The Playboy and the Czar: Images of Insatiability

...Did he himself descend to the heart of darkness, and if he did, as the consequence of what shattering experiences...

...0 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1981...

...Hence the dilemma of the writer during and since romanticism . He must be an intrepid consumer of experience, never fearing to transgress the red-plagued bourgeois world's prescriptions of moderation...

...Mock the insatiable gods and their revenge is insatiable . Tantalus, who served his son Pelops to the gods in a stew, was punished in Hades with eternal deprivation: fixed just beyond reach of the food and water he craved, as if he were Hefner tormented by bunnies he could not touch and Pepsi he could not drink . Prometheus, because he would not reveal the secret of his paternity, was chained to a rock in the Caucasus where an eagle fed daily on his 1 9 miraculously reconstituted liver . The crafty and death-defying Sisyphus was condemned in Hades to pushing his stone up the same hill forever without the satisfaction of Camus's afterthought that it might be a kind of existential triumph . And in Dante's Inferno as well the penalty for insatiability is insatiable suffering, which is no more than we expect when in Canto I the poet encounters a lion "ravenous with hunger" and a she-wolf who looks "all infinite craving ." There then follows the sad procession of those "Who let Desire pull reason from her throne"-whether they are the lovers Paolo and Francesca doomed to inseparability in the eternal stormy winds, Count Ugolino doomed to gnaw forever the head of the traitorous Archbishop of Paris, or Satan himself, each of his three ravenous mouths slavering bloodily with the famous morsels, Judas, Cassius, and Brutus . Compared to him, Milton's Satan, that grand sponsor of all . transgressive efforts, is a dietetic Puritan, but his terrible insatiability is nevertheless clear in his conviction that it is better to rule in hell than serve in heaven . Dante's Satan with his triple slavering maw is a horrible caricature of the polymorphous perverse translated from sexual to alimentary terms . He demonstrates the distinction between the German verbs fressen and essen, which is the distinction between eating in a brutish and eating in a civilized manner, between devouring as if one could never get enough no matter how much or how quickly one ate, and eating discriminately and with decorum . Petronius's "Banquet of Trimalchio" gives us an image of fressen, as does the Roman banquet in which the vomitorium was an essential piece of furniture . Fressen suggests the orgy as most of us imagine it : an attempt to satisfy a vulgar and insatiable 20 impulse to godhood . Thus fressen is the symbolic verb when Marlow, getting through his binoculars his first view of Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, sees a wide open mouth and "a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him...

...The play is organized around images of ravining, one of the most powerful of which appears in Act IV whbn the virtuous Malcolm in the process of testing Macduff s honesty represents himself as sexually insatiable and therefore a dramatic surrogate for Macbeth...

...But in the jealousy of the gods is the beginning of hubris : The gods will not be mocked...

...Clearly, Dante, Conrad, and Shakespeare knew this fear...

...It is interesting to note how often the same people who defend the obscene and the pornographic, whether out of personal preference or because of a perceived connection with liberating forces, are also militantly opposed to pollution and waste . In the traditional distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, the latter were wasters and polluters who because of their refusal to practice bourgeois virtues were ravining up life's means and had therefore sacrificed all claims on our charity...

...Shortly thereafter, Francois Mauriac, viewing the dead Proust and noting a last few illegible notes on an envelope beside the body, remarked that "right up to the end, his creatures had fed upon his substance and had drained him of what remained of life ." Here with the assimilation of his ascesis to that of the saint is a familiar romantic image of the artist : the heroically insatiable pursuer of his vision of truth-beauty who, when he is most authentic, is himself consumed (as is the "s ' it" in Shelley's "Alastor") t e insatiable object of his pursuit . We cannot be sure which is the Ugolino figure here, the artist or his art, but we know from the romantics, and especially from Keats, that the condition of this symbiosis is that of Tantalus : infinite desire with infinite frustration ; recurring and ravishing intimations of heaven's bourne but without sustaining hope of heaven . The image assumes the energies and intransigent idealism of youth, for only youth, we imagine, can stand up to the recurring fluctuations between ecstasy and agony . All too soon, as Wordsworth discovered, the visionary gleam would fade and there would be only the light of common day, which, as saint and artist know, is the light of the false consciousness of the world . Therefore, he writes in The Excursion (words Shelley was to quote later in his preface to "Alastor") : The good die first, And those whose hearts are dry as summer dust, Burn to the socket...

...That is why Marlow, though he knows that Kurtz was "hollow at the core," and therefore not equipped for his high-risk enterprise, must still insist that "Whatever he was, he was not common...

...In Reichean terms this means that they have all suffered from "the red plague," that deformation of consciousness and affect which results when one is shut off from the organic energy of the universe . Thus St...

...if we consume them, we appropriate those powers and (reversing Gandhi's brahmacharya) enhance our own potency for further appropriations...

...years ago in Crowds and Power, a ok strongly marked by its author's experience of Nazi Germany and World ar II, Elias Canetti, recently winner of the Nobel Prize, gave us an image of insatiability in a figure he called the Survivor . His Survivor is a perennial character in the human drama : He is a voracious consumer hero who needs "to o that he can survive others" and so nourish an ever growing sense of his own life-enhanced invulnerability . It was clear as Canetti wrote about the Survivor heroes of history and legend that Hitler and the caust were always on his mind . Was he saying that we must find a way to live with the possibility that Hitler too, as he piled up his bodies, demonstrated a thirst for life like no other man alive...

...What adulteries lurk behind the sonnets...

...Nevertheless, his thirsting is in a quite different context from that of Talese or Hefner, however much they may think of themselves as belonging in the Freudian dispensation . "We deprive ourselves," Freud writes, in order to maintain our integrity, we economize in our health, our capacity for enjoyment, our emotions ; we save ourselves for something, not knowing for what . And this habit of constant suppression of natural instincts gives us the quality of refinement . With its emphasis on the connection between creaturely denials and abstentions and the maintenance of civilization, this sounds like something out of Civilization and Its Discontents . Actually, Freud here is a young man very much in love writing to his fiancee, Martha Bernays, about thoughts that occurred to him while watching a performance of Carmen...

...The adversary culture of his anarchism seems to have been too dependent on any enemy that would stand fast so that it could be insatiably fed upon...

...The Spartan simplicity he advocates demands unremitting warfare against what is "reptile and sensual to us" and assumes that sexual continence "invigorates and inspires us ." Nietzsche's asceticism is well known...

...In the meantime (that biography still being in process), for many of his readers, Thy Neighbor's Wife points toward a desired reconciliation of anarchy and order, Dionysius and Apollo, hedonism and brahmacharya, vibrator and hairshirt...

...In his lust for life, he rivaled the Wolfschmidt Czar and the Playboy architect...

...This, of course, makes it easy for both writer and reader to believe that the biography has priority over the work, as if the writer's first obligation were to prepare for the kind of post mortem account of himself that will put the seal of approval on his work...

...At this point (August 29, 1883) Mahatma Gandhi is only 14 years old, but he will in time, through the practice of brahmacbarya or selfrestraint, put himself even more radically than Freud against the Party of Insatiability in the interest of acquiring potency to compel the environment . The practitioner of brabmacharya, through a ritualistic disciplining of his impulses, makes himself into an energy accumulator of a sort quite offensive to those who, infested perhaps with the gnosticism of Wilhelm Reich, believe that energy is acquired not by self-restraint but by magical infusions from without, after which it is both expressed and intensified by the release of impulse...

...Thus a play like Edward Bond's Bingo-in which a retired Shakespeare becomes involved in the quotidian corruptions of Stratford and dies an utterly disillusioned man-should probably be seen as an effort not to degrade Shakespeare but to give him a biography that will authenticate him in terms we can understand . But the writer or would-be writer as insatiable consumer faces the problem of surviving so that he can do his work . If the biography overwhelms the art, if the Dionysian impulse in him consumes the Apollonian, he dissipates his capacity to compel his environment and goes the way of Aschenbach in Mann's Death in Venice -or the way of those insatiable artist types, Flaubert's Emma Bovary and Melville's Ahab, who finally consume themselves . "I am so changeable, being everything by turns and nothing long," Byron wrote to Lady Blessington . But the writer must be something long and steadfast . If he is to set down his vision he must have his own brahmacharya, for the vision is not well served unless it is served with the monized with the impulse to experience insatiably . Proust's solution has its attractionshave your experience, then retire to your cork-lined room and make art out of it-but it is bad for biography . One is tempted to say that, given the contradictory nature of his situation, the ideal resolution for the artist is to dissipate himself into an early grave (ravaged with alcoholism, or syphilis, overdosed with drugs, penniless, hounded by the bourgeois enemy) and yet leave behind the undoubted masterpiece-so that it can be said of him, as the late Ralph Gleason said of Lenny Bruce, that he has joined the martyrs of history who took upon themselves "the weight of our mistakes and our greed and our selfishness...

...otherwise, he will have no material from which to make his art, nor will he have discovered on his own pulse the truth that is hidden beyond the limits of moderation...

...The Underground Man's ascesis of rejection had no more appeal for Bakunin than the brahmacharya of a Robespierre or a Lenin...

...Brahmachazya is as inconceivable to them as guilt: They are as innocent as, towards the end of his life, Henry Miller claimed to have been all along, "even though I've committed crimes in my innocence...

...For economic, political, social, and religious reasons, Western Civilization has for the most part not celebrated creaturely insatiability . Until quite recently our model figures have been disciplined self-deniers whether they led crusades, inspired revolutions, repaired disintegrating cultures, journeyed into the unknown, or cultivated spirit in monastic cells or desert caves . El Cid, Robespierre, St . Anthony, Lenin, St...

...Ronald Hayman writes that Nietzsche's recipe for the real or feigned madness without which there could be no moral evolution was "inordinate fasting, continual sexual abstinence, withdrawal into the wilderness, or climbing a mountain, or onto a pillar, or 'sitting on an ancient willow facing a lake .'" Both Thoreau and Nietzsche, as Talese and Hefner might see them, are prisoners of historically conditioned hypocritical forces that seek to deny middle-aged men the sexual variety they need to be happy and healthy . No one is more a threat to the Party of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1981 Insatiability than Shakespeare . It is easy enough now to write off most of the practitioners of brahmacharya : They are extreme, eccentric, neurotic ; or, as we have learned to say with dismissive charity, their naturally ample spirits were constricted by the meanness of their worlds...

...In this advertisement, as in those for Wolfschmidt Vodka and Playboy-indeed, as in most advertisements-there is a frightening and hyperbolic disjunction : Either accept the terms of the advertisement or miss life ; be a Romanov or be nothing...

...Augustine was suffering from the red plague when in The City of God he expressed his disgust with those early Christian chiliasts who expected that the reign of Christ would be attended with the leisure to enjoy "immoderate carnal banquets, furnished with an amount of meat and drink such as not only to shock the feeling of the temperate, but even to surpass the measure of credulity itself ." Even figures like Thoreau and Nietzsche, who can give so much comfort to those who believe that the establishments of civilization exist to frustrate the individual's lust for life, belong in this company...

...Hotchner, Talese is a disciplined, well-organized man who prefers formality, is intolerant of sloppiness in manners, dress, or language, and insists on domestic order and respect for...

...Given the high level of obscenity in public and private discourse that our kind of anarchism leads us not only to tolerate but approve, it comes as a surprise to learn from Woodcock that Bakunin kept an aristocratic concern for good manners and rebuked the young men who used bad language in the presence of women...

...He responds to his appetites, mainly libidinous, with a singlemindedness that puts to shame a Hugh Hefner or a Gay Talese, who must always self-consciously refer their consumerism to repressive Christian pasts, whether Protestant or Catholic . Hefner on his fabulous bed (where Pepsi Cola must be a sad substitute for nectar), or Talese in Thy Neighbor's life reveling at Sandstone or assage parlors, are still only wistful o . Keats in his poem ` Lamia" says of the god Hermes and his adored nymph as they escape for love's dalliance the "green-recessed woods" that e they grew not pale "as mortal lovers hey feast without surfeit...

...Revolutionary actions for him were not only means to an end (a destructive force that like Shelley's West Wind would prove to be creative) "but also experiences in themselves, capable of raising him from the everyday life which 'corrupts our instinct and our will, and constricts our heat and intelligence.'" One wonders how an imagination so capable of being aroused by images of destructive brute force to a state of religious exaltation would have reacted to twentieth-century images of destructivenessto the Holocaust, the fire bombing of Dresden, the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Naga.saki, or the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh--in which one might see expressions of our lurking Kurtzean desire "to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men...

...The contemporary adversary attitude toward all established interdictions, traditions, taboos, codes, systems, and forms of service that have tradidonally opposed the insatiable self in the interest of civilizing and socializing it is itself a protected convention...

...Thine own life's means...

...He seems to have been as certain as our own Weather Underground that fressen would ultimately serve the cause of essen...

...So with deconstructionist attacks on literary works and the tradition supporting them: The works and the tradition represent awesome accumulations of power that can be appropriated by those who have the Nietzschean audacity to dismantle them...

...Would such an imagination be able to resist the appeal of an ultimate nuclear annihilation in which, whatever else happened, the accumulated evils of centuries of degradation, including the hated bourgeois, would be forever removed ? In any event, it is hard to imagine Bakunin being anything but bored in a world in which, as he wrote in Reaction in Germany, "all our present dissonances will be resolved into a harmonious whole...

...No one cheats us this way more than Shakespeare . Was there a homosexual streak in him, as Leslie Fiedler and others have suggested...

...but with ultimate reference to Macbeth, the real murderer...

...And he is only authenticated if, like that vulgar type of the 21 artist, the insatiably experiencing rock star, he is himself consumed in the process...

...In the last quarter of a century it has been hard for the most rabid idealist to miss the message that means change ends...

...Hefner and Talese, like the rest of us, surfeit and grow pale ; one Pepsi begins to taste like another d the bunnies begin to blend into one another like clones . Perhaps in their surfeiting they express our jealousy of the gods...

...All his appetites were enormous, George Woodcock writes in Anarchism...

...We can imagine that the advertiser is as compelled by this disjunction as the public he addresses, and it is in this sense that most advertisements are honest . Most of us learn early in life to apply some rate of discount to such threats, but who of us ever gets completely beyond the fear that he might out of misconceived prudence miss life...

...Those interested in participating, please send a letter and a copy of your newspaper to: Student Conferenee The American Spectator P.O...

...He should be helpful to all those faithless anarchists who can take no comfort from Alvin Toffler's Third-Wave promise of a race that is at last "fully and radiantly human" unless that promise is put in a context of erotic anarchism . Talese (and perhaps Toffler as well) is in the tradition of those early Christian chiliasts who troubled Augustine . His book is an advertisement for a new heaven and new earth in which a special kind of performing self will, in Augustine's words, enjoy "immoderate sensual banquets" that "surpass the measure of credulity itself...

...The deserving poor, on the other hand, were frugal, thrifty, temperate, and conserving, and therefore did not need our charity . The distinction overlooked the extent to which the undeserving poor in their wasting and polluting were simply their betters, who have always known that one of the best ways to feel rich is to consume immoderately (conspicuously, to use Veblen's term), which inevitably has involved waste and pollution...

...The biographies of those anarchistic others, repeating on a coarser level the anarchism of their cultural betters, are never more shockingly satisfactory than when they degrade, desecrate, or defile established pieties or norms of conduct-especially sexual conduct--in the cause of anti-hypocrisy...

...Box 1969 Bleomlngton, IN 47402 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1981 23 arating swagger in which one proves to himself that he is no longer compelled by traditional codes of thought and language has a discouraging tendency, as Walter Kerr observed about the use of obscenities on the American stage, to end up as stultifying cliche...

...The dilemma for the contemporary anarchist who is also a passionate conservationist is that to be the latter he must adopt many of the bourgeois values of the deserving poor, for whom small has always been beautiful and less more, and so sabotage some of his life-enhancing destructive urges . V The Wolfschmidt Czar and the Playboy architect are as immune to dilemma and the red plague as are the gods . There is nothing radical or revolutionary in their attitudes ; if there were, some present 24 restriction on their lust for life would be implied . They have realized Bakunin's dream of a condition in which all dissonances have been resolved in a harmonious whole-in a world serene, ordered, and benignly disposed toward generous consumers...

...Paradoxically, if he wishes to oppose this spirit long and steadfastly he had better be himself a man of character . Thus we can only marvel, as Talese does in Thy Neighbor's Wife, at Hugh Hefner, who retains his youthful figure and executive energy in spite of an "alternate life style" that entails heroic ingestions of junk food and Pepsi-Cola along with a good deal of philandering attention to numerous frisky bunnies...

...He was no less voracious in his appetite for plots and conspiracies, and in the religious exaltation with which he perceived the possibility "of a revolution carried out with merciless violence and leading paradoxically to an idyllic Utopian world...

...Talese makes him sound like the ideal supervisor for the utopia of Augustine's chiliasts . IV The Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who opposed the Romanov spirit long and steadfastly, had the biography of a romantic poet . With him, however, the priority was on the "poetry," and the "poetry," as he makes clear in "Revolution, Terrorism, Banditry," was fired by the conviction that his generation, utilizing the combined forces of bandit and peasant and "fired by faith and love," must produce an "inexorable brute force and relentlessly tread the path of destruction ." To this brute force everything "is sanctified by the revolution," and the morsel to be insatiably consumed was the bourgeois, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1981 whom he hated as much as Sartre did: "In all Europe not a single person leads a quiet bourgeois life or can with honor reproach us without being forced into hypocrisy...

...If that was the case, he was spared the disillusionment of discovering how quickly liberating obscenities become impoverishing conventions...

...indeed, in democratic societies anarchism is an occupational hazard since democracy, especially when its individualistic bias is reinforced by an economic system that encourages consumption, cannot help catering to the insatiable human appetite for self-sufficiency and serf-expansion...

...John P. Sisk "The spirit of the Czar lives on," announce the familiar ads for Wolfschmidt Vodka, in which appears the Czar himself in full Romanov regalia, usually beside his beautiful blond Czarina and one or two handsome Borzoi hounds . He does various things in his various appearances : A giant among men, he bends iron bars on his bare knee and crushes roubles in his fist ; regal coaches carry him in elegance ; he rides like thunder with his Cossacks ; he hunts the wild boar in the northern forests and hosts feasts for a thousand guests in the Great Palace . He had a "thirst for life like no other man alive," and his drink, by a special appointment, is Wolfschmidt . In the most familiar version of the ad it is the of War and Peace, Dostoyevsky, and ov exander re ctionary who ruled s at the end of the last century, a in his thirst for life seems to have fallen short of Rabelaisian standards . Nevertheless, in the ad he dramaof insatiability, at once ist, which appeals to the f us to live as . To pu Solzhenitsyn the . on ; to cynics like s e ess quantities of or not supplied by specia appoint ; o temperance people it calls counter image of apple wine and Skid course, that the ad has little to do with t only presents after the fashion o e drama a more familiar modern the consumer hero, who sometimes needs to be pushed back into an exotic past in order to give him both validity and historical resonance . That he is really our contemporary is clear if we put alongside the Wolfschmidt ad a 1977 layboy magazine featurical Playboy reader : a successful young architect who in his own lust for life THE PLAYBOY AND THE CZAR : IMAGES OF INSATIABILITY 's s professor of English at . . pokane, WashSPECTATOR DECEMBER 1981 The consumer gods will not be mocked . is like no other man alive . At work and play he gives 110 percent of himself and gets "a lot back for it ." Like all consumer heroes, h-e is at war with time and wishes that "there were 70 minutes in every hour, 25 hours in every day and 8 days in every week...

...It is as if we have learned from the classic anarchists that if we wish a truly liberated, authentic, and enhanced personal life, we must have the courage to ravin up the means to whatever life we have been living, but without ceasing to believe that those means will remain in abundant supply to protect us in our ravining...

...The latter anticipates Kurtz, never more memorably than in his despairing "To-morrow, and tomorrow, and to-morrow" speech in Act V . Here he recognizes that when all the manifest forms of life have been stripped away, the ultimate reality is, as Kurtz reports, "the horror ." The play itself shows that while the manifest forms of life can be decep especially for those predisposed to misread them, they cannot be reductively separated from what is good and true . It therefore promises in Malcolm's last speech "by the grace of Grace" a return to good order "in measure, time, and place ." However, it is tempting for us to believe with Macbeth and our literary deconstructionists that the manifest of life is utterly fraudulent-that, as Hayman paraphrases Nietzsche's "Truth and Falsehood in an Extra-moral Sense," since "we cannot help being defrauded, we have evolved linguistic conventions to defraud ourselves reassuringly . " We are strongly compelled, that is, by a hero figure who in his negative ascetiavins up what has traditionally been life s means . Nietzsche, says Hayman, "rejected virtually the whole of contemporary reality, compensating himself with a fantasy about the future ." We know this spirit of intransigent rejection, but without the compensating fantasy, in the work of Rimbaud, Celine, Sartre, Robbe-Grillet, and Beckett ; indeed, it is a troubling presence in most modernist and postmodernist art and literature . "Truths are illusions whose illusoriness is overlooked," says Nietzsche, and if, taught by him, we go on to ask whether this statement too is one of those illusory truths, we only intensify our unease . "Like the Romantics," says Hayman, "Nietzsche believed the most authentic THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1981 experience to be the most individual ." It is one of the paradoxes of romanticism, so apparently committed to a zestful embrace of the manifest of life, that it prepares for an esthetic of insatiable rejection almost in proportion as the writer becomes truthseeker rather than maker . Individual romantics like Keats could protect themselves with a strategy of romantic irony, but the necessity of rejecting established and traditional forms in the interest of authentic individual experience quickly led to disillusionment with the manifest of life in whatever form it took . In time, then, we get a full-blown romantic ascesis of rejection in Dostoyevsky's Underground Man or in the author-hero of Celine's Journey To the End of Night-both of whom, as insatiable consumers of life's means, are the obverse of the Playboy architect and the Wolfschmidt Czar . III Speaking of the dying Proust, who was refusing to eat so that he might finish The Captive, Andre Maurois writes: "There was something sublime in this sacrifice of a mortal body to an immortal work, in this transfusion where the donor chose deliberately to shorten his days for the sake of the characters who were taking his life's blood...

...Short of this ideal it would appear that the writer, like anyone else who aspires to significant achievement, needs character . To be a genius is not enough, as Keats points out in his famous letter to Benjamin Bailey . Men of Genius "have not any individuality, any determined character" whereas men of character "are the top and head of those who have a proper self" and are, therefore "Men of Power ." Men of Power are oriented to accomplishment, not biography...

...But it is also because our muted and faithless anarchism, all pervasive as it is, lacks a substantial adversary which will stand fast so that it can be self-consciously opposed with Bakunin's ecstasy of embattled expectation...

...It is only that, as Augustine complained about the chiliasts, they so often express what is uncommon in themselves in such common terms . But there is finally more than this . Nineteen...

...they have always rekindled the drowsing passions-all ordered society puts the passions to sleep . . . " This romantically youthful statement helps to identify Kurtz (and perhaps Nietzsche as well) as the very type of the modern literary artist who as a heroic consumer of experience does not hesitate to go down to the heart of darkness itself...

...Nevertheless, our kind of anarchism is much less optimistic than Bakunin's...

...But here again there may be less experiential satisfaction in liberation from culturally imposed restrictions (since all liberations have unanticipated tradeoffs and are subject to the frustrations of rising expectations) than in the ravining violations of social, psychological, or moral norms that restrict liberation...

...But if we do not share Bakunin's faith, we at least share the attitudes and gestures with which it expressed itself, just as we share Nietzsche's radical skepticism which frees us from the obligation to seek a viable faith, without wanting any part of his Superman-producing ascesis...

...This makes for critical problems since the work then comes to us cluttered up with "authenticating" details of the life . What would happen to the artistic reputations of Sylvia, Plath, Delmore Schwartz, or Jack Kerouac if we could forget most of what we know about them as historical persons-if, in other words, they had to compete for our attention on a par with writers like Wallace Stevens, T .S . Eliot, or Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose biographies are so lacking in dramatic 22 sense of being cheated, to concentrate on the poetry...

...Instead of being in the future or clinging to the past, I'm finding incredible excitement by participating in what I'm doing right now ." The point to the ad is that he is an insatiable consumer whom purveyors of products and services may most effectively reach "by special appointment" through Playboy magazine . With the Czar and the Playboy architect we are in the presence of theological matters . Both ads are expressive of a theory of godhead in which the god, swallowing up past and future, a model of insatiability in an eternal Now . This is especially the case with the Greek deities whose Olympic escapades haunt our literary culture . The gods and goddesses follow their impulses, especially their sexual impulses, in a heavenly kind of chronological time with a purity of commitment which suggests that they are beyond hangup, just as in their consumption of nectar they are beyond hangover and cirrhosis of the liver . If in their erotic escapades they get into trouble with their spouses the results may be temporarily inconvenient, embarrassing, or even momentarily painful, but with a few notable exceptions are the matter of comedy or farce . Zeus is the ideal consumer hero...

...The interdictions hold us in awe of mysterious powers...

...Indeed, as the garrulous Marlow makes one all too aware, Kurtz, like the Wolfschmidt Czar and the Playboy architect, had a thirst for life like no other man alive . II There are, of course, other strategies for acquiring what life has to offer . Who is to say, for instance, that Freud did not have a thirst for life like no other man alive-that he did not, at least metaphorically, bend iron bars on his bare knee and crush roubles in his fist...

...Writers who conform to (and at the same time help propagate) this image get into the kind of trouble that makes interesting biographies . One who had never read a line of their work might conclude from the lives of Byron, Shelley, Dylan Thomas, D .H...

...in males) are best understood as correctives to the hypocritical discrepancy between preachment and practice itself suggests the kind of trouble that makes for interesting biography...

...For men to use bad language in the presence of women, or for women to use it, as they increasingly do, in the presence of men, is for us a most convenient way of appropriating the powers locked up in self-abnegating forms of service...

...The strongest and most evil spirits," says Nietzsche in The Gay Science, "have so far advanced humanity the most...

...In the interest of being something long and steadfast, their experiences are edited and selected with an economy that is as unacceptable to the true Romanov as Freud's letter to his fiancee would have been to Wilhelm Reich . Character formation to the insatiable consumer suggests the ascesis of the Moonies and the Hare Krishnas ; it is correlative with the false consciousness of the establishment world and is simply another way its pinchpenny censoring spirit threatens his very being...

...Perhaps they share the guardian angel which he believed looked after him because "I'm one of God's chosen ones ." One suspects that Talese the ex-altar boy is not, or at least not yet, one of those dilemma-less, innocent chosen ones as he attempts to combine a Kurtzean lack of restraint in the consumption of sex with a number of traditional bourgeois attitudes . According to the reports of Tony Schwartz and A .E...

...The grand objective was "a renewal of life" after centuries of degradation...

...The conference will feature workshops conducted by American Spectator contributors on various topics including editing, soliciting manuscripts, production, and the economics of publishing a student conservative newspaper...

...Either the artist is young or he has youth's insatiable appetite for experience with youth's intrepid refusal to be put off with bourgeois counsels of prudence or faint-hearted distinctions between fressen and essen...

...Socially and politically, as well as in his theory of human nature, he was an optimistic anarchist--or at least he was until in his old age he became disillusioned with the masses who seemed to him so dismally without passion for their own emancipation...

...This is in part because we have in such a short period of time seen so many violent attempts to improve the world end so quickly in making it worse...

...And those who lack the courage or opportunity to give an egoenhancing expression to their destructive urges can at least ravin up in junk literature the biographies of insatiably experiencing others...

...elders . It is not easy to reconcile such preferences with those implied by the pursuit of what he calls "impersonal future sex ." His naive conviction that attempts to satisfy an insatiable sexual appetite (especially...

...But the melodrama of his actions, with its promise of a new heaven and a new earth, was nevertheless important to him as a sustaining framework for that human insatiability that otherwise would have been completely without sanction, and conceivably even frightening...

...Nature is hard to overcome, but she must be overcome," Thoreau writes in Walden...

...What begins as an exhilAMERICAN SPEC'rATOR TO SPONSOR JOURNALISM CONFERENCE The Amerkan Spectator is sponsoring a one-day student journalism conference in New York City on Saturday, January 16, 1982...

...But Shakespeare beguiles us with his lack of eccentricity as in play after play he uses lust as the symbol of that uncontrolled insatiability that points to disorder in the soul and disorder in the universe . Macbeth, for instance, is a play about the tragic consequences of the failure to understand the true nature of man's insatiable impulses...

...One reason why it is so hard to criticize effectively, let alone restrict, pornography and obscenity in the arts, Whether "high" or popular, is not simply the widespread conviction that there is a precious abundance of experience in the pornographic, obscene, and desecratory, but that there is more life to be had in consuming the interdictions that oppose such experience...

...And Macbeth is finally not a melodramatic villain like Richard the Third but a tragic figure . Perhaps, then, we must concede this to the Party of Insatiability : that its heroes, as they ravin up whatever promises to fulfill their creaturely needs, may not be common, and may indeed connect with great themes, even when all they do is carry them to the point of defining caricature or horror...

...He needed the prospect of perpetual revolt where the revolt itself is "a personal liberation, and even a kind of catharsis, a moral purging...

...Surely in his lust for life he must have been the ultimate Romanov, yet we can't even be absolutely certain that he, wrote the plays traditionally assigned to him...

...Their essen will never turn into fressen . Not themselves anarchists, they help to clarify the true nature of our faithless anarchism : its uneasy need to believe that it will continue to be possible to enjoy the ego-enhancing pleasures of transgression without inconvenient social, political, or psychological tradeoffs...

...Lawrence, Antonin Artaud, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, or Fitzgerald that since they had the right stuff the literature they produced was the real thing...

...Shakespeare's synonym fo is the verb ravin, used with immediate reference to the supposed murder of Duncan by his sons, Malcolm and Donalbain ("Thriftless ambition, that will ravin up...

...Perhaps in Bakunin the insatiable urge to destroy had so much to feed on that he could indulge himself with aristocratic forms of abstention...

...Our own anarchism tends to be sentimental and narcissistic in its commitment to the destructive urge which gave Bakunin such mystic exaltation...

...He talked the nights through, he read enormously, he drank brandy like wine, he smoked 1,600 cigars in a single month of imprisonment in Saxony, and he ate so voraciously that a sympathetic Austrian jail commandant felt moved to allot him double rations...

...The spirit of anarchism is pervasive enough in our own time...

...Paul, St . Augustine, Sartre, and Sir Galahad all practiced brahmacharya of a sort...