The slightly unorthodox card game Bill manages to get himself into after his improving oneiric experience plays off an old joke, but what the hell, why not? It’s certainly a good excuse for going image diving for strip-poker pix. This classic game is visually well covered, whether in conventional naughty photographs that show up on Flickr:
Or in semi-vintage erotica:
Or even in manga-inspired comix:
Who wouldn’t want to play?
Having brought up Kiyoaki Kanai as a visual inspiration for a pirates post a few days back, I would feel remiss if I did not at least note, before returning to the main thread of posts on Gnosis Dreamscapes that Kanai has some work that can be much appreciated by thaumatophiles. The images to the left and below (those below you can click through for larger) are prime examples. As usual I don’t read Japanese, and running the accompanying text on the pages through Google translate tends to leave me feeling even more befuddled than before. Your tastes may vary, but statements like “So, I accidentally forgot the appeal of humanoid robot was there, I became a robot servant of his sex slave robot and robot body instead of a relative…the human mind, remedies or the mind, the need for further development of the robot to go towards a better feel in your area” tend to leave me scratching my head. (Although sometimes the pictures do lead to a better feel in my area, I must admit.) But I think it’s pretty clear that the images to the left and immediately below suggest the manufacture of female sex robots, combined with extensive testing thereof. Shades of Robotrix! Perhaps we’re looking at the Consumers Union laboratory of the near future?
And Kanai, naturally, also did his own rather complex take on the important theme of the sex machine.
That’s something dear to our hearts here!
Well, if the last pair of posts on pirates weren’t sufficiently strange for you, maybe this will be.
Because it turns out at the illustrators at SheAniMale.com have kinked into the whole pirate theme:
This narrative is going…exactly where you think it’s going.
Good use of the nautical setting, guys. Though I imagine that Patrick O’Brian must be spinning in his grave.
One of my simpatico commenters here at EroticMadScience.com asked if it might be possible to get PDF versions of the scripts forthe purpose of reading off-line. I’m certainly happy to at least try to oblige, although there might be a little bit of fooling around before we get anything ideal. My first pass at producing a PDF version of Gnosis Dreamscapes is here. By all means please have a look and let me know what you think.
I don’t expect that this will be perfect. The document has a slightly complex production history, having begun life in Celtx’s fine free screenwriting software and then having been exported to html (with a fair amount of manual tweaking) to get it to fit inside a WordPress blog page. The formatting is done with custom CSS with help from a WordPress plugin called Per-Post CSS (site here), so to make the PDF I did the simple and crude thing of reverse-writing it back into a simple HTML file, loading it up in a browser, and printing to PDF. I also tweaked the font to make it slightly heavier and (I hope) more readable.
I am eager to know what everyone thinks. Please comment. If it seems satisfactory I’ll try putting up versions for every script.
The visual image of Abigail the Lady’s Maid — captured and ravished by Moorish pirates, and now boxed up for shipping out as “a pretty addition to some harem.” has a rather specific visual inspiration in the art of Kiyoaki Kanai. I’ve blogged about Kanai before at ErosBlog, and his interest in girls in boxes has leaked into Gnosis Dreamscapes, it seems.
And perhaps more to the shipping out point, this curious illustration, which I think is meant to illustrate some sort of novel about sex slavery.
We’re a long way here from the Age of Fighting Sail, but the connection is no doubt clear.
When I was just about ready to launch EroticMadScience.com I wrote to a friend describing my enterprise in these words:
I guess it’s time I raised the Jolly Roger and set sail.
And that’s very much in the general spirit of things at this site, since a core idea behind the Gnosis stories is that it is a blessing to be able to escape the realm of ordinary human life and its conventions, to find a morality-free zone where we might indulge our imaginations.
Dreams are of course the best and most blessed of all such zones, perhaps. Hence Gnosis Dreamscapes. But pirates do nicely as well.
And naturally, as pirates are outlaws beyond the reach of any state, one naturally imagines that they might get up to some rather interesting activities.
(For a larger version click through to Kinky Delight.)
I’m a little surprised that there isn’t more pirate-themed porn than I can readily find with simple image searching. “Rum, sodomy, and the lash” was how Winston Churchill supposedly characterized naval tradition. Churchill probably wasn’t right about the sodomy bit, given how little privacy there would have been on an a ship in the days of fighting sail. But seriously, wouldn’t a square-rigged ship be something like an ideal BDSM playground? What with all those ropes and spars and the great familiarity that sailormen are supposed to have with different kinds of knots? To say nothing of the fondness that navy men have long had for corporal punishment as a means of maintaining discipline… Perhaps the shortage of usable vessels explains why we don’t see sailing ships used for more bondage shoots. Perhaps the Village People’s use of the U.S.S. Reasoner lingers in institutional memory, making the Navy skittish of any possible proposal by fine folks at Kink.com to borrow the U.S.S. Constitution for an afternoon. But perhaps I speculate too much?
That said, there are certainly some people willing to make good use of the vast homoerotic potential of pirates.
But interestingly enough it was none of this that inspired Bill’s naval dream. Rather, it was Kurt Weill and Berthold Brecht‘s song “Seeräuber Jenny” from Die Dreigroschenoper (1928) that really set my inner wheels in motion. A woman in an oppressive situation imagines pirates coming and wrecking destruction on all around her, and then carrying her off. Here is Lotte Lenya performing it in a 1931 film version. (German lyrics, and an alternative audio version, can be accessed here.)
So maybe this is really Michiko’s pirate dream?
I might have a real weakness for sorceresses, but not for princesses, even if they are designed like the fearsome but alluring 
Michiko Maeda. If you’re a sorceress, you can keep all your clothes on and you’ll still have me at the word “abracadabra,” but princesses will have to work harder, even if Rob’s dream-self will fall hopelessly and fatally for you.
What constitutes working harder in the context of an oriental fantasy might be easy to specify but not that easy to find. But I have a certain weakness for orientalist art (more evidence that I am a Bad Person) and it turns out that Flickr makes available a pool of fine orientalist art, from which the image to the right stood out for me. This will do very nicely as the image of an oriental princess working harder for my attention. I am especially pleased by the use of jewelry here, which seems to me spot-on. I’m not sure that the image was originally intended to represent any sort of royalty but really, who cares?
But the thing that really tickled my fancy when I looked into the provenance of this image a little further was that I found out it had been created by Henri Privat-Livemont (1861-1936), who was more famous as a creator of this Art Nouveau advertising poster.
An advertisement for Absinthe Robette. That works for me double. Not only does it reference the fact that Rob undergoes a dream analogue of the Apsinthion Protocol, but it also picks up on a theme I find personally appealing…
Rob’s dream-self in the first Gnosis dreamscape is so desperate for the love of Michiko Maeda’s dream-self oriental princess that he resorts to the rather dangerous assistance of a sorceress.
And I enjoyed writing that, because I have something of a weakness for sorceresses. Goes along with being a thaumatophile, I guess. Every time I have the chance to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I try to stop by and gaze at this painting, which was probably my initial visual inspiration for the sorceress scene.
Domenico Guidobono (1668–1746), "Allegory"
That’s good. Woman. Book. Assorted supernatural stuff that I can’t decode. But perhaps a little better from my perspective is this image (possibly of Circe) by the English Pre-Raphaelite John William Waterhouse.
John William Waterhouse (1849 - 1917), "Sorceress"
Woman. Book. And still better for the mad science lover, some sort of flask or beaker right in front of her. A good image if you think that the sexist organ a woman has is her brain.
But of course Rob’s dream is an oriental fantasy, so we need an image from orientalist art to really make the visual image work. Fortunately, I have one.
Friedrich von Amerling (1803 - 1887), "The Oriental" (click through for larger image)
Woman. Book. Play of light in an oriental setting. Works for me for the sorceress!
Right after the super-patriotic, brave, helpful, clean, young Special Forces Lieutenant John Samson provides a demonstration of his enhanced manliness for Colonel Madder, the Colonel gives us a little theology lesson, about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden:
Albert von Keller (1844 - 1920), "Adam und Eva" (1900). What do you suppose Eve is looking at in this picture?
Colonel Madder tells us that in Eden, Adam was able to achieve an erection by wholly voluntary means, and experienced no lust, and that now Lieutenant Samson, thanks to government mad science, is in the same position. And the Colonel attributes this peculiar view to St. Augustine.
Fictional license on Dr. Faustus’s part? Ha! The fact is that Augustine devotes chapter upon chapter of De civitate dei, his most important single work, staging an amazing festival of sex-negativity, in which he ponders at length such important matters as “Of Shame which Attends all Sexual Intercourse.” And we find, in Book XIV, Chapter 24 of this theological magnum opus, the following clever bit of argument.
| Seminaret igitur prolem uir, susciperet femina genitalibus membris, quando id opus esset et quantum opus esset, uoluntate motis, non libidine concitatis. Neque enim ea sola membra mouemus ad nutum, quae conpactis articulata sunt ossibus, sicut manus et pedes et digitos, uerum etiam illa, quae mollibus remissa sunt neruis, cum uolumus, mouemus agitando et porrigendo producimug et torquendo flectimus et constringendo duramus, sicut ea sunt, quae in ore ac facie, quantum potest, uoluntas mouet. Pulmones denique ipsi omnium, nisi medullarum, mollissimi uiscerum et ob hoc antro pectoris communiti, ad spiritum ducendum ac remittendum uocemque emittendam seu modificandam, sicut folles fabrorum uel organorum, flantis, respirantis, loquentis, clamantis, cantantis seruiunt uoluntati. Omitto quod animalibus quibusdam naturaliter inditum est, ut tegmen, quo corpus omne uestitur, si quid in quocumque loco eius senserint abigendum, ibi tantum moueant, ubi sentiunt, nec solum insidentes muscas, uerum etiam haerentes hastas cutis tremore discutiant. Numquid quia id non potest homo, ideo Creator quibus uoluit animantibus donare non potuit? Sic ergo et ipse homo potuit oboedientiam etiam inferiorum habere membrorum, quam sua inoboedientia perdidit. Neque enim Deo difficile fuit sic illum condere, ut in eius carne etiam illud non nisi eius uoluntate moueretur, quod nunc nisi libidine non mouetur. | The man, then, would have sown the seed, and the woman received it, as need required, the generative organs being moved by the will, not excited by lust. For we move at will not only those members which are furnished with joints of solid bone, as the hands, feet, and fingers, but we move also atwill those which are composed of slack and soft nerves: we can put them in motion, or stretch them out, or bend and twist them, or contract and stiffen them, as we do with the muscles of the mouth and face. The lungs, which are the very tenderest of the viscera except the brain, and are therefore carefully sheltered in the cavity of the chest, yet for all purposes of inhaling and exhaling the breath, and of uttering and modulating the voice, are obedient to the will when we breathe, exhale, speak, shout, or sing, just as the bellows obey the smith or the organist. I will not press the fact that some animals have a natural power to move a single spot of the skin with which their whole body is covered, if they have felt on it anything they wish to drive off—a power so great, that by this shivering tremor of the skin they can not only shake off flies that have settled on them, but even spears that have fixed in their flesh. Man, it is true, has not this power; but is this any reason for supposing that God could not give it to such creatures as He wished to possess it? And therefore man himself also might very well have enjoyed absolute power over his members had he not forfeited it by his disobedience; for it was not difficult for God to form him so that what is now moved in his body only by lust should have been moved only at will. |
Colonel Madder’s point exactly. You can find the relevant Latin text of Book XIV here, and an English translation here. I can make lots of strange shit up, but not this.
Just to recap here: St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, Doctor of the Church, and the most important Christian writer in the thirteen-century span between St. Paul and St. Thomas Aquinas, went on for sentence after sentence in his most important work speculating about the exact psychological mechanism through which Adam got his pecker up before the fall.
I wonder what the pious “family values” types would have to say about this, if they knew. Which I’m pretty sure they don’t.
The fifth Gnosis College script, Gnosis Dreamscapes, is now available. Professor Rebecca Waite is busy with new and highly-questionable experimental undertakings, proving that you can’t keep a good mad scientist down, while meanwhile our various heroes and heroines are up against it, facing a more motivated enemy than they ever did before. Am I making a spoiler if I say that whether they all make it, or several do not make it, depends rather centrally on what theory you hold in the metaphysics of personal identity? Also, there be pirates in this script. Really! So surf over…and enjoy.