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These are creatures with a body and a society. A cute naked little demon sits on the shoulders of another demon. Her vagina rubs against his neck. Are they just demon friends? Demons to the right are a little fat and big breasted. All exhibit a certain facial ugliness but they are all given bodies with sexual organs that are recognizably human. What is their use?
In ancient nightmares found in clay tablature in Mesopatamia one dreamer despairs,”I had sex with a demon!”
As a child, I read the erotica under the bed. One story takes plave at a public hanging. A woman feels a hand against her in the mobbed square. The hand lifts her skirt apart. The unseen man pulls her underwear down. This purely unidentifiable person enters her. He always pauses before each development; waiting for her assent or dissent. She lets him; she likes this. Something that is her will but not her choice, She did not choose him but she wills this. Finally, the bosy is dropped and the neck breaks. This is when he comes and she comes. He disappears into the crowd. They have never looked one another in the eye.
These armored images – with their slits and the liquid flasj of an undiscernible eye conjure up this same vision of the desire for something outside of identity – a recignition of desire – of something beating in the center – and that alone.
The male angel. The contested genders of angels. In the early 20th century, at St. John’s Cathedral of the Divine, the same sculptor as that of Mt. Rushmore, gets in a nasty fight. He insists that angels are female and the authorities insist they are male. It creates a public debate. Why the investment?
I originate from an era where the gender of angels appeared equitable – distributed between all of the female and male souls. Nonetheless, cherubs confound. Their genitals lost in fat and feathers.
This angel is clearly male. The men desire him. Let us imagine that.
In colonial Peru, paintings of male angels abounded. They are handsome and round-faced with wings and guns.
Here is another image from “Without Sanctuary” that not only reifies Als claim that the working bodies of murdered men slip into the ‘ethos’ of modern porn but also plays with another contemporary spectre of duplication/replication/twinning. The doubling of objects magnifies the effect of the body but simultaneously relays that bodies are replicable and expendible. Another one grows where the last died out.
Moreover, when we begin to let Als and Cooper hover in a textual proximity, we conjure an ancient embodiment of dennis cooper. A white man who collects lynching photographs with private and hot delight- a white man ejaculating in his pants as the body dangles and the flashes burn white in the charred night. It didn’t start with Cooper – a man who is pure excitement as he sees the body destroyed by rage. I don’t think this is the sort of man who cares for the body chewed up by grain thresher or cut short by train. The desire percolates only because one human was subject/eclipsed by another human.
I found a number of Centaur images. There seemed to be some confusion as to where a centaur’s cock should be. Between the back legs, like a horse? In between the front legs, like a man? None were doubly hung but some were left with nothing.
The centaur is considered a liminal being, trafficking between two worlds – the realm of beast and the realm of the human. But unlike the ghost, its interpenetration does not problematize the boundaries of presence, identity and all the other issues implicit in ‘haunting and the sociological imagination.’ However, while it doesn’t conjure the spector of what we were and who we killed – it rips open what we could be and what could be coming. It is distopic/utopic. For the Aztec, the horse/man is the beginning of the end. For the Minoans, the horse/man is the violent nomad from the north. The Centaur is the harbinger of a violent future that lays open the body to a new force. He sometimes hurls stones and branches. There is of course alot more to say about this and him and his possible slippage with notions of the terrorist – as sexual, as animal, as new force. The terrorist is never a ghost.
