Боги и Новые создания - [8]

into our chamber.

Room of withering mesh

read love's vocabulary

in the green lamp

of tumescent flesh.

When men conceived buildings,

and closed themselves in chambers,

first trees and caves.

(Windows work two ways,

mirrors one way.)

You never walk through mirrors

or swim through windows.

Cure blindness with a whore's spittle.

In Rome, prostitutes were exhibited on roofs above the public highways for

the dubious hygiene of loose tides of men whose potential lust endangered the

fragile order of power. It is even reported that patrician ladies, masked

and naked, sometimes offered themselves up to these deprived eyes for private

excitements of their own.

More or less, we're all afflicted with the psychology of the voyeur. Not in a

strictly clinical or criminal sense, but in our whole physical and emotional

stance before the world. Whenever we seek to break this spell of passivity, our

actions are cruel and awkward and generally obscene, like an invalid who has

forgotten how to walk.

The voyeur, the peeper, the Peeping Tom, is a dark comedian. He is

repulsive in his dark anonymity, in his secret invasion. He is pitifully

alone. But, strangely, he is able through this same silence and concealment to

make unknowing partner of anyone within his eye's range. This is his threat

and power.

There are no glass houses. The shades are drawn and «real» life begins. Some

activities are impossible in the open. And these secret events are the voyeur's

game. He seeks them out with his myriad army of eyes — like the child's

notion of a Deity who sees all. «Everything?» asks the child. «Yes, every-

thing», they answer, and the child is left to cope

with this divine intrusion.

The voyeur is masturbator, the mirror his badge, the window his prey.

Urge to come to terms with the «0utside», by

absorbing, interiorizing it. I won't come out,

you must come in to me. Into my womb-garden

where I peer out. Where I can construct a universe

within the skull, to rival the real.

She said, «Your eyes are always black.» The pupil

opens to seize the object of vision.

Imagery is bom of loss. Loss of the «friendly

expanses». The breast is removed and the face

imposes its cold, curious, forceful, and inscrutable

presence.

You may enjoy life from afar. You may look at

things but not taste them. You may caress

the mother only with the eyes.

You cannot touch these phantoms.

French Deck. Solitary stroker of cards. He

dealt himself a hand. Turn stills of the past in

unending permutations, shuffle and begin. Sort

the images again. And sort them again. This

game reveals germs of truth, and death.

The world becomes an apparently infinite, yet

possibly finite, card game. Image combinations,

permutations, comprise the world game.

A mild possession, devoid of risk, at bottom sterile. With an image there is no

attendant danger.

Muybridge derived his animal subjects from the Philadelphia Zoological

Garden, male performers from the University. The women were professional

artists' models, also actresses and dancers, parading nude before the 48

cameras.

Films are collections of dead pictures which are

given artificial insemination.

Films spectators are quiet vampires.

Cinema is most totalitarian of the arts. All energy and sensation is sucked

up into the skull, a cerebral erection, skull bloated with blood. Caligula

wished a single neck for all his subjects that he could behead a kingdom

with one blow. Cinema is this transforming agent. The body exists for the

sake of the eyes; it becomes a dry stalk to support these two soft insatiable

jewels.

Film confers a kind of spurious eternity.

Each film depends upon all the others and drives you on to others. Cinema

was a novelty, a scientific toy, until a sufficient body of works had been

amassed, enough to create an intermittent other world, a powerful, infinite

mythology to be dipped into at will.

Films have an illusion of timelessness fostered by their regular, indomitable

appearance.

The appeal of cinema lies in the fear of death.

The modem East creates the greatest body of films. Cinema is a new form of

an ancient tradition — the shadow play. Even their theater is an imitation

of it. Bom in India or China, the shadow show was aligned with religious

ritual, linked with celebrations which centered around cremation of the

dead.

It is wrong to assume, as some have done, that cinema belongs to women.

Cinema is created by men for the consolation of men.

The shadow plays originally were restricted to male audiences. Men could

view these dream shows from either side of the screen. When women later

began to be admitted, they were allowed to attend only to shadows.

Male genitals are small faces

forming trinities of thieves

and Christs

Fathers, sons, and ghosts.

A nose hangs over a wall

and two half eyes, sad eyes,

mute and handless, multiply

an endless round of victories.

These dry and secret triumphs, fought

in stalls and stamped in prisons,

glorify our walls

and scorch our vision.

A horror of empty spaces

propagates this seal on private places.

Kynaston's Bride

may not appear

but the odor of her flesh

is never very far.

A drunken crowd knocked over the apparatus, and Mayhew's showman,