As her bare feet slapped the floor in time to polyrhythms more ancient than Petra, Salome whirled and dipped and whirled again, slapping and whirling simultaneously, and, moreover, pushing and contracting her pelvis, as if straining to expel a child. Her eyes were wide and hot, and the purple scarves swirled all about her. She danced thusly for close to twenty minutes before the first veil fell.
For some reason, Ellen Cherry, Spike, Abu, and practically everyone else in the room had assumed that the first veil dropped would be an upper one; specifically, the one that obscured her nose and mouth. They assumed erroneously. When it finally fell, fluttering to the floor like the skin of a moonsnake, it bared not her face but her loins. The audience was stunned. Worried about their cabaret license, Spike and Abu panicked. Shaftoe’s battered brow furrowed with concern; he was, after all, an officer of the law. Ellen Cherry blushed. She had sunbathed nude with waitress girlfriends in Seattle, but she’d never really focused, been virtually forced to focus, on another woman’s pudendum. It was both fascinating and discomfiting. She was glad that Patsy was out back in the courtyard.
Everybody was shocked, even the unshockable. Yet nobody acted to stop the performance. Nobody. And Salome went on whirling and dipping and swooping and arching, and each time that she arched, they found themselves looking into the prettiest and pinkest little slit that anyone could ever imagine, its folds delicate and mysterious, its tiny stinger aimed at them like the gun barrel of a felonious orchid, the curly pelt around it as sleek and moist as the welcome mat at the Bermuda Triangle Hilton.
The veil had not lain long on the floor when Ellen Cherry began to…well, to receive ideas. Spontaneously, without preamble, things occurred to her; thoughts entered her mind, one might say, except that they were both more vivid and full-formed than the thoughts that she was accustomed to entertaining, and they were permeated with information that she hadn’t realized that she possessed. It was as if they were somebody else’s thoughts, zapped by ray into her brain, where instantly they took hold and became her own.
Earth, it occurred to her, was a sexual globe. Unique, in a solar system of dead rocks, snowballs, and gasbags, Earth was a theater, a rotating stage upon which a thin green scum of organic life acted out countless, continual scenes whose content, whether explicit or oblique, was almost wholly sexual. In the biospherical epic, the players were either Seed Packages or Egg Cartons (a few versatile actors such as the amoeba could perform both roles, but it was a dying art), and the scenery, props, and costumes were designed to enhance or facilitate the coming together of hero seed and heroine egg. The colors, the smells, and the sounds of organic things had evolved as sexual attractants, created to keep the trillion romantic plots moving toward a trillion more-or-less happy endings. Recent observations of behavior patterns of bonding molecules showed that even on the molecular level, intricate and tricky courtships were constantly transpiring: there was molecular rejection, for example, and presumably molecular heartbreak. Within a broad age span, sexually inactive organisms- plant, animal, molecular, or human- could be said to be aberrations, freakish or pathological misfits out of tune with the harmony of life.
Despite an often ostentatious masculine display that would indicate otherwise, the sexual drama (or melodrama or farce) was largely, historically, directed by the female. That was particularly true among human beings, in which species the male had gone to ludicrous and often violent lengths to compensate for what struck the more insecure of men as an inferior sexual role. One of the lengths to which they went was the establishment of patriarchal religion and the recasting of the father figure as the producer of the show, although from the very beginning, the cosmogonic principal had been feminine. Those men, envious and anxious, not only fired the Great Goddess (who smiled upon all manner of sexual expression, including that which moderns were to label "promiscuous" and "pornographic"), but they also spent thousands of years and billions of dollars trying to conceal the fact of her existence.
And this further thought occurred to Ellen Cherry after the falling aside of Salome’s first veil: that whenever society demonstrated signs of rediscovering the goddess, of returning to more feminine value systems, the patriarchally conditioned psyche generated diseases, literal diseases such as syphilis in the hotly romantic nineteenth century and, in the wake of the Sexual Revolution of the 1960’s, AIDS. Those diseases were caused not by sexual license but by the fear of sexual license, by the conservative DNA’s inability to adjust to hedonism; and they were compounded by guilt over the suppression of the Great Mother and the denial of the sensuality with which she so frequently underscored her coexistence with the void. Eventually, AIDS was destined to run its deadly course, however, and eventually every manner of carnal play would go back into full production, for like it or not, gentlemen, that was the way of her world.
Yes, that’s it! Thought Ellen Cherry Charles.
Comment: V Eternelle enjoys every word. Tom is so succinct… In Goddess We Trust.
