The following is Russell Brand’s explanation of how he knows whether a female orgasm is real:
“There’s eye-rolling ecstasy, the bacchanalian loss of self where they’re ready to tear up the trees, the grapes are being ripped from the vines, animals are being strewn across the forest. I think the roots of misogyny are in the unity women have with universal forces when they come. Men go, ‘What are they doing?’ They become goddesses with oceanic pleasure that looks like it may never end and could devour us.”
Are you scared of the orgasm?
“I was a bit scared of them, when I was younger. It’s a bit frightening, this transformative quality, an orgasm in women. I imagine that it looks better than the miserable squirt men issue. It seems different, though, when there’s an emotional element — transcendent.” http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/comedy/article6896096.ece
I was reminded of this while sitting in St Joseph’s Catholic Church in Paris on Saturday evening, accompanying my American friend who was singing at mass. To my surprise, not only did I get to hear her sing but I also heard a wonderful bassist and a sopranist, Fabrice di Falco. Watching Fabrice sing was entrancing. His eyes rolled, his mouth mewed its way through every shape of ‘oh’ like a baby searching for a nipple. When he hit the high notes his whole body shook. I understood why he might like to do this every day.
The last time I prayed regularly was in Paris. Since then I have abandoned organised religion but I have failed to abandon entirely the belief in a soul. Even if that soul is nothing more and nothing less than the vibrations with which Fabrice’s body shook and the rapture of his captive listeners: a group of strangers – Phillipinos, Sengalese, Indonesians, Irish, Americans – gathered together on a cold winter’s night in a city in a foreign land.
Not that I am saying you are God, Fabrice. It’s not you, mate, but what your voice brings together: the sum of your parts, and the parts of those little Phillipino ladies who crossed themselves and the Irish priest who gobbled down that big dry wafer and the 1960s concrete underground worship hall and the Arc De Triomphe outside and the fish lying at the bottom of the icy Seine. My new god’s all that and then some.
I like the Irish priest, Father Aiden, a lot. He tells us he married a couple that afternoon. ‘You see there’s all this sadness in the world,’ he says, ‘and in the midst of it there’s this lovely little couple standing in front of me and saying, ‘Let’s give love a chance.’ ‘
But back from love and getting stuck in in a sad world to ecstacy and losing oneself: It strikes me as so strange that Catholics can believe that God is actually contained by a tinsy bit of wafer and not even a sip of wine. Didn’t the Jesus man break that bread? On his last night on earth didn’t he drink wine with his friends and experience some Bacchanalian loss of self? But then he says, ‘Drink this, in remembrance of me…’ If Jesus had been a woman, would this have been easier to understand, or just another female guilt trip?
‘Let us proclaim the mystery of faith!’ declared Father Aiden at mass on Saturday. When I lived and prayed in Paris six years ago I never really noticed that phrase but now with my new-found lack of faith I love it deeply, truly, madly…
Vive La Paris
