The Naughty Bits (9 page)

from
Portable People

PAUL WEST

There’s a phrase bandied about in philosophy classrooms that gives me enormous pleasure: the problem of other minds. Much as I would like these words to refer to the irremovable thorn-in-the-side fact that other people have ideas and opinions of their own (Why? I ask, why?), the phrase is actually used to talk about the fact that neither Descartes nor Russell nor anybody else has been able to prove with certainty that there are intelligences beyond their own. The upshot is that the only consciousness you can attest to is yours, and all else could be a hallucination, an error, a fabrication. (To this, however, my response was always, If I was cooking this whole thing up, there would be a lot more free parking.)

In writing, of course, the phrase could be adapted quite readily to speak to the difficulty of creating characters that aren’t mere extensions of the author. Not surprisingly, the protagonists in my early stories were chaps rather like myself—lonely, emotionally stunted ne’er-do-wells who talked a lot better than they listened. Only later did I even dare to try to generate characters from my own imagination. And even those, as it turned out, tended to be drawn from some distant corner of my self. We bear a lot of people within us, and to be a decent fiction writer you end up seeking out even the Rhode Island delegates from the Congress of Identity.

It is the mark of a truly gifted writer to be able to go beyond this. Not only must they enter into the minds of others, they also have to make the minds themselves. Paul West takes this challenge to an extreme in his “novel”
Portable People,
a collection of channeled voices from the living and the long and recently dead, with characters as diverse as Imelda Marcos and Lord Byron’s doctor. West’s gift is dazzling: No two sound alike (beyond suspiciously prodigious vocabularies), and, what’s more, no two seem to share a philosophical or ethical position. Each is a discrete human writ large on three pages or less. So the scandal of a crotchety and mischievous Rodin in the excerpt that follows is counterbalanced elsewhere by the proud and surgical Edith Sitwell or the consummately disdainful Hermann Goering. West speaks more voices than the whispering winds.

Auguste Rodin

God’s dong, if such a thing can be, is a velvet hammer made of love that thumps the stars home, where they belong, in the moist pleat of the empyrean. Surely He needs no goading on, unlike myself, finger-dipping each and every cleft of every model, and all that a mere preliminary to what goes on after the day’s work is done, and we twist the big key clockwise. That is when I get my girls to tongue one another before my very eyes. It is almost as if the sculpting is mere prelude to the venery. By midnight, they are all going their ways, about their business, with Rodin syrup dribbling from them as they walk, like molten marble. Those who pose for me must taste my will, upended like ducks on a pond.

When my Balzac, now, strides forth with upright phallus in his fist, from behind he must be read as a giant lingam marching to India. I mean these burly semblances to stun, my Lord, as when, for Becque and sundry appreciative madams, I turn actor and behead with a sword the plaster statues arranged in front of me. Those who cry out, in abuse, “Rodin is a great big prick” are right. I am always and ever the policeman’s son, neither peasant nor poet.

I receive on Sundays, as my copy of
The Guide to the Pleasures of
Paris
says, married to that carthorse, Rose, who gave me a son with a broken brain, abandoned by Camille, who once adored me and now in the asylum murmurs, “So this is what I get for all I did.” At least she, unlike my Yankee heiress Claire, fat and daubed and drunk, never kept leaving the dinner table to go and throw up, as now, or play her creaky gramophone while my public sits around me, hearing me tell them yet again that it was indeed I who stove in Isadora Duncan, pommeling that little ear-like hole between her lively legs, and it was also I who, like the milkman delivering, brought her weekly orgasm to little sad Gwen John in her rented room. I snapped her like a wineglass stem, but made her coo all the same.

When I get Upstairs, His Nibs and I are going to go on such a masterful rampage the angels will cry to be raped, neuter as they are, and none shall contain us, we shall be so massive in our roistering, from the hand-gallop to the common swyve, with our hump-backed fists banged deep into the soft clay of eternity.

from
The Theogony

HESIOD

So let’s imagine you’re thinking of writing a book. What are you going to write about? Your family perhaps, your quirky friends, some ex-lover who wronged you (after having righted you so nicely), the day-to-day living tips you learned from your cat? Or maybe you’re an ex-lawyer, ex– navy SEAL, ex–secret agent, or ex–medical examiner whose insider information will drive a nail-biter narrative. But how about this as a topic for your first book? The origin of the gods and the history of the world. Nice modest project, no? But that’s what Hesiod, an eighth century B.C. contemporary of Homer, opted for as the subject of his first book, the
Theogony
—no small proof of how much Western literature has changed in the last twenty-eight hundred years.

Now Hesiod probably didn’t invent all his material (much of it he could have taken from oral legends passed down or from written sources that predate him), but it’s still great to imagine him trying to pitch it to a Hollywood producer: “Well, Mr. Coppola, it’s kind of this classic tale of birth and rebirth, of gods being created out of nothingness or out of the side of each other’s heads, of sons castrating their fathers and genitals floating on the sea and turning into goddesses, that kind of thing.” Francis Ford would probably look him deep in the eye, put his hand on his shoulder and say, “Best lay off that crack pipe, son.”

But although much of the
Theogony
is decidedly distant to the modern sensibility, the one thing it shares with much modern literature, sadly, is its leaning toward misogyny. In a book that otherwise makes almost no reference to normal human reality, Hesiod pauses long enough to take some gratuitous potshots at our mothers, wives, and sisters. Women are the curse Zeus inflicted on mankind because his son Iapetos stole fire and brought it to us, and apparently we haven’t been forgiven.

Yet among the gods at least, it’s not the females who cause trouble but the fathers and sons. Iapetos stole the fire from Zeus. Zeus, meanwhile, vanquished his father, Kronos, who had eaten all of his other children. And Kronos, as we will see in the following excerpt, also had a father to fear and, with the help of his mother, took matters into his own hands. Centuries before Sophocles and millennia before Freud, Oedipal myths were in full force, nowhere more clearly than in Hesiod.

For of all the children that were born of Earth and Heaven, these were the most terrible, and they were hated by their own father [Heaven] from the first. And he used to hide them all away in a secret place of Earth as soon as each was born, and would not suffer them to come up into the light, and he rejoiced in his evil doing. But vast Earth groaned within, being strained, and she thought up a crafty, wicked plan. Quickly she made grey adamant and shaped a giant sickle and told her plan to her dear sons. And as she spoke, she was vexed in her heart:

“My children, gotten of a sinful father, if you will obey me, we should punish the vile outrage of your father, for he first began devising his shameful deeds.”

Thus she spoke, but fear seized them all, and none uttered a word. But great Cronos the wily took courage, and answered his dear mother:

“Mother, I will undertake to do this deed, for I revere not our father of evil name, for he first thought to do the evil things.”

So he said, and vast Earth rejoiced greatly in spirit, and set and hid him in an ambush, and put in his hands the jagged sickle, and revealed to him the whole plot.

And Heaven came, bringing on night and longing for love, and he lay about Earth spreading himself full upon her. Then the son from his ambush stretched forth his left hand and in his right took the great long sickle with jagged teeth and swiftly lopped off his father’s members and cast them away to fall behind him. And not vainly did they fall from his hand, for all the bloody drops that gushed forth Earth received, and as the seasons moved round she bared the strong Erinyes and the great Giants with gleaming armor, holding long spears in their hands, and the Nymphs whom they call Meliae all over the boundless earth. And so soon as he had cut off the members with adamant and cast them from the land into the surging sea, they were swept away over the main a long time, and a white foam spread around them from the immortal flesh, and in it there grew a maiden. First she drew near holy Cythera, and from there, after, she came to Cyprus and came forth an awful, lovely goddess, and grass grew up beneath her shapely feet. And gods and men call her Aphrodite.

—translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White,
modified by Jack Murnighan

from
Singular Pleasures

HARRY MATHEWS

Come a little closer, I want to whisper something in your ear: I play Scrabble—alone. Frequently, joyfully, almost compulsively, I take out my dictionaries, set up the board, draw the tiles for one side (leaving the other side’s tiles undrawn until I’ve played the first side’s— so as not to “cheat”), and shift the letters in my mind until the near certainty that I’ve extracted as many points as humanly (or cybernetically) possible from the move tells me I can place the tiles out on the board. Then it’s the competition’s turn, and I do the same thing. An hour later the game is over. The score is astronomical; my mind is calm. And I’ve successfully kept for myself something that’s supposed to be shared with another.

And that, in fact, was the crime of the biblical father of masturbation, Onan, who, when he was supposed to impregnate his brother’s wife, pulled out instead and spilled his seed on the ground. So the word
onanism
—though it’s come to mean masturbation—really just means wasting. Perhaps, then, the mental masturbation of abstruse art and writing is so named not because of the pleasure it gives the practitioner but instead because it breaks the promise of communication.

Harry Mathews has no such problem. The lone American member of the group of mathematicians and writers known as Oulipo (short, in French, for “workshop in potential literature”—they are dedicated to the creativity fostered by formal constraint), Mathews composed a book of sixty-one prose poems about masturbation. And though the collection is titled
Singular Pleasures,
it shares its gift most readily. Each poem presents a different scene, in a different locale, of a different person of varying age (from nine to eighty-one) masturbating in imaginative, telling, poignant, and playful ways. After reading the entirety of Mathews’s collection, you begin to get a sense of the limitless possibilities— and want to add new ones to his list. “There was a man of thirty in a squalid walk-up in Little Italy, leaning naked over a Scrabble board . . .”

A man of thirty-five is about to experience orgasm in one of the better condominiums in Gaza. He is masturbating, but neither hand nor object touches his taut penis: arranged in a circle, five hairblowers direct their streams of warm air toward that focal point. He has plugged his ears with wax balls.

While the Aeolian String Quartet performs the final variation of Haydn’s “Emperor” Quartet in the smaller of Managua’s two concert halls, a man of three score and four summers sits masturbating in the last row of the orchestra, a coat on his lap. Thirty-three years before, after relieving himself during the intermission of another concert, he had returned to his seat with his fly unbuttoned. Unconscious of his appearance, he had become erect during a scintillating performance of the Schubert Octet and actually ejaculated during the final chords. The house lights had come up to reveal his disarray; he had fled; ever since, he has been laboring steadfastly to recreate that momentary bliss.

As he masturbates, a forty-five-year-old man in Pretoria is standing in front of a full-length mirror watching himself. On the far side of the two-way mirror, a woman of eighty-one sits looking at him, one hand busy beneath her skirts. The man ejaculates onto the mirror: she mutters, “Too soon!”

Inmates of the pensioners home in Constantia, Romania, four women (aged seventy-one, seventy-three, seventy-four, and seventy-six) and four men (seventy, seventy-two, seventy-five, seventy-eight) conceive and execute a plan for independent, simultaneous masturbation. Each agrees to aim for orgasm, in the privacy of bed, on the twelfth stroke of midnight every Saturday night, after the weekly bingo and dancing.—The director of the home will later be struck by the particular vivacity of these eight as it grows from week to week. They will refuse, however, to divulge the reason for their zest.

Sitting on an overstuffed chair by his bed, a boy of nine is masturbating near Stamford, Connecticut. He does not ejaculate, but a pearl of sperm gathers at the point of his still-childish erection. He knows what’s going on.

from
Poems

CATULLUS

Recently, my friends have been indulging their lust for schadenfreude by telling me that the Latin language has grown unhip. How can this be? When people speak coarsely of the “dead” languages, I inquire, “Dead for whom?” Almost invariably they respond, “For everybody.”

It is a sad state of affairs. With the demise of Latin, lost will be the poignancy of Augustine’s plaintive cries for God’s mercy; forgotten will be the singular nobility of Virgil’s hexameter (his readers turned to swine by the Circe of modernity); erased will be the majesty of Cicero, whose rhetoric was considered so supreme that throughout the Renaissance many speakers would not use a word if it did not appear in the Ciceronian corpus, believing that if it was unnecessary to Cicero it was unnecessary to language in general.