[This essay is linked to, thought entirely independent of, idiotic investigation the 8th.]
Image drawn by Tamara Fakhoury.
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All the people that I know were born with televisions inside their skulls; and with the help of these devices, all the people that I know keep their most persistent desires concealed.
Or might it be the other way around? ––That the inner-televised desires do the concealing? But if so, what is being concealed?
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A person dreams up some perversion and watches it repeat, flickering invitingly.
Each time it grows, and as it does, it develops in unforeseen ways; gradually, the dreamer becomes a spectator to their fantasy––becomes a part of their fantasy.
And then it is easy for the fantasy to take control: it comes into the fantasiser’s head whenever it wants, at times more vividly, at times less so; it dictates its own intensity and duration, at times ruthlessly, at times mercifully.
You catch yourself daydreaming at work, or unable to sleep.
But when was the last time someone finally actualised a fantasy? Is it not so that the more persistent a private fantasy is, the less likely it is that it will ever occur publicly?
Isn’t this true both for us and for others?
And even if a fantasy finally does get actualised, even when the desire that is played over and over inside a mind finally bursts out, gasping for breath, hot with blood and perspiration––isn’t there something supremely dissatisfying about it?
Namely, that it is now real, that its blood runs dry, its sweat finally stinks, its heat cools.
(Isn’t death, when it finally comes, a disappointment of this sort: the supreme anti-climax.)
Hasn’t the fantasiser grown so tired through the process of recreating it, that they have lost the strength requisite to actually create it for the very first time?
The fantasy played itself out and never asked for the fantasiser’s assistance in anything; so how can the fantasiser be capable of anything?
Where is the sinkhole that drains all this potential?
Where does a fantasy exist?
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We often hear that in the privacy of thinking, everyone is a pervert. But this is a contradiction, because perversions are observable; they are public divergences.
A thought or fantasy can never be a deviation.
In fact, when a fantasy is kept private––when we presumably conceal our fantasies, it is clear that this inner paying out of a persistent obsession is in reality concealing our radical perversion, our potential to transform publicly.
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The Marquis du Sade despised mother figures, which is perhaps why he so often tortured mothers in his pornographic novels; indeed, even in his own life, it was his mother-in-law that finally secured his longest imprisonment as a punishment for this sexual perversions. And the Marquis, even then, was most concerned to keep details away from his wife––not out of some petty pathological need to lie or to hide a fear of owning up to what he did, but because he was ashamed of his desires. He did not want his wife to think less of him.
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And what about all the things you might desire? This is not just about fucking. Dissatisfaction naturally leads one to dream up alternatives, and that is to be expected. But is it not so that the circumstance initially called for perversion; and are we, in our persistent fantasies, not then killing the pervert?
To dream of alternatives is not even half the job; one has to overcome the need to fantasise, to let the pervert come out gasping for breath, hot with blood and perspiration.
idiotic investigations 