Sexual Souvenirs Poem by gershon hepner

Without desire comes inertia,
emptiness routine,
Omar Khayyam found this in Persia.
Everyone is keen
on moving fingers knowing how
to write on lovers’ skin
before they push the pleasure plow
and punctuate within
the places that, when they’re explored,
inertia disappears,
returning to the bed and board
for sexual souvenirs
whenever they are threatened by
inertia’s deadly hand;
time passes fast, we fear to die
unloved, unknown, unmanned.


A middle-aged couple who rediscover erotic love, an old man who becomes infatuated with a young woman's feet - desire is everything in Junichiro Tanizaki's intense tales. Hanif Kureishi explains how the work of the Japanese master inspired him to write the screenplay for Venus (The Guardian, January 27,2007) :
The novel opens with a middle-aged man drugging his sexually cold wife in order to spend more time with her feet. The sexuality of both of them is in the process of being re-aroused by the constant presence in their house of their daughter's fiancé. Here jealousy makes passion possible. As Lacan puts it, 'The other holds the key to the object desired.' Tanizaki doesn't bother with social detail, but provides only the most necessary information about the city and the characters' social circumstances. And even though his characters are always medicating themselves - they are often sick, or imagine they are; no one is ever allowed to forget their body - his novels are frantic. In The Key, and in Diary of a Mad Old Man, the male and female characters, of whatever age, are too passionately involved with one another's desire - and the satisfaction, humiliation and family complications that follow from it - to settle for the seemingly nirvanic existence that their circumstances might allow. The couple begin drinking heavily and the wife becomes more westernised. A formerly modest woman, she repeats with her husband the ways of love-making she has just practised with her lover, whom she meets in the afternoons. When she then calls out the name of this other man - the man who will, at the end of the book, marry her daughter - her husband writes in his diary: 'At last, as her voice was rising once again, I took her. At that moment I felt I had burst into another world. This was reality, the past was only an illusion. Perhaps it would kill me, but this moment would last for ever.' His wish is granted. In the end he dies, or is killed, perhaps by the effort involved, while making love to his wife.



2/5/07