Showing posts with label lot's wife. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lot's wife. Show all posts

22 Nov 2018

Strange Flesh: Notes On Sodomy

Sleeve artwork for Mortal Way of Life (1988) 
by German thrash metal band Sodom


I. The Sin of Sodom is Polysemic

Sodomy is one of those lovely old-fashioned words that is commonly misunderstood. Many people, for example, think it refers exclusively to anal sex - particularly between two men - and perhaps recall that Oscar Wilde was accused (not unfairly) of posing as a sodomite by Queensberry.

Historically, however, sodomy possessed a much broader meaning and referred to all non-procreative sexual activity, including, for example, oral sex and bestiality. It was often also tied to the practice of pagan witchcraft. Sodomy was thus not simply a form of perversity, but heresy; a rejection of God and a libidinal defiance of his moral authority.

It's hardly surprising, therefore, to discover that sodomy has a biblical origin ...


II. What Begins with the Threat of Angel Rape Ends with Fire and Brimstone 

According to the account in Genesis [18-19], God decided to exact divine retribution upon Sodom after two of his angels entered the city (in human form) and were immediately threatened with gang rape by the inhospitable locals.

Although Lot, who was charged with looking after the divine messengers, offered the townsfolk his virgin daughters as sexual substitutes, the men of Sodom were adamant they wanted to experience strange flesh whilst they had the very rare opportunity to do so.

For the Good Lord, who had long identified Sodom (along with the twin city of Gomorrah) as a hotbed of impenitent sin and sexual depravity, this was the final straw and He unleashed his destructive wrath upon it and its inhabitants in the form of fire and brimstone.

Only Lot and his family were given the opportunity to get out of town, although, unfortunately, their escape didn't quite go to plan after Lot's wife made the fatal mistake of looking back, as if secretly longing to stay and continue her old life in Sodom. For this, as everybody knows, she was turned into a pillar of salt.

(Interestingly - and as perhaps fewer people know - Lot and his daughters found solace in this time of apocalyptic upheaval and great personal loss by entering into an incestous relationship and having drunken sex in a cave ... but that's another story, for another post: click here.)
 

III. On the Necessity of a Little Sodomy

Never one to shy away from these matters, D. H. Lawrence insists that not only can bawdiness be healthy, but even sodomy can be sane and wholesome, provided there is a proper give and take between parties: "In fact, it may be that a little sodomy is necessary to human life."

It's only the fanatic insistence on purity, writes Lawrence, that always leads to madness, denying as it does the simple truth that all men and women are subject to desire and possess "blood and bowels and lively genitals".

The only problem is that Lawrence wishes to restrict acts of sodomy to the right time. But, by definition, such acts occur at the the wrong time, in the wrong place, with the wrong partners and involve a misuse of organs; this is what makes them such unnatural acts.

Nevertheless, it's important to be reminded that however problematic many aspects of his work are for a contemporary readership, Lawrence was not someone who wished to restrict human freedom and experience. Just so long as we don't get our sex on the brain and seek to form an ideal identity upon it, he was happy to acknowledge the necessity of vice as belonging to a general economy of the whole.   


See: D. H. Lawrence, 'What's sane and what isn't', The Poems, Vol. III, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 1614-1615.


24 Jun 2014

Kidney Stones of the Soul

Thomas Hirschhorn: Resistance-Subjecter (2011) 
Gladstone Gallery, NY and Brussels


According to folk psychologist James Hillman, there are psychic crystallizations formed by material experience and memories which potentially cause blockages in the unconscious. 

I suppose we might think of these as kidney stones of the soul; equally discomforting, though perhaps far more hazardous to the health and well-being of the individual if they can't find a way to dissolve these deposits and release the energy they contain in a positive manner. 

Ultimately, if you don't learn how to piss the past away then you run the risk of ever-increased calcification; that is to say, if you obsessively keep looking back upon a life gone by, then, like Lot's wife, you'll turn into a pillar of salt - and that's never pleasant.    

All of which brings us to Thomas Hirschhorn's terrifying sculpture entitled Resistance-Subjecter (2011), in which a group of mannequins - bodies violently exploded or eaten away from within as evidenced by gaping wounds and cavities - are in a process of becoming-mineral.     

I'm aware that the politically-engaged and philosophically-informed Hirschhorn has his own very clear ideas concerning his work. As a Marxist, he's obviously concerned with what he would think of as the hard reality of things and this piece could, for example, be read in these terms. 

But, for me, this work is more than that and more than simply a rather banal reflection on the objectification and commodification of the human being within consumer capitalism as one critic suggests; more too than merely a warning about the corrosive effect of the gaze. 

Rather, it's a reminder to drink plenty of water and never allow tiny elements of the self to harden too much: love that which melts into innocence and forgetfulness; hate that which solidifies and endures.      


Notes: 

The above work by Thomas Hirschhorn can be viewed as part of The Human Factor: The Figure in Contemporary Sculpture, an exhibition curated by Ralph Rugoff at the Hayward Gallery, London (17 June - 14 September).

Thanks to Dr. Simon A. Thomas for the insight into James Hillman.