"I am said to have a hard heart, a very bad one
indeed; but is that fault really mine? or is it not
rather from Nature we have our vices as well as
our perfections?"
-Marquis de Sade, 120 Days of Sodom
Marquis, right now, a woman in Toronto
is pushing a length of pipe into a man
who is paying her to hate him. It's a strange
appropriation to finance a woman's hatred,
but it's also hard work to put a pipe inside
a man. After he's left her bachelor apartment,
she'll roll her drop sheet back and hose it down
in the tub. She'll peel away her tall plastic
boots and rub her calves. Her shoulders
and her jaw will be sore. She'll take a bath
and, afterwards, she'll make a pot of soup
and eat it while she watches HBO.
What's her transgression, or for that matter,
his? His torture's self-imposed; she'll spend time
in Venice for her holidays, get more time
off than a Safeway clerk will ever have.
It's too easy to call her a victim
and he her oppressor. His pleasure
and her commerce are entwined.
Perhaps it's preferable they marry
so she'll no longer require a paycheque,
but an allowance? This ain't the fifties,
man, though we've still got that atom bomb.
Imagine! That tool exists which, as you say,
"could so assail the sun to snatch it from
the universe and use that star to burn the world."
My terror is terror's ubiquity.
War: it's not murder, it's industry
and a pretty swell career besides.
Think of those sitting on death row
who await appointments with machines,
their last sensation that of a needle's
prick in the vein or a hand to secure
their restraints. It's no sweet sexual game
for the inmate or for the soldier who
might never know their killer's face but who
can put death on their calendar like a
holiday. There is difference between
what is real and what is fantasy.
Marquis, I see you in your cell;
it's cozy, despite the racket in the streets-
all around you, papers and books spread
open like mouths to mouth your fiction.
Outside, the revolution raves while you
have every comfort a man could desire
but freedom, yet there's more - even freedom
is a curse for you. Bourgeois, your own find
you reprehensible, and yet you are far
from a man of the people. Where does one
live when one fits nowhere but in fiction
and insanity? Even today
that's what we call our in-betweens: insane.
We give them lithium and bus passes and hope
they melt into the crowd. I think that, in my time,
you may have loved as you desired. That one
for whom your whip made passage through
the night? She lives, anticipates her agony
one blow at a time - and how she wears her stripes!
Such is the nature of our theatre, to paint
the coward's face with bravery, the bold pallid
with fear.
-Elizabeth Bachinsky
