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.

Go green

Where does the name “apsinthion protocol” come from?

Well, from ἀψίνθιον (apsinthion) of course. It’s the Greek word for wormwood, Artemisia absinthium. which among other things, is the key ingredient in the spirit known as absinthe. Professor Joseph Corwin, though nominally some kind of psychologist, is also a bit of a Hellenist >manqué who knows that sort of thing. So it’s not surprising that he should apply the name to his process for reducing a girl into “the most precious of liquors.”

Now it’s hardly surprising that a mad scientist should focus on absinthe as the spirit of choice. Wine and beer are probably both older than recorded human history itself. Whiskey and brandy are probably of medieval origin, while gin is an early modern, most likely seventeenth-century product. But absinthe is a product of the early industrial age, probably first produced in 1792 by a physician. It’s creation is thus closely contemporary with the work of Alessandro Volta on “animal electricity” and thus with Mary Shelley’s inspiration for Frankenstein. Only connect…

But beyond that association, there’s a close connection between absinthe and both erotic and poetic inspiration, and that perhaps represents my own point of view more than Corwin’s. To an extent I have not seen for any other spirit, absinthe was personified as la fée verte, the Green Fairy. She was a potent (if dangerous) spirit:

with no small appeal.

Pleasure à l’outrance, even at the risk of self-destruction. An appropriate name in erotic mad science indeed!

The Green Fairy was banned for a long time, even in the countries was distilled. The wormwood used to make her allegedly contained a dangerous narcotic, but more likely the ban (at least in France) was a form of industrial protectionism for French winemakers. (That’s the way it so often is, isn’t it? “For our own good” is a way of lining others’ pockets.) The ban itself at least was an occasion for some interesting art lampooning authoritarian politics, as in the example to the right, commemorating the ban in Switzerland, which followed that in France. Here the Green Fairy is burned at the stake (her French sister awaits her in heaven).

But there’s a happy ending here, which is that the Green Fairy is now legal again in most juristictions, even the United States. So I’ll note in passing a favorite brand, “La Capricieuse,” distilled by Claude-Alain Bugnon at Artemisia Distillerie Artisanale, which combines not only wicked potency but one of the most beautiful labels in the spirits world.

Not available (yet?) in the United States, although her milder (but still sexy) sister La Clandestine is. Santé!

Why liquid girl?

“You get warmer and warmer, and then you melt.”

If you had to come up with the genesis of the strange fantasy of Li Anwei and Nanetta Rector and eventually others orgasmically turning to liquid, a conceit on which The Apsinthion Protocol turns, you might do worse than that, a description of what orgasm felt like, given to 18 year-old me by a female companion.

But there’s doubtless some reason why this particular metaphor stuck so soundly in my mind. Could it be, perhaps, that liquids, and water especially are such erotic elements? Venus is intimately connected with the sea: she was neither gestated in a womb nor constructed as a piece of technology like Pandora, but emerged from the sea foam, the product of sea-water and the blood from the castrated genitals of Ouranos. Her emergence is commemorated in perhaps the greatest masterwork of the early Renaissance, Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.

It is a subject painters will return to again and again. Consider Odilon Redon’s twentieth-century symbolist version of the same, which I find particularly striking.

But the association of women and water and eros is not limited to Venus. Consider also, as just one example,Gustave Courbet’s Woman in the Waves.

Women, eros, liquid. So powerful an association that there’s even a genre of erotica (printed in water resistant volumes, like that depicted at the left) devoted to it. And if you survey photographic erotica, you’ll find that it’s a prominent theme — so much is shot in our around water — on beaches or in oceans or near waterfalls or ponds. Or in baths or showers or hot tubs. Surf over to a frequent poster of tasteful female nudes — GoodShit for example — on any day of the week and count the number of young lovelies who are in, or near, or covered with water.

And so I suppose it is hardly an accident also that some odd person like me might drive the metaphor into a more literal sort of fantasy…