NO FORCE IS SPARED, no money, no mental effort, no imaginative resources, nothing is spared, indeed, one willingly squanders it all, ruining oneself just to satisfy that frenzy. Lives are ruined, one’s own and other people’s, patrimonies and matrimonies, professions, families, all of society is devastated as prisons are filled and pages of infamy and ridicule are scrawled in order to quench that frenzy. “All that mud for three minutes of letting off steam!”
How our sex lives influence all the rest of our lives—how they influence life itself! Either because they absorb it or because they are ejected from it; and even when they unfold in a balanced manner, because in fact equilibrium is a signal of the greatest imaginable lack of equilibrium: in short, it is a signal of danger.
Shy, modest, apprehensive individuals can be driven to knock down all manner of obstacles, starting with their own conscience and dignity. Laws, bonds, affections, piety, decency, human bodies: it’s all swept away, all sacrificed. There is nothing left except a frenzy, and indeed in the end not even that exists any longer. Once the ceremony gets under way, in fact, there emerges a certain mechanical coldness: the kind that drove Angelo to perform the act of suffocating his last two victims, mother and daughter.
THOUGHTS, words, deeds, and omissions: the catechism that we were taught at SLM put these things on the same plane, and it was possible to commit a grave sin in each of these categories, assuming any of these attitudes whatsoever, that is, by doing something or not doing it, or just saying it or thinking it. Now, in our sadistic fantasies what is most frequently lacking is the opportunity or the courage or the effective will to put them into practice: they remain on the level of words, thoughts, and images. If sadistic fantasies suddenly became real the world would become a bloodbath, a paroxysmal torture chamber. Leaving aside the catechism, which was rightly concerned with covering all aspects and all human activities, both physical and mental, in an effort to identify the possibility of sin even just in the form of intention, it remains clear what distinguishes a fantasy from an act: How many degrees of separation, however, are there between the two things? What equation links them, transforming one into the other? Can you perform a brutal deed without having premeditated it in the slightest? And above all, when you become accustomed to indulging in violent images and taking pleasure in them, are you really sure that there is no risk of their ever taking shape in real life, no danger in other words that you might just do those things, instead of dreaming them and nothing more?
15
IREAD SOMEWHERE that a young man aged twenty-two tried to rape a woman aged fifty-three. Because she put up fierce resistance, he killed her, raped her corpse, and tossed it in a lake. Then he fished her back out and raped her again.
Ah, how many stories I’ve stumbled across in the course of this research project of mine! For instance, the story of a man who violated the cadaver of his beloved sister, laid out in her casket for the viewing and wake; he had come in her mouth and his relatives found him that way, with his trousers unbuttoned right next to the loved one’s smeared face, in the throes of a pleasure so intense that he hadn’t even noticed their arrival in the chapel of rest.
These things would be incomprehensible and yet I try to understand them all the same, and I almost succeeded, if not in actually understanding, that is, making entirely my own, an act of the sort, well, at least I manage, so to speak, to conceive of it, it forms in my eyes while still remaining mute and awaiting meaning. The preference accorded a dead body rather than a living woman has its point, as fine and subtle as a human hair, but hair can grow thick and strong, never break, still resist years after you’re dead, attached to something that is no longer a head but basically a cranium . . . the lack of any heartbeat or scintilla of energy, the immobility, the passivity of the dead body, these are all elements of stimulus toward an act that is thought to be irresistible, that cannot be halted or mitigated, and is therefore a perfect instance for a depiction of fatality. The corpse is the only human figure completely deprived of any will of its own. Not even the most docile and thoroughly subjugated masochist can match a corpse in terms of availability. The caresses of a living body are always restrained or guided by that body’s reactions and can’t bring you the unrestrained pleasure that you feel as you clutch a corpse to your chest and shower it with amorous effusions. Once you have committed the supreme violence of murder, a world of delicacy may open up, there is no longer any place for brutality: when the body of the obstreperous baby doll finally settles into peace, then you can lavish a thousand caring attentions upon it. There is a story of a man who had taken home a woman’s decapitated head, and covered it with kisses, sweetly calling it “my wife.”
The pungent desire to see, in contrast with the immobility, a liquid organic spurting on the inanimate body . . .
Like those Japanese perverts who would rape a goose and, just as they were on the verge of coming, cut its head off with a kitchen knife: a perfect synchronicity of pleasure and death.
BACK IN THAT PERIOD, at beach resorts, topless bathing was becoming more common and so, to a lesser extent, even though it had always existed, was nudism. Nudism, however, has the peculiar wrinkle of demanding an adherence that is ideological in nature, while no proclamation needs to be made in order to take off your bikini top, nor do you have to wave any flag other than your own two mammaries, and in fact this way of exposing oneself on the beach has become one of the common habits of the population even in Italy, until it has become so insignificant that it is starting to become almost rare again, I would say, with a tendency specific to generational categories, so that nowadays it is less common to have twentyyear-olds sunbathing with their breasts bared than fifty-year-olds and up, that is, the twenty-year-olds of back then, who were accustomed to doing it in their youth. Far more than nudism, in any case, it was topless sunbathing that shifted the traditional boundaries of feminine shame. Some theorists had hypothesized that the reticence derived from the fact that a woman’s genitalia are hidden, practically invisible. Hence the male frenzy to explore them, to violate their secrecy. Let’s leave them secret, protected in the darkness between the legs. But the breasts? The pussy may very well be invisible, while the tits can be seen clearly, and when naked, big tits, but also small tits and soft tits and sagging tits, can be spotted from a distance. In spite of efforts at deliberate disattention, it is impossible for a male not to notice them, not to take notice, and even a detached observer like Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar strolled up and down the beach to peer at them. What was true for a man born in 1923 was also true and remains true now for a man born in 1956. I don’t know how things work for the succeeding generations . . .
We get it, you might be saying, we understand. If women must be treated like sexual objects to use and discard, it may be difficult to get aroused unless you render them, in fact, just like objects. Therefore, a woman who speaks, who thinks, who reacts, protests, or weeps can become unbearable, to the point that a rapist has no alternative but to eliminate her.
That said, there can be no doubt that a considerable portion of the pleasure that derives from the sex act consists of the universally, and wrongly, vilified reification of your lover’s body, as well as your own body, bodies that are broken down in the sex act, fragmented, made wonderfully independent of the whole, restored to the pure material of which they’re made and the pure form in which they’re shaped, with the individual anatomical details that become autonomous of the general meaning claimed in order to hold together the individual, free even of the identities of those who are participating in the amorous disporting in question. Thanks to this process, the woman lying nude next to you, the curve of her hips, may look like a mountain range, and her breasts may resemble pomegranates, and all the hyperbole of the Canticle of Canticles will fade in comparison, and the metaphors of the Baroque poets and those uttered by Ariel in The Tempest will no longer be stupendous rhetorical figures, but objects, real objects, real as only objects can be—things, simple things, m
atter, pure physical expanse, because that naked body is finally and blessedly an object, which certainly doesn’t push us to hold it in disdain, but rather to admire it, cherish it, venerate it. And play with it. Objects weren’t made to be destroyed, you know! Unless they fall into the hands of a demented child. More was done during wartime to save objects than human lives! Porcelains and paintings were sealed in lead crates while thousands of children were burned alive with white phosphorus bombs. Are we sure, after all, that it’s always and in any case a good thing to be treated like people rather than objects? It is rare that anyone intentionally destroys a Meissen soup tureen—but how many women have been murdered with malice aforethought? Hatred seems to have an easier time of targeting people.
That is why I jotted down a few lines of a “Hymn to Sexual Reification.”
Oh, the splendid autonomy of the anatomical parts
of which the body is composed!
To lay one’s gaze lightly
for just an instant on his or her neck:
what on earth could this be? We can ask for no greater delight
and in it we swim as if in a boundless sea.
Oh, the wonder of headless torsos in museums!
All the chatter about personality, the integrity
and inviolability of the individual (but which individual? Where?
who??) when quite to the contrary a religious sense
capable of respect toward the human creature
emerges far more powerfully from the anonymous
splendor of a corporeal detail, the hair, a breast
toes and fingers to be gazed upon and kissed, the fissure
between the buttocks and the fold beneath them, fine as a thread . . .
Oh, the dorsal muscles of a man lying facedown!
it is true that a body reduced to a thing is the image that comes closest to that of a lifeless body . . . for that matter, the sex act has this in its destination, desire burns in view of this, in this it finds its achievement, that is, in finally feeling itself to be lifeless, exhausted, stripped of all meaning and higher sentiment to lie as an object among objects, a thing among things, matter no longer in search of redemption. “Perhaps you and I are no longer people, but things . . .” says a love poem that compares the beloved’s body to a landscape, to a still life. Otherwise intercourse would be an activity like any other, useful or fun, productive, while it is the exact opposite of any productivity and utility. In the case of an actual outcome, a consequence of the coitus, its productivity is in fact paradoxical, almost a mockery of the original premise, with a long-term effect that is as spectacular as it is disconcerting: I make love to annihilate myself, and instead I reproduce myself. I’d like to delete myself and instead I multiply and proliferate. Having joined together into the same act two such opposing tensions has been considered by a great many thinkers as a wise deception of nature, the seductive trap of reproduction. The Romantic pairing of love and death has its polarity inverted into love and life. Well, okay, I’m not going to argue with that.
THE IRREPLACEABLE FUNCTION of intercourse is to liquidate (at least temporarily) the obsession, at once most catholic and most rational, with the individual, with the accompanying retinue of qualities, uniqueness, dignity, rights, etc., all those things that are useful to the municipal registry or in court or at work but which, in bed, are nothing but a deception and a hindrance. No blessed abandonment is conceded to those who stand watch on the ramparts of their own personality. Whoever takes that psychological or juridical burden with him under the covers will always sleep alone. Luckily every so often sex passes by and clears the field, resets the results to zero, like the great blade of a snowplow. In sex, you start from scratch every time, that is to say, from your body, this soft machine. Yes, I’m talking about the miracle of people changed into things. If it’s not to exploit them, to sell them, or to make them suffer, the fact that people are transformed into things, then where would be the harm in it? Why consider a nightmare something that to me, for instance, is a daily aspiration, perhaps the only truly religious aspiration of my life, that is, to escape from my person? Can it be that anyone should mistake this sacred need for anything abject? To happily become objects: if only! It would take years of practice, not even a Brahmin or a hesychast can do it . . . To become nothing more than a plant, a rock, a desert flower, or rather an apple, no, better yet, that apple’s shadow on a windowsill . . .
IT IS INEVITABLE THAT THIS PROCESS entails a risk. These are experiments done on the crater’s rim. It may be that you never wake up at all, that a wish is granted whose scope you hadn’t really entirely understood in the first place. The suspended animation stretches out until it becomes permanent. That’s the risk. The story is told of a personage in antiquity named Hermogenes, who was able to leave his body: his soul wandered through the world as it pleased and only when it was satisfied with all the things it had seen would it return to its home, in his body. What happened, though, was that some bad people noticed this magical ability of Hermogenes, and were jealous of him. So while his soul was out wandering the world, they burned his body. When the soul returned, it found its residence was gone . . . and it fell into despair . . .
EVERY KEY POSSESSES a combination of cuts that makes it suited to one and only one lock. In the same way, every individual pursues a distinctive form of gratification. As a result, it’s almost always impossible to obtain that gratification in perfect accord with someone else, rarely does the required profile match up exactly. Sexual encounters are therefore often frustrating or forced, for at least one of the two lovers, if not for both: you’re always a little too high or too low, you make compromises or sacrifices, willingly or unwillingly, you renounce a great deal from the very outset, and other things necessarily along the way. You’d like more or less, faster or maybe slower . . . What with all the compromise, you end up meeting on a sort of no-man’s-land, unfamiliar and alien to both of you; if concessions aren’t made, then one becomes the mere instrument of the other’s pleasure, but when someone is reduced to that state, soon she or he will be destroyed and replaced, worn out and replaced, compared and replaced. Once a human being has sunk to the role of a tool, however sophisticated and functional a tool, they will soon become sheer wreckage.
IMPLICIT IN THE SEX ACT, in any sex act, even the most joyous, is the possibility that it will end with a lifeless body: it’s a symbolic possibility, which one can access through the image of the “little death” of the orgasm, and whose catastrophic outcome is continuously grazed, acted out, and at once indicated and concealed in its corporeal nature; you approach it with audacity and recklessness or as a game, and you disengage from it with a shiver; in any case, it’s present and up close, as a sort of radiant center to the act itself. However remote or dreamlike it may appear, this possibility of death exists every bit as much as the chance of starting a new life, it hovers on the horizon of possibility, constituting one of the indispensable elements of pleasure: uncertainty. An indicator of precariousness that for this exact reason drives lovers to seize as much, each of the other, as they can. The force of gravity of the sex act attracts opposites, it’s the eye of the storm, the center into which all energy is sucked and swallowed: it is there that the squandering of energies is conveyed. That is what the coupling of individuals consists of, this is what their annihilation constitutes: in that bonfire the identities are dissolved and a new one may begin to take shape, only to see the light many months later. Among the countless declensions and gradations of this theme, there are murderous ones, where the possibility of death elsewhere staged as a game suddenly looms as an unexpected outcome, or at an ever purer and more extreme level, when the intention is to kill, and sex serves only as a protocol of execution. Just as the government might use the guillotine or the noose, likewise the single maniac uses the sex act, which alone, it’s true, is not sufficient to cause death, but might, so to speak, inaugurate it, it is a preliminary phase just as fasting and ablutions are in certain
religious ceremonies that lead to the decisive vision through stations of approach; instead of placating the aggressor, sex only pushes him toward a higher level, the next step, which is murder: it is there that he wanted to arrive right from the beginning. And so, that which lies deep in the sex impulse as an obscure implication, in a form that could barely be distinguished from the other motives, is brought out into the light, purified and powered up, until in the end it’s so strong that it can stand out against the background where it was resting, it becomes entirely autonomous, in fact, it becomes its exact opposite, its negative stand-in, its own double. This is how inside the erotic universe (and not outside it, as people tend to think) a zone is created where, in place of reciprocal joy and pleasure, what triumphs is death. Death, which is nothing other than the hidden fold, the minor key of the act of love, which turns into a dominant chord.
IN ANY CASE, it’s still a dismemberment. The dissection of the female body undertaken by the photographic gaze, in pornography every bit as much as in artistic photography. Pieces of woman, obscene and slobbery and painted red or else icy like marble in the stupendously grainy imagery of the masters of the black-and-white print: the objective is different, but the process of decomposition is quite similar.
THAT ANATOMICAL DETAIL you see so close up, during the sex act, isn’t a thing, nor is it a person. It’s something alive that however possesses no individuality. Although it is shaped in a particular form, a breast, an ear, a nipple, the veins that pulse in an arm or in the erect male member or that can be glimpsed beneath the translucent fair white flesh, the peach fuzz, the pubic hair, the belly button, an ass cheek, an asshole spasmodically contracting or gaping open, the eye beneath its eyebrow, aren’t really all that different from every other eye, buttock, wrist, asshole. Really, they could belong to anyone, and this is the source of their infinite wonder: in the fact that they’re impersonal. I’m not saying they’re all the same, but rather that they belong to no one. Sex renders those who practice it beatifically anonymous, as they writhe intertwined and the horizon of their vision is wide open; or in the blank relaxation that ensues after their spasms. When you exhibit, when you expose or hand over your nude body, the person disappears, swallowed up by their own physicality. They are ready to be taken by another, by their gaze or their hands, seized, possessed, rejected, used, or abandoned. In an advanced civilization, where slavery does not exist and minors are supposed to be protected from the abuses of adults, this is the only occasion in which you can take possession of an individual. Make it mine, as you might say of an inanimate object. Because you cannot possess people, only things, there would be no reciprocal possession if lovers didn’t deliver themselves into each other’s hands. It’s by becoming a thing in another person’s hands that you allow him or her to fully become a person, that is, a subject capable of exercising possession. By being possessed you allow the elevation of rank of the person possessing you: by losing your individuality, your own name, you allow the other to acquire it, as if by some miracle. Whether this exchange (person for thing, thing for person: I became a thing in order to make you a person) is the result of violence and abuse or is done as an act of free will, a loving exchange, or else as a pure exercise of perversion, none of that changes its substance, only its modality: being treated as an object, then, can be a wonderful experience or a risky form of fun or a human being’s worst nightmare.
The Catholic School Page 117
