november16

by Dan Roentsch
Chapter Four of Ron Bass's To My Twenty-Fifth Century Biographers awaits below.

Anal sex and incest — the topics that most attract my attention to this chapter — are certain to arouse, unless the incest in question is imagined with any member of my family. None of the women in my family wears a babushka or mustache, but should they start tomorrow it might be Wednesday before I noticed the change.

Fortunately for me, the siblings depicted by Ron bear no resemblance to my own.

And the anal sex and incest in chapter four doesn't happen all at once and in one place. This is because Mr. Bass has provided a plot. You can skip down and read it now if you wish, but permit me one more point: The ending ... is suspenseful, and makes use of the character Heydrich Quisslinger, at least by name. If you would like to know more about Heydrich or most of the other characters mentioned, you might do well to look at the navigation bar at the right. Click on the link that reads, '25th Century Biographers.' There you can read all four extant chapters in order.

—DR, November 16, 2009

Copyright 2009 Dan Roentsch

To My Twenty-Fifth Century Biographers

Fiction by Ron Bass

 

Chapter 4: Anal at the Biennial

Les Enfants Terribles

Abhorrent love retains a festive air
in hindsight's shadowed glow. But once the glare
intrudes too far to ever be concealed,
a second skin of wisdom can get sealed
too tightly, unless penances are made.
In essence, memory becomes a trade-
off in this exchange of dreams: Cheating death,
while keeping their psyches crossed, their twinned breath
discharges fragrant spoor into the ground.
Rain whips the conjoined lovers; a hell hound
growls nearby. The music of the spheres turns
dissonant, as the vessel slowly burns:
Tracing this mystery back to its sources
requires tact, and a knowledge of corpses.

June 20

by Dan Roentsch
I give you Chapter Two of Ron Bass's To My Twenty-Fifth Century Biographers, wherein ... but no ... no characterizations this time, for now we are into the book ...

That was my resolution a moment ago, and I am able to keep it, except to note that in this chapter of Mr. Bass's opus we find that Bobbie Sue Nickerson's affairs are the perfect stepping-off point for a broad and merciless characterization of bourgeois Americana.

Years ago a London cab driver confronted Ray Davies, lead singer and songwriter for the Kinks (whose work is devoted extensively to the bashing of the British middle class), saying: "I like your songs, but why are you always trying to take the starch out of us?"

Were that same driver confronting Ron Bass, he might look into the rear-view, shake his head, and ask: "You can't even leave us Wally and Beaver?"

—DR, June 20, 2009

Copyright 2009 Dan Roentsch

To My Twenty-Fifth Century Biographers

Fiction by Ron Bass

Chapter 2: Form Follows the Funk

On another hand,
On another hand,
On another hand …

Brockden White,
Perquisites of Divinity

American Culture on the Skids: Los Angeles, 1969

* * * *

* * * *

* * * *

May 23

by Dan Roentsch
The icon "Simone," described in a Brief Note on Obsession, has, for me anyway, an ironic provenance. As a teenager I had considerable exposure to the works of CS Lewis, an inspiration to any believer — in Hell and Satan and rescue by a long-dead Nazarene peasant — who wishes also to consider himself an intellectual.

(I managed to avoid the talkin' lion books, however.)

One of Lewis's serial works is the so-called "space trilogy," a foray into science fiction in which the exemplar of human life (a philologist named Elwin Ransom), discovers that all the people in outer space believe in the Middle-Eastern grass-god Yahweh, and that many of them have read the earlier works of CS Lewis. The trilogy comprises the novels, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.

In That Hideous Strength, about yet another ultimate confrontation between Satan and Jesus' troops on earth, Lewis concocts a moral definition of women. He tells us, in the person of some oracle or other, that there are two kinds of women, and that their job on planet earth is to affect men for good or for evil.

These two kinds of women are the "Celestial Venus" (good) and the "Infernal Venus" (the other good).

(These emblems of man's temptation and salvation make their way into other Lewis works, notably The Screwtape Letters.)

Of course, the purpose of the Infernal Venus as concocted by Lewis is to distract men from their heavenly duties by appealing to sensation. The Celestial Venus' job is to lure man to God, using the long, full hair and vaginal ignorance Lewis projected onto the Guinnevere-esque princesses peopling his own bowdlerized versions of Celtic idylls.

The Infernal Venus is the origin of the character of Simone. — Which became more elaborate after I concluded Clive Staples L was out of his mind, and began casting a jaundiced eye on the motivations of the Celestial Venus.

I'm convinced you can take the rest of the story from there, and, neglecting certain details, you will no doubt have the narrative.

(The use of Simone as a literary-philosophical device is inspired by Aristotle's use of the "great-souled man" in the Nicomachean Ethics.)


—DR, May 23, 2009

Copyright 2009 Dan Roentsch

A Brief Note on Obsession

by Dan Roentsch
I am a partisan of erotic obsession. Not in spite of its debilitating effects on mundane existence, but because of those effects, and because it is so rare a phenomenon, and so ignored as a value to be sought, that it may enter some lives only by way of French drama.

What I mean by "erotic obsession" is the surrender of oneself to ecstasy in another.

(I conceive ecstasy as a current, lifting the ecstatic out of herself, which is to say, outside of routine and the values she places on familiar objects and recurring events giving consciousness an easy continuity. She yields to this current when another makes its soul — its self — known by the pleasure the other brings to her senses.)

I am aware that obsession — even obsession as I have defined it above — is considered a sickness by the clinically-inclined, who fondle the notion that anything is a disorder that intrudes upon an otherwise-placid mind and cannot be dispelled with simple incantation. Obsession makes its subject less vulnerable to the anesthetic of routine. For this reason it must be eliminated.

Routine. The holy grail of the diagnostic manuals. Routine is the natural sedative of passion; the firearms-free enforcer of conformism. It is the received wisdom of cadres of therapists and their pharmacological abettors that any thought threatening to disturb routine and to awaken your raw brain should be treated apace with a pill, an intervention, a scolding, and the cold shoulders of the gang you "hang" with. Are you able to meet with your friends on Sunday afternoons to dilate upon your mass-produced lives? If you cannot bring yourself to sit on the stoop with a beer in your fist the way you could a week ago, you have come to the right place, for I have a prescription pad and an excellent sense of your place in the social totem.

Should you instead surrender control to ecstasy in another, your consciousness, awakened from habit, finds, in that to which it has surrendered, a new existence with unclassified sensation. The order of the ecstatic's former life turns to a skeleton. Friends condemn but their voices recede. His life is now risk wrapped in the psyche of the other.

To understand this obsession, one must first understand its proper object. Not anyone will do.

In order to help explain who will do and why, I have created Simone.

(Simone is an icon. She is not a person I have met. Her name is taken from the name of a café at the corner of St. Mark's Place and First Avenue in New York City.)

Nothing about her is accidental. You cannot see her clothes, collars, bracelets, rings, piercings, the streaks in her hair, the length of her heels, the curve of her buttocks, the arch of her back ... you cannot see these without seeing the mind that made them.

Even her casusal appearance is determined by what she has on hand, and she is particular about what she has on hand.

She feels no compulsion to procreate. She is not a slave of the race.

She is an outsider. She takes pleasure in certain others, but, like Aristotle's great-souled man, she prefers to be alone because she is her own best friend.

She keeps secrets about herself from everyone. There is a place in her soul that no one but she may go into.

She has a sense of humor about everything but what is in that place.

She owns and does not share.

She does not fear judgment.

The word "relationship" bores her.

The word "compatibility" makes her laugh.

She gives herself to erotic obsession, but continues always to judge the worthiness of her object.

She is not interested in discovering a connection deeper or more spiritual than erotic passion.

She makes her psyche known through the portal her lover's senses. Her smell, her taste, her touch ... the sight of her, the sound of her voice, the demands she makes, the pleasure she takes and gives are the vehicles of her soul to her lover's.

She makes her lover jealous of every person and every thing that takes her attention: jealous of the laces on her shoes for the time it takes her to tie them; of the wine that soaks her tongue and the stool that bears her weight.

She is revered for her carnal power. She is not an angel but a Fury. Not a Madonna but a god that eats blood.

She is inevitable.

April 27

by Dan Roentsch
A few weeks ago, the View From Outside published Ron Bass's Barack W. Bush, a story that stands on its own, but which is also Chapter Three of To My Twenty-Fifth Century Biographers, which we begin publishing serially today.

Ron uses the novel, draped about the character of poet Brockden "Bronc" White, to give us characters and situations both bizarre and real (a juxtaposition I will explain in just a moment). As I said of Ron's work when Barack W. Bush was published:

Ron's prose reminds me of the cinematography on the old Batman television series: rich colors set in high contrast, popping out of the screen like something psychedelic but marshalled to a purpose.

To My Twenty-Fifth Century Biographers

Fiction by Ron Bass

 

Chapter 1: It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Your worldly-wise scribbler idylls, then slips away
To Post Futurist forms of a pleasure-lit day.

Brockden White, To My Twenty-Fifth Century Biographers

Chopping cabbage in the hot sun
I fought the slaw and the slaw won
I fought the slaw and the slaw won. . .

There is a young beagle
Isabel by name
She is a fearsome snuffler
Low cunning is her game
Isabel Arfer, low cunning is your game
Isabel Arfer, low cunning is your game. . .

Living on embassy row
Going with the flow of information
Living on embassy row
Just taking part in the latest penetrations
Living on embassy row

And when I die I'm going back home
To my study in the future
I'm going to write up the notes from this latest expedition
And then publish a couple of articles
In the learned journals of my chosen fields. . .

Mandalas on my pillow
Told a tale on me
Mandalas on my pillow
Nearly set me free

April 20

by Dan Roentsch
There is a  discussion group associated with this website, and several of the original members are writers of my acquaintance.
  
I know that others of you who have joined are not writers, so let me hurry to say that I do not infer you are a writer simply by your having the grace to join this group.  And I offer that assurance almost as a form of congratulation.  There are reasons for this.
  
The first is that writers inflict injury upon their friends — that is, writers who are any good at all inflict injury upon their friends. In the first place, they are forever wanting to know if you have read his or her latest, which will certainly answer your latest question and perhaps cure you of prejudice.
  
And, of course, because writers write, you, as their friend, sister, or lover sense their productivity as an obligation.  Can you imagine undertaking the companionship of Mr. Stephen King?  No?  Have you read Cujo?  Imagine reading one of his epics of the shroud at the rate he releases them, which surely cannot be much less often than once every few months.  Imagine that, to escape the pressure, you go to a woman of cruel  and primitive appetites who makes you feel as though you can almost live with the reading of the next magnum opus.  And at the precise moment you are feeling it, imagine she tells you— with casual enthusiasm — that she has an erotic memoir due out in June and would love your opinion.
  
So if you are not a writer who has joined the View From Outside discussion group, you may read on without fear of defamation.  Otherwise, you may read on.
 
 (The following list is alphabetical, by last name.)

 Mick Arran 

 I learned of Mick's existence after he   reviewed my blog, the LumpenBlog!, which was (and still is) a comic novel in blog form.  (The LumpenBlog! follows the adventures of three persons: two men completely unaware of the female libido, and a woman who is the female libido seen from a Dutch angle.)   He reviewed it with such skill, even where he found it wanting, that I made plans to read more of his work.— And there was plenty to read, as Mick was the contributor to or author of several blogs.  Among them, LitBlogs, Majasblog, Omnium: The Early Warning Frog, and Dispatch from the Trenches.   Later he began to produce his own serial mythologies, hosted as, Snake Tales, Aunt Harriet's Revenge, and Wilbur.   
 Perhaps my favorite of these fictive works was his first: Snake Tales,.   In the excerpt below, Cat Blonde has purchased clothing she doesn't want Big Tony to see.  To cover her tracks, she hides the clothes in a new, plastic garbage can. 
  
 

 "now she's got a problem, see, she's got to get the new laundry with the tags missing out of the trash can and into the house without big tony seeing her and there's no telling if big tony's going to pick that very moment to decide he doesn't want to sun himself any more and come back into the house where there's a layer of brick between him and it, so she just leaves it there. which is a good thing because big tony picks that minute to come in after all and he would have caught her with her arms all full of new laundry with the tags missing and they would have had words and cat-blonde doesn't like having words with big tony because he doesn't have any and it ain't a fair fight. so she leaves it there with the missing-tag new laundry in it and goes on into the house where she makes big tony his favorite meal — baked beans and franks with plenty of salted onions–and they watch tv and then after awhile, in the natural course of things, they go to bed and a little while later big tony is snoring like a moose and cat-blonde sneaks out of the house and downstairs to the kitchen and snaps on the outside light and goes to get her new laundry with the missing-because-she-threw-them-into-a-passing-egg-crate tags out of the trash can."

Over time I became such a fan of Mick's that I invited him to write the forward to the print edition of the first LumpenBlog!-based print novel, Cruel Women, Stupid Men.  (I give you my word, Mick, it really is coming out.)  
  
 Mick's current observations of  politics and culture may be found at  Mick Arran:Witness for the Prosecution. 
  
 

 Ron Bass 

 Ron and I have been acquainted since the 1980's.   This means he is one of the few people whose mind, like it or not, still holds the fading images of actors prosecuting plays written, produced, or directed by me Off and Off-Off Broadway. 
  
 His collection of short fiction and one-act plays, the Velveeta Underground,  was published in 2006 by the Erotic Authors Association for its Signature Series.  His other work includes To My Twenty-Fifth Century Biographers, which will be serialized on the View From Outside imminently.  In fact, beginning in just a few days.  Chapter three of that work has been on exhibit here already under the title, Barack W. Bush. 
  
 Ron also writes songs for his band, Jersey Petroleum. Among them:  "Jesus Went Surfing," "Tell It to Oprah," and "Let's Eat Some Time, Baby." 
  
 You will find more of Ron's work on his blog, and more of my thoughts on his work in my prefatory note to Barack W. Bush. 
  
 

 Peter Hobbs 

  
Pete and his partner Elizabeth Foley are the duo who alone and with occasional staffing accessories constitute  Elyria Pictures in New York City.  Pete also teaches screenwriting at the New York Film Academy in Manhattan, where Liz chairs the Production Department.
  
The author of about twenty-five screenplays, Pete is also the creator of Mystifield, a television series now in development.  (It has been my pleasure to read the first several scripts for this series, a non-moribund tale of teenage zombies.)
  
Elyria Pictures recently completed shooting Bridge of Names, a feature film about a young man named Steve who just wants to get to Granby.  Along the way he meets girls, punks, a charismatic preacher, and a child sired by ... someone, and boasting the performances of  Robert Postrozny, Rachel Zeiger-Haag, Court Dorsey, and Rip Torn.  (I too appear in the film as an eccentric fellow with no driver's license and a wardrobe outfitted entirely by International Male.)
  
Hobbs and Foley are also the authors of the screenplay Funny Peculiar, which Rip Torn has described as "great American literature," and are about to launch a web television series entitled Rachel Bites.  Pete has written perhaps a dozen scripts for the series, as well as a dozen more for the program's first spin-off, Avery Rules.  You will find examples of Pete's writing by following the links at ElyriaPictures.com.
  
One of the first declarations made in my presence by Peter Hobbs was: "Movies are my life."  I later learned he was not saying it to increase his share of favor among the independent-film groupies at large in Union Square.  The characters Pete creates manifest his interest in the blunt, primitive, sometimes brutal elements of human motivation.— In the always-simple choices lying at the base of a character's motivation which, when inconsistent, can produce a dense tangle of rationalization, neurosis, and conformism, and which, when consonant with one another, can produce minds comparatively free of noise and ... simple.
  
(Pete and Liz have based two characters on me.  In one of his scripts, Pete describes the character as looking "a little like Iggy Pop, if he was a hit man or an arms dealer."  For those of you who have never met me, that is an accurate description.)
 
  
 

 Marilyn Jaye Lewis 

  
If you go to her website and click the "books" link, you will come to the conclusion that Marilyn is a prolific author.  What you won't know from that simple exercise is that she is also the author of one of my favorite erotic novellas, Neptune & Surf, published in 1999 and selected by the Guardian (UK) as one of that summer's Top Ten reads.  Her other works include  Mammoth Book of Erotic Photography   (editor),  When Hearts Collide: An Erotic Romance , and  Stirring Up A Storm:Tales of the Sensual, the Sexual, and the Erotic .
  
I originally met Marilyn via the machines that send out email.  I met her briefly once, in the real world, when she was promoting Stirring Up A Storm ,  a book notable for, among other virtues, containing an erotic story by Joyce Carol Oates.
  
In addition to her literary endeavors (her latest is entitled Twilight of the Immortal ), she has been using the Internet longer than virtually anyone else who is not a full-time member of the geekoisie.  In the past decade she has created six websites that I am aware of, including the home of the Erotic Authors Association, the first American organization to honor literary excellence in the erotic genre.
  

 Ivy Madden 

  
Imagine the nexus of Camille Paglia and Bikini Kill.  (You may have to close your eyes.)  If you can further imagine someone living near to or at that nexus, that person is Ivy, or so I submit.  If you doubt, go to Erotic Bohemian , where she writes under the name "pagankinktress."
  
It has been the usual case for me, when reading writers after my initial acquaintance with their work, to ask: "But where is the edge? "  In Ivy's case, the better question might be, "Where isn't the edge?"  In a cyberverse packed dense with sophomoric naughty-bloggers struggling for style, Ivy gives us the self-aware reactions out of which real criticism arises.  There is the vital meta- in her writing, as the phenomena under her consideration includes that of her writing about it, as if she were making tiny, precise cuts with a steel scalpel.  Part of this is no doubt due to the fact that she doesn't constrain herself to a single writer-identity ("I am a sex-blogger." "I am a political blogger."), so her mind wanders over an array of subjects, and tends to look for the ways in which these subjects integrate.  The result is never dull.
  
Until very recently, the top entry at Erotic Bohemian was a retelling of the myth of Persephone.  Years ago I staged, twice, a retelling by a different author of that same myth.  And I liked that retelling.  But after reading Ivy's version I look back on that script and ask, "But where's the edge? "
  
 
 

April 5

by Dan Roentsch
A few years ago, an acquaintance of mine with a religious proclivity and exhibiting some umbrage at my disregard for his hobby, asked me bluntly, in the middle of a restaurant somewhere in Chelsea (Manhattan, not Massachusetts) what my religion was.

I replied: "My girlfriend's vagina." My girlfriend at the time was present, and I believe her response was to stare at her food and chew.

Out of that incident, and certain roilings inside my brain, came a screenplay and later a short film (still in post) entitled Mrs. Benning's Vagina, in which the scene is replayed with greater drama and in which the character Mrs. Benning responds with greater wit than my erstwhile girlfriend who, I believe, is still somewhere chewing something.

A few days ago, I found myself engaged in a conversation with an intriguing woman who said without equivocation: "I absolutely reject anything that supports a separation of body/spirit/mind. These all blur beautifully, or should."

Indeed they should, but I believe no sentiment is more likely to arouse the villagers to torches and pitchforks than that one just expressed. Although on my mind for a time, the conversation seemed an excellent precipitent cause for A Brief Note on Eros.

—DR, April 5, 2009

A Brief Note on Eros

Essay by Dan Roentsch
]]I often say, and in fact you may have heard me say, that erotic passion is perhaps the most profound spiritual connection available to human beings.

I choose my words with startling care. I sense that some who read the sentence above will feel a sense of loss, imagining that, if what I have said is true, then men and women are no more spiritual than animals.

It is true that the logical consequence of this consideration is that there is no firm line to be drawn between concrete lust and that ineffable something called love which, drained of eros, means something along the lines of "my old pal, Sue."

Indeed, there are entire tomes of everyday psychology aimed at giving this ineffable abstraction substance. What is love without eros? If we lived in the days when men and women dug potatoes in order to live, you can be sure that said tomes would comment that pure love, the best love, the ineffable sort of love dictated by the dead Plato and his living wards, is present when two "significant others" (what lovers call each other when they begin to lose significance) find themselves able to dig potatoes, one with the other, without a necessary word passing between them. Partners having the affection requisite to shed a tear, should the other stumble and fall that final fall, potato in hand.

In contradiction of this, I submit (again) that erotic passion, not collegial ease, is the proper substance of this spiritual connection. This substance is not to be sought elsewhere, especially not in the clouds or in asexual common interests such as the collection of porcelain figurines or the novel Franny and Zoey. If the woman whose vulva once branded you is now emotionally indistinguishable from your sister, you have not conquered or transcended anything. You have been defeated, castrated, and your tongue has been cut out.

In case it isn't obvious, embracing this notion of the unified mind and body (particularly to the extent where erotic passion is considered a spiritual characteristic and a high virtue) implies the rejection of most ethical and religious systems and the bourgeois values of every nation with the temerity to call itself "great."

Consider the puritans and hedonists, by most accounts even mightier rivals in the culture war than Democrats and Republicans.

No doubt you could get the puritans to embrace the idea that erotic passion is perhaps the most profound spiritual connection available to human beings if you made eros into something altruistic, a "free gift" you give your "partner."

(The thought makes me shudder, and raises in my mind the specter of a million men in short hair and pajamas washing out their mouths and gurgling, "I love my wife I love my wife I love —")

And no doubt you could get the hedonists to embrace it, if you were to remove the words "profound" and "spiritual" and replace them with the verbal equivalent of a smirk.

This is because the hedonists borrow whole from the puritans the premise that body and spirit are confined to separate cocoons each with their own separate fulfillment. The hedonists are simply comfortable with and forgiving of the body and its fun. But the hedonist's bodily-function sex, unable to penetrate the mind, restricted to anonymous, animal sensation, falls on a steep slope of diminishing returns. It may be reinforced by fantasy, but after awhile fantasy fails to satisfy. It becomes a distraction from the event at hand, rather than an enhancement.

Further, the hedonist, while practiced, is otherwise inexpert. Bodily functions, after all, do not require creativity, craft, and reflection.

And the final destination for the bodily-function hedonist is puritanism itself: out-and-out, reeking in its putrefaction. Why? Because one day she will want to reclaim her spirit, and having no theory of the spirit that admits of erotic passion, she will be thrust back upon the same theory of spirit by which all the other lemmings live.

Consider two literary examples. In the first, eros is the basis of an entire lifestyle, including its ethics, aesthetics, values ... its spirit. I am thinking of Pauline Reage's Story of O.

Forget the specific kinks of the characters in that story. Consider them, at least for the sake of this argument, a metaphor for any form of eros. The story is about a woman who is indoctrinated into a lifestyle and into a society of others that is entirely based upon the erotic. She does so at the behest of her lover, and his beckoning her to do so is itself erotic, as is her surrender. Every otherwise-mundane routine of their lives is now tinged with the central pleasure of their senses. More than tinged: knowledge of another mind, present and creating one's pleasure produces and magnifies that pleasure until it becomes to mere sex what crack is to mere cocaine. It cannot be escaped for even a moment, and when there is a sense that it may be eluded, the lovers introduce talismans to bring them back to the right place in their minds. Rings, collars, fragrances ... these have a neutral meaning to outsiders, but are charged for the lovers with the hardest connotations of longing and desire.

Now consider, in contrast, what I will call a typical story of "penthouse letter" hedonism. (This is not a story that appeared in that superb and glossy magazine — at least, it did not appear to my knowledge; I am simply paraphrasing innumerable stories of the same general contour that were the ambient literature of my college dormitory.)

Here is the general thrust. A regular American male arises on a Saturday. The ball game starts in two hours. With free time on his hands and a list of errands pinned to his refrigerator, he heads up to the laundromat. There he encounters a girl in cut off jeans sitting coyly on one of the dryers. Perhaps he has seen her before. He tries to complete the laundry errand as expeditiously as possible, but she is giving him looks of promise. A moment later, the prose becomes rhythmic.

Glad to get that out of his system, and wondering if they will ever meet again, he finishes folding and goes home to watch the ball game.

In the Story of O, eros permeates every aspect of day-to-day existence. In the puritanism-based hedonics of the "penthouse letter," however, it is carefully compartmentalized, exploding into the world for a moment then subsiding into the fixtures when the world of routine and sexless pseudo-joy will not be kept waiting any longer.

Thus, an ethics based on eros is not only practicable, it is highly desirable. Forget your upbringing and the gargoyles that came with it. The prayer to the labia majora — which is the locus of my most intense pleasure, the pleasure that tells me life on earth is good — is rational. The prayer to a peasant dead two-thousand years after impalement is bizarre and brutal, and the good of the self-sacrifice it demands cannot be demonstrated by anything concrete in the life of the devotee.

It has never been a characteristic of the romantic movement — in any of its incarnations — that it has an abundance of systematic thinkers who can put into words the logical reason for rebellion in the name of passion. The romantics have been able to attract a number of songwriters and playwrights, but not so many logicians.

It is not my intention to set forth in this essay a serious treatise of eros-based ethics, but consider the following as hints, or examples, or suggestions.

First, people raised in the Great Christian Faiths — or in any other of the Great Faiths describing the naked human as intrinsically embarrassing to his Maker — are too likely to regard themselves sinners, inevitable sinners, and give themselves a break for not being saints. That, as they like to say on the television programs, is a rookie mistake. An ethics is valid if the humans can effect it. Conversely, an ethics that can be practiced only by saints last seen in plaster renderings is an ethics for sheep who like to be shamed.

Second. There are a number of new ways of relating erotically open to men and women who shed the arbitrary constructs of monogamy. But consider also the number of famously dull sexual arrangements that have in fact an intrinsic erotism simply not observed by the majority of their practitioners.

For instance, I am content with the proposition that marriage is a gigantic, gray bore with no end in sight, but monogamous affairs based on eros are not. There is a definite "I-wanna-be-your-dog" erotism — a connoisseur's erotism, I submit — in denying yourself to others because you are another person's property. For polyamorists — who universally consider themselves too highly evolved for this taste — I recommend at least a try. In the erotic context, even my potato-diggers, whom I abused so badly in the earlier parable, will find something promising in the after-dig, and not a little to drool over in the digging itself, now an hours-long metaphor.

(Virtually every bourgeois value is, at bottom, a celebration of inertia, of surrender to gravity. How can we come to rest, close our eyes, and drift off secure in the knowledge that upon awakening our things will still be within reach? How can we find someone, lock them down, curl up, go to sleep, and be sure that when we awaken and want them again, they will still be there?)

And consider the sorts of values eros eliminates. I have already mentioned the positive value of raising a young boy to worship the vulva rather than the figure of a dead man on a stick. I have also already mentioned the advantage of eliminating the concept of "selfless sex." I beg your pardon. Ramming those two words up against one another is giving me nausea sweats. But I do it for you, as an act of ....

Eros is a god that kills repression. Where the repressors want to contain the sexual, eros seeks to expand it, to find the center of the world in every touch, in every smile, in every tremble.

And I will add this, too, that Eros is a god of light. The princes of darkness rule where fear replaces pleasure, no matter what else they may say about salvation and the paradise in the world after this.

March 31

by Dan Roentsch
After reading Ron Bass's Barack W. Bush, and perhaps my own Run With the Lemmings, you no doubt long for a preview of future revelations, titillations, and good times planned for the future at The View From Outside.

I cannot promise good times. I cannot even promise entertaining times. But see if this teases your curiosity:

• A brief discussion of how the proposition "God exists" is an oxymoron. (It is brief in my mind, at any rate. It may come out to several thousand words when I start translating it into human sounds.)
• A brief examination of the erotic as opposed to the merely sexual. The puritans of left and right have come to terms with sex, but eros still sends them screaming into the night, searching for a cop. -- A cop in shiny, black leggings.
• An examination of Simone de Beauvoir's salient point in The Second Sex; namely, that the root cause of woman's subordination to man throughout history has been her reproductive role and the various manifestations of "family values" that have bound her to it. Although I disagree with Beauvoir on many important points, I agree with this particular premise and her myriad observations in support of it. (Note that I do not promise this will be a brief examination. I suspect Simone deserves more time than God.)
• An examination of the institution of marriage, and not just marriage, but any affair that strives to outlive eros.
• And The View From Outside may well be serializing the rest of Ron's novel, To My Twenty-Fifth Century Biographers.

Barack W.Bush

Fiction by Ron Bass

 

Chapter 3: The Prisoner Of Kennebunkport

March 28

Ron Bass's Barack W. Bush is certain to offend most those who expect to be offended least. It has thus has found its way to The View From Outside.

I have attended readings of Ron's work a number of times, at various locations all within the boundaries of New York City's Greenwich Village. The reception of Ron's sense of humor seems always to include laughter mingled with little gasps, as if dinner partners disagreed over whether to be amused or outraged -- or shocked that they may be in the process of discovering one of New York's best-kept literary secrets.

Run With the Lemmings

by Dan Roentsch

I know that your social consciousness is haunted by the question: "What's happening on the same-sex marriage front in North America?"

Perhaps you are gay and crave the benefits accruing to participants in Western Civilization's longest-lived feudal institution.

On the other hand, you may be preoccupied with this question because you would like to see the Constitution amended to ensure that the evildoers do not acquire the sanction of law for deploying their deviance at orifices made coital only by craft and the suspension of disbelief.

Perhaps your interest is piqued by the California Supreme Court's opinion that gay men and women have the right to acquire the special legal status of "married," by California's subsequent consideration of Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage, or by your rumination upon such artifacts as the following:

"Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups."

Opposite-sex couples have used these technologies since their inception, but as an exceptional intervention to treat infertility, not as the norm. The focus that same-sex marriage has placed on these technologies has alerted us to previously unrecognized ethical issues — since same-sex couples can be expected to resort to them as a matter of course.
^{(Somerville, Margaret. "Gay Rights, Children's Rights." MarriageDebate at the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy. 15 July 2005. 28 Feb. 2008. <http://www.marriagedebate.com/2005/07/gay-rights-childrens-rights-margaret.htm>)}

March 20

In Run with the Lemmings I make two arguments. The first is the argument against faith. The second is an argument against embracing bourgeois values in the name of romantic revolt.

This note considers the first argument, the argument against faith. The salient point is:

Faith pits the cognitive method necessary for actually living your life against the cognition-killing non-method necessary for increasing the power of prophets and their cults.

Protestants make the Holy Spirit — the silent partner in the Trinity — a more significant agent than do the Catholics, averring that He — or It — invades the prostrate personality, deprives it of whatever individuality, ego, and art it may once have possessed, and supplies it instead with conformity, humility, and stained glass. No mortal effort required or even appreciated. All the sinner has to do is suffocate his brain and ignore the screams.

March 11

You know the name of the website now, and you have seen the little slogan. Why, you no doubt wonder, would anyone want to draw such a line in the sand. Me they can kill? You, they own? Why not, "Me they can put on probation. You they can pat on the back."

"Me they can kill .. you they own!" is quoted from the film Papillon. Papillon, a prisoner on Devil's Island, makes the observation to his toadying comrade Dega, whose attempts to be a model prisoner living by the rules and pleasing his masters make him ineffectual as a human.

I expect you will hear in this choice of words an unwillingness to equivocate, and that you will understand why I hear the squealing of beaten dogs in the garrulous, nine-to-five polemics of the fatally collegial.

In the same vein in a distinctly different venue, HL Mencken described the position on the American totem occupied by the farmer, and noted that to condemn the farmer was as fearful an enterprise as rebuking the Holy Spirit. Mencken then announced that he would undertake such condemnation on the grounds that he was already damned.

Those are the thoughts that motivate the work appearing on these pages. Work that says there is nothing worse than being owned and anyway we are all killed by something.

—DR, March 11, 2009
Copyright 2009  Dan Roentsch