Under the Sign of the Golden Phallus

Because for a long time I dreamed of being Lady Chatterley's lover, ideas of 'phallic consciousness' and 'phallic tenderness'  had a powerful hold on my youthful imagination: I painted the phallus, wrote poems in celebration of the phallus, and religiously revered the phallus as part of a neo-paganism of my own invention. 

Kate Millet would have been at least partially justified, therefore, in accusing me of doing precisely what she famously accused Lawrence of doing: i.e., transforming an already questionable model of masculinity into a misogynistic mystery religion founded upon homoerotic worship of the penis. 

But this isn't entirely fair. What Millet failed to appreciate is that when Lawrence wrote almost obsessively of the phallus in his later work, he was not referring to the penis-as-organ belonging exclusively to a male agent. On the contrary, the phallus, for Lawrence - as for me back in my golden phallic days - was a sacred symbol that cannot be reduced to being 'a mere member of the physiological body'. 

And it's not, for Lawrence at least, even a symbol of male power or cosmic potency, so much as it's a symbol of the relatedness between bodies. Sneering contempt for the phallus, therefore, betrays a horror of being physically in touch with others: this, writes Lawrence, is the 'root-fear of all mankind' since the Fall into idealism. Hence the often frenzied efforts on behalf of moralists to denigrate the phallus and to nullify it - not least of all by wilfully confusing it with the penis. 

What Nietzsche terms the slave revolt in morals begins, arguably, as a revolt against the phallus; the free man or woman - free, that is to say, from fear and from shame - is more than happy to submit before the phallus and accept it as that which unites them into one flesh, or a single phallic body. When the phallic wonder is dead in us, writes Lawrence, then we become wretched and have no sense of beauty or joy.  

Only when the phallic wonder is strong and healthy can men and women come into direct touch with one another and with the world. By acknowledging the phallus as she does, Connie learns how to respond not only to the naked body of her lover, but also to animals, trees, rain, moonlight, and even inanimate and mundane household objects, such as an old kettle. Phallic wonder makes everything sparkle with fresh glamour and allure and enables the heart to enter the fourth dimensional kingdom of bliss. 

This sounds, I know, like the worst kind of occult-metaphysics and romantic fantasy. But I still think there's something important in this phallic philosophy and that it can be read today as a type of speculative realism that would lend itself rather nicely to an object-oriented ontology. 

Thus, without too much embarrassment, I still - all these years later - continue to write under the sign of the golden phallus. Though these days, like Warhol, I like to decorate the phallus with tiny flowers and hearts and tie it with a pretty ribbon to indicate my recognition of the fact that even art, religion, and sex shouldn't be taken too seriously; that they are all, as Susan Sontag suggests, exercises in failed seriousness - and all the more beautiful for their failure.