COLONEL SODOM GOES to GOMORRAH Jonathan Bowden
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COLONEL SODOM GOES TO GOMORRAH Jonathan Bowden First Edition Published September 2011 Printed in Great Britain Copyright © Jonathan Bowden 2011 All Rights Reserved Cover design and layout by Daniel Smalley Cover painting ‘The Marquis de Sade’ by Jonathan Bowden ISBN 978-0-9565120-4-8 The Spinning Top Club BM Refine London WC1N 3XX www.jonathanbowden.co.uk Albert Louden (1942-) --- Obese women Matriarchs most rare Across the mantle Of an orange sky Float between Leyton’s Sky-scrapers Wearing green aprons. Dedicated to Dorothy Bowden (1931-1978) Jonathan Bowden Photo by Daniel Smalley Studio Sade, or Colonel Sodom Goes To Gomorrah SADE, or COLONEL SODOM GOES TO GOMORRAH A non-fiction novel ONE A face haunts modern psychiatry or sexology, per se, and it places an ebon hand upon a mustard screen. Could it be a photogravure’s negative or a mezzotint (?)… the hint of which gives itself up to rare oils. These examine themselves in the light of Charenton’s Oeuvre; where a ‘progressive’ asylum allows the inmates to enact their own plays. Immediately our shadow or silhouette becomes clearer, and Man Ray’s dissimulation waxes large. Do you remember his painting or sketch? It’s not a photograph (exactly) rather a memorial to the Marquis de Sade, the Charenton asylum’s most notorious inmate. The ‘divine’ Marquis appears bloated, heavy, morbidly obese, dense, and also scorbutic – the effect of an absent sun in Vincennes’ cells. His mother-in-law was disappointed in him, (you see). Nonetheless, Donatien Alphonse Francois gave off the whiff of a pantomime dame… albeit in a sinister mien. For the density, glabrous sincerity, ponderousness, and minor effeminacy were let loose upon a clown’s visage. Can he best be summed up as a polymorphous Glock? In any event, the French literati known as Leonard de Saint-Yves once declared that Sade wrote the science fiction, l’anticipation, of anthropology. Is this true? Certainly, an explicator called Maurice Heine was on firmer ground in declaring him to be one of the least read but most discussed authors. Perhaps our last affidavit should be left to Samuel Beckett, the Noble laureate. He made some moves – ultimately unrealised – to provide the literary pornographer, Girodias, with a translation of The One-Hundred-and-Twenty Days of Sodom. In memoriam, Beckett opined that much of de Sade’s output proved to be mindless obscenity, but that some of his descriptions of love and ecstasy were as extraordinary as Dante. Shall we examine this assertion? 6 TWO Deep within a citadel of pain the shadows mount, and each glyph announces its punishment over these wraiths. A cast of thousands can take part, as in Justine, but the colours which congregate in our circus were red and black. Some kind of large-scale massacre was taking place, and priapic nudes, Boschian breast-plates, zebras, walking foot-things (as well as an entire Mediaeval Bestiary) flits afore us. They dish out a plague of ‘injustice’ in vaults or rooms, as cylindrical tendrils which were made from flesh teeter upwards. This mural – by itself – comes to embody Wyndham Lewis’ Inferno; whereby a cascade of human brillos boil prior to a red eruption, a tower of flame. It had to make itself out to be Dante’s Inferno come round again; or alternatively, it’s one cyclotron or pin-ball machine on a cosmic scale. In this Globe’s reaches a taxonomy vents its chill, and it displays the chapter headings of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. It does so with a faded glamour… whereby a cacophony of screams raise themselves up against pinkish chalk. (Note: won’t such a scenario muster Cain or beat the Devil? In any event, a mind casts its neurons back to Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Yet this time there is a fateful twist, in that the Four Horsemen have invaded a prelapsarian host. They bring violent mayhem, destruction or brigandage – albeit staged via a graphic novel called War is Hell). Most assertively, manikins are held up, twisted, skewered or deboned… and these puppets adopt nakedness, less out of Eros, than to swim against a tide of personality. De-personalisation is the watchword here; and it catches the lisp of the Capek brothers, twin playwrights, who spawned robotic lore. Yet Isaac Asimov’s ‘Three Laws of these cybermen’ falls sheer or still, and such molluscs grapple insanely in a pit. You see, razor-heads, half-opened corses (themselves split like fish), globular intrigues avec dildos, Mummers’ Bessys in those English plays, Siamese twins collected by von Stroheim and mountebanks, in eighteenth century wigs, all strut their stuff. Even though they are suddenly killed or put to death by swinging 7 blades, axes, prongs or Head-things. These prove to be Big Heads, in British folk drama, and they wear conical hats or triangular gear like a Padworth hobby-horse. A west country ritual (this) which celebrates the battle of Cressey yet ultimately originates, via trick-or-treating, in the Ku Klux Klan. At their head rides the Marquis de Sade. He possesses an enormous base about which to dance, and a rocket’s tube leaves off leewards. How to describe its evil best amid the screams? THREE Now then, Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade’s rig surpasses aught else, and it surrenders to a joke or Horror mask. It betrays about it the lintel of Jules Michelet’s Satanism and Witchcraft in the Middle-Ages. Wherein – by way of a book’s poster – a naked starlet lies on a white coverlet, and this altar’s festooned with black wax-candles. A votary in a darkened hood or coif mumbles via a corner, and may this be de Sade himself? Or, quite possibly, the author of A Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man has found alternatives; within which Dominican traces figure. Touché, any limitations on breeding wax entropic in eighteenth century France. Nonetheless, our Marquis besports a lintel-cum- rosebud, even a mask which draws on spare tonsils. It can never be destroyed owing to a pyramidal lurch, and it moves or splays towards the ceiling by way of a floor. Moreover, the Marquis’ eyes were sullen, blood-shot, vaguely exhausted, limpid or perennially sad. The lower grill on this trapeze, or Masque of Comus, shows a row of teeth that are serrated in their glee. Yet this cover-all predates his commission in the Royal cavalry in 1754, and, if we’re honest, it delineates a werewolf’s absence… even a side-show barker’s cry. Similarly, in terms of Professor Gunter von Hagens’ corpse art, our aristocrat finds himself kitted out in silk pyjamas. He also wears a bright red cravat under his throat. “Kill them all!”, he gestures to his minions, “for the link between eroticism and violence derives from reptilianism. It accords a saurian stem behind various three-brain theories – 8 whether or not Koestler’s mid-wife toad gestures wisely.” (Note: when severed at the knee, though, frogs taste just like chicken in a Gallic delicacy… and such a breeding-ground croaks its last). Further, the French word for toad is crapaud – and that’s something else to consider! FOUR By the by, a new figurine is introduced into the drama, and this happens to be a Mantegna manikin. It proves to be perfect in its Grecian simulation, at least in terms of statuary, and He stands there with his arms folded. A cast-off helmet – to be sure – seems to be grasped within his palms, and its formula adopts a conical basis. Does it remind us, en passant, of that cruel story by H.G. Wells known as The Cone? Forthwith, de Sade’s fingers rub together like rival twigs or briars, and they salivate after the form of rich robes… these adopt the mannerisms of severed limbs. Yet not really, since the prosthetic armatures that Brian Aldiss spoke of, in Doctor Moreau’s Other Island, are upon us. Such poles speak to us of a Scarecrow’s image, even though any element of farce has long been removed. In the foreground, a male torso rests on bloodied ground; and over it looms a cowled or robed votary. This judgement – as always in de Sade’s work – lends a transgressive or irreligious filter to the piece. (What with the orange slit-eyes sweltering amid some haze… despite those Roman Catholic touches that are obvious. It responds, in contravention, to Montague Summers’ image of Romanism; at once baroque, tremulous, scented, hieratic, Latinate, bleating and Pink Triangle tinged). De Sade continues to speak in a disembodied voice. It grates in a mildly bisexual way, albeit filtered through a metallic device… rather like a Dalek’s unction. Such vocal cords were taut with a suppressed excitement – even an erotic glottalstop. May de Sade’s newest text, Colonel Sodom Goes to Gomorrah, begin here? It has to be an exercise in the most spicy Grand Guignol. 9 The divine Marquis: “I summoned you, the most powerful of my orgy mongers, quod extreme sex knows no limit outside a pericarp. It transgresses or proceeds against the skin, in terms of a disabused envelope. Cast it aside, why don’t you? For – like in a mathematical equation – the real point is to ascertain Faculty X by balancing both sides of such a formula. Likewise, if we were to transform an equation into a diagram then X lies at the farthest point of a line when it transgresses a circle. The truth is extreme, in other words.” First Hierophant or Slave-Master: “But what do you require of my matter in such an Anti-life equation?” Donatien Alphonse: “It strikes our anvil with the freezing uncertainty of lightning.