Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (1939)
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs [Project Gutenberg EBook 2004 #6852]
After the years of drinking, the months of pill-popping, the weeks of crying out like a finger-nail-biting brat at my psychiatrist's office, and the days of singing Marley's "Redemption Songs" in the shower (with aid of a fine drug called Lithium), I have at last begun to enjoy Bobby Timmons again. His pattern-finding piano style, which is like a reconnaisance of musical possibilities with a faulty set of binoculars, is suited to that which I can only call the soul's lament: too tired and sick of the sun to do more than recline in the shadows and murmur -- eloquently to oneself. This is of great importance to me, for sound is the only power capable of scrambling the all-too-organized onslaught of memories that has become increasingly vocal in my dreams.
She was much more than pretty. ... She was smiling, a subtle half-smile uncontaminated by thought.
She wasn't hard-boiled. It was just that she put love on a special plane ...
Her invitation wasn't to pleasure, but to struggle ... If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from a parapet of a sky-scraper. You would do it with a scream. You couldn't expect to rise again. [my emphasis]
In the novella, Faye gives both Tod and Homer a chance to become fervent worshippers of disinterested female beauty. As I have written elsewhere (in my piece on Anglo-Saxon heroics), the decline of manly notions of self-sacrifice as heroism (exemplified in poems like "The Battle of Maldon," the Finnsburh fragment, and, of course, Beowulf) and the rise (so to speak) of chivalry as the noble licking of the female shoe (exemplified in the works of the great troubadors) made it possible for a man to really know himself sexually.
Man is the one who desires, woman the one who is desired. This is woman's entire but decisive advantage. (Madame Venus, in Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, p. 10)
Actually, I did not write this explicitly in the piece on Anglo-Saxon heroics, but I'm writing it now. To be overwhelmed by a woman -- in all the gasping, pleading, writhing, breathless ways possible -- is, for me, the height of sexual experience and the utmost expression of my love for the one who entices, torments in exquisite fashion, and ultimately fulfills me -- by releasing me. I mean, of course, the release of orgasm, which only has meaning when the eyes of the cummer meet those of the one making it happen. I look up, out of the world, only held to sanity by the embrace of the one into whom I pour myself.
I am not sure what to make of The Day of the Locust. I only know that Faye stood out, for me, as a proto-dominatrix for whom the torment she inflicted upon her worshippers (and I consider Tod to have been a more deeply afflicted fane-builder than Homer) amounted to a trifle. For she only sought fame as an actress, to be loved by the faceless crowd. Her desire was the type that no single person can fulfill, and so she was inaccessible -- by accident of temperament, not by conscious design. My ex-wife sought, not fame, but a type of success that was peculiar to her: a carefully maintained and organized exertion of her abilities in a finite sphere (if that makes even a subatom of sense). In this, I had no effect, no influence, no staying-power -- once she achieved her goal, it was on to the next thing. Sex was a matter of desire meeting opportunity. For me, it was a world to be explored with no waystations prepared in advance. In music, one might compare Bobby Timmons at his unbuttoned best with the nearly neurotic tight-laced perfectionist mouldings of Steely Dan. There is perfection and grace in both, but the soul (and I am getting increasingly comfortable using that word again) lavishes itself upon itself most primally in the former, and finds itself a carven glazed monument in the latter.
* * * * *
She was, indeed, much more than pretty. That is a word that has become nearly obsolete, at least among the younger set. It is too cute and ... small. Which is precisley what it means: small, dainty, cuddly, easy to control. A pretty woman is a woman who is on one's level, who doesn't demand much in the way of intellectual investment -- she may not be easy sexually, but she is easy to talk to. Pretty much. My ex-wife demanded much in the way of talk; she had deep notions and her ideas, if not well-developed, were certainly large entities scratching frantically at the door of logos. Speaking with her was a welcome challenge; and as the conversation increased, so did my desire.
There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere. (Bill Evans, "Improvisation in Jazz," liner notes to Miles Davis, Kind of Blue [1959])
The excitement of the moment, when "direct deed is the most meaningful reflection" (ibid.), produces a space in which we may adjust the temperature to our liking. A mixing of metaphors here, but it makes sense. Think of the power resident in a single word from the one you love: productive of peace, elation, comfort, and the stress of response -- all in one elaborate yet tantalizingly simple moment. It is like the call in music ... the opening provided by the bassist, whose thunder, upon receding, gives the violin a chance to soar mightily into a realm of once repressed, now expressed, memories. Music does that to a soul -- there it is again -- music takes nous into a realm of instant communication, in which "I don't know" is not an option. Music demands a response, and a call in return. The beauty of the woman to whom one replies musically is not prettiness times ten, it is awesome Beauty. The sublime.
"And always cold in this modern world of ours, she seeks to keep her sublime body warm in a large heavy fur and her feet in the lap of her lover. I imagine the favorite of a beautiful despot, who whips her slave, when she is tired of kissing him, and the more she treads him underfoot, the more insanely he loves her" (Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, p. 119). Such is the metaphor of the one who has found his perfect match, only to be aware -- in a manner so painful as to defy words -- "that the end was in sight even before she did. All he could do to prevent its coming was to increase his servility and his generosity. He waited on her hand and foot" (West, The Day of the Locust, p. 143). Any man who has ever been in this position knows it does not work. It annoys the goddess, and the whipping and the kissing ceases. Role-play is the closest one can ever come to the experience of loving a woman from below, from beneath her exquisite feet, while gazing into her incomparable eyes. Speech does not occur here, and so the tearing of the ever-so-delicate parchment is not a danger. Yet the comforting absence of speech, the pure anticipation of what may or may not occur -- Will she permit an orgasm? Will she make me pass out beneath her latex-clad bottom? -- these wonders are safe possibilities. No matter what she does or does not do, when the role-playing session is over, she remains my beloved. Yet the time comes -- not for all, but for me -- when the fun is over and the the fear is not the luxurious fear of the tightening of the plastic bag over my head as she brings me to climax, but the very real fear of knowing that she has contacted attorneys, and my days of hearing her voice and kissing her with all the love a mind-body composite can bear to feel without going mad are over. Forever.
I remember the glory of seeing her so long ago, in her bathrobe, gloriously barefoot, smiling the placid smile of one who has something so special planned that it must be concealed beneath the subterfuge of a bedtime gesture: a night of placing my tongue in places that produce the most mellifluous moans ...
The Day of the Locust is a book about the loss of a goddess who never had a chance to be genuinely adored and worshipped, for both Tod and Homer were uncreative souls, incapable of knowing that Faye's wall of apparent unobtainability was in fact a result of "boredom and disappointment" -- for a powerful woman despises uncreative men.
"Yes--you have awakened my dearest dream," I cried. "It has slept long enough."
"And this is?" She put her hand on my neck.
I was seized with a sweet intoxication under the influence of this warm little hand and of her regard, which, tenderly searching, fell upon me through her half-closed lids.
"To be the slave of a woman, a beautiful woman, whom I love, whom I worship." (Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, p. 48)
And this most creative man got his wish -- for a while, for it eventually turned into a hell. But one must experience the fullness of female dominance before undertanding that it forces a man to appreciate what made the troubadors tick, what made poets like Byron cherish in verse the all-too-rare gift of unconditonal love, or which made Wyatt write, in a different vein, "But all is turned now through my gentleness / Into a strange fashion of forsaking." One never knows if one's love is truly returned, if the light behind the beloved's eyes is burning within or simply a reflection of one's own. The only truth, really, the truth that can be experienced without question, is that of plain old forsaking. When I fell upon my knees, kissed the hem of her bathrobe -- much later in our marriage -- and watched as she turned away in disgust, I knew with a certainty unknown before: I was despised. Not for lack of creativity but for my addiction to the bottle.
She whipped so hard that the blood flowed, and that, at last, notwithstanding my heroic spirit, I cried and wept and begged for mercy. She then had me untied, but I had to get down on my knees and thank her for the punishment and kiss her hand. (Venus in Furs, p. 42)
All is metaphor here (well, not entirely), but I never did get a chance to kiss her hand. I was utterly forsaken.
* * * * *
I am writing this piecemeal, after a bout of blackout drunkenness and a trip to the hospital for detox. It is 4:30 AM and I am drinking black coffee by the potfull and writing in spite of myself. I realized in the hospital that if all were to end, it would be like this:
"One step further," [Marilynn] commanded. "Now kneel down, and kiss my foot."
She extended her foot beyond the hem of white satin, and I, the supersensual fool, pressed my lips upon it. (Venus in Furs, p. 99)
Yes, I was and am a fool -- but not an uncreative one. I did not, like the silly Tod in West's tale, run madly into a crowd who possessed no "mental equipment for leisure" (p. 178). But leisure is not what the supersensualist wants. The lovely Lisa [she was / is a woman from Philadelphia whom I "dated" for a bit after my wife left me; Lisa was, perhaps still is, a sexual acrobat with ever-open legs] enjoyed the leisure of free sex: experimental episodes with bondage equipment was not her thing, but she did give me several handjobs that made me scream so loudly that the neighbors complained -- so I guess I can't complain. One day, as "punishment" for forgetting to buy her bourbon, she made me remove the shoes she'd been wearing that hot summer day and kiss her feet.
What does this have to do with anything? Not a fucking thing, except that I am sober and suffering from insomnia and need to ejaculate some words. I am listening to the Stones, Exile on Main Street, and none of it makes a damned bit of sense. I look at the unsmoked cigar sitting on my desk and wonder why I am still alive.
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