Love among the Ruins: David Cannon Dashiell's Queer Mysteries

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The initiatory experience here will be a virtual one, an initiation into the matrix. William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer and spearhead of the 1980s cyberpunk movement, described the matrix as a "consensual hallucination," (26) which Bacchic cult experiences likewise seem to have been. The entrance to the ecstatic Dionysiac world in the Villa of the Mysteries is marked by Silenus playing a cithara at the edge of a rocky landscape (E). Entry is gained through enchantment, music inducing mental and physical transformation: the initiate becomes a goat kid and is suckled by a paniske, a female satyr (F). In Dashiell's frieze we are not granted visual access to the ecstatic realm. It is introduced by a techie monitoring Barbarella's vibrations as she dons Virtual Reality headgear and breast, genital, hand, and foot stimulators and sensors ([E.sub.1]-[F.sub.1]). Through these she will hallucinatorily drink in cult secrets like the suckling goat (on all fours she becomes an infant or a "kid" again, if we define childhood by quadrupedality, as in the Sphinx's riddle). The gray and male figures starting to appear are part of the reverse narrative, which we will analyze in its turn.

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In her next appearance, the Pompeian woman, in human form again, draws back in fright at a mysterious revelation (G), while Barbarella also experiences a vision that we cannot see ([G.sub.1]). Lips parted, tongue visible, she is in the grip of an ecstatic communion ("ecstasy" derives from ec stasis, "standing apart," which the initiates in both friezes are literally doing). After an enigmatic divination scene in the Pompeian frieze (H) and an equally elliptical vision in the Dashiell ([H.sub.1]), an intoxicated, reclining couple--Dionysus and Ariadne--appear in the original (I), and a pair of female aliens in the later work ([I.sub.1]). Dashiell literalizes the inspiration the alien women are receiving: it comes through their respirators. The inflated orbs they are sitting on, which supply their high, reinforce the pneumatic nature of this prosthetically mouth-to-mouth experience. (27)

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The revelation of the mystery follows. The Pompeian initiate unveils what is contained in a liknon (winnowing basket), most likely a phallus (J-K), and Barbarella breaks eggs from a chalicelike container (a classic symbol for the matrix or womb--cyberspace is here an intrauterine realm), getting her fingers wet and sticky ([J.sub.1]-[K.sub.1]). What she is experiencing in virtual reality has nothing to do with the eggs we see; these are stand-ins for several things. The breaking of the eggs comments on the nonreproductive nature of lesbian sex and is of course an image of ball-busting; (28) the egg is also a standard shape for female vibrators. The revelation the initiate is virtually experiencing here is how to lubricate and get lubricated: the mystery is the secret of secretion.