The Tongue Sacrifice
The Dalai Lama's tongue fantasy; Glossolalia; George Bataille's L’Erotisme; masturbation and circumcision
So, the Dalai Lama asked a young boy at a crowded public event to suck his tongue, and the world lost their mind for a day or two, aghast that their favorite old man in those liturgic gold and crimson robes could be such a profane pedophile, and to do it out in the open like that, basically telling the world to go fuck themselves, because he doesn’t care anymore, he’s going to finally do what he wants to do now that he’s eighty-seven years old, because this whole masquerade of advocating for world peace with Bono or whoever clearly isn’t working.
Now, if you paid any amount of attention to this meager flash of a story, you probably concluded that he didn’t actually ask a seven-year-old to suck his tongue like it was a real psychically bloodsucking cacoëthes, that the Tibetan phrase “Che le sa” (“Eat my tongue”) is an often used joke from elders to have a harmless laugh with kids. The myth goes that the last emperor of Tibet, the much reviled Landarma from the 9th century, who was the incarnation of the bull-head guardian of hell, had a black tongue, and sticking your tongue out today in Tibet is a sign of respect, a sign that you do not have a black tongue and therefor not an incarnation or descendant of the evil king. And if you ever flirted much with common sense you might suspect that it is at least possible that the Chinese government was behind a media campaign to siphon this clip from its context, helping it go viral in the way it did. After all, the United States officially does not recognize Tibet as a sovereign people, they are formally under the command of China.
With all that said, there is an underlying Freudian perversity of sticking your tongue out to a little boy and telling him to suck it. It reminds us that he’s human and fallible. Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote that the respite for intimidation when facing an emperor or king was to imagine them naked, taking a shit, stepping out of the shower like a wet and shivering rodent, masturbating with only the dull and pitiable guilt of distraction. The Dalai Lama, without his robes and esteem, is just another dying man, hunched over on his stool, his balls resting on the stump like a depleted coin satchel, like the melting boneless flesh of a Dali painting.
There’s an early interview with Paul Thomas Anderson, when he’s twenty-five, twenty-six years old maybe, having just completed filming Boogie Nights, and he’s eating pizza and clearly high on cocaine, and he posits an interesting point, in that we as viewers deserve “to see Forrest Gump and the Robin Wright character make that baby that we see at the end…How does Forrest Gump have sex?” He means this not in a salacious way, but as maybe the most revealing act as understanding his character. We can do the same for the Dalai Lama.
In George Bataille’s 1957 book, L’Erotisme, he organizes eroticism under three forms: the physical, the emotional, and the religious. The first two being fairly self-explanatory, religious eroticism is “bound up with seeking after God’s love” in its familiar Western form, “but the East, intent on a similar quest, is not necessarily committed to the idea of a personal God. The idea is absent from Buddhism in particular.” But human eroticism is a distant experience than animal sexuality. It’s tempting to just disregard every sexual lust as animal programming for our dominant procreation that comes into its tantalizing variations that make it enjoyable. Bataille disagrees. It has a religious component that’s undeniable. It’s one aspect of our inner life: “We fail to realise this because man is everlastingly in search of an object outside himself but this object answers the innerness of the desire.” During a particularly great bout of sex, we lose ourselves, disappearing into the act itself. Bataille regards eroticism as the “disequilibrium in which the being consciously calls his own existence in question.” How many times have you nearly told the stranger you’re sleeping with that you love her? Because in that moment you probably do, and the love you have for her is probably real, however fleeting it might be. The intoxication of the inner experience, like the involuntary act of speaking, is inseparable from the erotic experience.
Of course, glossolalia—speaking in tongues—is the most literal form of the tongue as a religious act. It’s referred to five times in the New Testament, usually as an act of speaking in an unlearned langue while receiving the Holy Spirit. It’s often attributed as an explanation for the mysterious Voynich manuscript, the 15th century illustrated codex written in an unknown language. The videos inside megachurches of people having manic episodes, flailing their limbs until they fall backwards, yelling a strange tongue you want to call gibberish, is not that unlike a psychotic episode. The Jerusalem syndrome for example is the phenomenon of certain spiritual delusions and often flamboyant hysteria that is usually triggered by visiting Jerusalem. Our only true worship is the worship of the tongue.
The diapason of arousal to love is just the length of insanity you’re willing to endure. “The whole business of eroticism is to strike to the inmost core of the living being, so that the heart stands still,” Bataille continues. Arousal is just being possessed into a state of demonic hilarity for some moments until you get to eject it from your body and mind for however long until it crawls back again like a carnivorous shaitan, intent on reliving the fantasy yet again. Most kinks deter the projections of reason, and make you do the strangest impulses. Why on earth would any one want to lick an asshole with the same audible ravenous hunger as a pig snorting in her trough? What about toe sucking. If you saw a man sucking on his friend’s toe on the street, you would regard him as just another insane man on the streets. Insane in the streets, freak in the sheets. A friend of a friend is a dominatrix, and once she took a shit in a man’s mouth at his request. He was a well respected surgeon, with a family, and requested that she not relieve herself for three days beforehand, and upon receiving the massive turd in his gaping mouth he sprinted out of the room, and was never heard from again. It’s at the moment when the fantasy evaporates into the reality, and he feels the hot turd slip down his throat that he probably realized he was possessed by something outside himself. Even if the Dalai Lama did want his tongue sucked by a boy in front of a large congregation, it would fail as any interruption of the normal, only concluding the lame desires of an old man, some weirdly random attempt at feeling uproarious and wild and completely failing at it.
Years ago, I happened to check my spam folder and saw an email with an old password I used to use as the subject line. Confused, I clicked on it, and the email stated that they have my passwords, and they have cam footage from my laptop of me jacking off, and if I didn’t send them some large quantity of money, they would release the videos to all my email contacts. I never considered giving them anything, or replying, and they never released anything to my knowledge, but I still wonder what that footage would have looked like if it ever existed. With the blinding blue light shining against my face as I squinted and twisted my lips, my mouth agape, clicking new tabs furiously to cum to exactly the right moment. It would have been one of the more notably embarrassing moments of my life. Even if I saw it alone and it was never released, I probably would have been embarrassed for myself, or ashamed, pitying my base perversion and how ugly I could look while getting one off.
The outrage directed at the Dalai Lama is of course, like everything else, selective. It seems obvious that this was some lost-in-translation mistake, taken out of context, bored people behind their computer screens finally able to pounce on the issue of the day or week. In Slavoj Žižek’s essay, “Suck My Tongue, Crush My Balls” on Project Syndicate, he points out that clitoridectomy is part of an ancient Tibetan tradition, and no sane person of modern values would defend that today. Female genital mutilation (FGM) rates are unnervingly high in almost all Muslim-dominant countries—93% in Malaysia, 97% in Somalia, 87% in Egypt, 95% in Guinea, etc., and when I stated that statistic some years ago at a party, the host said I was a crazy Alex Jones supporter and threatened I should leave. When religion gets involved in anything that has to do with the sexual, it usually becomes a brutalized perversion, a sacrifice of the body. You chop off the unclean bits of the body as a sacrifice to God for his mistake in your creation. Metzitzah b’peh is the Jewish practice of circumcising the baby boy and then sucking the blood from the baby dick to clean it. Who on earth thought of this, and why are some ultra-orthodox Jews even in New York still practicing this? I asked my friend later if he thought gender reassignment surgery in children was a good idea, and he applauded efforts to make it more available. There is a strange disconnect of modern liberal values here in the West, in that it’s considered antiquated barbarism to cut off just the tip of your genitalia in the name of religion, but applauded by many as progressive modernism if you chop off the whole thing not for religion. Nevertheless, it is a sacrifice to the sexual.
Bataille goes on to discuss sacrifice and war: “The unleashed desire to kill that we call war goes far beyond the realm of religious activity. Sacrifice though, while like war a suspension of the commandment not to kill, is the religious act above all others.” The Christian cross for example, is the most recognized symbol on the planet, and our culture’s obsessiveness for it is at least partially just an obsessiveness for a bloody sacrifice, for an unquestioned frenzy for human sacrifice and gore. During Aztec sacrifices, the practice of piercing and cutting off one’s own tongue was considered a personal sacrifice. When Richard Ramirez was on trial for his brutal rapes and tortures and murders, he became a sexualized fringe celebrity for many women, who reenacted their own miniature Beatlemania, fantasizing being part of his Satanic rituals. This is unsettling, but also unsurprising to most of us. We intuitively understand what Bataille calls “leftovers from the past do persist.”
The evolution of our civility is not exactly uniform. But it’s still there, working away at the larger edifice of our collective selves. This is where we are now. Every time you think of the Dalai Lama now you’ll think oh yeah, the tongue sucking guy. Nice act, you had us all convinced you were the spiritual guy. He’s probably both. He’s probably neither one. He’s probably every imaginable sexual fetish you’ve ever thought of. He’s probably chosen by God, he’s probably God himself. We feed ourselves with an appetite of tabloids. After all, Bataille said “the suspension of taboos sets free the exuberant surge of life and favors the unbounded orgiastic fusion of those individuals. This fusion could in no way be limited to that attendant on the plethora of the genital organs. It is a religious effusion first and foremost; it is essentially the disorder of lost beings who oppose no further resistance to the frantic proliferation of life.” Bataille says so, and he’s never wrong.
Good read 👅
Incredible. An absolutely brilliant voice and an immense read.