The Spirit of the Erotic

Several years ago, on a winter’s eve, I was sitting at my desk reading a rather central passage in a very good book:

Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden. But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest you die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die. For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.

Nothing unusual to be absorbed in that passage. It’s a text to which we’re all drawn — repeatedly — if for no other reason than that none of us really understands how we got to where we so perilously are. But on this particular winter’s eve this tale about a garden lost was freighted with special meaning. For I was scanning the lines much as I might have scanned the lines of a critic’s review after seeing a movie.

The movie had shown that afternoon, and, starting from the moment when my daughter and I pulled into our driveway after returning from her preschool, it took all of five minutes. It went like this. Car noses into port. Its pilot, call him Father, turns off engine, unfastens Daughter’s seat belt, and leaves Daughter to fend for herself while he carries groceries up steps and into house. By the time Father makes it to dining room window to check on Daughter’s progress, Daughter is already out of car and on her way up steps. Halfway up she stops and looks around, obviously savoring her freedom. Then a bicycle, locked to step railing, catches her eye. For several days now Father has been telling Daughter not to touch the bicycle’s chain because the grease thereon might stain her hands and clothes, and as Daughter eyes the bike this instruction is clearly in mind. She’s still for a few seconds, then glances up toward the front door to see if Father is watching. Convinced of his absence, Daughter returns her attention to the bike. Suddenly she reaches out, unhesitatingly grabs hold of the chain, and brings her hand close to see, to know the effect. A minute later Daughter enters house. As if called, she marches straight up to the Lord God her Father and unblinkingly states: “I didn’t touch Mummy’s bicycle.”

It is an outright lie. A first lie, a quintessential lie. And as Daughter utters it she literally holds her begreased hand behind her back in order to hide her nakedness.

What amazed me about this scenario was not so much its content as that its transcript had been on public record for as far back as mankind could remember. I knew, because I had the transcript before me. Reading over that Genesis text caused me to sock my brow. There, in a testament descended from a strange people in a strange land, was a blow-by-blow account, plus analysis, of what had just transpired in the head of my three-year-old daughter. It all fit, and to the tee. I couldn’t decide which was more incredible: Was it that my child’s act should be a direct recapitulation of Eve’s? Or that Eve’s act was possibly every bit as concrete and individual as my child’s? For a second I lost myself in an effort to summon, from the depth of 35,000 years, a Cro-Magnon time of bear-claw necklaces and bone flutes and elaborate burial rites. But soon I gave that up and returned to the fact that was closest — namely, that on the evidence of that day my daughter had, from my point of view, passed over and joined the rest of us. Like Eve, she had fallen under the sway of what I propose to call the spirit of the erotic.

It is commonly thought that eroticism is synonymous with sex, or at least “sexiness.” And for obvious reason. Sex is the center, the very cradle of life, the place where all things get seen for what they are; thus eroticism blooms most fully there. But eroticism’s essence, its seed if you will, doesn’t have much to do with sex, per se. Rather, it has to do with something to which even children have access. I mean the business of knowing. For the spirit of the erotic is nothing if not the impulse to “dis-cover.”

Eve had before her a word, a living communication from God: “Thou shalt not eat of the tree in the midst of the garden lest you die.” And as she turned the command over in her mind, the immediate and, above all, plain sense of it began to be lost. Much as the sense of a word gets lost if it is idly repeated over and over (the serpent is nothing if not an echo), so too did God’s word begin to become a dead letter whose meaning, if it had any left at all, was simply that it covered up some other, more vital sense: “God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof your eyes shall be opened and you shall be as gods.” In other words, Eve began to conceive of truth as something behind, instead of in and among, the corporeal flesh (or “letter”) of God’s word, and naturally she wanted to get at it. Eve, tradition has it, couldn’t bear to stay under a “veil.” Does this mean she couldn’t bear some vow of celibacy? Not at all. It means that she distrusted the face of things, that she looked on faces as though they were opaque masks, that she was therefore driven to part the veil of appearance in order to get at “things in themselves.” Gnostic that she was, Eve hungered for direct, unmediated, word-less revelation, and the world has never been the same since.

That we are indeed sons and daughters of Eve can of course be made readily apparent by examining the dynamics of sexual passion. Who among us, for example, has not looked on the face of a lover as a mere shadow, a tease, an outward expression of a deeper and more private realm to which we (at considerable cost) seek access? Some of us may even have gone further. Some of us, after calling a lover to come, may actually have labored to raise that lover out of the river of lovemaking solely in order to feast from a high seat of transcendence on the wriggling, iridescent life of hooked prey. But lest we forget that overtly sexual events comprise just one of many different dimensions in which the spirit of the erotic is manifest, let us, as well, cast at least a glance toward the phenomenon called modern science.

Certainly it cannot be denied that ever since Aristotle, scientists have manipulated nature in order to trick its “secret” out of hiding. Since Descartes, in fact, nature has begun rather often to figure merely as a test site for the confirmation of hypotheses. I do not mean to buttress the bad press Descartes has received in recent years. The man designed wheelchairs, spectacles. More to the point, I do not mean to seem ungrateful for the vistas opened to us by science. I take as much delight in learning how electrons behave as the next person. Nevertheless it does seem well to note that, particularly in the modern era, scientists have been playing games of serious strip-and-tease. Right now, the whole world over, scientists are patiently drugging and prodding and coaxing in the name of disinterested observation. They are massaging and then interrogating — and all in order to get a “result,” to worry forth a “reaction,” to get nature to come. Upon being asked to sum up the Los Alamos bomb-building enterprise of which he was a part, the physicist John Wheeler once put the matter like this: “We knew the energy was in there, we just had to find a way to get it out.” No doubt Wheeler meant that his colleagues had to get the energy “out” because if they didn’t the Germans would; but this fact doesn’t render his phrasing any less significant.

If it weren’t that so much pain and defilement ensued, the situation would be comical. For at bottom the seducers and scientists of the world (and there is a little of each in all of us) operate on a dubious premise — namely, that what appears is somehow superfluous, a kind of chance by-product of an allegedly self-sufficient, usually hidden, noumenal realm. Why be so sure that true being exists “behind” appearances? Oh, to be sure, there is an “inside.” There is always an inside of one sort or another. But what’s inside is invariably generalized. Don’t the insides of our bodies all look alike? And are not these insides of ours alike to precisely the same degree that our outsides, which is to say our faces and the personalities written on them, are infinitely various and distinct? It is the same with nature or a good poem. A bird’s plumage is not just a protective coloring; it is in fact designed to display brightness and color. Indeed, sometimes the look of a bird is so glorious that one can’t help but wonder if the presentation of plumage is the end for which birds exist. Similarly, true poetic language is never merely tacked on in an effort to make some “content” palatable. Poetic language is itself the content: That which good poetry “says” cannot be said in any other way. In sum, faces matter. It’s in the songs, the landscapes, the faces of things that true being is to be found at its most specific and therefore most real and intense. Call it just a surface, ignore incarnational logic, try with Melville’s Ahab to “strike through the mask,” and you will invariably come up with something dull, and generalized, and gray. You will find, as Ahab did, “nothing” — that which the book of Genesis calls “death.” Our age, of course, has started to call this nothing “nuclear winter.” But it doesn’t much matter which term we adopt. For each term describes the result of just one event: Under the sway of an eroticist a climax is a nuclear detonation, is a torn veil, is a broken word.

So much for what an eroticist wreaks in the world. What happens to the eroticist himself? Let us call to mind a typical sensualist. What do we see? Quite exactly, we behold a person who is turned “on.” A person who is “on” like a wired light can be said to be “on,” a person who shines with a sensational, rather than a passionate, light. What electrifies him? Is it awe at the mystery of a woman’s seasons or even the vision of cotton looped over thighs? Hardly. For a sensualist the charge derives from something more abstract. Specifically, it comes from halving what is properly whole, turning the two halves against each other, and then basking in the peculiar, novel, and, above all, interesting sparks which result. Is it not much more interesting to toy with the repellent force between two magnets than to witness the force that bonds them? Kids think so, at any rate, and so too do sensualists. It is usually assumed that the spirit of the erotic, in contrast to the spirit of the Christian faith which defines it, is premised on reverence for the body. Not so! When fully developed, the spirit of the erotic actually fuels on the outright despisement of flesh — and to the very same degree that the Christian faith holds flesh sacred. What is the doctrine of the resurrection of the body if not a stubborn recognition that flesh, even sexually aroused flesh, is the home of spirit? Well, to an eroticist that is a very threatening notion. For what the eroticist really does, when he aspires to “know,” is to transcend by that very aspiration the flesh that is his body. No longer is spirit joined to and expressed in flesh, but, instead, a kind of professorial (spuriously angelic) spirit investigates flesh; the eroticist proceeds to bring flesh close — be it his own or his lover’s or both, coupled — in order to hover over it and thereby delight in his distance from it. He positively revels in disembodiment — both in the disembodiment he causes and the disembodiment he is. The more his mind freezes, the more his body goes up in flames.

In other words, eroticists do what they do for the hell of it. Hell: Isn’t that the place where fire and ice, rather than working in concert, mutually reinforce each other’s simultaneous existence and thereby underwrite an iron-clad law of unchangingness? For an eroticist, fire serves to intensify the sensation of ice, and ice serves to intensify the sensation of fire. Period. At no point do fire and ice ever really interpenetrate and become living water. That event, in fact, is the one thing an eroticist really fears. Too much living water and his game is up; “safe sex” might give way to procreation. But a little water, a few trickles here and there which one can then freeze — that’s a different story. This sort of sensation artistry has a lot of different aspects to it, of course. In addition to “lovemaking,” other only slightly less dramatic aspects include states like pity and nostalgia. But in each instance the artistry amounts to the mere rubbing together of apparent opposites simply juxtaposed. In one case the opposites may be predicaments, as when a person who pities just senses the difference between himself and someone else less fortunate. (To pity someone is not to shoulder his pain.) In another case the opposites may be life and death. (To flirt with death, as one does when one rides a roller coaster, is a very different thing from dying.) In still another case — a theologian’s, for example — the opposites may even be “nature” and “grace.” But the sensation is the same throughout. It is frictional.

My daughter, needless to say, had no inkling of all this. This kind of knowingness, this kind of living death comes with time and practice. But though my daughter can hardly be said to have feasted on the demolition of incarnational fact (indeed, she continued to look as solid and rooted as a peasant harvesting potatoes off some east European steppe), she was not for this reason any less worse off. On the contrary, by acting the way she did that winter’s day she had sundered flesh from spirit in a manner worthy of the most skilled and deliberate of eroticists.

How can this be?

That we should have to work to see the answer is one of the surest signs, along with our too uncritical identification of sensuousness and eroticism, that we live in a benighted age, an age which may well be as dark as those middle ages our time calls dark were bright. Be that as it may, we tend nowadays to gauge the meaning of spirit and flesh almost exclusively in mind/body terms — thought (res cogitans) on the one hand, bone and blood and sinew (res extensa) on the other. “Spirit,” even for rigorously Christian thinkers like Wendell Berry, let alone erotic thinkers like Milan Kundera, has actually come to mean “mind.” Not surprisingly, then, if ever we should come across some antique (scriptural) preference to how man is ideally a composite of flesh and spirit, most of us immediately picture a person who is vigorous, altogether fit in both a physical and a mental sense. But the scriptural authors meant by flesh and spirit something very different from body and mind! To them flesh referred to what we now think of as psychosomatic wholeness. Spirit, on the other hand, meant “animating life principle.” The Hebrew word for it was ruah, the Greek pneuma, and what both these words signified was “wind,” or “breath.” Thus when the scriptural authors spoke of man as a composite of flesh and spirit, they meant that man was, ideally speaking, informed by and ordered to the life-giving breath of God. In a sense they thought of persons as words. Flesh alone was mere sound, meaningless in itself, but because it was “ensouled,” because it was inflated by God’s breath and “sent” to break over the teeth of circumstance and eventually death, flesh signified. Unless of course men didn’t do the will of Him who sent them.

Keeping this in mind, let us turn once again to the story of the Fall. Eve fell, it is now clear, the second she questioned the meaning of the command not to eat of the tree in the midst of the garden. It was at that instant, and not at the instant she ate of the fruit, that she became — in the deepest sense — “naked.” Eve became naked precisely to the extent that she became, as Hopkins has it, “unstressed” by the will of her parent. Thus the real significance of Adam’s and Eve’s (and my daughter’s) disobedience is not to be found in the fact that they broke a rule. Rather is it to be found in the onset of idleness, in the drift away from the invigorating, incarnating power of the Father’s word. No longer subservient to the word of God, Adam and Eve sundered themselves and crowned that part of their flesh called “mind” to reign in the Word’s stead. Thenceforth, as Descartes so neatly demonstrated, it was solely because they “thought” that they “were.” As for the rest of nature — be it their own bodies or the world of grass and streams and wildlife — all that became, in consequence, something lifeless and other, a merely “material” realm whose chief significance was that it stood ripe for exploitation.

I think what we’re really doing, when we give ourselves over to erotic energies, is simply trying to keep warm. But by the grace of God we’re in the cold — have been, ever since the Eve and the child in us went idle. And the way to keep warm, when you’re cut off from the fire of life itself, is to break incarnational fact. Families, selves, heavy nuclei, words — there’s a lot of energy stored in each, and the quickest, the easiest access to this energy is simply to break these bodies open and bask in the heat that gets released as the sparks fly up. And if the fire has died down and the senses have begun to cool? Why, at that point we simply pick up the sticks of our broken life (mind and body, present and past, “I” and “everybody else”) and start to rub them together. That’s what eroticism amounts to. And perhaps the best way to see that it’s wrong is not to dwell on how it’s immoral, but, instead, to note that it just doesn’t work. We can’t raise the dead by ourselves. Admittedly, sometimes it seems as if we could. Fully developed erotic energy can seem a lot like new life. How can it be otherwise since we can’t help but traffic in the real — which is to say, the holy and hard-won? But though the spirit of the erotic may be intense, it remains in the last analysis something parasitic, something which can only squander, and never build up, God-stuff. Having no principle of replenishment within itself, the spirit of the erotic is compelled to raid the store of cosmic energy invested in creation and then to keep on raiding it, because the fuel, the unchafed flesh of personhood and pristine wilderness, gets used up. It’s an entropic phenomenon. Unlike genuine desire, whose energy is not so much generated as shared, eroticism’s end is “dead heat.”

Ought we not, then, to turn away from that end and pray instead that we may be filled with this other kind of desire that knows the body for home? To be perfectly accurate, it is not for me to say. Each person must make that choice for himself. The only thing permitted for me to say is that such a turn is bound to be unsafe. For there are passions in heaven, passions richer and fiercer than our own.