PROJECT 9: ORGASM.

My Meal at Every Wink.
Pen and ink and Watercolour.
(Detail). Leaf from Orgasm Notebook. 1978

This project involved a number of cross-referential ideas. Orgasm, sometimes referred to as 'The Little Death', crosses boundaries without a heart. The sexual channels are also the body's sewers. There are unmistakable links between excreta, decay and sexuality. Life can be seen as instability and disequilibrium exhausting it's own resources. It proceeds on one condition; the extravagant procedure of things given life, making room for fresh cycles. Lenkiewicz notes:

"...that excitement is death-like, the feeling of losing control, being swept off one's feet, the swoon, 'I die because I cannot die', says St. Theresa. "

In earlier cultures than our own the horror of carrion or decomposition linked in a Faustian style with punishment for pleasure. Decomposition was a sign of failure, the underlying meaning of the macabre. Baroque Theatre staged its love scenes in tombs. The sexual act, like death, could be seen as a transgression separating us from daily life, from rational society, work, etc; plunging us into a violent otherness. A dictatorship controls the body. The genitalia acts on behalf of the whole organism. Orgasm as the release of tension is a revolution, anarchic and dangerous to the order of the body politic. What we desire to possess we fear to lose. The body is never static, it is an energy system whose 'reality' does not consist of substances but of events. These events are aesthetic in their nature. Whatever attraction directs our energy is strangely cannibalistic. What we desire is incorporated - seeing is eating.

 
"This needful, never spent, And nursing element; My more than meat and drink, My meal at every wink "

When the Aranda Tribe ask each other: "Have you eaten?" they mean, "Have you had intercourse?".The very corpse through which we derive our pleasure is slowly consumed, "eaten", by time, sorrow, sickness and death. "You look good enough to eat", is autophagy, aesthetic cannibalism. At the risk of stretching the metaphor too far, orgasm is the result of 'the vagina' eating 'the penis'. The vagina has a boundary, the penis has it's boundary, orgasm dissolves these boundaries. Only the exaggerations feel true. St. Theresa's remark describes orgasm far more effectively than Bemini's Vatican statue. Orgasm places some part of our consciousness on a tangent to the rest of it; like a moebius strip, the circle appears to have two sides, but in fact it only has one. It is said that we 'love' in order to defend ourselves from beauty. We cannot escape our private aesthetic so we drown in it."
These observations and many others litter Lenkiewicz's notebook on this theme.