26th August. People clinging to the skirts of transcendent order, religious included, are very boring indeed but I must admit that Christian-orthodox churches provide the punter with entertainment: lurid, surreal cartoons covering the walls; the damp, crypt-like nave fumigated with incense and filled with the high-pitched lamenting of hairy Goth priests (think Bee Gees doing ominous atonal hymns); grannies in black scarfs, collapsed on their knees, ardently kissing icons; trendy youth praying to uninterested byzantine idols (what for? triumph in love? in exams? a new i-pod?).
I don’t know if it occurred to you that people’s ideological convictions (e.g. religion) hide their desires, especially from themselves. Well, then listen to Zizek, the Vegas-era Elvis of social theory, arguing that what conservatives truly desire when ranting against the moral decrepitude, decadence and degeneracy of contemporary society is wallowing in a world of sin, decadence and perversion. The 'prude nice liberals' and 'promiscuous and nasty conservative liberals' are not just mythical figures.
So what does the Christian desire when she rants against sin or paints in pornographic detail the tortures of saints and sinners? To wallow in sin, of course. Christian mystics have deliriums in which they are Jesus' private concubine and Christian churches are museums of fetishist erotica that titillate the faithful's mind and flesh. Naked bodies writhing in pain, mouths gaped in wet moans of pleasure, eyes drowned in the voluptuousness of S&M ecstasy cover the walls of those boudoirs of mystical climax. Enough to give Ratzenberg a permanent (transcendent of course) hard-on. Just check out these hot tiles from a convent in Olinda.
So, what do the Christian puritans raving against dirtiness in religious representations really want to see? Those that have put trousers on the characters in the Sixtine Chapel or severed the dicks of ‘too naturalistic to please God’ fountain statues in Palermo?
They desire to see genitalia, obscenity, perversion. A little fresco on the wall of an Oltenia monastery depicts sinners, naked but without the genitalia being represented at all by the original, chaste, painter. And what does some religious puritan do? S/he scratches out, frantically, the place where the genitals were supposed to be (see the row of naked people marching between two devils at the bottom of the picture below).
Why? Well, because she desired to see obscenity were there was none, was appalled by her own dirty desire and transformed her guilt into a simulacra of righteous anger against obscenity – erasing what was not there in an attempt to erase her guilty desire.
And to top all this orthodox orgy up here’s this fellow, wearing a Hell’s Angels jacket, checking out the relics and other ca(nni)bbalistic Christian artefacts with the half-studious, half-pious air people put on when visiting churches, libraries or museums. ‘Jesus rode a Harley Davidson' as one hit wonder band Ugly Kid Joe demonstrates on its uncalled for second album.
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