Eros: body or soul? part 3

After reading my over-long reply, D answered me in turn as follows:
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Goodness; you did justice and more to what I wrote, and given my time constraints, I cannot begin to address all the fascinating issues you raise. I think, however, that there is a certain tension in our view of the erotic that will serve to stimulate our relationship. We have significantly different views…I wonder how this will play out.

Let’s return to the question that troubled Plato and many other writers. What has desire to do with love and love with desire? C. S. Lewis made a very interesting observation when he notes that lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other while friends stand side by side, absorbed in something else. We have each experienced falling in love and barely being able to tear our eyes away from the other person. Lovers also talk about their love while friends rarely mention it. Love and loyalty are often shown on the battlefield, yet the men involved are profane and lace their comments to each other with humor and teasing. Friendship means comfort, help and security; it’s what my colleagues and I offer each other at school. But erotic love offers danger, anxiety and stress; I may want only good for my fellow teachers, but I want you, and if I cannot have you, or someone takes may place, I will be unhappy; indeed, my love can turn to hate.

Erotic love is not a form of companionship; at least not at first. Its initial and defining impulse is to a desire for mutual possession and there is a certain violence to that desire. Erotic love, unlike other forms of love, desires no worldly benefits or gains beyond itself. Erotic love is not another form of agape or friendship; it is of a different order. Erotic love is not a blend of friendship and sexual desire. As I well know, the element of desire cannot fade away without altering the love itself. Erotic love seeks to possess, to hold and to exclude; and its object is not just the body of the beloved or the soul. It is the embodied person; the person bound by flesh.

Love, like desire, feasts on looks; this is how we present ourselves and makes a present of the self. Beauty is very much involved in our choice of lovers. Yet age affects us all, and even the blind desire others. Desire is aroused through touching and caressing. In arousal, the body occupies the foreground and it becomes transparent, exposing the other person as object and subject of desire. Desire is dangerous and it causes us acute anxiety. You will remember your own shyness and insecurity the first time we were together. This is natural; the expression of desire is rarely safe and our society constructs elaborate institutions to protect us from the abuse of sexual feelings. We may condemn extramarital unions, but no one censures friendship.

I believe lovers may also be friends, but you are not my friend by virtue of being my beloved. I freely confess to being jealous and at war with every rival—even the rival the friend might approve. Blake is right when he says:

Love seeketh only self to please
To bind another in its delight;
Joys in another’s loss of ease
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite

One of the most difficult challenges for me is to appreciate the tension between friendship and erotic love. We are lovers, and thus I find it difficult to accept the otherness of you, and accept your life as a life apart, given that I want to be first in your affections. Yet in fact we spend most of our time as friends, not lovers. The basis of friendship is precisely that recognition and acceptance of the otherness of the friend. Of course a friend desires the company of the friend, as I want to see [a friend on the faculty], but I also want him to be complete as an individual and to have a life of his own; and in two years I hope he will be far away from this school. I have no such hopes in my relationship with you; I want to see more of you and stop renouncing intimacy. Friendship must be mutual; if [that other teacher] does not want to be around me, the friendship will die. There is no such thing as unrequited friendship, as there is in love. Love is not a feeling, or even a complex gathering of feelings; love is an emotion and it can exist even when the other person is unavailable or gone.

My friendships are not exclusive, and it would be silly for me to demand that my friends have no other close relationships. But my love for you is exclusive and this is a great mystery. The presence of desire, which seems to be the major underlying difference between friendship and erotic love, does not fully explain this vast gulf. I recognize you do not share this view, and I leave myself open to great heartache because of it. It is a difference I must reluctantly accept. Yet in many ways, friendship and erotic love share many features in common. We share good conversation and companionship. We find each other and our friends irreplaceable. Both friendship and erotic love are life-long commitments and beyond. There is no goal outside the relationship itself. Finally, both are gifts and can be offered and received in no other way. I might then argue that both erotic love and friendship are not the same as love for God, because that is commanded and is only just and right. But friendship and my love for you are choices, not duties. Are we bound to one another by some fateful tie, like a parent to a child or a husband to his wife, like Hosea to unfaithful Gomer, like God to faithless Israel? [I'm sure she came up with the Biblical reference entirely on her own, by coincidence, because I absolutely have not told her that I go by the name "Hosea" here!] Perhaps not; rather, we are free to evaluate each other’s virtue and Good and if we find either wanting, we may leave the relationship. Erotic love may by-pass virtue and even decency, but an affair like ours can never be divorced from our effort to find in the other a person special, precious, and worthy of our devotion.
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I wasn't quite sure what to say to all this, so I answered a little lamely that, "Of course you are right that erotic love cannot be simply the same as friendship, because of the very ferocity that you articulate so brilliantly. And yet there is something very similar about it. There is a mystery here that I do not understand very well, and I don't quite know what to say about it."

Then our discussion meandered into other directions, until we came back to the topic of "ferocity" by discussing pornography.

Eros: body or soul? part 2, Note 6

I am not sure I would explain anything Plato wrote with the phrase, "given his own homosexuality." In the first place, anything we say about Plato's own personal behavior is necessarily speculation; in the second, Plato is a sufficiently deep and subtle writer that I believe he could write one thing even while personally preferring something else, ... if that's where he found the argument taking him. And in the third place, you and I both know that Greek sexual behavior can't really be squeezed into modern straitjacket terms like "homosexuality" or "heterosexuality." Heck, I remember a long discussion of the subject with you over dinner once, where we both agreed that in fact there really is no such "thing" as homosexuality at all. There are people who like to do this or that in bed, but the lived experience is broader and more varied than the terminology.

Leaving Plato's private life out of it completely, I must also disagree with the idea that "Perhaps Plato saw no higher purpose in sexual union than pleasure." My reading of the Symposium and the Phaedrus makes sexual union into a cosmic principle. Yes, he is always trying to universalize it; yes, there is all this tiresome, edifying verbiage about ascending the ladder of love up to a love of the universal Forms, blah blah blah. But he was always conflicted. Last year I bought a translation of the Symposium that Percy Shelley had written for his own interest. And honestly, you cannot read Socrates' long speech about cosmic love without hearing Plato in the background, clawing at his mattress in a desperate desire to get it on -- a desire that he has obviously forbidden himself to gratify, but that eats away at him daily. I wish I understood his reasons better; it might help me see if there are spots where I have genuinely taken the wrong tack in my analysis above. But I will say at the very least that Plato is certainly the writer who originated a lot of the bland, edifying, anti-erotic rhetoric that we hear today about love, and that he is also the only philosopher in whose writings I can hear any clear recognition of the power of erotic need.

Eros: body or soul? part 2, Note 5

This topic is potentially huge, because it raises the question, "What are the ends of human life?" or "What is the nature of man?" I have to limit myself to just a few comments.

The biggest challenge to my claim that eros is somehow complementary to (and therefore coordinate with) logos is likely to come from those philosophers who believe, along with Plato and Aristotle, that logos is simply the highest activity of man -- that the purpose of man is to think, or that the final goal of man is rational thought. To these men, let me say simply that their position is impossible. Rationality cannot be the final end of man, because rationality is not an end -- it is a means. Reason is fundamentally instrumental: once you know what your goal is, the best way to make sure you get there is to analyze the conditions logically and make a rational plan of action. For difficult goals, no other method comes close.

But reason doesn't give you the goals in the first place. Those come from somewhere else. Of course, I don't mean that they are unreasonable in the sense of being impossible or crazy. I fully accept that our goals, our final ends, have to be consistent with reason and achievable by rational means. I just claim that we know them prior to (or independently of) rational analysis; that they derive their attraction or force from something besides calculation.

A simple example: suppose someone were to decide (as I am about to suggest) that building and maintianing human community is a primary human goal. Well that's fine, but did you deduce the fact from something? Did you calculate it from some more general principle? What could that more general principle could that possibly be? It would have to be some statement of the form "Man is designed by nature to live in community." But all that does is to restate the same thing in different words. Rather than being an allegedly more general principle from which the goal to build and sustain community can then be derived, that statement about "designed by nature" is nothing more than the very same goal itself, gussied up in a powdered wig and standing on stilts. It's like saying that sleeping pills work because they contain a "dormitive principle" ... i.e., because they put you to sleep. Note that in all this I don't deny the goal itself (in this case, of community). All I insist is that the goal is prior to anyone discovering it: we have always gotten along better in groups than we did alone (other things being equal), and that was true millenia before anybody stopped to question it. Reason can find principles like this inductively, by putting together pieces of evidence and hazarding a guess what kind of picture best explains it all. But that is an instrumental role for reason, not a sovereign role.

So if human rationality is purely instrumental, if Reason is a handmaiden, ... then whose? In service of what? I've already given away my answer -- viz., that reason is in the service of human sociability. Sociability, or community, is as close as never mind to a highest goal for us, because we are so weak and helpless on our own that we require the help of others to survive at all. But the help of others is a force-multiplier beyond the wildest dreams. Adam Smith's famous chapter on the application of the division of labor in pin manufacturing captures in a snapshot what has made all the difference between what could have been our extinction as a particularly weak and weaponless primate, and our actual domination of the globe. And we owe it all to sociability, and the ability to organize. But without words and the capacity for rational planning, organization would have been impossible. So our verbal and rational ability -- logos, writ large -- is in the service of sociability, or community.

I have almost lost sight of sex in this discussion, but not quite. The thing is that sex, too, serves the cause of sociability. Sex binds us together, makes us care for each other more tenderly. In the immediate-return foraging communities studied by Ryan and Jethá in Sex at Dawn, sex frequently served as a kind of social glue holding people together when they recognized no common authority to hold them together by force. Naturally sex also serves the goal of reproduction. But I think it is inescapable (as I suggested in a recent letter) that the bonding function of sex is even more important.

So reason and sex both serve the goal of human community. And human community is the highest human end. Is that it? In the end we are just like ants in an anthill, only bigger? Not quite. Because while reason and sex are both in the service of something higher (namely, human community), they inevitably color the goal that they serve. Human community, therefore, is not merely togetherness; but it must inescapably be, in the crudest terms, a rational type of togetherness and also a sexy type of togetherness. What does this mean?

Human communities have a rational component. This is why Aristotle was right to classify us, not as a herd animal simply, but as a political animal. When we come together, we deliberate about what to do; we make plans, discuss them, and try to persuade others to see the benefits of our suggestions or the faults in the other guy's. All of this is rational, verbal activity. All of it is logos. And it should be clear that we can't really imagine what human society would be like without it. These features are fundamental.

In the same way, human communities have a passionate, erotic component. Partly this is because some of our social bonds are with those with whom we make love. But of course the erotic is far wider an experience than that, and it flavors all the color and sentiment that we find in the world. Can we imagine any human community not knit together by bonds of passion and sentiment? Yes, no doubt there are some ... certain highly dysfunctional business offices, or other equally dysfunctional political tyrannies. But they are terrible places to live ... emotionally starved and communally poor. They are possible, they can be imagined ... but they are still hardly human. Certainly any fully human life, to say nothing of the best human life, would be lived in a richer and fuller community, one where the bonds of eros (both direct and indirect) knit the people together so that their hearts beat as one -- or if not as one, than at least closer to that than in the cold, antiseptic environments where eros is absent.

I want to say one more thing, about how eros shapes our experience and our ability to respond to the world. In the Philebus, Plato calls sex a "mixed pleasure" saying that it contains both pleasure and pain. He adds that the most intense pleasures are always "mixed" and that they derive their very intensity from the admixture of pain in their composition. Let it be so; what is the consequence? Only this -- that somehow we as a species have found a way to mix pleasure with pain, thereby making the pain supportable. Of course we don't do this deliberately; the "mixing" is all below the conscious level. Still, it is a precedent; and with that precedent, at some level, we may -- we must -- be able to derive the courage to face other pains when they come. In this sense, erotic experience looks to be the first precursor to tragedy in the sense of Friedrich Nietzsche ... tragedy whereby the Greeks (so he argued) consciously transmuted the pain and horror of life into immortal beauty. And this, said Nietzsche, allowed the Greeks to face their fears and pains more steadfastly than any other people. If the experience of sex frames our experience (at some level) to prepare us to do the same, surely that is a fundamental feature of our consciousness without which it is hard to imagine calling us human.

Eros: body or soul? part 2, Note 4

To say this opens a fascinating topic for further consideration: why does it happen sometimes that our bodies assert a strong preference for someone that our minds reject? It's easy to think of examples from popular imagery: the sex kitten with brains of cotton candy; the dangerous man who is violent and dashing. The answer is just that these people answer our longing for some goods but not others. It's a common enough experience when we look for any kind of good. In an opera, who is the prima donna: the cute young slip of a girl who is the right age to play the character as written, or the "great fat contralto with a voice like a foghorn"? Too often the only woman who can sing the part doesn't look the part, and the director has to choose. Or who is the best general to lead your armies: the brilliant youngster who can plan circles around your enemy, but whose personal commitments are fickle and unreliable (Alcibiades); or the seasoned veteran whose courage and loyalty are never questioned, but whose strategic sense is decidedly pedestrian (Nicias)? Either one can go wrong. (In fact, they both did.) So when our bodies suddenly feel a powerful lust for those whom our minds tell us are altogether unsuitable, it's the same thing: they exhibit a set of goods that is detectable on one wavelength, while conspicuously lacking those that are detectable on another. In other words, I think all selection of sexual partners involves choices that are at some level "voluntary" if not always fully conscious.

What is fascinating is that a strong decision in one area can shape one's judgement in another area. We've all heard stories of guys who are so smitten with how sexy some girl is that they overlook any number of unsavory personality traits. But it works the other direction too. All sources agree that Socrates was surpassingly ugly; yet he had the handsomest boys in Athens following him about like puppies, longing (if we can rely on Alcibiades's speech in The Symposium) for some quiet, solitary night to slide under his blanket. If anything, I take this as further evidence that body and soul are not opposites but a continuum of some sort. If they were opposites, it is hard to understand how the goods of one could prejudice our evaluation of the other so easily. Seeing an elegant mathematical proof doesn't make me find my food tastier, after all; nor does a luscious dessert make me cleverer at solving problem sets.

Eros: body or soul? part 2, Note 3

It is easy to see this in our senses, which can tell that something is wrong with a picture, a scene, or a situation long before our conscious minds understand it. And the sophisticated decision-making carried out routinely by organs like the liver boggles the mind. Lewis Thomas once wrote with horror about the possibility of making hepatic decisions consciously. He said that, rather than be told he was now in charge of his liver, he would prefer to be told he was now in full control of an airplane flying at 30,000 feet. He said that in the airplane, at least, he could hope to find a parachute and jump.

Eros: body or soul? part 2, Note 2

"If to the soul, then what part does the body play in it?"

It's both.

"Is carnal love really the goal of it?"

Yes. Maybe not the only goal, but it is one among others. For example, when a student feels lust for a professor, the student's mind may genuinely want instruction; the student's soul probably wants to become like the professor in some way that the student admires. But it would be fatuous to say that the student's body is somehow not longing for a carnal consummation at the same time. At least, thinking back to when I was a student .... :-)

"If carnal love is the goal, is erotic love just a bodily appetite like hunger or thirst?"

Since the distinction between body and soul doesn't hold up in this context, erotic love is indeed a bodily appetite but there is no "just" about it; it is at the same time both an appetite of the body and a high aspiration of the soul.

Eros: body or soul? part 2, Note 1

My argument is by giving suggestive examples. (I don't think I can give a more rigorous argument without a definition of "body" and "soul" to start from.) The first one I owe to Mark Twain, who asked famously whether the mind can remain sober while the body is drunk. More contemporaneously, it is well known that hospital patients who maintain a positive and hopeful attitude (a disposition of the soul) heal faster (in their bodies) than patients suffering from the same thing, who don't. People who experience chronic, unremitting pain (in their bodies) are more likely than others to develop attitudes (in their souls) of crabbiness, bitterness, and melancholy. There are drugs that can be given to the body which change a patient's mood or personality. And so on. Any dualism of soul-body or mind-body which can survive these examples is too impractical to be much use in this argument.

Eros: body or soul? part 2

I replied to D's thoughts on sexuality (see part 1 of this series) as follows:
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You started your analysis of sexuality in exactly the right place, I think. The topic is so wide that if we don't tie it down to earth somewhere, there is a risk that we might get lost in it; and I think this is a good starting point. Is our affair right or wrong -- or neither -- and why? On the one side is the clear teaching of the whole Christian Church (a "catholic" teaching in the widest possible sense of the term) that any adulterous affair is wrong. On the other side is a sense that I think we share equally clearly, that in some ways it truly does not feel wrong. Of course there is always room for self-delusion; but I think if I were eating a lunch I had stolen from somebody else, I would be aware of the wrongness even while enjoying the flavor of the food. And somehow that analogy just doesn't seem to fit the situation between you and me. So why not?

My hunch from the outset is that the traditional teaching is at best incomplete, or subtly misled -- even perhaps, as you write, "deeply flawed". If that turns out to be true, it might create something of a problem for works like the New Testament, which are sources of the traditional teaching. It may not be an insuperable problem. I think there is a way to be "open to the sacred" -- even to serve God -- while still accepting that the Scriptures can be supplemented in places. But that is a whole new discussion. The first step is to look at the traditional view as you have presented it, and to examine it afresh.

One side note on the text that follows: As I wrote this, I found that there were a lot of places where I had to meander somewhat far afield to make my point. To keep the structure from getting completely lost, I have shoved a lot of this meandering into NOTEs which I have linked in as separate posts of their own. These NOTEs form an integral part of the text; when I say "(See NOTE x)," there is a chunk of the argument missing that you'll have to click forward to NOTE x to find. But on a first reading you might find it helpful to skip them and forge ahead.

To begin: You start with a series of questions, "To what part of the human being does erotic love belong; the body or the soul? If to the body, then what part does rational choice play in our sexual emotions, and how can they be disciplined and controlled? If to the soul, then what part does the body play in it and is carnal love really the goal of it? If carnal love is the goal, is erotic love just a bodily appetite like hunger or thirst?" Of course you are right that they are not new questions. But I think that they are the wrong questions ... or, rather, I think that the questions themselves are based on faulty assumptions. That means that the conversation starts off on the wrong foot from the beginning.

"The body or the soul?" I think the distinction here is not as crisp as it sounds, and that there is a lot to be said in favor of William Blake's proposition, "Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age." (Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 4) Admittedly, sometimes it is useful to be able to distinguish the body from the soul in certain discussions or applications. But the interconnection between them is so deep that I think in the end they have to be considered the same. (See NOTE 1.) And therefore the question about erotic love dissolves, because it belongs to both of them. This means that a couple of your follow-on questions can be easily and immediately answered. (See NOTE 2.)

The question about choice, however, demands a few words more. You go on to explain: "As a Christian, I am aware that love is the highest commandment, and if so, then love must be a choice and involve voluntary thoughts and decisions, not just be an animal imperative." Yes and no.

First, love must certainly be consistent with the human excellences, and among other things this does involve choice. But I don't think that conscious, logical calculation is the only model for choice. I argue, rather, that -- just as there is no crisp division between body and soul -- so there is no boundary line where intelligence stops short. Our bodies, rather, contain as much intelligence (in their own way) as our conscious intellects. (See NOTE 3.) And of course our bodies make very clear decisions about whom we love, or at any rate whom we want to love. There is a crude epigram to the effect that "No-one is ugly at 3 o'clock in the morning." But by the light of day we can all tell which people our bodies would willingly choose, and which not. And I am persuaded that, if we understood well enough the "language" of our desires, we could see exactly why our libidos chose these people and not those ones -- not just that he or she is "hot" but that he or she exhibits a kind of goodness, ... a species or aspect of The Good ... which is particularly important or relevant to the intelligence that resides in our bodies. (See NOTE 4.)

Second, there may be some confusion over what is distinctively human and what is animal. I am very struck, for example, by Ryan and Jethá's argument -- based on close observation of the natural world -- that it is precisely by putting eros in the service of generation that we reduce it to an "animal imperative"; while an extensive and vigorous sex life, one far outstripping the needs of mere reproduction, is as distinctively human a behavior as speech or reason. Nor is this comparison accidental. I think an argument can be made, in fact, that our eros serves a role complementary to our logos; that both are in the service of the highest human ends; and that both are essential and irreducible components of our experience of what it is to be human. (See NOTE 5.)

Third, if love is the highest commandment, what exactly does that mean?

1. In the light of my remarks in NOTE 5, I think that to say love is the highest commandment is to say (under the mode of revelation) something similar to what a philosopher might mean when he says (under the mode of reason) that the highest human end is sociability, or community. Community is what we are here for.
   
2. But human communities are not anthills, composed of random groups of people tossed blindly together. Human communities are in the most important instances chosen. We choose our friends and companions by looking for the good in them -- good at any and all levels. We know we have found something good because we enjoy it, and The Good is what you enjoy. The lenses or filters through which we discern the good -- the fundamental criteria by which we find our friends -- may appear many on the surface, but I think in the end they can be reduced to two: logos and eros.
   
3. We maintain our communities, those networks of interlocking friendships that bind us together, by nurturing and growing our mutual enjoyment of each other ... by making better and deeper friendships with each other. How do we do this?


4. With some friends we share a bond of logos, an intellectual bond; and we nurture that bond by talking together, questioning and thinking together, helping each other to teach and to learn.


5. By analogy, then, I think we also have to say that with some friends (admittedly not all) we share a bond of eros, an erotic bond. And we nurture that bond, in the first instance, by making love together, connecting in a way that nothing else can touch.

We are called to love God with all our heart and mind and strength. But I think that any call to love our fellow man is incomplete if it appeals to our hearts and minds but not to our bodies as well.

Can erotic love lead to sin? Can it be "vicious and degrading"? Of course. Anything good (meaning finite things in the world this side of Jordan) can be perverted to do evil. But it is important to distinguish carefully where the actual sin lies. Let's take the case of adultery in particular. In the face of the foregoing argument, I have to deny flatly that the sin lies in the sex itself. It doesn't. I say this with confidence because I have lived on the other side of the equation. When I was able to look at myself analytically, in the context of Wife's infidelities, it was never the sex itself that caused me the pain. But when her affair with someone else caused her to abandon me, to shut me out, to turn cold or hard-hearted to me ... or at any rate, when that was the way it felt on my side ... that was where the pain was. There was the sin. By extension, I argue that sexual love between the right friends is in itself no sin, because it is in itself no more than a working-out in practice of the command to love each other, or of the high goal of human community. Of course I speak of "the right friends" and not indiscriminate acquaintances. But the building and maintaining of ties of love and friendship cannot be in and of itself sinful. It is when building this bond causes us to neglect or betray that bond, that we sin. If our love for someone new causes us to lose our love for someone who came before (a spouse, for example) ... if our love for someone new causes us to abandon or betray the one who came before, to shut her or him out in the cold, to turn away with a hard heart ... well, it is the betrayal or the abandonment or the hard-heartedness that constitute the sin. So if loving someone new causes those things, then in that case the adultery has caused the sin. But that is not the same as saying that the adultery is itself the sin.

What is more, I categorically deny that there is anything special about erotic love in this respect. Any kind of love can become "vicious and degrading". Any kind of love can lead to sin. Love of God? Many a fanatic has been led astray by what started as a genuine, ardent love of God. Love of country? That's too easy. Love of children? You gave a simple example, of a mother whose misguided love for her children leads her to do their homework for them. But there are darker, more vicious examples. I believe that in her own mind, Wife's mother was motivated by love for all her children; yet in her hands that love became a warped and poisonous thing that left none of them whole. The absence of "carnal focus" is a red herring; it's like saying "Well at least there are no chocolate sundaes involved, to excite gluttony." No, there aren't -- but what is there is a worse sin by far than the occasional chocolate sundae. I have no doubt that your love of your children, and of your friends, are indeed all innocent, in the sense that they are not leading you into sin. But that is a blessing and a grace, that you are able to love all these people in a constructive way not a destructive one. The absence of an erotic component is just a coincidence. If the argument is valid, then innocent carnal love must also be possible.

I'm not sure that I can subscribe to all your personal generalizations about Plato (See NOTE 6), but they don't affect your argument much. Whatever his reasons, Plato certainly introduced into Western thought an aspiration toward a kind of pure, bloodless love; and the early Church picked this up with alacrity. I agree with you that this was a mistake. I am not sure I understand Plato's motives, still less those of the early Church Fathers.

But I do think the argument is clear, that a life without passionate, sexual desire is scarcely recognizable as a human life at all; and that the direct physical expression of erotic love is [or can be, if it is not perverted into causing pain and harm] absolutely right and proper as one fundamental component of the best human life, the end for which we were made.

Eros: body or soul? part 1

Back around New Year's, D and I started a discussion about the nature of sex: what is it really, and what does that mean for us? Partly, I suspect, D introduced the topic because our letters had gotten pretty routine -- often little more than diary entries -- and I guess I was showing some impatience. Anyway, she proposed some thoughts, I replied at great length [I know, you're shocked], and she began to answer again. Then the pressures of every day interrupted us for a while, and when we next discussed sex it was with reference to the Atlantic article on pornography that I discuss here. Anyway, here is the discussion as far as we got.
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I still wrestle with serving God at the Catholic Church while involved in an affair with you. That tension has not gone away, but I am a great deal clearer on the challenges and I am much more sensitive to the issues involved. Some of these have to do with sexuality, which is one of the subjects we have briefly touched upon. The challenge of a sacramental marriage or an affair open to the sacred is this question: To what part of the human being does erotic love belong, the body or the soul? If to the body, then what part does rational choice play in our sexual emotions, and how can they be disciplined and controlled? If to the soul, then what part does the body play in it and is carnal love really the goal of it? If carnal love is the goal, is erotic love just a bodily appetite like hunger or thirst? These questions, as you well know, are not new.

As a Christian, I am aware that love is the highest commandment; and if so, then love must be a choice and involve voluntary thoughts and decisions, not just be an animal imperative. The New Testament ideal is that love is brought forth by God and reflects his true being. The love we have for one another is both a duty and a test of virtue here on earth. Sensual longing was to play little or no role; erotic love was refashioned on the model of love we owe to God. Like the other forms of love, it is a way of living, both a joy and a burden and it points to a world beyond where no one will be married. We surround erotic love with ceremonies and rituals, and with a demand for fidelity and sacrifice. Even poetry, both in the Bible and in other religious traditions as well, seem to speak of erotic love but in fact have been interpreted as odes addressed to God.

You don’t have to be a modern reader, unmoved by the Christian vision, to understand why the Bible and the church might find sensual love problematic. Erotic love can be sinful and destructive, and loving you outside the structures of society is complicated by my desire for you. Parental love, my love for my family and friends are not forms of temptation; I could be led into sin, for example, if I were to write my child’s term paper so he would get a higher grade, but there is no carnal focus; my love for my children and my friends remains innocent. Erotic love can be vicious and degrading; perversion, like among the friends of Boyfriend 5, the priest child abuse scandal, prostitution; there is a clear need to safeguard the expression of the erotic and to distinguish the virtuous from the manipulative and selfish use of sexual desire.

I’m not sure that Christian reliance on Plato was helpful in making this distinction. Plato seems to argue that the soul must ascent from the desire for carnal union with the beloved to the act of serene contemplation of the Form of the Beautiful. Perhaps he wants to strip away all the base elements of sexual expression (all the sweat and smells Wife finds so distasteful) and carnal desire to enjoy love as some form of semi-religious veneration. If sexual desire is troubling and bound to lead us into sin, then to overcome its force and power, it becomes necessary to remove our focus from the particular to the universal, from the aging and mortal to the ever beautiful and eternal.

It’s an inspiring vision, but I find it deeply flawed. Plato holds that one emotion can exist, now as erotic desire for a human individual, now as a rational contemplation of the Forms. But this isn’t my experience and it seems illogical. What makes my erotic desire ever so powerful is my desire for you as an individual, the fully present Hosea, with the small bump on your nose and the abundant hair on your chest. That’s a very different state of mind from my contemplation of God in centering prayer. What Plato is describing is a bloodless philosophical passion that has nothing erotic about it; it is not even directed to a person. I realize this view has profoundly shaped Christian theology, but for me, it seems to separate my desire for you from my love for you, one being base and shared with animals and one being rational and spiritual. But sexual desire can and does involve the rational mind; there is nothing unintelligent about my love for you. Perhaps Plato saw no higher purpose in sexual union than pleasure, given his own homosexuality. There could not be any reproduction, so desire produced nothing meaningful beyond the momentary ecstasy. In genuine erotic love, it is the individual person, not the act itself or the Universal, which should be the focus. And it’s precisely there that our human nature, both body and soul, seem most inextricably intertwined.

I have to go; this discussion is incomplete, but it’s a beginning, and you seemed a little bored with the prosaic to the exclusion of all philosophical discussion. I hope you have a productive day at work. It is likely to be much less crazy than mine!

All my love, forever and ever… D

Thoughts on failure 2, Pancho Piquet

The following is from Robert Pirsig's book Lila:
__________

"Here's to Pancho Piquet."

"Who is Pancho Piquet?" she asked.

"The carpentero de ribera. He was an old Cuban. He spoke Spanish so fast even the Mexicans had trouble understanding him. Looked like Boris Karloff. Didn't look Cuban or Mexican at all.

"But he was the fastest carpenter I've ever seen," the Captain said. "And careful too. He never slowed down, even in that jungle heat. We didn't have any electricity but he could work faster with hand tools than most people do with power tools. He was in his fifties or sixties and I was twenty-something. He used to smile that Boris Karloff smile watching me try to keep up with him."

"So why are we drinking to him?" Lila asked.

"Well, they warned me, 'El tome!' He drinks! And so he did," the Captain said.

"One night a big Norte, a norther, blew in off the Gulf of Mexico and it blew so hard... Oh, it was a big wind! Almost bent the palm trees to the ground. And it took the roof off his house and carried it away.

"But instead of fixing it he got drunk and stayed drunk for more than a month. After a couple weeks his wife had to come begging for money for food. That was so sad. I think partly he got drunk because he knew everything was going wrong and the boat would never get built. And that was true. I ran out of money and had to quit."

"So that's why we're drinking to him?" Lila said.

"Yeah, he was sort of a warning," the Captain said, "Also, he just opened my eyes a little to something. A feeling, for what the tropics is really like. All this talk about going to Florida and Mexico brought him back to mind."

"What do you want to go back there for?" she said.

"I don't know. There's always that feeling of despair from there. I can feel it now just thinking about it. 'Tristes tropiques,' the anthropologist, Levi-Strauss, called it. It keeps pulling you back, somehow. Mexicans know what I mean. There's always this feeling that this sadness is the real truth about things and it's better to live with a sad truth than with all the happy progress talk you get up north."
__________

While you are at it, you might be interested in this comment posted to some discussion site, commenting on the very same passage.

Thoughts on failure

D and I have been discussing failure lately. It started with our discussion of expat life the Monday of our last date. I've told you what caused me to get depressed at that conversation, but it took a couple of days before I was able to explain it to D in a letter. When I did -- when I explained that I thought I'd be more comfortable at the table of Sister Failure than dining with some of the expat executives she described -- she tried to talk me out of it with remarks in the vein of "There, there, Hosea, you're not a failure." That told me that she really hadn't heard what I was trying to say, so I spent a little time trying to figure out what I really was trying to say. I came up with something close to the following.
__________

It is quite late, but I have been sitting thumbing through the latest Time Magazine. The cover article is about Amy Chua's new book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and I found myself thinking about Sister Failure as I read it.

Sometimes I wonder whether you hear my remarks about Sister Failure in quite the same tone of voice that I have in my head when I write them. Maybe not quite, because it seems like you try to talk me out of seeing myself in some kind of relation or connection with "her," and yet somehow I think that if you heard my thoughts the way I meant them you might not feel like you had to. I'm not quite sure: "Sister Failure" is a conceit, after all, that I made up pretty recently; and my thoughts on "her" are maybe somewhat confused and contradictory. What I do not feel is that the term "failure" in this context is any kind of reproach. I'm not quite sure I can articulate what I feel instead, but I think there are several levels.

The easiest level to describe is the one where "success" and "failure" describe incomes. That is, after all, one common way of using the words, at least in this country, and I think we both have a pretty good idea of what they mean. "Success" (in America, with respect to incomes) refers to an income of a certain size or larger, that is deployed in such a way as to buy a certain level of material wealth. I don't think it is necessarily a happy way to live, and I don't expect ever to live that way. Partly I don't have that kind of an income now. And once I am divorced, I may take it into my head to look for work somewhere else, somewhere exciting, doing whatever I can find there. If I make that kind of a move -- meaning a move for the sake of the new place, not for the sake of a job -- my income is likely to drop. And if I can momentarily stretch the meaning of "failure" to cover everything that is not "success" ... well, that will end up including me just because I'll never make it inside that particular income bracket. I don't lose any sleep over that fact, though -- not a single wink -- because I would have no idea what to do with that kind of money if I had it.

Another data point surfaces when I think about the people who were my friends in college. Oddly, they were not the other high achievers in my class. (My academic record was a little nuts.) I don't mean that any of them was stupid -- I'm not sure we had a lot of stupid people at my college. But my friends were a little aimless, like I was; plugging along but not sure why, or where they were headed. They were a different group altogether from the confident, driven students who knew what they wanted to do, who systematically applied to law schools or graduate schools in their senior years, and who tended (through dedication and focus) to get most of the top spots in the class. I often felt that I ought to be more like these people, but on the other hand I felt kind of intimidated by them. Any one of them could give an account of himself better than I could. The things they knew, they seemed to know more deeply, while my knowledge was a huge nest of bright-and-shiny tidbits collected from all over the place. And if I had had to answer the question, "Which of the students in your graduating class are the natural successes?" I would certainly have picked them ... even if that meant not picking myself.

It's truly odd, because there is a part of me that feels that it would be invigorating to be ambitious and challenged, a part of me that is eager to go out and pit strength against strength. I wrote you a lot about that when you mentioned that of course you would like to be a great teacher ... in retrospect I think I must have written a lot more than anyone could have wanted to read. And in fact one dimension of our friendship for each other, yours and mine, runs exactly through our delight in each other's strengths.

But side by side with that ambition I have always felt this persistent timidity, this fear. Indeed, in some ways I think that success smells to me something like fear, which is really peculiar. Isn't success supposed to smell sweet? But somehow success (for me) carries with itself the threat of radical impermanence, like I am only an inch away from not being good enough so I have to scramble harder and ever harder to scoot away from the edge of that cliff. In this context, failure is actually liberating. An acceptance of failure means that I don't have to be wound up tight all the time. It's a fair question to wonder how, with all that fear of not being good enough for strong, driven, motivated people, I was ever able to make myself vulnerable to you. I think the answer is twofold. First, I had known you for so long as a friend of Wife's that you already felt fairly safe to me. Second, you had already taken the huge risk of making yourself way more vulnerable to me first. I would like to think that I would have had the courage to pursue you otherwise, but ... well in all those years I didn't do it, did I? So I don't have anything to congratulate myself on here.

It's also a simple fact that we all fail many times in life. I surely learned this in my marriage if nowhere else, because I failed over and over and over again. Not only the little, tactical goals failed, but most of the big ones too. That sounds bleak, but it prepared me for all the times as a parent when I wanted with all my heart to achieve A, and all I could get was B or C. By the time we had kids and that started to happen, I was on the way to learning that in such a case it is best to settle for what is possible and move on. A big reason that I don't react even worse than I do when communication breaks down between you and me is that I have already experienced worse breakdowns so many times that I have started to learn how to deal with it. "Started" ... I don't claim expertise. But I had to smile very softly to myself when you told me that my depression placed huge demands on you, because it meant that I was asking you to fail over and over again in our relationship. The smile was just because I took my own failure towards you very much as a matter of course. So it seemed like no big deal to me for it to go two directions.

And of course this is why we all need forgiveness. Nobody ever has to forgive success. But we have to be able to forgive each other over and over because we are always failing each other, always disappointing each other. It seems like all the time -- well OK, that's an exaggeration, but let's say "not too infrequently" -- that I misstep badly in our relationship or misstate something in a letter and have to ask your forgiveness. You step more gracefully than I do, so you don't misstep as often; but I can only hope that I am as willing to forgive if the occasion ever arises. I'm sure the reason God asks us to forgive each other is that He has a better understanding than we ever could of just how often we need it ourselves.

Pornography and erotic madness

About a week and a half ago, D called my attention to this article in the Atlantic Monthly, about pornography. It's a good article; and even if you don't have the slightest interest in anything I have to say next, I recommend you take a few minutes and read it. D wrote me, "Much of what today's article said I slowly agreed with, but none of it is very comforting or flattering or makes me feel great about sex. Much of it is repugnant and disagreeable. Sigh." At that point I had not seen it at all, nor even heard of it yet. But I figured I had to look it up. Anything that can make D feel bad about sex must be pretty powerful stuff.

What follows is based upon the thoughts that I sent her back in response, once I had read it.

There are two things that caught my notice on the very surface of the article, right away: both are important. One I like, the other not. What I like is that the author makes it very clear that the huge growth of Internet porn doesn't mean anything fundamentally new. So many people have written easy diatribes, either against the new technology (because we were all so purer in the old days) or against those wicked pornographers who are spoiling sex for the rest of us (because we would all have purer desires without Bob Guccione and Larry Flynt). This author, Natasha Vargas-Cooper, by contrast, makes it crystal clear that "The fault, dear Horatio, lies not in our web servers but in ourselves." The Internet has made it possible for people to access things they couldn't reach before, but there wouldn't be that much porn out there if a lot of people didn't want it.

What I dislike is how often Vargas-Cooper reduces the discussion to a focus on men's sexual response, men's desires, men's aggression. Is there an aggressive component in male sexual response? You bet! Absolutely true. Can it push a normal, inoffensive nebbish of a guy into brutal or degrading actions that would horrify him once he was back in his right mind again? Sure thing. We all know this. But is it really so very different with women? Here I have to pause a minute. Now obviously I'm not a woman, so I can't speak with first-hand authority about female sexual response. But Vargas-Cooper herself makes it clear between the lines that whatever it is "women want" -- even if it does turn out to be different from what men want in some ways -- is nonetheless not "nice," not "refined," not "dignified," not "cultivated," not anything of the kind. Whether it is in some details the same as or different from what men want, it has the possibility of being (in any event) just as nasty, dirty, elemental, and savage. She says this explicitly when she remarks that, "If a woman thinks of the best sex she’s had in her life, she’s often thinking of this kind of sex ["extreme", "raw", "unpracticed", "beyond our control"], and while it may be the best sex in her life, it’s not the sex she wants to have throughout her life — or more accurately, it’s not the sex she’d have with the man with whom she’d like to spend her life. " More intriguingly, Vargas-Cooper makes the same point even when she is trying to make the opposite one. She says, for example, that Internet porn (the extreme, degrading stuff) appeals "overwhelmingly" to men. Her proof is that men make up two-thirds of all porn viewers. Two-thirds is overwhelming? Let's do a little math. Right at the beginning of the article, she says that in January 2010 -- one month -- almost 60 million people visited a pornographic website. If two-thirds of them were men, that means that one-third of them -- that's 20 million -- were women. If 20 million women in the United States are viewing Internet porn in a single month, ... gosh, that sounds like a pretty big sample to me. So maybe it's not just men who get off on the crude stuff.

But what's important is not cavilling about little points like this one. What is truly important is to try to understand just what is going on here. How is it possible that sex -- the blessed gift of golden Aphrodite, that softens the sternest soul and brings beauty and joy and song into the world -- how is it possible that this very divine gift can be so aggressive, so brutal, so degrading? And note that I am not asking about perversions of sex -- we all know that anything originally good can be spoiled by evil. That's the whole point of the story of Lucifer. But Vargas-Cooper is clear-eyed enough to brook no confusion over the fact that it can sometimes be the nastiest sex that is the most enticing. So what does this say about us? Are we ourselves incurably corrupt? Are we somehow in our nature attracted to evil? That's certainly one legitimate reading, and it seems to be the one D was mulling in her remarks that I quoted above.

But I think there is another way to approach the question, and it appeals to me for a couple of non-intellectual reasons. One is that I enjoy paradox; another is that it is kind of fun to run smack dab against any kind of received wisdom. So this approach starts by admitting everything Vargas-Cooper says, but then also noting that -- as we all know from first-hand experience -- sex can be very good. It can even (sometimes) approach to the highest good human beings are able to experience. It is important not to forget this fact. And things equal to the same thing are equal to each other.

Therefore: If, on the one hand, sex is (or can be, at certain times and under certain conditions) brutal and dirty and degrading; ...

And if, on the other hand, sex can also be very very good; ...

Then surely it follows that [somehow, in ways we don't understand] what is brutal and degrading can be [sometimes, in some respects, from some points of view, with other qualifiers that we don't even know yet or can't think of right now] good.

If I were to repeat that without all the cotton batting in my mouth, it would come out as: what is brutal and degrading can nonetheless be good.

D was really unhappy with this conclusion, at any rate when I stated it so baldly. She talked about obvious examples of human degradation like the concentration camps as clear examples that were not good. Coming back to sex, she added, "I might disagree with your assertion that brutality does not leave a mark on one’s psyche and character; I deal with too many rape victims at my school to accept that assertion. And of course, rape is a form of sexuality; it cannot be labeled only ‘violence and a desire for power’, although has elements of both apart from sexuality. Rape and other forms of brutal sexuality can be devastating, and not just to children."

Well of course I never meant to deny any of that. To say that a few very special brutal things can also sometimes turn out to be somehow good in some special way is not at all the same as saying that all brutal or degrading things are always good, always simply good, or good without further qualification. That latter would be crazy talk. In the same way, I never imagined (for example) that "Degrading = Good" could ever become some kind of slogan for social engineering or reform. That is the direction that the Marquis de Sade tried to go (almost exactly) and his results were nauseating. So this insight (or deduction, or whatever it is) can apparently not be easily or simplistically generalized outside of its original sphere of application.

It is also true that sexual brutality can leave deep scars on the soul. D wrote of the rape victims she meets at her school; Vargas-Cooper, in a very different way, writes of "Last Tango in Paris." There is no question that these scars can be deep and real. Again, I would not dream of disagreeing.

And yet, somehow there is a great mystery here. Because while it is patently, undeniably true that what is brutal can be evil and scarring, I think Vargas-Cooper is pointing to a more hidden truth which is that it need not always be so in 100% of cases. Of course I agree that the Shoah was evil; and of course it is clear that the rape victims in D's school are shattered and scarred by it. But what about Vargas-Cooper's one-night stand, the one where her young man could only be excited by something that made her uncomfortable? There are a lot of things I could say about that story -- first among them, that I would hate to be that young man because it must be sad to be him, to live with a soul shaped like his. But I think we cannot say that the event scarred or brutalized Vargas-Cooper, ... even though at some level it was intended to. But there are many levels here. One one level, she and the young man were friends, apparently. On a deeper level, he wanted to find something that would hurt her, because he found it exciting. And on a still deeper level she was happy to comply ... partly, I think, out of kindness or affection to him; but also partly, she seems to hint, because it was at least possible for her to be excited by it too. (She never says this explicitly, but I think it is implied by the other things she does say in other parts of the article about being excited by things that revolt one.) I don't think that necessarily means it would have excited her on a different night, or under other circumstances. Maybe it is just that she hoped his reaction could be contagious. Or maybe it is something else, ... I am really not sure. But I am certain that she would not have written about it so matter-of-factly if the experience had truly scarred her. So there is something mysterious going on here, where aggression is wounding ... except once in a while under special circumstances, when it isn't; where degradation is degrading ... except now and then between just the right people at just the right time, when it isn't ... or isn't exactly. It is very difficult to pin down with any precision.

Is there any way of understanding how it could have come to be in the first place, that these kinds of things can be exciting? Yes, I think so. The place to start is the observation that in some ways we appear to be made with parts that have overlapping uses. It is undeniable that one of the places in the soul (or brain, if you prefer) from which we draw the power and fantastic energy that fuel our sex drives is from that same pool which also feeds anger and fighting. Here is another point at which I have to correct Vargas-Cooper just a bit. She quotes Freud on "'emotional ambivalence' -- the simultaneous love and hate of the object of one's sexual affection. From that ambivalence springs the aggressive, hostile, and humiliating components of male sexual arousal." But I have to disagree with her use of the words "ambivalence" and "hate". Oh sure, I suppose it happens sometimes. But she writes as if it is fundamental to male sexual arousal that we have to both love and hate our partner, and that's not true. I would go farther and say that even if you accept the description of male sexual arousal as "aggressive, hostile, and humiliating" (at least in part) it still does not follow that it springs from hatred. The thing is, somebody who did those things while sane, while in his right mind, in the light of day ... that man would have to be motivated by hatred. Fully agreed. But to act that way in bed ... I'm not so sure. I won't deny that there are some guys who do feel that kind of ambivalence. You can find guys pretty easily to prove just about any disreputable point you'd like to make about men. [That was a small joke.] But I think it's also possible for a guy who feels no such ambivalence nonetheless to act in bed in this same kind of aggressive way. Why? Because he has gone temporarily out of his mind. Because he is in the grips of erotic madness, and so in a sense is no longer himself. Or you can say that is also a part of himself, but it's not a persona he would be willing to admit to the next day at work around the coffee machine. It is a persona that is so different from who he is the rest of the time that he can look back at the nighttime in wonderment. "Was that me? Did I really do that? To her?? And she let me?? Wow ... what could ever have possessed us ...?" Of course, what possessed them both was lust, erotic madness; and while a man is in the grips of it, that madness upends all his values. Things that he honors and cherishes in the daytime become of no account; things that he finds sordid or repugnant may in that moment shine with a new light. I expect that this is true of women too, although probably in somewhat different ways. But it is still madness. It still draws its power from the same pool of energy that fuels rage and cruelty and ferocity under other circumstances. And so that pool of energy colors the experience of erotic madness with its own special hue. It is because we draw power from the same undifferentiated pool of energy that sexual madness acquires a flavor of aggression and wrath. There is no need for it to involve any actual hatred or ambivalence ... it just makes us act as if we felt those things. Because it makes us crazy.

OK, that's a kind of quasi-biological explanation, that sex and fighting draw energy out of the same pool and both give their scent back to the energy itself. That's not really an explanation at the level of lived experience. Is there any way to make sense of this odd confluence of the repulsive with the attractive, that treats our immediate experience fairly? I have an idea, but I am not sure how well it works. But the fact is that our civilized selves -- our appropriate, refined, dignified, cultivated, self-controlled, "nice" selves -- are masks. They are roles we create, characters we play in the vast theater of Living With Others. We create them by overemphasizing some parts of our selves, cutting out other parts, and substituting plausible stories for the real reasons of our hearts. To that extent, they are -- not to put too fine a point on it -- lies. They may be necessary lies, because we know that we would repel the very people whose love and attention we crave if we did not play these roles. And of course they aren't really lies because we all know that we all do the same thing. We all know that there are parts of ourselves we don't show to others, and so we can guess pretty easily that they all have dark corners of their own hearts they don't show us. Still, there is a good bit of artifice to civilized life; and while the goal of civilization is to make that artifice effortless -- so that it becomes nearly real -- it remains a mask. It separates us from the immediacy of life, the rawness of direct sensation and reaction.

Sex cuts straight through all that bullshit, at any rate if it is good sex. False sex, civilized and refined sex, is clearly bad sex. So I think part of what people may find attractive about the crudeness of much pornography is that it bypasses our masks directly. It speaks directly to the dark corners of our hearts that we won't admit to anyone. It may be low and nasty, but it is direct and raw in a way that almost nothing is any more. And after so many years of trying to make civilized behavior seem like second nature, it can be a relief to give up and stop pretending. Even if this or that kind of porn isn't exactly your cup of tea, I think the rawness and directness make it appeal to us on some lower level that resents all the polite manners and cultivated behavior we have to put on every day before walking outdoors to meet the world. Even if there are ways in which the message of much pornography is profoundly false, it can feel true in ways that we may not be able to articulate clearly. This is the same kind of truth that I was trying to write about in my post "Beyond Dignity?" although there I wasn't thinking about pornography at all.

At a more abstract level, the metaphysical system that Robert Pirsig outlines in Lila (not the rather different system in his earlier and more famous Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) would also accommodate this "odd confluence" very nicely. In Lila Pirsig sketches a metaphysics in which there are multiple standards of good-and-bad, ... all equally valid! What is more, something that is very good in this scale might well be very bad in the next scale. (He explicitly instances sex as an example here, although not with the kind of graphic detail that Vargas-Cooper provides.) In the end he has a system that subsumes all these partial scales into a larger picture, and I won't try to summarize it right now. But I do think it works as a framework for understanding the paradox Vargas-Cooper highlights in pornography.

Without scaling Pirsig's heights, though, I think we can agree that what is right and good -- and exciting and gratifying -- in sex is not necessarily right and good in the outside world. Sex is almost a kind of world unto itself. Of course it can color the outside world -- D has written me eloquently about how sexuality can be a spirituality, and about how it can orient one's entire approach to life. But still, the things that are right in bed are not generally right outside of bed. In that sense -- that very restricted sense -- sex is like madness. This doesn't have to be a bad thing -- in the Phaedrus, Plato writes of madness (and also erotic desire) as a divine gift, something truly superhuman that allows us momentarily to transcend the world and reach for the gods. But it does mean that what applies here doesn't apply there. For this reason, I think we don't have to feel bad about the nasty aspect of sex. Even if it attracts us in bed, that doesn't mean it would ever attract us outside of bed -- and I'll wager that 99% of the time it does not. To say (as Vargas-Cooper does) that sexual excitement can include these elements which look rather unsavory by the light of day does not mean (as D fretted back at the beginning of this post) that there is something wrong with us, that we need to condemn ourselves or feel bad about who we are. All it means is that -- really and truly -- we cannot judge sex by the same standards we apply to the light of day. They are different worlds; and to each, the other looks like stark madness. That doesn't stop it from being a divine gift, however. The ways of the gods often look crazy to us.

In the end, there is no simple answer. Any attempt to wrap up the whole question, the whole experience, in a tidy formula will be wrong. Questions like this remind me why intellectual humility is a virtue; because the most interesting questions are always the ones we can't figure out.

Maybe I've got it all wrong. Thoughts?

Fourteenth date

Wow.

So D and I spent this last weekend together in Faraway City. I told Wife I had to give a seminar in the office there; I told my coworkers I was taking a couple days vacation; I flew out the evening of Thursday, got in after midnight, then met D’s plane close to noon on Friday. I am starting to write this now in the airport Monday night (and finishing it later in the same week). What about the three days in between? Several things stand out.

In the first place, it almost didn’t happen at all. Back last fall, D and I were bickering over how to pay for our next visit. I insisted that I would pay for the whole thing; D insisted that she would pay her share; and there we sat at a standoff. (See for example here and here.) Finally she said she didn’t care who paid for what so long as we saw each other, and I made reservations for this weekend in mid-January. No sooner had I done so, of course, than she asked how much she owed me for her ticket. (sigh) Honestly what I wanted more than anything else was not to have to discuss money at all … it brought back way too many memories of having to plan out finances with Wife. But D is stubborn. (You are shocked to hear this, I realize.) I had to threaten to cancel the tickets before she would let up, and even then she was grumpy about it. I suggested that if we really had to talk about money, maybe we could do so in person, after we had been together for a day or so … thinking that maybe after enough sex we’d both be more relaxed and able to approach the question more calmly. In any event, I didn’t cancel the tickets and we did meet.

Sometimes I think I am past it sexually, or nearly. I’m almost fifty years old and D is radiantly sexy. We are in bed as I stroke, suckle, lick, squeeze, rub … but I don’t get hard. Maybe later, … sometimes I still wake up hard in the mornings … but that’s no guarantee that I’ll stay up. D just tells me that I can’t expect sex at fifty to be the same as sex at twenty, and that she is still perfectly content. (She also gently suggested that Pfizer sells medication for this sort of disappointment.) But it can be depressing.

D herself, needless to say, may be older than I am but she isn’t past anything. Her whole body, every inch of skin, every nerve, is a finely-tuned machine designed for orgasm. I told her this weekend how sexy she is, and she said, “Well thank you, I’m glad you think so.”

“That’s not what I mean,” I tried to explain. “I’m not talking about a private opinion, that you are ‘subjectively sexy,’ so to speak. My point is that you are objectively sexy. Think of a Ferrari: when you call it a fast car, you don’t mean that it’s my opinion or your opinion that a Ferrari is fast. You mean that it is designed to go fast. Every single design decision is taken with speed in mind. The engine won’t even work right at low speeds: the plugs foul, the engine dies. But get it up to 150 or 200 miles per hour, and it performs like a dream. OK, well it’s the same thing with your body, except it’s not about speed. Your body is designed to function under conditions of stimulation and orgasm. You aren’t built for celibacy; you get cranky and unhappy when you have to undergo it for too long. But slide into bed and suddenly everything falls into place. Suddenly you are firing perfectly on all cylinders. Sex is what you were made for … far more than any ordinary mortal. In some deep way, calling from eternity, sex is your destiny! This is what I mean by saying that it’s really not just my opinion. You are objectively sexy.”

D was embarrassed by this. “Don’t be silly; I’ve gone years without sex before this.”

“Yes and you were miserable every minute. Look, it’s easy to see what I mean. How many other women do you know who experience orgasm when their toes are suckled?”

“Actually I read an article about toes online just the other day. I’ll send you the link.”

“Whatever.”

We talked about masturbation. D said that she hardly ever masturbates. Huh, what? How is this possible? Well, she said she feels that masturbation is kind of a cheat, because part of the real richness of sex is the deep relationship with another person. Fine, that’s true, but what about just getting off? We talked a little longer and she explained that when she really gets depressed it can be hard to feel sexy … then since she interprets the whole world through the lens of her libido (another reason I say she was made for sex) this means she spirals into despair. Fine, I told her, let Dr. Hosea give you a prescription. The next time you feel like that, masturbate. At the beginning you may be too depressed to feel much like it; but halfway through, you’ll feel a lot better and you’ll feel much more willing to go on. Trust the voice of experience on this. She said she’d think about it.

We talked about some of her previous lovers. She made a point of saying that every single one of them treated her well, every one was a gentleman of whom she had fond memories. The fellow who wanted to take her virginity when she was a teenager, the cultured older gentleman who finally did several years later, even the friend she called up when she was alone and deeply depressed and just wanted to get laid. She had only kind words for all of them.

We talked about my marriage, about Wife’s crazy financial decisions, about the thousands of dollars flushed down the drain over the decades for no discernable reason. I explained as clearly as I could why I never intend to let anyone else have any control over my finances or decisions, once the divorce is final. (Naturally this is why I had been so stubborn when she had tried to discuss paying for the trip.) She commented only that it was helpful to understand how I felt, and that she was hearing for the first time a level of anger and bitterness in my voice that obviously runs deep and that I usually hide when talking about Wife’s antics. Really, ya think?

Talking and fucking … we didn’t do a lot else. The hotel was one of these extended-stay places with a kitchenette, so we bought some groceries and cooked. The weather was crappy so we didn’t really feel like going out for anything else, anyway. But that was enough.

The sex was great. Friday afternoon (as soon as we got to the hotel) it was urgent and hurried – that’s what we get for waiting four months between visits. Then we got dressed, went out to buy groceries, came back to fix supper, and fucked some more. By Saturday morning D was telling me she was already sore, and there were stains on the bed that could have looked like a period if that weren’t a thing of the past for her. So we slowed down and went a bit more gingerly. But didn’t stop.

Sunday night was a little remarkable. We had spent all afternoon eating chips and drinking wine; after finishing two bottles we needed another to go with dinner. I offered to go out to get it. D said that was fine, she would get the food ready while I was gone … only could we lie down first? Maybe cuddle and kiss for a couple of minutes? Maybe feel each other’s skin?

So we lay down on the bed … and suddenly we locked together. Clothes fell negligently here and there. I never did get hard this time at all, but for two hours D rolled in ecstasy. She was exhausted, she was sore, she’d have to urge “Be gentle there” … and then it was “More. More. MORE. Oh my God!!” When we talked about it later, D was pretty embarrassed; but the language she used to describe it made her rapture sound almost like a religious experience. She didn’t want to discuss it a lot; maybe later. On the other hand, when I say that she is designed for sex like a Ferrari is designed for speed – this is part of what I mean.

Monday morning we talked for a while. D told me about the people she has known in all the places she’s lived around the world, and I began to slide into a brown study. I think it was the descriptions of how the executives live in her husband’s company, at various locations around the globe. It’s not that I envy them, although I’ll never live half so grandly. It’s rather that I realize how uncomfortable and out of place I would feel there. Somehow I think I would feel more comfortable dining at the table of Sister Failure, and this probably says something important about me. (If nothing else, it is probably a good indicator of what I should expect in my professional future, sad to say.)

D saw me suddenly fall quiet, and it disturbed her. She began to feel like she had stepped on some kind of landmine she hadn’t known was there, and so she backed away clear to the other side of the room – exactly what I had asked her on a previous occasion never to do when I get depressed. She began to say she should have left the evening before, rather than have said something to depress me so. (What?? And miss last night’s glorious sex?) So I found myself a little bit in the ironic position of having to console her for my depression! Specifically, I reminded her that she is not responsible for my moods. It is not her job to prevent me from getting depressed. All I ask – all I ask – is that, when it happens, she stay with me. Hold my hand. Let me hold her. Keep the direct human contact open. That’s what I need above all to make it better.

She frowned for a while, staring at the floor and thinking about this. But then she came back over to the bed where I was sitting, and stretched out. She said, “You are asking me something hard. I fear I will never know where all the potholes are. You are asking me to be willing to fail a lot in our relationship. But I can do that. I won’t run away.” Then she sat up, slid into my lap, and smiled. And it was better.

Finally we checked out, drove to the airport, and flew back to our respective homes. We both faced huge piles of work left undone for the sake of this trip. But it was worth it. The next morning, I e-mailed D that I had gotten home safely and chit-chatted about little things. And then I added, “The weekend keeps coming back to me in reveries unbidden, and I have to shake my head to get back to work. You have talked many times about the lifelong task of ‘becoming a woman,’ but I can only reflect that your womanhood is an instrument on which you can already play music of subtlety and complexity befitting an entire orchestra.


In my mind I hear your voice like violins, in thoughtful, nuanced discussions drawing on perceptions and insights that would be clean out of the reach of anyone with less than a half century of experience and of careful meditation on that experience. Cutting across that subtle richness like horns or trumpets is a kind of sharpness and clarity -- equally well as idealism for the future and as indignation at injustice -- that one might imagine from a young woman in her twenties. Skipping gaily across the top is the flute section, the playfulness of a little girl who jokes and banters with me, who sneaks up to hug me from behind, and who scoots into my lap with her arms around my neck smiling winsomely. And then there is the passion, ... the divine passion before which my words fall helplessly to the ground and I pull my shoes from off my feet in reverence ... the sublime passion that only the Muses can sing of rightly, and for which mortals like me can feel only awe, and gratitude, ... and overmastering desire ....

Dear heavens I love you, deeply and passionately, now and ever,
Hosea”