dwarfgoose

Photo of graffiti near my home.

To my surprise, I have realised that I do say Ah, la, la quite often, like a lot of French people. But, I wonder, must my views on sex also be French? Do I think that unfaithfulness is inevitable? Do I believe that all men look at porn as a matter of course? I don’t know.

As a child my father once pointed out a small cinema to me. ‘I don’t look at their pornographic images anymore,’ he confided, ‘I turn my head away!’ He made it sound like a kind of triumph. He would always assume I understood anything he told me. I glanced at the grey pictures and saw people who appeared to be floating between grey sheets. Their bodies stretched out and yawned in their strange positions. ‘Pornographic’ was just a word to me. Some words were like cars, their content shielded behind smoky windows, speeding away to the outskirts of my understanding where they floated in grey limbo (a bit like the people in the sheets). These words were not unfriendly, just impenetrable.

A woman I knew walked in her partner’s workroom one evening. He had his computer facing the door and didn’t notice that the porn on the screen was reflected on the window behind him.

Photo taken near my home in 2003.

‘Poor men’, my father would tell me, ‘poor men, it’s hard for them.’ I’d look up at him and nod wisely. Men are fragile, they are animated by strange mechanisms, that can explode at any time …

A sister? A friend? A wife?

Photo taken from my car.

Men may be even more scared of death than of their ‘explosions’. Eros and Thanatos were intimately linked for the Greeks. It could be a sacred terror for men to penetrate the place they crawled out of the very first day of their lives. In the Ancient Mysteries, initiates had to go down into holes in the earth and lie there in the dark in a parody of birth and death. The vagina itself is strangely evocative of the tunnel Near Death Experiences all speak of. Maybe porn is the mysterious loci, the Purgatory, where one rubs against one’s most intimate sorrow.

In the photographs of the small cinema of my childhood, the disincarnate grey bodies floated in a crepuscular emotional region, a ‘cave of forgotten dreams.’ Human sexuality appears to have as many branches as a genealogy tree. I once read that Doctor Richard Kraft Ebing’s  exhaustive list of all the sexual practices and deviations on the planet in his Psychopathia Sexualis fits to a T with the Marquis de Sade’s enumeration sexual fantasies. When a doctor’s research echoes a writer’s imagination, the archetypal world seems very close.  The Ancients had the bacchanals and the dyonysian mysteries instead of having small grubby grey cinemas in side streets.

Now porn has taken a violent, cruel turn. The internet has provide easy access and discretion that was not available to the Marquis of Sade. Someone told me that men look at porn in the same proportion women consume romantic fiction. We console ourselves of an existential wound that hurts us all in different ways.

I worked in a Melbourne second hand bookshop in Brunswick Street for a year. One day, a blond, slim girl bought a book. I hadn’t read it yet, I told her, but I loved the author. She paid and left. A few days later, she returned and plonked the book on the table. ‘For you,’ she announced. After my effusive thanks, we pursued our conversation. I asked her what kind of job she did. ‘Oh, I’m a stripper,’ she answered. I swallowed and asked her if she liked her work. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it lets me read as much as I want.’ We looked at each other and smiled. I realised I was facing one of the delicate hinges of this complicated world. She didn’t seem happy, but on the other hand, she didn’t seem unhappy. I was staring at an individual bacchanal, a balancing act between a feminine nature, the nature of society and men’s nature. Such sweetness on the loose …