ANCIENT PORN

It was Agatha Christie, who was nicknamed The Woman with the Dirty Mind.

That epithet, however, did not refer to the sexually obscene, but rather to the murderous offensive. Christie invented filthy manslaughter, to be devoured by her readers as if they had become anthropophagi. Some of her books are quite entertaining, though. Most of them are not; they contain improbable plots and are improbably dull.

Sade might be called The Man with the Dirty Mind, now of course referring to bland and blunt sex of all variety. Then again, he shares with Christie’s long list of bad detective novels their intensely dull boredom. Reading for instance his The 120 Days of Sodom, will serve you as a good medicine against insomnia, written as it is by that Bookkeeper of Sexual Behaviour.

In this Postmodern, oversexed age, if not the pornographic age as such, perhaps all of us become the victims of a dirty mind, of our everyday projections with some sexual overtone. While sitting in the waiting room of the notaire, accompanied by my very sexy immobilière, ready to listen to an almost Sadean long, dull recitation of all the defects of my new house-to-buy, I opened a book on the hospital history of my new hometown – Montmorillon. My eye fell on the picture shown above.

Ancient porn, is what I thought, not yet digitally brought up to date. My first impression was one of a rather oversized Sadean prick – in Chaucer’s apt words: man’s silly instrument – cruelly and anally raping a woman, the whole image done as a so-called postmodern installation, made of cloth, perhaps even a work made by a true feminist, out to shock you – or do whatever. Art, in short.

Only in the second instance was the filthy gaze redirected, the object brought into context, a picture in a book on the history of end-of-18^th-century French hospitals. The image concerned a quite revolutionary, visual kind of training, used to teach doctors, surgeons and midwifes, called sages-femmes, the complications of labour and childbirth. Suddenly, I saw the child, where before I had observed that phallus.

La Dame du Coudray made the rounds of hospitals, from Poitiers to Montmorillon, using this display. She even demanded that her show should be performed in public, that is “in front of the Intendant of Health, various persons of distinction and the whole municipal counsel.” So, a public performance of sorts, perhaps afraid that an exhibition of this kind for the true crowd might indeed cause pornographic uproar.

A bit like l’Enfer, that section of France’s greatest public library which was always closed to… the public, only opened to people of distinction such as professors who would bear in mind Dante’s wise instruction ‘to leave all hope behind’. That Hell, of course, contains the most delicious works of pornography, even the complete works of dull Sade. By now, there is no one left even willing to enter l’Enfer – all joyous sexual filth may be found on film or on the internet. Perhaps, there may be still a professor left, willing to enter that Hell of Books, to perform his or her intellectual duties.

Sierksma, Montmorillon 16.7/2020