There is no more right to strike than there is to incest and adultery. -- Proudhon
There's an interesting passage in "Alice in the Forbidden Zone," Howard Hampton's reading of the TV show Twin Peaks and The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer; the latter is, in Hampton's words, "the wildly perverse popcult artifact" that appears to be "just another shiny cog in the Twin Peaks merchandising machine." Supposedly written by a girl who was later murdered, Laura Palmer's Secret Diary is "a product of pop images, and a strange apotheosis of them, but it mostly seems to come out of nowhere -- a nowhere free spirits and rebellious daughters have disappeared into and reappeared from since civilization institutionalized the pagan universe in its own sanitarium." (Artpaper No. 3, November 1990, p. 17).
The key phrase here is "free spirits and rebellious daughters." It is in part a reference to -- even a continuation of -- Greil Marcus's seminal book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Harvard, 1989), which is concerned in part with the Brethren of the Free Spirit, a nominally "heretical" group active in the 13th century in Europe. Certainly there are plenty of young writers currently deriving all kinds of inspiration from Lipstick Traces. But Howard Hampton is unique in that he seems to be tapping into something that can't be found in Lipstick Traces, but should be.
Hampton is obviously interested in the sexual politics of Twin Peaks, which unfolds as a narrative of investigation into the brutal rape and murder of Laura. "Orgies in the woods, secret ceremonies, drugged bliss," Hampton intones; "clear echoes of paganism that intensify throughout the course of The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, until those echoes pass into a heresy that paganism is barely the dimmest shadow of." One of the "heretical" sexual practices clearly implied by the coupling together of "free spirits" with "rebellious daughters" -- but not explicitly mentioned by Hampton -- is incest. If we are all "sons" and "daughters" of the figure Hampton calls the Father-Tyrant," then, structurally speaking, incest is inevitable and unpreventable, even when consciously avoided (as in the case of Oedipus). Phrased another way, all human sexual encounters are incestuous by definition. Thus, the taboo against incest is far from universal or unbreakable; indeed, it is hard to see how there could even be such an illogical taboo in the first place. "We're kissin' cousins," Elvis Presley once sang, with evident glee, "that's what makes it alright."
Certainly Greil Marcus is aware of the importance the deliberate breaking of the taboo against incest had to the Brethren of the Free Spirit. He writes in Lipstick Traces,
If Original Sin was traced to lust, lust had to be pursued in all of its forms [by the Brethren]. One destroyed the lie of Original Sin by refuting it in acts. In Erfurt, Germany, in 1367, Robert E. Lerner says, free spirit Johann Hartman testified that "he could have intercourse with his sister or his mother in any place, even on the altar, and . . . it would be Ômore natural' to have sex with one's sister than with any other woman. Nor would a young girl lose her virginity after sexual intercourse, but if she had already been robbed of it she would regain it after having relations with one free in spirit. Even if a girl had successive intercourse with ten men, if the last of them was a free spirit, she would receive her virginity back."
But Greil doesn't place any special emphasis on incest as such. In Lipstick Traces, incest figures as a particularly vivid example of Free Spirit libertinism; but it is only an example; it isn't the distinctive feature of that libertinism itself, the thing that defines it. For Greil, the distinctive feature of the Brethren of the Free Spirit was their refusal of work. He writes,
The house of the Free Spirit had many mansions. As the adepts believed that sin was a fraud, they believed that property -- the result of work, humanity's punishment for Original Sin -- was a falsehood. Thus all things were to be held in common, and work to be understood as hell, which was ignorance -- only fools worked. Work was a sin against perfect nature.
"Like the Ranters, [the free spirits] stripped off their clothes and preached naked," Greil writes. "If they did not commit incest or murder it was because they wished not to." But what of those who did commit incest or murder? Did any free spirits commit these "unnatural" crimes? Lipstick Traces is silent on these points.
A recent book by Marc Shell, The End of Kinship: "Measure for Measure," Incest and the Ideal of Universal Siblinghood (Johns Hopkins, 1988), does take up these points. But we can't hold up Shell's book as an example of what Greil's book could have been if its author had taken up the free spirits' unique interest in incest. It would appear from some of the passages in The End of Kinship that Marc Shell would consider Greil Marcus's reticence on the subject of incest to be some kind of hysterical or near-hysterical repression of themes the author himself finds personally troubling. Shell would no doubt dwell on the fact that Marcus appears to be loathe to refer to the Brethren of the Free Spirit, preferring instead to refer to "the heresy of the free spirit," "the house of the Free Spirit," and so forth. But this is not to say that The End of Kinship is without interest, or without relevance to Lipstick Traces.
In the light of Shell's book, we can return to Marcus's book and find an area or two in need of a certain amount of correction. "Though in some ways as old as Christianity, or even older than that," Marcus writes, "as an identifiable cult the heresy of the Free Spirit came to light not long after the founding of the orthodox orders." For Marcus, there is little connection between the Brethren of the Free Spirit and the orthodox orders that preceded them or in some cases came into being contemporaneously with them. He writes, "The Free Spirit grew in strength and numbers when the Franciscans and the Dominicans began to slide into wealth and bureaucracy, leaving their roads [upon which they had wandered, preached and begged for sustenance] for monasteries." In other words, the popularity of free spirit ideas grew in proportion to the elitism of the Franciscans and Dominicans. But the "slide" into wealthy bureaucracy and the retreat from the roads to the monasteries did not necessarily entail the renunciation of experimenting with revolutionary forms of everyday behavior and social organization on the part of the orthodox orders.
Like the Brethren, the orders continued to believe that private property was a falsehood, work was hell, and all things should be held in common. Furthermore, both the "heretics" and the orthodox orders believed that men and women are, literally speaking, the sons and daughters of a single father (God). The primary difference between the "heretical" Brethren and the orthodox orders seems to have been the fact that the former practiced and extolled physical incest with each other, the latter practiced and extolled spiritual incest with the Holy Trinity. But it is the "secret" connection between the two -- the fact that both groups practiced and extolled incest of one sort or another -- rather than their spectacular distance from each other, that seems the most startling to modern eyes. Had Greil taken this startling connection between "heresy" and "orthodoxy" into proper account, his book would have been less a heretical "secret history" than a history of how "secrets" (or "heresies," if you prefer) are produced, distributed and imposed.
Let's state our critique of Lipstick Traces in terms of pop music, for the explicit purpose or burden of Greil's book is to show that all the promises of the Brethren of the Free Spirit were recalled, denounced as unfulfilled and proclaimed as if for the first time by the Sex Pistols, in particular by their song "Anarchy in the U.K." Lipstick Traces uses Michael Jackson and the spectacular success of his Thriller! album to trace the limits of what the Sex Pistols had been able to accomplish. But it would have been a more complete book if it had followed its discussion of Michael Jackson with one about Prince, the "brother" who replaced the Gloved One in the limelight of the spectacle when Thriller!'s bubble finally burst. While both Michael Jackson and Prince are "sexy," the former's sexuality is a spectacular but unthematized secret; the latter's sexuality is an overtly stated promise that the divisions between male and female, and straight and gay, can be superseded in everyday life. In Michael Jackson, the past or prehistory comes to an end. In Prince, the future -- your future -- begins. God save that queen.
[Essay first published in NOT BORED! #18, 1990.]
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