A SHORT HISTORY OF THE DEMONIAC SPIRIT OF
THE EROTIC AND THE VIOLENT IN THE CHRISTIAN
ERA,
IN THE TRANSITION FROM
THE CHRISTIAN ERA TO THE TECHNOLOGICAL ERA,
AND FINALLY IN A PURELY TECHNOLOGICAL ERA
St. Pauclass="underline" The triumph of the spirit over the flesh, but still bothered by a “thorn in the flesh” (unlike Socrates, who wouldn’t have worried).
St. Augustine: The triumph of the love of God in the City of God over lust in the city of man, but—“Grant me the gift of continence, but not just yet.”
Dante: Sexual sinners in the outermost, least punitive, circle of hell, storm-tossed, blown to and fro like birds on the winds of desire, yet still together and still in love. Cf. traitors and murderers in innermost circle, up to their necks in boiling pitch.
Chaucer’s Miller and Wife of Bath: The frankly erotic harmonized comically and humanely as earthy transgressions, committed and recognized as sins, but without neurotic guilt and to be forgiven by the loving Lord and Master, the goal of the Canterbury pilgrimage.
Don Giovanni: The appearance of the pure demoniac spirit of the erotic; the Don’s seduction of 1,003 women set to the joyful music of Mozart; yet this same spirit of the erotic posited by Christianity, e.g., the damnation of the Don and his descent before our eyes into the fires of hell.
Fanny Hilclass="underline" The spirit of the erotic in English pornography; the sinister charm of secret sex under the veneer of Christian proprieties and layers of Victorian clothes; the white skin of thighs against black stockings.
World War I: Joyce Kilmer’s poetry, Colleen Moore in Lilac Time, “Mademoiselle from Armentières”; the erotic diminished to the sentimental and to good-natured sex between the doughboy and the French farm girl; with a decline in passion and the spirit of the erotic, and an increase in violence with the rise of technology; 20,000,000 dead.
World War II: Betty Grable, Anne Frank, Adolf Eichmann, Stalin; the subsidence of the erotic in favor of a rise in the dispassionate, abstract violence of ideology, Fascism, Nazism, Communism; war increasingly in the hands of technicians; the decency of Truman and Oppenheimer contrasted with the death of 100,000 women and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Arendt’s banality of evil = the growing disparity between the monstrous violence of technology and the smallness of the technician-perpetrators; World War II as a transition period between the decline of the Christian era and the rise of the age of technology; 50,000,000 dead.
Period between World War II and World War III: The ascendancy of the erotic; the eroticization of all sectors of culture: work and play, films, TV, novels, plays, commercials; yet the spirit of the erotic is still posited and specified by lingering Christianity, e.g., the charm of the secrecy of sex under clothes, the charm of “forbidden” sex, liaisons, pornography; pornography as “dirty” yet interesting, or rather, “dirty,” therefore interesting; the hypocrisy of some critics: critics who say that pornography is dull, whereas in fact pornography is for many readers the last resort of interest after the disappointments of age; the critic, of all people, knows that the non-pornographic novel is generally so boring that he hopes for the “dirty part” like a schoolboy looking for the “good parts” of Ulysses.
The spirit of violence vented in spectatorship sport, either through mass TV viewership or surrogate participation, e.g., 100 million people watching the Super-Bowl; Little League moms screaming curses at umpires, and dads punching out other dads and later beating up their own kids; the ultimate inadequacy of the spectatorship safety valve: thirty-eight dead in a riot at a Buenos Aires soccer game; war.
World War III: The year 2000 +, the demoniac spirit of the erotic no longer posited by Christianity but triumphant in its own right, perfected as genital technique but deprived of the charm of the forbidden, the secret, the “dirty,” “sinful,” “extramarital,” “fornication,” “adultery”—even the word fuck has by now lost its homonymous semantic charge and is neutered as fish, fowl, fix; the perfection of contraceptive technique; the conquest of Herpes II virus and all homosexual AIDS diseases; the perfection of visual and tactile aids (no longer called pornography, from porne, harlot) as sexual stimuli; erotica elevated to a major literary and art form. War without passion: one billion dead.
The spirit of violence in the coming technological sexually liberated age? Here is the great problematic.
Question (The Great Problematic): Will the ultimate liberation of the erotic from its dialectical relationship with Christianity result in
(a) The freeing of the erotic spirit so that man and womankind will make love and not war?
or (b) The trivialization of the erotic by its demotion to yet another technique and need-satisfaction of the organism, toward the end that the demoniac spirit of the autonomous self, disappointed in all other sectors of life and in ordinary intercourse with others, is now disappointed even in the erotic, its last and best hope, and so erupts in violence — and in that very violence which is commensurate with the orgiastic violence in the best days of the old erotic age — i.e., war?
(CHECK ONE)
Question II:
(a) Will World War III happen absurdly, by an accident in a purely technological, sexually liberated age, e.g., by computer malfunction, misinformation, misbehavior by a small-time Qaddafi madman?
or (b) Will World War III erupt because of the suppressed fury of the autonomous self, disappointed now even in the erotic, that very demoniac spirit which is overtly committed to peace and love but secretly desires war and apocalypse and nourishes hatred of all other selves and perhaps of its own self most of all?
(CHECK ONE)
THE BESTIAL-SEXUAL
Thought Experiment: The Confrontation of the Autonomous Scientific Self with the Eruption of the Spirit of the Erotic, Issuing in Two Kinds of Violence, one the Bestial-Sexual, the other the Banal-Lethal
SCENE I: Open house at the Maison Burgundy, a French Quarter hotel in New Orleans, celebrating Mental Health Week, open to the public and hosted by mental-health workers, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, et al.
The most popular hostess is “Dr. Betty,” a visiting radio “personality,” a nationally known talk-show psychotherapist (known in the business as a “psych jock”), a pleasant, fortyish blonde just this side of the overblown and overweight, but in an attractive, even voluptuous, way. A small crowd has gathered around her. She fields questions in her best low-keyed, cheerful radio style.
Someone, a thin intense young woman, has just asked a question about how to overcome sexual inhibitions: “I like men, they like me, I want a rewarding sexual relationship, but I turn myself off,” etc.
One of the listeners in the small crowd is a young street person known hereabouts as a “chicken,” that is, a teenage male prostitute available to either sex. Streetwise, somehow managing to swagger standing still, in his short leather jacket he looks like a muscular, coarse, slightly out-of-focus John Travolta. While the others smile and nod, he stands, thumbs hooked through his belt loops, and watches Dr. Betty through hooded eyes.