Fuses, again

Donald Richie's comment on the denigration of women in pornography has reminded me of a text I posted here almost two years ago, and which I cannot resist linking once again.

And can any human being in her/his right mind wish for anything else than to inhabit a relationship in this way -- no hierarchies, no denigration or objectification of anyone? Just the sheer joy of intimacy and trust.

Fuses, or: inhabited bodies.

'the nymph with the broken back', or: enduring misogynistic clichés...

Scene from Alban Berg's Lulu
Soloists, English National Opera, 2005
http://www.musicweb-international.com/SandH/2005/Jan-Jun05/lulu1804.htm

Enduring but most definitely not endearing clichés.

And wouldn't it be wonderful indeed—a sign of genuine, humane Progress—if men and women began to see, through the glossy veneer of aestheticised morbid violence, what these images really stand for and the profoundly sad truths they convey?

Again: sic transit gloria mundi...

*       *       *

The term masochism was invented by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who, in his Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), linked the phenomenon he defined as "the wish to suffer pain and be subjected to force" (86) to the name of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, a popular author of the period whose heroes usually spent their time in enthusiastic pursuit of maltreatment. But Kraft-Ebing saw the phenomenon of masochism as being a true "perversion" only in men. "In woman," he contended, "voluntary subjection to the opposite sex is a physiological phenomenon. Owing to her passive role in procreation and long-existent social conditions, ideas of subjection are, in woman, normally connected with the idea of sexual relations. They form, so to speak, the harmonics which determine the tone-quality of feminine feeling." Nature itself, Kraft-Ebing insisted, has given woman "an instinctive inclination to voluntary subordination to man; [who] will notice that exaggeration of customary gallantry is very distasteful to women, and that a deviation from it in the direction of masterful behavior, though loudly reprehended, is often accepted with secret satisfaction. Under the veneer of polite society the instinct of feminine servitude is everywhere discernible" (130).

The late-nineteenth-century male thus had it from the very highest, most advanced "scientific" authority that women, even if they might seem to indicate otherwise, wanted to be beaten and subjected to violence. In addition to being instructed by what Kraft-Ebing was saying, men were by 1893 being reassured by such other eminent--and widely read--authorities as Lombroso and Ferrero, that the "normal woman is naturally less sensitive to pain than a man" (The Female Offender, 150), so that there was clearly absolutely no reason to be squeamish about pushing women around a bit. On the basis of the "findings" of these and other "scientific" observers, the proponents of dualistic thought thus installed another durable antifeminine myth whose ramifications still echo daily through the popular arts of our time. In the literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries an author's adherence to the theory that women just naturally liked to be beaten was a sign of extreme intellectual sophistication. It was an indication that one was truly well informed about matters of scientific interest. . . .

In France, Pierre Louys, in Woman and Puppet (1898), had the perverse heroine of that novel, Concha, respond in spasms of yelping ardor to the narrator's violent attack upon her, during which "for perhaps a quarter of an hour" he "struck her with the regularity of a peasant pounding a flail . . . and always on the same spots, the top of the head and the left shoulder" (218). In a paroxysm of masochistic ecstasy she cries, "How well you have beaten me, my heart! How sweet it was! How good it felt--" Later Concha confesses to her attacker that if she told him lies, it was specifically "to have you beat me, Mateo. When I feel your strength, I love you, I love you so; you cannot imagine how happy it makes me weep because of you." And, beguilingly, she asks, "Mateo, will you beat me again? Promise me that you will beat me hard! You will kill me! Tell me that you will kill me!" (220)

Like Louys' heroine, Frank Wedekind's Lulu, the archetypal woman at the center of his play Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box (as well as Alban Berg's opera based on Wedekind's plays) does not really become interested in a man until he becomes violent toward her. To one of her early lovers she exults, "How proud I am that you will do anything to humiliate me! You degrade me as deep as a man can degrade a woman . . ." (77). For Lulu, as for Concha, the male's violence toward her is supposed to be proof of her power over her man, and this knowledge presumably makes that violence an erotic stimulus for her. The dictum pronounced by another of the men in Lulu's life, that "beating or love-making, it's all one to a woman" (122), had become one of the most common clichés among intellectuals at the turn of the century. . . .

It is clear that few of the anti-feminine clichés which had become institutionalized by the 1890s have had a more immediately destructive influence on the daily lives of women throughout the twentieth century than this particular pair of male wishfulfilling items of late-nineteenth century "scientific" knowledge. This is the period in which recourse to scientific truth rather than "faith" became the principal justification for the brutal and widespread oppression of human beings on the basis of race and sex, and for the institutionalization of concepts which ultimately led to the blanket justification of violence done to others because one group had decided that another "had asked for it." The women-want-to-be-raped theory is an integral part of the overall self-serving pattern of the rationalization of aggression which still dominates the world today, and which was crucial to the development of the imperialist mentality at the turn of the century.

It may seem a rather bathetic mismatch of causes to point to the supinely sprawling feminine nudes favored by painters of the Paris salons as a contributing factor to the spread of the aggressive mentality in the late nineteenth-century life. But inevitably the mentality of rape, whether it be personal and physical or cultural and intellectual, requires that guilt and temptation, and hence the justification for punishment, are to be seen in the other, in this case the woman. All too often the gestures and expressions of ecstatic transport accompanying the supine posture of these nudes suggest a perverse excess of erotic abandonment as the origin of the women's forced posture, as if somehow, in the midst of an intense spasm of uncontrollable desire, they had succeeded in breaking their own backs, thereby dooming themselves to stay forever paralyzed and helpless in the distorted position in which the artist chose to paint them. The sprawling nymphs' helpless postures, joined with their obvious ecstasy, thus suggested quite deliberately to the viewer that these women were, so to speak, "asking to be raped." 

--Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture (0xford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 101-05. [emphases added]

Arthur Hacker (1858-1919), "Leaf Drift" (1902)

a season in purgatory (6)

Sexual helplessness bears monsters of perversion. Symposia of Amazons, and other horrible themes. A threefold cycle: Carmen-Gretchen-Isolde. A Nana cycle, Théâtre des Femmes. Disgust: a lady, the upper part of her body lying on a table, spills a vessel filled with disgusting things.

--Paul Klee, Diaries.

Another perplexing contradiction in Kyoka's depictions of women (or of 'Woman', as he never really describes real women, but an archetypal, ghostly femininity): on the one hand, he has been regarded as a fierce critic of the then new ethics of Meiji society that pursued worldly success at all costs, to which he opposed, in the gothic tradition of Poe, love as a substitute for social and economic power. Yet, on the other hand, his fascination with women as the embodiment of evil was also unwittingly attuned to that very same emerging ethos within which the evolving male was expected to combine an attitude of socioeconomic belligerence and distrust of others with an ideal of personal sacrifice or abstinence in the service of worldly success.

Such dynamics were already at full throttle in the West, as Bram Dijkstra illustrates in his wonderfully provocative study Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture:

The symphonic incantations of ever newly curving female bodies were like the choral movements of a satanic invitation to worldly abandon. Women offered melodies of cradled melancholy to the laboring brain of sainted masculinity. Steely-browed and lean-loined Ulysses sailed past these aching calls, seeking financial self-sufficiency among the shoals of vice. The late nineteenth-century middle-class male already knew that Superman's ego was powered by gold. He feared that the Kryptonite of beauty could only weaken the essence of a transcendent power he knew to embed in his seed. Even the thought of a strong woman with a will, a mind, and wishes of her own was enough to weaken the musculature of a selfhood nourished by the bitter herb of monetary gain. The ardor of man's will to power seemed to shrivel into insignificance before the tumescent homage of his body to the wonder of a woman radiant with life and unmoved by the commands of cash. (p. 235)

(The recently) modern Japan, of course, had its own blend of native and imported traditions—Shintoism, Buddhism, Confucianism—which, combined with the newly imported Western logic of capitalism, did even more ruthlessly contribute to put women in their proper place. (And thus the 'natural order of things' has been, to this very day.)

Hence the wanderers and the 'holy men' who traverse the anxiety-ridden sexual territory of Kyoka's stories are not, ironically, that different from the men of the business world he so intensely despised for their lack of refinement and taste. What all these male 'ascetic' figures have in common is their search for some form of transcendence and their ultimate determination to keep Woman within her role as the soft, passive human clay that can be molded according to male fantasies and perceptions concerning the structures of ideal beauty and behaviour.

The idyll is shattered, lo and behold, when she slithers out of the frame of domestic bliss and motherly self-negation to reveal, in Dijkstra's words, 'the animal beneath the veneer of civilization with which the poetic spirit of man had covered her'—'a swamp, a palpitating expanse of instinctive physical greed whose primary natural function [is] to try to catch, engulf and, if possible, absorb the male and make him subservient to her simplistic physical needs' (p. 237).

And in Kyoka, as usual, the escape from such predicament is self-denial and/in death.

*       *       *

My base desires had brought me to this, to this point of indecision. As long as I could see her face and hear her voice, what did it matter if she and her idiot husband shared a bed? At least it would be better than enduring endless austerities and living out my days as a monk.

I made up my mind to go back to her, but just as I stepped back from the rock , someone tapped me on the shoulder. "Hey, Monk."

I had been caught at my weakest moment. Feeling small and ashamed, I looked up, expecting to see a messenger from Hell. What I saw instead was the old man I had met at the woman's cottage. . . .

"What are you doing here?" he asked me. "You should be used to this kind of heat, or did you stop for something else? You're only twelve miles from where you were last night. If you'd been walking hard, you'd be in the village giving thanks to Jizo by now.

"Or maybe you've been thinking about that woman. Your earthly passions are stirred, aren't they? Don't try to hide it. I may be a bleary-eyed old man, but I can still tell black from white. Anyone normal wouldn't still be human after a bath with her. Take your pick. Cow? Horse? Monkey? Toad? Bat? You're lucky you're not going to be flying or hopping around for the rest of your life. When you came up from the river and hadn't been turned into some other animal, I couldn't believe my eyes. Lucky you! I guess your faith saved you. . . .

"So now that you know her story, you probably feel sorry for her. You want to gather firewood and haul water for the woman, don't you? I'm afraid your lustful nature has been awakened, Brother. Of course, you don't call it lust. You'd rather call it mercy or sympathy. I know you're thinking of hurrying back to the mountains. But you'd better think twice. Since becoming the idiot's wife, she's forgotten how the world behaves and does only as she pleases. She takes any man she wants. And when she tires of him, she turns him into an animal, just like that. No one escapes. 

"And the river that carved out of these mountains? Since the flood, it's become a strange and mysterious stream that both seduces men and restores her beauty. Even a witch pays a price for casting spells. Her hair gets tangled. Her skin becomes pale. She turns haggard and thin. But then she bathes in the river and is restored to the way she was. That's how her youthful beauty gets replenished. She says 'Come,' and the fish swim to her. She looks at a tree, and its fruit falls into her palm. If she holds her sleeves up, it starts to rain. If she raises her eyebrows, the wind blows.

"She was born with a lustful nature, and she likes young men best of all. I wouldn't be surprised if she said something sweet to you. But even if her words were insincere, as soon as she gets tired of you, a tail will sprout, your ears will wiggle, your legs will grow longer, and suddenly you'll be changed into something else.

"I wish you could see what the witch is going to look like after she's had her fill of this fish—sitting there with her legs crossed, drinking wine.

"So curb your wayward thoughts, Good Monk, and get away as quickly as you can. You've been lucky enough as it is. She must have felt something special for you, otherwise you wouldn't be here. You've been through a miracle and you're still young, so get on with your duties like you really mean it." The old man slapped me on the back again. Dangling the carp from his hand, he started up the mountain road.

I watched him grow smaller in the distance until he disappeared behind the mass of a large mountain. From the top of that mountain, a cloud rapidly blossomed into the drought-cleared sky. Over the quiet rush of the waterfall, I could hear the rolling echoes of clapping thunder.

Standing there like a cast-off shell, I returned to my senses. Filled with gratitude for the old man, I took up my walking staff, adjusted my sedge hat, and ran down the trail. By the time I reached the village, it was already raining on the mountain. It was an impressive storm. Thanks to the rain, the carp the old man was carrying probably reached the woman's cottage alive.

This, then, was the monk's story. He didn't bother to add a moral to the tale. We went our separate ways the next morning, and I was filled with sadness as I watched him begin his ascent into the snow-covered mountains. The snow was falling lightly. As he gradually made his way up the mountain road, the holy man of Mount Koya seemed to be riding on the clouds.

--Izumi Kyoka, ‘The Holy Man of Mount Koya’ (1900), from Japanese Gothic Tales, trans. Charles Shiro Inouye (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), pp. 65-72.

.

a season in purgatory (5)

I have been focusing on 'One Day in Spring', my favourite story by Kyoka, but it is in 'The Holy Man of Mount Koya' that his recurrent themes, and, in particular, his morbid misogyny and truncated eroticism are more explicitly aestheticized. Images of a dangerous, violent, deadly nature recur and are inextricably associated with the woman who seduces and tempts the hero. She personifies throughout the regressive, atavistic, bestial element in woman's 'nature'—taking men, ensnaring them, and, once tired of them, turning the hopeless creatures into animals.

The ultimate symbol of the male's sense of fear and need for female nurturing, she is invariably encountered in the water, her privileged milieu. And it is here that the mendicant, on the verge of yielding to temptation and giving up his ascetic life, withdraws in hesitation and fear.

Once again, in the climactic scene of the tale, he does not take her into his arms but sees the woman being ravished by the dark, turbulent waters. 

Once again, violence and death prevail—and, with them, the failure of love in passivity.

*       *       *

To tell the truth, ever since I had left her earlier that morning this single idea dominated my thoughts. No snakes spanned my path, and I encountered no leech-filled forest. Still, though the way might continue to be hard, bringing tribulation to my body and soul, I realized that my pilgrimage was senseless. My dreams of someday donning a purple surplice and living in a final monastery meant nothing to me. And to be called a living Buddha by others and to be thronged with crowds of worshippers could only turn my stomach with the stench of humanity. . . .

After the woman put the idiot [husband] to sleep, she came back out to my room. She told me that rather than going back to a life of self-denial, I ought to stay by her side in the cottage by the river, there where the summer is cool and the winter mild. Had I given in to her for that reason alone, you'd probably say that I had been bewitched by her beauty. But in my own defense let me say that I truly felt sorry for her. How would it be to live in that isolated mountain cottage as the idiot's bed partner, not able to communicate, feeling you were slowly forgetting how to talk?

That morning when she said goodbye in the dawning light, I was reluctant to leaver her. She regretted never being able to see me again, spending the rest of her life in such a place. She also said that should I ever see white peach petals flowing upon a stream, however small, I would know that she had thrown herself into a river and was being torn apart bit by bit. She was dejected, but her kindness never failed. She told me to follow the river, that it would lead me to the next village. The water dancing and tumbling over a waterfall would be my sign that houses were nearby. Pointing out the road, she saw me off, walking along with me until her cottage had disappeared behind us.

Though we would never walk hand in hand as man and wife, I kept thinking I could still be her companion, there to comfort her morning and night. I would prepare the firewood and she would do the cooking. I would gather nuts and she would shell them. We would work together, I on the veranda and she inside, talking to each other, laughing together. The two of us would go to the river. She would take off her clothes and stand beside me. Her breath upon my back, delicate fragrance of her petals. For that  I would gladly lose my life!

Staring at the waterfall, I tortured myself with these thoughts. Even now when I think back on it, I break out in a cold sweat. I was totally exhausted, both physically and spiritually. I had set off at a fast pace and my legs had grown weary. Even if I was returning to the civilized world, I knew that the best I could expect was some old crone with bad breath offering me a cup of tea. I could care less about making it to the village, and so I sat down on a rock and looked over the edge at the waterfall. Afterward, I learned it was called the Husband and Wife Falls. . . .

The smaller stream was trying to leap over the rock and cling to the larger flow, but the jutting stone separated them cleanly, preventing even a single drop from making it to the other side. The waterfall, thrown about and tormented, was weary and gaunt, its sound like sobbing or someone's anguished cries.  This was the sad yet gentle wife.

The husband, by contrast, fell powerfully, pulverizing the rocks below and penetrating the earth. It pained me to see the two fall separately, divided by that rock. The brokenhearted wife was like a beautiful woman clinging to someone, sobbing and trembling. As I watched from the safety of the bank, I started to shake and my flesh began to dance. When I remember how I had bathed with the woman in the headwaters of this stream, my imagination pictured her inside the falling water, now being swept under, now rising again, her skin disintegrating and scattering like flower petals amid a thousand unruly streams of water. I gasped at the sight, and immediately she was whole again—the same face, body, breasts, arms, and legs, rising and sinking, suddenly dismembered, them appearing again. Unable to bear the sight, I felt myself plunging headlong into the fall and taking the water into my embrace. Returning to my senses, I heard the earthshaking roar of the husband, calling to the mountain spirits and roaring on its way. With such strength, why wasn't he trying to rescue her? I would save her! No matter what the cost.

--Izumi Kyoka, ‘The Holy Man of Mount Koya’ (1900), from Japanese Gothic Tales, trans. Charles Shiro Inouye (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), pp. 62-65.

.

a season in purgatory (4)

"In a nap at midday, I met my beloved." He returned to the poem. "Then did I begin to believe in the things called dreams." . . .

He had just seen a dream, but then—

What about dreams? he thought. He felt as though he were seeing one now. If you wake up and realize you were asleep, then you know you were dreaming. But if you never wake up, how could it be a dream? Didn't someone say that the only difference between the mad and the sane is the length of one's periods of insanity? Like waves that grow wild in a blowing wind, everyone has times of madness. But the wind soon calms, and the waves end in a soothing dance. If not, then we begin to lose our minds, we who ply the seas of this floating world. And on the day that we pray for repose yet find no reprieve from the winds, we become seasick. Becoming seasick, we quickly go mad.

How perilous!

We find ourselves in the same situation when our dreams don't stop. If we can wake up, it's a dream. If we can't, then it's our reality. And yet, if it is in our dreams that we meet the people we love, why wouldn't we dream as much as we could? If the world asks, 'What's gotten into him?' The dreamer answers, 'Here I am,' fluttering in tandem with another butterfly, enjoying his enlightenment.

--Izumi Kyoka, ‘One Day in Spring’ (1906), from Japanese Gothic Tales, trans. Charles Shiro Inouye (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), pp. 115-16.

a season in purgatory (3)

"There you go again. If you doubt me that much, then I'll have to spell it out for you." [She said.] "See this glorious grass? These trees? They have blood and passion. They're hot beneath the sun's red light, and the earth is warm like skin. The light penetrates the bamboo grove, and the blossoms are without shadows. They bloom like fire, and when they flutter down unto the water, the stream becomes a red lacquered cup that slowly floats away. The ocean is blue wine, and the sky . . ."

She turned the white palm of her hand so it was facing upward.

"The sky is like a green oil. Viscous. No clouds, but still murky and full of dreams. The mountains are stuffed like velvet pillows. Here and there, the heat waves shimmer like thick coils of smoke rising fragrantly into the sleeves of a kimono. The larks are singing. In some faraway vale, the nightingale is calling, 'Isn't life a pleasure?' It has all its needs, and not a complaint to make. On a bright sunny afternoon like this, you close your eyes and right away you're drowsily dreaming. What do you think?"

"I don't know what I think." He looked away from the brightness of the spring day that her words had conjured. He focused on her.

"What are you feeling?"

He didn't answer.

"Are you having fun?"

"Fun?"

"Are you filled with joy?"

"Joy?"

"Do you feel alive?"

"Do you?" he countered.

"No, I feel sick, just the way I did when I saw you for the first time."

The wanderer sighed and took back his walking stick. Grabbing it with both hands, he held it near his knees, as if punting in the sea of love. Then he folded his arms and found himself staring at her.

--Izumi Kyoka, ‘One Day in Spring’ (1906), from Japanese Gothic Tales, trans. Charles Shiro Inouye (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), pp. 124-25.

a season in purgatory (2)

Kannon, Goddess of Mercy! The wanderer silently prayed for help. His defenses had all come to naught.

"Your stockings are all covered with mud. Why don't you take them off and let me have them cleaned? I live right over there."

He hastily pulled back from her fingers as they reached for his leg. He collapsed onto the embankment, then sat up, the nape of his neck hot because of the warm grass. He was sweating. His face was flushed. His eyes were blinded by the intense spring light.

"Forget about my stupid stockings." His words sounded like something a second-rate storyteller would say. He shuddered. When his vision finally became clear, the woman was picking up his walking stick. She held it gracefully with both hands and stood before him in a relaxed fashion.

Her sash was tied with its end hanging freely. Her lined kimono fit loosely on her shoulders. With the slight movement of her body, the crimson silk slipped down slightly over the edge of her sky-blue sash. The style of her clothing hardly matched the walking stick. She looked pitiful, crushed by love's burden, as if she was being held captive in place of her husband.

"Thank you so much." Again, she took the initiative. "I'm not sure what I should do." Her eyes were half-closed in thought. She seemed worried and weighed down with sadness, like the blind when they sigh. "I shouldn't have said that. I really didn't mean it that way. I didn't want to say I began feeling ill because I saw you. Even if that were true, how could I say such a thing? I saw you. And then I started to feel ill. . . ."

She repeated what she had just said, whispering to herself. "Please. I know you understand what I'm trying to say." She came closer and sat down. Leaning back, she spread her sleeves out on the the embankment. She parted the green spring grass with her shoulder. Their skirts spread out toward the wheat field before them.

"I didn't mean to insult you. You understand, don't you?"

"Yes."

"You do?"

He nodded, but he still seemed to be bothered by something.

"You're mean for getting mad at someone because of the way they talk," she said.

What a disagreeable woman! He looked at her, feeling as if he had to defend himself. "You should talk. I didn't get mad at you for the way you said it. You're the one with a bad temper. All I was doing was repeating what you said to me."

"Yes, and you lost your temper."

"No, I didn't. I was going to apologize."

"But you should have known what I really meant. It's a matter of expression, you know. Like a morning-glory leaf. From the top it looks thin and flat, but underneath it's quite full. You should listen to the underside of language."

"The underside of language? Now just wait a minute." He closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and took a breath. "You're trying to tell me you meant the opposite of getting your feelings hurt. Which is this: that after you saw me, you felt better right? So why don't you just leave me alone? It's perfectly clear that you're just playing around." He took her to task but laughed as he did.

She stared at him coolly. "You're such a complicated man. What did I say to make you talk that way to me? You shouldn't pick on people who are weaker than you. Can't you see I'm suffering?"

She put her hand on the grass and moved her knee. "Listen to what I have to say. All right?" She smiled as if enraptured. Her mouth was so seductive it seemed as though her teeth had been dyed black. "Let's suppose there's someone I dream about all the time, someone I long for. Can you imagine that?"

--Izumi Kyoka, ‘One Day in Spring’ (1906), from Japanese Gothic Tales, trans. Charles Shiro Inouye (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), pp. 121-23.

.

a season in purgatory (1)

“It’s almost impossible to tell you how this sunny spring makes me feel. It’s like talking about a dream. This quiet sadness. Can’t you feel it? It’s like seeing the most vivid part of a dream, don’t you think? . . . 

“I feel more vulnerable in the spring than in the fall. That’s why I’m so damp. This isn’t sweat. It’s something the sun has wrung from my heart. Not pain, not distress. More like blood being squeezed from the tips of a tree’s tender leaves, as though my bones are being extracted and my skin is being melted. Yes, that’s the perfect expression for times like this. I feel like I’ve turned into water, as though what’s being melted of me will soon disappear, and that there will be tears—though neither of sadness nor of joy. 

“Sometimes you cry when someone scolds you. Other times you cry when someone comforts you. But on a spring day like today, your tears are of this latter kind. I suppose they’re sad. Yet there are different types of sadness. If fall is the sorrow of nature, then spring is the anguish of human life. . . . 

“Invited by a warm, gentle wind, the soul becomes a dandelion blossom that suddenly turns into cotton and blows away. It’s the feeling of fading into death after seeing paradise with your own eyes. Knowing its pleasure, you also understand that heaven is vulnerable, unreliable, sad. 

--Tamawaki Mio in ‘One Day in Spring’ (1906), from Izumi Kyoka, Japanese Gothic Tales, trans. Charles Shiro Inouye (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), pp. 125-26. 

*       *       *

In time of departures, thinking of beginnings. Of what once brought me here, of what awoke the passion—and, later, the disappointment.

Of why the fascination never ends.

My view of Japan was always from the ground, between the country and the city, working, living among Japanese people. I was never one to seek company among groups of expats, be they struggling academic researchers or well-off Roppongi types.

Yet, at the same time, mine was always a Japan of the mind, because fundamentally mediated by literature. It was in certain Japanese writers, in their words and images, that I have found something which resonates deeply within me and with which I have played hide-and-seek ever since. Something I cannot fully explain but that is at once universal and unique, as is the hallmark of all great art.

While I did feel the initial attraction for the quaint and pretty vanishing Japan of the Western exotes—Lafcadio Hearn, Pierre Loti, Wenceslau de Moraes—it soon struck me as stereotypical, remote, outdated.

What I was looking for and have found, heartbreakingly, here is a dark and unsettling truth that, once one touches it, one cannot but recoil—in horror, in disgust, and, above all, in sadness. One cannot avoid seeing and thinking of it, though, at times judgmentally, at times sympathetically, but never with indifference.

Were I to name the writer who has struck the deepest chord with me in this respect, it would be Izumi Kyoka. His tales of madness and death sound so quintessentially Japanese, and yet so archetypal and thus universal in the human struggles, oppressions, inequities, and impossibilities they embody.

As a feminist—that is, as someone who is committed to social change in order to achieve more balanced,  fairer and thus happier relationships between women and men—what puzzles me in Kyoka is, on the one hand, his sympathetic depictions of witty and lovely female heroines, who, precisely because of their wit and loveliness, are crushed by a brutal, callous patriarchal society that values them only for their outer beauty and fertility. They are never more than coadjutants, helpers, or mere toys. Countess Kifune in ‘The Surgery Room’ (1895), Tamawaki Mio in 'One Day in Spring’ (1906), among others: their desire for love, their lives stifled and destroyed by a society that oppresses the true emotions of people. These women are invariably bright and beautiful, weak and strong, passionate and pure-hearted, but also mad and downtrodden.

And herein lies the 'on the other hand’, the all-pervasive double standard that has haunted the male images of femininity, time out of mind: Woman as maternal, nurturing, but also as dangerously alluring; Woman as the saviour of Man but as someone who must be subjected to unspeakable suffering and sacrifice to qualify for the honour of bringing the male his inner peace. There is no doubt as to who remains at the centre, shaken and embattled at times, but fundamentally immovable in the end. Woman is to be fought as a demon or altogether avoided; or, even worse: Woman is to be placed on a pedestal and lovingly revered as a being from a distant star, divinely powerful. She has no agency in this world though, no subjectivity, no reality. In a word, she is better dead—or asleep or subdued—than alive. (Some call this misogyny, but who am I to stick on labels?)

All these sexist stereotypes trammelling women have existed in the West, under different guises, since time immemorial. Yet in Japan they assume particularly disturbing sexual overtones, because Japanese masculinity is so grounded in the psychology of amae—mother-dependent sons who never really grow up—and Japanese femininity trapped in the interplay of female spoiling and male dependence. The dominance of the mother in this culture is what has, ironically, perpetuated what Chizuko Ueno coined the Japanese 'transvestite patriarchy': a patriarchy that cloaks itself in femininity, making thus women's situation more complicated and the struggle against male dominance more difficult.

Charles Shiro Inouye, in the magisterial Introduction to his selected translations, argues that Kyoka’s sexually hesitant heroes mark ‘the birth of the weak male’, the beginning of a process of male regression that is so blatantly obvious to anyone familiar with contemporary Japanese society. In Kyoka, the sexually immature, neurotic male is tempted and crazed by a desire which he rarely has the courage to test and which remains therefore unfulfilled, as in ‘The Holy Man of Mt. Koya’ (1900). To quote Inouye again: 'They make beauty, not love'… A truncated eroticism.

And this seems to happen not so much out of moral principles but because of the male’s impossible attempt to reconcile Woman as nurturer and Woman as lover. Maternal and erotic love can only meld in death, out of this world. Love’s fulfillment is thus always linked to death and lovers must die to be together, as Countess Kifune and Doctor Takamine do in 'The Surgery Room':

Although their graves are in different places—one in the hills of Aoyama, one downtown in Yanaka—the countess and Doctor Takamine died together, one after the other, on the same day.

Religious thinkers of the world, I pose this question to you. Should these two lovers be found guilty and denied entrance into heaven? (p. 20)

Or as in the drowned corpses at the end of ‘One Day in Spring’:

The boy’s head was like a jewel pressed against the woman’s breast, the red lion’s cape still wet and tangled around her white arm. Beautiful and alluring, Tamawaki Mio had finally discovered the destination of the dead.
The wanderer would never forget how they had parted at the embankment, how he had looked back and seen her, holding her purple parasol to the side, her black hair weighing down upon her as she watched him walk away. As the sand on the beach spread and drew back soundlessly, hollowing out and filling back in, he thought of how the waves must have ravished her. From the sand there appeared only beautiful bones and the color of shells—red of the sun, white of the beach, green of the waves. (pp. 139-40)

And it is here that Kyoka’s unsettling ambivalence lies, as well as my own ambivalence towards him and the world he stands for. A world where oppression and death are viewed as beautiful and virtuous, and which has bred both images of striking beauty and the most dangerous, wrongheaded delusions and mistakes.

Not a heaven, most definitely, but a purgatory of unfulfilled love and lost souls, epitomised in Kyoka’s strangely oppressing, dark Spring.

.

twists of fate... (3)

... or how much less fun life would be without certain amusing sexist stereotypes.

A recent chat with a friend has brought back memories of this absolutely glorious videoclip, which I so much cherished in my salad days.

Some displays of masculinity are eternal indeed, like the white knight upon a fiery steed or the superman sweeping you off your feet.

The crack of the whip, the pistol point, the shiny, racy red car...

And these lovely lads, of course.


Still holding out for a hero, after all these years!

Bonnie Tyler, Holding Out for a Hero


Where have all the good men gone
And where are all the gods?
Where's the street-wise Hercules
To fight the rising odds?
Isn't there a white knight upon a fiery steed?
Late at night I toss and turn and dream
of what I need

[Chorus]

I need a hero
I'm holding out for a hero 'til the end of the night
He's gotta be strong
And he's gotta be fast
And he's gotta be fresh from the fight
I need a hero
I'm holding out for a hero 'til the morning light
He's gotta be sure
And it's gotta be soon
And he's gotta be larger than life

Somewhere after midnight
In my wildest fantasy
Somewhere just beyond my reach
There's someone reaching back for me
Racing on the thunder end rising with the heat
It's gonna take a superman to sweep me off my feet

[Chorus]

Up where the mountains meet the heavens above
Out where the lightning splits the sea
I would swear that there's someone somewhere
Watching me

Through the wind end the chill and the rain
And the storm and the flood
I can feel his approach
Like the fire in my blood

twists of fate... (1)

Dicksee, Chivalry, 1885.
Source:
http://www.qwiki.com/q/?_escaped_fragment_=/Damsel_in_distress

... or how so very often the would-be saviour, the rescuer of damsels in distress turns out to be the one in dire need of being saved (from himself).

Or how the smasher ends up smashed.

Goodness gracious, how I hate sanctimoniousness indeed. More and more.

in response...

... to a recent conversation with an old friend, I was reminded of something I posted here a while ago and which I still fully endorse. The conversation focused on the perplexities of an increasing number of impoverished, self-deluded, disembodied, dispirited lives - or shall I say 'lifestyles' instead? - spent around pseudo-anonymous social networking websites, porn, online wanking, etc. - revealing, above all, a depressing inability or fear to become emotionally committed to someone (which has nothing whatsoever to do with formal, institutional commitments such as marriage, arghh...).

While no one, virtually no one, can purport to be immune to this kind of non-existence in our difficult times so averse to risk, I personally resist it as much as I can to preserve a minimum degree of sanity & groundedness.

So, here's to you, chérie, with a toast to what's left of a lived life!


========================


Fuses, or: inhabited bodies

Until we solve the mystery of sexuality, contemplation of kaleidoscopic genitalia - from glossy and nubile to lank and withered - will remain an interesting and important exercise in human self-discovery. . . .

Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of its romantic veneer. No one can claim to be an expert in gender studies who is uncomfortable with pornography, which focuses on our primal identity, our rude and crude animality. Porn dreams of eternal fires of desire, without fatigue, incapacity, aging or death. What feminists denounce as woman's humiliating total accessibility in porn is actually her elevation to high priestess of a pagan paradise garden, where the body has become a bountiful fruit tree and where growth and harvest are simultaneous. "Dirt" is contamination to the Christian but fertile loam to the pagan. The most squalid images in porn are shock devices to break down bourgeois norms of decorum, reserve, and tidiness.

The Dionysian body fluids, fully released to coat every gleaming surface, return us to the full-body sensuality of the infant condition. In crowded orgy tableaux, like those on Hindu temples, matter and energy melt. In the cave spaces of porn, camera lights are torches of the Eleusinian Mysteries, giving us flashes of nature's secrets.


Camille Paglia, 'No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality', in Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (London: Viking, 1995), pp. 66-67.

************************************


While I do acknowledge the cogency of Paglia's argument - porn has no doubt a 'ritualistic' and didactic role to play and will always exist and be in great demand - there is something about it that deeply upsets me because so impoverishing. Sex seen in the crudest of lights and stripped of everything that makes it meaningful and worthwhile: intimacy, tenderness, the ambiguous play of light and shadow, the sense of an actual lived and shared life. A fully inhabited body. There is indeed a huge difference between something done to you or something that you do to someone and something you do with someone.

For a glimpse into the sheer beauty of the joyful chaos, naturalness, emotional and sensuous intensity of meaningful, inhabited sex - an inhabitedness no amount of porn or occasional intercourse between strangers will ever, ever replace - I can only vividly recommend Carolee Schneemann's Fuses (1964-67), an experimental erotic film that should figure prominently in every history of avant-garde and feminist film.

Fuses, 1964-67.
Film still.

A silent film of collaged and painted sequences of lovemaking between Schneemann and her then partner, composer James Tenney; observed by the cat, Kitch.

"...I wanted to see if the experience of what I saw would have any correspondence to what I felt-- the intimacy of the lovemaking... And I wanted to put into that materiality of film the energies of the body, so that the film itself dissolves and recombines and is transparent and dense-- as one feels during lovemaking... It is different from any pornographic work that you've ever seen-- that's why people are still looking at it! And there's no objectification or fetishization of the woman." –Carolee Schneemann

Source: http://www.caroleeschneemann.com/fuses.html

soft or hard, that is the question...

Despite all the mumbling & grumbling, one's professional survival in the academic world depends more and more on getting published, so there's no alternative but to grab the bull by its horns when you have to. Seizing these precious few weeks unburdened by teaching commitments, I've been writing and re-writing a couple of papers and book reviews for (possible) publication.

One of the texts I'm currently working on is a study of images of "female nature" in contemporary women performance and land artists. Ever the sceptic, I've been reading through, half amused and half irritated, a pile of books on different brands of feminism, variously committed to celebrating, dismissing, deconstructing, etc., the persistent association of "woman" with "nature". Having no vocation or patience whatsoever for the impenetrable (literally) theoretical elucubrations of sisterhoods of resented lesbians and tomboys, I decided to explore other less... erm... dense critical discourses, namely one that goes by the name of ecofeminism.

While I tend to empathize with some of their goals & tenets, I nearly always end up with a bout of indigestion when I bump into pearls of wisdom such as this one:

Can we understand mortal 'techne' as an overflowing of rich sap, an expressing of warmth and wonder, rather than phallocentrically as an active producing of "man-made" products, mentally directed and often violently erected? (Can we understand the phallus itself as soft and giving rather than hard and penetrating without losing the erection?)

Carol Bigwood, Earth Muse: Feminism, Nature and Art (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993), p. 187.

It's certainly laudable to do away with dichotomies, binary thinking, etc., but... soft without losing the erection, good ladies?... I think you're in serious need of a radical reality call, if not of a good anatomy lesson.

If this is where feminism is heading for (no pun intended!), then I'm so much happier with Paglia's stuffy old non-conformist feminism-with-brass-balls - which, by the way, has the perfect reply to what she intrepidly calls the "granola brigade" and their politically correct pieties:

I have intensely disliked the tendency of many feminists to want men to be remade in a kind of shy, sensitive form - to become, in essence, new kinds of women, contemporary eunuchs with a soft penis, which is less inconvenient to women. I think that this is not in the interests of the human race. We want a hard penis. We want masculine vigor. And I'm afraid that in order to get men macho again, we may have to endure a certain amount of instability in sexual relations. That is, there may have to be a kind of honorable truce between enemy camps.
So what would be my advice to the sexes at the end of the (20th) century? [arms akimbo in fierce, campy drag queen mode] I would say to men: get it up! And to women I would say: deal with it!

Camile Paglia, "The Penis Unsheathed", in Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (London: Viking, 1995), pp. 15-16.


Couldn't agree more, especially these days when you find yourself surrounded by this sinister, invading army of narcissistic metrosexual clones. Perfectly groomed and moisturized, alright, but sexy as ice cubes and boring to death, bah.



[Image: Kanamara Matsuri/Festival of the Steel Phallus, Kawasaki, Japan]

I need a hero... (1)

I often don't know whether to laugh or to cry at some guys who pout feminist rhetoric and all its abstractions & stereotypes, but deep down are scared to death of real, assertive, independent women. And who needs the phoney protection of these chaps, when their ingrained misogyny & bad faith come to the surface at the least provocation?

Mentally little boys still clinging to mommy's skirt, no wonder they prefer to stick to their own kind (and to mommy's skirt), with whom they can indulge in their little fits of temper and live in eternal childhood, amen.

Now, is it my impression or these little horrors are mushrooming everywhere  like sinister clones? O, masculinity, masculinity, where art thou going...? [sigh]

Halloween (and beyond) dilemmas...

After having witnessed, in dismay, the local children's Halloween parade yesterday, I cannot but vividly recommend this useful video to their parents.

Actually, I recommend it to the moms of all Japanese little boys & young men, regardless of their age and whether it's Halloween or not... There you are. ";oP


How To Find A Masculine Halloween Costume For Your Effeminate Son




(Link stolen from Mark Simpson's post "Halloween Dilemmas", with thanks.)

a different kind of intimacy

Again: I guess I'll never be able to solve that relationship of fascination-distaste I have with Karen Finley's work. Yet (or thus?) I find myself returning to her writings over and over again, discovering beautiful, moving moments that redeem it all and reinforce what I have written here apropos another artist I deeply admire.

Indeed, even though I usually dislike putting people & things into little boxes or categories, there is for me a clear-cut distinction between porn - or occasional, no-strings-attached sex between strangers, for that matter - and the sense of an actual lived and shared experience, with all the intense emotional and sexual bonds created within it.

The body does know the difference between that which inhabits it, however fleetingly, however precariously, in the dark, or in the half-light, and that which is just inconsequential, self-gratifying froth.


=========================================================

The lights are out, but we make our way with touch, something velvet and maroon, like bedroom slippers. I take your arm and glide your skin against my thigh. I light the candle of lemon magnolia, and we pass the cedar closet where the towels are kept. Outside is a lake. Our eyes are used to the darkness and a faint new moon, we only met yesterday and still managed to get here. We find the bathroom, it is a room with only a tub, and the hot water still works. You are behind me and you hold my gingham skirt. I left my white cotton panties at the beach. I turn on the water and let the rust wash out and make the water as hot as possible. I pull your linen shirt off of you and your pants down and I run my hands across your chest. In a bottle are sage green salts and I put them in the water. In my skirt are petals of summer roses and orange peel, which I add to your bath. I help you into the water and let you sit and I get on my knees and use the lavender soap. I lather and massage your back and skin. I make a lather and wash your thighs and feet and toes and neck and fingers. I come down to your cock and I massage and let it grow. I keep doing it as I kiss you all wet, as you lay back, and I have your balls in my other hand, holding tight and firm, and the smoothness of your skin - I want to eat you. I push firmly on your cock so it is straight up against your firm belly. I need to touch you now like no other time and I hold the top of your cock and move fast and then slow, so very slow, so very slow, I keep doing it, for you don't want me to stop, and I never will.

Karen Finley, A Different Kind of Intimacy: The Collected Writings of Karen Finley (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2000), p. 331.

un-labelling (4)

The gaps in our knowledge about the specific links between gender and desire raise a broader and even more perplexing question: If you are someone who responds to the person and not his or her gender, then where does your gender fit in? In other words, does fluidity in sexual desire extend to fluidity in gender identity?

Gender identity is defined as an individual's internal psychological experience of being male or female, regardless of how masculine or feminine he or she might appear to other people. The association between sexual orientation and gender identity is a complex and controversial one. [...] Individuals whose gender identities are discordant with their biological sex - that is, women who feel that they are really male, or men who feel that they are really female - are transexuals, not homosexuals. In recent years, the broader term "transgender" has been increasingly used to denote the total spectrum of individuals who experience their gender identity as somewhat fluid, or who experience various degrees of discordance between their gender identities and their physical bodies. [...]

[Fluidity - with respect to both gender and sexuality - raises a dilemma] for all people, female, male, and otherwise. Namely, how do you live a noncategorical life in a rigidly categorical world? [...] No matter how much you might resist putting your identity and your desires into neat and tidy boxes, society still wants you to do so. It is more acceptable to be a man trapped in the body of a woman [or vice-versa!] than to be neither male nor female, neither gay nor straight. [...] [People] who challenge those categories every time they step outside the front door, pay a dear price for their insistence on a different path and a different truth. But they would have it no other way.

Lisa M. Diamond, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2008), pp. 193; 201. [my emphases]

un-labelling (3)

Another possibility [for rethinking sexual orientation in light of person-based attractions] is not a fourth form of sexual orientation but rather an independent characteristic that all individuals possess, in greater or less degrees. To understand how this might work, consider sex drive as an analogy. Among heterosexual and lesbian/gay/bisexual individuals, there are those with strong sex drives and those with weaker sex drives. Having a stong or weak sex drive is not a separate type of orientation; nor does it reveal anything about a person's orientation - it is simply an additional source of variation among people.

Perhaps the capacity for person-based attractions operates in the same way. In other words, maybe there are different types of heterosexual, bisexual, and lesbian/gay individuals - some for whom gender is extremely important, and some for whom it is not. So, for example, a lesbian woman [...] might generally be attracted only to women, but her person-based attractions might periodically trigger attractions to men. Other lesbians might not possess such a capacity, in which case even their closest, most wonderful male friends would do nothing for them sexually. [...]

We can imagine the same distinction among heterosexual women. For [heterosexual] women [with a tendency to form person-based attractions], the development of a robust emotional bond to a female friend can spark unexpected feelings of physical desire that are specific to that friend. Other heterosexual women might never have such an experience, no matter how deep their same-sex friendships.

Lisa M. Diamond, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2008), pp. 188-89.

un-labelling (2)

How can we rethink sexual orientation in light of person-based attractions? I can imagine two possibilities. One is that the capacity for person-based attractions might actually be an independent form of sexual orientation. In other words, whereas the present categories of heterosexual, lesbian/gay, and bisexual presume that gender is important to everyone, and that the key differences simply concern which gender a person desires, perhaps there is a fourth category of individuals for whom gender is irrelevant.

Such individuals would necessarily possess the capacity for attractions to either gender, though this does not necessarily mean that they would think of themselves as bisexual. Rather, like some of the women in my study, they might adopt alternative labels such as "queer," a term that is increasingly used to signify a form of sexuality that resists rigid categorization. As one woman noted, "I used to identify as bisexual, and I wasn't sure whether or not I wanted to be with men or women. Now I feel like my sexuality is more fluid, and I call myself queer because it includes all genders. It's a better term; it pretty much conveys the fact that I'm not attracted to a man or a woman based on their gender, but who they are."

Many women with person-based attractions reported that this was a longstanding pattern for them, which often first manifested itself in early adolescence as a persistent ambiguity between love and friendship. Their experiences support the notion of a gender-neutral orientation. As one women noted, "I have a really blurry line between friendship and crushes - I always tend to like people and not distinguish whether I like them as a friend or more than a friend." [...] Many people develop passionate attachments to childhood friends that appear to disregard gender. As we grow older, we typically come to distinguish between liking somebody "as a friend" and liking that person as a potential lover. Perhaps part of the uniqueness of having person-based attractions is not just that you are insensitive to gender as a basis for attraction, but also that you have more fluid boundaries between love and friendship.

This raises the inevitable question of how the rest of us come to acquire and internalize such distinctions. [...] How do we begin to draw boundaries around certain types of emotional intimacy? Developmental timing may play a role. [...] Many researchers have argued that not until late adolescence do we fully integrate a sense of gender into our sexual desires. As John Gagnon argued, "It is quite clear that during the ages of 12 to 17 the gender aspects of the 'who' in the sexual scripts that are being formed are not fixed. . . A deeper complication is that it is not obvious whether it is the gender aspects of the 'who' that have provoked the nascent desire or even if the desire is linked to a 'who' at all." Perhaps, then, an orientation toward person-based attractions represents a deeper form of gender-neutrality, in which our sexual scripts remain fundamentally open with regard to the sex of the person to whom we are attracted.


Lisa M. Diamond, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2008), pp. 186-88. [my emphases]

un-labelling (1)

A most interesting book that offers a radically new understanding of female sexuality, by proposing to break the stalemate in which feminism as well as gay, lesbian & queer studies are still locked, and to go beyond the old dichotomies informing them: essentialism versus social constructionism, nature versus culture, straight versus gay...

In view of my w(e)ariness concerning certain (sch)isms, rigid categories & labels recently vented here, I couldn't agree more with Diamond's argument that, for some women - and for some men, I should add! - love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual [or perhaps not even bisexual] but fluid, changing as [they] move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships. She raises thus key questions about the role of gender in structuring our basic experiences of desire, by showing that very often our sexual attractions are person-based - linked to personality, emotional qualities, etc. - and not necessarily gender-related. This is to say that some people can respond erotically to anyone with a desirable personality or with whom they have a strong personal connection, regardless of that person's gender: they typically describe themselves as being attracted to "the person, not the gender". Hence this "gender-free" eroticism challenges, or even undermines, the very distinction between "same-sex" and "other-sex" attractions which is still at the basis of conventional models of sexuality.


Hum, promising indeed... An appetizer (more to follow soon, if/when time allows...):

[Prevailing] assumptions hold that an individual's sexual predisposition for the same sex or the other sex is an early-developing and stable trait that has a consistent effect on that person's attractions, fantasies, and romantic feelings over the lifespan. What few people realize, however, is that these assumptions are based primarily on men's experiences because most research on sexual orientation has been conducted on men. Although this model of sexual orientation describes men fairly accurately, it does not always apply so well to women.

Historically, women who deviate from this model by reporting shifts in their sexuality over time - heterosexual women falling in love with female friends, lesbian women periodically dating men - were presumed few in number and exceptional in nature. In other words, they were just inconvenient noise cluttering up the real data on sexual orientation. Yet as research on female sexuality has increased over the years, these "exceptional" cases now appear to be more common than previously thought. In short, the current conventional wisdom about the nature and development of sexual orientation provides an incomplete picture of women's experiences. Researchers now openly acknowledge that despite significant advances in the science of sexuality over the past twenty years, "female sexual orientation is, for the time being, poorly understood."

This situation is now changing. As scientists have begun investigating female and male sexual orientation as distinct phenomena instead of two sides of the same coin, consensus is gradually building on why women appear so different from men. Specifically, we have found that one of the fundamental, defining features of female sexual orientation is its fluidity. We are now on the brink of a revolutionary understanding of female sexuality that has profound scientific and social implications.

Sexual fluidity, quite simply, means situation-dependent flexibility in women's sexual responsiveness. This flexibility makes it possible for some women to experience desires for either men or women under certain circumstances, regardless of their overall sexual orientation. In other words, though women - like men - appear to be born with distinct sexual orientations, these orientations do not provide the last word on their sexual attractions and experiences.

Lisa M. Diamond, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2008), pp. 2-3.