FIFTEEN

WRITING ABOUT SEX

2008

 

 

 

For whatever reason, and I don’t remember how it happened, I am now what people call “sixty-four years old,” and I have to admit that I started writing about sex almost as soon as I realized that it was possible to do so—say, at the age of fourteen—and I still do it, even though I was in a way the wrong age then, and in a different way I guess I’m the wrong age now. Various people who have liked me or cared about me—people who have believed in my promise as a writer—have hinted to me at different times in my life that an excessive preoccupation with the subject of sex has harmed or even ruined my writing. They’ve implied that it was sad, almost pitiful, that an adolescent obsession—or maybe it was in fact a psychological compulsion—should have been allowed to marginalize what they optimistically had hoped might have been a serious body of work. Meanwhile, people I don’t know very well have tended over all those decades to break into a very particular smile, one I recognize now, when they’ve learned that I’ve written something that deals with sex—a winking smile that seems to suggest that a trivial, silly, but rather amusing topic has been mentioned. It’s a smile not unlike the smile that would appear on the faces of some of our more conservative teachers in the 1950s when the topic of “jazz” was raised—a smile sometimes accompanied back in those gloomy days by a mocking, suggestive swaying of the hips.

I suppose it goes without saying that James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and others were expanding the scope of literature and redrawing humanity’s picture of itself when they approached this subject in the earlier part of the twentieth century. But by the time I came along, many of my friends were embarrassed on my behalf precisely because the topic I was writing about seemed so closely associated with an earlier era.

So why have I stuck with it? I suppose it has to do with the point I’ve heard boringly expressed by writers in one way or another all of my life—the thing they always say, while in a way always hoping that no one will believe them, though what they’re saying is true—some variation or another of “I don’t do my own writing.” I personally sometimes express the point, when pressed, by saying that I see my writing as a sort of collaboration between my rational self (“me”) and the voice that comes from outside the window, the voice that comes in through the window, whose words I write down in a state of weirded-out puzzlement, thinking, “Jesus Christ, what is he saying?”

The collaboration is really quite an unequal partnership, I’d have to admit. The voice contributes everything, and I contribute nothing, frankly, except some modest organizing abilities and (if I may say so) a certain skill in finding, among the voice’s many utterances, those that are most interesting. (I suppose I’m quite a bit like one of those young college graduates in jacket and tie who helps some unruly but for some reason celebrated man to write his autobiography.) When I try to define the voice, I say, weakly, “Oh, that’s the unconscious,” but I’m eventually forced to conclude that, if the unconscious has thoughts, it has to have heard these thoughts (or at least their constituent fragments) from human beings of some description—from the people I’ve met, the people I’ve read about, the people I’ve happened to overhear on the street. So it’s not just a theory that society is speaking to itself through me. If it were not so, all I would be able to hear, and all I would be trying to transcribe, would be the sound of my own heart sending blood through my veins.

Obviously, society has asked writers, as a group, to take time out from normal labor to do this special listening and transcribing, and each individual writer has been assigned a certain part of the spectrum. No writer knows—or can know—whether the section that’s been assigned to him contains the valuable code that will ultimately benefit the human species or whether his section consists merely of the more common noise or chatter. But obviously, the system can only work if everyone dutifully struggles to do his best with the material that’s been given to him, rather than trying to do what has already been assigned to somebody else.

The voice outside my own particular window has repeatedly come back to the subject of sex. And sure, I regret it in a way, or it sometimes upsets me. But if I were to conclude that the voice is fundamentally not to be trusted, where would I be then? The enterprise of writing would have to come to an end for me, because on what basis could I possibly decide to reject what the voice was saying so insistently? The truth is that if I tried to listen to somebody else’s voice instead of mine, I wouldn’t be able to hear it. And without an outside voice, what would I write down? Who would I listen to? “Me”? It doesn’t work that way. So at a certain point—and with a certain sadness, because of how I knew I would be seen by other people—I decided I was going to trust the voice I was hearing. And of course, like every writer, I hope I’ll be one of the ones who will be led to do something truly worthwhile. But in another way, it actually doesn’t matter whether it’s me or not. That’s just a game—who did the best? The actually important question is not whether “I” am one of the better cogs in the machine—the important question is whether the whole mechanism of which I’m a part is or is not one of evolution’s cleverer species-survival devices, one that might be very helpful—even at the last minute.

Why is sex interesting to write about? To some, that might seem like a rather dumb question. Obviously when someone interested in geology is alone in a room, he or she tends to think a lot about rocks. And I imagine that when many geologists were children, they put pictures having to do with rocks on their bedroom walls. And I would have to guess that geologists find it fun to sit at a desk and write about rocks. So, yes, I find it enjoyable. But apart from that, I still find myself wondering, “Why is it interesting to write about sex?”

One reason is that sex is shocking. Yes, it’s still shocking, after all these years—isn’t that incredible? At least it’s shocking to me. And I suppose I think it’s shocking because, even after all these years, most bourgeois people, including me, still walk around with an image of themselves in their heads that doesn’t include—well—that. I’m vaguely aware that while going about my daily round of behavior, I’m making use of various mammalian processes, such as breathing, digesting, and getting from place to place by hobbling about on those odd legs we have. But the fact is that when I form a picture of myself, I see myself doing the sorts of things that humans do and only humans do—things like hailing a taxi, going to a restaurant, voting for a candidate in an election, or placing receipts in various piles and adding them up. But if I’m unexpectedly reminded that my soul and body are capable of being totally swept up in a pursuit and an activity that pigs, flies, wolves, lions, and tigers also engage in, my normal picture of myself is violently disrupted. In other words, consciously, I’m aware that I’m a product of evolution, and I’m part of nature. But my unconscious mind is still partially wandering somewhere in the early nineteenth century and doesn’t know these things yet.

Writing about sex is really a variant of what Wordsworth did, that is, it’s a variant of writing about nature, or as we call it now, “the environment.” Sex is “the environment” coming inside, coming into our home or apartment and taking root inside our own minds. It comes out of the mud where the earliest creatures swam; it comes up and appears in our brains in the form of feelings and thoughts. It sometimes appears with such great force that it sweeps other feelings and other thoughts completely out of the way. And on a daily basis it quietly and patiently approaches the self and winds itself around it and through it until no part of the self is unconnected to it.

Sex is of course an extraordinary meeting-place of reality and dream, and it’s also—what is not perhaps exactly the same thing—an extraordinary meeting-place of the meaningful and the meaningless. The big toe, for example, is one part of the human body, human flesh shaped and constructed in a particular way. The penis is another part of the body, located not too far away from the big toe and built out of fundamentally the same materials. The act of sex, the particular shapes of the penis and the vagina, are the way they are because natural selection has made them that way. There may be an adaptive value to each particular choice that evolution made, but from our point of view as human beings living our lives, the evolutionary explanations are unknown, and the various details present themselves to us as completely arbitrary. It can only be seen as funny that men buy magazines containing pictures of breasts, but not magazines with pictures of knees or forearms. It can only be seen as funny that demagogues give speeches denouncing men who insert their penises into other men’s anuses—and then go home to insert their own penises into their wives’ vaginas! (One might have thought it obvious that either both of these acts are completely outrageous, or neither of them is.) And yet the interplay and permutations of the apparently meaningless, the desire to penetrate anus or vagina, the glimpse of the naked breast, the hope of sexual intercourse or the failure of it, lead to joy, grief, happiness, or desperation for the human creature.

Perhaps it is the power of sex that has taught us to love the meaningless and thereby turn it into the meaningful. Amazingly, the love of what is arbitrary (which one could alternatively describe as the love of reality) is something we human beings are capable of feeling (and perhaps even what we call the love of the beautiful is simply a particular way of exercising this remarkable ability). So it might not be absurd to say that if you love the body of another person, if you love another person, if you love a meadow, if you love a horse, if you love a painting or a piece of music or the sky at night, then the power of sex is flowing through you.

Yes, some people go through life astounded every day by the beauty of forests and animals; some are astounded more frequently by the beauty of art; and others by the beauty of other human beings. But science could one day discover that the ability to be astounded by the beauty of other human beings came first, and to me it seems implausible to imagine that these different types of astonishment or appreciation are psychologically unrelated.

It’s also interesting to write about sex because it’s often noted that writers like to write about conflict, and of course conflict is built into the theme of sex. A story about a person who wants to have a plate of spaghetti might be interesting, but a story about a person who wants to have another person—now, that is potentially even more interesting, because the person who is wanted may not want in return. But leaving aside the conflict involved in the fact that people’s desires are often at cross purposes, sex has always been known to be such a powerful force that fragile humanity can’t help but be terribly nervous in front of it, so powerful barriers have been devised to control it—taboos of all varieties, first of all, and then all the emotions subsumed under the concepts of jealousy and possessiveness, possessiveness being a sort of anticipatory form of jealousy. (I noticed recently that a sociological survey of married people in the United States found that when asked the question: “What is very important for a successful marriage?” the quality mentioned most frequently—by 93 percent of the respondents—was “faithfulness,” while “happy sexual relationship” came in with only 70 percent. In other words, to 23 percent of the respondents, it seemed more important that they and their partner should not have sex with others than that they themselves should enjoy sex.)

Sex seems capable of creating anarchy, and those who are committed to predictability and order find themselves inevitably either standing in opposition to it, or occasionally trying to pretend to themselves that it doesn’t even exist. My local newspaper, the New York Times, for example, does not include images of naked people. Many of its readers might enjoy it much much more if it did, but those same readers still might not buy it if those images were in it, because if it contained such images it couldn’t be the New York Times, it couldn’t present the portrait of a normal, stable, adequate world—a world not ideal, but still good enough—which it’s the function of the New York Times to present every day. Nudity somehow seems to imply that anything could happen, but the New York Times is committed to telling its readers that many things will not happen, because the world is under control, benevolent people are looking out for us, the situation is not as bad as we tend to think, and while problems do exist, they can be solved by wise rulers. The contemplation of nudity or sex could tend to bring up the alarming idea that at any moment human passions might rise up and topple the world we know.

But perhaps it would be a good thing if people saw themselves as a part of nature, connected to the environment in which they live. Sex can be a very humbling, equalizing force. It’s often been noted that naked people do not wear medals, and weapons are forbidden inside the pleasure garden. When the sexuality of the terrifying people we call “our leaders” is for some reason revealed, they lose some of their power—sometimes all of it—because we’re reminded (and strangely, we need reminding) that they are merely creatures like the ordinary worm or beetle that creeps along at the edge of the pond. Sex really is a nation of its own. Those whose allegiance is given to sex at a certain moment withdraw their loyalty temporarily from other powers. It’s a symbol of the possibility that we might all defect for one reason or another from the obedient columns in which we march.