ON PORNOGRAPHY
211
degraded and often unrecognizable form, worth listening to. I've sug–
gested that this spectacularly cramped form of the human imagina–
tion has, nevertheless, its peculiar access to some truth. And this
truth-about sensibility, about sex, about individual personality, about
despair, about limits-can be shared when it projects itself into art.
(Everyone, at least in dreams, has inhabited the world of the por–
nographic imagination for some hours or days or even longer periods
of his life; but it's the full-time residents who make the fetishes,
the trophies, the art.) That something one might call the poetry of
transgression is also knowledge. He who transgresses not only breaks a
rule. He goes somewhere that the others are not; and he knows some–
thing the others don't know.
Pornography, considered as an artistic or art-producing form of
the human imagination, is an expression of what William James
called "morbid-mindedness." But James was surely right when he
gave as part of the definition of morbid-mindedness that it ranged
over "a wider scale of experience" than healthy-mindedness.
What can be said, though, to the many sensible and sensitive
people who find depressing the fact that a whole library of por–
nographic reading material has been made, within the last few years,
so easily available in paperback form to the very young? Probably
one thing: that their apprehension is justified, but may not
be
in
scale. I am not addressing the usual complainers, those who feel that
since sex, after all,
is
dirty, so are books reveling in sex (dirty in a
way that a genocide screened nightly on TV, apparently, is not).
There still remains a sizeable minority of people who object to or
are repelled by pornography not because they think it's dirty, but be–
cause they know how pornography can be a crutch for the psycho–
logically deformed and a brutalization of the morally innocent. I dis–
like pornography for those reasons, too, and feel uncomfortable about
the consequences of its increasing availability. But isn't the worry
lIOIllewhat misplaced? What's really at stake? A concern about
the uses of knowledge itself. There's a sense in which
all
knowl–
edge
is dangerous, the reason being that not everyone
is
in the
same condition as knowers or potential knowers. Perhaps most
people don't need "a wider scale of experience." It may be that,
without subtle and extensive psychic preparation, any widening
fi
experience and consciousness is destructive for most people.
Then we must ask what justifies the reckless ulimited confidence
