Pornography
What relation does pornography have to despair and truth?
It is peculiar example of something that cannot be defined as truth or nontruth.
Pornography, of all of our products, is the only thing that makes no serious
attempt to assert its veracity. It has no pretense to truth. It is true
that the plot it supposes is fake, but its artificiality is only a gesture,
a veil; it is not an artificiality that attempts to displace, mimic or stand
in for a reality; that is, it has no ulterior investment in truth. Rather,
it is fantasy laying bare its own belly, owning up to its own insubstantiality.
It is anti--- in many other respects as well. For instance, it revels in
values that are usually ignored in our lives: lying, fantasy, crudity, defecation,
sadism.
There is no way there could be a relationship forged between anything serious
and pornography---by definition, anything that pornography touches will
be automatically camp, surreal, blown.
And although most pornography patently shuns despair through its flights
of sugary fantasy--fulfilled hopes of sexuality--our need for it, conversely,
shows us that we cannot generate our own, must rely instead upon this contradiction
of flesh that is not flesh, motion that denies the possibility of contact,
a hope that is of the most banal sort. Despite the insulin, actual sweetness
evades us. We are still outside, grabbing ourselves, looking in.
In light of this, what is real and when is it desirable or necessary? Is
'reality' achieved simply through the dint of effort, 'truth' by a greater
emphasis upon appearance and consistency? These images upon the screen,
are they real? Or, is anything that is not an object open to manipulation?
Do not things in turn create their own reality? Is not reality, as C.S.Pierce
suggests, simply influence? By this token, a thing that has no influence
does not exist.
Some axioms to consider:
1. Only few individuals exist except unto themselves.
2. Love is only when someone begins to exist for you, in your field of vision,
walking in your dreams.
3. A death does not exist for you until you see it.
4. Pornography ceases to be effective pornography when it attempts to influence
you in ways that mimic reality, that is, when it begins to make an effort
to authenticate itself. It crumbles, you become distracted by the effort
of thinking, torn apart by the simultaneous departure from and return to
reality.
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