The Devil's Sperm Is Cold Read Free Page A

dignity, a phrase which seems almost to have lost all meaning, and which is even being denied referential reality by one of America’s most prominent psychologists and perhaps millions who are persuaded along the lines he proposes. It is clear that the concept of human dignity, if understood merely as an ideal to be strived for, is nothing more than another image by which people hypnotize themselves. But if we understand it as a quality of being, then we are talking about something which, like the peaks of distant mountains, is usually attained by only by a few. Along erotic lines and in its bluntest terms, the question might be asked: is eating shit consistent with human dignity? In The Devil’s Sperm Is Cold, when Margaret is allowing Al Leeds to debase her, she notes that from one viewpoint, lying naked on a rug while an odious man shoves his shoe into her cunt is terribly degrading, but “existentially, it’s no more or less peculiar than anything else.”
    It is precisely what might be called an existentialist-nihilist attitude which states, “the earth is an insignificant speck of dust dancing preciously around a mediocre star in a medium-sized galaxy. Life on this planet is a cosmic accident. Human life is a lawyer trying to collect insurance on the accident. We are trivial, transient, and ridiculous. In the face of that, does it matter whether one is pope or pauper, lives on sunshine or eats shit?”
    The opposing viewpoint might be called the we-are-created-in-the-image-of-God metaphor. This imposes an ideal, and insists that we live by it. Through it we attempt to lift ourselves by our own shoestrings. And from a psychological/political standpoint, the notion is intended to protect us from our own excesses.
    The middle of the road is the role of good-guy-agnostic, which holds that we don’t know what’s going on but that we should strive to be good for its own sake. Good, according to this model, is what makes you feel good, throughout your entire being, and so constitutes its own reward. But along these lines, I’ve been tied to a bed and been whipped while having poppers put in front of my nose and found that the result of the entire process was to cure my cold.
    I think the way to deal with this issue of human dignity is to remain with the question and not seek an answer. The point is to use the question as a magnifying glass through which to examine ourselves and all of creation. If in each thing I do I ask, “Is this consistent with my deepest understanding of human dignity?,” then when we have our erotic spells, everything we do serves as a means of learning who we are. Then, everything is allowed.
    Yet, there is a catch. For as we become smarter, as we become more acute observers and questioners, then not everything is equally valuable. We find that the very process of examining alters our perception, our feeling, our behavior. In this way, each of us learns what constitutes human dignity for us, we learn what we enjoy, what makes us intrinsically harmonious. In Buddhist terms, “we resume our original nature.”
    At that point, there isn’t very much more to say. The true expression of eroticism then takes place in the erotic act, and all commentary on that, all photographs, films, sculpture, dance, and theater, is reduced to the incidental. For if one is discovering the source of energy oneself, one isn’t all that very interested in someone else’s experience of the same phenomenon. It is only because so many of us are so impoverished in our own lives that we look to others to tell us “how it was, will be, or can be.”
    Except for an occasional small piece, I don’t do any more erotic writing. I’ve said pretty much all I can say about what I have tried, and am now much more interested in integrating my experiences. My only possible words of comfort at this time would be: Don’t settle for secondhand experience. Find out for yourself. Don’t get caught up in the rigidity of