Kiss Me Deadly: Thoughts Inspired by J. G. Ballard's 'Track 12'

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Kiss me with the kisses of your mouth, for your love is deadlier than poison.

 

 

I. 

 

To press one's lips against those of another human being and then to insert your tongue into their mouth in an act of amorous exploration, has always seemed a rather queer thing to do. 

 

Of course, I'm no philematologist, and I don't know if kissing is an instinctual act of passion or an example of learned behaviour reinforced by poets and filmmakers. But I do think that Freud was right to identify it as a primary form of perversion [a].    

 

And I do think that D. H. Lawrence was right to describe the close-up kiss on screen in terms of obscenity (i.e., a loss of scenic distance) [b]. There's something profoundly unpleasant about an intimate and private act made visible and public - when it is literally in your face.

 

And the sound of smooching can also become disgusting and disorientating when it is recorded, amplified, or in some way mechanically processed - as we discover in J. G. Ballard's short story 'Track 12' [c]. The fact is, there are some sights that should always remain unseen and there are some sounds that should always remain unheard ...

 

 

II.     

 

Ballard's story rather reminds me of one of those written by Roald Dahl that originally formed the basis of the British TV series Tales of the Unexpected (ITV 1979-88); slightly sinister, darkly comic, and with an unexpected sting in the tail.

 

'Track 12' concerns a love triangle between a university professor, Sheringham, his wife, Susan, and her lover, Maxted. The latter, a former athlete, has been invited by Sheringham to his home on the pretext of discussing a potential business deal (although Maxted suspects he is about to be confronted over the affair).   

Throughout the evening, Sheringham insists on playing odd sound recordings of otherwise inaudible sounds amplified 100,000 times and challenging Maxted - fitted out with headphones that have made his ears feel bruised and numb - to guess what they are (one of them is the sound of a pin dropping). 

 

Maxted finds these games infantile and irritating; one man's obsession with microsonics is another man's boring waste of time:

 

"'Some of the records are interesting,' he admitted. 'They have a sort of crazy novelty value, like blown-up photographs of moths' faces and razor blades. Despite what you claim, though, I can't belive microsonics will ever become a scientific tool. It's just an elaborate laboratory toy.'" [91]  

 

Maxted - "a tall fleshy man with a coarse handsome face" [92] - also finds Sheringham a grotesque bore: 

 

"He surveyed Sheringham with as much detachment as he could muster, wondering whether this prim unattractive man, with his pedantry and in-bred academic humour, had any redeeming qualities whatever." [92]  

 

Sheringham insists on playing one last track. Maxted, however, is feeling cold and shivers as a low noise begins to crackle from multiple speakers placed around the patio. As he attempts to reach across the table to help himself to more whisky, he uncontrollably falls back into his chair:

 

"His stomach seemed to be full of mercury, ice-cold and enormously heavy. He pushed himself forward again, trying to reach the glass, and knocked it across the table. His brain began to fade, and he leaned his elbows helplessly on the lass edge of the table and felt his head fall onto his wrists." [93]  

 

This is never a good sign: in fact, it's often a sign one has - as in this case - been poisoned: "'Chromium cyanate. Inhibits the coenzyme system controlling the body's fluid balances, floods hydroxyl into the bloodstream. In brief, you drown'" [93], as Sheringham politely informs Maxted with a sympathetic smile. 

 

He then goes on to reveal his knowledge of the affair that's been going on behind his back and explains to Maxted how he's been secretly recording the illicit acts of intimacy with numerous hidden microphones. Meanwhile, track 12 continues to play:

 

"Being fed into the patio was a curiously muffled spongy noise, like elastic waves lapping in a latex sea. The rhythms were huge and ungainly, overlaid by the deep leaden wheezing of gigantic bellows. Barely audible at first, the sounds rose until they filled the patio and shut out the few traffic noises along the highway. 

      'Fantastic, isn't it?' Sheringham said. [...] 'These are 30-second repeats, 400 microsens, amplification one thousand. I admit I've edited the track a little, but it's still remarkable how repulsive a beautiful sound can become.'" [94]

 

Fearing that the drugged and dying Maxted will never guess what it is he's listening to, Sheringham gives him a clue: 

 

"'Last Saturday, just after midnight, you and Susan were lying back in this same chair. [...] The wind is your own breathing, fairly heavy at the time, if I remember; your interlocked pulses produced the thunder effect.'" [94]

 

But it's no good: Maxted is too far gone to answer. Watching as his rival "drifted in a wash of sound" [94], Sheringham pumps up the volume and bellows in his rival's ear: 

 

"'Maxted, can you hear the sea? Do you know where you're drowning?' [...] 

      'In a kiss!' Sheringham screamed. 'A kiss!'" [95]

  

 

Notes

 

[a] In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916-17), Freud reminds readers that the mouth is the entrance to the digestive tract and not a sex organ per se. Thus, even a kiss between the most respectable married couple who pride themselves on leading a normal love life might be described as a perverse act, since it consists in the bringing together of the oral erotogenic zones instead of the genitals.

 

[b] In his essay 'Pornography and Obscenity', Lawrence claims that "the most obscene painting on a Greek vase [...] is not as pornographical as the close-up kisses on the film". See Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 253. 

      See also Lawrence's poem 'When I went to the film', in The Complete Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 385, and Lawrence's 1928 painting Close-Up (Kiss), in D. H. Lawrence's Paintings, Introduction by Keith Sagar, (Chaucer Press, 2003), p. 58. Prints of this artwork are available to buy on pixels.com in a variety of formats: click here. 

 

[c] 'Track 12' first appeared in the April 1958 edition of the British science fiction magazine New Worlds (Vol. 24, No. 70). Readers can find it in several different collections of Ballard's short stories, including Passport to Eternity (1963), The Overloaded Man (1967), and The Venus Hunters (1986). It is also in The Complete Short Stories, Vol. I, (Fourth Estate, 2014), pp. 90-95, and it's this edition that page numbers given in the post refer to. 

      Interestingly, the story was adapted for screen by Harold Pinter and a short film (22 mins), directed by Joseph Losey, was made in 1967, featuring Stanley Baker (as Maxted), Dirk Bogarde (as Sheringham), and (an uncredited) Julie Christie (as Susan), whose puckered lips fill the screen at the film's deadly climax (a scene which, according to Mark Bould, had a profound influence on David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983)).  

     

 

Musical bonus: 'Kiss Me Deadly', written by Billy Idol and Tony James, from the album Generation X (Chrysalis, 1978): click here. Or, to see Generation X in action, click here. 

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. 

D. H. Lawrence: Priest of Kink

Ooh, he was awful - but I like him!

In a famous letter written to Sallie Hopkin on Christmas Day, 1912, Lawrence insists that once you know what love can be, then - even if the skies have fallen - "there's no disappointment anymore, and no despair". He then announces that his future task as a writer will involve "sticking up for the love between man and woman".

And, in the years and books that followed, he did indeed posit heterosexual coition as central to his erotics and defend what he called in his late work phallic marriage, i.e., marriage founded upon complimentary gender opposition, the seasonal and sacred rhythm of each calendar year, and a penis that only ever ejaculates inside a vagina.  

However, despite his own sexual politics forever oscillating between the romantic and the reactionary, Lawrence's work also provides us with an explicit A-Z of perversions, paraphilias and fetishistic behaviours, obliging readers to think about subjects including adultery, anal sex, autogynephilia, cross-dressing, dendrophilia, female orgasm, floraphilia, gang rape, garment fetishism, homosexuality, lesbianism, masturbation, naked wrestling, objectum-sexuality, podophilia, pornography, psychosexual infantalism, sadomasochism, and zoophilia.       

One is almost tempted to suggest that Lawrence was, in fact, a priest of kink ...

See: The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 492-3. 

See also Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, (Oxford University Press, 1991). I am very much in agreement with Dollimore when he writes that there is a perverse dynamic at work within Lawrence's text and that he audaciously eroticises (and queers) Western metaphysics. Certainly, Lawrence is far more than a prophet of heterosexual experience conceived in a conventional manner and ultimately he deconstructs his own phallogocentrism; thus his continued importance and interest as a writer. 

Lipstick Traces (with Reference to the Case of Cleopatra)

Zabrena: Historically Accurate: Ancient Egypt / Cleopatra Makeup Tutorial

YouTube (8 Oct 2014): click here. 

One of the questions I find endlessly fascinating is that of nature and artifice and the nature of artifice in relation to femininity.

It's a question that invariably takes us back to Baudelaire who suggests that without makeup Woman - as a figment of the pornographic imagination and not merely as a lump of flesh with distinct reproductive organs from the male - not only fails to excite or interest, but is less than human. It is only as a cultural-cosmetic effect that she elevates herself above her animal biology and captures the hearts and minds of men who would otherwise happily make do with other pleasures.      

For as Baudelaire admits, woman is not an animal whose component parts - even when pleasingly assembled and proportioned - provide a perfect example of harmony; "she is not even that type of pure beauty which the sculptor can mentally evoke in the course of his sternest meditations". In order to cast her complex spell of enchantment, she needs to adorn and thus enhance her physical attributes. 

Take the mouth, for example: who in their right mind would ever have dreamt of kissing the lips of a mucous-lined orifice with two rows of sharp teeth - and, indeed, exploring such with their own tongue or virile member - were those lips not first painted in an irresistible shade?

For whilst a smile, betraying as it does a certain vulnerability, may attract the attention of a man, I doubt that alone would be enough to persuade to perversion. And, let's be clear about this, oral sex - which includes French kissing - is an obvious abberation, involving as it does a form of what Freud terms anatomical transgression.

Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile, Isis Reborn, and a skilled fellatrix, knew exactly what she was doing when she applied crushed beetle juice in a beeswax base to her lips in order to stain them deep carmine red.

As Adam Ant once put it: She was a wide-mouthed girl ...    

See: 

Charles Baudelaire, 'The Painter of Modern Life' in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. by Jonathan Mayne, (Phaidon Press, 1995): click here to read online. 

Sigmund Freud, 'The Sexual Aberrations', in Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory, trans. A. A. Brill (NY, 1910): click here to read online.

Play:

Adam and the Ants, 'Cleopatra', Dirk Wears White Sox, (Do It Records, 1979): click here to listen on YouTube.