Phallic Symbols

NOT A FOUR-LETTER WORD But sex is...

Sex is really not as offensive a word as we think it is. Read any psychologist about this and he'd tell you everything we do has sexual implications. And, to make it more acceptable, psychologists have a word for it: displacement. That seems to be more acceptable, not to say less disturbing than "sexual activity". Displacement can be classified as an act in which your unconscious desires, such as sex, are expressed in other ways. Viewed in this manner then, no way can sex be an offensive word, unless of course one does it offensively. And then it becomes offensive. Bastos.

It is lamentable how sex becomes mere entertainment in today's headlines. Instead of being awed or curious about it we laugh our groins out when seeing a naked figure. Sex, a thing as serious as death of Gloria's declining immunity, is being jeered at. Some may even find Michaelangelo's David laughable because the sculpture got balls.

In his essay Pornography and Obscenity D. H. Lawrence profounded the basis for essaying sex in literature. He asserts that there is nothing wrong with sexual feelings in themselves, so long as they are straightforward and not sneaking or sly, and that the right sort of sex stimulus is invaluable to human daily life.

So, why the need to express sex in literature? Because doing so is one way of treating and enjoying sex properly as inestimable to an individual's well being. What Lawrence is saying is that this phenomenon can become pornographic when it is not treated judiciously. It is the double meaning that makes the issue offensive. Double meaning. When you are trying to hide something, like trying to hide a secret, a dirty little one. The question of pornography is solely a question of secrecy, for without it there would be no pornography. It is the foxy, tricky, sneaky way that erodes our imagination that sucks our minds into thinking that sex is an entirely foul subject.

Sex is the fountainhead of our energetic life, Lawrence said. It is a powerful, beneficial and necessary stimulus in human life. This need of expressing sex in literature is so vital a stimulus in our everyday lives that by furtively and therefore improperly relishing sex, by having that sneaky tricky kind of sex, this will spontaneously lead to an improper, furtive enjoyment of life, a sneaky tricky kind of life: live-in, keeping a querida and begetting unwanted children. Societies and civilizations are born through sex, plain and raw. It is the starting point of the proper sort that steers us on to a truly spry life, devoid of the dirty little secret. It is the wellspring of all true human vitality.

And since sex is the wellspring of all true human vitality, its expression in literature is validated. This same expression attains a peculiar exquisiteness, an interesting appeal, when delivered through symbols. Most writers resort to the so-called phallic symbolism. It is a literary device in which a representation of the penis becomes an embodiment of generative power.

Lawrence's critics, those who hate him anyway, because there are those who admire him for his lyric genius, argue that he is much too preoccupied with sex to the point of blatancy. This is because Lawrence wants to find human freedom through sexual means which most of his contemporaries find too aggressive. Although Lawrence uses the sex thing as a means of ushering human freedom, his is a kind of sex that is at once pleasurable and at the same time utilitarian.

Nevertheless, a reader of Lawrence would discover that he tackles sex not through tangible representations of the phallus for he himself is an avowed antagonist of what he calls the American writer's deep passion for double meaning, for symbolism. What we instead find in his stories are straightforward narratives of the sexual encounters, which, seen in their entirety, are actually extended phallic symbolism as setting.

In one of the passionate clandestine trysts of the protagonists Connie and Mellors, for instance, we read how Connie describes the phallus as small and bud-like, oftentimes wilting, yet so lovely and tender. And, in the same vein, she goes on to recount her sexual experiences like a flame of desire, tender, and feelings melting in the flame. A strange and slow thrust of peace, as the inexorable entry of the risen penis quivered inside her, strange and terrible, saying, "But it came with a strange slow thrust of peace, the dark thrust of peace and a ponderous, primordial tenderness, such as made the world in the beginning... a sudden little flame of new awareness went through her... a life within life, the sheer warm, potent loveliness... How lovely, how lovely, strong, and yet pure and delicate, such stillness of the sensitive body! Such utter stillness of potency and delicate flesh!" As most serious readers of this type of literature would concede, we here read from Lawrence a lyric account of potentially obscene vulgarity: the genitalia and the sex act. Yet it is the sheer starkness of the sexual act that makes the scene lyric, and lends ravishing elegance to the recounting of the sexual union.

In Teodoro Locsin's poem Jealousy the embodiment of the generative power that is the phallic symbol is adroitly handled in the description of the serpent tempter, thus: The jeweled snake with beady eyes/ Turns and coils around the lie/ That changes love into a rope/ To hang my poor and struggling hope. The sexual assault on Eve by the Devil is suggested in the words snake, turns, coils, rope. These are unmistakably phallic, in material form as well as in their archaic association: snake is to phallus as turn, coil, rope is to the sexual act. In a much subtler yet equally evocative description Jose Garcia Villa in his Proem would say, a poem must be slender as a bell and must hold fire as well. By image association we readily note that bells are by nature not slender and are neither constructed to hold fire. And so we deduce, what else but the phallus could have the musicality of a bell, slendered and fiery? In still a little deeper subtlety is the central figure of the mirror on the wall in Nick Joaquin's May Day Eve which the ladies looked into in the midnight of the last day of April, chanting a modified mantra-like version of Mirror, mirror on the wall in Snow White. Because it is from this same mirror that the lady chanter is supposed to meet the eventual man of her life, the constant allusion and the centrality of the mirror gives it a phallic significance. J. A. Romualdez (Aurelio A. Peña to Dabawenyos) throws subtlety to the wind in Catfish and goes sensually provoking in a love scene: She kept gliding her wet, slimy hands underneath like she was chasing a catfish under water. Finally, she grabbed its slippery head and held it without a sound.

In Portnoy's Complaint where Philip Roth apparently makes fun of the sexual organ, the fun is just that: apparent. Young Alexander Portnoy in a sauna bath scene found himself in front of two white penises, his father's and his father's pal's, both genitals Jewish. Ten-year old Alexander, curious of these blanched organs, transfixed a detailed eye on them. This is supposed to be very serious incident, yet you feel Alexander felt himself most embarrassingly ridiculous at the moment, staring at them and doing nothing. The whole thing looks apparently funny, but it's a serious one. It was funny because it was serious. It is the coming-of-age scene of the boy that is the phallic symbolism here more than the literal phalli. The naked adults in the bath tub themselves embody the generative power that awes the boy.

The Bible, surprisingly to many, is itself a rich source of material for phallic symbolism as setting. Excuse the irreverence, but one audacious Christian even once claimed that the Old and New Testament are nothing but one big historical account of how God chose a particular race to indulge in sexual intercourse to produce a Messiah. Yet far from being an orgy the sexual setting has a divine end that transcends its purely physical one: that of the incarnation of the Savior. And the word became flesh and dwelt amongst us... In the fullness of time. Sex plays a unique function in Scriptures. The first chapter of the book of Matthew recounts how generations from Adam to Joseph produced living, breathing sexual beings that eventually brought forth the Messiah through sex. Other palpable things like the staff of Moses, the whale that swallowed Jonah and structures like the Tower of Babel are just a few of the Book's unending list of phallic allusions. The most magnanimous of these is the cross.

The cross at Golgotha. The ultimate in the masonry of sexuality expressed in suggestive language. It was a symbol reaching the peak of suggestiveness: birth. It was the ultimate sexual symbol producing birth itself, the birth of a new life. As St. Francis would pray, it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. The generative power that phallic symbolism ultimately embodies is nowhere made more powerfully manifest than in the death of Christ in the cross: death for life that life may issue that knows no death. Life that represents the holy communion of a phallic love: Immanuel, God with us; not the vulgar secular finite sort, but a love stripped of all malicious symbols, and the crucifixion of a phallic sin, the self-consciousness of sexuality that was the lot of Adam and Eve after the fall. The dirty little secret.

Sex. Pure true sex. The more sensitive writers could not but convey pure true sex that has in the fallen mind become so truthfully false. Out with the "dirty little secret" of sex that Lawrence spoke of that sinful man. In the phallic symbolism sex is brought out in broad daylight but served in the blue china bowl of suggestive language like exotic salad, something to relish sans malice, something to savor sans reservation, something to indulge in without pretense. This is the justification of sex in literature. Sex is to be experienced in the vicarious banquet table of the writer but with the sober limitations of language refinement, candid but evocative. There can be no room anymore for bastos once the vulgarity has been peeled off the potato. No longer can the mere mention of penis send shock waves of ambiguous flushed guilt and titillation to electrocute the libido of the ignorant minded. Otherwise the dirty little secret of vulgarity and undue naivete will addle us up and we shall have turned pornographic without the slight suspicion of how we did.

The need for sexual expression is basic. Sigmund Freud says, "Modern literature is predominantly concerned with the most questionable problems which stir up all the passions, and which encourage sensuality and a craving for pleasure, and contempt for every fundamental ethical principle and every ideal." I am personally not Freudian by conviction but I find reason to agree with what he says here. that because modern life has become more sophisticated and restless, our exhausted nerves are seeking recuperation through stimulation and in highly spiced pleasures, which is visible in our apparent need for and yet priggish aversion to sex. Lawrence said that when the psyche deteriorates and the profound controlling instincts collapse all sex will be as dirt and dirt sex. And such sexual confusion becomes nothing more than playing with dirt. He further laments that this is the state of the common, vulgar human being whose name is Legion, and who lifts his voice shouting, "Vox populi, vox Dei," of which Lawrence believed to be the source of all pornography, for indeed the voice of the people about sex is just the instinctual impulsive viewpoint of the majority that is vulgar and bias. How can that be Vox Dei, how can that be the voice of God who, after creating two sexual beings in the Garden declared, "it is good"?

If there be any literary merit, any poetic excuse for being for sex in literature, it is this: That because of the degrading image of sex in the popular uneducated mind, not only in life but in literature as well is there an indication that there is a need for a makeover that will eventually usher in a transformation of perception of what sex truly is and how phallic symbolism is its refining medium.