At some point, through the same mechanism by which the picture initiates its dialogue on objectification (whether one takes it as a picture of a biological lie, a statistical leaning, or a visual truth), someone has to ask: What would the picture be saying if the body in polyester was white and male — or a white female body with the fly a-gape around some hefty labia? Or a black female body? Or with a small dick, small cunt, etc.?
They would all be shocking. But what would the different trajectories of that shock be? Only such questions can sketch out the nature of what the picture-as-is is doing.
Without its schlong a-dangle, “Man in Polyester Suit” could be a sales photo for a late ’70s issue of GQ Magazine. It is, after all, a funny picture. (It’s the visual inverse of a joke people, black and white, have been telling for years: What’s ten inches long, three inches around, and white? The white answer, straight and gay, male and female, is: “Nothin’!” The straight black male answer just removes the exclamation point. And the black gay answer is: “Not a thing, honey!”) Its laughter is directed, however tastelessly, at straight white males — but desire (would you like to suck or fuck one? Would you like to have one?) implicates all persuasions in its dialogic thrust. Hemphill, Mercer, and Julian all ask sensibly: “What do [Mapplethorpe’s images] say to our wants and desires as black, gay men?” As a black gay man, I’d suggest — sensibly — the answer starts with what one feels about big black cocks, and only point out that that answer is not necessarily conditioned one way or the other by being black alone. The larger question is, however, how predictable does the picture appear to presume the answer to be?
Just how old is the joke? And how new does dressing it up in polyester make it?
To engage these questions at all is to risk becoming the butt (as it were) of the joke. But clearly that goes for Mapplethorpe as well.
A suggestive historical note to close with: Within six weeks of the October 1839 date Louis Daguerre took out his patent on the Daguerreotype, the first man was arrested on the steps of the Louvre for selling pornographic photographs: naked women against backgrounds and in poses suggesting the most famous nudes on the museum walls within — putting high art, pornography, and photography into a contestatory wrangle that has not silenced since.
20. “Novelists ought not to be deaf,” write Disch and Naylor on page 59 of their wondrous historical reconstruction Neighboring Lives. But, for better or no, I am losing my hearing.
21. The Twin Cities: One is made of polished sewer grills, violet neon tubes, and twelve-foot mosaic panes reflecting other mosaics.
The other is made of words: “tenebrose,” “ineluctable,” and “abrogation”—but not “sybaritic,” “nilotic,” or “alpine.” (They cleave to other geographies, urban, agric, or mountainous, all together.) The second, like the first, has a history. The first, unlike the second, has only associations.
The first is populated by tall women in translucent plastic raincoats, short, muscular men in tanktops and loose camouflage fatigue pants, one out of thirteen of whom has a walrus moustache and is hung like a buffalo. The Japanese population is on the rise; and Native Americans have, recently, been migrating here from the west.
The second has a free public transportation system of pneumatic capsules, is cut by a river of No. 3 watch oil, and crouches in the shadow of the first. There are more animals in it than people — most of them with silver fur, ebon scales, or scarlet feathers. What human inhabitants stroll its streets tend to have hair the hue and crispness of rusted Brillo. They speak in gnomic phrases, punctuated by silences during which they examine their pocket calculators, the bolts on their roller blades, their antique calipers and circular slide rules.
The cities share, however, a dump.
And when the garbagemen from one poke pitch forks into the black sacks deposited there from the other, they step back, breathe in sharply — one or two brave ones scream — while still another stands there, eyes closed, the green canvas of his right pantsleg trembling.
22. Title for a Lacanian paper on heterosexuality: “A Lass and a Lack.”
23. The Palace and the Sea: Late that night in the palace of Alcinous, the Traveler regaled the king and his courtiers with tales of the storm-bound, sun-shot sea. As the fire burned in the walk-in fireplace and serving women moved among the guests, refilling goblets with wine, he told of mast-high waves, rafts of ice, ropes of white fire that netted the winter waters, and the slow metamorphosis of the periplus, from split cliffs a-glitter in dawn sun to the black lace of forests under indigo evening; and of how his ship had sailed through mayhem and magic to the gate of hell.
But the little princess, whom almost everyone had forgotten by now, thought to herself as she heard him: Where is this fabulous sea? Isn’t it all in the wash and wonder of his words, brought here, safe within the palace stones, made tame as a summer’s pool beside which one picnics with the other girls, off in the forest…?
For outside she could hear the rhetoric of the ocean, as it crashed at the foot of her home, yowling and growling around the rocks, leaping and hissing as high as her father’s anciently laid foundations.
In the roaring fireplace a moist log at last took flame and — cracked, spouting sparks toward blackened chimney stones, sifting more ash onto the hearth and, for a moment, interrupting the flow and weave of the Traveler’s cunning discourse on (his understanding of) the sea.
As if having heard his daughter’s thought, King Alcinous now asked: “Say, once again, Traveler, where is that sea…?”
23. “To Newton and to Newton’s dog Diamond,” Carlyle reminds us in the second chapter of The French Revolution, “what a different pair of universes…”
24. “Man,” says Dennis in the half-dark, “I’ll fuck you up the ass so much the cum’ll be runnin’ out your nose — you won’t need any moustache wax!” Odd how affection manifests itself in various ages and epochs, in various social niches.
25. If rhetoric is ash, discourse is fire…
26. The desire to be conscious of the process of losing consciousness, of having no consciousness at all — this paradox is source and kernel of the anxiety over dying and death.
27. I am awed, and just a bit terrified, at the mystery of my own existence. That something so rich and wonder-filled as fifty years or more of living should be given to someone as fallible and unimportant in the universe’s larger scheme and just plain ordinary as I is astonishing.
28. The twin cities are, of course, Xanadu and Wagadu. Telemachus awaits his father’s return in one; Telegonus, Odysseus’s son by Circe (who, according to Eugammon of Cyrene, eventually slew his father by a spear tipped with fish bone, during Odysseus’s shadowy second voyage), lurks in the other, waiting for the wanderer who, after divorcing Penelope and marrying Collidice, Queen of Thesprotia, took off on that mysterious second journey Dante, Tennyson, and Kazantzakis all write of.