The side effects of spring fever

Deciding I had spent just about enough time in front of the computer, I slipped out to bop around the Pearl District and beyond. Eventually I found myself at Reading Frenzy, a common enough thing when I’m feeling restless at work. Browsing,
I discovered that Joe Matt’s latest collection is called Fair Weather (ah well) and was startled into laughter by an art book with a blue delft china AK-47 on it’s cover. (still not sure
why I laughed)

I ended up leaving with the latest Bitch(the theme being obsessions) as well as the latest Colors
(the theme being food). As if I have all this freaking time to read. As if I didn’t have all those magazines Kip and I subscribe to through the mail at home waiting for me to more than glance at them. Oy.

I tell ya, it’s a good thing I take the bus into work and am inclined to taking baths. Otherwise I’m not sure if I’d ever get to read. Oh, right, and doing cardio at the gym, when I’m not distracted by political messages.

The main book I’m reading now is The
Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade by Wendy
Doniger, which, for those of who check out my about me page on occasion might have noticed that this is a book I’ve been “Planning to Read” for about seven months. And I’ve had it out from the library even longer.
I was just so reluctant to start it. I mean, I adore Doniger’s writing, which is engaging, and her books and usually touches on everything I like from a non-fiction culture studies book– myth, symbolism, social history, sex, gender and sexuality. Two of her books: Women,
Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts and Other
Peoples’ Myths: The Cave of Echoes are among my favorites. As with most academics presenting their polemic, I don‘t always agree with her conclusions, but reading her work has always been an entertaining and thought provoking experience. But I just couldn‘t bring myself to start a 500 page book that focused on a plot device beloved by Shakespeare.

I finally took the plunge and as this book also deals with doppelgangers, animal brides and grooms, somnambulists, cross-dressing as well as theories of defilement and divinity and much more, I am happily two-thirds of the way through. And, as usual, there is a heavy emphasis on the tales and folklore of India.

Many of the non-fiction books I read reference and reverberate off each other. Not surprising as about eighty percent of them deal with what I listed above and then I steer towards books on tricksters, fool, shamanic practices, death, the human body, the human mind, liminal spaces—not to mention women specific
cultural studies. So I’m not to surprised in knowing quite a few of the authors she quotes through out—Marina
Warner, Thomas
Laqueuer, Midas
Dekker, Margorie Garber and so on.

But I was surprised when she made an observation that somehow resonated with the book that I am casually reading concurrently with the Bedtrick, Pharmako/Poeia
by Dale Pendell, a book that falls into another category of book I read, ritualistic psychotropic drug use and the various cultures it exists in.

The passage from the Bedtrick is using an analogy of the Biblical bedtrick story of Rachel and Leah (and Jacob) in association to the approach taken by the designers of medical drugs:

(Roald) Hoffman first likens the strategy of
drug design to the Trojan horse…and then goes on to describe how a drug
fools the disease into thinking that it, the drug, is actually the body on which
the disease wishes to feed….Hoffman and (Shira) Leibowitz then turn to
the metaphor of two bedtrickster sisters, Rachel and Leah, suggesting that the
NK (natural killer) cells might be renamed NL (natural lover) cells. “How
much more appealing to deal with L cells (after Leah) which mimic R cells (Rachel
cells), snuggling up to unsuspecting bacteria. Immunological terror can be turned
into erotic trysts, battles into orgies. As Laban set up his daughter for his
duplicity, so drug designers craft molecules that deceive…”

This passage just seemed to resonate with something that Dale Pendell said. I searched Pharmako/Poeia back and forth to find what might be like calling to like before realizing that what I was thinking of actually came from an interview of Pendell conducted by David Levi Strauss and Peter Lamborn Wilson for Cabinet
Magazine:

DLS: In Poeia, there’s a beautiful passage about “a power greater than the poppy.” And later on, you write, “The first poisons were love philters, potions to ensnare the heart. Other seductions came later: knowledge, the Elixir of Life.” Do you think this is literally true?

DP: Yes, I think so. We’re speculating, but the etymological basis is certainly there. And looking at ancient classical books on magic, so much of it is love magic. And in popular magic, love charms are so often the major thrust. Bury a lock of hair before your door, and she will come to you. I think looking for eternal life was a later development. [laughter]

DLS: Immortality can wait, baby.

DP: Love is really the last socially acceptable form of divine madness. I’mworking on a piece using the Poison Path methodology on love and desire. Looked at as a drug, love is certainly more dangerous than anything else out on the street. It kills more people, and inspires more murder and mayhem, than any
other substance by far.