Dickweed
As supplementary to the ongoing porn symposium, there here follows yet another post all about about spunk.
A weed is a flower out of place; Helen Chadwick’s Piss Flowers are not weeds. How could they be, since pissing – on the ground, in the snow – marks territory, establishes a proper place? What is ejaculated, by contrast, is by definition out-of-place – its thrownness is the distinctive thing about it. There are discursive ejaculations, too: grunts, shouts, curses: conversational weeds. The thrusting, spurting male body is a body with Tourette’s. And the female? The curious thing about female ejaculation is that nobody seems quite sure what it is: it might just be piss after all. And it might not. And does it matter?
Irigaray wrote at some length about the perils of trying to understand female sexual morphology on the basis of the male genitalia. The very fact that there’s this thing that’s sort of a “female prostate”, except it’s not really (it appears to be mercifully un-cancer-prone as well; something of a state of blessed exemption around those parts), illustrates both the structural irreconcilability that characterises sexual difference, and the fact that this irreconcilability is typically made visible by means of a failed or failing analogy. You can’t, in other words, have a Lacanian formula for sexuation without an analogism for it to ruin – or without an already-ruined analogism in whose disarray the wake of its rampage can be discerned.
The dream of the male poet is to say it with flowers, to arrange his ejaculations – the thrown matter of language – so that everything is finally in its right place. It is in the poem “That Man As A Rational Animal Desires The Knowledge Which Is His Perfection” that Geoffrey Hill writes “I imagine singing I imagine / getting it right”, and concludes with a desire for “spontaneous happiness as it was once / given our sleeping nature to awake by / and know / innocence of first inscription”. Does écriture feminine dream the same dream? Or even an analogous one?
October 25th, 2006 at 9:39 pm
but HC’s piss flowers are male and female, because they were created by her and her boyfriend when staying in a snowy area (canada somewhere i think) – so the bit in the middle that sticks up is her stream of piss into the snow, then he stepped up and waggled around to produce the petals. So the male is a piss artist and is open whereas the female marks a singular length, when inverted.