18 Feb 2025 / {Not} Fiction

Duped by Deuce

“Any picture has to be displayed at eye level. And you must then, learn to appreciate a picture. See the frame, its contours first. Focus and stay on the mount. It is the second fence between the picture and the world outside. After you have applied these two filters, and only then, see the picture. See it, don’t just look at it. See it and enter it. See each detail, soak it in and imagine you have entered into the frame and are one with the picture. You are participant and beholder. That’s how to appreciate art. Soak it, immerse in it, imprint it, enter it and be it. At least for the extended duration you must. These are the most elementary and essential grains for a student of the fine arts.” 

The year 1974. Mr. Bishamber Khanna, dapper bachelor art teacher. A tad forbidding and clearly over the top. Good looking man in the manner of James Stewart. Brair pipe and russet brown turtleneck offset by beige trousers. A hang of Chaz. I recall the scene very well. Digestion of his lectures was impossible for an eight year old most useless (as in almost everything) art student. But I am sure he spoke more to himself than to me. With such a man, from an under ten vantage point, not to be awestruck and intimidated at once, is an impossibility. I have retained nothing of my education, save scraps like ones thrown by a faraway art teacher, a painter of some repute himself. Time and all things pass as they must. Over the years, I tunnelled my inheritance to create a large residue of leisure overlaid with carefully cultivated tastes. And I must confess, an abiding attraction for the female form. I joined the brotherhood of perpetual indulgence and devoted myself to the pursuit of pleasure. Assiduously practicing unsolicited but well used advice from my deceased uncle Paul and his licentious advice: “God gave you a joystick son. Plug and rock”. This objective apart and certainly included, I consider myself an accomplished lover and a respectable aesthete. Beauty, fine conversations and the arts are my realm.

The matter I mention, materialized when I was at a private viewing of 19th century masters. Among them, the work of Gustave Courbet preserved at the Museed Órsay. Private viewings are rare occasions, never episodic. In my case the first private viewing has never been repeated. Innately dangerous and loaded, I think of private viewings as altogether avoidable. Not being invited has nothing to do with it. I slot private viewings in my mind as the defining scene from Night of the Generals: the Jarre music, an uptight psychopathic general Tanz and for the scene, young corporal Hartmann. Jeu de Paume museum. The pair pass through paintings – Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Gaugin, Degas. Tanz freezes before the Degas. Hartmann reads aloud from his notebook: “Vincent van Gough. Self-portrait titled Vincent in Flames. Painted in an insane asylum”. Tanz is transfixed. In trance. He sweats, trembles slightly and the left eye twitches. He stretches an unsteady hand seemingly to steady himself. Hartmann takes his arm. Tanz snaps himself back and shouts: “How dare you touch me! Never do that again!” He, I am sure, was in the painting. My intention, deliberate, was to be in the painting. That correct way of appreciating fine art. It is called the Quiet Eye Technique. A practised and cultivated trait which teaches singularity of sight to the exclusion of everything else. The Origin of the World is a painting, seldom, if actually seen. I approached it with heavy caution and high anticipation. Background reading had told me about the popular Turkish-Egyptian diplomat, a toast of libertine society before he faced ruination by gambling. The flamboyant Khalil Beyhad in his heyday curated an ephemeral but dazzling collection celebrating the female body. The painting is regarded as the most unabashed of Courbet’s several of the female form. Daring and frank, it is reputed to have has a peculiar fascination difficult to describe. Always stark, the painting is not attenuated by any historical or literary device. It escapes pornographic status thanks to the master’s virtuosity and acute refinement of his amber scheme in treatment. An audacious, new language suggests Venetian style. This, because Courbet claimed lurid descent from Titian, and Correggio. A tradition of carnal, lyrical paintings. The subject, naturally female. I thought this painting would be voyeuristic. The gall to paint such a picture. Anticipation finally led to appearance. The painting in its literal, absolute starkness and set in gilded frame was before me: The Origin of the World.

I don’t know what to say. Its entire focus is on the vulva. The seer sees just that. Partially, in the same manner as the Taj Mahal was meant to be revealed, before worshippers of the stark and the literal had their way. Silly manicured affected garden and the rest of it which produces endless grotesque photos framed in hubris. The builder had meant the building to be revealed gradually. With mystery and anticipation, in tantalizing glances before it showed itself fully and seemed to say behold me, I am a tomb like none other. Courbet knew and practised that aesthetic. The object of his focus, a vulva, is only partially revealed because it is thickly covered with hair. Somewhat like a partial sun or moon (whichever you prefer) peeping out while being chaperoned by thick clouds. Arresting sight, eternal siting of the mons veneris. It excites primordial sentiment, not sexual. On the contrary, it is mystical. It is mysterious, awesome. The impact of beholding that painting never settles. It lies in the realm of what we cannot know and what we are captive to. My thoughts, as I saw the work. Very naturally, I had applied the axiom from 1974.

Descent into the painting was acute. I was drawn into a vortex which was also a whirlpool. Inexorably sucked into what the vulva depicted and what it did not. As I involuntarily entered the vestibule, I lost all consequence of myself. I was flushed in. Once there, entrapped. I was cast into vulvas and moved to wombs of all creations and all creatures, one after the other. Incessant sucking in and spitting out before being sucked in again. There were minor variations of physiology in each vulva, but the experience always the same. The feeling and cadence of my journeys cannot be explained. I have never understood them; not fully at least. Dark, pulsating, unknown cavities with infinite untold passages like rabbit warrens. Each could take the visitor anywhere or nowhere. These were inhabited I knew, by life and its intentions. Varied, diverse forms and shapes. All and every manner of creature, immense in limitless variety. Disembodied entities as well, seeking uterine chambers. Eager to appear on the stage howsoever fleetingly. Entrapment in the zone between a vulva and a vagina is peerless. I was neither in nor out. And since I was in a grey zone flux, I saw it all. The craving, the thrusting, the casting, the expelling. A giant washing machine which tinkered with its controls without ever switching them off. Indescribable and very morbid. Irony of technique which has always existed, creating a churn as it summoned the other to itself, then into itself. Intercourse initiated to create, and through creation keep the other in thrall. The Hell of existence is an infinite one. Each vulva leads to it. The circle never devours itself completely. In and out, out and in. An insufferable rhythm. On an etheric plane, it shatters the player but since it never quite finishes you off, concentric circles of being beholden to a state of being, drop rings upon rings non-stop. I cannot even begin to explain. The more I try, the more I tighten knots in my mind. It is too abstract to be told and too thick to be measured. I saw black holes in space as terrific vulvas, paths to dimensions impossible to comprehend. I saw incredible portals which afforded unimaginable transfers to lands of befuddlement. All the portals were happy to just be. They had acquired a life of their own, these perennial and insatiable maws. Favourite diet was attention and engagement. Another staple was creation and torture. Their strength came from this. Also their purpose, some relevance and amusement. Everything was a morbid sort of play. A simultaneous and simulated play with chimeras and seductions resting atop quagmires and entrapment. ‘Once in, never out’ the vulvas said. Beyond the push and pull of sexual impulse, behind mere functional genital, the world exists in a portal; a gantry actually. A herald presaging this, and as I discovered to my misfortune, limitless other worlds. Exceptionally powerful and mysterious, therefore daunting in its dark silence and inertia. It stated reality, infinity and eternity. It also signified a strange and macabre aspect even though it was a funnel of birth, life and pointless renewal. Terrible zero-sum games with all manner of playthings but no playmates.

All the worlds exist inside vulvas. We just don’t realize this. Vulvas are perennial. All those within these portals, all those condemned to a state of being, are one and several parts to the whole. The vulva and the beings in dark symbiosis. Courbet painted a vulva while being inside an unimaginably large vulva. He divined the eternal or celebrated the carnal, I can’t say. Both, perhaps. Like me, he too waited in the anteroom of all there is.

A pitiable wretch, I have been maddened by vulvas ever since that sighting of his painting. I saw too close, therefore too much. And that was the vector of my condition. The mind always wanders, that’s its nature. Tiresias, the blind Greek had lived as both man and woman. In dispute Zeus and Hera summoned him to ask a most basic question: Who enjoys sex more? Man or woman? “Woman” answered the clairvoyant. “Nine times more” he added. Hera was furious. She struck him blind. I don’t know. But before we arrive at weakness of the female libido, consider the thoughts of Tiresias. Now, while it is established fact that I had spent a fair amount of time and effort in getting out, it is equally true that for the remainder of my life, I had spent disproportionate time, energy, resources, effort to get back in. Callow fool, I could not see it for what it is -- several worlds in parallel. Each of these deserving, demanding and receiving infinite attention. Each engagement or intercourse cursed with a pointless state of being. From the state of being arose the great dichotomy. Polarity of desire and action and reaction, which has spun the multiverse into motion. And keeps it thus. A portal, especially one which compels and impels an eternal onion like relationship, does flabbergast the beholder. It operates with not one but several veils of deception. The portal is one while it appears as several. Penetrated all the time, but impossible to permeate. And that is the catch. In retrospect, getting out in the first place is a disconcerting experience. I remember my emergence from the sea of existence, from existing in a benign microverse to being pushed out. Emerging from a slit, every inch of me a recalcitrant actor pushed out of the wings, onto the stage. Shoved actually, my protestations notwithstanding. That infinitely sad and horrible feeling of being pushed. Expulsion, of being discarded, thrown out and that snapping of the bond. If anything is paradise lost, this is it. In emerging, the first and most horrific thing which assaulted me, was the light and the noise. The light has never been experienced. It is blinding so one keeps the eyes shut in the beginning. The noise, one is familiar with in degree, having heard it in the chamber of existence. But it is nothing like the noise of the world. This is searing, incessant, high decibel and non-stop. All creatures are born in their mother’s pain, and die in their own. The moment of birth is excruciating for the being who is born and the being who births it. But the pain of dying is never as terrible as the unbearable pain of being born. In death one returns to the shade and obliteration. There is some succour there even though only perceptually. The wise know that the being has no escape from pain. Incarnate or discarnate, it has no choice but to endure it. I saw the great vulva as the universe, spitting forth endless multiverses. One after the other, countless unlimited states of being brought forth into play. Interacting in all the interactions there can ever be. All connected by the slime of existence, of being. Periodically, the great vulva stimulated, excited and pleasured itself. The diversion was pure indulgence, mockery even, as it feigned seduction, surrender, subservience. From gross manifestation of modifying the female into the male life-forms on earth, to the pinnacle of creating and birthing the male, the great vulva was absolute. It was all there ever was, all there is, all there will or can ever be. In its cold, dark, mysterious and inexorable presence which dwarfs all dimensions and all states of creation, the great vulva is implacable. We are in it. Expelled and drawn in during a grand pantomime. Infinitely loving, nurturing, nourishing, benign | infinitely vengeful, destructive, malevolent. The great vulva is complete, it is irreducible to binary bifurcations. It is unitary. It is both denominator and numerator. Therefore it is absolute. It is minuend and subtrahend, quotient and aggregate, multiplier and divider. It is everything known and unknown, including the unknowable. We are in and of the great vulva. It is God indeed. Ultimate, infinite, unknowable.

Towards the end of my acutely disconcerting experience, Courbet flashed again. Full face and as close as possible. His works zoomed into my eyes and entered my head at the point between the forehead and the nasion. More than once, several times over. Drumming a message, running a sequence. Starting with The Bathers, the huge naked voluptuous and enticing women casting. Followed by The Gateway to the World, with its unabashed and stark glaring truth. Immediately then, The desperate, stupefied man in realization of sorts, having done the deed -- Le Desespere. His unfinished gouache The Man Made Mad by Fear came last. Sisyphean condemnation of my fate, linked to The Stone Breakers came as finale. The forever job. Only in this case, the never-ending loop of getting out of a woman and then the life-long pursuit of trying to get back in. A hopeless, never-ending task cloaked in layers of illusion and reams of promised pleasure. Pantomime of the ages. It ends in permanent and appalling despair. Juxtaposed with the revelation, in antithesis of it, a high pitched, shrill female voice recited Lord Byron CLXXIII: “She walks in beauty, like the night. Of cloudless climes and starry skies. And all that's best of dark and bright. Meets in her aspect and her eyes; thus mellow'd to that tender light, Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.” I liken that voice, often in my head, to Bianca Castafiore’s The Jewel Song. I do this with trepidation. Nothing jocular or light about an opera singer’s high C, it quivers glass to dissolution. Now imagine the natural resonant frequency of my mind. Fragile at all times, utterly compromised after being beguiled and inveigled disproportionately by perils of the petticoats. Like the lotus eaters, an aesthete is the child of his age, but all the worse for him if he is at the same time its pupil, even worse, if minion. As all three, I am petrified of women, of everything female. In bloodcurdling dread. I recite Ciaran Carson. “I fear the vast dimensions of eternity…I fear the Jabberwock whatever it might be…I fear the gremlins that have colonized my brain…And what else do I fear? Let me begin again.” All very bright and very loud. The high pitched sort of feminine loud. Without reprieve. From bashful blushing babes to the Venus Flytrap. From Gropecunt Lane to the Vagina Monologues, the dangerous, deceptive, insidious gender has me petrified and fascinated. It is all there is, eternal and perennial. It is Nature just as I am Will. And Will must yield to Nature, alas. Nature eventually blows away Will smithereens. In its passive inertness and dark unknowable mystery it is a great transcendent. It is consummate artistry, it uses subterfuge masquerading as serendipity. It keeps all and everything in orbit.

If you are female, do not be offended. In this, I have stated only that which is absolutely true. True, as I understand it to be.