I am a sensitive creature and so silences disturb me. Even beautiful silences.
So again I return to this thought about the ethics of revisiting this erotic past of betrayal, and if this revisiting is itself betrayal.
For me, habit is very important. Habit is the basis of character. I follow Aristotle in this regard. And so the habits that we repeat shape us. For these reasons, I am both sympathetic to the claims of Chelsea girl, in her recent post, and to the writer that she critiques. Pornography, like all forms of cultural product, does, in the forms that it repeats, create habits of thinking and acting. In other forums I have defended these claims to potentially absurd consequences (that reading crap like The DaVinci Code should be prohibited for certain age groups). The idea is, garbage in, garbage out.
My critique of that text comes, not from having read it (like I could waste four hours reading that when I could be reading Michel Tournier or the like), a mere aesthetic judgment, not a judgment about its content (let's just pretend like I can maintain that separation between form and content . . .). But with pornography, the matter is more complicated. Pornography has always struck me as so facile in its end. That is, why, although I am trying to implicate myself among this community of individuals (largely among a bunch of female writers (such as the above) I feel comfortable with and not their male counterparts, zum Beispiel, this fellow), I know that I cannot enjoy posts describing sexual acts as others, those who comment on their posts, do.
I mean, these posts interest me, don't get me wrong, but they don't really arouse me. I've been image habituated. I have to end up visiting Redtube to get off.
But I do get aroused by revisiting my past. At least some of the time. And I feel exhilarated in exhibiting these incidents, which by the standards of this community I seem to enjoy would be quite "vanilla." But for the same reason that I worry about the way that pornography shapes the way that I view sexual interactions, I worry about the way this exhibitionism and the betrayal in particular that it emphasizes shapes my own actions.
My history with betrayal is quite old. But the closer I come to so-called maturity (at my age, it has been a long time coming) the more I wonder why I can't be happy with less and what conflicts I am precipitating by continuing these practices. Shouldn't all this be tapering off a little?
Or have I fetishized infidelity so much so, that I cannot, like Séverine in "Belle de Jour," enjoy a relationship without being unfaithful and its concomitant guilt?
Maybe I've been lying to myself and I simply need to admit to polyamoury. Yet I feel quite convinced that, neither I nor another could sustain that.
4 comments:
Polyamory is not the same thing as infidelity, and if you have indeed fetishized infidelity, polyamory won't do. That being said, I wonder why the fetishizing of betrayal, because I do suspect a bit of that from your text. And concomitantly, you also fetishize memoir, which is a different kind of betrayal--the betrayal of the past to ever actually become present, much as we reach for the story. Do you suppose there's a commonality among all these ghosts?
No, certainly, polyamory is not the same as infidelity. I didn't mean to suggest so. It's only infidelity in the social sense, in regard to normative values that color our grammar and supposed common interactions.
But yes, it will not due if betrayal is what I have fetishized.
I am curious about this way you speak of a betrayal of the past. It's a fascinating idea. Could you say more?
Hmmmm.
Hmmmm again. I like what you have written here, but I need to go away and think about it some more.
Fetishizing infidelity. Do you think that's what you've been doing? Fetishizing the past, certainly, as Marcelle has intimated. Maybe it's just the cult of the 'what if'. I certainly am guilty of that.
Marianne
Sorry to take so long returning. I was on a bit of a hiatus. What I meant was this: when we look back at our past, we think we're seeing truth. But somewhere inside us, we know we've reconstructed a narrative. That we won't ever reach the moment we're trying to capture, and it won't ever capture the moment we thought it did. That's what I meant by the betrayal of memoir. And it's part of why I got so pissed off when Oprah yelled at James Frey. As if any author's "memoir" isn't half-fiction anyway?
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