<\/p>\n
Dark Eros: The Imagination of Sadism<\/em>\u00a0by Thomas Moore, 1990, Spring Publication Inc., P.O. Box 222069, Dallas, TX 75222, paperback, 190 pp., $14.50.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Moore would hardly identify himself as a member of the s\/m sexual subculture.\u00a0 His fascination with Sade — at least on the surface — is intellectual, not sexual.\u00a0 He is intrigued with Sade as a philosopher and theologian, not as a creator of wildly sexual scenes.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n As a result, his book performs a service for Sade that no s\/m enthusiast ever could:\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But it’s more than that.\u00a0 Something about the contrast between the goody-goody presumptions of everything being “nice” and “fine” and the unconquerable deviltry of the unconscious.\u00a0 Something about hypocrisy.\u00a0 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 had no business at all.<\/p>\n So I was immediately delighted to find that Moore, in the very first page of his book, sets his stage by explicating exactly these sorts of issues:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n “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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In other words, it was a time much like ours.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Yes, I thought, this is it, this is the heart of the matter.\u00a0 At a time when George Bush is the representation of kindness and reasonability, 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.<\/p>\n The teenagers into being black and nasty know this.\u00a0 Queer Nation knows this.\u00a0 The sexual outcasts of 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.\u00a0 Anyone who has taken even preliminary steps toward affirming the reality of their sexuality in our sex-hating and sex-fearing culture knows this.\u00a0 You know this.\u00a0 I know this.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n “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.”\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Moore’s knows that his soul-making is a blackening process, something that requires pictures that transcend the pastel world, something grounded and deepened by its involvement with the underside, with night, with darkness.\u00a0 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.”<\/p>\n Moore also asks us to distinguish between morality<\/em>: “the ongoing process of entering into one’s destiny and nature with responsibility” and moralism<\/em>:\u00a0 “a fixed notion about what one’s nature requires.”\u00a0 Moralism, he says is essentially “a defense against<\/em> morality, the safeguarding of a single, safe idea about one’s life, and resistance against the subtlety and complexity of that life” (emphasis added).\u00a0 In moralism, Moore notes, “nothing has been blackened by experience and stinging reflection.\u00a0 Simplistic interpretations and values of the past have not decomposed.\u00a0 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.”\u00a0 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?<\/p>\n “The essence of the Sadeian work,” Moore says, “is to turn over the stones of culture to see what life is hidden beneath repression.”\u00a0 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.”\u00a0 For Moore it is “the pornographic imagination, in dreams, books and movies [that] reveals the directions of the soul’s desire.”<\/p>\n For Moore, this is the core issue in Sadeian “perversion.”\u00a0 He notes that the Latin root of the word perverted<\/em> 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.”\u00a0 The images the moralists want to ban as “perverted,” Moore says, can be seen<\/p>\n <\/p>\n “as a goad to change or as an opportunity for psychological movement….\u00a0 The impact on the reader or observer of this kind of image is not as much pain as revulsion.\u00a0 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….\u00a0 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….\u00a0 The pervertedness invites either defensiveness against the image or a stretching of the imagination.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sade’s significance, for Moore, is that he “gives voice to the shadows of love.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n “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….\u00a0 He teaches his characters and his readers that they can learn to love this underworld….\u00a0 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.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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 soulfulness inherent in Sade’s work.\u00a0 Says Moore:\u00a0 “Whatever it is that inspires the love of images oblique to norms and standards should not be killed off or wished away.\u00a0 It can be placed in a secure container where its images will boil up into articulate forms.\u00a0 This is the essence of soul-making.”\u00a0 Thus, for Moore the essential question becomes:\u00a0 “What world has to be made… for eros to be evoked?\u00a0 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.”<\/p>\n To look at these issues, Moore notes, “we are required to suspend moral belief and entertain notions that border on the absurd.\u00a0 Is there any value hidden in the core of abuse, violence, perversion, and incest?\u00a0 Do the odd sexual couplings and scatological extravagances of our dreams instruct us positively in the nature of the psyche?\u00a0 Does love of the perverted have a place in the opus of the soul?”<\/p>\n Dark Eros<\/em> is a fascinating journey into these and other fundamental questions raised by the writings of Sade.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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 to the level of humor, psychological insight, and real wisdom.\u00a0 For all who understand and appreciate the paradoxical and ironic nature of the world, of the workings of the psyche, and certainly of how sexual desire and energy operate in\u00a0 as ass-backward a sexual culture as ours, this book is a real blessing.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Spectator<\/i>, March 27, 1992<\/p>\n Copyright \u00a9 1992 David Steinberg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-essays","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}