{"id":516,"date":"1994-09-16T12:38:58","date_gmt":"1994-09-16T19:38:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/eroticbynature\/?p=516"},"modified":"2014-05-13T12:41:01","modified_gmt":"2014-05-13T19:41:01","slug":"midnight-musings-on-sex-as-discovery-the-lure-of-the-other-and-the-hera-aphrodite-dilemma-comes-naturally-25","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/1994\/09\/16\/midnight-musings-on-sex-as-discovery-the-lure-of-the-other-and-the-hera-aphrodite-dilemma-comes-naturally-25\/","title":{"rendered":"Midnight Musings on Sex as Discovery, the Lure of the Other, and the Hera-Aphrodite Dilemma (Comes Naturally #25)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

Waiting for Popcorn<\/b><\/p>\n

I\u2019m standing in the popcorn line at the movie theatre.\u00a0 I\u2019m about to go in to see Whoopi Goldberg\u2019s new film Corinna, Corinna<\/em> which, among other things, is about an interracial relationship.\u00a0 The man behind me in line — a heavy-set, regular-looking guy in his 50s — is very seriously quoting Scripture to his woman partner relating to the very subject of interraciality.<\/p>\n

God told King Solomon, the man says, that it\u2019s important for his people to stay with their own kind.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because if you have your people getting intermingled with people from other tribes, pretty soon they\u2019re going to get intrigued with the strange gods that other tribes worship.\u00a0 This is Jehovah talking, the guy who put the mono in monotheism (not to mention monogamy), so obviously taking up with strange Othergods would be extremely bad news.<\/p>\n

The man behind me in the popcorn line is being seriously philosophical, not particularly racist.\u00a0 His tone of voice is matter-of-fact, not nasty.\u00a0 Just a quiet little commentary on the nature of Otherness.<\/p>\n

Now personally, I find Otherness more fascinating than frightening, which may explain why I keep getting struck by lightning.\u00a0 If I saw a UFO land behind the hill over there, you can be sure that I would have to go check it out, even if it was likely to mean getting put in a cage, tortured, liquidated, or taken to some inhospitable planet and never being able to return home again.\u00a0 I would be one of the indigenous people (as they say) who gets fascinated with the weird Europeans when they show up on the beach.\u00a0 I\u2019m not arguing that this is some higher form of existence or anything; it\u2019s just how I am.<\/p>\n

For no reason at all, I found myself turning around and looking at the man and his decidedly less-serious-looking woman friend.\u00a0 They looked back at me, as in “What are you doing in our consciousness?”\u00a0 I struck a bit of a pose.<\/p>\n

“The gods may be strange out there,” I offered with mock sagacity, “but the sex is great.”\u00a0 I have no idea why I said anything at all, let alone that, but that\u2019s exactly what I said.\u00a0 It seemed like the obvious bottom line, especially with regard to Solomon, keeper of the many hundred concubines.<\/p>\n

The man stopped dead in his mental tracks.\u00a0 The woman, to my surprise, laughed in a most friendly way and threw me what I interpreted (perhaps misinterpreted) as a knowing, almost salacious, look.<\/p>\n

I shrugged what felt like a very zen shrug.\u00a0 “It\u2019s a trade off,” I said in the spirit of philosophical closure, with a tone of voice reserved for things very wise and profound.<\/p>\n

None of the three of us knew quite what to say after that, so we just stood there in silence.\u00a0 Disliking awkward silences, I took it upon myself to continue.<\/p>\n

“Wasn\u2019t Solomon the king who had hundreds of wives?”\u00a0 I asked.<\/p>\n

The man acknowledged that he was.<\/p>\n

“And wasn\u2019t he also supposed to be the wisest man of all time?” I probed further, feeling very Socratic.<\/p>\n

“Yes,” the man agreed, “he was.”<\/p>\n

I shrugged again, this time more rabbinically.\u00a0 “The road of Excess leads to the palace of Wisdom,” I said, denoting conclusion a second time, passing off the words of William Blake as if he were Scripture, and trying to decide if this really followed from the previous sentences.<\/p>\n

Neither the man nor the woman caught the cross-millennial cut-and-paste, and neither questioned the presumed divinity of Blake\u2019s wisdom.\u00a0 Neither did they speak, so struck were they with trying to plumb the significance of the Lesson I had gently but weightily laid upon them.\u00a0 Or perhaps they were just struck dumb with the weirdness you have to put up with trying to just get some popcorn in movie theaters these days.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 I had already turned back to the counter and ordered my popcorn and soda from a cheerful young man who, I thought, was unlikely to ever be heir to Solomon\u2019s wisdom.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n

A Little Historical Perspective<\/b><\/p>\n

William Blake said a lot of outrageous and inspirational things.\u00a0 For example, he penned the motto that I have had taped to my desk for the last fifteen years:\u00a0 “HE WHO DESIRES BUT ACTS NOT BREEDS PESTILENCE.”\u00a0 Not bad for the 18th century, eh?\u00a0 Blake was speaking to something deep in me when I first met him at 13, even though I was decades away from having any idea of what that something was.\u00a0 Watch out all you minders of the straight and narrow path:\u00a0 literature most definitely is subversive.<\/p>\n

Perhaps you remember Blake\u2019s poems from your high school English class:\u00a0 “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright….”\u00a0 In addition to his poems, many of which were not nearly as innocent as they might at first seem, Blake also drew dozens of deliciously outrageous engravings, images that would get most any high school English teacher fired if he\/she were to show them to a class full of minors.<\/p>\n

William Blake — wild crazy poet and artist — lived from 1757 to 1827 and was one strange ecstatic sexual mystic, over and above whatever else he may have been.\u00a0 According to Robert Bly, Blake was arrested and nearly executed when a neighbor complained to the authorities that he was in the habit of fucking his wife in his garden, in plain daylight, neighbors be damned.\u00a0 The only thing that saved Blake\u2019s hide was that several character witnesses of high reputation solemnly testified that he was in fact an accomplished literateur<\/em> and artiste<\/em>.\u00a0 The court relented, sanctioning Blake\u2019s perversion in the name of artistic license.\u00a0 William Blake — 1; Jesse Helms, Lord of Sussex — 0.<\/p>\n

I am<\/em> going somewhere with all this but, column plan aside, I also believe it\u2019s important to remember that there have been strangely, unconventionally, and excessively sexual people throughout history — a long and glorious tradition, you might say.\u00a0 If you think sexual perversion was invented in 1990 or 1960, you\u2019ve got another think coming, young (wo)man!\u00a0 (Why I could tell you stories about your grandma and me that would set you back on your ear, no matter how much fancy latex and how many exotic sex toys you like to carry around with you….)<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n

Going Beyond the Pale<\/b><\/p>\n

Now, according to my Bible-curious teenage stepson, it turns out that Solomon did not faithfully follow the advice of the Lord, our God, King of the Universe, who giveth us his pronouncements on the propriety of restricting cocks to cunts of their own tribal flavor.\u00a0 On several distinct occasions, Solomon\u2019s cock led him beyond the sanctioned borders of Israelite cuntdom.\u00a0 Because Jehovah\u2019s advice is never really advice at all but rather Commandment, Solomon consequently suffered a generous share of divine punishment (Divine punishment, I mean — not the fun kind) as a result.<\/p>\n

That Solomon, in all his wisdom, kept going back for more Otherly adventure, speaks of more than some kind of compulsive Don Juan syndrome, more than inadequate impulse control.\u00a0 We\u2019re talking about the King of all the Jews here, after all.\u00a0 No, the point goes deeper, beyond psychopathology to the nature of psychosexual reality itself.\u00a0 Eros, the Greeks knew, is a trickster who doesn\u2019t like to play by the rules of reason.\u00a0 Coyote — the Native American equivalent — is equally sexy, wily, and unreasonable.\u00a0 If the Jews, the Greeks, and the Native Americans are all talking about the same thing, maybe we would do well to listen up….<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n

Of Sex and Ongoing Discovery<\/b><\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s just a male thing, but maybe not — this way that the sexual drive seems to have something to do with going beyond drawn boundaries, outside the circle of wagons, crossing into the mysterious and dangerous territory of the unknown and perhaps unknowable.\u00a0 There\u2019s something about sex that has to do with discovery, with unpredictability, with exploration, with mystery.\u00a0 Maybe it\u2019s not exactly sex that involves these things.\u00a0 Maybe it\u2019s passion<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The couple that\u2019s been married for twenty years (or five, or two) and whose sexual ritual falls into a few familiar patterns over and over again is likely to lose interest in sex altogether.\u00a0 This is such a mass phenomenon these days that the sex professionals have given it a name — Inhibited Sexual Desire (ISD).\u00a0 And guess what?\u00a0 Teaching established couples better communication skills and how to get each other off more precisely doesn\u2019t make Inhibited Sexual Desire go away.\u00a0 Even when people know how to correctly pleasure each other, they often don\u2019t bother to take the time and energy to do so.<\/p>\n

The lesson seems clear:\u00a0 It\u2019s the spirit of discovery that wants to be kept alive, that motivates ongoing excitement and passionate sexual desire.\u00a0 Without a sense of discovery, even the best of sex becomes repetitious and loses its edge.\u00a0 Isn\u2019t it the reaching for discovery that makes extramarital affairs —\u00a0 stories whose endings cannot be seen from the beginning — so hot and so commonplace?\u00a0 Of course, it\u2019s also possible, and in many ways more rewarding in the long run, to go down instead of out in search of the spirit of discovery — to pursue discovery via depth rather than breadth.\u00a0 Ask the tantrikas.\u00a0 My point is simply that discovery and exploration in one form or another are essential to maintaining the passion that is indispensable to vibrant, magical, deeply satisfying sexual existence.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n

Hera and Aphrodite<\/b><\/p>\n

This is something of what James Hillman was getting at, during his talk — the final installment of the “Sex, Intimacy, and Culture” symposium this spring.\u00a0 Layne Winklebleck spoke to some of this in his Spectator review of that talk several weeks back.<\/p>\n

In Hillman\u2019s Greek mythological terms, there is a basic conflict between the energy the Greeks attributed to Hera, goddess of all goddesses, and the energy they assigned to Aphrodite, goddess of beauty.\u00a0 Hera, as Hillman explains, is (among other things) the goddess of coupling.\u00a0 She is the representation of the desire (in men as well as women — these gods and goddesses are not to be taken too literally or gender-specifically) to be paired, to be bonded, to be committed to another person, soul to soul, for all time.<\/p>\n

In the Greek Pantheon, Hera is married to Zeus, god of all gods and, among other things, quite the philanderer.\u00a0 Hera\u2019s antithesis in spirit, and competition (one could say) for Zeus\u2019s loyalty and attention, is Aphrodite, the beautiful young woman, the passionate seductress, the unbearably compelling counterurge to the longing for union — the urge to start again and again from the beginning, the spirit of outward discovery and autonomy, the spirit of a kind of freedom that is inevitably opposed to the need to couple in Hera\u2019s way.\u00a0 No one can tell me what to do, says Zeus when he is under the influence of Aphrodite.\u00a0 No one can bind me or bound me.\u00a0 This is the urge to be infinitely expansive, for all things to be possible.<\/p>\n

As the Greek stories go, Zeus gets fascinated over and over again with Aphrodite energy in one form or another.\u00a0 Each time, Hera is utterly furious with him.\u00a0 As Hillman emphasizes, the one thing that Hera\u2019s coupling urge cannot tolerate is being uncoupled or disattached.\u00a0 To Hera, Zeus\u2019s fascination with Aphrodite is not exuberant, playful reaching out for adventure, but abandonment and betrayal of the essential primacy of the couple itself.<\/p>\n

What are we — as women and men — to do with this contradiction, with this existential tension between the desire to couple and the desire to keep alive the spirit of adventure and discovery?\u00a0 Members of the audience asked Hillman this question so often that he became quite exasperated by their persistence.\u00a0 He consistently refused to offer a remedy for the dilemma.\u00a0 There is no answer to this tension, he insisted.\u00a0 This is not a psychological problem to be analyzed and resolved.\u00a0 It is rather an inevitable, essential enigma to be simply marveled and appreciated, a source of perpetual conflict that animates the very erotic flux of existence.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m with Hillman on this, as I am on many things.\u00a0 The only rest from this sort of instability is in the grave.\u00a0 You can tear your hair out about this for the rest of your life, or you can accept the inevitable and stop complaining about how complicated the forces of life are.\u00a0 You can tear your partner\u2019s hair out about this for the rest of your time together, or you can respect — perhaps even rejoice in — the wicked unsettledness that erotic existence drapes over our shoulders.\u00a0 Life is richest when the mysteries are appreciated for being mysterious, when unresolvable dilemmas are appreciated for being unresolvable.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n

Embracing Madness Yet Again<\/b><\/p>\n

In their book We\u2019ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World\u2019s Getting Worse<\/em>, Hillman and LA writer Michael Ventura speak of love in this way:<\/p>\n

“When you realize that love is all about heartbreak, you\u2019re all right.\u00a0 But if you think it is about fulfillment, happiness, satisfaction, union, all of that stuff, you\u2019re in for even more heartbreak….\u00a0 Love is a very funny place to go for safety….\u00a0 Your idea of love, what you\u2019ve thought of as love, what you expect from love, what you cling to as love — this is what you [have to] give up….\u00a0 Love is a madness….\u00a0 The question is… what is the madness looking for?\u00a0 What does the madness want?<\/em>”<\/p>\n

Love as discovery, not a safe warm bath.\u00a0 Sex as discovery, not a safe warm bath either.\u00a0 Heartbreak and madness are part of the show as surely as both Hera and Aphrodite are here to stay.<\/p>\n

To my mind, the inherently unstable nature of both love and desire is a madness to be celebrated and glorified, not an imperfection to be fixed; an energy to be ridden and be ridden by, not just an interruption to peace and quiet to be subdued and tranquilized at the first opportunity.\u00a0 Aphrodite need not be a threat to Hera — the spirit of discovery, the urge to go beyond, can be brought into the heart of the coupling if Hera will embrace Aphrodite as her sister rather than cast Aphrodite out as her enemy.\u00a0 This requires an embracing of turmoil, and a letting go of one kind of safety, neither of which is a simple matter.\u00a0 But isn\u2019t the vitality, in the end worth the uncertainty?<\/p>\n

Spoken just like a man, you might say.\u00a0 Somewhere I think I hear Hillman and the full Greek chorus laughing at my foolishness.\u00a0 This is, after all, precisely what Hera will not do.\u00a0 Two minutes after I plead for embracing the contradictions, here I am trying to make them go away.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

September 16, 1994<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 1994 David Steinberg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

Waiting for Popcorn<\/p>\n

I\u2019m standing in the popcorn line at the movie theatre. I\u2019m about to go in to see Whoopi Goldberg\u2019s new film Corinna, Corinna which, among other things, is about an interracial relationship. The man behind me in line — a heavy-set, regular-looking guy in his 50s — is very seriously […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comes-naturally","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}