On the Sex Life of Robinson Crusoe 1: Getting Jiggy with a Soap Bark Tree

Even a tree has its own daimon. 

And a man might lie with the daimon of a tree. 

- D. H. Lawrence 

 

 

I. 

 

As regular readers will know, dendrophilia has featured in several posts on Torpedo the Ark, including, most recently, one in which I discuss an illustration by Wallace Smith for Ben Hecht's controversial novel Fantazius Mallare (1922): click here. 

 

However, as you can never have too much of a wood thing, I thought I might share details of the happy liaison between Michel Tournier's reimagined Robinson Crusoe [a] and a fallen soap bark tree (Quillaja saponaria) ...    

 

 

II.

 

With time on his hands, Crusoe develops many new interests. Among these, is an interest in the "marital rites of the creatures surrounding him" [113]. Not the mammals and birds, "whose couplings seemed to him a repulsive caricature of human love" [113], but the insects. 

 

He was particularly fascinated by the role the latter play in pollination, a process that seemed to him "both moving and supremely elegant" [113] and he spent many long hours observing the queer relationship that existed between a wasp and an orchid [b]. 

 

This "wonderful mingling of subterfuge and ingenuity" [115], makes him not only reconsider his religious beliefs - "had the natural world been contrived by an infinitely wise and majestic God, or by a baroque Demiurge driven to the wildest whimsicalities by his love of the bizarre?" [115] - but also wonder whether there were trees on the island which "might be disposed to make use of himself" [115] in a similar manner that the orchid exploits the wasp ...

 

Suddenly, "the branches of the trees were transformed in his mind into voluptuous and scented women whose rounded bodies were waiting to receive him" [115]. And so Crusoe sets off to find a suitable lover:     

"Searching the island from end to end, he finally discovered a quillai tree, which had been blown over by the wind but not wholly uprooted. The trunk, which lay on the ground, ended in a fork of two main branches rising a little into the air. The bark was smooth and warm, even downy at the point of the fork, where there was a small aperture lined with silky moss.

      Robinson hesitated for some days on the threshold of what he later called his 'vegetable way'. He hung about the quillai with sidelong glances, discovering in the two branches thrusting out of the grass a resemblance to huge, black, parted thighs. Finally he lay naked on the tree, clasping the trunk with his arms while his erect penis thrust its way into that mossy crevice. A happy torpor engulfed him. He lay dreaming with half-closed eyes of banks of creamy-petaled flowers shedding rich and heady perfumes from their bowed corollas. With damp lips parted they seemed to await the gift to be conferred on them by a heaven filled with the lazy drone of insects. Was he the last member of the human race to be summoned to return to the vegetative sources of life? The blossom is the sex of the plant. Innocently the plant offers its sex to all as its most rare and beautiful possession. Robinson lay dreaming of a new human species which would proudly wear its male and female attributes on its head - huge, luminous, scented." [115-116]

 

Alas, this blissful life is fated not to last beyond several happy months. First the rains come. Then a spider ruins everything: for one day, as he lay spread upon the wooden body of his beloved soapbark, "a searing pain in his gland brought him sharply to his feet" [116] and he spotted a large red spider running along the trunk of the tree before vanishing into the grass. "It was some hours before the pain abated, and his afflicted member looked like a tangerine." [116] 

 

Ouch! Perhaps not surprisingly, this incident puts Crusoe off dendrophilia: 

 

"Robinson had suffered many misadventures during his years of solitude amid the flora and fauna of a world enfevered by the tropical sun. But the moral significance of this episode was unavoidable. Although it had been caused by the sting of a spider, could his malady be regarded as anything other than a venereal disease [...]? He saw in this a sign that the 'vegetable way' might be no more than a blind alley." [116] 

 

That's a shame - and I think this an absurd reading of what happened. However, it has the significant effect of transforming Crusoe from a dendrophile into a full-blown ecosexual, as we will see in part two of this post ... [click here].    

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Michel Tournier, Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (Éditions Gallimard,1967). The text I'm using here is the English translation, simply entitled Friday, trans. Norman Denny, (John Hopkins University Press, 1997). All page numbers given in the post refer to this edition.

      The subject of Crusoe's sexual life whilst on his island has intrigued many authors. Diana Souhami, for example, wrote an award-winning study of Alexander Selkirk, the real-life castaway whose story inspired Daniel Defoe, in which she cheerfully speculated on his masturbatory habits and erotic preferences, ranging from buggery to bestiality. What she doesn't suggest, however, is that Selkirk/Crusoe may also have been a tree-hugger, in the carnal sense. If you want to know about that, you have to read Tournier's novel.

      See Diana Souhami, Selkirk’s Island, (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001). Best-known for her unconventional biographies of famous lesbians, this book was perhaps a bit of a surprise for Souhami's readership. Combining elements of fiction and fantasy with fact, it is difficult to categorise as a work. It should probably be noted, however, that Selkirk's own memoirs contain no hint of impropriety with goats.  

[b] Gilles Deleuze, who praised Tournier's novel - suggesting that it traced a genesis of perversion - would later, in collaboration with Félix Guattari, use this double figure of the wasp and orchid to illustrate the concepts of rhizome, becoming, and deterritorialization. Like Crusoe, Deleuze and Guattari were fascinated by the manner in which certain orchids display the physical and sensory characteristics of female wasps in order to entice male wasps into unnatural relations and co-opt them into their own reproductive cycle. 

      See Deleuze and Guattari, Mille plateaux (1980), trans. into English as A Thousand Plateaus by Brian Massumi, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987). The material I refer to is in the Introduction: Rhizome. As far as I am aware, Tournier has never received the credit he is due for initiating this line of thinking; indeed, there is but a single reference to Tournier in A Thousand Plateaus (p. 261) and this quotes from his later novel Les Météores (1975), not Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique. 

      However, Deleuze did write a lengthy essay on the latter, which was published as 'Michel Tournier and the World Without Others' in an appendix to The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, (The Athlone Press, 1990), pp. 301-321. 

 

 

The third and final part of this post on the sex life of Robinson Crusoe - sun-fucked - can be read by clicking here.  

 

 

Crawling on All Fours in Shaggy Inhumanity ...

William Blake: Nebuchadnezzar (c. 1795-1805)

tate.org.uk

 

 

I. The Case of King Nebuchadnezzar

 

Most people are probably vaguely familiar with the figure of King Nebuchadnezzar who, if the Bible is to be believed, was deprived of his mind by God and forced to live like an animal as punishment for excessive pride or hubris. The fact that he destroyed Solomon's Temple and held God's chosen people captive probably didn't go down well either [1]. 

 

William Blake famously produced a large colour print depicting this Babylonian monarch reduced to the status of a mad beast. As can be seen, he looked pretty rough during this seven year period; almost like some sort of werewolf. Alexander Gilchrist writes that the picture shows Nebuchadnezzar: 

 

"crawling like a hunted beast into a den among the rocks; his tangled golden beard sweeping the ground, his nails like vultures' talons, and his wild eyes full of sullen terror. The powerful frame is losing semblance of humanity, and is bestial in its rough growth of hair, reptile in the toad-like markings and spottings of the skin, which takes on unnatural hues of green, blue, and russet." [2]

 

Happily for Nebuchadnezzar, at the end of the septennium he is restored to sanity and full human status - indeed, he even gets his kingdom back, having learned his lesson, so all's well that ends well in his case ...     

 

 

II. The Case of Robinson Crusoe

 

Despite what naturists may choose to believe, I'm not convinced there's anything positive to be gained from the experience of nudity; I certainly don't think that running about with your kit off in the woods or on the beach, makes you essentially healthier, happier, or more vital. 

 

Having stripped off his clothes in a heavy shower of rain, Robinson Crusoe later muses on this question of nakedness and the importance of garments: 

 

"It was true that neither the temperature nor any consideration of modesty required him to go about dressed in a civilized manner. Sheer habit had caused him to do so, but now in his despair he began to appreciate the value of that armour of wool and linen with which human society had hitherto protected him. Nakedness is a luxury in which a man may indulge himself without danger only when he is warmly surrounded by his fellow man. For Robinson [...] it was a trial of desperate temerity. Stripped of its threadbare garments - worn, tattered, and sullied, but the fruit of civilized millennia, and impreganted with human associations - his vulnerable body was at the mercy of every hostile element. The wind, the thorned shrubs, the rocks, and the pitiless light assailed and tormented their defenceless prey." [3] 

 

Clothes serve many important functions. But offering a degree of physical protection in a hard, sharp and dangerous world is by no means the least of these. However, as time passes on the island, Crusoe succumbs to the devastating effects of isolation and eventually finds himself as naked - and as bestial - as Nebuchadnezzar in Blake's famous print: 

 

"Robinson could not have said how long it was since he had left his last shred of clothing on some thornbush. In any case, the thought of sunburn no longer troubled him, since his back, flanks, and thighs were now protected by a thick coating of dried mud. His hair and beard had grown so long that his face was almost invisible beneathy their tangled mass. His hands had become mere forepaws used for walking, since it made him giddy to stand upright. His state of physical weakness [...] but above all the breaking of some little spring in his soul, had led him to move only on his hands and knees. He knew now that man [...] can only stay upright while the crowd packed densely around him continues to prop him up. Exiled from the mass of his fellows, who had sustained him as part of humanity without his realizing it, he felt he no longer had the strength to stand on his own feet. He lived on unmentionable foods, gnawing them with his face to the ground. He relieved himself where he lay, and rarely failed to roll in the damp warmth of his own excrement. He moved less and less, and his brief excursions always ended in his return to the mire. Here, in its warm coverlet of slime, his body lost all weight, while the toxic emanations from the stagnant water drugged his mind. Only his eyes, nose, and mouth were active, alert for edible weed and toad spawn drifting on the surface." [4] 

 

III. Lou Carrington's Contrasting Vision of the Pure Animal Man

 

Crusoe's experience of becoming-animal doesn't sound so great a life - and certainly puts being in a Covid lockdown into perspective. It obliges one also to reconsider D. H. Lawrence's fetishisation of the animal man, articulated, for example, in St. Mawr by Lou Carrington who informs her (somewhat sceptical) mother that she is tired of nice, clean men with minds and wants instead men full of their own animal mystery, burning with life:

 

"'A pure animal man would be as lovely as a deer or a leopard, burning like a flame fed straight from underneath. And he'd be part of the unseen, like a mouse is, even. And he'd never cease to wonder, he'd breathe silence and unseen wonder, as the partridges do, running in the stubble. He'd be all the animals in turn, instead of one, fixed, automatic thing, which he is now, grinding on the nerves.'" [5]   

 

It's a lovely vision - in stark opposition to the image of Crusoe -  but one worries that just as the latter is the product of a fear of animality and the loss of humanity defined in moral-rational terms and related to the covering of one's nakedness, so Lawrence's fantasy is the product of his own romanticism and a longing for a natural paradise of some kind, in which man can dispense with clothing and his animal nature will no longer be corrupted and domesticated by civilisation.    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Readers interested in the story of Nebuchadnezzar will find it in the Old Testament Book of Daniel, a collection of legendary tales and apocalyptic visions dating from the 2nd century BC. The consensus among scholars is that the work should obviously be read as historical fiction, rather than historical fact.   

 

[2] Alexander Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake, (Dover Publications, 1998), p. 408-09. 

 

[3] Michel Tournier, Friday, trans. Norman Denny, (John Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 33.  

 

[4] Ibid., p. 40.

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'St. Mawr', in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 62.       

Notes on The Fetishist (and Other Stories) by Michel Tournier

(Minerva Press, 1992)

 

 

I. 

 

This collection of short stories by Michel Tournier - originally published as Le Coq de Bruyère (1978) - is a queer and often disconcerting mix of the sordid supernatural (to borrow the author's own description). 

 

Such a mix will, of course, not be to everybody's liking; one anonymous reviewer dismissed the tales as curiosities at best and sneered that Tournier was "no more than a cerebral Joyce Carol Oates, lazily toying with dark urges and forbidden pleasures" [a].   

 

Other readers - myself included - who enjoy philosophically-informed fiction that explores the porno-mythic imagination and accelerates what Jonathan Dollimore termed the perverse dynamic, will, however, like this book - and like it a lot. 

 

To be perfectly frank, I don't care if Tournier is a didactic writer, or if his characters "often seem more like prototypes, moving with the momentum of the ideas they embody, than like real people" [b]. The last thing I wish to encounter in works of art are real people. I meet real people every day in the real world and I'm sick to death of them.

 

Perhaps that's why I was so excited by the concept of photogenesis in 'Veronica's Shrouds', one of the stand-out stories in The Fetishist, which "implies the possibility of producing photos that go beyond the real object" [c]. Such photos do not merely capture a model's likeness or reveal a hidden aspect; they create something new and allow for a becoming-photogenic (even if this process can prove fatal, as it does here, to poor Hector).      

 

Other tales that I absolutely loved include 'The Red Dwarf' and 'Death and the Maiden' - both of which inspired posts on Torpedo the Ark: click here and here, for example. The young female protagonist of the latter, Melanie Blanchard, is, for me, one of the most memorable figures within 20th-century French literature; a character that might have been given us by the great Belgian writer Amélie Nothomb. 

 

As for the story which, in the English translation, lends its title to the collection and which I was particularly looking forward to read, well, I have to admit, it's a bit disappointing. I don't know why that is, but suspect it's because I don't quite share the protagonist's passion for slips, stockings, panties, and bras, etc. Nevertheless, it's a story worth commenting upon at more length ...

 

 

II.

 

'The Fetishist' is a mildly amusing story of sexual obsession; the monologue of an erotomaniac, Martin, who has briefly escaped from the asylum where he has been confined for many years after attempting to steal a garter belt from a woman on the Paris Metro. An extremely harsh and unjust punishment for a man who, whilst he may have kinky tastes and be very highly-strung, isn't mad even in the assessment of the asylum's medical director.              

 

As something of a philosopher on the catwalk, I share Martin's love of clothes and his contempt for nudity: 

 

"They say that the tailor makes the man. How true! A naked man is a worm without dignity, without a function - he has no place in society. I've always had a horror of nudity. Nudity is worse than indecent - it's bestial. Clothes are the human soul. And even more than clothes - shoes." [d] 

 

This is true too, of course, for women - perhaps more so, inasmuch as womanhood and the question of style are inextricably linked (and may, in fact, even be one and the same). And Martin's fate is to be consumed with desire for women and their clothing; not just their underwear, but also their hats and dresses and even handkerchiefs. 

 

Again, what he can't stand is female nudity - not even that of his wife, Antoinette, on their wedding night:

 

"When I went back into the room [...] Antoinette was lying on the troika. Stark naked! And she was looking at me smiling, a little red in the face even so. But I didn't recognize her. Oh yes, there was her face, with its smile that I loved, but that big white body displayed there in front of my eyes like ... like ... Like something in the butchers window! And I was ashamed for her, for myself, for us both." [203]

What saves the situation for Martin is spotting the chair on which his new wife has discarded her clothes:

 

"It was like a little island of solid ground in the middle of a swamp. So I went over to the chair [...] and, well, I went down on my knees and buried my face in the pile of clothes. A warm, soft pile, which smelled good, like new-mown hay in the summer sun. I stayed there a long time like that, on my knees, my face hidden. [...] Next I picked up the clothes and held them in a bundle against my face, and stood up, keeping them there so as not to see anything. I walked over to the bed and scattered them over Antoinette's body. And I said: 'Get dressed!' Then I rushed out like a maniac." [203-04]

Readers will doubtless be pleased to know that Martin does eventually consummate the marriage; but only when Antoinette consents to be fucked fully-dressed. Afterwards, they establish an agreed set of rules governing their lovemaking: "To start with we had agreed that she would never appear naked in front of me." [205] Antoinette quickly grows to like this arrangement, as it secures her a fashionable wardrobe and a wide range of expensive and sophisticated lingerie. 

 

Unfortunately, Martin's fetish develops in a new direction - one that leads him along a crooked path; first stealing an "adorable  little bra in mauve satin trimmed with lace" [210] from a cashier working at the local cinema, and then ... well, then came the regrettable incident on the Metro: "That was what wrecked everything. I must have been mad!" [212] 

Enflamed after a shopping expedition to buy still more fancy lingerie for Antoinette, Martin notices a pretty girl push pass him as he enters the Parisian subway system. That might have been the end of it, only there was a sudden gust of wind:

 

"A ferocious draught was rushing through the half-opened gates. It hoisted up the girl's miniskirt and held it there for a moment, even though she quickly clamped both hands down on her thighs. But in that split second I had seen a suspender belt, and what a suspender belt, it burned me, it pierced me, it practically killed me [...] In black nylon, gathered wide, the white skin of her thighs contrasting sharply with the long, very long, suspenders which started at the belt and travelled down to collect her stockings in their little chromium-plated clips." [212-13]  

 

Of course, he has to have it. And so the story goes from being a Benny Hill-like fantasy, into an unsavoury tale of sexual assault:

 

"I chased after the girl. I caught her up, and wedged her into a corner. Luckily we were alone. I stammered: 'Your suspender belt, your suspender belt, quick, quick!' At first she didn't understand. Then, without hesitating, I pulled up her skirt. She screamed. I repeated: 'Quick, your suspender belt, and I'll go away.' Finally, she obeyed. In the twinkling of an eye, it was done. I had my trophy [...] I was radiant. I brandished my suspender belt like a Red Indian flaunting his Paleface's scalp." [213]

 

When Antoinette discovers what he has done, she leaves him and Martin's life pretty much collapses. He starts stealing from the hoisery section of his local department store, but his heart is no longer in it. Secretly, he longs for the day he is finally caught: "I'd had enough. I wanted to make an end of it." [214]

 

Eventually, he is caught and is sent to prison. Then is interviewed by a psychiatrist and sent to the asylum. But soon he is gripped once more by his fetish for women's underwear. The fact is that whilst some men stand to attention before the flag of their nation, for illicit lovers like Martin it's frilly black knickers and pink nightslips that make them stiff with respect and desire. 

 

And, whilst I don't condone the incident on the Metro, neither do I condemn fetishists for their peccadilloes.     

 

Notes

 

[a] From a review of The Fetishist in Kirkus Reviews (15 August, 1984): click here to read online. 

 

[b] Bob Halliday, 'The Sexual Imagination of Michel Turner', The Washington Post, (28 October, 1984): click here to read online. 

 

[c] Michel Tournier, 'Veronica's Shrouds', The Fetishist, trans. Barbara Wright, (Minerva, 1992), p. 96.  

[d] Michel Tournier, 'The Fetishist', ibid., p. 199. Future page references to this story will be given directly in the text.

 

 

Hoplophilia 2: Mark and Jez: For the Love of Gunny

Yeah, sure. You've got sarcasm, but I've got a big gun. 

Now pass me the Doritos ...

 

 

I. 

 

To reiterate: you don't have to own a gun or be a member of the shooting fraternity to acknowledge the fetishistic appeal of firearms; guns are stylish, guns are cool, and guns are deadly. In short, guns are sexy and they excite many different types of people. 

 

Some, like Melanie Blanchard, whose case we examined in part one [click here], have an erotico-philosophical fascination for guns along with other dangerous objects that might facilitate exiting this boring world. Such people are keen to investigate the profound complicity between love and death.   

 

Others, like the socially and sexually awkward loan manager Mark Corrigan and his best friend Jeremy (played by David Mitchell and Robert Webb in the Channel 4 series Peep Show), have a more comic - although, arguably, just as kinky - fascination for firearms ...

 

 

II. 

 

Following the death of Jeremy's great-aunt, he and Mark (with the assistance of Super Hans, played by Matt King) are clearing out her house. Quite unexpectedly, Jeremy comes across a gun - or an illegal firearm as Mark calls it - hidden in an old box. 

 

Excited by his new toy, Jeremy takes Gunny home and leaves it in a drawer in his bedside table. Although Mark pretends otherwise, he's also turned on by the thought of the weapon and so, later, when he thinks Jez isn't around, he sneaks into the latter's bedroom in order to admire and fondle Gunny.   

 

The following scene, written by Simon Blackwell, is much loved by hoplophiles everywhere:

 

 

Mark: (Right, everyone's out. Might sneak a little peek at the gun. It's fine to be fascinated by the gun. It's fascinating. Everything that can kill a man is fascinating. Guns, electric chairs, paracetamol, lead piping.)

 

Jeremy: Hello Mark. 

 

Mark: Oh, hi Jez. I was just, you know, making sure it was safe. Gunny, the gun. 

 

Jeremy: You like it Mark. That's fine, you like the gun. Guns are great. Design classics like the Routemaster bus or ... those chairs. 

 

Mark: It's fine to like it as an object, isn't it? I might carry it around the flat for a bit. Would that be OK? 

 

Jeremy: Sure, man. Enjoy. 

 

Mark: (Oh, this is good, this feels so good.) [1]

 

What's interesting is how - just like Melanie in Death and the Maiden - Mark also finds the thought of deadly weapons and potentially lethal objects fascinating and how, like Melanie, it (sexually) excites him to hold the beautiful-looking gun.     

 

The episode ends with Jeremy disappointed to discover that Gunny has been deactivated: "It's like he's told me my cock doesn't work." This understanding of the gun in phallic terms is, of course, a psycho-cultural cliché - and you don't have to be a Freudian (or a James Bond fan) to see it [2]. 

 

Melanie Blanchard, if I may refer to her case once more, is happily reminded of a former lover's sex organ - "which had given her so much pleasure for so many weeks" [3] - by the gun she steals. And, when, in 1975, looking for a term to describe the group of sexy young assassins he had assembled and agreed to manage, it's no coincidence that Malcolm McLaren decided upon the term Pistols.  

 

Notes 

 

[1] 'Jeremy's Mummy' is the fourth episode of the fifth series of the British sitcom Peep Show (and the twenty-eighth episode overall). Directed by Becky Martin, it first aired on 23 May, 2008. The full script of this and other episodes of Peep Show can be found online: click here. To watch this and related scenes featuring Gunny, click here.

 

[2] Readers interested in the topic of phallic weapons as a cultural trope can learn more on TV Tropes: click here.

 

[3] Michel Tournier, 'Death and the Maiden', in The Fetishist, trans. Barbara Wright, (Minerva, 1992), p. 122.  

 

 

Hoplophilia 1: Melanie Blanchard and the Practice of Joy before Death

 

 Dave Seeley: Woman with Gun (aka San Diego Girl) 

Oil on Gesso panel (15" x 20") 

daveseeley.com

 

I. 

 

You don't have to own a gun or be a member of the shooting fraternity to acknowledge the fetishistic appeal of firearms; guns are stylish, guns are cool, and guns are deadly. 

 

In short, guns are sexy and excite many different types of people, from Melanie Blanchard, the morbidly curious young female protagonist in Michel Tournier's Death and the Maiden, to the socially and sexually awkward loan manager Mark Corrigan, played by David Mitchell, in the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show.

 

I will discuss the latter case in part two of this post [click here]. Here, I wish to speak of Melanie Blanchard and her practice of joy before death ...

 

II. 

 

Ah, the lovely lemon-eating, death-obsessed figure of Mlle. Blanchard ... Her face "the picture of innocence, its thinness and pallor accentuated by the heavy mass of her black hair" [109] - surely one of the most intriguing figures in 20th-century French literature. 

 

I understand perfectly her metaphysical dread of boredom and that great grey wave of blandness which threatens not only to submerge her, but drown the entire world. And, like Melanie, I prefer to eat "everthing acid, sour, or highly spiced" [112] rather than stuff on cakes full of jam and covered in buttercreak icing; the childish food that people were always offering her and which "foreshadowed and provoked the advancing tide of greyness, the engulfment of life in a dense, viscid slime" [112]. 

 

And like Melanie, I believe the practice of joy before death is of vital importance; that one should constantly think about how best to construct a beautiful, stylish - some might even say chic - death and keep at hand the instruments that might facilitate such - ropes, razors, pills, and - if possible - a pistol ...

 

When she thought about [her friend's] fiancé, who was training to become a police officer, it was "always the image of the bulging holster containing his pistol that first entered her mind" [118]. She arranges to meet the young man at a café and when he leaves his cap, truncheon, and bulging holster on the counter in order to go and make a phone call, she yielded to temptation and slipped the latter into her handbag, then made a quick getaway before he returned. 

In several magnificent paragraphs, Tournier writes: 

 

"The pistol [...] was a source of great comfort. Every day, at a certain hour - she always trembled with impatience and anticipated joy as she awaited it - she brought out the magnificent, dangerous object. [...] Placed on the table, naked, the pistol seemed to radiate an energy that enveloped Melanie in voluptuous warmth. The compact, rigorous brevity of its contours, its matt and almost sacerdotal blackness, the facility with which her hand embraced and grasped its form - everything about this weapon contributed to giving her an irresistable force of conviction. How good it would be to die by means of this pistol!" [119]

 

"The pistol was not loaded, but the holster contained a magazine and six bullets, and Melanie soon found the orifice in the butt where it should be inserted. A click apprised her that the magazine was in place. Then the day came when she felt she could no longer wait to try it out. 

      She went off very early in the morning into the forest. When she came to a clearing, a long way from any path, she took the pistol out of her bag, and, holding it with both hands, as far away from her as possible, she pulled the trigger with all her might. Nothing happened. There must be a safety catch. For a moment she ran her fingers over the butt, the barrel, and the trigger. Finally a kind of protuberance slid towards the barrel, leaving a red spot exposed. That must be it. She tried again. The trigger yielded under her fingers and the weapon, as if seized by a sudden fit of madness, kicked in her hands. 

      The explosion had seemed tremendous [...] Trembling all over, Melanie put the pistol back in her bag and resumed her walk. Her legs felt weak, but she didn't know whether this was the result of fear or pleasure. She now had a new instrument of liberation at her disposal, and how much more modern and practical this one was than the rope and the chair! She had never been so free. The key to her cage was there, in her bag, next to her make-up remover, her purse, and her sunglasses." [119-20]   

 

It's not that the gun - or any other instrument of death - is particularly fascinating in itself; it's more the fatal significance of the object that counts for one who knows the sinister happiness of preparing their own exit from this life and thus putting an end to the boredom of existence. The immanence of death - made manifest in the pistol, for example - "conferred an incomparable destiny" [117] on Melanie's life.       

See: Michel Tournier, 'Death and the Maiden', in The Fetishist, trans. Barbara Wright, (Minerva, 1992). All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition. 

La Jeune Fille et la mort

A Bat and a Songbird from Nick Brandt's The Calcified (2013)

 nickbrandt.com

 

 

Lemon-eating Melanie Blanchard was an unusual girl. Docile, intelligent, and hardworking, it was impossible not to consider her a star pupil: "And yet she drew attention to herself [...] by ridiculous inventions and strange behaviour." [1] 

 

Her joyful curiosity about suicide, torture, and execution went far deeper and was far more complex than a simple fascination with horror. Like many children of her age, she was enchanted by the mystery of death, which, in her experience, had two opposing aspects:

 

"The animal corpses she had seen were usually swollen and decomposed, and exuded sanious secretions. Such beings, reduced to their last extremities, crudely avowed their basically putrid nature. Whereas dead insects became lighter, spiritual, and spontaneously attained the pure, delicate eternity of mummies. And this did not only apply to insects for, ferreting around in the attic, Melanie had found a mouse and a little bird that were equally desiccated, purified, reduced to their own distinctive essence." [2]

I couldn't help recalling this passage from Michel Tournier's short story 'Death and the Maiden' when viewing images from Nick Brandt's haunting collection of photographs entitled The Calcified (2013); a collection in which the petrified bodies of animals that have drowned in the ultra-salty waters of Lake Natron, Tanzania, are displayed for our morbid delight [3].     

 

Melanie would have loved these pictures - and would doubtless describe the fate of the animals so perfectly preserved as a good death.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Michel Tournier, 'Death and the Maiden', in The Fetishist, trans. Barbara Wright, (Minerva, 1992), p. 109.

 

[2]  Ibid., pp. 112-113. 

 

[3] For an interesting feature on Brandt's work see Joseph Stromberg, 'This Alkaline African Lake Turns Animals into Stone', in the Smithsonain Magazine (Oct 2, 2013): click here to read online. 

 

 

I am grateful to the artist Heide Hatry for bringing these photos by Brandt to my attention via her Icons in Ash Instagram account: click here. 

A Brief Note on Achondroplasiaphobia (With Reference to the Case of Lucien Gagnero)

Velázquez: The Buffoon El Primo (c. 1644) [1]

Museo del Prado

 

 

Following a recent post in which I discussed Michel Tournier's short story Le nain rouge [click here], I received an email from a reader expressing disappointment that I didn't address the tale's overt anchondroplasiaphobia and malicious stereotyping of little people as monstrous and malevolent.

 

That's true and is, I suppose, a legitimate concern: maybe I should have said something about how the figure of the dwarf functions within the mytho-cultural imagination and maybe challenged some of the language used by Tournier to describe Lucien Gagnero.  

Having said that, it would be tricky to portray the latter in a positive or sympathetic light. Not because of his dwarfism, but because he strangles and rapes a woman; cruelly humiliates and sodomises her husband; displays a worrying desire to surround himself with children under twelve; and fantasises about being the kommandant of a Nazi concentration camp. 

 

In brief, Lucien is a depraved and sadistic psychopath - although, that of course, is precisely the negative stereotype identified on TV Tropes [click here]. 

 

Still, isn't it preferable to inspire fear and be despised as inhuman, than to be seen merely as a pint-sized figure of fun ...? 

 

 

Notes

 

 

[1] Formerly believed to be a portrait of Sebastián de Morra, a dwarf-jester at the court of Philip IV of Spain, it is now - thanks to recently discovered documentary evidence - thought to be another buffoon known as El Primo. The red robe that the figure wears reminds one of the huge crimson bathrobe that Lucien Gagnero drapes around himself and which helps trigger his metamorphosis from a little person into an imperial dwarf, full of the courage of his own monstrosity. 

 

See: Michel Tournier, 'The Red Dwarf', in The Fetishist, trans. Barbara Wright, (Minerva, 1992), pp. 61-74.       

 

 

Never Trust a Dwarf Dressed in Red

Adelina Poerio as the anonymous dwarf in Don't Look Now (1973) 

and Jean-Yves Tual as Lucien in Le nain rouge (1998)

 

 

I. 

 

One of the most terrifying figures in cinematic history is the homocidal dwarf played by Adelina Poerio in Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973); a brilliant film adaptation of a short story by Daphne du Maurier published two years earlier.

In the tale, du Maurier describes the final scene when the doomed protagonist, John, finally confronts his fate:

"The child struggled to her feet and stood before him, the pixie-hood falling from her head on to the floor. He stared at her, incredulity turning to horror, to fear. It was not a child at all but a thick-set woman dwarf, about three feet high, with a great square adult head too big for her body, grey locks hanging shoulder-length, and she wasn't sobbing any more, she was grinning at him, nodding her head up and down.

      [...] The creature fumbled in her sleeve, drawing a knife, and she threw it at him with hideous strength, piercing his throat, he stumbled and fell, the sticky mess covering his protecting hands." [a] 

 

II. 

 

Lucien Gagnero, the small-bodied protagonist of Michel Tournier's short story Le nain rouge (1978) [b], also has a penchant for wearing red and committing vile deeds, including murder, and it's his tale I'd like to share with you here ...

  

Despite being a successful divorce lawyer who "applied himself with avenging ardour to the task of destroying the marriages of other people" [61], Lucien didn't find it easy being of reduced stature; it was something he had resentfully resigned himself to:

 

"When [he] reached the age of twenty-five he had to give up, with a broken heart, all hope of ever becoming any taller than the four feet one he had already reached eight years before. All he could do now was resort to special shoes whose platform soles gave him the extra four inches that elevated him from dwarf status to that of small man. As the years went by, his vanishing adolescence and youth left him exposed as a stunted adult who inspired mockery and scorn in the worst moments, pity in the less bad ones, but never respect or fear [...]" [61]

 

When a wealthy former opera singer named Edith Watson comes to see him to discuss dissolving her marriage to Bob, a young, good-looking lifeguard from Nice, Lucien is keen to take the case; scenting as he does "secrets and humiliations that more than interested him" [61]. 

 

One day, Lucien goes to visit his new client in her luxurious apartment. He is rather taken aback to find her on the terrace lying "practically naked on a chaise longue, surrounded by refreshments" [62]. The radiance of her big, golden body, "with its violent odour of woman and suntan lotion, intoxicated Lucien" and it was not merely the stifling heat of the day that made him sweat profusely. 

 

Needing to urinate, Lucien asks to use the bathroom: all black marble, spotlights, and mirrors, with a sunken tub and a shower which sprayed water from all angles (not only from above, but from behind and below as well). For some reason, this shower fascinates Lucien and he cannot resist removing his clothes and trying it, making liberal use of the toiletries at hand: "He was enjoying himself. For the first time he saw his body as something other than a shameful, repulsive object." [63] 

 

When Lucien leaves the shower, however, he sees himself reflected in the labyrinth of mirrors. Although he discerns an impressive nobility in his facial features, he can't find much to admire in his disproportionately long neck, round torso, and short, bandy legs. Even his enormous penis, which hangs down to his knees, seems more comical than anything else.   

 

It's at this point that something miraculous happens: rather than putting on his own clothes, Lucien notices a huge crimson bathrobe hanging from a chrome peg:

 

"He took it down, draped it around him until he was completely hidden within its folds [...] He wondered whether he would put his shoes on. This was a crucial question, for if he relinquished the four inches of his platform soles he would be confessing, and even proclaiming, to Edith Watson that he was a dwarf and not merely a small man. The discovery of an elegant pair of Turkish slippers under a stool decided him. When he made his entrance on to the terrace, the long train formed by the outsize bathrobe gave him an imperial air.

      [...] The notary's clerk had disappeared and given place to a comical, disquieting creature of overwhelming, bewitching ugliness - to a fabulous monster, whose comic aspect added a negative, acid, destructive component." [63]       

 

By affirming his achondroplasia, Lucien has become who he is. Just like the hunchback understands that in his deformity lies his very essence, so Lucien has had to realise that his grandeur lies within his dwarfism and is not reliant upon a pair of built-up shoes. Such a revelation is transformative and has instant results; for not only does Lucien become who he is, he also finds love. Edith was "enchanted to discover that such a small, misshapen body should be so fantastically equipped, and so delightfully efficacious" [64]. 

 

The narrator continues:

 

"This was the beginning of a liaison whose passion was entirely physical and to which Lucien's infirmity added a slightly shameful, sophisticated piquancy, for her, and a pathetic tension mixed with anguish for him. [...]

      From then on, Lucien led a double life. Outwardly he was still a small man, dressed in dark clothes and built-up shoes [...] but at certain irregular, capricious hours [...] he [...] metamorphosed into an imperial dwarf, wilful, swaggering, desirous and desired [...]" [64]

He fucks Edith, subjecting the large-bodied blonde to the law of pleasure and sending her into ecstasies that always culminated in obscene abuse for her human plaything and living dildo. Lucien didn't care what she thought of him, only he was terrified of losing her ... And when he discovers she has secretly reconciled with Bob he was "overwhelmed with murderous hatred" [65].

 

And so he kills her. Hiding in her splendid bathroom, he leaps on Edith when she enters and strangles her: "While she was in her death throes Lucien possessed her for the last time." [66] Then he sets about framing poor Bob, the young colossus with a sweet, naive face, for the rape and murder. 

 

At first Lucien returns to his old life, taking up his disguise as a little person whom people mocked or pitied. But the memory of the superhuman monster that he now knew himself to be haunted him day and night:

 

"Because he had finally had the courage of his own monstrosity, he had seduced a woman [...] killed her, and his rival, the husband [...] was everywhere being hunted by the police! His life was a masterpiece, and there were moments when he was overwhelmed with breathtaking joy at the thought that he only had to take his shoes off to become immediately what he really was, a man apart, superior to the gigantic riffraff, an irresistible seducer and infallible killer! All the misery of the past years was due to his having refused the fearsome choice that was his destiny. In cowardly fashion he had shrunk from crossing the Rubicon into dwarfism [...] But he had finally dared to take the step. The slight quantitative difference that he had accepted in deciding to reject his platform shoes [...] had brought about a radical qualitative metamorphosis. The horrible quality of dwarfism had infiltrated him and turned him into a fabulous monster. In the greyness of the lawyer's office where he spent his days he was haunted by dreams of despotism [...] and on several occasions the typists were surprised to hear him let out a roar." [66-7] 

 

 

III.

  

I think if I'd been the author of this tale I would have ended it here. Readers should note, however, that Tournier continues the story of Lucien Gagnero, taking it in a surprising direction ... 

 

First, Lucien becomes notorious in the bars and nightclubs of Paris that he parades around, whilst wearing a dark red leotard that shows off his muscles and genitals. Men soon learned to fear him and women "submitted to the obscure fascination" [68] that he exerted. Lucien then finds fame as a circus performer; his giant hand act proving to be a sensation. 

 

"But Lucien was still not completely satisfied by his fame" [69]: he wants - and takes - further cruel revenge upon Bob, who, still on the run for a crime he didn't commit, comes to him for help one day when the circus pitched its tents in Nice. 

 

Incorporating Bob into his act, Lucien publicly humiliates him over and over again, whilst, in private, he makes him into his bitch: "it happened one night, then every night, that he climbed into the side-berth in which his former rival slept, and possessed him like a female" [72]. 

 

Lucien's real love, however, is neither for rich women nor beautiful young men: it is, rather for those of his own size; i.e. children under the age of twelve. For he had noticed that whilst the adulation of the adults in the audience did nothing to soften the "ball of hatred that weighed hard and heavy in his breast" [72], the innocent love and laughter of children "cleansed him of his bitterness" [74] at last. 

 

I suppose we might call this the redeeming power of paedophilia ...

Notes

 

[a] Daphne du Maurier, 'Don't Look Now', in Don't Look Now and Other Stories, (Penguin Books, 2006), p. 55.  

[b] Michel Tournier, 'The Red Dwarf', in The Fetishist, trans. Barbara Wright, (Minerva, 1992). All page numbers following in the post refer to this edition.

 

For a follow up post to this one - on achondroplasiaphobia - please click here.

Sinister Writings 4: Purity is the Malign Inversion of Innocence

From the film poster for The Ogre, (1996) 

dir. Volker Schlöndorff and starring John Malkovich

 

 

Michel Tournier's enthralling novel The Erl-King (1970) contains many philosophically important ideas; none more so than the following apology for perversion, which is expressed so powerfully that it requires no commentary [1]:

 

"Purity is the malign inversion of innocence. Innocence is love of being, smiling acceptance of both celestial and earthly sustenance, ignorance of the infernal antithesis between purity and impurity. Satan has turned this spontaneous and as it were native saintliness into a caricature which resembles him and is the converse of its original. Purity is horror of life, hatred of man, morbid passion for the void. A chemically pure body has undergone barbaric treatment in order to arrive at that state, which is absolutey against nature. A man hag-ridden by the demon of purity sows ruin and death around him. Religious purification, political purges, preservation of racial purity - there are numerous variations on this atrocious theme, but all issue with monotonous regularity in countless crimes whose favourite instrument is fire, symbol of purity and symbol of hell." [2]    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Having said that, there will doubtless be those who would like a commentary on the above; such persons may care to read Ursula Fabijancic's, 'Purity/Innocence: A Defense of Perversion in Michel Tournier's Le Roi Des Aulnes', in Dalhousie French Studies, vol. 72, (2005), pp. 71-86. It can be accessed via JSTOR: click here.

 

As Fabijancic rightly notes, the key notions of purity and innocence should not be taken as binary opposites; their inherent instability (and reversability) precludes attaching absolute fixed moral values to them. Also, there exists an ambiguous zone in Tournier's fictional universe where all apparent opposites meet and converge with one another. Ultimately, as readers of the novel will know, Tournier uses the term innocence in a similar manner to Nietzsche and the book's ogre-like protagonist is innocent in a way that many non-Nietzscheans will find problematic; particularly given the nature of his perverse tendencies. For Abel Tiffauges, only true outsiders - social misfits, sexual deviants, immature philosophers et al - share that same quality of innocence and forgetfulness that we find in young children. Finally, we might note in closing that Fabijancic finds Tournier's inventive defence of perversion unpersuasive from an ethical standpoint; mainly because it rests upon a highly idiosyncratic definition of the term innocence and lacks intellectual rigour and consistency. These things don't overly bother me, however. 

 

[2] Michel Tournier, The Erl-King, trans. Barbara Bray, (Atlantic Books, 2014), p. 66.      

 

 

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.