NOTES OF A REBEL ANGEL

-a Taoist vision of popular culture by John Savlove/SaveLove Music/john@savlove.com

Part One: Internal Combustion

Socrates is absolutely right when he teaches, “Know thyself.” What can’t be said in a
two word phrase, however, is that the self is an interdisciplinary study. Double majors
include Inner and Outer Self, Chemical and Essential Self, Conscious and Unconscious
Self, and more, with at least a thousand subtopics per field. A term as broad as
“sexuality” fits in all over the place. While it is too easy to say there are as many sexual
types as there are people, the fair observation is that people take on varying mixtures of
sexual preferences and habits. Knowing the self led me to the type of sexuality I promote
today. Some call it Tantric; some call it Taoist; others derive the principles from Egyptian
or even certain European sources; a few laymen may just think “semen retention”. People
who practice it do not share all the same preferences or habits, but they are all engaged in
an approach that consciously links the physical, emotional and spiritual processes. That is
why I think people involved in this practice are part of the most potentially valuable and
shamefully ignored minority group of them all.

For the sake of an umbrella term, I’m going to call all such sex alchemic. The word
speaks to the transformational aspect at work no matter which philosophical sect is
backing it up. This writer’s path was to focus on the techniques as taught by Mantak
Chia. Parallel interests in related scholars such as Wilhelm Reich helped me form my
own custom-made perspective. I worked out for myself how it could not be contradictory
to embrace both the inducement to regulate one’s organs/emotions Chia’s Taoist school
teaches - and the spontaneous orgasm crucial to the psychophysical dearmoring for
Reich. And indeed, the trick is in knowing the complex sets of flows as related to the
self. No matter how many different kind of workshops you attend, you’ll still be the you
who started out at birth. Just about everyone has figured out by now that we humans
come equipped to do a lot more than few among us have even begun to do. The notion
that the essential information contained in the sperm or the egg could be transmuted to
serve one’s own body made sense to me. A microcosm of art-school West meets suitably-
diluted East, the idea has been to slowly upgrade the various levels in their harmonized
turns – the muscles and bones, the moods and ambitions, every relationship from the core
on out. The breathing doesn’t always have to be smooth, but when breath settles into a
blissful groove you know the ride was worth taking. Sometimes it’s with a partner,
sometimes alone. Sometimes in groups! But for alchemical couples, breathing is integral
to the sex. And again, because popular attention to conscious breathing is much greater
now than it used to be, more people are set up to make this leap into a new realm of
pleasure than ever before.

The point of this piece, then, is not so much to instruct technically as it is to imagine a
culture where people take such concepts as the norm. Surely one can get a feel for what
we’re talking about without actually experiencing it. You can get a feel for racecar
driving just by reading the blurb on the book-jacket. Between the book, TV, imagination,
and knowing firsthand what it’s like to hit 75 in a Ford, you can put yourself in the
driver’s shoes. But NASCAR does not come with quite as all-encompassing a set of
cultural implications. At the bookstore or library, car racing is classified under Sports or
Automotive. The Kama Sutra finds its place in Eastern Religion or Sexuality. It will not
find its way into Politics or Gender Studies because the Kama Sutra already fills its shelf
appropriately. As the most beloved how-to manual to emerge from classical Hindu
literature, there is no reason to change its slot in the compartments of Knowledge. But to
show the ways modern practitioners of Kama Sutra or some such similar approach to sex
will naturally come to bear influence on other non-sexual aspects of life – that is a
challenge for positive integration barely explored by today’s cultural theorists. The
society is so stacked against such integration that even people engaged in alchemical sex
would understandably be unsure as to how to make an impact beyond the bedroom.

How would culture be different? Well, for starters, there would be fewer explosions.
This is perhaps the most obvious place to begin; even so, the levels are vast. The first
distinction to be made is between real-life and entertainment explosions. No one is
suggesting the cessation of all explosions of either type. However, if we get to thinking
about how many explosions are seen or made each day for the sake of illustrating
fictitious screenplays, we already know that there are just too many. We may disagree on
why there are too many: some may claim they make us insensitive to violence, others that
they appeal to our basest instincts, and not a few popcorn fans would say they’ve become
redundant as to finally be boring. But we know we’re used to entertainment explosions,
and we pride ourselves on our ability to distinguish them from real-life explosions. The
phony explosions drive the plot and race our adrenalin. The real-life ones we want to be
very far from unless executing them under controlled conditions. Hollywood is in turmoil
because it knows that the era of truly explosive blockbusters is over – now action flicks
cram the special effects and the execs expect them to fill seats. No one seems to know
what other stimuli might appeal to the mass-market male. Now let us stop to imagine if
that very pool of common men was accustomed to knowing the difference between
orgasm and ejaculation. This may seem dreadfully unrealistic, all the same, imagine
them: Young men who at least know they have a choice --- between the old-fashioned
spasm or the full-body sweep. Either way, the pleasure of arousal will be followed by an
outcome of some kind, with many degrees of possibility between the quick spurt and
love-stoned endless streaming. The male has been conditioned to believe in a generalized
discharge, a rush to climax parsed only by how adept he is at prolonging before the
inevitable. Suddenly these men no longer believe that. Instead they are sitting in the same
old cine-plex watching the latest action flick in possession of an expanded set of
information that has reorganized their belief system. Suddenly they see through not only
the shallow pleasures of the massive explosion scenes, but as well the motivations
guiding all the characters in the story. That’s right! Any man – of any position or
background – will earn himself a top grade as Character Analyst simply by holding back
and working with his sperm energy long enough to discern different kinds of orgasm. Far
from preposterous, this is true for the same reason why intelligent, well-meaning liberals
often remain stuck or stymied – because precepts need to be embodied on the
physiological level if the emotions and intellect are ever to realize their best intentions.
 So we’re back at Blockbuster video where, remember, the most fanciful part of our
fantasy is that men could reach these conclusions suddenly rather than after years of
diligent development. They are in the store, confronting the array of dramas, adventures,
documentaries, and comedies. About the only place alchemical sex gets mention is in
comedies. Comedy is a saving grace and anything worth thinking about gets made fun of
at some point. The other category would be science-fiction. Because while sexual union
may not be the only way to get into what’s goes on in the Matrix or an ET’s telepathy, the
transmutation of sperm or ovarian energy can only help. I would consider it a key. To
unlock what exactly is where the selection of available DVDs falls short, if only because
we don’t want really want our heroes so developed beyond the point of irony. What
would the plots of films about enlightened people be about? Is it possible for a film
without villains to hold all the dramatic tension of a killer thriller? The initial reaction is
that any story without a central conflict is going to be boring. As it happens, the
unraveling to greater meaning in truth and soul is fraught with conflicts. And there are
many fine films concerned with such themes, just not yet a few about modern people who
use these alchemical concepts as a springboard for their comedy, their problem-solving,
their attitude. Conflicts are like jobs – they turn over. Meanwhile, modern cinema’s
Sensitive Guy lumbers through his evolutions, but neither as comic foil nor as dramatic
counterpart to a thicker skinned hombre does this necessary archetype come close to
approaching the kind of sensitivity that propels behavior into a whole new flowering of
civil society. Which brings us – maybe just a little too quickly – to another question: If
large audiences were to turn away from epic warfare and other firestorms due to waning
consumer satisfaction, how much longer before a changed popular imagination affected
government policy? There’s an analogy to be made between explosions of buildings and
explosions of temper. We all love explosions of temper in the movies! In real life, though,
they inflict real pain. Every little kid knows how much fun it is to make things go boom-
boom; and adults do not have to forsake acts of destruction to mature into responsible
citizens. The point of adulthood would seem to be the responsibility for the breadth of
expressive endeavor. The big picture is in how the sensitivity with which a man relates to
his woman is reflected in his dealings with other men. The separation between work and
home along traditional lines helped reinforce limits in the marital connection, in accord
with the customarily limited sense of sexuality and station that defined the society’s
winners and losers. The classic male quick-fix when faced with this stasis was to quietly
have an affair with his secretary. The women’s movement has helped break down the old
patriarchal divisions, but without an accompanying push towards enlightened male
empowerment, the single moms and tough new female role models are far from enjoying
the kind of power that is truly our collective birthright.

As an alchemical lover, a man’s sense of what it means to feel secure would change.
The performance anxiety that comes part and parcel with the old conditioning has given
way to a trustful awareness of his nature. He enters his 40s, 50s and 60s with as much
sexual vigor as his 30s. Viagra is never on the recirculative man’s shopping list. At the
same time, his penis is no longer a weapon of conquest. He has no taste for secrecy or
concealment. He wove an enduring intimacy with his partner that didn’t sputter into mid-
life crisis for either of them. They’ve kept on chooglin’ grooving to the subtler movement
of the two great imperatives of pop, COOL and HOT. He does not experience the slow
dissipation of a man who ejaculated every time he sought it for the last thirty years.
Rather, he finds himself at the start of the next stage, for which converting his ching seed
essence to chi was the foundation. At 50 his circulatory system is flushed with enough
chi to begin impacting “Iron Shirt” blood cells through the organs and bone marrow. And
it all happened organically – didn’t cost any money really - the healing arose from the
sheer nature of his own biochemistry. So this reconstructed man presents the Christian
ideology of what is right with some serious contradictions: The man is wholesome, open,
honest, and vociferous in his appetite for righteous love making. How can the Christian
state defend itself with an army of men who’ve abandoned all their aggression games?
Afraid enough of humanity’s innate (i.e. “God-given”) powers to wage a separate war
against its own creative thinkers, the Christian soldiers are not yet quick enough to realize
that this is the War of the Information Age, with the first culture to prove how useless the
subjugation of women is to the rest of the world the winner. But you can be sure the
pharmaceutical companies don’t want to hear about these wonders. Not to mention the
way these findings lend themselves to other sets of information that governments tend to
block stiffly, including the Gaia Hypothesis, dowsing, vibrational medicine, extra sensory
perception, even the common sense of photovoltaic cells. To be nakedly secure about
one’s feelings is dangerous to anyone still halfway in denial. To feel both nakedly secure
and physically better than the lure of rewards and punishments offered at the gym is a
threat to Western manhood quite the opposite of the terrorist threat. It is the ecstaticist
threat.

From all sides nay-sayers abound. People you thought would love this discussion are
backing off. The media is saturated with vulgarity but when your bro starts talking up
sexual enlightenment, that’s somehow impolite. The guys really aren’t like-minded. The
leap may demand shedding too many layers of deviancy for it to be much fun at all. “The
world is for fighters and takes everything you’ve got. Now you tell me I can’t pop my
wad either? Forget it. It’s against nature. You’ll never get an 18 year-old to do that. The
hormones won’t allow it. And to hell with altruism and will. We work too hard for what
we do have. Our women think so too. Now you’re going to say the women are as
brainwashed as the men. My woman wants a dude who competes - who works hard,
plays hard, and comes hard.” One day the alchemical man smiles with wry sympathy
upon his opponent, the FCC censor, observing his own disgust with the televised product
delivered by his edgy East & West Coast friends. As minority groups go, this one’s going
to get shoved aside every time… for not being needy on the one hand, and for not being
respected as really necessary on the other. Clearly cosmic energy is just as available to
homosexuals, but gays aren’t remembered for putting Tantra on the agenda. It hasn’t
found its center of charm yet; multi-orgasmic tranquility still holds little appeal for the
voyeur. No wonder it’s such a flop at the movies.

And so it is back to the movies for our forlorn hero. He returns home to his alchemical
wife with a small pile of rentals, ready to revisit the predominant themes once more,
humbled by how difficult it is just to make one little bit of difference in the world. They
settle down to the lot with a little trick they learned from yoga. Like an inherent preface
to the practice of renewal, being present guarantees bringing something new to the shape.
The lovers feel the same way about movies and music. The finished works are fixed,
archived, and on hand for any time. They don’t change, but our experience of them does
because we have. The alchemical couple starts off with a porno. It doesn’t fit into the
surroundings well, but they press on until fully detached by it, and momentarily confused
as to how millions of people spend billions of dollars annually watching one-dimensional
sex on a two-dimensional surface. Later they go for some great acting. This time around
they’re looking at the bands of tension in people’s bodies.

“Look at the constricted upper lip on that army general! He holds himself just like a
military creature would, and the glazing over the eyes is spot on.”

“Look at how many of the suspense and comedies are about deception of some kind –
betrayal, subterfuge, misdirected passion.”

“Nobody is well except in the family films.”

“Yeah, but if those characters are such models, why does it work out that upon
graduation into adulthood all the action still inexorably shifts towards war, injustice,
greed, lust, murder, and revenge?”

“Because they have no idea how to sustain energetic romance in a domestic setting?”

“Could be, darling.”

They’re brainstorming now about those unwritten hits. New rites of passage stories,
psychic courtships, heroes with a gift for only telling the truth.

“How about an emphasis on retention as a natural form of birth-control – something to

unite all those who seek a healthy alternative to abortion?”

“To unwanted pregnancy. The love consciousness combined with the technique is a
double-pronged approach to sane family planning!”

“The Bible-thumper who turned Japanese?”

“Y’know honey? The plots and archetypes of cinema might be a little absurd, a little
beyond anyone’s reach. But not the highly suggestive, platitude-filled world of popular
song. The next step in seeding the alchemical interface with the parent culture would
have to be through music.”

“Mmm-hmm. I can hardly wait to re-mix ‘Endless Love’!”

Part Two: Steam Heat

 The discussion reaches a serious turning point here because both Tantra and music go
back thousands of years whereas the movies are recent phenomena. We don’t want to
consider music as pure sound so much as music in conjunction with words and stated
ideas. Today there is a virtually endless supply of music to use as a background to love
making, Tantric or otherwise. The New Age section at the record shop is an analog to
Eastern Religion at the bookstore: in their own department, consumers attracted to this
niche peruse varieties of trance, meditation and international music without it impacting
much on aspects of culture offered elsewhere. That is all good in the realistic assessment
of this movement’s inroads into modern life. Influences can remain superficial for the
longest of times, and then suddenly – pow! - they’re giving acupuncture to major league
athletes.

But what we are dealing with here is no less than the direct lineage of the 21st century
troubadour to the form’s pre-historical beginnings. By prehistoric, I am referring to the
Sufi origins of the word and its mission, which go way past the usual associations with
the 12th century Provencal balladeer. We are used to the romantic vein that connects the
troubadour with French medieval courtly love and follows him, in secular parallel to the
history of the Church, right through to the searching troves of a Bob Dylan or Frank
Sinatra. According to Idries Shah and his scholarly sources, Arabic minstrelsy as
performed in Saracen Spain and southern France throughout earlier centuries was adapted
by the Europeans, sweeping musical and sentimental similarities along, including phrases
in translation. However, writes Shah, the meanings connected to the word root TRB
extend beyond ardor and into mastery, rule, and the covenant of generations. “Seen in the
light of Sufic usage, therefore, we are not dealing with a phenomenon of Arab minstrelsy,
but with the efforts of a group of Sufi teachers, in which the love theme was a part of the
whole. The idealization of woman or the playing of the viol are insignificant but
nonetheless partial aspects of the whole.” Neither is this, mercifully, the final emphasis
on womankind in the Sufi literature.

A digression into Sufism is useful, then. Worth admitting at this point is that I know
much more about pop music than I do about Sufis, Taoists, or Hindus. Rock and roll led
me to spirituality; as a child, religion never led me anywhere. But I’ve learned enough
since to make these observations cohere. What can be concluded is that if we seek
alchemical love making in major religions, we find it in their mystical sects, for which in
each of them the larger religion serves as a shell: Tantra lives within Hinduism and
Buddhism; Taoism filtered into Confusicianism; the Sufis are a part of Islam; the Kabala
is Judaic; the Knights Templar and other Western Magick maintain an allegiance to
Christ. Taoism is most attractive to me because it is the most physiologically specific
about what rebirthing guru Leonard Orr calls “the science of everlasting life”. The Sufis,
though, are the most elusive and the most adamant about conscious evolution. To be a
Sufi is in fact not to be a member of any religion. Sufis are on a “path”; a devotee joins
an Order and picks up on that particular skein of the weave. The Sufis, in their constant
reminding of the disciple of how much must remain cloaked - until the right teacher
appears; until the perceptual organs are properly developed; perhaps never for most of
present day humanity – remind us of how hollow our usual sense of expertise is about life
and most certainly mystical experience. The Sufis take as much joy as they can in
everything, including humility. They believe in the sensual life, in seeing the face of the
totality in one’s beloved, and in open-hearted service to the world… Alchemical sex
would be cloaked. The exemplary marriage, modest and chaste, is what is seen. Sufis will
at least provide a poetic discourse on the complexities of love’s intoxications; Buddhists
often view Tantric sex as best when used metaphorically only, because, say the Friends of
the Western Buddhist Order, “For those experienced enough to see and feel themselves to
be a Buddha, it is highly unlikely they would want to involve themselves with sex at all!”
In other words, lazy people need not apply. 21st century abstinence is obviously
problematic, but so is the sheathing of sexual wonderment, with no chance for political
visibility when even the mentors of its own home religions consider the stuff too hot or
powerful or liable to slip into the profane to pass on to their congregations. Why
shouldn’t it be brought out? What’s so darn perfect about the whole system now that
normal people shouldn’t know more about this sexuality?

Which is why pop culture could be a glorious response to this problem. Pop culture is
all about loose connections. What began in the crystalline desert sands of an ancient
awareness is now a pop cliché that can and will be taken to many, many levels: “I will
always love you.” Like the most perfect form to be filled by the work of a lifetime. How
many people immediately hear Whitney Houston when they read that line? Let those
words ring out with sincerity to a man’s parents, teachers, high school sweetheart, bride,
children, concubine, friends, enemies, care givers, gods, and self alike! Love can and
cannot be reduced to an advertising slogan. It serves the sublime and the ridiculous and
the mundane. Love is powerful and free, yet also bought and sold. The internet
accelerates all these uses of love by sorting and locating information instantly – making
all internet information part of pop culture. That’s why pop-ups are naturals for your
computer screen! They’re all competing for the real pop in pop culture, the population,
which, conditioned as we may be, does decide what is popular. The phrase goes on to
play off all the fun things that go pop like weasels, fizzy drinks, balloons, and oh wow
releases. It wasn’t too long ago that a college sophomore could not surf from a Science
Fiction & Fantasy Forum to web-sites containing the key words “Sufi” and “sex”. Out of
this enormous jumble of continually re-ordered knowledge the loose connections thrive
and grow tighter.

It doesn’t surprise me that Rumi’s name appeared in the first two entries after
Googling “Sufi” and “sex”. I was going to write about him anyway. Google just proved
that if pop culture made a household name out of an ecstatic Islamic poet, that would be
Jelaluddin Rumi. Kabir is hardly a close second. Modern readers receive Rumi most
often through Coleman Barks’ translations, who earned his reputation for an accessible
and pertinent rendering of Persian dialect. One has to dig – those first two Google entries
won’t do it – but Rumi does depict the difference between bad and good orgasm. In the
Mathnawi there is a section Barks puts into English as “Sexual Urgency, What a
Woman’s Laughter Can Do, and the Nature of True Virility”. It is the tale of the Caliph,
in love with a beautiful girl, who loses his lust for her after he senses that beautiful love
was made between she and the Captain who brought her to him. He is the hero of the
story in that he gives her up, but the Captain is a hero for the qualities he displays during
and after the slaying of a lion threatening her tent:

The engagement, the coming together, is as with the lion.

His penis stays erect all through it,
And it does not scatter semen feebly.
The beautiful one is amazed at his virility.
Immediately, with great energy she joins with his energy,
And their two spirits go out from them as one.

Whenever two are linked this way, there comes another from the Unseen world.
It may be through birth, if nothing prevents conception,
But a third does come, when two unite in love, or in hate.
The intense qualities born of such joining appear in the spiritual world.

You will recognize them when you go there

Your associations bear progeny.
Be careful, therefore.

There are two more important points that the history of the Sufis helps clarify. The first
is about the length of time it takes to reach stages of knowledge and eventually gain
mastery. No one expects teen-agers to forsake their growth spurts for the esoteric craft of
transmutation. The world of difference would be in the educational milieu. By the time
young men might be ready to put their fledgling enlightenment to the physical
extrapolation, they would actually be prepared to do so, having noted the examples of
men in their 40s and 50s. The legacy of alcoholism, abuse, insatiable financial growth,
and wrath – that’s the part that’s supposed to recede into some pool of post-discovery
situated inversely away from the slender strip of arcane knowledge now slowly spreading
out. Ejaculation would be understood and supported as part of the growth process. The
moral environment would be much saner and many sex-related problems would decline.

The second point is about gender equality. When referring earlier to the pre-historical
roots of the troubadour, I did not only mean in terms of the Sufis. Scholars like Riane
Eisler take their pre-history all the way back to evidence of Goddess worship in the
Paleolithic Age, and she begins her dissertation in full around 6000 B.C. E. at the birth of
Cretan society. The Chalice and the Blade and Sacred Pleasure present her account of the
psychosexual landscape in all its historical scope. Needless to say, I agree with her
equating the matriarchy with partnership and the patriarchy with domination. She is wary
of a “male-centered” mentality in Tantra and the Kabala, authored by men, teaching with
an attitude that “still elevates the male spiritual experience over both the ‘inferior’ woman
and the ‘inferior’ bodily or carnal realm”. The Sufis, under the shell of Islam, suffer this
contradiction in spades. The Tao is not mentioned in Eisler’s section about Eastern and
Western mysticism. The I Ching, the Taoist text that delineates the interplay of masculine
and feminine elementally, frequently concerns itself with the difficulties of keeping
wisdom alive within a larger religious or royal framework. As a child of the comic-book
culture that Eisler sagely views as a blend of patriarchal domination riddled with some
pagan sacred femme, my sense of the troubadour’s quest begins soon after the destruction
of the matriarchal agragarian communities by the barbaric nomad-horsemen. The
troubadour has been evoking those long gone nights of bliss ever since.

The biological imperative of the woman who rears and the man who roams is hard to
deny, but the point of the Information/Aquarian Age should be ultimately the
improvement of mating, tending, and birthing itself. There are indications in all this
literature – Sufi, Gnostic, Morphic, you name it – that alchemical love making is the
cornerstone of a harmoniously evolved society, but for it to really work the genders have
to be more openly balanced. Thousands of years of conditioning have deflected us away
from this perception of pleasure. Everything can be interpreted as a tug toward this
suppressed perception. All the while artists have sought this harmony, a few of them
remembered, most of them forgotten. There are no doubt hundreds of other living
musicians, writers, rappers, film-makers, and dancers besides this author who have
created an independent body of work celebrating sexual alchemy. But to be true to the
theme of popular culture, this discussion revolves around copyrighted artifacts from the
established canon, although the market chaos of free downloads offered by any on-line
artiste is already dismantling the corporate entertainment hierarchy.

A few titles spring to mind. The Dominos’ “Sixty Minute Man” was the decisive link
between old-time hokum and the blue boasting of a Willie Dixon or Prince. Dr. CC,
“Strokin’” Clarence Carter, is a classic paragon of the ever-lasting prescription, yet even
he foresees a day when “Grandpa Can’t Fly His Kite”. With lyrics that go no deeper than
the title, Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” is inspirationally non-specific, all things to all
people. Can we all agree that “Sexual healing is good for me”? Likewise, the Pointer
Sisters were probably not thinking about Tantra-fusion when they sang, “I’ve got a man
with a slow hand” – but they were on the way. Their lover is not one to “come and go in a
heated rush”. Indeed, cooling off the organs, especially the brain, is a hallmark of this
approach. Directing the breath with conscious intent is the key to that. Sting, reputed to
club all night and practice yoga in the morning, doesn’t show much Tantric subtext in his
lyrics, but “Every Breath You Take” revisited can turn a guy brooding over his ex with a
stalker’s mentality into a reassuring psychic commitment fueled by respiratory
magnetism! Spirituality and sex are both easy enough to find in rock – but because they
are rarely conjoined in this way one must look more closely into the proportions. Rock
progressives schooled in quantum mumbo jumbo often reflected back quite beautifully,
such as Jon Anderson’s lyrics for Yes: “Cord of Life”, “Total Mass Retain”, “…all
complete in the sight of seeds of life with you.”

When we leave the broad brush stroke – e.g. Steve Winwood singing “bring me a
higher love” - for more specific poetics, that’s when we feel the energetic split in
romantic consciousness more acutely. This is because as soon as one gets serious the
burden of the Judeo-Christian ethic comes to bear. The integrity of the Goddess was
raised in fiction and film recently by the Da Vinci Code, an entertainment that brought the
mass market that much closer to the fabric of our Western tension. Madonna succeeded in
subverting the image attached to her name world-wide twenty years earlier – although
she has advanced woman’s empowerment more within the “Madonna and Whore” duality
than actually transforming it. Madonna slams the old iconography with the new in
spectacle after spectacle, keeping it fun, still on the dance floor, still pop. But in rock
(not pop) steeps the subtler literary traditions. 20th century rock: The era that suggested
kindred spirits between John Lennon and James Joyce; Brian Jones and Percy Shelley;
Bruce Springsteen and John Steinbeck. With Dylan their Poet Laureate, the modern bards
keep the slipstream alive in front of the greater minds of our heritage. Some of those gave
word in favor of alchemical sex – Sir Richard Burton, Carl Jung, Colin Wilson; most of
them stayed off to the other side – Dante, St. Augustine, Foucault; a few of them were
open enough to alchemy itself for the sex to not be too far behind – Goethe, Paracelsus,
William Blake, Rudolf Steiner. In the rock ‘n roll family of punks and poets, I’ve
identified one artist each with in favor of and not too far behind: the Clash and Patti
Smith. We’ll deal first with Patti Smith.

Smith is a pivotal figure in the dialogue between rock and literature. She came up as a
poet, living in the Chelsea Hotel with Robert Mapplethorpe as anonymous art students in
the wake of the Beats. She collaborated on a play with Sam Shepherd. Eventually she
found her way to the intonation of her work over the rumblings of electric guitar. She
spawned punk rock in the same way Led Zeppelin spawned heavy metal: as transcendent
artistes stewed in slipstream, already beyond what would follow. From her first small
press book Seventh Heaven to her latest CD, Patti Smith proclaims her influences –
Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Jim Morrison. As she matures, other heroes surface – Blake,
Gandhi. At the height of her earlier period, on Easter, Smith explored the lunar silver and
solar gold of alchemy. But the verses were bound to be in terms of crap rather than
communion, because all those rebels were waging a War of Love, and the ecstasy of that
in its nth degree is Patti Smith’s punk rock:

the transformation of waste

is perhaps the oldest pre-occupation of man
man being the chosen alloy
he must be reconnected – via shit, at all cost
inherent with(in) us is the dream of the task
of the alchemist to create from the clay of man
and to re-create from excretion of man
pure and then soft and then solid gold

The communion is in the alienation from the parent culture. The strange glimpse into a
chaos of love and light that separates the sensitive out is already too much to tolerate. It
elicits disgust for everything, not bliss. Jim Morrison knew that he was uncomfortable in
his body and that to “break on through to the other side” the psyche’s repressed darkness
must be explored. Like Sid Vicious and Rimbaud, he died young. But even Blake, who
was so uncommonly happy in his domestic life and receptive to supernatural visions,
existed in a context where sexual alchemy was at best theoretical but more likely just
indulgent or absurd. Patti Smith is a survivor. She quit the game after her next album,
married a likewise prototypical punk from Detroit, the MC5’s Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, and
raised a family. He died of a heart attack at age 45. She’d continued to publish through
the laidback years and was already making her musical comeback. The quality of elegy
always so true to Smith permeates her latter day work – for her husband, for the Middle
East, for everything in the world the artist sees and to which she dedicates.
 The Clash were original punks too, only from England, where their movement
emerged more in parallel than as exported by Patti or the cartoonish Ramones. British
punks were desolate, extreme, angry, and political. The only other English band from that
period to come close to the Clash’s enduring presence is the Sex Pistols, and for the
opposite reason. The Sex Pistols self-destructed almost immediately, true to the nihilistic
faux-art outrage their manager put them up to. The Clash started out fast and loud, but
Joe Strummer brought the intelligence of an international army brat to his London pub
band, and it shows in the lyrics on their first album and in their early nod to Jamaica as
well. By the time they put out their third album, on which the song at issue here appears,
the Clash had expanded in every direction, holing up in the studio with a legendary
producer, offering pastiches of song styles to amplify their themes, responding to the
Beatles, as it were, on firm footing. That album, London Calling, from 1979, received
deluxe treatment for its 25th anniversary edition in 2004 and was an occasion for
magazines to put the Clash on their cover. Joe Strummer had already died by then, at 50,
another sudden heart attack. Co-writer Mick Jones and the rest were available for looks
back on the making of a milestone. Everybody knows that London Calling isn’t great for
“Lover’s Rock”, but for the martial drive, the hoarse wild singing, the savage wit, the
sublimely detailed musical and historical trenchancy, all in the name of revolution! It was
a 2-record set, which mattered more back before downloads sorted everything into
shuffled or alphabetical tracks. On web-site fan reviews this one is almost always
overlooked or trashed. The only rock song explicitly about semen retention appears at the
start of side 4, the concluding side, and,… well let’s look at what the editors of Uncut had
to say about “Lover’s Rock” in their quick track by track for the Clash tribute edition: “If
every masterpiece has its flaws then this clumsy sermon on contraception to a rock-
reggae slouch is the LP’s weak point.” By way of comparison, the next track is “Four
Horsemen”: “Death rides a horse while smoking a spliff. The Clash send up The Book of
Revelations in swaggering style.”

By now it should be painfully clear what is going on here to anyone who understands
what has been written so far. The editors of Uncut can only see what they know. They are
not thinking about the barbaric nomad-horsemen who stripped the feminine codes away
with their first rape of the land; these are critics interested in the culture as it is.
Strummer, Jones, and Co. lead us on a tour de force through Thatcher’s backstreets,
Hollywood, Wall Street, the Spanish Civil War, Stagger Lee, industrial clampdown, and
apocalypse. Side Four segues from the horsemen to “I’m Not Down” and “Revolution
Rock”, worthy and different takes towards the positive. It is a classic set with an organic
unity which could be no more aptly completed than by a “hidden track”, unlisted on the
jacket, which turned out to be their first FM hit: “Train in Vain”. That was Jones’ hit, a
girl-lets-down-guy song with a good tense rhythm. The Clash rarely sang about girls. “If
you ain’t thinkin’ about man and God and law, then you ain’t thinkin’ about nothin’-”
that’s Joe Strummer in an interview. Joe was survived by his second wife and a pair of
daughters, but he had split bitterly with Jones over these related questions of success and
direction once the Clash reached their commercial apex at album 5, Combat Rock. (Along
with the band’s biggest hits, Patti Smith and the Clash find their true celebrity
intersection here when Allen Ginsberg incants throughout “Ghetto Defendant”.) Some of
their tracks feel evenly partnered – you can’t always be sure who did most of the writing.
“Lover’s Rock” is one of those, and Jones’ comments in the Uncut piece do not clarify.
But they do make it clear that, as an idea, this kind of sex was worth thinking about, just
not worth thinking about long and hard:

UNCUT: “Lover’s Rock” was unusually introspective for the Clash, wasn’t it?

JONES: A song doesn’t always have to be about a big subject. You can sometimes tackle a small
subject and see how you go. I don’t know if we were the best group at depicting emotional
personal relationships, but we kind of stabbed at it, if you’ll excuse the pun.

Strummer certainly sounds like he knows what he’s talking about as he whoops in
between unison lines sung with Jones, furthering the case that the words are his. Without
further ado let’s scan the lyrics of a groove rather more suave than as reported earlier:

Yeh, you must treat your lover girl right – if you wanna make Lovers Rock
You must know a place you can kiss – to make Lovers Rock
Cos everybody knows it’s a crying shame
But nobody knows the poor babies’ name
When she forgot that thing - that she had to swallow

You Western man you’re free with your seed – when you make Lovers Rock
But whoops! There goes the strength that you need – to make real cool Lovers Rock
Cos a genuine lover
Takes off his clothes
And he can make a lover in a thousand go’s
An’ she don’t need that thing – that she had to swallow

His nervous system is geared for the eventual heart collapse, yet if he were so indulged
in a midnight bull session, one can see Joe thinking it through like this: Well, forget
anybody who grew up on a pogo stick, cos they’re gonna knock it, eh? That’s our
audience. OK. The Church said sex is only for procreation, and that having it just for
pleasure is wrong. Obviously that’s wrong, but the tradition taints sex and screws us into
seeking guilty pleasures that lead to emotionally unsatisfying relationships. The sex my
Indian matey told me about is better for the woman, ultimately better for the man, and at
the end of the day amounts to the most satisfying non-pro, you know, RECkreative sex.
(pause ~ dead silence) And bullocks if I can’t get drunk to do it. (they laugh)

Conclusion: a Circuited Sphere

Tantric is also a 21st century grunge-rock band who sing of the usual struggles and
turmoil with a grim determination not particularly resonant with their name. No matter.
The very use of the word speaks to the trendiness of the concept. Anyway, it’s a wonder
rock survives at all. New Age teachings as filtered through, say, Todd Rundgren were
thought of as too cerebral then. After a full generation of the beat’s surrender to hip-hop
thunder and digital lightning, imagine how many of today’s listeners feel the same way
about the Beatles. And to the extent that they are correct, this is good news. John
Lennon’s vision was more in his head than in his body. Lennon’s is one saga that doesn’t
need retelling. To bring this exposition full circle, we return now to the two names
referenced at its very start, Mantak Chia and Wilhelm Reich. We reintroduce them to
Riane Eisler, and expect mighty grandchildren.

Taoism, as mentioned earlier, meets Eisler’s standard by not displaying that archaic
image of male royalty like the Kama Sutra. Any man who publishes with his wife a
companion female sexual cultivation book to the male is not likely to be the object of
male dominator theory. Such is the case with Chia. Mantak and Maneewan are modern
people dealing with eternal truths, energies that are always there to be tapped. The
feminine/masculine principle is easily corrupted in dominator culture, but in Taoist
cultivation, the beauty is that each gender circulates an independent balance of yin and
yang within before going to the partner for further exchange of essences. Two dynamic
unities of opposite gender together for a meeting of the spheres.

And that should conclude the piece right there. Except the world is much more cruel
and convoluted than that, and so we return to Reich to complete the breadth of vision that
has allowed this progress. Reich represents the place where psychoanalytic therapy first
embraces a holistic paradigm. The spirituality of people half-frozen in their skin is
“mystico-mechanico” impulses that breed passive religion and superstition. The Christ-
head, as he saw it, is the man Jesus pulsating cosmic streams with the orgone, the
universal energy. Eisler refers to Reich a few times in Sacred Pleasure, and to one of his
primary torch bearers, James DeMeo. DeMeo uses archaeological and paleo-climactic
evidence to support the theory of Saharasia, the desert belt that includes northern Africa,
the Middle East and part of Asia, as once green country turned arid over time by
ecological changes brought on by the nomadic incursions. She mostly agrees, adding
differences and amplifications. She quibbles with Reich occasionally, but only because
he’s already a little dated. There was no such thing as Gender Studies when he wrote.
Wilhelm Reich died in prison because governments were afraid of his orgone
accumulators. They had no use for his cloud-busters and other urgently needed science
because the system could not tolerate anything he had to say. In one short life Reich
uncovered it all – character analysis, body armoring, the function of orgasm, the sub-
cellular soma, the biopathy of cancer, the repression and the potential – but he did not get
to enjoy cosmic energy so much as understand it.

Jung receives no mention in Sacred Pleasure and only a sole passing one in The
Chalice and the Sword, a notable omission for works this comprehensive. My conjecture
is that Jung is an array of interesting evolutionary aspects without ever addressing head-
on the systemic indoctrination against women. Jung’s name is more prominent in the
popular imagination than Reich’s. He too was one to explore as far as he could in his field
of study – different from but quite as illuminating to Western thought as Reich – again,
functioning as an intellectual. Jung’s lesson as perceived by a 21st century kid with barely
the time for an hour of Bill Moyers is that his brain receives visual language like a
computer, except instead of it all being in 0s and 1s, it’s in symbol, then psyche, psyche,
symbol, symbol, psyche, symbol, symbol, that sort of thing. What the kid is actually
doing is watching television shows peopled with psychic detectives, teen-age witches,
and science-fiction heroes who take materializing in and out of space for granted. Inter-
dimensional romances are more common than Taoist sex on TV, although in real life yoga
would be recommended to precede or facilitate the weirder stuff. Freud, Eisler admits,
figured out that everything relates to the pleasure principle. As a straight male feminist
constantly facing the alienation this path must endure, the most heartening thing I can say
to Riane Eisler is that more women are leading the way. One place to prepare the body
and soul for alchemy is a good yoga class, where the majority of teachers and students
are usually women.

Delayed gratification is a Judeo-Christian strategy. It keeps the castes flexible by

sorting out the diligent from the lazy. But it does not square well with the quick male
ejaculation (the prototype for instant gratification?), nor does it accurately describe the
alchemical process, which is a continuous mounting and receding of small pleasures
along the way to greater releases. If hedonism has a bad reputation, it’s because people
are harmed in the wake of selfish pleasure-seeking. However, to trace both self-awareness
and pleasure is to eventually become wholesome. Civilization has not yet found the
patience to absorb this direction. Instead, there is a seemingly eternal push and pull
between chaos and order, a tug between opposing viewpoints that keeps the war between
ideologies something like the friction of sex.

The metaphors are shifting. Would you rather think of yourself as a car or a computer?
Sure, carbohydrates are the gas inserted at the top of the food tube, with incompatible
mixtures resulting in anal exhaust. But check out the way toddlers adapt almost instantly
to keyboards and mouse clicks, as if their consciousness was already updated to work
with the design. Our electrical heating and cooling systems are accessed through yoga,
and, through greater extension, sexual alchemy. Technology can assist us in our return to
instinct, but it cannot do the work for us any more than drugs – neither LSD nor Prozac –
can do the work for us. The wiring is ours. The body is a cauldron with the heart at its
center. Consciously directed breath stokes the furnace. The guts are another brain. Light
is our vehicle. This information gets disseminated to the public by two basic distribution
streams with their own push and pull of separating and coalescing, the corporate and
independent. Regardless of which stream or merger has the most to do with getting this
remedy into gear, one thing’s for sure: Tantric sex is more than just a drop in the bucket.

JOHN SAVLOVE

March 2007