Pornographic Reflections

This article is about pornography, yes, but it is not explicit and should likely not offend. Still, it's about porn. Also, this is more a collection of thoughts than an argument... just a few things that have lately been running through my mind...

I've been thinking about pornography lately. Wait, let me start that again. As part of the writing process for The Execution, I've been thinking about what pornography means and what it does to the people who view it and make it, porn being not so much a theme as a recurring image in the novel. In the spirit of full disclosure, let me just get it out there (as if it weren't already obvious) that I am a white male fast approaching thirty. And so I, like so many men growing up in this slide between centuries, have a history with pornography, especially the internet variety... you know, the kind that so easily entangles.

OED time. Pornography, n. "The explicit description or exhibition of sexual subjects or activity in literature, painting, films, etc., in a manner intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings." As one crude distinction between "art" and "porn" puts it, if after you've masturbated to it you are bored with it, it's porn and likely has no artistic value, despite whatever pretensions it may play at.

A few weeks ago, I watched a documentary called 9to5: Days in Porn, a film that followed (loosely, I think) several people in The Industry - girls (some now famous), directors, agents, producers, the like - for two years. No real thesis emerged - the filmmakers, as much as documentarians can, remained invisible (their attempt, I guess, to remain "objective," whatever that means). A recurring theme emerged amongst the subjects, however: their own happiness and sense of achievement. They claim to enjoy what they do, even the husbands and wives of pornstars, who themselves are often involved in the biz. While I don't necessarily think they are liars, and while I feel certain that no one could survive in that business without at least some measure of self-deception, I also think that the kind of people who produce and participate in porn and purport to find pleasure in it (okay, I'll stop alliterating P now...) actually lack the apparatus and capacity for true happiness (... sorry, I tried). Let me put it like this: I think it takes a certain damaged personality to willingly sell yourself, and an even more damaged one to film your wife or girlfriend with other men. I'm not talking about a history of abuse, or drug use, or anything like that. I'm talking about moral and spiritual devastation. Maybe they are happy, but that's only because they are not whole enough to reach for anything higher.

But I won't lie and say that porn doesn't have a certain attractiveness, especially for the consumer. I won't say that it isn't erotic or arousing or that I'm immune to its enticements. But I've found that the eroticism of porn is tyrannical, and the more time you spend with it the more it rearranges your own ideas of the erotic. In a sense, porn reveals to you your own impulses and sexual imperatives. You could tell a lot about someone, I'd guess, from the type of porn they look at, were they willing to tell you (most of us probably aren't, and that shame is, I think, a good thing). But in another sense, a much more dangerous sense, porn not only reveals them but guides and shapes those impulses, so that after consuming it for any length of time it no longer reveals but dictates, and you find yourself somewhere entirely different and often not pleasant.

The pornographic camera is, for the most part, extremely myopic; it's sexual epistemologies are hermetically sealed and reduce sexuality and eroticism to a function of organs and anatomy, which is simply tragic and repulsive. I myself have several times had to undergo a "cleanse," a deliberate re-mapping of the erotic and sexual, in order to purge myself of these broken images and put back together the sort of mentality and desires that I want. This is hard. Re-mapping your own mind is a very hard thing to do. But it is very valuable and freeing.

I bring all this up because the writing of The Execution has in many ways been a cleanse. For those of you who have read some of my drafts, this may sound odd, given some of the novel's more unflinching episodes, several of which contain elements of sexual cruelty. But it's true, at least for me, the bewildered author. I think Christian literature, and I mean modern Christian literature, lacks a full confrontation with the erotic. It wasn't always like this. Dante certainly didn't avoid such a confrontation. Neither did Milton or Blake. For all three of them, the sexual and the erotic are major themes; and all three of them put the sexual and the erotic into an intelligible and, I think, valuable context (even if Blake's context was... idiosyncratic). I am trying to do that as well. Of course, I'm no Dante, Milton, or Blake, and would never claim to be. But they are my models, my spiritual grandfathers, if you will. In a world where porn has, as keeps getting repeated, gone mainstream, I think it is important, and only going to become more important, to fight back in order to keep the pornographic camera from being the only hand shaping society's vision of the erotic.

Abandon All Hope...

A while back, Electronic Arts announced that they were adapting Dante's Inferno as an action video game, as a sort of God of War clone, but one in which a Medieval Christian iconography, as depicted in the first canticle of the Commedia, is substituted for the Greek mythos. If that makes no sense to you... that's because it makes no sense. Look:



I've been trying to figure out what to make of this. My initial reaction was unmitigated hostility. That anyone could even think any aspect of the Commedia was suitable material for an action game boggled and enraged me. And that then shifted into a sort of anxious curiosity. Translations, even from one medium to another, are not necessarily, in theory, doomed undertakings. But now that I've looked at some of their publicity material and seen some of their PR stunts, the hostility is back. The game is shaping up to be an offensive, ugly parody of Dante's intention... a prurient and savage mockery of his moral and religious kerygma. Leaving aside the more obvious narrative departures (especially what looks to be an unforgiveable mutilation of Beatrice), the developers seem either not to understand or, I think more likely, to be willfully working against the poem, as can be seen here, where they talk about their interpretation of the Circle of Lust. I can only assume most of them, if they've even read the Inferno, read it only to revel within, and now exaggerate, the poem's strong images. I'm going to guess that, if the game is even partially successful, the sequel will not be called Dante's Purgatorio or Dante's Paradiso.

It's not so much the imagery and art direction of the video above that agitates me. It's the fact that this - this! - is being called an interpretation of the Inferno. If you want to make a game about hell and about a warrior (not a poet or a pilgrim, but a warrior) dismembering demons and damned souls... fine. But don't call it the Inferno. Don't bring Dante into it.

In the past, I have posted about the Commedia. Dante's work, not only the Commedia but also his lesser-known works like La Vita Nuova, have had a profound impact upon me. In my personal canon, the Commedia is a central text - not a planet but a star around which spins an entire textual universe. To see it used like this, reduced like this... it feels a bit like witnessing a sex crime, one committed against Dante, against Beatrice, against the entire history of Western literature.

I hope this game fails... I mean really fails.

Pictorial :: Michael Mazur

I've been reading Dante's Commedia lately.  During my research, I stumbled upon a gorgeous collection of Inferno etchings, made by painter Michael Mazur.  Enjoy.

Midway on our life's journey, I found myself

In dark woods, the right road lost.  To tell

About those woods is hard - so tangled and rough

And savage that thinking of it now, I feel

The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.

-Inferno, Canto I.1-5

He hurled the sinner down, then turned to rush

Back down the rocky crag; and no mastiff

Was ever more impatient to shake the leash

And run his fastest after a fleeing thief.

The sinner sank below, only to rise

Rump up - but demons under the bridge's shelf

Cried, "Here's no place to show your Sacred Face!

You're not out in the Serchio for a swim!

If you don't want to feel our hooks - like this! -

Then stay beneath the pitch."  They struck at him

With over a hundred hooks, and said, "You'll need

To dance in secret here - so grab what seam

You're able to, in darkness."  They then did

Just as cook have their scullions do to steep

The meat well into the cauldron - with a prod

From their forks keeping it from floating up.

-Inferno, Canto XXI.43-58

We had left him, moving on

When I saw two shades frozen in a single hole -

Packed so close, one head hooded the other one;

The way the starving devour their bread, the soul

Above had clenched the other with his teeth,

Where the brain meets the nape.  And at the skull

And other parts, as Tydeus berserk with wrath

Gnawed at the head of Menalippus, he chewed.

-Inferno, Canto XXXII.124-131

Dante, Inferno.  Translated by Robert Pinsky, The Inferno of Dante.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.

The entire collection of Mazur's Inferno etchings can be viewed online here.

Dreams and Allegory :: Medieval Love Poetry

During these last few weeks I've been taking a class on the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, specifically a class on The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde. Dreams and allegory, often intermingled, float through the under-current of most medieval poetry and occasionally rise to the surface in a glorious display of poetic expression. I find these two dreams, the first from Troilus and Criseyde and the second from Dante's Vita Nuova, to be shocking and rather beautiful. Their violent imagery, so foreign to our post-modern and often too sentimental notions of love, captures that sense of new-found love that can, when we are not prepared, overthrow our hearts and minds. Enjoy.

And as she slep, anonright tho hire mette
How that an egle, fethered whit as bon,
Under hire brest his longe clawes sette,
And out hire herte he rente, and that anon,
And dide his herte into hire brest to gon-
Of which she nought agroos, ne nothying smerte-
And forth he fleigh, with herte left for herte.
(Troilus and Criseyde, II.925-31, Geoffrey Chaucer)

To every captive soul and loving heart
to whom these words I have composed are sent
for your elucidation in reply,
greetings I bring you for your sweet lord's sake, Love.
The first three hours, the hours of the time
of shining stars, were coming to an end,
when suddenly Love appeared before me
(to remember how he really was appalls me).
Joyous, Love seemed to me, holding my heart
within his hands, and in his arms he had
my lady, loosely wrapped in folds, asleep.
He woke her then, and gently fed to her
the burning heart; she ate it, terrified.
And then I saw him disappear in tears.
("To Every Captive Soul," Vita Nuova, Dante Alighieri)


"To Every Captive Soul" translated by Musa, Mark. The Portable Dante. Penguin, 1995. 592.