DELIVERANCE

Having finally read the novel, after four decades of oblivion as to the masterful origins of backwoods horror, I nailed the tremendous importance of the staggering number of flicks figuring yellow-toothed, dirty-nailed, obnoxiously fiendish personages from "the Country of Nine-Fingered People and Prepare to Meet Thy God"[1]. The book reads like an eerie crossbreed of the early unpredictably surrealistic rural pornography[2]and horrifically suspenseful first Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) fused with the writing sensibility of Raymond Carver and unrelenting survivalist machismo. The sexual component is not so much prominently present in the novel, as merely hinted in abrupt inhales of menacingly unfamiliar country air or scrotum-cringing (albeit weirdly matter-of-factly erotic) moments of contact with the widely-understood nature. The portentous prediction of Lewis, the only survivalist maniac among the four urbanites in the story, that "the whole thing is going to be reduced to the human body"[3] is promptly fulfilled in the encounter with two inhabitants of Helms County who anally rape one of the friends, but more subtly during numerous organoleptic contiguities, initiated by the mystic interaction with "the gold eye" of the pussy-holding Kitt'n Britches model[4], and succeeded by the abject glimpse of slaughtered chickenhead in the river, the forced, sensuous crawling/"fuck[ing"[5] against/of moon-lit cliff performed by Ed, or the ambiguous meshing with the rapists themselves. Take the narrator's initial repulsion towards Stovall and his playmate, followed by a primal, nearly homoerotic fascination. This is the first description we get of the assailants:

They came forward, moving in a kind of half circle as though they were stepping around something. The shorter one was older, with big white eyes and a half-white stubble that grew in whorls on his cheeks. His face seemed to spin in many directions. He had on overalls, and his stomach looked like it was falling through them. The other was lean and tall, and peered as though out of a cave or some dim simple place far back in his yellow-tinged eyeballs. When he moved his jaws the lower bone came up too far for him to have teeth.[6]

The one that initiates the sodomic act is also identified as having a "sick-looking face"[7] or simply "whorl-faced"[8], which together with the country drawl makes for overly reprehensible yokelness. But passages later Gentry, the would-be rape victim, exhausted after his erotic cliff union and animalistically prepared for killing hunt, muses seconds before arrowing Stovall to death: "There was something relaxed and enjoying in his body position, something primally graceful; I had never seen a more beautiful or convincing element of a design"[9]. Strangely enough, the passivity and wailing of the raped Bobby during the assault is more reprehensible to the narrator than the physical appearance and inhumanness of malefactors, which is ostensibly shown when the former's manhood and his place in the group is invalidated in the following terms: "he felt tainted to me"[10]. Scened later, Gentry exhibits an apathetic acceptance of the ruthlessness of natural order and a kind of bizarre amity with Stovall:

I felt, in the moonlight, our minds fuse. It was not that I felt myself turning evil, but that an enormous physical indifference, as vast as the whole abyss of light at my feet, came to me . . . [i]f Lewis had not shot his companion, he and I would have made a kind of love, painful and terrifying to me, in some dreadful way pleasurable to him, but we would have been together in the flesh, there on the floor of the woods . . .[11]

It appears that Dickey was also the foreshadower of almost every backwoods slasher scene in which strayed young city-dweller(s) first irresolutely encroach upon the territory of the enemy. In the following passage, the four townees enter The Griner Brothers' Garage, seeking supplies and help in the downriver trip:

It was dark and iron-smelling, hot with the closed-in heat that brings the sweat out as though it had been waiting all over your body for the right signal. Anvils stood around or lay on their sides, and chains hung down, covered with coarse, deep grease. The air was full of hooks; there were sharp points everywhere - tools and nails and ripped-open rusty tin cans. Batteries stood on benches and on the floor, luminous and green, and through everything, out of the high roof, mostly, came this clanging hammering, meant to deafen and even blind. It was odd to be there, not yet seen, paining with the metal harshness in the half-dark.[12]

I guess what gives Deliverance its terrifying resonance on the level of subconscious urges is the minimal stylistic gradation of sexual horror, and its placement in a certain ideologically contorted territorial universe (the US South) where some forms of behavior might not be baffling or detestable for the persons involved. The behavior of the narrator seems to prove this porno semi-dystopic adaptive attitude. While the events unfolding are traumatic from the perspective of the habitual normalcy of social rules, some sort of tantalizing mysticism of encountered perversion is also involved. The factor that makes every pornography work for anybody is a (hidden) fetish. That the men-raping Benson has a wife adds an aspect of realism to a story that might be otherwise considered purely an exercise in pornographic evil sublime. That's what good pornographers try to achieve: to make the characters and their actions believable despite the setting and generic formulaicism. Relevantly, Samuel R. Delany aims at precisely such skewed realism when it comes to most of his protagonists;when Kidd discovers that the twenty-seven-year-old hunk Tak is sexually involved with a 15-year-old black boy, this is how he reacts: "[s]uch distortion tells me nothing of him, and is only terrifying because so much is unknown of myself"[13]. And much of the sexual iceberg seems to remain hidden considering Tak's bragging confession that he's "gone to levels of perversion" one might have hard time imagining[14], even in such a liberatory space as Bellona.

Nicely executed stroytelling, altogether.


[1] Deliverance p.227
[2] Farmer's Daughters (1976)is, IMO, the unavoidable classic of the genre with its half-retarded boychild, inbred sex coercion at gun-point, the motif of convicts trespassing on a family farm, the atmosphere of bizarro rustic pornotopia and sexploitation.
[3] D. p.40
[4] D. p.22
[5] D. p.151
[6] D. p.95
[7] D. p.95
[8] D. p.100
[9] D. p.161
[10] D. p.111
[11] D. p.154
[12] D. p.57
[13] Dhalgren p.423
[14] Dhalgren p.413

I.

"I am the sweeping tapestry of my sensory and bodily perceptions. I am their linguistic reduction and abstraction, delayed and deferred till they form a wholly different order, called my thought. I am, at the behest and prompting of all these, my memory which forms still another order. I am the emotions that hold them together. Webbing the four, and finally, I am the flux and filigree of desire around them all.

Perhaps, though, I am only the interpretation of all of them that I call reality. (Do I write with my pen? Does another daemon hold the pen and write with it?) Am I the sexual surge and ebb that cannot quite be covered by any of the above, but that impinge on all the others and often drown them? What of the bodily apparati in general, as they fall, pleasingly or painfully, into the net of myself? I am always an animal excess to the intellectual system that tries to construct me. I am always a conscious sensibility in excess of the animal construction that is I. And that is why I am another, why my identity is always other than I."

Samuel R. Delany Longer Views: Extended Essays. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1996. p. 150

WILL THIS BE THE LAST IMAGE?

"Delay and Deferral: Body and Interface

[. . .]

It is important to note that a substantial difference between being a "member" of a pay porn site and simply surfing for porn on the Web; and regardless of the growth and gross income of porn sites, many (if not most) people who look at porn on-line are not members of pay sites. Thus, from the perspective of the average viewer, a primary experience of looking for, and eventually at, cyberporn is precisely one of frustration and waiting.[6] The premise of cyberporn is one of immediate gratification, yet the technological systems of the Internet, as well as the interfaces of cyberporn sites, necessitate delay: the delay of logging on, the delay of finding a site, the delay of "signing through" the initial contract, the delay of having the thumbnails load, and then, finally, the delay of waiting for the selected image, sequence of images, or video segment to appear. A high-speed connection may decrease this delay, but cyberporn constantly pushes the boundaries of bandwidth; as soon as the technology can immediately deliver full-frame images,
streaming video comes on offer, with slower load times. Even with a high-speed connection, there is still often delay on the side of the site delivering the content. The technologic of the computer forces these sequential acts of waiting and looking and waiting to become habit, and in so doing, it inscribes repetition and delay as pleasures of a different order. On some level, there is indeed a limit to what the viewer will willingly put up with in order to get what he or she wants, and as such, delay can become frustration. But Web surfing a telling term, offers its own pleasures, regardless of the frustration porn sites both understand and provoke; the structure of many porn sites seems to both direct and cater to the viewer's desires for delay and deferral by allowing the process of searching exist under the aegis of the goal of "getting what they want," but in excess of it. Specifically, the floods of images and the enormous range of selection on any given pay site are there for a reason , and the reason seems to be precisely this process.

One might see this delay as intensifying the pleasure of the eventual visibility of the object by causing the object to acquire an illusory inaccessibility. But it makes more sense to see the satisfaction as taking place in the deferral of satisfaction itself. Seen in this light, the goal exists in part to allow the subject, or a portion of the subject, to rationalize the pleasure of surfing. To imagine the goal, then, is to project into a moment of perfect satisfaction - and the obtaining of a perfect image, one completely adequate to the subject's desire. But in comparison to this imagined perfect image, every image will always remain inadequate, and so the "search" continues. Psychoanalysis generally, and Jacques Lacan's particular articulation of the impossibility of fulfilling one's desire [7],' articulates this point and its implications for subjectivity at some length. But common sense tells us that part of the pleasure in Web surfing is the pleasure of motion and movement either toward an unknown object or away from a boring desk job. The nearly perfect image,the one that comes closest to approximating one's desire - the group-sex shot with the not-too-busty redhead bent over in the front, perhaps still only offers momentary satisfaction; in fact, images close to one's desire can provoke anxiety because they might cause the end of Web surfing. The subject is faced with a choice-will this be the last image? Even if the viewer knows he or she is unlikely to find one better, he will often continue on, forgoing the pleasures of the known for the pleasures (often through frustration) of the unknown. The user constantly shifts on to new images-and in the process, new delays-in an endless slippage of desire in which part of the pleasure derives from habitual repetition and habitual deferral.[8]" (109-110)

from "Going On-line:Consuming Pornography in the Digital Era" by Zabet Patterson in Porn Studies. Ed Linda Williams. Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2004. 104-123

I totally agree with the author of this as to the common experience of pornography-viewing phenomenology, including the inevitable yet slick commercialization of psychoanalytical implications of fetish and pixelization of desire. I've never experienced the gritty adventurousness of porn theaters which inevitably failed as anything beyond secret, mostly befouled, homo-eroticism (or at least that's what chronicles tell me) and were the closest we came to the cultural pornographic guerrilla. I'd speak ill of the clean, insulating masturbatization of sexual imagery in home video screenings aimed solely at solitary gratification (which is how most people experience pornography and think about pornography). At its best, masturbation involves the ultimate fantasies of interpersonal freedom and "construction of . . . self"/ves[1], but prevailingly it's just that - purely physiological, manic tension release. Still, there is something wickedly subversive about the socially-revolutionary-satirical origins of pornography and how it has been turned into enslaving desire machine. Pornography, like all images, should feed appetites and prompt experimentation and this, unlike screen violence, does not presume imitative aggression, but in most cases imitative pleasure. It is in-between of those moments of deferral that should ascertain the productivity of our fantasies and sexual intrapsychic scripting. I don't see why women would desire pure eroticism and men pure gratified fantasy. I don't see why nobody would want communal rituals of sex images and pornographic shamanism.

[1]William Simon quoting Burke and Ferenczi, among others in Postmodern Sexualities. London and NY: Routledge, 1996. p.83

SEXUALIZATIONSHIPS via ARTERTAINMENT

REPULSION (1965). An old lady's wisdom: Men want to be spanked and then given sweets. Most are ghoulishly mushy, liquidating themselves into female softnesses and expectations. Others are ghoulishly ossified and sly. Bondsman to their packs, mothers and mothers' dead ringers. Once you cease to care enough and look around sans sexual appetency.

"One way street" (above) and the female psyche on the pavement.

DHALGREN (1975)/HOGG (1995). There is no such thing as an human "alpha male". Unless one changes into a werewolf at full moon, this an archaism and cultural catachresis. Men are not wolves, sexually, the meanest and beastly ones have become emotional hyenas or lice, the weakest have numbed themselves into monogamy. In fiction, of course, they're detestable hyperboles. Hog(g): "I'm shit," [1], Kid(d): "I am a parasite." [2] Consider there actually were such thing as an alpha male, there'd be hardly an adequate phrase to name him, therefore their speech is constituted by pretentious emasculations and poses, at best confusion. This is culture.

PORNOCRACY (2001)/NIERUCHOMY PORUSZYCIEL (2008)/THE KILLER INSIDE ME (2010). Women have a diathesis for aphanisis which has originally been invented for them anyway. Serial killing has been invented for men. The integrity of body and social character has never quite been our scene. In true life, when you call a man an asshole (the prefix "ass" is quite important here, being a hole requires metaphysical depth men are barely capable of), he believes he's integral and he is because he knows of none otherwise. Gay men abhorring female secretions, slasher monsters in need of dismembering. Freud wrote, they love what they do not desire and when they desire they cannot love. Women, instead, would want sexual schizophrenics, Deleuzian "desiring machines" perpetually breaking down in order to work. Cuddling after rape, incessantly. That a man is an identity in fixed construction is a perpetual nuisance. Nobody ever tells us to "be a woman," and "behave ladylike" has already become a behavioral kynicism. Breillat wrote: "The person who must respond to an expectation doesn't have the free will of the Word. That's what makes men desperately nasty and why we must fear them." [3] Solely in sexual terms, domination and sadism are a myth. Lars von Trier allows his female characters to cut off their clitorises, mutilate a penis, and live among cardboard rapists but it's all their will against permissive idiocy of supine male angels. Nicole Blackman sang: "I want matches in case I have to suddenly burn." [4] Heat and matches. There is this thermostatic remarkability: while men vaporize heat on body surface, women tend to keep their physiological warmth at core organs (hence warm heart, cold feet)- what a fine somatic analogy of sexual genderism.

PORNOGRAPHY: SIDE VIEW. What you see: loud boars, good boys caught unaware by the sublime moment of jouissance, lowbrow and highbrow, subtle and primitive, driven and passive, they're all dumb flesh monumentalizations of something beyond themselves. So are women, acting and performing.

DEADGIRL (2008). Zizek wrote: "Dreams are not for those who cannot stand reality, it's rather that reality is for those who cannot stand their dreams."[5]He also iterated Lacan in that sexual intercourse in its breath-taking intensity and intimacy is real to the point of being traumatic. I like the idea that pornography has been invented for us to realize that the subconscious must think intensely about how wrong it is to fuck a social mortuary of taboos in order for our bodies to enjoy it as a fetish. The wasteland of obstinate fe[male] bodies tamed and drenched from fantasies of cheer[leaders] and home-alone[break-ing] teenage daughters[plumbers] vs libidinal delirium of douche bags[nymphomaniacs]. Ethics for the XXIst century: dead meat of fantasy gnaws deadly and contagiously.



Animalization in a world without women in CALVAIRE (2004).


[1]Delany, Samuel R. Hogg. Boulder: Black Ice Books, 1994. p. 114
[2]Delany, Samuel R. Dhalgren. Toronto, New York, London, Sydney, Auckland: Bantam Books, 1975. p. 607
[3]Breillat, Catherine. Pornocracy. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Native Agents Series, 2005. p.39
[4]Recoil. Want. Mute, 2000.
[5]Zizek, Slavoj. Lacan. Przewodnik Krytyki Politycznej. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2008. p.73

eCARDS FOR BELOVED ONE(s)

someecards

SERRES

". . . to proceed cautiously towards the desperately desired opening; these are things I know about the body." (17)

"I touch one of my lips with my middle finger. Consciousness resides in this contact. I begin to examine it. It is often hidden in a fold of tissue, lip against lip, tongue against palate, teeth touching teeth, closed eyelids, contracted sphincters, a hand clenched into a fist, fingers pressed against each other, the back of one thigh crossed over the front of the other, or one foot resting on the other. I wager that the small, monstrous homunculus, each part of which is proportional to the magnitude of the sensations it feels, increases in size and swells at these automorphic points, when the skin tissue folds in on itself. Skin on skin becomes conscious, as does skin on mucus membrane and mucus membrane on itself. Without this folding, without the contact of the self on itself, there would truly be no internal sense, no body properly speaking, coenesthesia even less so, no real image of the body; we would live without consciousness; slippery smooth and on the point of fading away. Klein bottles are a model of identity. We are the bearers of skewed, not quite flat, unreplicated surfaces, deserts over which consciousness passes fleetingly, leaving no memory. Consciousness belongs to those singular moments when the body is tangential to itself." (22)

"Dense and blue, the body burns with stray languages. Empty like the tent, it leaves behind its jewels and regrets their absence: DESIRE. At the end of the fifteenth century, this term retains its Latin meaning, nostalgia, more than it embodies the contemporary meanings of lust and covetousness." (57)

"Loving a body, that rare special thing; no other volume on the surface of the planet has more value. Love confuses us; two chambers pouring together. Lingering near the surface of skins - veils, complex and subtle tissues - this or that indefinable scent, belonging exclusively to her or to him and signifying each one to the other, in consent. We do not love unless our senses of smell find themselves in improbable accord, a miracle of recognition between the invisible traces which scud over our naked skins, as air and clouds float above the ground. Until death there remains within us this spirit, in the chemical and mystical sense of the written and spoken word; as far as the nose is concerned, the emanations of whomever we have loved remain. It returns to haunt our skin, at dawn on certain mornings. Love perfumes our lives, aromas resurrect encounters in all their splendour." (171)

Michel Serres The Five Senses. A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies

"030"

This is probably too pretentiously fetishistic and not very subtle in terms of sexual imagery, and might as well be considered cheaply commercial (lingerie, necklace and interiors definitely appeal to my parvenu female sensibility), and additionally, I wouldn't personally call it "guitar porn" [http://uncoy.com/2010/10/guitar-porn.html], at worst nymphomaniac groupie erotica or frotteurism and it's not sensational for its tawdry pro-porn feminist emotionality, yet no matter how fake this is, the ruttishness is entrancing and I buy it. I also couldn't help to recall another rock song for wild fornication, the way she bats her eyes...