Erotica Artist Ch. 02: Romance and Renun
Yet at the same time my awareness of my isolation increased. In movie houses and concert halls I was surrounded by couples on dates or groups of friends. I was dateless and friendless. My physical confinement was over but my solitude was not.
I lived on the fourth floor of a red brick residence on the tip of Point Grey, surrounded by Commerce and Engineering students. And here at least my solitude was broken by a room-mate, a tall, bespectacled, acne-blasted Engineer named Ron Pilkington, who in his own way was every bit as weird as I was. He too could go for hours without saying a word, and he never had a date on Saturday night.
He was also, I realized, after several bumbling attempts at conversation, one of the dullest men alive. Still, he was someone to talk to, and after remaining mute for so long, I had to start somewhere. I began practicing the art of conversation with Ron. I stuck at it for several weeks before giving up.
I went out alone on weekends and concentrated on my courses throughout the week. I attended classes religiously that first year, even doing my best in a math and a science course, subjects I loathed but which were required of freshmen back then. I savored my English Literature survey course most, the exposure to authors I'd been only vaguely aware of up until then. I even enjoyed a brief half hour of success when my professor, a dithery but endearing older woman with an English accent, read aloud to the class my paper on T.S. Eliot's 'The Hollow Men.'
I was deeply grateful that she did not identify me, though I sat through the recitation with heart pounding lest she might. Afterwards I was quietly proud of the achievement, though the paper had not been that difficult to write. By then I knew a thing or two about hollow men.
I read Thomas Mann and Henry James for the first time and felt a pang of empathy. All that delicacy, all that inhibition. Restraint and passivity were still my middle names at this point, English decorum and reserve my watchwords even though my roots were in the rough, industrialized north. And of course I had no more physical contact, no more sex life, than most of James's characters, or James himself, for that matter.
What I did have, for the time being, as a supplement to my serious reading, were girlie magazines. Escapade and Sir!, Gent and Dude, Swank and countless others. All very tame as yet, of course, in 1965. Air-brushed spreads of lovely young women with breasts bared, and the stiff, stupid early sixties hair styles. But they were naked, they were posed alluringly, and they were available, at least as fantasy figures. Best of all, you didn't have to talk to them!
The real liberating explosion of hardcore porn was still several years away, and while in the world of print the odd Bee-Line paperback sometimes came close, the only mainstream purveyors of anything resembling erotica were D.H. Lawrence and another Henry, James's polar opposite, Mr. Miller.
Lawrence also seemed to know a thing or two about emotional repression, I learned, and he gave me a hope of some eventual liberation. I wasn't sure how or when freedom would be attained but I sensed, through my reading, that it was possible. Literature and mainstream media were helping in my quest for freedom.
* * *
It was a year of preparation, more than anything. I was able to see things in a sharper and sharper focus. Never again, for example, would I be restricted in my course choices. I was enduring the very last math and science courses of my life and henceforth I would take only what interested me. Enough restrictions. Enough limitations. I was already eyeing courses in Psychology and European and Classical literature for next year.
My personal life needed much work, I realized, and though I was unsure how to effect change, I was determined to try. Maybe that Psychology course would offer me some insight into my own sad case.
I went home to Beaver Falls for the summer feeling more upbeat than I ever had. I'd seen something of the outside world now, after my three years of confinement, and the experience had quickened my senses. I was ready to try broadening my outlook further.
With this in mind I quit work in the mill two weeks before school re-opened and with my bank account solid I flew out of Beaver Falls and boarded a train for San Francisco. I stayed for four days in a cheap hotel half a block from the flashing neon of the North Beach strip clubs though of course I was too timid to enter any of them.
In Los Angeles I took ninety minute bus rides to all the beaches and sleazy attractions, filling my knapsack along the way with obscure forty fives I'd heard on am radio in the dead of night.
I depressurized on the way back north with stops in Portland and Seattle and by the time I crossed the forty ninth parallel I could sense a real change coming in my life. The short vacation had boosted my morale no end and I settled into my single room back in residence, free now of my fascinating roommate Ron, with some real anticipation.
I felt at home now on campus, even though I was still surrounded by Commerce students and Engineers. And I felt relaxed in a city that was smaller than any I had just visited but which was more spectacular, in its way, than all of them combined. And the fact that it wasn't an American city for some reason played no small part in my satisfaction. It wasn't only beautiful and cosmopolitan, it was safe.
I sensed change and more freedom coming. When Henry James had Roderick Hudson yearn to strike out and do something "indecent," another character suggests he give a picnic. Okay, maybe I wasn't ready to be quite that reckless, but I did enroll in more Literature courses as well as the Psychology and Classics I'd been eyeing. And I bought myself a VW Beetle to tool around town in.
Around this time too a huge sense of liberation came from the loss of whatever religious faith I possessed. Not that I'd had much to begin with, but over the course of the summer, as part of my self-imposed reading program, I'd plowed through the Old and New Testaments. It was, to coin a phrase, a revelation. It was now beyond me how anyone could read even the first few books of the Old Testament and retain any religious faith whatever.
I began to sense that religious belief was just another form of stricture, of mind-control, of imprisonment. The monotonous recitation of catechism in my elementary school days had meant less time for more relevant school work. And what about all the hours wasted in Sunday school, stifling in the musty church basement on glorious sunny afternoons, until one day my friend Terry suggested playing hooky.
What a concept! The freedom of scuffed knees and wet sneakers from hours spent exploring the muddy stream that ran through Dean Wood. Such bliss compared to the monotony of organized worship of what turns out to be no less a fantasy figure than Santa Claus.
And yet I had believed, unquestioningly, brainlessly, because that was what adults had taught me to do. Just as I believed in Santa until the fateful day I said "Hey, wait a minute ...."
The two concepts came for me to run in parallel, as I plowed my way through Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy: the belief in God seemed to be an adult version of the belief in Santa Claus, and was just about as relevant to life in the real world. Patriarchal claptrap all.
It was exactly the same system of reward and punishment. If you were all good little boys and girls, at the end of the year Santa filled your stocking with lovely presents. If you weren't, you would receive nothing.
If you believed in God and followed his precepts and were free from sin, whatever that was, you would be rewarded with a one-way ticket to heaven. If you did not believe, or were sinful, you would burn forever after in hell.
The latter concept seemed to be simply a more sophisticated, lifelong system of psychic terrorism. For as I read on, with an increasing sense of freedom, the one word that recurred over and over again in connection with God was fear. You must fear the Lord. You will have no real knowledge until you learn to fear this terrifying being.
But fear wasn't the only keyword that appeared over and over. Anger, wrath and fury were also everywhere: the dear Lord's endless, perpetual fucking rage. The Old Testament God an insane old patriarch, drunk, besotted with fury.
He does nothing but threaten, terrorize, destroy, burn, kill for page after relentless page. Death and mayhem are his main preoccupations. The so-called word of the Lord turns out to be one long outpouring of blind hatred and revenge.
Punishment and retribution, all for not worshipping this lunatic, for not obeying his crazed statutes. Terror and death are his watchwords. Along with that old favorite: slaughter!
Isiah pretty much summed things up: "Behold the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it"
So much for God's message of hope and love for mankind. But old Isiah was just getting warmed up: "Every one that is found shall be thrust through, and every one that is joined unto them shall fall by the sword.
Their children shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes. their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished."
Okay, Isiah, enough, we get it! Our children will be slaughtered and our wives raped in the name of the Lord. But no, on and on he goes: "Their bows also shall dash the young men to pieces, and they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb, their eye shall not spare children."
Reading such passages in my late teens and early twenties first off filled me with despair, for if indeed this book, these books, were what Western religions were founded upon, surely there was no hope for humankind.
Until this hate literature was abandoned, along with all the organizations built upon it, the world would be full of bigotry, misogyny, genocide and terror.
But then also, the more I read the more I sensed freedom, for the more I read the faster my weakling faith died. If this homicidal maniac was God, I decided, who in their right mind could believe in him?
I began to think of the God of the Bible as a fictional character, a villain to outrival any in literature, who made Captain Ahab or Iago look like choirboys.
But then I concluded that this wasn't God speaking at all, not even in a fictive voice. There was no God worth believing in who would speak this way. The speaker here, the writer of this litany of intolerance and hate, was good old man himself: embittered, twisted, psychotic old men deliberately terrorizing a gullible multitude.
The wrath of God was really the white-hot rage of the tribal elder trying to instill discipline in the flock through terror.
And so I lost my faith forever and gained a semblance of freedom. Freedom through a love of reading, through literature, through knowledge,
I began making a list of every outrage I encountered in the good Book. There was death by stoning for not observing the Sabbath. For worshipping other gods. For stubbornness, rebelliousness, gluttony, drunkenness. For adultery, homosexuality.
A husband discovers the woman he's married isn't a virgin: she should be stoned to death for "playing the whore." In Judges a concubine is gang-raped one night and her husband, instead of comforting her cuts her into twelve pieces and sends her into all the coasts of Israel.
There were the Lord's "arrows drunk with blood." the "sword without and terror within." There was the poor fellow who is "wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off." He shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord. Why not? I wondered.
A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord. Why not? Maybe he needs it more than most. Transvestism is an abomination. Why? "Thou shalt not plow with an ox and an ass together." Why not?
If you don't listen to the Lord, He'll smite you with consumption, inflammation, with blasting and mildew. I figured I could take the inflammation and blasting, but maybe not the mildew.
And when David wants to marry Saul's daughter Saul doesn't want a dowry, he wants a hundred Philistine foreskins. David, anxious to impress, brings him two hundred Philistine foreskins. What a guy!
And the story of David and Bathsheba and her poor son of a bitch of a husband: what about that? The great David. Not just a fornicating asshole, not just a murderer, but a committer of genocide! Axes and harrows of iron indeed, not to mention the brick-kiln!
The leap into faith, it began to seem to me, was a leap into neurosis, a term I was becoming familiar with in my psychology class preparatory reading. And the lunatic who commits mass murder in the name of religion was just at the more extreme end of the spectrum. The seeing of visions was just imagination unrestrained. Psychosis. It was all a matter of degree.
After classic literature, my favorite reading was girlie magazines and pornographic novels, but I suspected that if I lived to be a hundred and ten I'd never come across anything anywhere nearly as obscene as the Lord's sweet revenge for the so-called "abominations of Jerusalem" as related in Ezekial:
"Slay utterly old and young, both maids and little children, and women."
Or the passage in Hosea where infants are "dashed in pieces, and women with child shall be ripped up."
Or in Jeremiah where the Lord causes sinners to "eat the flesh" of sons and daughters.
Enough of this. Enough of this hate literature, I think. There is no beneficent Father up there doling out reward in heaven, where we all meet up to spend eternity with those we've loved and lost. At what stage of life were we supposed to meet them again? When they were innocent children? Healthy young adults? Mature older folks? Or when they were old and sick, at death's door, ravaged by cancers or any of the innumerable scourges nature, or the Lord, has to offer? No, no beneficent Father. But perhaps even more important, no rage-besotted Father either, screaming at us "You are sinners! You are unclean! You are guilty as hell and are to be shipped there as soon as I've tallied things up!" For there is no hell either. No Satan, no Beelzebub. That's just another invention of the elders, the psychic terrorists.
Enough of this. Freedom through reading. Liberation through literature.
* * *
Everything in the new term fell into place perfectly. I had five classes per day, from 9:30 to 4:30, with Tuesdays and Thursdays completely free to study or do as I wished. Maybe my classes would suffice for yet another year, along with my other solo activities. Maybe I would fulfill that early promise and have more essays read out in class by my professors.
But deep down I doubted it. I needed more now. I was hungry for more. I was determined to make a sustained effort to meet people, to break out of my shell.
My preference would have been for a beautiful female who enjoyed movies and R&B concerts, but the first friend I made in university, the first real friend I had made since leaving the UK six years earlier, was a handsome male named Nick Halliday.
He lived on the same floor of the residence block and I had at first written him off as superficial and self-absorbed because women seemed to find him hard to resist. He was never part of a group, but could often be seen in the cafeteria deep in conversation with one or two of the more stunning co-eds in residence. A big part of my resentment of him was pure envy, I had to admit. I'd never even spoken to the man. I simply couldn't conceive that anyone that good-looking could also be a decent person.
Past midnight one Friday I was alone in the deserted residence lounge playing the Jimmy Smith version of Bernstein's "Walk On The Wild Side" on the antique stereo when Nick poked his head through the door and asked if he could listen in. Which he did, in respectful silence till the cut was over, when he asked to hear it again. And then a third time.
He was dressed in a crisp white shirt with a dark tie and jacket, and before we parted that night I asked him where he'd been, dressed so formally. He'd taken a date down to the cathedral, he explained, to hear selections from Bach's "Mass In B-Minor." Bach to Bernstein and Jimmy Smith in one evening. Why not?
And so a casual friendship began based on a diversity if not an out-and-out eccentricity of tastes in music. Nick introduced me to the world of baroque music and I exposed Nick to the underworld of R&B and jazz.
Nick was also a serious student of film, and had already published some critical reviews in the university newspaper. He recommended obscure foreign movies to me and lent me collections of criticism and serious film periodicals.
No girlie magazines or pin-ups for Nick. His room was crammed with books of criticism or biography but otherwise was as austere as a monk's cell: the walls were bare and the closets almost empty.
He spent most of his non-study hours playing bridge in the lounge with a group of Engineering students. Or he was out at movies and classical music concerts with any number of lovely young women. There didn't seem to be a regular girlfriend, but he was often visited in his room by women who didn't even live in residence.
One afternoon, maybe three weeks after our meeting in the lounge I came across a stocky but pretty redhead in glasses who was gazing forlornly through the open door of Nick's vacant room. Behind the glasses her eyes were tearful. She clutched a sodden tissue in one hand and a notebook and paperback novel in the other.
Maybe I imagined it, but I thought she swayed back on her heels as if she was about to collapse. That's probably what did it. Before I knew what I was doing I was asking her to wait in Nick's room while I brought him up from his bridge game in the lounge.
These were the first pleasant words I'd addressed to a female my own age since leaving the UK so many years before. I could speak because I was concerned for her, granted, but I had to admit too that I was relaxed because I didn't find her very attractive. What a thing to acknowledge. But it was true.
She didn't want to impose, but I insisted. She was not a frail girl, but she appeared exhausted and despondent, a little like an abandoned waif in the Hardy novel she was carrying.
"Have you known Nick long?" she asked as she entered and gazed about the room.
"A few weeks."
"He's quite a special person, don't you think?"
"No question."
"Do many women come around here looking for him?"
"Not many, no," I lied.
"But some do."
"I don't pay much attention."
"He's a very understanding, compassionate person, don't you think? I suppose that's a big reason women like him so much."
"I'm sure. What else could it be?" I agreed.
Whatever it was, compassion, looks, sex appeal, it was potent. I had only gotten as far as the head of the stairs when I ran into a second woman asking for Nick, this one a striking blonde with a magnificent figure. I had quite a job diverting her back downstairs. I wasn't sure the two women knew each other, or if the first would get even more upset if confronted by this amazing person. I offered to escort her down to the lounge.
"Are you sure that's where he is?" she grinned. "You wouldn't be fooling me, would you?"
https://anotepad.com/notes/3e2yt3pp
http://portalanalitico.anvisa.gov.br/web/luwadicu/home/-/blogs/rae-jensen
https://id.arduino.cc/fumamiki
https://archive.org/details/unternacktentantraunddiesuchenachveranderung2019
https://www.arcaracing.com/users/7226420
https://www.applefritter.com/users/tigoloro
https://www.animexx.de/fanart/zeichner/62719/2143790/
https://www.aparat.com/u_7141168
https://archiveofsins.com/r/thread/17158543/
http://ciencia.ara.cat/joguinesdelaboratori/2011/02/11/de-que-esta-fet-un-pensament/
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