Now that I am firmly established as a dealer in syphilitic iconography, a few words on the subject:
For me, as a metaphor the pox engages to some extent discourses about genius, autonomy, and subjectivity. Perhaps most superficially obvious and pertinent is the fact that many 19th century writers, artists, composers, philosophers, etc, suffered from late stage tabes dorsalis - a neurological condition that caused deterioration of the spinal cord and often manifested in a dementia that produced euphoric, lucid, manic bursts of creativity shortly before death - and the question of how much this condition affected their later life output is interesting to me. It was an incredibly common and widespread disease until the mid-20th century (when along came penicillin), though discourse on it was kept to a minimum due to its connectedness to sin (its social stigma might be comparable to that of AIDS in the modern era).
Susan Sontag wrote in Illness As Metaphor:
- It is with TB that the idea of individual illness was articulated, along with the idea that people are made more conscious as they confront their deaths, and in the images that collected around the disease one can see emerging a modern idea of individuality that has taken in the twentieth century a more aggressive, if no less narcissistic, form. Sickness was a way of making people "interesting"--which is how "romantic" was originally defined....Perhaps the main gift to the sensibility made by the Romantics is not the aesthetics of cruelty and the beauty of the morbid, or even the demand for unlimited personal liberty, but the nihilistic and sentimental idea of "the interesting."
In conjunction with the tradition of western theology (as per St. Augustine, for example), suffering, organic and mental, is held to be the manifestation of original sin and evil. Certainly syphilis is a manifestation of sexual sin, even without metaphorizing, which is what makes the metaphor all the more cloyingly sweet if we are to appropriate it and build upon it, especially in the 21st century when the disease has been so long dead. If our individuating sins are what make us interesting in this Romantic, nihilistic sense ("sovereign" in a Bataillean sense), then syphilis - not at all mysterious or romantic or grave as Sontag's favored metaphors of cancer and tuberculosis (she sets aside syphilis as a trifling, at best intermediary symbol next to these) - is a perfect little bonbon of a metaphor for the artist astride him/herself. (An image which might lead us down a psychoanalytic path littered with phalli, mirrors, and lack...some other time.) Syphilis' insidious, gentle violence leading to eventual fatality is analogous to the decadence of the organic world at large; its corresponding bursts of florid genius are analogous to the best intellectual and artistic efforts of culture. On a biological plane, the disease encompasses possession on a miniature but totalizing scale: these spiraling spirochaete bacteria infest the brain and spinal column so efficiently that the sufferer is truly among the possedé at the end of his or her life. This is nature in its purely satanic guise, as understood by the Romantics at least.
(I wonder if the artists of the 21st century might not eventually, stimulated by nostalgia and a penchant for old fashioned hubristic excess, begin decorating their groins with false bouquets of syphilitic bloom, merkins of disease, if you will. Their groins will scream: BEHOLD MY GENIUS. Like the aristocracy of the 19th century did when they swooned and starved themselves and made their faces artificially wan and inflamed with macquillage to better resemble the fatal men and women of literature and the arts, who were ever beset with that most romantic disease: tuberculosis.)
These drawings are not at all a literal depiction of syphilis, which should be clear to anyone who knows anything about it (tsk tsk). I'm working on a few very large and ornate paintings of the subject, but then I'll probably move on. You can only draw so much of this kind of thing. I have lots of texts and pictures on the subject, and the colorful, blistering, suppurating chancres are not really the easiest thing to look at for long periods of time.
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