direct hit! GR style

[ray gonne]

Brian D. McCary wrote:
> 
> However, I dinna find the hardon thing weird.  Surely, one reaction to impending
> and inescapable death is the decision to pursue personal gratification for
> the breif lifetime left?  Seems to me that one reasonable explanation for the
> increase in hedonism and decadance which seemed to peak in the late 70's was
> in reaction to the perception that we could all die tomorrow.  It was only after
> the threat of total anihilation became less believable that people might consider
> postponing, perhaps indefinitely, all those guilty pleasures.  Or so I see it.
> (I'm thinking of Joan Didion, too, who wrote in "Salvador" that everyone in
> El Salvador chain smoked, because the idea of dieing of lung cancer in El Salvador
> in the early eighties seemed absurd)
> 

for me the most interesting part of david's post had to do with the
reference to the post-death hard-on, which i thought of immediately when
he mentioned that slothrop responded to the at-any-moment idea with a
hord-on. ie we're dead before we know it if the bomb falls (especially
if it hits us on the head), and so perhaps psychologically we are the
walking dead, sporting that one last massive hard-on (which to me brings
to mind w.s.burrough's Naked Lunch kink-hangings; add the image of that
post-mortem ejaculation, arcing through the air like a...rocket). this
is to say the one-last-fuck thing doesn't seem to apply as well as the
death-erection (think also of gregory corso's sexual treatment of the
bomb in his funny, poignant, bomb-shaped poem "Bomb", circa 1958:
			O Bomb I love you
		I want to kiss your clank  eat your boom
		  You are a paean  an acme of scream
		     a lyric hat of Mister Thunder
) to GR as i see it so far (having just begun really to take it on).
however, that last hard-on does to me reek of sterility and, of course,
death.

ray