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The Soul’s Basement Delights
Review of Dark Eros by Thomas Moore
David Steinberg
David's New Book
By David Steinberg
David
Steinberg, editor of The Erotic Impulse, Erotic by Nature, and Photo
Sex, writes the Comes Naturally columns, which are published in San
Francisco’s Spectator magazine. If you’d like to receive Comes
Naturally and other writing by David Steinberg regularly via email (free
and confidential), send your name and email address to David at eronat@aol.com. Past columns are available at the Society for Human Sexuality’s
“David Steinberg Archives”: www.sexuality.org/davids.html. Three books edited by David -- “Erotic by Nature: A
Celebration of Life, of Love, and of Our Wonderful Bodies,” (
www.sexuality.org/l/davids/en.html
)”The Erotic Impulse: Honoring the Sensual Self,” (www.sexuality.org/l/davids/en.html)
and the just-released photo anthology, “Photo Sex: Fine Art Sexual
Photography comes of Age” ( www.sexuality.org/l/davids/ps.html
)-- are available from him by mail order.
Read
Sadie's Review of David Steinberg's new book of Erotic Photography: Photo
Sex
One has to wonder what led Thomas Moore -- new-age
psychotherapist, musical composer, Renaissance scholar, doctor of
philosophy in religion -- to put himself face-to-face with the Marquis
de Sade, to immerse himself in Sade’s voluminous writings, to take on
the task of synthesizing the Divine Marquis and Carl Jung. It must have
been a difficult task for Moore; you can feel him wrestling to reconcile
his intense fascination and respect for Sade with his revulsion for much
of what Sade explores. Moore would hardly identify himself as a member
of the s/m sexual subculture. His fascination with Sade -- at least on
the surface -- is intellectual, not sexual. He is intrigued with Sade as
a philosopher and theologian, not as a creator of wildly sexual scenes.
Moore is not a Sadeian devotee, but he is definitely curious, and he
senses that Sade is onto something profoundly important -- something
important for everyone, not just the folks into latex and leather.
As a result, “Dark Eros,” Moore’s meditation on Sade, performs a
service for Sade that no s/m enthusiast ever could: it explores Sade at
his most basic, and offers an opportunity for the uninitiated to get
past superficial fear and loathing and address the core material that
makes both Sade and the exploration of Sadeian sexuality so profound.
It has long seemed to me that s/m was about to become the cutting-edge
sexuality of the times, a form of sexual expression uniquely matched to
the unaddressed issues of contemporary Western life, though I was never
able to make explicit to doubters why I thought this was so. Part of it
is that the basic themes raised by conscious exploration of s/m --
power, intimacy, trust, surrender, emotional and sensory intensity, the
relation between pleasure and pain -- are core issues for all of us,
within and beyond the sexual aspects of our lives. But it’s more than
that. Something about the contrast between the goody-goody presumptions
of everything being “nice” and “fine” and the unconquerable
deviltry of the unconscious. Something about hypocrisy. Something about
the manic urge to bring all of life under control, to sanitize it, to
extend the rule of reason and order to places where it has no business
at all.
So I was immediately delighted to find that Moore, in the very first
page of his book, sets the stage by explicating exactly these sorts of
issues:
Sade’s time was an age of reason, we say, a time when the universe
seemed knowable and when it was compared to a clock in its mechanical
precision. His was also a time when the wealthy strutted their
affectations and quests for pleasure publicly and when the hypocrisy of
public values rendered social justice arbitrary and capricious. In other
words, it was a time much like ours.
Yes, I thought, this is it, this is the heart of the matter. At a time
when good men, speaking in sincere tones and emphasizing the care and
reasonableness of their words, calmly tighten the noose of misery around
the necks of people whose lives are already unbearably difficult, at a
time when the preachers of new Christian values and high-handed moralism
turn up again and again as financial swindlers and sexual hypocrites,
the truth and honesty of Sade’s passion in addressing and celebrating
the dark side of human behavior and desire becomes wonderfully
exhilarating and refreshing.
The teenagers into being black and nasty know this. Queer Nation knows
this. The sexual outcasts of oh-so-many stripes and colors all know
this, be they gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, transvestites,
“sex addicts,” s/m’ers, swingers, people with genital jewelry, or
beyond. Anyone who has taken even preliminary steps toward affirming the
reality of their sexuality in our sex-hating and sex-fearing culture
knows this. You know this. I know this. And Thomas Moore not only knows
this, but has managed to explicate the whole Sadeian system in a way
that honors the complexity and significance of this primal revolt
against simple-minded morality and sentimentalism.
“My purpose in turning to Sade,” says Moore, “is to find a
darkening of consciousness, to seek out a foul-smelling imagery
appropriate for the amplification of those dreams and fantasies and art
pieces that reveal an underworld aesthetic and a shadowy psychological
reality.” What Moore is interested in is what he calls “soul-making,”
that process of adding depth and profound meaning to the superficial ups
and downs of daily existence.
Moore knows that his soul-making is a darkening process, something that
requires representations that transcend the pastel world, something
grounded and deepened by its involvement with the underside, with night,
with darkness. Warning us away from “the easy heroics of ordinary
virtue,” Moore asks us to explore Sade because “he opens a great,
rusty door that leads down into a pit where the soul’s basement
delights are to be found.”
Moore also asks us to distinguish between morality: “the ongoing
process of entering into one’s destiny and nature with responsibility”
and moralism: “a fixed notion about what one’s nature requires.”
Moralism, he says is essentially “a defense against morality, the
safeguarding of a single, safe idea about one’s life, and resistance
against the subtlety and complexity of that life” (emphasis added). In
moralism, Moore notes, “nothing has been blackened by experience and
stinging reflection. Simplistic interpretations and values of the past
have not decomposed. Nothing has ever been dissolved, honestly observed,
or allowed to change color and tone in the passing of time and in the
crucible of experience.” Isn’t this the core issue these days, this
substitution of moralism for morality, this reduction of complex issues
of meaning and purpose of life to fixed and simple-minded formulas of
“good behavior” that run directly counter to the real dynamics and
complexity of emotional existence, especially in the realms of sexual
feeling and desire?
“The essence of the Sadeian work,” says Moore, “is to turn over
the stones of culture to see what life is hidden beneath repression.”
In this sense, the pornographic image becomes as important as the more
accepted erotic one because, as Moore notes, the special contribution of
pornography is that “pornography can eroticize anything” and “to
limit eros to the things of Venus is to establish a monotheism of the
erotic,” to deny that “every aspect of life has its inherent
eroticism.” For Moore it is “the pornographic imagination, in
dreams, books and movies [that] reveals the directions of the soul’s
desire.”
For Moore, this is the core issue in Sadeian “perversion.” He notes
that the Latin root of the word perverted means “to turn completely or
upside down,” which is to say that “a perverted image has the power
to turn us upside down, forcing us to consider experience from an
inverted perspective.” The images the moralists want to ban as “perverted,”
Moore says, can be seen
“as a goad to change or as an opportunity for psychological
movement.... The impact on the reader or observer of this kind of image
is not as much pain as revulsion. If we could withstand our disgust and
let the image penetrate consciousness, our world might be momentarily
turned through or inside out or upside down.... This reversal of
consciousness is a technology of vision, an opening to an appearance
regularly blocked by a well-ordered, reasonable, and moral point of
view.... The pervertedness invites either defensiveness against the
image or a stretching of the imagination.”
Sade’s significance, for Moore, is that he “gives voice to the
shadows of love.”
“The society he creates in his fiction, the lords and chattels of
libertinage, are the precise figures we deny, repress, ignore and
undervalue in our sentimental view of morals and social structure.... He
teaches his characters and his readers that they can learn to love this
underworld.... Denial of these [dark] loves leads to a sentimentalized
world, a split life weighty with the burden of...the frenzied pursuit of
right living, impossible virtues, and sentimental values [that are]
neither necessary nor an honest reflection of how we live.”
Moore’s goal is “soul-making” -- creating an aliveness grounded in
the rich complexity of the human soul -- and it is here that he bonds
most strongly with the Sade’s work. Says Moore: “Whatever it is that
inspires the love of images oblique to norms and standards should not be
killed off or wished away. It can be placed in a secure container where
its images will boil up into articulate forms.” For Moore the
essential question becomes: “What world has to be made... for eros to
be evoked? The Sadeian libertine answers that question by exploring the
most revolting necessities of the soul, all those things which we try to
avoid or conquer in our sentimentality or our puritanism or our
enthronement of the good and pure.”
To look at these issues, Moore notes, “we are required to suspend
moral belief and entertain notions that border on the absurd. Is there
any value hidden in the core of abuse, violence, perversion, and incest?
Do the odd sexual couplings and scatological extravagances of our dreams
instruct us positively in the nature of the psyche? Does love of the
perverted have a place in the opus of the soul?”
“Dark Eros” is a fascinating journey into these and other
fundamental questions raised by the writings of Sade. Moore’s
intelligence, perceptiveness, and imagination animate Sade’s writings
and teachings from a perspective that is both distinctly outside that of
Sade and yet quite respectful of and friendly to it. Whether he is
talking about “The Ravishing of Innocence,” “Love’s Inversions,”
“The Perverted Image,” “Shadow Therapeutics,” or “Sadeian
Culture,” Moore continually holds both Sade and his vision well above
the more commonly known perspectives of exoticism and outrageousness,
raising them to the level of humor, psychological insight, and real
wisdom. For all who understand and appreciate the paradoxical and ironic
nature of the world, of the workings of the psyche, and of how sexual
desire and energy operate in as ass-backward a sexual culture as ours,
this book is a real blessing.
DARK EROS: THE IMAGINATION OF SADISM by Thomas Moore, 1990, Spring
Publication Inc., P.O. Box 222069, Dallas, TX 75222, paperback, 190 pp.,
$14.50.
David Steinberg
P.O. Box 2992
Santa
Cruz
,
CA 95063
(831) 426-7082
(831) 425-8825 (FAX)
eronat@aol.com
Copyright
© 2003 David Steinberg
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