|
Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
To taste whole joys
John Donne, Elegy XX
Perhaps we should start with a denial: what the body is not, what it does not perform. The body is not a comfort. The body is not an equilibrium. The body does not perform assertions. We make an effort to affirm it, through art, desire, fantasy. But its fate is always a denial. And a conflict.
Therefore we should start from the body to think about art regarding this vast subject - sex - and, contrarily, which is still under restriction.
"Human sexuality is essentially traumatic", says Joyce Mac Dougall. Perhaps all art produced about it is an effort to overcome the trauma. It is a puzzle in which we are thrown without choice. We try to survive and get a fruit (an apple maybe).
Eroticism is defined as an intention of sensuality, but in a world compressed in banality, where the commonness of transgression destroys all the real possibilities of transgression, as Michel Foucault said, what does it mean? Erotic art: I doubt it.
Thinking about the relation between art and sex, what first came to my mind was all the literature written by early 20th century women. Damned women, transgressive women, literature without cultural legitimacy in the time it was produced. In the literature written by women, the poetic voice reveals the prohibition to sex and to pleasure. Nelly Novaes Coelho considers that in the essay "O erotismo na literatura feminina do início do século XX, da submissão ao desafio ao cânone"
(http://www.hottopos.com/vdletras3/nelly.htm).
She examines the work of Colombina (São Paulo), Gabriela Mistral (Chile); Gilka Machado (Rio de Janeiro); Juana de Ibarbourou (Uruguay) and Florbela Espanca (Portugal), all writers born at the beginning of the 20th century in different cultural environments. They, according to Coelho, were the first to presume themselves "as transgressive writers in the original canon of the Christian bourgeois civilization: the prohibition to the sex." Coelho also says: "the first challenge they aimed at was at the 'sin of the flesh' assuming it as an evil thing but impossible to resist".
I also remember the Isle of Love episode (IX, 68-95) from the Luis de Camões epic poem "Os Lusiadas" (1572).
At this moment in the epic, Vasco da Gama and his crew are returning to Portugal, after their journey to India. The Island gives them all the reward they deserve for the successful journey. The meeting between the Portuguese and the Nymphs is based on pure sensuality: naked goddess are washing themselves and when the men approach they go to the forest to hide but their eyes offer what they deny to the men's hands:
Outros, por outra parte, vão topar
Com as Deusas despidas, que se lavam;
Elas começam súbito a gritar,
Como que assalto tal não esperavam.
Hüas, fingindo menos estimar
A vergonha que a força, se lançavam
Nuas por entre o mato, aos olhos dando
O que às mãos cobiçosas vão negando.(IX, 72)
They are awarded with pleasure. In this mythic place they seduce the Nymphs and conquer sex as conquering new lands. The soldier Leonardo fights for his Nymph despite his unlucky fate in love:
Leonardo, soldado bem disposto,
Manhoso, cavaleiro e namorado,
A quem Amor não dera um só desgosto,
Mas sempre fora dele mal tratado,
E tinha já por firme prossuposto
Ser com amores mal-afortunado,
Porém não que perdesse a esperança
De inda poder seu Fado ter mudança;
Quis aqui sua ventura que corria
Após Efire, exemplo de beleza
Que mais caro que as outras dar queria
O que deu, pera dar-se, a Natureza.
Já cansado, correndo, lhe dizia:
«Ó fermosura indigna de aspereza,
Pois desta vida te concedo a palma,
Espera um corpo de quem levas a alma! (IX,75-76)
Through "pure love" the Nymph surrenders herself. Love changes fate, it is the redemption:
Já não fugia a bela Ninfa tanto
Por se dar cara ao triste que a seguia,
Como por ti ouvindo o doce canto,
As namoradas mágoas que dizia.
Volvendo o rosto já, sereno e santo,
Toda banhada em riso e alegria,
Cair se deixa aos pés do vencedor,
Que todo se desfaz em puro amor. (IX, 82)
The Pietro Aretino (1492-1556) "Sonetti Lussuriosi"(1525) is poetry that does not bring the astonishment of love and passion. According to José Paulo Paes, translator and author of the Critical Essay in the Brazilian edition of the "Sonetti" :
The voice that we hear in the "Sonetti Lussuriosi" is not the voice of the Head, pleasing itself in metaphorical elegance to express astonishment, perplexities and dissatisfactions of love and passion, but it is the voice of the Body appealing to the brutality of the shout to throw the lava of love and lust.
The poetic voice is associated with pleasure by using vulgar vocabulary as an element of the poetic composition. If we consider the paradigms of the Renaissance Italian culture, it reveals a lot about that reality - there are possible things to live, and possible to say in a mock and humorous way:
Tu m'hai il cazzo in potta, in cul mi vedi.
Ed io vedo il tuo cul com egli è fatto,
Ma tu potresti dir chío sono um matto
Perchè tengo le man dove sta i piedi.
Ma s'a cotesto modo fotter credi,
Credilo a me, che non ti verrà fatto,
Perchè assai meglio al fottere io m'adatto
Quando col petto sul mio petto siedi.
Vi vuo'fotter per lettera, comare,
E vuo'farvi nel cul tante ruine
Colle dita, col cazzo e col menare,
Che sentirete un piacer senza fine.
Io non so che più dolce, che gustare
Da Dee, da Principesse e da Regine?
John Donne(1572-1631) is far from the humor and mockery of Aretino's "Sonetti", specially his "Elegy XX. To his mistress going to bed". This poem (with the Augusto de Campos wonderful translation to Portuguese) inspired Pericles Cavalcanti to compose a song, deliciously performed by Caetano Veloso in the album "Cinema Transcedental".
But the poem is more moving than the song. John Donne was an English churchman, a priest of the Anglican church, named dean at St Paul's cathedral in 1621; one of the metaphysical poets brought to the 20th century by T.S. Eliot. In the poetry of John Donne there is the explicit sexual ecstasy of love and passion, built with dazzling wordplay associated with uncommon metaphors.
In "Elegy XX", the woman is compared to the new land - America - a virgin, full of mysteries, naked, on which wandering hands exploit the desire of conquest:
Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my Newfoundland,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann'd,
My mine of precious stones, my empery ;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee !
To enter in these bonds, is to be free ;
Then, where my hand is set, my soul shall be.
The woman, object of the carnal love, is also a mystic book, and only to a few allows/gives her reading/pleasure:
Like pictures, or like books' gay coverings made
For laymen, are all women thus array'd.
Themselves are only mystic books, which we
-Whom their imputed grace will dignify-
Must see reveal'd. Then, since that I may know,
As liberally as to thy midwife show
Thyself ; cast all, yea, this white linen hence ;
There is no penance due to innocence:
To teach thee, I am naked first; why then,
What needst thou have more covering than a man?
In contemporary Brazilian literature we cannot forget Hilda Hilst (1930-2004) ─ the writer who identifies the places of the body and of the soul in the poem "Do desejo" (About desire):
E por que haverias de querer minha alma
Na tua cama?
Disse palavras líquidas, deleitosas, ásperas
Obscenas, porque era assim que gostávamos.
Mas não menti gozo prazer lascívia
Nem omiti que a alma está além, buscando
Aquele Outro. E te repito: por que haverias
De querer minha alma na tua cama?
Jubila-te da memória de coitos e de acertos.
Ou tenta-me de novo. Obriga-me.
(And why would you like to have my soul/ In your bed?/ We said rough, delightful, liquid,/ Obscene words, because that was the way we liked it./ But I did not lie about cummings pleasure lasciviousness/ Neither I omitted that the soul is beyond, seeking/That Another. / And I repeat to you: Why would you like to have my soul in your bed? /Be happy with the memory of coupling and statements. / Or try me again./ Oblige-me.)
As answer to the uncountable publishers refusal to publish her "serious" work, Hilst persisted in that subject in the beginning of the 1990's, writing a trilogy: the novels "O Caderno Rosa de Lori Lamby" (1990), "Textos Grotescos" (1990) and "Cartas de um Sedutor" (1991).
"O Caderno Rosa de Lori Lamby", an amused knavery (as the author herself defined), is a first person novel narrated by a 8 year-old girl who writes in her diary her imaginative fantasy about sex, absorbing influences of her father, a writer of erotic short stories. The controversial romance was adapted to theater (with the actress Iara Jamra) and to film by the director Sung Sfai in 2005
Are those the girl's fantasies or ours? Hilda Hilst's marvelous literary construction in this book makes us ask that. The girl seems to be playing with her imagination, mixing reality, pieces of information and fantasy. The excitement is ours not hers:
I told daddy that I like to be licked but it seems that he did not hear me, and if I was able to stay a long time in my little bed with open legs but it seems I am not because it is harmful, and because we have a schedule for that. It is just one hour, when it is more, we earn more money, but it is not everyone that has so much money like that to lick. The young man told me when he comes back he is going to bring me some black torn socks to wear. I asked him to bring me pink socks because I am very much fond of pink and if he does it I will lick his staff for a long time, even without chocolate. He said I was a very pretty little bitch. He wanted also I come back to bed again, but it already had passed a hour and there's a bell when people stayed more than a hour in the bedroom. So he asked to kiss my little hole there behind, I let him do it, he put the tongue in my little hole and I wish he was not putting out his tongue but the bell rang again.
Recently a polemic episode between the director José Celso Martinez Correa and the actor Paulo Autran was in the newspaper Folha de São Paulo. It began when the actor in an interview ("Autran não perdoa ninguém e agrada a todos" , Ilustrada, November 30, 2005) declared that he did not consider as theatre a play which has two actors masturbating on a stage, in reference to the play "Os Sertões" by the director José Celso and his group Uzyna Uzona.
José Celso is a visceral director, courageous, and for that, controversial. If his plays have orgasms, naked actors or not, his performances are always able to turn us head over heels (I have met Dionisius once in one of his plays: "As bacantes").
Paulo Autran is a highly respected actor in Brazil for his work in theatre, movies and television — a canon in the art of acting whose career is already a chapter of the Brazilian theater history in the last 50 years.
The play of José Celso is adapted from a book – Euclides da Cunha's "Os Sertões". It tells the story of the Canudos war, a conflict in the Brazil's country between the recent declared Republic and a group of religious people led by Antonio Conselheiro, in the 19th century. Euclides da Cunha was a writer and a reporter and told in the book what he saw and lived.
José Celso answered Autran in the same newspaper (Folha de São Paulo - Réplica: Quem tem medo de masturbação masculina?, December 12, 2005) revealing that although the actor did not see the performance, he is focusing only on the "masturbation taboo":
(...) a short time of an orgasm, about 3 minutes of a 6 hours play: "A Luta 2". Mariano Matos, a great young actor, creates a work of art with the part of a soldier who is waking up in the middle of a dream of love, attacked by gunmen and being shot in the moment of his "petite mort", the orgasm.
Nowadays, sexual subjects on stage just to shock the audience is a naive choice. Definitely that was not Ze Celso's intention. He explains:
Jean Genet's divine masturbation, for us, is totem. It is the basis of the work of a free actor of genius subtext, who knows how to provoke his imagination from his deep and free pleasures, dreams and desires. Who knows how to practice prayer, meditation, masturbation, begin a self-knowledge. Knowledge about desire, about how to give a spirit, a soul to his/her own Eros, how to make through his body the body of an acting role, and give to it the most precious, the electric tension, for that the part should stay alive, free, theatrical, tactile, and sensual to the audience.
But the director takes a risky road, creating doubt in the audience. Any sexual metaphor in a world where people's eyes and senses are accustomed to the same mass message paralyses our sensibility to the recognition of beauty/sense that can be raised. The challenge is to inaugurate new meanings for that without meaning.
One who does not follow that dubious road is the director Ana Kfouri. In her play "Volúpia" staged in Brazil between 1998 and 1999, the director started from texts by diverse authors who had written about sex to create a strong performance that was extraordinary. "Volúpia" is part of the seven deadly sins that the director is going to stage. "Gula" and "Preguiça" have already been played. "Ira" is the project for 2007.
Now Kfouri is staging "Esfincter", until January 29th in Sesc Copacabana, RJ, with the Companhia Teatral do Movimento. From the texts " Lettre aux acteurs" and "Le Discours aux Animaux" by the French author Valère Novarina, Kfouri's play serves to the pupose of the author: theater is a place where words and speech are considered as a body, but not that expressive one, otherwise it is a bloody body moving by its own internal mechanism.
The director says that there is the motive to intensify the artist-audience relationship and create communication between them. Certainly, she wants to communicate "a certain feeling of reality."
In Kfouri's plays naked actors on stage and heartbreaking words are procedures, as Henry Miller has said: "the deliberate element that is found [in art] nothing has to do with the sexual excitement, as in pornography. (...) His aim is to awake, to communicate a feeling of reality".
Art must bring the expression of a feeling. It is a place where we are able to live an experience by provoking all senses at once, even if it is talking about politics or ordinary duties.
As Pablo Picasso said:
"Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art. "
Or if it does not excite the body to move on through the provocation and perception of senses, it is not art worthy of its own name.
|
