To drive by moonlight down the Cape Peninsula’s western shore, and to be lost in that silvery no-man’s-land night between stone-pine and kelp forest, is to be reminded of how beautiful fire can be. You see it far away, at first, nothing more than a blob of incandescence against the black surge of the Atlantic, but as the road drops away towards a private cove, the night’s pastoral revelries are illuminated: ageing hippies, their bare legs spindly and their grey ponytails satanic in the glow, swinging burning poi over their heads.
And then they are gone, and the moonlight resumes its subtle reign over the landscape. But not for long. The corona of another bonfire silhouettes distant boulders. Again, sparks whirl and shadows dance. Ah, more midnight rituals: tikked-up gangstas, swinging burning hippies over their heads …
It’s not that one wishes to see harm come to those Baby Boomers who chose to cultivate toenails instead of pensions, even though one may sometimes wish secretly that they’d take an angle-grinder to the horny obscenities that curl down over the ends of their sandals like 10 filthy little armadillos. Not at all. Most are gentle and kind spirits, selflessly watering the weed of idealism, or scooping the stinky whey of materialism off the flyblown yoghurt of spiritualism. They tread lightly in this world, bringing nothing with them but a faint aroma of toe-jam, and leaving nothing but a yellowing copy of The Bell Jar. In life they are mayflies on the stagnant millpond of endeavour; in death, desiccated fish moths dangling from the dream-catcher of posterity. They also dig metaphor lank.
But every so often they overstep the mark, and embark on a plan of such imbecilic grooviness that one longs to travel to their fire-dancing cove and fling Big Macs at them out of the window of one’s car; and the Global Orgasm is such a plan.
The science behind it is simple. The planet has an energy field around it. This is the home of Shiva, Kali and Jimmi Hendrix. It is invisible to the cynical telescopes of the military-industrial complex, but innocent souls, like people who make a living by playing lutes at flea-markets, can see it if they look directly into the noonday sun for seven minutes.
Then they will see the pyramidal temples built by the space Polynesians before they chose to give up immortality in exchange for bacon. They will see them then, and always, whether their eyes are open or shut. Bootlicker doctors will call it ocular damage. The lute-players know better: it is enlightenment.
But it is here that the straightÂforward physics of the energy fields becomes a little esoteric; since it now becomes apparent that the field cannot only affect the thoughts and actions of those on the planet, but that their own thoughts — or, more specifically, their outpourings of emotion — can affect the field. (Those wanting a superb elucidation of this hugely complex causal relationship are advised to consult the seminal work of hippie physicist Grebe Birkenstock, the acclaimed Particles Obey the Laws of Love: The Cosmic Hug, more specifically Chapter 3, entitled “Fart and depart: the ingestion of soy milk as a social catalyst in the rapid clearing of small rooms in communes”.)
It is a theory as elegant as a veil stapled to the conical hat of a young woman playing Galadriel in a roll-playing weekend in the Cederberg mountains. Put hate into the energy field, and the world fills with hate. Put love into it, and it fills with bliss.
Which is how two greying Americans devised the notion of the Global Orgasm, which was scheduled to take place on Friday. Get everyone to, in the words of the Beatles, come together, at more or less the same time; and get all those millions of orgasmers and orgasmees thinking thoughts of love and peace; and the energy field would transform into a throbbing, sweating poncho of good vibrations.
Apparently its proponents haven’t considered the consequences of pumping idiocy into the Hendrixphere, but one doesn’t want to be cynical. The trouble is, of course, that thinking and orgasms tend to be mutually exclusive.
Last year Danish researchers found that large sections of the female brain shut down during climax, and history — and civil courts — tells us that by that time, males have been dissentient for many minutes, if not hours; the result of a reaction caused by the sight of female nudity, known as a full frontal lobotomy.
No one likes misanthropes. But who could possible think the best of a species whose very conception is characterised by the presence of at least one slack-jawed moron? Other than whey-scoopers, that is …