Wednesday, February 24, 2021

Pornosophy: Wheel of Fire


"Lear and Cordelia" by Ford Madox Brown (1848-9)

The unexpected cosmopolitan use of language in situations where such locutions are not expected can be both humanizing and liberating. Recently a porn actress demonstrating her talents with a particularly well-endowed partner commented, “this is going to be comical.” Such turns of phrase are not the expected badinage in couplings predicated on dominance and submission. Generally, the script for such productions can be summarized by two words “oh yeah,” repeated ad nauseam from beginning to end. Could the actress have been browsing at volumes like Octave Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban or Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in her local Barnes & Noble before the shooting? Consciousness raising can occur in the most unlikely situations—which is also one definition of revolution. Is it safe to assume Louis the XVI had no idea the sans-culottes would storm the Bastille? Generally pornography is predicated on hyperbole, but here is an example of an exchange in which an organ that bore some resemblance to the trunk of an elephant was presented to an average-sized mouth out of which emanated the kind of speech that might be encountered at a diplomatic reception in place of the usual inanities constituting the soundtrack of a so-called loop. “This is going to be comical,” doesn’t compare to Lear’s “But I am bound upon a wheel of fire that mine own tears do scald of molten lead.” However it does leave hope that flights of eloquence may occur almost anywhere. Remember the famous Groucho Marx quip, "I wouldn't want to belong to a club that would have me as a member?" Membership is the operant word.

Read "The Findings" by Francis Levy, The Evergreen Review


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