Steam

I did the steam test this week in Chicago, which has been colder than Siberia, Antarctica, and Mars. I filled up a measuring cup with hot water and tossed it out of the window of my storage room. I was temporarily blinded by that amazing, but sadly fleeting, release of energy I had created.

And all that steam, an explosive combination of extreme heat and extreme cold in this case, got me thinking of not just what steam is, but how authors and artists and filmmakers use steam to convey multiple ambiguities in their works of art.

But steam is not the fog that hides haunted houses, though it resembles it superficially. Steam is released physically under conditions of great thermodynamic pressure. Once released into the air, it dissipates, but it can also be harnessed to provide more power. (No steam engine, no Industrial Revolution!)
 

For example, the song “Steam Heat” compares the steam heat of a radiator to what will become the heat of passion, however unfavorably. Kissing is what gets that energy, sexual energy released:
 

I got (clang) (clang) s-s-s-steam heat, 
I got (clang) (clang) s-s-s-steam heat, 
I got (clang) (clang) s-s-s-steam heat, 
But I need your love to keep away the cold,

I got (clang) (clang) s-s-s-steam heat, 
I got (clang) (clang) s-s-s-steam heat, 
I got (clang) (clang) s-s-s-steam heat, 
But I can't get warm without your hand to hold,

The radiator's hissin', still I need your kissin'... 
To keep me from freezin' each night, 
I got a hot water bottle, but nothin' I got'll... 
Take the place of you holding me tight

The sound of the hissing and the clanging is dissonant and mechanical, the heat; the thermodynamics reveal great struggle to be harnessed, to work, to produce, in contrast to the organic steam produced by the physical and emotional interaction between the lovers.

And in the vintage gay porn movie Turned On!, Al Parker wanders in a fantasy sexual world that resembles a literally steamy gay bathhouse. The steam blurs conventional physical and emotional boundaries. It dissipates, but in its dissipation somehow creates more energy rather than declining into entropy or freezing into rigid crystals. Thus the men multiply, the cocks multiply. Energy is eternal delight, according to William Blake, and in this film it transcends thermodynamic laws.
 

 

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