"There are two essentially different classes of instincts: the sexual instincts...and the aggressive instincts, whose aim is destruction." ~ Sigmund Freud
Have you ever seen something so stupefying that you were at a loss for words? I saw such a thing last night and have been trying ever since to express my thoughts and reactions to it. Still, words fail me. That would be tolerable enough if it weren't for the fact that I can't get the thing out of my mind because it disturbed me so deeply.
It was a cake. A baby shower cake, to be exact. I will not post the image of the cake here because I can't bring myself to post the monstrosity.
Imagine that your little boy is having a birthday party. He's into cowboys and indians. So, you bake him a cake and choose Custer's Last Stand as the theme. You encircle indians on horseback around the edges of the "battlefield," placing fallen soldiers in the middle with tiny arrows piercing their bodies, and then you drizzle icing "blood" over the dead soldiers forming large pools of it around each of the tiny little "corpses."
Or, imagine that your grandmother has died of cancer. You go to the funeral to pay your respects and say your last goodbyes. Gramma looks angelic lying there in her casket in her favorite pink dress...with the 5-pound tumor the surgeon cut from her gut, perfectly preserved with embalming fluid and resting there on the pillow next to her head.
This cake was like that. It depicted a smiling baby's head emerging from the womb with chunks of "blood and gore" along with it, like stones in a glacier field.
A smiling baby's head. Popping through a large slit in a pink cake. With chocolate sprinkles strewn about on the pink icing that look like five-o'clock shadow. I can't get the image of it out of my mind. It's like something straight out of "Chucky."
Inappropriate is too mild a word. Bizarre does not fit. Grotesque does not begin to describe it. Callous? Disrespectful? Irreverent? Dishonorable? Scornful? Sadistic? Savage? Blasphemous? It's all of the above and more. My reaction on seeing it was to recoil in horror, the way you would react if you opened a gift box and found a snake inside. You would instantly snap the lid shut and drop the box.
I must admit I had the same reaction when I first saw the animated "Dancing Baby." Remember that, the diapered baby bumping and grinding its hips lewdly? Among a small crowd of co-workers, I was the only one who did not find the spectacle uproariously funny. Yeah, I'm weird like that, I guess. I don't find the cheapening of perfect innocence and purity, of all that is good and wholesome, of human life in general, amusing.
In literature, sex and death are inextricably related. I never did get the connection myself, but perhaps it's nothing more than this: you're born; you die. End of story.
In postmodern culture, we celebrate both sex and death, not life. Not goodness. Not innocence. Not anything that is holy or worthy or of good report. We are obsessed with the artifacts of sex and death, with the detritus of sex and death, and with the mechanics of both. We have become a sex and death culture.
