Pornosophie
“Pornosophy”
1. The fornications of wisdom
2. The harlotry of wisdom
The unashamed exhibition of the mind’s workings (preferably one’s own), or of the results thereof, intended to cause mental &/or intellectual excitement and the indecent enflaming of the mind.
First usage of the word as an adjective [pornosophical] by James Joyce in Ulysses, Chapter 15 (Circe).
.
.
“THE PASSIONATE INTELLECT”
Heroine of Pornosophic Writers: Dorothy L. Sayers
(…) I have no news, except that - looking forward to the confidently-expected food-crisis, I have purchased two Hens. In their habits they display, respectively Sense and Sensibility, and I have therefore named them Elinor and Marianne. Elinor is a round, comfortable, motherly-looking little body, who lays one steady, regular, undistinguished egg per day, and allows nothing to disturb her equanimity (except, indeed, the coal-cart, to which both take exception). Marianne is leggier, timid, and liable to hysterics. Sometimes she lays a shell-less egg, sometimes a double yolk, sometimes no egg at all. On the days when she lays no egg she nevertheless goes and sits in the nest for the usual time, and seems to imagine that nothing more is required. As my gardener says: “She just thinks she’s laid an egg”. Too much imagination - in fact, Sensibility. But when she does lay an egg it is larger than Elinor’s. But you cannot wish to listen to this cackle … (…)
[ The Letters of Dorothy L.Sayers: 1944-1950 Vol 3, 2nd June 1947 To C.S. Lewis (of all people ;-))]
Dorothy L. Sayers was born in Oxford in 1893, and was one of the first women to be awarded a Degree from Oxford University. She read Modern Languages and Mediaeval Literature and got a First-Class Honours.
“Guinness is good for you” - advertisement
by Dorothy L. Sayers, during the years she worked as a copy-writer for
an advertisement agency.
She’s probably best known for her Lord Peter Wimsey novels, which are indeed a treat. The flimsy Lord Peter is finally tamed by Harriet Vane in “Gaudy Night” (Oxford was never far from her mind). Their honeymoon is disturbed by yet another murder in “Busman’s Honeymoon”, and the romantic heart can heave some more sighs with “Thrones, Dominations”, in which the earlier Bertie Wooster-like Lord Peter becomes almost a human being. “Busman’s Honeymoon” is undertitled “A Love Story with Detective Interruptions”, and is also a delicately erotic exploration of married life. (Which can be considered decidedly kinky, in view of what’s being offered on the internet as “normal” nowadays). These three crime novels are not only well-constructed & entertaining whodunnits, they also offer insightful as well as witty reflections on love, sex and relationships, and on feminism, always ingeniously intertwined with the plot.
“[…] Awkward sort of thing, really, talking to a brainy woman. Don’t quite
know what to say.”“You talk to her exactly as if she were a man,” said Wimsey.
Less well known, perhaps, are her theological writings. She started research on Christian doctrine for her first religious play, “The Zeal of Thy House”, in 1936. Her radio drama series “The man born to be King”, broadcast during the war years and at the time an overwhelming success as well as a bit of a scandal (Jesus speaking vernacular was too provoking and blasphemous for some of the Board of Religious Broadcasting members, and created hysterical reactions all over the nation). The series were, however, from the very first broadcast, such a thundering success with the public, wich felt that they got a real understanding of Jesus, that the BBC decided on broadcasting them all.
“God’s mode of being is utterly other than ours, and ours wholly included in it.”
Dorothy L. Sayers became a kind of Catholic-Doctrine-Agony-Aunt, a role which she came to resent more and more over the following years. From this theological research, however, came one of her most profound books, “The mind of the Maker”. She contends that the creative process in art works in ways that correspond to the dynamic relation among the three Persons of the Trinity in Christian theology – and that the activity of one illuminates the activity of the other. Dorothy L. Sayers was an Anglican Catholic, a firm believer but, as she said herself, she quite lacked any religious passionate feelings. She delighted in catholic doctrine because it appealed to her rational, logical, academically educated mind, and “The Mind of the Maker” is, at least to others of a pornosophical turn-of-mind, a truely mind-enflaming essay. Her passion was indeed the passion of the intellect. Her understanding of God the creator as compared to the novelist as creator, of Gods time and the author’s time, she explains from her own experience: Lord Peter & Harriet Vane have their time-line in and out of the novels (years may go by about which nothing is written, but in which they actually “lived”). Peter and Harriet have no notion of another time frame outside their world - at most they could speculate about a “Creator”, but they can never know the author - she is altoghether out of their world, their life-time-span. The author’s time runs at a completely other level, rhythm, velocity.
Just so we can not know God’s time.
“(…) That new-washed world of clear sun and glittering colour which we call the Middle Age (as though it were middle-aged) but which has perhaps a better right than the blown rose of the Renaissance to be called the Age of Re-birth”.
So it was with a well-prepared mind that Dorothy L. Sayers discovered, in August 1944, The Divine Comedy and Dante Alighieri.
The tale of her passionate mind once more inflamed is brilliantly and passionately told by herself in the letters she wrote during that period [The Letters of Dorothy L.Sayers: 1944-1950 Vol 3
” I have just thougt of the quotation I ought to have placed somewhere conspicuously on the title-page of my Dante - the passage where Elizabeth Bennet is explaining to her father her engagement to Mr Darcy:
“We all know him to be a proud, unpleasant sort of man; but this would be nothing if you really liked him.”
“I do, I do like him”, she replied, with tears in her eyes; “I love him. Indeed he has no imroper pride. He is perfectly amiable.”I wish it had occured to me earlier! It so exactly represents my feelings. (…) it would have been such fun for the critics and the academics, and all the dreary people who call Dante “grim”. “
[The Letters of Dorothy L.Sayers: 1944-1950 Vol 3, 18th November 1949, p. 469]