The Hydra's Tale: Imagining Disgust | Robert Rawdon Wilson

The Hydra's Tale: Imagining Disgust

R. Rawdon Wilson

“This book is as deeply hybrid as any I have seen.Hydra is multi-genre and multi-dimensional. It draws upon the considerable resources of Wilson’s scholarship, and that in an amazingly multi-disciplinary manner. Anthropology, cultural studies, experimental psychology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, theory (both literary and cultural) all play significant roles. In addition, the book shows off the author’s fiction-writing in a number of quite varied ways. Short fictions and parables run through the book. There are some striking examples of ficto-theory as well.It is also, evidently, auto-biographical though it is also, I suspect, bio-fictographical.The parables and metables that punctuate the scholarly/theoretical discussion are a delight.”(Wilm Robertson, Australian Journal of Para-Literature, 3: 1-2: 97-101.)

Disgust seems like a commonplace human affect. All people feel it, though not for the same reasons.It can show up anywhere, in the midst of nearly any activity. It is easy to imagine, often indeeply loathsome, nausea-causing scenes. Violent and copious vomiting, sudden incontinence, public excrement (at least in its mammalian instances) rot, putrefaction and stench, all suggest experiences that would lead most human beings to feel disgust.For a book that sets out to study disgust, such scenes are at once obvious and almost too easy. Turn the problem of disgust around and look for the border cases:the scenarios in which disgust emerges abruptly from things that ought not to be disgusting or else marks the transformation of the attractive (or innocent) into its opposite and those moments, equally problematic, when things that have long been experienced as disgusting suddenly becomes acceptable, even desirable. These scenes will be more difficult to interpret, but also more apt to focus the problem more clearly. In such moments, you will be looking, not at open sewers or running rivulets of filth and gore but, at the body’s pulse or the constant flow and swish of its fluids. (And we are all, male and female, plain or lovely, hairy bags filled with fluids of varying viscosity.) Imagine a "thick white jam” that lisps, trickles and sticks until “there is nothing but gnarled knots of pale solid animal hair in the morning shower.”That is how David Foster Wallace describes an adolescent boy observing his nocturnal emission in the morning. Nothing there that is, in particular, disgusting. Yet the author has clearly set out to evoke disgust. The character seems to feel disgust. You might almost smell the acrid stench of decaying sperm even though Wallace has made his character experience only a “clean sweet smell” that he cannot believe comes from anything made inside of himself.

For a book such as this one, the subject is everywhere and in everyone. And, although this book is not intended to be an exercise in gonzo cultural theory, the subject is both within, and close to, the author himself.I have long been interested in disgusting things. Sometimes I strike others as having a genuine enthusiasm, almost teen-age in its spontaneity, for slimy, deliquescent rot. More certainly, I take a writer’s pleasure in metaphors, the imaginative constructions that actual disgusting things can make possible.And I have also, I believe, a scholar’s interest in the what (or who), why, when and how of disgust. What is disgusting? Why, and under what conditions, do certain objects and acts become disgusting?How does it work upon you:upon your eyes, throat, viscera and imagination? I also have a writer’s interest in how disgust has been represented.What are the images of disgust? How do disgusting images exert their power over viewers and readers?How are disgusting phenomena made sense of, used and transformed in our society?In part, my continuing interest in disgust may go back to having had a morally repressive middle-class up-bringing, my mother (in particular) always finding things that I should not taste, touch or even see. It may also relate to my anti-repressive young adulthood.In a series of work-experiences, largely intended to make my parents shudder, in such roles as a merchant seaman or as a ringmaster for a small Australian circus, I encountered all manner of things, objects, acts, attitudes and practices, that I had never previously experienced. I learned to recognize the sight and smell of rotting fish in Manila, both intense enough to gag a maggot, the reeking odour of human ordure in the Australian bush and quite a few unhygienic practices in San Francisco. Most significantly, I learned that it is quite possible to eat food that once, under different circumstances, might have made me nauseous with overflowing disgust.

Once in the remote bush of Western Australia, I found the ground meat that I had intended to cook for dinner already fly-blown.It slithered with maggots, all performing their little humping crawl beneath the plastic covering.In a spasm of loathing, I threw the contaminated bundle into the rubbish, rushing to wash my hands as quickly as I could. However, an experienced bushman rescued the package and showed me how to cook the meat using a long-handled frying pan over an open fire.By keeping one side of the skillet relatively cool, slanted downwards and hanging out over the fire, he tricked the maggots, desperate to continue their minimal existence, into crawling out of the meat onto the cool side.He then dumped them into the fire and, presto! the meat was now ready to eat, savoury if not entirely appetizing. (A bit later, I learned that many bushmen would simply cook up the maggots in fly-blown meat, devouring the ugly dish without qualms as just “protein.”) For many people, such as my mother, the taboos that govern disgust-reactions might still operate. A numbing sense of pollution would still make the meat impossible to eat.The maggots in the fly-blown meat had vanished, but not the overpowering awareness that they had been there.

In many encounters, I learned that hunger and a radical chance of circumstances, even if neither always nor forever, can weaken disgust and its supporting consciousness of contamination.In all such experiences, I would wonder how people managed to overcome disgust or how they learned to tolerate so easily what often struck me as deeply repulsive. Very early I had a strong sense that disgust was rigidly coded, given to us by our parents and by our culture in unmistakable terms, but readily transformed as lifeworld conditions changed. This paradox doubles every manifestation of disgust.You can always ask about the powerful social forces that have brought it into being, its rigid and choking etiology, but you can also remark upon its unstable and variable nature, always subject to shifting conditions and values.(Anyone who ignores this paradox would probably not write a very penetrating study.)I also came to recognize that disgust was both a psycho-visceral and a moral term.A bigot’s words can wound the spirit much as the sight of something deliquescent and sludge-like can torment the sight. Racism, sexism and homophobia, or any other form of identity chauvinism, all may invoke the sense of foulness and filth that leads to disgust and contamination. The Euro-American gesture of overtly refusing to shake another person’s hand marks the moral disgust, disguised as physical disgust, that one person may experience in the presence of another. Even to touch a bigot might, for some people, invoke a loathing so strong that a personal sense of contamination would result. (The ways human beings disgust one another seem almost to be infinite.) Consider the complex doubleness involved. A bigot will assert that another human being disgusts him, no doubt alleging physical disgust (certain bodily characteristics, such and such acts or behaviours) that makes him wish to vomit, but his bigotry, on a moral level, should be deeply disgusting.It will cause others to turn away from him. The bigot’s disgust will probably have been learned during childhood and adolescence, a rigid product of cultural training, but, however hateful and evidently intractable, it can be transformed. The person who experiences moral disgust at the bigot’s nasty identity-jingoism might once have felt a similar kind of hatred.At least, that does seem often to happen and it is the ideal hope behind much education, religion and literature: however deeply ingrained, human aversions can be modified, transformed and even wholly up-ended.

Like other European languages, English permits single words, “revulsion” and “loathing” as well as “disgust,” to designate both physical and moral aberration. This makes disgust an extremely complex term, but, inescapably, it also makes it a deadly simple one. Disgust offers a ready-to-hand term of abuse which people at either end of a moral spectrum can hurl at each other.Calling another person “disgusting” may be a spontaneous response to bodily presence, either personal grooming or behaviour, but it may also be a ritual-practice incorporating distinct gestures of revulsion, a wrinkled nose and curled lip or even an extended palm-forward hand.Part of the fascination of disgust is its power to serve as an abusive term. It is not particularly vivid, scarcely as strong as quite a few Shakespearean terms, lacking imagistic depth, but yet capable of delivering insult and hurt. Few people, it seems, enjoy being called disgusting even if they are willing to own the loathed practices.

What disgusts is never stable, never irrevocably fixed and certain. It changes from culture to culture, and from time to time within a single culture.Furthermore, an individual person can pass through many phases in each of which what is disgusting will evoke very different responses, modifying from loathing to indifference, ambivalence and desire. In his History of Shit, Dominique Laporte tries to show that the history of human excrement is also the history of subjectivity.Similarly, the history of disgust (if it were even possible to write) would reveal an overlapping, if not wholly coterminous, history of consciousness.Like consciousness, disgust is highly metamorphic. It undergoes constant alteration in focus and attention, like the bulges and bloats beneath the membrane of a ravenous pseudopod, as time and experience shift onwards. Oddly, the normal theories of disgust all seem to claim both constancy and fixedness.

There are several different theories to explain why certain objects and acts are disgusting, all of which cast at least a weak light, but they have all struck me as inadequate. Not worthless, and certainly not to be ignored, they are nonetheless too limited adequately to account for disgust’s multi-faceted complexity.By and large, the theoretical models assume that once acquired, once fixed in consciousness, the disgusting must remain what it is or as it has been learned.Yet my personal experiences had shown me, over and over, that disgust did change, its well-marked boundaries did shift, and what you might once have learned to avoid could be accepted calmly, with detachment and equanimity even.Most strikingly, what had once been learned as disgusting, in the transformations of experience (eagerly, hungrily even), could be yearned for.Thus one major issue that confronts any serious study of disgust must be the comparative inflexibility of the theoretical positions that have been used to explain a unstable, shifting human experience.I might like to begin this book by claiming, as William Ian Miller does, that disgust is a “roiling” subject, closely identified with all manner of bodily secretions and effluvia, for which, given its obviousness, the question of an explanatory theory must be either unimportant or easy. This is not the case. The question of theory dogs every step of a study of disgust.(From the “Preface.”)

* * * * *

Nineteen years can be a mature age.You will have learned how to do certain things, to accept commitments and to behave responsibly towards others. When I was nineteen I did not often behave maturely. For the past half year, I had been working as a merchant seaman. I was green in mind, but I had read philosophy and French literature during my single year at university. I also knew a bit (hardly more) about history and political theory.Though brightly callow, depthless, I absurdly thought that I was sophisticated.Perhaps I had some (scanty) reasons for thinking so. I had sailed out of San Francisco for half a year or so and I had seen a number of Asian cities. And I had continued to read during all this time.No doubt, I had been misled by the narrowness and simplicity of my experience into this fantasy of sophistication. My sexual experiences had all been unshaped, happenings in a green mist, like sudden dream-shoots in a green world. I had an inadequate understanding of many little things.I had never given serious thought to disgust, though I had experienced disgust, quite powerfully at times (beginning with the sliced peach my mother had attempted to give me).Nineteen is a wonderful age for fantasy, but an unlikely one for introspection.

One night in San Francisco, I met an attractive red-haired woman. I had been drinking with two shipmates in an up-scale lounge off Lombard street west of Van Ness. The woman smiled at me as I sauntered back from the men's room to the lounge. I responded as swiftly as an eyebrow arching or an eyelid opening.I stopped, bent down close to her ear and whispered that she was beautiful, the most beautiful woman I had seen since I had got back from Japan.(Thus I managed to advertize my false-romantic life.) She was certainly pretty. Years later, I still remember her as lithe and seductive, having red hair, perky breasts, a long, intelligent face and large sparkling green eyes that could glisten doubtfully. Almost instantly, she had engaged my fantasies.A few minutes after we had begun talking, we decided to leave together.I waved goodbye to my friends who chortled lubriciously at my good luck while she spoke sotto voce to her girlfriend who gazed at me quizzically.When I actually had her out in the street, hand in hand, heading somewhere, I abruptly realized how little I knew about San Francisco. After a bit of discussion, we went to Chinatown and found a place that she knew. She took the task of ordering from me. Won ton, spicy shrimp, squid in black beans and garlic, chicken in nuts of some kind (cashews, of course, but I didn’t know that then).I talked endlessly about being a seaman, about literature, about myself.She said little, but played with my feet and caressed my knees under the table.She asked me if I liked women. Did I like to love women,? Did I want to love her?I kept saying that yes, of course yes, yes I loved love, yes. Does I have limits? she asked, her green eyes shimmering.I replied urgently that I had no limits. I was limitless (my passion was boundless, my drives unquenchable): limits were only the wretched anxieties of the bourgeoisie.

At the time, eating a good Chinese meal and talking about love and sexual possibilities, I actually thought very little about her.Her name was Georgie, a nickname for Georgia Lee. (But I remember this rather uncertainly. My first "real" girlfriend had been named Georgia Lee and so perhaps I only confused the two names.)She was an artist, and she taught art at a local high school. I have always remembered some patch of conversation when we talked about frames and framing prints. Did I understand how important frames were? she asked.Most of the details of her life slip my memory. Georgie's apartment was on Russian Hill, north of Nob Hill, on Green Street.Years later I walked through the Russian Hill neighbourhood looking for her apartment, but I couldn’t find it. I paused for a few minutes at the corner of Green and Leavenworth contemplating one of the best views in San Francisco, Alcatraz Island down the steep hill looking very much like an image in old-fashioned stereoscope. I couldn’t find her apartment, though it was likely that it had been torn down to make room for several new high-rises.I did remember that her apartment had looked very lived-in, vividly an expression of individual human life.

Her own paintings and the reproductions of other paintings hung on all the walls. The apartment looked very lived-in, vividly an expression of individual human life.I learned that she was twenty-five, six years older than myself, and that she had been born in Seattle not far from where I had been.Our paths had crossed momentarily, never intersecting again, having spun out very differently from the very similar physical birth-points. The difference in our ages meant that our memories were quite unlike: Georgie remembered shops and museums, the university, but all I could recall were water and evergreen trees, ferry boats and drawbridges, islands, harbors and lakes. A brilliant image of Mount Rainier, breaking through clouds with the sunlight behind it, loomed over my memory. Georgie remembered it more as a familiar landmark. Still, we both carried tatters of fog in our hair, and wet sunsets in our hearts.

Later in her apartment, I looked at reproductions of Chagall, Duffy, Klee and Miró. There were reproductions (or copies, perhaps) of Odilon Redon's paintings.(When, years afterwards, I came upon Redon's "Sibyl" in the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Georgie would flood back, her apartment off Hyde springing up around me, pervading the museum.) She had books, too, mostly art histories and surveys, but there wasalso some anthropology and modern history. She made mea drink, a sticky concoction called a Singapore Sling (strictly for adolescents, in that time, of that place) that I had specifically requested.She had not giggled as she made it, nor smiled knowingly. Then we sat talking irresolutely about art.I persistently interjected comments about novels I had read. Finally, we began the exploratory process of having sex together, or "making love" as (with the typical false consciousness of the time) I might have said.We settled down together on a dark green calico couch, kissing and touching tentatively, but she engaged in delaying tactics, keeping her legs pressed closely together, crossed at the ankles. The delaying tactics were, of course, familiar to me since they have been standard moves in my rather narrow sexual experience.

I had not yet succeeded in removing her panties or bra when I felt an urgent need to urinate. All the liquids I had drunk that night had rivered their way into my bladder. I got up to go to the toilet, saying something disingenuous (I intended no ironic clichés) like "I'm going to miss you" or "Wait for me, darling, I shall return with infinite desire." But Georgie followed me into the bathroom. I was surprised, but I was also familiar with the sexual associations of urination. The "place of excrement," at least insofar as that meant urination, was exciting and watching the Other pee, as I had grown up understanding sex, was a fairly commonplace way-stop on the way to actual copulation.

I was not ashamed to have Georgie watch me urinate and I would have enjoyed watching her, if that became part of the situation.I had seen other women urinate and I had always found the experience, though not necessary to arousal, definitely exciting. (More musical than a male's rather crashing performance I might have said then, thinking of my favourite modern author.)Five years before, when I was fourteen, I had peeked through some bushes to watch my first Georgia Lee pee while we had been on a romantic stroll through a local park.I found the female squatting position to be charming, endearing even, not especially "earthbound" (as Camille Paglia puts it) ^[i], and delicately thrilling. I might not have been so compliant, or so excited, if it ever became a matter of defecation. I had never watched a woman defecate and I had never wanted to.Urolagnia, though not its more robust comrade, had always been a potential frolicker in the stiffly managed routines of sex. So I expected Georgie to stand beside me watching me urinate and then perhaps to sit on the toilet while I, kneeling in lust, watched her. Instead, she reached down and took my penis in her the fingers of her right hand and pinched the glans. "Not yet," she whispered. "Don't pee yet." Then, still holding my penis, she began wriggling out of her slip and panties and with her left hand she reached behind and unhooked her bra.Leading me by my penis, she edged over to the bathtub. Slowly, languidly perhaps (that's how I would remember the moment), she slid down into the tub, opening her legs for the first time, and said (softly? romantically?) "Do it on me." I had heard of golden showers, but I has never quite believed in them. It was rather like the very different, but semiotically linked, act of eating excrement:I had heard about it, but it was totally outside my immediate experience.I had nnot yet ver explored the interrelationship between sex and disgust."Piss on me," Georgie murmured huskily from the tub. I gaped and felt queasy. I said stupid things like "You don't really want me to, do you?" or "You won't like that, I better not." But Georgie knew exactly what she wanted.She wanted a man to urinate upon her. She insisted.And the situation, afterwards graphically incised upon my memory, did actually seem to demand that I do just that.

I looked down upon her. She had very small breasts (no longer quite as pert as they had seemed earlier, shrunken perhaps in experience’s cold light) and she had a thin clump of long, curling red hair around her vagina.I aimed at this flaming tuft, as if it were a target, and began to urinate directly onto it.Immediately, Georgie commanded me to widen my range. "Don't do it all there. Pee on me everywhere." I moved the direction of the stream up to her bellybutton, her breasts and along her neck and shoulders. I could not bring himself to urinate upon her face.As my urine slowed, I brought the stream, now an exhausted dribble, back down to her vagina, the final drops falling upon her knees and feet. Georgie seemed very happy. Could she pee on me, she asked."That's not necessary," I said foolishly. I led her by the hand, naked and wet, back to the green couch. Taking her back to the couch, wet but drying, was simply an absurd thing to do, as ill-mannered as insensitive. But I couldn’t think clearly at the moment.No doubt, I should have let her urinate on me and then have taken another shower, in water, with her.That would have been the right way to incorporate excremental pleasures among the many steps of sexuality. But I was inordinately upset by the actual-life experience of a golden shower.I felt a deep disgust over the act. At the door to the bathroom, I had begun to gag, controlling my vomit only with difficulty. My participation in Georgie's fantasy had lessened me.

Back on the couch, I discovered that I had lost all sexual yearning. Georgie's breasts no longer excited me. Her vagina was too wet (slippery from urine) and everything about her depressed me. I very much wanted to leave and make my way back to the ship.At nineteen, I was completely impotent. Georgie must have realized that her desire for a golden shower had disgusted me.When I mumbled that I had to get back to the ship for the four A. M. watch (a lie), she said nothing to stop me from going. I slunk out of her apartment.

I felt a great deal of shame when I left.Georgie’s perfunctory, embarrassed farewell suggested that she, too, felt shame.It had been a sexual adventure that has gone stupidly wrong. There had been no romance at all, no romantic archetypes had been in play, but only a wintry misadventure in human absurdity.In time, I was able to make out the important lesson that sexual pleasure takes diverse shapes and rises upon any number of practices, not all of which receive bourgeois, nor Apollonian, sanction. However, in the moment I learned an even more important lesson: that shame and disgust are intimately linked, coupled in a bawdy, carnivalesque dance. I felt shame, but only after I had experienced disgust. When I had begun to gag leaving the bathroom, I had not yet felt shame. That came a few moments later when we were sitting once again on the green calico couch. I had done something, an act that would have made my bourgeoise mother physically ill even to hear about. It had been an act that, in the terms of my childhood training, the Apollonian order of things into which I had been inducted, was unclean, improper, dirty. Georgia Lee may have felt shame first, upon recognizing my hesitation, even before the surprise of my impotence. Then she would have experienced self-disgust, a corrosive sense of having been made abject. My hesitancy, my lack of wholehearted participation, my momentary gagging, my impotency, all would have combined together, as a harsh judgment upon her being, to create self-disgust. She must have felt as if a stranger had caught her out in a private act of coprophagy, or engaging in something (almost) universally taboo, such as necrophilia or infantile cannibalism.

A bit later, perhaps a couple of days, after I had taken time to reflect upon the secret pas de deux with Georgie and had tried to make sense out of it, I experienced another kind of shame and even some self-disgust. In my extravagant creation of a romantic self-image, I had certainly told her that I had no reservations about sex.Sitting in the Chinese restaurant, pushing against her feet and having my knees squeezed between hers, I had tried to make her believe that I was a sophisticated, accomplished lover who recognized no sexual boundaries. I had bragged without knowing what I was bragging about, or in the least regard understanding the moral consequences of speaking to another human being in duplicitous ways. There had been neither honesty nor actual sophistication in that persona: no undisclosed shard of my being was being fashioned then, no projection of an ideal conception, but only a confident falsity for the single purpose of screwing Georgia Lee.I had led her to believe that whatever she desired I would be happy, because mutually excited, to perform. I had no idea what, in the real world of other people’s fantasies, this might entail.

And Georgia Lee? In the future, looking back, I would romanticize her.I would imagine her as an artist who found her creativity in transgressing the boundaries of sexual experience. She was in the de Sadean tradition, a Dionysian artist, perhaps a secret reader of George Bataille, pursuing always (as Bataille did) the obverse connotations of her own name (Arcadian and idyllic), trying to live her life without measure, without limitations. In perverse experience, along the obscure paths that are liberating to follow, through the limit-cases beyond which lies abhorrence, the deliquescent domain of the disgusting, creativity might be found.Look for it, the Sadean mind advises, look for it in the Dionysian, not within the Apollonian. ^[ii] Break the boundaries, symbolic but seared into the unconscious like brands; explore, and see then how the fingers, the tongue, the whole body, will explode into flames.Overcome your horror, nuzzle Medusa's hair, and hear the many little tongues whisper the possibilities of creation. I would have Georgia Lee on my mind for all the years to come.I would fantasize that, had I been different, had I not broken her creative dance, she might have painted, later that night or the next day, a picture that never found life:a loosed, unbound tongue of fire.

The next morning, when my shipmates asked about her, I deceitfully said that she had been great, terrific, snazzy even, juicy in so many way, given wonderful head and so forth. My dishonest tongue wagged clumsily with falsehoods and shame.Mostly what I actually remembered was her sparse red pubic hair slick with my urine.I did not like the memory, but I was stuck with it. It would grow upon me.

What were the lessons from this misadventure?I had already learned that disgust is complex and characterized by uncountable personal variations.I knew that it could come suddenly as you stepped unwittingly across a boundary or else were abruptly struck by something hurtling across your own.Unexpectedly touching something deliquescent and slimy causes disgust; so does being invaded by something loathsome, a swarm of spiderlings (say).Eventually, I would learn that you could overcome disgust and thereafter never feel it again in any similar situation.. (My first instruction in that lesson had actually taken place at seventeen in the back seat of my father’s Studebaker.)What I had not understood before is that two people, collaborating to perform a mutual act, create a dynamic, a view of life and a scope for action within it, utterly different from their single inclinations.I learned that the appearance of disgust functions like a judgment. Georgie had felt judged by my gagging, by a man engaged with her in a sexual exchange who manifested disgust.Observing both hers and eventually my own, I also learned that shame follows disgust like an obsequious bootlicker. Above all, I learned that dishonesty and wilful deception (what I had told Georgie at the restaurant) and conscious deceit (what I told my shipmates) could be profoundly disgusting. Insofar as disgust is a moral term, then it seldom functions more meaningfully than in judging human deceit and dishonesty.Moralists have a point when they see such misleading and ensnaring actions as kinds of filth.(From Chapter 3)

* * * * *

The most unhappy man I ever knew was a brilliant student of philosophy. When I first met him, we were both in a tavern near the University.He was alone at the bar, but a mutual friend introduced us and we ended up spending a late evening talking through an endless series of ancient difficulties.He smoked constantly, a habit that even then I found dubious, but it seemed so much a part of his character that I barely noticed. Sometime before midnight, I was astounded to see him take a lit cigarette and grind it out against the back of his left hand.As I got to know him better, I learned that he had scars from cigarette burns up and down both arms.The inside of his mouth was often cut from broken glass. He would bite the rim off a beer glass and hold the jagged shards in his mouth as blood pooled behind his tightlysqueezed lips.Then he might spit it out on the floor, blood and glass together. He said, and I believed hm, that he really wanted to swallow the glass and that he did, against bodily habit and disposition, sometimes succeed. I never knew another man so sad.

It didn’t take me long to understand that he felt a deep uncertainty and a lack of confidence about many things, including existence and himself. Today, it would probably be easier to smoke out the root of the problem: abuse, sexual trauma and perhaps a failed repression of tormenting memories.At that time, although I certainly knew that many people had been sexually abused in their childhood, I assumed that everyone could bear up and carry on.My new friend didn’t bear up well at all. Something gnawed at him savagely. Several times I tried to discover the reasons for his self-hurtful behavior, always approaching the issue indirectly. (“Tell me about growing up in Texas?” “What was your worst experience?” etc.) On two or three occasions, I asked him directly to change his behavior simply as a matter of hygiene and as self-preservation.He always said that he would, but then I would have to watch as he stubbed out cigarettes on his skin.He was like an alcoholic who promises to quit, but never can since his craving overpowers him.Addicted to suffering and pain, my friend clung to his personal regime of punishment and retribution.

I lived alone at that time. I had a rather dingy room a few blocks from the University in an old building that was known affectionately to students as “Firstein’s Flophouse.” It was, both cheap and convenient, a magnet for students in the Humanities.One morning, shortly before five, I woke up to the sound of faint knocking at my door.It was my new friend, stinking in a wretchedly unwashed condition, reeking of stale beer and bleeding from the corners of his mouth. He was curled up on the floor against the door, weeping and whimpering faintly like a man who has been tortured to the point of near death.I brought him into my room and made him some instant coffee on a hotplate.I tried to persuade him to shower, but he wouldn’t take his clothes off.I did manage to talk him into rinsing his mouth out with an antiseptic wash.The problem that always seemed to drive him to self-punishment was, he had tried to make me believe, a terrible sense that he was unloved. There would usually be a girl in the background, someone I would never meet, who had just dumped him. “I’m worthless,” he would sob between philosophical disquisitions, his beer slopping over as he would gesticulate with his glass in hand. What he usually said was, “I ain’t worth shit.” However, by the time he showed up at my door that morning, I had understood that his difficulties with girls masked some other, far deeper problem. It was that submerged region of darkness that I would sometimes try to reach with my ineffectual questions.

After he had rinsed his mouth and spat out the last threads of blood, I suggested that we go for a walk.We walked down 57^th Street, under the Illinois Central viaduct and out to the shores of Lake Michigan. It was still very early in the morning, no later than six-thirty, but the traffic was already heavy along the Lake. There was a small peninsula, a tiny thumb of land sticking out into the Lake where I often walked when I was writing term-papers.I steered us out to the end of the point so that we could contemplate the cityscape stretching North towards the Loop and Navy Pier.We sat on a large rock almost against the edge of the water. Suddenly, he leant his head into my shoulder, sobbing.I felt tense, but I let him keep his head pressed against me. I did not put my arm around him, but I did pat his nearest shoulder encouragingly. This was a moment of confession.

I was never certain what had brought on the weeping, slobbering self-revelation. Probably the need to tell someone had been building up within him. Today he would be seeing a therapist, but I never heard the least suggestion that he was receiving psychological counselling of any kind.On the two or three occasions that we talked about such matters, he had expressed the philosopher’s scorn for Freud and psychoanalysis. He was a man, terribly hurt by something in his past, who had no resources other than his own. That morning by the Lake, he abruptly welled over because I had acted like a friend. I had looked after him on more than one occasion and that morning I had actually welcomed him in an almost brotherly manner.

He had been sexually abused. From the age of eight or so, his father had anally sodomized him on a regular basis. I might have guessed that he had been abused, but the knowledge that it had been his father struck me like a blow to the head.Through his sobs, he told me that he had never been able to escape his father and that his mother, though she must have known what was happening, did nothing to help.What was worse was that his father had often given him to an uncle for sex.He had been like a rent boy that his father had kept in the house for casual sex.No one ever offered to help or had ever tried to advise him. His mother looked away and never lifted a finger to help.His terrible fate was never discussed or even mentioned in his home. Now, grown into adulthood, he had left his family behind, escaped the dark pit that was Texas, as he said, and established that he was , or could be, a brilliant student in a difficult subject. He believed that he would never be happy until he went back to Texas and murdered his father. He was in the fork of a decision: he could ease his memory by killing his father or he could go on to earn a Ph,D. in Philosophy.Later, I realized that a third option was the most likely. He would continue on his self-tormenting course until, nothing resolved, no solutions ever found, he killed himself or went mad.Today if I were to meet him again, I expect that he would be living on the street in Chicago or San Francisco. He would be truly cast out.

After that Spring, I never saw my friend again.A few years later, he learned my address and wrote to me in Australia wanting to know this or that, but saying nothing about his bad memories, his self-loathing, the confession at the Lake or his wish to kill his father.I wrote back, but I never heard from him after that. He was the first man I had ever known who admitted to having been sexually abused. I had known women who kept dark secrets about their childhoods and who would intimate that terrible things that had been done to them.They would never say explicitly what had happened, but you could tell, from hints or form coded allusions, that they had experienced horrors. My friend was the first man who had spoken about his abuse, and even the terse tale that he told had been slow in coming, obviously very hard for him to articulate.He was, I believe, the first person I ever met who was deeply, and perhaps irremediably, abject.

All the contemporary clichés about sexual abuse come into play when I try to recall him. He had been abused, his natural trust in his parents had been violated, he had been traumatized, he had been transformed into an object. He possessed a long string of memories that were painful to live with and which, it seems, he had been unable to repress. And these memories made him feel worthless, unloved and unlovable, cast off both from his family and from society.All these haunting memories, and all the intensely negative affects that surrounded them, circled around one fact and one body part. His anus had been raped, but raped not merely in the narrow contemporary sense of exacting non-consensual sex from another person. He had been raped in the older sense of having been carried off, ofhaving been kidnapped.His anus had been subjected to violent, undesired sexual intromission, but it had also been kidnapped, alienated from his sense of his own personhood.Unlike the phallus, a highly social bodily appendage, the anus, Guy Hocquenghem observes, is “essentially private.” Social formation, centring around toilet training, hides the anus from public scrutiny, denies its pleasure-giving possibilities and concentrates it upon its excremental function. Although much happens during intimacy that is never made public, including several varieties of anal sexuality, the anus is not usually a topic for public discussion.It does seem to be, in Western cultures at least, an “essentially private” bodily part. Of all the many cyber(body)parts that you might imagine, a colostomy bag would be, I suspect, the least acceptable and the most difficult to endure.My friend had been stripped of this privacy, which no doubt, in a classic (if tragic) double bind, he had also been taught to preserve. Having been anally raped, many times over a number of years, had exposed his hidden anus to a terrible public knowledge, but it had also, paradoxically, transformed hm in to a boy whose anus was the most important thing about him. He had become morbidly conscious of his anus, both that it was a potential area for sexual pleasure (which could be commanded against his will) and that it had been taken away form him, made public in an extremely painful way. He was experiencing, I know now, deep and corrosive abjection. The world he inhabited was as spare and angular as a harsh argument.It opened before him, like a Beckett novel, in narrow vistas of existential bleakness.

Against the figure of the abject person, you have to set all those whom you have met who seem to experience no self-consciousness at all. Rather than having their self-consciousness stink in their minds like a rotting corpse, they seem hardly aware of their own existence (other than as a self-satisfied pleasure). They do not feel self-disgust, certainly not abjection, and they do not mind acting in disgusting ways. Like so many other aspects of the study of disgust, the problem of consciousness occupies an unmistakable highpoint. An abject person, like my friend in Chicago, experiences an intense, overwhelming self-consciousness; a person who will perform private acts publically may seem to have no self-consciousness at all. You could say that an abject person lives in a fictional world, given over entirely to modes of victimization and punishment, in which he or she acts as a participant-observer.(From Chapter 7.)

Further references

Robert Rawdon Wilson guest-edited a special “Disgust Issue” of the Australian literary journal, MATTOID (#1, 1994). See his introduction, “Nuzzling Medusa’s Hair: Or, What Perseus Failed to Notice” (pp. 1-29). Robert Rawdon Wilson, “Cyber(body)parts: Prosthetic Consciousness,” BODY & SOCIETY. 1: 3-4 (November, 1995): 239-59; rpt. CYBERSPACE/CYBERBODIES/CYBERPUNK.Eds Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows. (London: Sage Publications, 1995). http://www.tcs.ntu.ac.uk/books/titles/cyber.html

Robert Rawdon Wilson, “The Hydra’s Spoor,” HEAT 2 (1996): 113-29. Http://www.ozemail.com.au/~indyk/heat2.html

Chapter 1:The Hydra's Spoor--Loathsomeness

Chapter 2:Its Stench--Conceiving Disgust

Chapter 3:Its Lair--The Representation of Filth

Chapter 4:Its Body--Parts and Machines

Chapter 5:Its Many Eyes–Imagining disgust

Chapter 6:Its Heads--Perverse Geometries

Chapter 7:Its Venom--Feeling Abject

Conclusion:The Hydra on a Pin

For more on "Disgust" by R. Rawdon Wilson see Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2001. Http://www.ualberta.ca/UAPRESS/P/FRAMRSET.HTML

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