M.O.Q.: The Sex Magicians Chapter One

 

In the thrall of King Kong.

The Sex Magicians Chapter One: "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" pg. 3-13

Apologies and obligatory reminder of Swedenborg's dictum: "angels know nothing of time." That dictum is spoken by Swedenborg's pilfered head in The Great When and mentioned a few times over the course of The Bumper Book of Magic. In some ways, I feel as if I've been on drugs with two such important titles coming out with only a breath/the breadth of a week in between them. I also timed my return to school on the worst possible day and ended up going back in time for conferences which saw me arriving home at 8pm. But here we are, and hopefully we can all agree- better late than never. 

The first chapter of The Sex Magicians introduces us to arguably the primary protagonist of this slim volume of smut, Dr. Robert Prong. Prong is the first incarnation of Dr. Frank Dashwood in The Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy. Dashwood, named after the founder of the most infamous incarnation of the Hellfire Club, and Prong both hold the enviable, if somewhat challenging, position of head of the Orgasm Research (Foundation). As exact as Phineas Fogg and as hellbound-determined as Macbeth,  Prong is imbued with a lot of humor by Wilson. His names for the various dildos made me snort, as did his assistant's name when I read it the second time. Humor aside, Wilson wastes little time in filtering some of his own fascinations through Dr. Prong as he references the Foundation locating the "original" Cuban Superman, a fantastically real if-much-fictionalized performer in the sub-tropical sin-paradise (for the tourists and the elite, at least) of pre-Revolution Havana. Wilson has an entry on the Superman in his Playboy's Book of Forbidden Words and explains that he was a performer who performed in sex shows where he was known for his his ability to couple with multiple women, ejaculating with each partner, and still keep the show going. Wilson notes, with what seems to be a little disdain or dissapointment, that succesor or imitation Supermen were not able to replicate the original's act and instead used Novocaine to dull their members. He ends his entry with a bon mot wondering about the Superman's fate under Castro's socialism. 

The original Superman performed at the Teatro Shanghai, an infamous club in a city of racey entertainment, and his true identity remains a mystery. He was a mystery of a man who seemed to be a well-loved neighbor, who might have practiced Santeria and was most likely gay. Evidently, even during the hayday of his performance, he was often only known to tourists by the enigmatic title "The Man with the Sleepy Eyes" and to locals as "La Reina" as a crude allusion to his true sexuality. A recollection of the show from journalist Robert Stone, excerpted from this excellent and highly-reccomended essay, recounts some of the less appealing aspects of the Superman spectacle: 

The Superman Show, Stone recounts, featured a blond performer “whose deportment was meant to suggest wholesomeness, refinement, and alarm, as though she had just been spirited unawares from a harp recital or a public library.” The other performer was a black man “who astonished the crowd and sent the blond into a trembling swoon by revealing the dimensions of his endowment.” Stone continues, “Suffice it to say that the show at the Teatro Shanghai was a melancholy demonstration that sexism, racism, and speciesism thrived in pre-revolutionary Havana.”

The Cuban Superman was probably such a tantalizing bit of salacious folklore (really, read the essay) for Wilson because he represented what Wilson considered to be an almost-impossibility amongst men: multi-orgasmic longevity. Indeed, Wilson's admiration and envy of women's ability to acheive orgasm multiple times in a single session is one that comes up throughout his fiction and nonfiction works and Prong's similar obsession is the inciting incident for the creation of the Mama Vibe. One can balance this portrayal of women's sexuality, filtered solidly through the male gaze, with the dual truth that many women aren't educated or empowered to understand what makes them orgasm- especially during the benighted, if seemingly liberated, pre-Internet age. While I'm certainly not arguing that the web is a great source of sexual education in general, if used judiciously and with a sense of responsibility, one can find a plethora of informed articles on many aspects of the seemingly unlimited spectrum of human sexuality. During Wilson's age, hearsay and pornography were often the only sources of information about what I'm going to call "the sexual other," namely people who didn't tick like you do. 

For instance, when we first read The Illuminatus! Trilogy together, my lovely wife noted that Wilson and Shea seemed to think it was very easy for women to reach orgasm. Wilson also seemingly overestimated the ability for women to achieve orgasm through vaginal intercourse; or, at the very least, he embued his fictional characters with the right combination of nerve endings to do in ways that would be statistically improbable in real life. Aside from these very heteronormative misconstruings of "the sexual other," Stone's recollection and assessment of the Superman Show and details found in Wilson's description of ACE-via-HAL's voice remind us that the 20th Century was an era of misconception and ignorance, not too unakin to our own, but enough so that the atmosphere can occasionally stifle. I can move through those patches pretty quickly, but that's my experience- your mileage may vary. 

On the other hand, I found the following excerpt to be strikingly modern in its reflective humor on racial anxiety:

"It was Roger's habit to talk in racy and slangy terms on occasion when addressing foundation employees. 'It relieves the tension,' he would explain if a visitor was upset. 'Call a spade a spade,' he would add emphatically, unless the visitor happened to be black."  

The joke concerns the dictum, "call a spade a spade" which pre-dates the usage of the term "spade" as a slur and rather refers to the gardening implement, and is actually a mistranslation (attributed to Erasmus) of an older Greek idom "call a bowl a bowl." The fact that Prong finds the statement to be sufficient for most visitors except when faced when a visitor who might, quite rightfully, interpret it differently seems like something from an Iannucci-produced comedy. (Perhaps of some interest, while I intially believed that the idiom was referring to the playing card suit as a kind of "anti-cheating" dictum as its origins, it does not. The origin of the slur does refer to the playing cards and was first used in the 1920s, long after the mistranlated idiom had entered into the vernacular.) 

Finally, we arrive to the man of the hour, if we are to conceptualize man's true self as his dick: the appendage chosen by Miss Josie Welch to have attached to ACE, King Kong. Wilson was fascinated by the sexual subtext of King Kong and brought it up intermittently throughout his oevure: the obvious lustfulness in Kong's attitude towards Ann Darrow, the sexual jealousy that palpably existed between Kong and protagonist Jack Driscoll and the question of exactly how the mechanics of such a coupling between beauty and beast would play out. This is made all the more interesting when we consider the biological reality of a gorilla's stature to penile length does not measure up to the chthonic belief that Kong, whilst erect, would become some sort of ithyphallic deity. I will admit that, in the throes of sexual development, I had wondered about this as well- long before reading Wilson, so I can't even blame him. A quick Google will show you that other brilliant and discerning minds have entertained the same series of ruminations, calculations and self-effacing emasculation. So this thrust of ideas is what is prepared to enter Miss Welch on the interior original cover, and it's even bigger than it looks. Like God's dick, famously pondered upon by Wilson in his inaugural The Realist article, King Kong's dick, if properly conceptulized, would defy the dimensions of the imagination. We leave the chapter with the priapic version of St. Anselm's ontological argument running in and out of Josie Welch, taking her into a sexual reverie verging on an astral incursion, and Prong about to throw away his hard-maintained scientific credibility. He's saved from this ignominious, A.M.A.-condemned fate by a phone call. 

With the congruent release of The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic and the embarkation of the actual matter of Wilson's first published fiction, I think it is apropos to point out that Dr. Prong's apprehension of his seemingly-damningly materialistic approach to his art sounds strikingly similar to Steve and Alan Moore's understanding of consciousness; as far as it is outlined in "Adventures in Thinking," the opening essay of The Bumper Book, and reinforced throughout the grimoire, that consciousness itself is profound and demonstrably endless: 

"Since these psychological intagibles were- as Dr. Prong sometimes wittily remarked- "both psychological and intangible," there was no end to his research." 

Next week we'll meet the novel's secondary protagonist/antagonist whose legacy is a chain of characters that dangle well into the then-future of Wilson's fiction. I will make sure we're back on schedule for Tuesday evening. (I'm also working on a review of The Bumper Book of Magic, but it is going to take a minute. I'm trying not to make it too much of a navel gazing memoir. Probably going to be anyways.)