A Mortal Fascination for Volcanic Eruptions

Silence cannot do away with the things that language cannot state.
G. Bataille, Eroticism

Darkened for atmosphere, the museum visitors move in whispering clutches, like clumps of reed in river water, through the artfully constructed maze of ancient destruction. Like all good exhibits, it has a narrative: a before, a during, an after.

There is a beautiful mosaic that once graced a house in Pompeii while the volcano above it growled its intentions. And on the tiny, lit screen of my phone, you are also rumbling, embarking on the confession of a smaller, more intentional cruelty. This is the art of foreplay.

The picturesque, charming Mediterranean town and the pretty, guileless, lovesick woman. I cannot keep the two separate. The earth is cruel and so are you, and I have no words to explain why both these things arouse me.

If I had no pity, no empathy, it would be easier to explain. But I do. Just as surely as I feel the fear of the impending cataclysm for the long dead of Herculaneum, I fear for the woman whose heart you’ve already wounded, here in the dark passageways of this grim exhibit, as you recount your personal atrocity.

It turns me on. Not the atrocity, but its confession and reverberation. The hypnotic inevitability of the sequence of events. The knowledge that you are torn in two by the pleasure of the act and the wretched guilt that envelopes its aftermath is so much more alluring than the mindless wrath of nature. It’s left you with a hunger to fuck your way through it. And I want you with mindless ferocity.

And so there, in a darkened corner of the room that houses the calcified remains of innocents overtaken by events, trapped in the infernal and relentless lava, I drink in the words of your penetration, of your envelopment, and I am trapped as surely as they were, covered like they were, turned to empty casts by the heat. I am drenched in the presence of their dry and crumbling corpses. I come silently in the shadows, thighs pressed together, trembling with the tension of the paradox.

Although I have no words to describe the  fascination I hold for volcanic eruptions, my silence doesn’t lessen its iniquity.