I recently watched Writer of O<\/em>, the 2004 documentary about Pauline Reage\/Dominique Aury\/Anne Desclos, the multiply-aliased author of the most famous work of French pornography since de Sade. Story of O<\/em> was a big influence on me, as I noted in that birthday book meme<\/a>. Three things stood out to me from the documentary.<\/p>\n # The attempts to film scenes from the book are ludicrous. It\u2019s all arty pseudoporn, too refayned to be hot and too lewd to be sensual. Black silk sheets and similar Fifty Shades<\/em> trappings. If you ever read the book, and look, I\u2019m extremely not telling you to do that because it\u2019s death-driven s\/m porn and no part of that is good, but if you do, you\u2019ll find that it creates a hushed, remote world, feverish but also in an odd way pristine. You\u2019ll think of words like lambent<\/em> and elegiac<\/em>. The only element of the book\u2019s tone which the documentary gets right is when we see golden autumn leaves drifting down over the car as O and her lover drive to the chateau. That autumn-afternoon feeling is key to the book\u2019s power, the spell it casts. You can read anywhere on the internet countless stories of thrusting whatnot and pulsing whosits. Story of O<\/em> creates an actual artistic atmosphere: the piano playing in a far-off room, as the curtains blow in that first chilly breeze of dusk.<\/p>\n # Aury met Jean Paulhan, the man to whom all of the O<\/em> work is written as a lover\u2019s correspondence, in the French Resistance. After the war they began an affair. While Mme. Paulhan was suffering from Parkinson\u2019s. You\u2019ll be unsurprised to learn that Paulhan played around on Aury too; and that it made her feel bad, because for all your jokes about French adultery, promiseless hotel love isn\u2019t good for them either. The lover in the hotel tryst can feel special, singled out and set apart from the normal world of obligations and hopes\u2013time stands still. And there can be a feeling of glamor in sacrificing those hopes of a future with the one you love. But then time starts up again and he moves on and you\u2019re left with just those grubby mammal feelings.<\/p>\n Aury had a very demure personal style, and Paulhan even told her not to be so self-effacing. Which I do love. \u201cOstentatiously self-effacing\u201d is more or less exactly how I hoped the author of Story of O<\/em> would be.<\/p>\n # Toward the very end the film finally gets into one of the most compelling aspects of the book: the unsubtle mysticism. This is a mysticism of dissolution of the self\u2013death, as Aury states bluntly. O is always aggressively surrendering control only to slyly show that she retains it. But her final desire is for total (ostentatious!) obliteration.<\/p>\n O<\/em> is a book about ecstasy, the sudden rapture of standing outside one\u2019s self. That\u2019s a lot of what I loved in it. When I was baptized I was baptized into Christ\u2019s death, and I don\u2019t think the religion would have made as much sense to me or been as compelling if that complete surrender weren\u2019t a part of its demands. I love every story which explores the hunger for ecstasy, whether the self is surrendered in sex or music, alcohol or prayer, in doing violence or suffering violence. Probably my favorite song about how all these forms of ecstasy can strike the same chord in the soul is that U2 song, \u201cDesire<\/a>,\u201d which is seriously just a list of hungers. Over the counter\u2013with a shotgun\/Pretty soon, everybody\u2019s got one\/I\u2019m in a fever when I\u2019m beside her\/Desire<\/em>. Or let me also submit the great wrestling anthem, \u201cChoked Out<\/a>.\u201d At one, at last, with the universe!<\/em> Ah, this bravura.<\/p>\n The ferocious desire for ecstasy can take you to a lot of different places. There are solitary ecstasies and ecstasies of union. Alcoholic drinking is always eventually a solitary ecstasy\u2013the dissolution of the self, sending occasional illegible missives from the great drowned kingdom of the mind. There are ecstasies which make you less individual; O dissolves into her costume. Or which make you less alive. O literally dies (maybe\u2013the ending is playfully, mythically coy). Story of O<\/em> looks like it should be about ecstasy of union, but it\u2019s really about solitary ecstasy\u2013which you should guess as soon as we learn that O doesn\u2019t menstruate. So there is no danger of conception, the most thorough form of union between male and female. O is the sovereign of her world, albeit a Summer Queen who burns briefly and then dies.<\/p>\n Christianity offers an ecstasy of union which makes you more alive and more individual, hence the weirdness of the saints. To put it as bluntly as possible, Jesus wanted Anne Desclos to be weirder than Jean Paulhan wanted Dominique Aury to be. You journey through the death into an unimaginably weirder and more intense life. (Or, I mean, Christianity promises this after death but you\u2019re not guaranteed to feel like you\u2019re on fire<\/a> all the time while you\u2019re alive.)<\/p>\n So recovery the way I\u2019m trying to do it is an alternative form of ecstasy, not an alternative to ecstasy. When I say everybody should be Catholic, even gay people, I\u2019m not saying you guys should be cut off from ecstasy. I think by this point I\u2019ve proven that I would literally rather die than stop seeking ecstasy. But I try now to turn from the pursuit of solitary ecstasy to the ecstasy of union. I don\u2019t often experience it, not in a way I can taste; I get a lot more \u201cconsolations\u201d from prayer than I think most people do, which is not comforting since basically every spiritual writer says you get fewer and fewer consolations as your prayer life deepens. Or maybe that is<\/em> comforting, since I internally feel God\u2019s presence much less often nowadays than I did when I was just converting. I still trust that He\u2019s there, though if that\u2019s a lot harder for you, know that it\u2019s more likely because of my generally stubborn personality than because of my shambolic, dutiful and distracted prayer life. I still trust that the purpose of my life is not solely to stick my face in the flame, but to meet my Lover there, in a kiss of fire<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently watched Writer of O, the 2004 documentary about Pauline Reage\/Dominique Aury\/Anne Desclos, the multiply-aliased author of the most famous work of French pornography since de Sade. Story of O was a big influence on me, as I noted in that birthday book meme. Three things stood out to me from the documentary. # […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,7,177],"tags":[381,11,292,52,414,64,122],"class_list":["post-10919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-mackerel-snapping","category-too-much-is-never-enough","tag-girls-like-violence","tag-his-banner-over-me-was-love","tag-i-believe-in-ecstasy","tag-if-whiskey-were-a-woman-id-be-married-for-sure","tag-la-nouvelle-heloise","tag-sublimity-now","tag-totentanz"],"yoast_head":"\n