men could work their will with impunity.

      One day, out hunting, Adrets and his officers brought a bear to bay, and its retreat was cut off by a precipice. The bear charged one of the men, who fired, hit it, and was soon rolling with it in the snow. The baron, who had seen what had happened, sprang forward to help the man but suddenly stopped, transfixed by an unutterable pleasure. He had noticed that the man and the bear, intertwined as they were, were gradually slipping towards the abyss, and the baron stood frozen and hypnotized by this fall in slow motion. Then the black bulk toppled over into the void, the only stain left on the whiteness was a grey streak, and Adrets groaned with joy.

      A few hours later the officer reappeared, wounded and bleeding, but safe - the bear had broken his fall. He expressed respectful astonishment at the baron's slowness in coming to his assistance. The baron, smiling dreamily as at some delightful recollection, replied in a mysterious sentence heavy with threat: "I never knew a man falling was such a wonderful thing."

      After that, he gave free reign to his new passion. Taking advantage of the religious wars, he imprisoned Catholics in Protestant regions and Protestants in Catholic ones, and arranged for them all to 'fall'. He worked out a subtle ritual. His prisoners were blindfolded and forced to dance to the music of a viol on top of a tower without a parapet. And the baron, breathless with pleasure, would watch them draw near, move away from, and draw near again to the void, until suddenly one of them lost his footing and fell shrieking through the air, to be impaled on a bank of lances stuck in the ground at the foot of the tower.'" [41-2] 

 

I don't know how historically accurate this account is, but François de Beaumont was certainly a genuine figure who switched sides during the religious wars of the French Reformation and became known not only for his military genius and bravery, but also for his appalling cruelty. And he is recorded as having forced eighteen prisoners to throw themselves from the top of a castle keep - so the account is probably pretty accurate. 

 

Anyway, what does it matter? There are truths which infinitely supass the truth of that which is factually correct. The crucial thing is that Adrets had chanced upon a form of cadent euphoria and that there's "probably nothing more moving in a man's life than the accidental discovery of his own perversion" [42]. 

 

Thus, the question that one hardly dares to ask is this: How many people watching the terrible events of 9/11 unfold before their eyes, also made a similar discovery to Adrets: that there is nothing more wonderful than to watch a man falling to his death ...           

 

 

Notes  

 

* The photo used here is one of a series of twelve taken by Drew. It appeared in papers around the world, often arousing angry criticism over its use. The unidentified subject of the picture was trapped on the upper floors of the North Tower and either fell whilst searching for safety or jumped to escape the fire and smoke. Of the 2,606 people who died in the attack on the WTC, it is estimated that as many as 200 fell or jumped to their deaths. For an excellent meditation on the photo, see Tom Junod's 'The Falling Man: An unforgettable story', Esquire (Sep 9, 2016): click here to read online.    

 

** Michel Tournier, The Erl-King, trans. Barbara Bray, (Atlantic Books, 2014), page references given in the text refer to this edition.  

 

For sinister writings on angelic oppression, click here. 

 

For sinister writings on the sexual politics of Adam and Eve, click here. 

Sinister Writings 2: On the Sexual Politics of Adam and Eve

Theodor Harmsen: Hermaphrodites (2017) 

The Book of Adam and Eve 

theodorharmsen.com

 

 

What do you call the layer of excess fat surrounding the vagina? 

Woman.  

 

If ever there was a joke written to offend feminists concerned with the sexual objectification of women - particularly their reduction to a body part - it's this one. 

 

And yet, if certain midrashic interpretations of God's creation of man in terms of what we would now call intersexuality are to be believed, then we might well ask what is woman if not merely a monstrous personification of cunt given an autonomous life of her own once separated off from the body of Adam.

This is not a question that escapes the attention of Abel Tiffauges:

"Reading the beginning of the Book of Genesis, one is pulled up short by a flagrant inconsistency that sticks out like a sore thumb in the venerable text. 'So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them ...' This sudden transition from the singular to the plural is downright unintelligible, especially as the creation of the woman out of Adam's rib does not occur till much later, in the second chapter of Genesis. But all is clear if one retains the singular throughout ... 'So God created man in his own image, that is, at once male and female ... And God said to him, be fruitful, multiply ...' etc. Later he sees that the solitude implied by hermaphroditism is undesirable, so he puts Adam to sleep and takes from him not a rib but his ... womb, i.e. his feminine sexual parts, and makes these into an independent being." [14-15]

 

That's interesting: for not only does it mean that Adam was originally created as an intersexed being, but - made as he was in God's own image - that God too is therefore both male and female (or, if you prefer, neither male nor female). 

 

Exactly how Adam was physically constituted is something that rabbis and Christian theologians who have bought into this idea have long debated; was he a true hermaphrodite or simply one half of a conjoined male-female twin assemblage (i.e., a single bi-sexed body)?   

 

Fascinating as it is to think of the Old Adam "armed with all his reproductive apparatus, [...] a constant prey to amorous transports of unimaginable perfection, in which he is both possessor and possessed, except - who knows? - during the periods when he was pregnant by himself" [15], this is not my main point of interest. Nor am I concerned here with the (potentially liberating) implication of this myth for those who identify as trans, queer, intersex, or non-binary. 

 

Rather, my concern is for the daughters of Eve and how this myth enables the kind of sexism contained in the joke with which I opened this post, by encouraging men to think of woman as not only a walking, talking sex organ, but a sex organ which originally belonged to Adam before God decided that the hermaphroditic model was not quite working and tore the sexes asunder.

 

If, technically speaking, woman has no sexual parts of her own - but is herself merely a sexual part of the original man "deposited outside himself [...] and taken up when needed" [15] - then why, for example, should a man worry about the ethical issue of female objectification, or wish to ensure female pleasure and fulfilment; particularly when he is "naturally out of step with woman's slow, vegetative ripenings" [8] ...?   

 

See: Michel Tournier, The Erl-King, trans. Barbara Bray, (Atlantic Books, 2014). All page references in the text refer to this edition. 

 

For sinister writings on angelic oppression, click here. 

 

For sinister writings on cadent euphoria, click here. 

Sinister Writings 1: Angelic Oppression

Cameron: Holy Guardian Angel 

According to Aleister Crowley (1966)

 

 

I. 

 

In the winter of 2017 - and as if anticipating the coronavirus - I developed a continuous dry ticklish cough, which stayed for several weeks and left me with respiratory problems. My GP sent me for a chest X-ray, but this didn't reveal anything. So he decided I had developed an asthmatic reaction and issued me with an inhaler. He also prescribed Montelukast, a medication deisigned to make breathing easier by helping to prevent airways from constricting. 

 

Two-and-a-half years later and still often breathless, I was finally given an asthma test, but this also came back negative. Having long since abandoned the steroid inhaler, I was advised to also stop taking the Montelukast tablets; in fact, the nurse who administered the test said I should never have been put on them - and then left on them for 30 months - in the first place.

 

And whilst my breathing has, thankfully, been better of late, I sense there's still an underlying issue and that, sooner or later, some sort of allergen will trigger things again. My doctor doesn't think I should be overly concerned, but I would like to know what caused the problem, will it return, and is it likely to get worse. 

 

I'm also tempted to no longer conceive of the problem in strictly medical or scientific terms, but to understand it symbolically as one best explained within angelology ...

 

 

II.

 

As far as I'm aware, unlike Abel Tiffauges, I've never done anything to antagonise my Holy Guardian Angel. But, just like demons, angels are hypersensitive and easily offended, so perhaps back in the winter of 2017 I did do or say something which called forth punishment from my HGA and that my subsequent respiratory distress wasn't merely the result of having picked up a virus, but, rather, from having been given an angel's punch ...

 

For although such is dealt with a fist that is "harder and heavier than marble" [60] and can leave one gasping for breath for a longtime afterwards, it isn't, of course, a purely material blow and so is often unfelt at first. The fist of bronze, we might say, is "enveloped in the white feathers of the spirit" and this magically softens and disguises the blow. 

 

Now, being neither a Catholic nor a Thelemite, it's difficult for me to think seriously in terms of spiritual entities existing independently of man. But still the fact remains that "sometimes I have difficulty in breathing, and then it is as if the brazen fist is [...] bearing down still with all its weight upon my chest" [60].

 

My GP, of course, whilst unable to find anything physically wrong and thus at a loss to explain my condition, had little time for such ideas; even though he identifies as a Muslim and thus presumably accepts the existence of malaikah ...   

 

Still, regardless of what he or anyone else might believe, I like to think that the angelic has charged my respiratory life with supernatural significance:

 

"Thanks to it, my lungs have made the transition from glandular darkness to visceral dawn  - even in extreme instances, to the broad daylight of consciousness. These extreme cases include the great dyspnoeic distress that makes me lie on the ground and struggle against a muderous though invisible grip; but also the profound and happy inspiration in which the whole sky, full of the flight of swallows and the sound of harps, plunges its forked root directly into my lungs." [61] 

 

 

See: Michel Tournier, The Erl-King, trans. Barbara Bray, (Atlantic Books, 2014). All page references given in the text refer to this edition. 

 

For sinister writings on the sexual politics of Adam and Eve, click here. 

 

For sinister writings on cadent euphoria, click here.

St. Christopher: the Dog-Headed Saint

Ágios Christóforos

Kynokephalos

Until I read the 'Sinister Writings of Abel Tiffauges' [1], I had no idea that St. Christopher - the Christ-bearer - was widely believed in Byzantium to belong to the savage race of dog-headed people known as the cynocephali ... 

 

Obviously, the Orthodox Church didn't like to acknowledge this and disapproved of depictions of the saint that showed him as semi-human; it was only from the 17th-century on that artists began to paint Christopher in his full therianthropic glory (though these images were prescribed in 18th-century Russia during the reign of Peter the Great).        

 

The ancient Greeks, of course, were long familiar with canine-headed Egyptian dieties, such as Duamutef (son of Horus) and Anubis (ruler of all things associated with death) and believed that there was a race of dog-headed people living in the mountains of India who wore the skins of animals and communicated by barking.     

The cynocephali afford such a marvellous combination of magic and animality, that they have become archetypal figures within the human imagination, as we can see, for example, in medieval art and literature. Early Christian scholars wrestled with the question of their origin; how could they be descendants of Adam? And, if they weren't descendants of Adam, then how could they be considered human?     

It really is a fascinating topic; one which certainly makes me more interested in the life of St. Christopher, who was not only canine of feature, but described by some as a giant. I do wish he'd dropped the accursed Christ-child in the river, however, and left him there to drown. For if he had, then perhaps the latter's moral legacy would not continue to weigh so heavily upon us all ...   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Part I of Michel Tournier's brilliant novel The Erl-King, trans. Barbara Bray, (Atlantic Books, 2014). See pp. 35-37. The account given here of the life of St. Christopher is adapted from Jacapo da Varazze's Golden Legend - a collection of hagiographies originally compiled c. 1259-66 and widely read in late-Medieval Europe.