A fetish I bet you hadn’t even DREAMED of…!
Sep 7th, 2007 by Paul Moor
I’d intended to write something quite different this time (in essence: about the almost innumerable subtly nuanced little psychological surprises and “gotchas!” directly connected with my recent naturalization as a German citizen), but into my lap this morning dropped this tasty tidbit of sexual esoterica – and who could possibly resist passing it on to fellow seekers after truth?
My first sixteen years in this vale of tears I passed under the strict, strait-laced Southern Baptist roof of my Mississippi-born parents (e.g., just for openers, no card-playing or movie-going on Sundays), with my almost hysterically religious/superstitious mother the dominant figure in that ill-starred dyad. They did not belong to what their native state knew as a “Primitive Baptist Church” – a term I first discovered during an early visit to that exotic part of the country in my mother’s charge, where you’d see signs out in front of an occasional run-down church proclaiming it the This-or-That “Primitive Baptist Church”. When I asked my mother the obvious question, her answer consisted entirely of this: “With foot-washin’”.
At least not snake-handlin’. That customarily indoor sport seemed focused elsewhere in the deep dark South, I believe in the hillbillier areas of Tennessee. I’d long known that such things did enliven the “religious” services of some ultra-fundamentalist Protestant sects, but my own eyes – figuratively out on stems – didn’t witness that until an unforgettable documentary film (Dutch-made, as I recall) turned up years ago on German television, and branded itself indelibly into my memory.
During that part of the church service the European visitors had managed to film, the congregation members first danced themselves into an almost literally hysterical frenzy, then out would come the snakes, in a box where the totally ecstatic celebrants would take hold of them, lift them out, and hold them more or less at arm’s length while their frenzied dancing continued. The filming even captured the instant when one serpent actually sank his fangs into the arm of the man “handling” him; the case-hardened pros behind the cameras naturally let their film run uninterrupted, and the man finally lapsed into his fatal last coma with them recording every last second of it.
These nuts justify what they do with some obscure verse from the omniscient, unquestionable Bible, naturally; this poor devil lapsed into unconsciousness flat on his back, clutching a Bible thoughtfully placed into each hand by his attentive co-religionists, who prayed their fool heads off for the good Lord Jesus not to let him die for merely having obeyed what they interpreted as a divinely inspired Biblical command. (If this folkloric activity interests anyone reading this, let me know and I can go into more detail about that permanently unforgettable film at another time.)
Anyway, getting back to today’s posting…. My first sixteen years exposed me to a downright pathologically unhealthy anti-sexual childhood I somehow managed to survive. When I finally went from El Paso’s Stephen F. Austin High School to New York’s Juilliard School of Music, unshakably confident of course that at sixteen I already knew just about everything worth knowing, I’d never once had a talk with either parent about sexual matters. That deprivation has left me with a lifelong insatiable curiosity – especially after my introductory encounter with psychoanalysis, which in time came close to becoming my profession – about every aspect of the human animal’s almost infinitely variegated sexuality, some of those aspects exotic indeed … but what popped up today on my monitor screen surprised even comparatively case-hardened me.
“Red” Camp, the wild and wonderful jazz pianist married to a faculty member during my two post-Juilliard years at the University of Texas in Austin, used to joke about some gentlemen he described as “queer for doorknobs”. Well, this English dude brought to my unprepared attention this morning a specimen one would have to call queer for automobiles.
I forget the name of an especially sleazy tabloid (the Enquirer?) sold at the check-out of virtually every U.S. supermarket, but if you think that sleaze-sheet sets a journalistic low, you haven’t yet wallowed in the bottom-scraping equivalent area of the British press. The present story at hand came from one of that London ilk’s standard-setters, The Sun.
To get finally to the point, Chris Donald, a literally passionate Cheshire mechanic by profession, in some mysterious way “makes love” to classy automobiles (The Sun uncharacteristically draws a veil over explicit details) that somehow ring his libidinal chimes. The paper does at least in passing drop a tantalizing mention of exhaust pipes….
But instead of teasing you with mere paraphrasing, let me without further ado turn you over to that complete article.
In my old age, the clarity of determinism inveighs against my judgmentalism. The snake handlers in the south, the destitute, the criminal–it seems to me that no man chooses a life that leads to poverty, or dissipation.
Those who were blessed to be born with intellectual capability and its companion, self-awareness, impose the notion of choice on others. I’m not certain choice obtains in either case.
We appear to chart our own course, but I can never accept the notion that pedophiles and murders are people who choose their fates. I think our conditioning compels us to hard-wired, predestined outcomes.
I know this is not related to the point of your post, but it keeps occurring to me as I resist my tendency to judge other harshly. I find some solace in allowing those who transgress against me personally and society in general, some modest portion of understanding.
Though I am not religious, I pity those who are compelled to burden their lives with rituals of obeisance to supernatural forces. If you envision each human as the product of programming that was completed before they were 5, it allows you to express some compassion that is otherwise unavailable. It allows me to be comfortable with myself and provides an avenue for feeling that I am humanizing myself.
Maybe I am delusional; maybe I am totally wrong. My own aging is about reconciliation. I enjoy your blog, and as I read it and compare your gifts with my own poor abilities, I think–how blessed you have been, while most of us have not been so gifted.
Thanks for your kind words about this rumpus room, Jerry – and, once again, for your so kindly rushing to our collective aid with that swift replacement of those dazzling “rhetorical fireworks” (to borrow an apt term from Christine von Grafenstein, a Bavaria-based member of our merry band here) loosed, in Arabic, by that firebrand Los Angeles psychologist Wafa Sultan. Each of us does of course have different abilities, but don’t let one thing about this hangout deceive you, namely that the way I write comes to me without quite considerable effort on my part. I seldom allow others to lay eyes on anything I haven’t re-read, carefully, at least three (frequently more) times and often re-worked every time. Good writing means work, real work – for anyone. Googling has brought me no definitive answer as to the true authorship of a variously attributed aphorism that figuratively hangs over me (and probably every writer worthy of the name) every time we sit down at our respective infernal machines: “I hate writing. I love having written.”