Death or victory
I’ve often wondered what might have lead to my writing something like this exchange in The Apsinthion Protocol.
MOIRA
It would be a one-way trip for whoever did it.
NANETTA
It would mean giving up everything in this world.
MOIRA
And possibly entering a far more wonderful one.
NANETTA
Or it might mean a few moments of ecstasy, and then annihilation.
MOIRA
And there is likely very little time to decide.
(In my bleak moments I often think that what Nanetta and Moira would eventually achieve — even if it was just blissful annihilation — would be superior to the alternative: adulthood.)
One finds one’s erotic inspiration where one is. Where I was for a lengthy stretch of young adulthood was Harvard’s Widener Library. Had I had my druthers, the erotic inspiration would have taken the form of a studious-but-sultry meganekko but sadly there was a severe druthers shortage in Cambridge at the time and so I didn’t get mine.
There was, however, this mural executed by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925).
A doughboy embraces death and victory in the same moment. (We know he’s victorious because there’s a defeated figure in a stahlhelm at his feet, presumably one of those nasty wicked Germans.) At the time I would pass this mural daily (it’s on the library’s main entrance stairs) my conscious thoughts were that it was a singularly shameless bit of militaristic propaganda.
My subconscious thoughts, I conjecture, were on a different track entirely, thinking that maybe it’s cool — erotic even — to throw one’s life in like that. It’s a natural interpretation — look at the soldier’s face, it’s expression and positioning under Victory’s bared breast. It would explain a lot about the sort of things I’ve written.
Sargent didn’t do much in the more explicitly erotic line, although there is some, for example this study of a nude Egyptian girl.
Orientalist art — something I’ve found appealing before.
Moira in the library
Moira’s trip to the dark and forbidden parts of the Gnosis College library holds a certain special place in my heart, even if it isn’t a sex scene. It brings back fond memories of a conceit of my youth.
Part of the genius of the fictional universe created by H.P. Lovecraft was to imagine the existence of certain forbidden, powerful books, of which the Necronomicon was the most often invoked, hidden away either in the hands of private collectors or the locked stacks of major university libraries. The idea of books that contain hidden knowledge that is the gateway to power and pleaure, or perhaps self-destruction. is a splendid topos well designed to appeal to the sort of bookish people who, well, read a lot of books.
It certainly appealed a great deal to me, and as a fantasy seemed all the more convincing when, as a more advanced student I got access to the major research libraries of certain large, old, and rich universities. It is hard to escape the feeling on the C and D levels of Widener Library, that you’re delving into dark things.
Interestingly there actually are real-world collections of forbidden books. The British Museum had a “Private Case” and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France had an “Enfer” collection.
And in a peculiar example of life anticipating art, at least some of the books in these collections weren’t just smut, but had real power. Or perhaps one might say, they had a certain power exactly because they were smut. As the historian Robert Darnton has document in the The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, erotic materials circulating in eighteenth-century Europe were often not just books meant to be read “with one hand.” The were vehicles for the dissemination of radical and political ideas. Arguably, they contributed to the delegitimation of the very political order which tried to suppress them.
Frontispiece to Thérèse philosophe, a forbidden best-seller in pre-revolutionary France
So Moira really is seeking power and pleasure via the library stacks. A nerd’s fantasy perhaps, but hey, it’s me that’s writing this stuff.
The inevitable tentacle sex post
Sensitive readers of The Apsinthion Protocol will probably have thought it more or less inevitable that once Moira Weir saw this picture in one of Professor Corwin’s publications
"Dream of the Fisherman's Wife," by Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849)
she would soon be in for a very wild ride.
There’s a certain element of controversy about tentacle sex. Most people associate it, if they associate it with anything, with Japanese animation that many people find nasty. This isn’t an entirely wrong association: there are some good reasons why tentacle sex is so prominent in anime, which go beyond the fact of an artistic tradition of which artists like Hokusai were a part. Helen McCarthy and Jonathan Clements, in The Erotic Anime Movie Guide, write as follows:
The visual grammar permitted by the tentacle is extremely useful to the pornographer. With no restriction on length, it permits penetration without blocking the view. It can be used as a form of restraint, permitting multiple penetration, sexualized bondage, and ease of camera access. Best of all for the tentacle as a pornographic device, while it may often look suspiciously like a penis, to the extent of possessing a foreskin or glans, or even ejaculating upon climax, it is not a sexual organ by definition. The Japanese film-maker can thus show as many as he likes, doing whatever he wishes, without falling foul of the usual censorship restrictions. The only problem with the tentacle is that the film-maker must find an excuse for its appearance. This is best accomplished by making monsters a feature of the storyline, be they demons, invading aliens, or creatures from the id. And since such creatures are evil by nature, it is a logical step in such porn to accentuate the incidences of rape and sexualized violence.
And that’s certainly a possibility, one that seems to fit into the conception that most people have of tentacle sex. If you’re so inclined you can go out and find whole blogs devoted to anime tentacle sex, a lot of which doesn’t look all that consensual, with names like tentaclehettaisex.com (enjoy if that’s what you’re into, disdain if that’s what you think tentacle sex necessarily is).
There are, naturally, alternatives, some of which have been explored by my blogging mentor Bacchus over at ErosBlog. A while back he posted on this image
Youren by Toshio Saeki
Which suggests a very different idea of tentacle sex than the idea most people have. (More of Bacchus’s interesting blogging on the subject can be found here and here.)
Looking at these images makes one wonder (it certainly made me wonder) whether there couldn’t be tentacle seductio or, for that matter why the id of which the tentacles are supposedly the projection need necessarily be the male id. Why not the female id?
Amanda Gannon, in a post at Tor.com entitled “Sucker Love: Celebrating the Naughty Tentacle,” advances a congruent point.
There’s a particular detail in The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife that convinces me that hers is a dream of such ecstasy. As the enormous octopus sprawls between her thighs, she has reached down and wrapped her hands tight around two of its embracing arms. She is drawing it toward her, not pushing it away. I don’t hesitate to say that gesture is familiar to me.
That passion is the same fantasy of every person who has ever dreamed of being carried off by pirates and ravished into a state of perpetual ecstasy, the same passion of the vampire’s orgasmic embrace, the werewolf’s bestial lusts, and so many more. The tentacles may be exotic, but the theme is familiar.
Think about that enough, and scenes like Moira’s encounter just sort of write themselves.
