Shame, Shame on You–and Me
Credit: shame-full.com
Not surprisingly, the article I posted here two days ago about public humiliation of Chinese mistresses has caused a measurable amount of reaction and debate among commenters on the blog as well as in my personal life. The article sparked a long, ponderous mood and meditation for me over the last few days, ranging from the political to psychological, and finally resting, as so often is the case, in the metaphorical and metaphysical.
It all started with the question of the relationship between shame and arousal. What would have caused these women to become violent, a mob of thugs? I thought about the rage, the human condition, biology. Humans are seething animalia and Mistress-dom, in all of its instantiations, brings out all that is human: love, sex, passion, loneliness, family, revenge, disgust, shame, justice, oozing, seeping masses.
I have been attracted to the mistress, intellectually and experientially, for a long while and so write about it in its broadest range and sense. On my blog, I toss the randomly acquired tidbit in with the big pot of stew of boiling thoughts over time, current curious human behavior in the news mixed with the rangy human theoretical concerns of graduate school professors and wannabes, and contribute to the expansive umbrella of my topic. I guess that is the structure of this blog, as much as I claim to have any.
But back to my musings, my next question concerned the relationship between shame and discipline. It is no secret that humiliation and shame are tools of the American “justice” system. Ask anyone who’s been in jail. She knows the systemization of acts, speech and design–from the guards’ avowed disgust, continual shouting and the panopticon vis a vis inmates–of degradation of the human spirit and person, of the human. Martha Nussbaum’s Hiding from Humanity queries the effectiveness of penal discipline performed through humiliation, claiming it degrades human-ness. Nietsche also believed shaming another is a deprivation of his humanity. Might the risk of dehumanization be measured against the efficacy of shame as a deterrent?
And what of the relationship between sex, shame and fantasy? It seems that much of fantasy is about domination and submission, often humiliation being one form of psychological control. What has been learned or experienced in childhood, in growing up in a culture, that compels people, some people, to combine shame, sex, power and control? It is not as easy to see this enactment of the prison guard-inmate relationship in our daily relationships, though it exists. Seizure of control by one or the other in a couple, whether by force or manipulation–or humiliation-is often one sided but also a constant shifting, or something in between. The power roles may be patently obvious, the dominant one apparent as the dominatrix, for example, but the inside workings of the couple-hood is not always clear.
When the drunkard comes home and beats his wife and the neighbors send the police to intervene, why does the wife defend the abuser against the police? One might surmise that she is afraid for herself and her children, perhaps, should the police interfere and the crazed eventually returning man believes it her fault. But one could also postulate that she is used to this kind of abuse and would rather have the father of her children around than have him hauled away, absolutely useless to her. She may know how to put up with physical violence, believe she has him under control because she knows what sets him off, knows what his limits are, and what the resulting damage will be–all of which is known.
Fear of the unknown is greater motivation than the shame she experiences in her debasement by another, in the eyes of her neighbors. But shame is a powerful emotion. Borrowing from a conversation with my recovering girlfriend, shame keeps you from being whole, causes cracks and are the cracks, the seepage. Shame is ubiquitous. Jane Bolton, Psyd, MFT, CC in Psychology Today writes about “What We Get Wrong About Shame,” and lists the following as manifestations of shame:
• Shyness is shame in the presence of a stranger
• Discouragement is shame about temporary defeat
• Embarrassment is shame in front of others
• Self-consciousness is shame about performance
• Inferiority is all-encompassing shame about the self
According to Bolton, these unsuspecting traits or emotions are associates of shame: embarrassment, discouragement, self-consciousness, inferiority and shyness. How often do these come into play? Shame is a powerful motivator and de-motivator and manifests itself in many contexts derived from biology and culture. We are programmed with shame from the stories told to us to regulate our behavior from birth: religious stories with fear and morality, codes of behavior that transform beastie children into civil adherents to a perceived orderly society.
All of those synonymous terms are conceived in the presence or eye of the others. Shyness is experienced in the presence of a stranger and discouragement is experienced as defeat due to shortcomings of the actor in the eyes of others. Embarrassment, self-consciousness and inferiority are all attributions of others’ perceptions to self, unworthiness, incompetence, and unattractiveness, perhaps. The byproduct and/or the foundation of these emotions and assessments is shame.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines shame as “A painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.” Shame is first a feeling. It is a physical and emotional experience. As Oxford exemplifies, one can be hot with shame, a physical heat resulting from the stabbing emotion that flushes one’s face and felt bodily. The cause of the physical sensation is a realization or “consciousness” of defying or being misaligned with some standard, moral or otherwise, deviated from it.
Notice the definition is devoid of agency. Who is judging the behavior as deviant, self or other? As created beings, biologically and culturally, moral codes of behavior or societal codes of conscience, are dictates that precede human existence. One is born into an ongoing culture with established laws and principles. Those become conscience, form conscience. “Wrong” or “foolish” is a judgment measured against those inherited codes, whether they be right or wrong.
Sex is tied up with morality and behavioral dictates more than any activity or aspect of the human. Everything is about sex and death. Freud got that one right. So, shame (a form of public death) and sex, of course, are integrally linked, inextricably. Think: slut shaming, walk of shame, wall of shame. These are expressions of shamed-sex, deviance, socially unacceptable, judged, and not unsurprisingly, attached to women, harkening back to Victorian attitudes (and long before) of chastity as the creation of desire.
Shame is encoded emotion, powerfully influencing conduct and thought. As such, it is culturally differentiated. And because cultural mores are inherited and amassed over time punctuated with archaic notions of wrong and right, anachronisms, they are often arbitrary and illogical even as they are organizational and self-policing sources for a society.
Take for example, China’s concubine culture historically as well as its modern day mistress culture–the acceptance that wealthy men, at least, have mistresses–(See Jeffrey Hays’ facts and details; the Daily Beast on concubine and mistress culture in China; and chineasy.org)
and juxtapose it against the social “norm” or trend (I claim ignorance) for mistresses to be publicly shamed and beaten for being a mistress. Those two dispositions appear contradictory and hypocritical. Nevertheless, shame is the unifying factor and violence the universal expression in these public beatings.
All parties to this public spectacle are shamed, ashamed or shameful, the beating wives/girlfriends, the mistresses, the onlookers who do nothing and the men who cheat silently turning their eyes from the scenes are all enmeshed in guilt, shame, regret, embarrassment, red-faced and angry.
The wives/girlfriends are beleaguered with the shame of their failings. Why did their husbands find someone else? Where did they fall short? What do they lack? The mistresses are shamed–and guilty–by the laws of marriage and the principles of honesty. Why are they not marriage-worthy? Why must they feel excitement only with secrecy and deception? Who are they hurting? The onlookers regret this public scene and ask themselves about their own motives and derelictions of duty, desire, honesty, guilty about their own inability to act to help the mistress, to take a stand somewhere on the issue, to upheave. And the missing men, well, there are so many questions they ask, don’t ask, should ask, are asked of them. Why do they cheat? Because they can.
So, while there are obvious questions about the dynamics, ethics, morals, justice and character of a society in which mistresses are beaten by gangs of women in the streets while onlookers look away, it is not enough to dismiss it as just a cultural idiosyncrasy as there are human constants underscored here that need recognition: shame dehumanizes and when is it ever acceptable in a society to dehumanize, given the world’s susceptibility to genocide (a hop, skip and a jump away from “mere” dehumanization)?
On the other hand, when judging behavior, the context is important. Part of the strategy to avoid dehumanization is understanding the causes and motivations of behaviors, not necessarily to excuse, but to come to conclusions (and judgments) with circumspection, respecting the complexity of the participants of such a violent practice, for participants and onlookers alike. Sensibilities, of course, are culturally predetermined too, so perhaps the violence of the act isn’t experienced in China to the same degree and in the same way American eyes experience such a display.
When we look upon and judge others, the looking itself is a cause, effect and manifestation of the behavior. Shame is caused by the gaze of others; when we separate ourselves the inner self of desire from the outer self of public expectation, we gaze upon ourselves. Shame is the mistress. Her role is shame-defined by the public but desire is her only transgression, she the victim of the violence of shame. Her “crime” was to consensually engage in love or sex with a man who desired her. She is merely a scapegoat.
The mistress is the metaphoric umbrella for all the dynamics of emotion, psychology, power, artifacts and action called human in this scenario. She is catalyst, container, and contained. In the larger contemplation, she is the metaphor of love’s mind, spirit and body–and is least blameworthy.
Why the People Should Not Mete Out Justice
“It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
“This day of torment, of craziness, of foolishness—only love can make it end in happiness and joy. —W. A. Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte, Le Nozze di Figaro (1786)”
― Martha C. Nussbaum, Political Emotion
“What do you regard as most humane? To spare someone shame.” Friedrich Nietzsche
“Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.
Hannah Arendt
Chinese mistress beaten in the streets by a mob of women marks new trend of wronged women meting out punishment in China. This disturbing bit of news brings to mind so many social, moral, and philosophical questions such as the meaning of justice, the role of power and violence and social contracts. But mostly, it is a disturbing lack of humanity to use shame as a method of punishment.
The details of this bizarre story may be found here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2791108/mob-rule-chinese-adulteress-stripped-naked-beaten-senseless-latest-attack-kind.html
That We Come Undone – Judith Butler
“Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. And so when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do (and as we must), we mean something complicated by it. Neither of these is precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another, or, indeed, by virtue of another.”
― Judith Butler, Undoing Gender
Man, Mistress and Object
She has a lover, she says, who is married and only available for sex when his work and family life permit, which is sometimes frequently and other times scarcely.
According to Kant in his Lectures on Ethics, sexual relations outside of a monogamous marriage leads to objectification of the participants, particularly the woman, as she is used for sexual gratification and afterwards discarded (163).
She describes this relationship as non-vertical, meaning they never meet except in a hotel room or the apartment he leases for sex, a horizontal proposition. She says she has never met him but once in public for coffee, once for a martini.
More specifically, Kant writes in the Lectures on Ethics that “sexual love makes of the loved person an Object of appetite; as soon as that appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry. … as soon as a person becomes an Object of appetite for another, all motives of moral relationship cease to function, because as an Object of appetite for another a person becomes a thing and can be treated and used as such by every one” (Kant Lectures on Ethics, 163).
She must be ready at any time to jump at his call, email or text, when opportunity arises, if she is to see him, and she wants to see him. She believes she loves him and has always loved him since she first met him, even though from the start, it was a utilitarian arrangement. They were both looking for sex outside sexless marriages.
Again, Kant notes, the inequality inherent in the mistress or concubine relationship–the woman completely surrenders her sex whereas the man with multiple concubines or wife does not–even though not for profit is also objectification as she is still used and possessed by the man.
She and her lover have little in common other than sex. In terms of social position, career and ideology, they are worlds apart. He is owner of a multi-billion dollar company and she is an elementary school teacher. His views are diametrically opposed to her own: Tea Party Republican Conservative Evangelical Christian vs. Progressive New Age mystic. His world is black and white, the world of no bullshit commerce and the market: You are either contributing to the economy or you are a drag on it. She is about compassion and communitarianism: society is only as strong as its weakest members who need help from those who have more.
Only in monogamous marriage is the surrendering of each partner equal, each one claiming possession and property the other, and thereby avoiding objectification, mere using. It is the power differential that creates this inequality that Kant deems the core of objectification (plato.stanford).
They have been meeting for nearly 8 years, just this way, little talk, just about the areas they can find common ground like parenting, beer and sports, but mostly sex. Their meetings are always secret, discreet, and sexual. They meet, undress in silence and engage in sex immediately. After the act, they rest in each other’s embrace and only then will he chat about his work and family, tell stories about funny exchanges with friends. She listens and laughs.
By surrendering herself, her sex, to a man who does not equally surrender himself fully to her, she allows herself to be used as a thing and thereby loses her humanity, which Kant equates with rational choice. She is a means to an end, merely.
In between sex sessions is the only foreplay they engage in. They fantasize. His fantasy is to dominate, possess, humiliate and control. He emails her about all the things he is going to do to her, including rape, sodomy and confinement. She encourages him and participates in this fantasy, providing her own desire to be owned, possessed, abused and humiliated.
Feminists Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin claim that pornography perpetuates female objectification by catering to patriarchal socio-sexual objectification, making women the instrument of male pleasure or eroticism, sexual acts performed on women for men’s pleasure, a role constructed by society and perpetuated by pornography (plato.stanford).
MacKinnon writes: “… A sex object is defined on the basis of its looks, in terms of its usability for sexual pleasure, such that both the looking—the quality of gaze, including its points of view—and the definition according to use become eroticised as part of the sex itself. This is what the feminist concept of ‘sex object’ means” (MacKinnon 1987, 173)
She says she has fantasies that she imagines when she masturbates, fantasies about rape, domination, humiliation and control, ones she can never share. He uses a naked picture of her when he masturbates. It is faceless.
But other thinkers such as Ronald Dworkin and Martha Nussbaum attribute objectification to a host of images society perpetuates from soap operas to fashion, women as appearance only. Additionally, women are partly responsible for their objectification, for being objects of the gaze, as they conform to societal dictates for appearance, bodily appearance (plato.stanford).
She says she loves him, that he is a good man, tender and loving. He strives to please her and loves her, wants her to use his body for her pleasure. She gives her body willingly and he takes it greedily, hungrily. He desires her always, tells her she is beautiful and makes her feel beautiful and loved, even consumed, but in that consumption merged. They enter each other’s bodies and through their bodies, their hearts and minds.
Sandra Bartky in her book Feminism and Domination asserts women objectify themselves by internalizing the patriarchal gaze and living life through the eyes of the gazer, regardless of a specific gazer or societal gaze. She, woman, has internalized that gaze and lives under it herself. In addition, women are fragmented by being associated with their bodies rather than their minds and personalities. In Simone de Beauvoir’s words, they objectify themselves to obtain power over men, in seeing themselves as alluring objects of men and engaging in unilateral sexual acts of pleasuring men; this unilateral pleasuring gives women power. Women as ornaments, attention to body size and shape by dieting, surgery, apparel, mannerisms, taking up less space than men, these actions perpetuate and are the result of objectification.
He has said that he would love no other ever again, would go to his grave fantasizing about her, that she is all he could imagine wanting in his life and regrets not having met her sooner, when he was looking for a wife. He makes her feel desired.
Objectification, then, according to Langton, is a process in which the social world comes to be shaped by desire and belief. An objectifier thinks that her or his beliefs have come to fit the world, where in fact the world has come to fit her or his beliefs (plato.stanford).
And he is jealous and possessive. He claims he would own her, on a leash, not let her out of a cage if she were his, but also says he would treat her like the queen she is, if only she makes him feel loved: sex, food, tenderness and home. He wants to own her completely as his, his sperm repository, his lover, his wife, his mother of his children, his body to do with whatever he wishes with or without her consent. And he offers his body to her equally with the same rights and privileges. He believes it is biblically deigned it should be that way. She is not a believer but believes that his desire to possess her is what fuels her imagination and desire for him. She loves him and will always subjugate herself to him knowing he would treat her with respect and never harm her.
Alan Soble and Leslie Green believe objectification of people is not necessarily a bad thing. People in the pornography industry are willingly employed objects. People ARE objects. It is only wrong when people are treated merely as objects, as means and not as ends in themselves, to use the terms of Kant’s Moral Imperative. Martha Nussbaum agrees and expands objectification into categories one of which is instrumentality. Using each other sexually, as objects, can be enjoyable. Equality, respect and consent are the key factors to judge any act of objectification objectionable. It is contextual whether something is good or bad in terms of objectification. People may use each other as sexual tools, as mere bodies for a means to an end, if in other respects or overall, they treat each other with respect and act with mutual consent (plato.stanford).
Neither of them wish to leave their respective spouses but merely to spend time, more time, and sustain each other for the rest of their days.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-objectification/
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Chaos and Cyber Love
“chaos is the hauntology of the modern era” Arthur Kroker
How long before we are bots unknown to be?
Data is inscribed into flesh hitching DNA rides.
Generations unfold chromosomally influenced.
Replicants evolve in time, skin and commerce.
We parade and charade love on the city streets.
Aping the arts of others and ourselves as selves.
Interpellated we march onward chaotic bot-hood
We are the haunted of a Hauntology we aren’t.
GMO, HMO, HBO, society streaks a mean shove
How do we know who is machine and who man?
I dream of a mistress sex cyborg to mediate love.
Love is not the antidote, not the cure but the plan.
Dream of a Mistress Sex Cyborg
Credit: rarewallpapers.com
When I was five, I suffered from nightmares. I don’t remember of what, but I remember fearing sleep. My mother did not allow her children into her bed at night unless warranting such special treatment or need for vigilance over illness, such as a high fever. I may have had the privilege to sleep with Mom once or twice since I was, unfortunately, a very healthy child. But that may have been the cause of the nightmares or at least the desperation I felt, not having a ready fix for them.
Perhaps I got the idea to pray to God as a solution from school. Back then prayer in school was unquestioned. After the pledge of allegiance, the announcer over the loudspeaker (yes the pledge of allegiance and morning prayer were an electro-communal experience) concluded, “And now for our morning prayer,” which was later re-worded to “And now for a moment of silent reflection,” the signal to pray quietly for a minute. I knew God, a word not frequently heard in my household other than in profane epithets my father would toss about on the infrequent occasion of his being awake the same time as the rest of his family. He worked nights. I understood the word, though ours was not a religious family; holidays were eating occasions, just like for my kids now, only holidays to them are gift-receiving occasions. My parents were practicing appetites. Food was their religion. Still is for my living-with-me father, at least, as he has no question more asked than “What are we eating?”
But when I was five and nightmare-filled, I resolved to pray nightly before sleep, begging God with a one-sentence “Please don’t let me have bad dreams” incantation repeated in quick succession enough times to knock me into dreamland. So, when the ritual removed the nightmares, I pondered the remedy and asked my mother in some randomly fallen into my lap opportunity to chat with my mom, who was always busy with too many kids (4 then, 5 later), “Do you believe in God?” She hesitated. It was long enough for me to slide into a little anxiety before she finally said, “I don’t know.” I cannot remember the explanation after that because those three words were the only ones that mattered to me and affected me long afterward.
I didn’t become an atheist or an agnostic or an adherent of any religion as a result of that encounter. In fact, I tried on many religions over the years: Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as well as agnosticism, atheism and a touch of the wiccan. Today I am still theologically ambiguous, often ambivalent, but a steady incursion of yoga into my life starting at 15 and flexing strenuously or ambivalently throughout my four decades since has led me to a commitment to certain constants such as life in balance (koyaanisqatsi is the Hopi word for its opposite, a word on a button I wore on an old army-navy supply backpack I have sported since the same age) and a dedication to the mystery. I have matured enough to have acquired a healthy respect, understanding, and awe of science: method, premise, discovery and temperament. Though I still cannot commit to any one ordering principle of the universe or multiverse or kingdom.
I have thought about reincarnation and the afterlife in general. In my musings, I have wondered about the human condition as walking, breathing, pulsing meat but also as anima, what I imagined I witnessed depart from my beloved Copper when he was put to sleep, the light and animation immediately stilled, or imagined while staring at a corpse. I have read enough in my lifetime of philosophy, theosophy, literature and science to conclude: I don’t know. Thanks Mom.
So, I have decided that when or if I do come back, I will come back as a sex cyborg, not purely utilitarian machinery like Woody Allen’s Sleeper orgasmatron or orgasmic orb, nor sex kitten destructo agent and object like Vanessa the fembot in Austin Powers’ The Spy Who Shagged Me but more like Star Trek’s Data from The Next Generation, who is a participant and observer of human behavior, learning to emote human style. He is a scientist of human behavior and emotion, both distant and involved, objective and subjective. His capability is not merely a marvel of advanced robotics but of his own capability to learn and grow. I want to come back as Data-fied sex cyborg (not of the Borg race, mind you, more generically cyborg). Probably not the first to imagine this. Think: Donna Haraway’s Cyborgs.
The sex cyborg or sex-bot I imagine is an automaton that charges not from battery or electricity or kryptonite, but from sexual energy, that which is produced in the mutual sexual act–the one most electric–from foreplay (for those willing) to final orgasm or beyond, wherever the sexual activity of a particular session ceases. To keep alive and charged, this sexual agent must connect to its energy source at least once a day for minimally an hour, which means she/it is a once a day every day gal-bot. It also means she must be a multiply-relationshipped, mistress-type bot to obtain quality and quantity of sex and thus charge; long time committed relationships generally contain floods and droughts. Masturbation with imagined mutuality is a weak source so provides little life and would take longer charging time.
The intake of sexual energy is a logical source for a sex-borg because sex seems to be where much of human energy is spent: thinking, chasing, scheming, doing, cheating, excavating, mining, imagining and experiencing. So, the sex machine never fails to find a charge and lives indefinitely, especially if she is styled after the computed universal consensus of what is called “beauty” for a given culture, whether that is symmetry of features, youth, voluptuousness, waif-like body and demeanor, wherever the society is in terms of its constant flux of aesthetics.
Why a sex-bot? Well, besides the obvious, a constant life source and well, fun, I think the mistress-as-robot position is one most amenable to great and constant learning about human nature, what makes people really tick, the underside and bowels of the deepest, darkest (in the sense of not coming into light) guts and mystery that is human. In its many carnations, sex is experienced by and connected to all that humans started out to be, became and ended up to be. I don’t mean gender. I mean the genetics we are born with accented by environmental influences–loving father, mother, absent, cruel, war-torn world, whatever life brings–forms who we are consciously and unconsciously.
Why do some need more sex than others? Why do some not need it at all? How does one get off on eating shit while another doesn’t even find Johnny Depp sexy enough to “do”? It is thus with humans that we experience sex as a repository for all that we are and all we decide in life, our tastes and life choices and everything else. What we get off on is directly correlative to something we were born with or were shaped by in my non-scientific, non-professional home grown logic culled in my experience as a lifetime mistress and story collector.
As a distant observer and participant with a beyond human memory capability, I could do a lot of data collecting and pleasuring. I could potentially be pleasured myself, but I don’t think in the same way as a human experiences pleasure, more like mind-fucking empathy, not voyeurism, empathy. That’s why the cyborg as mistress is effective and intriguing. She is interested in the human species as a wannabe but dispassionate enough to be effective. With the right programming, she could be multi-skilled, adaptive, flexible and if not genuinely at least convincingly compassionate enough to perfect, satisfy and effectuate a wide range of scenarios and partners. She is far more gifted, less cynical and more professional than the human professional of the oldest arts. She is able to collect and provide gem-fuls of information about human nature, desire and need. She is Mistress Hum-bot, potentially something for everyone, who cares, in her fashion, to the extent of her capability, a post-human humanist. Wait, I think my mom already produced one of those. Okay, not really but fun to imagine.
Leonard Cohen’s “I Long to Hold Some Lady”
I Long to Hold Some Lady from The Spice Box of Earth
I long to hold some lady
For my love is far away,
And will not come tomorrow
And was not here today.
There is no flesh so perfect
As on my lady’s bone,
And yet it seems so distant
When I am all alone:
As though she were a masterpiece
In some castled town,
That pilgrims come to visit
And priests to copy down.
Alas, I cannot travel
To a love I have so deep
Or sleep too close beside
A love I want to keep.
But I long to hold some lady,
For flesh is warm and sweet.
Cold skeletons go marching
Each night beside my feet.
The scene is set in this song from the outset, longing for a body, any body (some lady) of not just the female kind, but one ascribed “lady” characteristics, suggesting manners and carriage, not just woman, which is neutral along the lines of female, a mere nominative term. In just the first line, a reader can see what Leonard Cohen is about in this song. Him.
His use of a mistress, the one night stand, a body, for his purposes, whether that is sexual or inspirational–the muse–is obvious. He refers to what he desires as “lady” and “flesh” and “bone”, which suggest the physical body and sexual desire, but he also uses words like “distant” and “perfect” and “masterpiece” along with religious figures of pilgrim and priest, suggesting the female figure as muse, on her pedestal, in his mental loins, a mere image for idolatry. But in the end of the poem, it becomes clear that woman is merely a placeholder for his own masturbatory lovemaking, the love he cannot travel to as it is so “deep”, I would posit inside of him, is the love of a woman….because he is so busy loving himself.
Leonard Cohen’s image as poet-lover is not unknown to others who know his music and writings, the lover who dabbled with so many women (Joni Mitchell one of the more famous of them), committing to none, and painted them on the walls of his imagination in his music and in his schtick, his gig, the crooner surrounded by the chick backup singers. Whether act or true story of his inability to attach/commit, he is devoted to promoting and expressing that romantic self image in just about everything he writes: Cohen as being Cohen. And that’s not a bad thing.
I like Leonard Cohen’s music and writing, most all of it. He is a caricature of a beat generation figure of freedom of expression and romantic love mid to late 20th Century style. He is historical. The brush strokes of his collage poetry is delicate and flavorful, like his last few lines: “For flesh is warm and sweet/Cold skeletons go marching/Each beside my feet.” The contrast of warm flesh, evoking the blood and bone imagery throughout, juxtaposed with the cold skeleton, life and death, is stripped purely in binary anatomical, biological terms. The romantic notion of craving someone gets reduced to blood, bone, and death. It is not macabre so much as a revelation that the “lady” was a mere idea in the first place–mistress muse of his imagination.
One may begrudge him for being a user and abuser of women for his purposes like any rapist, or one can judge him a showman plying his trade full of promotion and self-selfish love, or one can enjoy a poet using symbol and metaphor in his own style. Give him a break? For “there is a crack in everything (and everyone). That’s how the light gets in.”
Mistress Muse Has Left the Building
Theater, theater everywhere and not a jot to spare.
I awake to coffee spill and news-ful cancer’d glare.
And fire drill call to hurry up let’s go I’m gonna be late.
Flinging my body to stand from sleep, I jerk my gait.
O where is my morning muse with her golden hair?
She is cleaning the sick of crusted plates from night.
She is driving the pouting glum of stare to school late.
She is plumbing pieces of despair picked from market.
Theater, theater in the air and none too soon to bear.
I lunch on steering wheel carousel toast with shmear.
From work to work I go changing shoes at red lights.
And home again to gaze into supper’s dull delights.
O where is my afternoon muse with her flesh of dun?
She is quilting the patches of place to place and back.
She is feeding the abysmal depths of teenage hunger.
She is bickering the truth of decaying parental mind.
Theater, theater nowhere near the pleasure palace be.
I sleep in hollow cavern deep with laundered sheets.
And trace the catatonic trail of deeds that light leads.
To bed alone with fantasy flee’d I sweep seams free.
O where is my night late muse with her sleeping brow?
She is unloosing strands tied tight in day’s do and do.
She is fallowed dark in forms of wisp and trollop sims.
She is aloft in costumed stages of trim repair of dreams.
Mistress Muse Where Are You?
When the thought I seek doesn’t come
I sit poised, fingers frozen in mid-type,
waiting for the words to percolate down
from my brain to my digits in wait, ready
But when sentences flow without stop
when they pour onto pad seamlessly
is when there is no thought, only flow
flying letters flipping up the paged screen
The stretch of linguistic limbs of mind
and the barren desert of heart desire
produces no cave gem of the delightful
just a wrenched out, eked out word squirt
Drenched in the sweat of sexless desire
it hurts to turn the cogs and wheels on
to keep the grooves oiled and tea hot
I am no longer the poet I was ever before.
In the gaze of the other 