Never to Leave that Valley his Fathers Called their Home.

This begins what will hopefully become a regular series of posts on art criticism focused around those pieces with specific applications to our ongoing investigation of sleep-eating. Today’s selection, Saturn Devouring His Son, was only the most obvious and disturbing of a large collection we plan on glossing.

Francisco Goya’s overeager biographers are quick to point out that the artist’s diminishing eyesight and growing isolation at the end of his life contributed to the gloomy oeuvre of his later work. I am quick to point out that the dude was painting depressing shit his whole life, and that if anything changed when he went blind it was only a matter of degree.

Oh, cheer up, Mr. Sappy-pants!

Another frequently held opinion about the work is that it somehow represents blindness and insanity; the madness that a rapidly encroaching death confers on the elderly. Erik Weems writes, “[Goya] renders [him] blatantly insane, Saturn shown without any recognizable expression of premeditation.” This line of interpretation belongs in O magazine, just above the picture of Oprah on a bicycle. I would first like to know what an “expression of premeditation” is. Perhaps when a cannibalistic act is premeditated the cannibal in question achieves an inner peace as he consumes his/her victims. Apparently Erik Weems knows about these things. I must admit I do not.

Erik Weems can tell this was not planned.

What I do know about is the painting itself, and although it is impossible to determine premeditation from it, Goya does leave us with substantial clues as to its interpretation. The original myth has Saturn assured of his children's eventual usurpation of his role. Thus motivated, he eats them in order to prevent his eventual downfall. Samuel Beckett seems to substantiate Saturn’s concerns when he says, “there is no hope, for everyone is a parent.” And, yes, that is a pun: Beckett was fond of them.

In defense of Erik Weems’ position, there is something jarring in Saturn’s expression; namely, he does not look on his victim (his son) but gazes past him and out at the audience. The resulting experience (for the viewer) is the impression that Saturn is more interested in us than in the son he is devouring.

The act of cannibalism is often referred to as “primal,” or, alternately, “savage.” These are both words, coincidentally, that were used in a recent Cosmopolitan article that heralded fucking against a wall as the greatest sexual position. On the one hand is the unthinkable crime: the familial betrayal of protective father against dependent son--like Abraham raising the axe above Isaac’s head; yet made even worse through the act of feeding. On the other hand is the thrilling sexual act, in which you are encouraged to claw at one another and scream in order to heighten the “primal” and “savage” enjoyment.

The question should be, How WILL you sleep when he's not there?

The disturbing point is that in the Cosmo-approved fucking there is a piece of Saturn Devouring His Children. The desires are crisscrossed: the perversion of food-lust has the meat of the ram transubstantiated into the helpless Isaac; the wall-fucking transforms procreation into mock-violence. Notice also how in the media food is frequently sexualized and vice-versa—not just in women’s magazines, but even things as (seemingly) harmless as advertisements for frozen pizza.

Death Mask and I have provided plenty of evidence already describing how sleep-eating connects with a distant past in which desires existed at their “primal” geneses. That is not to say that this “time” ever existed, but that it exists qua universal point of intersection of all human desire. This point of universal desire, of the excess of all possible satisfaction, exists dependent on the fact that it is impossible i.e. that it can never be symbolized or dominated by interpretation. Because it resists our efforts to subjugate it we strive towards it with stupid and blind stabs in the dark; we fuck against a wall or eat an entire frozen pizza while sleeping or watch Spielberg movies about the Holocaust. These efforts, however pleasurable in the short term, continue to deny us access to that point of original (terrible) joy. Instead we get only glimpses, only tiny crumbs off the enormous Whole.

Here, in Goya’s painting, rests the impossible Whole. It stares us in the face because it already knows us—knows us like it knows its own children.

All Heaven in the Sphincter

Well now there IS a germ-free alternative to traditional necking.

There are two ways of looking at the natural opposition of yourself and everyone else. The first, mostly influenced by Kant, describes an impassible void that mediates any experience between the self and the Other. This void is both compelling and repulsive; it attracts and denies the advances of the individual towards those outside him/herself. It is described as the focal point of human relations.

I think this is horseshit, and so does Jean Genet. He holds the opposite opinion, essentially that there is no void--that the chasm between self and Other is perpetually recreated by the self in an interminable effort to preserve the self. The real horror is not the idea of an impossibly unfathomable line separating oneself from the rest of humanity, but instead the concept of no differentiation at all. In his essay titled, "What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet," Genet describes the experience of realizing that he is exactly the same as a man with a "disgusting moustache" on the Paris Metro. The experience, for him, is more jarring than any difference between the two of them could be. In fact, he longs for difference to provide a source of solace as his realization is broadened.

Portrait intended for Genet's unpublished work, "What Remains of a Giacometti Torn into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet."

Sleep-eating is perceived initially as a phenomenon contained wholly by the self. This would seem self-evident*. But the number of cases of sleep-eating that involve onlookers and bystanders has begun to pique my interest. Besides, one never remembers nor ever wholly witnesses one's own sleep-eating act. While it is taken as a matter of cause that the sleep- and food-lust that intersect in the act are universal, to what degree does the mediation of the act provide its own cathartic release of these universal tensions?

This post serves as notice of the development of a new branch of parasomnial investigation: the realm of the self v. the universal within the tradition of sleep-eating.

*I apologize for the pun, but I really can't help my self.

Of the Filthy, Sturdy, Unkillable Infants of the Very Poor

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."

When talking about the supposed universality of Freud's theories on the repressed surfacing in sleep, Wittgenstein made reference to the inherent problem of semiology and dreams; whereas he agrees that dreams leave the unmistakable mark of decipherable signifiers in our consciousness, he disagrees that any "fluency" in this "language" is possible. His hypothetical example involves a man who claims fluency in French, but can only translate from French into English and lacks any and all ability to translate in the reverse direction. In other words, Freud fails (by his own standards of universality) at any claim to translate dreams.

Now, Wittgenstein is a crafty fellow, and many people are quick to point out his tendency towards ironic dialectic synthesis. He himself has said that the key to his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus is "what is not in it." The argument could be made that Wittgenstein only came up with a somewhat misleading hypothetical in order not to discredit Freud but instead to lend credence to his theories. Colleagues have claimed that Wittgenstein stated that he found the "Viennese fellow" compelling and "very interesting."

Did you realize this guy went to school with Hitler? No shit!

But what if we take the emphasis of Wittgenstein's hypothetical off of the relationship to psychoanalysis? What if we ask Wittgenstein a question (since Wittgenstein himself seems fond of asking Wittgenstein questions)? What if we say, but Herr Wittgenstein, isn't there someone who can translate truth into dreams?

Hegel says, "The soul is a bone." I say, "I am a private East Coast university." For years I defined myself against what I perceived as an imaginary line drawn between the elite world of academia and myself in the (pejoratively) public state university. Well, unfortunately for both my definition of myself as the stain on the otherwise rosy fall landscape on the metaphoric brochure photograph of academia and my bank account, I'm on the other side of the line. And what I've discovered about this line is that it does not belong to the realm of the imaginary. It is both of the Real and a prescient bit of reality. While the former may be a little more obvious, the latter was a shock to me. Every single building on campus is protected as though we are surrounded by flesh eating zombies. Lack of identification guarantees that you will not be allowed in anywhere, even to a classroom, without contacting the central identification office. The real benefit of crossing the line, I suppose, is that I am now of the "community" that can safely take a shit on a clean toilet. Before, I would have had to shit my pants on the subway like anyone else.

My own private hell/haven

Of course, my contempt for the world of private elitist universities was a rouse behind which I hid my true desire to be a part of that world. As always, my desire being realized is not a source of satisfaction, but instead a troubling sensation reminiscent of Freud's notion of the uncanny. Like in a nightmare, reality is changed only slightly--the result of which is more troubling than the complete suspension of recognizable reality. In this way, I feel that my original (waking) dream has been translated into reality, yet is intractably perceived as a dream, as something that demands interpretation. Only my familiarity with the illusion makes it seem any less uncomfortable and indecipherable than it is.

It's for this reason I stand by my question to Wittgenstein. True genius is not manifest in the discovery of truth, but in the domination of this truth qua transference to the realm of signification; in other words, into a dream.