May's Essay_The Erotic Life

At times my email exchanges with former students go something like this (the most recent thread with this particular student begins with yet another in a running string of random questions):

Student: What do you think about witchcraft? Do you have any favorite books?

Teacher: Excuse me?!! Do I look like Wikipedia? You can't just continue to ask me questions without giving any of you...!
                  What about the plan to sail around the world?
                  Who are your favorite storytellers?

Student: Okay okay... Forget the witchcraft talk... Let's talk about Love instead...
What do you think of love? A goal of life? What's your take on soulmates?

Teacher: I'm afraid I don't do the soulmate thing... the idea first came out of Aristophanes, a comedic poet who fuses the souls of Robin Williams, George Carlin, and Eddie Murphy. So the idea is not born of an idea at all! What would I say about Love? I suppose it would be something like: keep the sentimentality, but don't be blinded by it; and keep up, daily, the discipline of being actively considerate of the Other.
                  Does that do anything for you?

Student: Ha, those words of wisdom inspired a smirk...

This rather scantily clad “conversation” is representative, of course. Likewise, I have to admit that many times these dialogical nuggets of data-exchange leave me bemused, other times, stymied; and this particular interrogative snippet had the dubious virtue of leaving me both bemused and stymied. However, it also got me to think along the track of how we can or might reflect on the Goals & Purposes of our life: What is the meaning of life? Is there a purpose to my life? Such is the alchemy of the philosophically geared mind.

Georgia O'Keefe_Black Iris, 1926

It is an enigmatic peculiarity of our world that occasionally, just like with Georgia O’Keefe’s images, things are not entirely as they seem to be. There are going to be times, for example, when a flower is really not just simply a flower…

            So like Life itself, which attends naturally to its vast variety of seeding and flowering activities, Thinking is also an irrepressibly erotic activity—a coupling, an attempt to create unity within disunity. It is through Thinking that we strive to bring disparity into harmony, to join together that which seems to us disjoint. And Philosophizing, which seeks to grasp in its noetic embrace whatever Insight and Clarity might be gleaned from thinking about Man-in-the-world, is the most erotic of all human activities. Is philo-sophia not, after all, a Falling in Love with, a Yearning for, a Lusting after Insight (Wisdom)? An insatiable craving for Meaning?

            It would seem, though, that the Days-of-Our-Lives reflect back to us all too often the Story that we are loosing our way in the Trivia Vitae of day-to-day activity. And yet we start out so well! When we are young and just entering into the fray and looking forward to changing the world—the world, our Life, charms us with an almost infinite array of promise and potentiality. Then at some point along the way we seem to enter into a mist-bedecked bog of banalities, which encumber and indeed constitute the part-and-parcel actuality of living day to day… cleaning toilets, washing dishes, doing laundry; getting achy, getting sick, or even just getting a little sneezing fit; or coughing; cleaning up after the dog, or the children; folding clothes; eating, drinking, staring out the window, cleaning up in the garden; reading, watching movies, talking, not-talking, crying, feeling sad, feeling joy, feeling nothing in particular; remembering; wondering what could have been. These are the quotidian events that end up marking, day in and day out, hour after long hour, and minute-by-minute, the paths of our individual passage through the spaces of the world.

            We did not ask to be thrown into this Flood of Life; so it is easy to believe, as we swim around looking for handholds to help keep out heads above water, that there is no particular purpose to our individual lives. However, wisdom traditions of Eastern and Western Thought try to show us ways out of the bog—ways we might transcend the banality of living by probing into the secret places of our erotic natures in order to birth our Life as a work of art. Because there are actually an infinite number of purposes to our being in the world, and each, in some way or another, takes the form of the Other, including the Other that is our-Self. This is the very essence of eroticism and the erotic life.

Our word erotic comes out of the Greek word, Eros, which originally referenced the god of desire, or eros tout court, which has the sense of sexual or sensual vigor. In the earliest Greek tradition, which derives from the poet Hesiod (c. 700 BC), Eros was a primordial god who was already present in the earliest days of the world. Parmenides (c. 515 BC) modifies this tradition slightly, making of Eros the first of all the gods, thus making Eros/eros both the unifying principle (Eros) for and the ferocious and vitalizing “Urgewalt” (Picht, 326), which is to say the elemental erotic power (eros) within all things that come into existence. Eros/eros will be much diminished in later narrative traditions, and in particular in the Latin tradition, when the original Greek principle/power, which is as irresistible as it is permeating, becomes much more narrowly individuated, embodying Aphrodite’s youthful, and sometimes diminutive son, Cupid.

There are a variety of erotic traditions available to us in our narrative heritage. Famously, of course, there is the tradition of Homer’s Achilles in the Iliad, who is so enraged at the death of his beloved friend Patrokles that he threatens to demolish the entire Trojan army. Zeus actually has to step in to avoid ultimate calamity, so Achilles then turns his erotically induced wrath upon the body of the enemy who had killed his friend, the Trojan prince Hektor. A second important movement of eros in the poem will also inspire Achilles to yield up the body of this same enemy to the Trojan king, Priam, Hektor’s father. Achilles models for us two very distinct types of erotic activity – that of sorrowing for his fallen friend through his destructive wrath, and, in what might seem an irrational reversal, that of yielding to a sorrowing father’s request and paying honor to the body of his valorous warrior son, Hektor, nobly fallen in battle, even though it was Hektor who killed Achilles’ beloved friend.

            In the Odyssey Homer also gives us the story of Odysseus’ eros for the day of his homecoming, his nostos, an unquenchable desire that emboldens the hero to stand fast in the face of the obstacles thrown against him by the gods to hinder his homecoming from Troy. There is no doubt that eros sustained our hero over the ten long years of his return; but it was a wide-ranging eros –for his throne and his son and his wife, but also for the life that had been his prior to his departure for the far-away plains of windy Troy some 20-years earlier.

There are other erotic traditions revealed in Sophocles’ drama, Antigone. In the Theban civil war, one son of Oedipus stood with the new king, Creon, while the second son dared to oppose him in rebellion. Both sons are killed during the rebellion, and Creon decides to honor the dead body of the one and to leave the other’s body to rot on the battlefield. The new king’s proclamation, of course, created an impossible erotic tension between the love & obedience due to the state, and the love & obedience due to the gods, which required the dead to be honored by burial. So Antigone, sister to both brothers, defies eros to the state, demanded by submission to the king’s edict, and follows instead a pious eros, showing deference to the gods, and buries the rebel brother’s body. Greek tragedy being what it is, being seduced by the right eros brought disaster to Antigone, and being solicited by the wrong eros brought disaster to Creon. Everything was erotic, but nothing was happy. Sigh…

In a rather different, but enormously suggestive erotic tradition, the Greek poets also lay out for us the story of Prometheus, who, all traditions combined, stole the eternal fire from Zeus and gave it to men. Generally speaking, the interpretation of this Promethean tradition tends to link the idea of the eternal fire to some sort of human intelligence, or reasoning, or skill in the arts. This tendency is certainly confirmed by Plato’s dialogue, the Protagoras, where it is argued that even Prometheus’ name, derived from pro- (before) and manthano (to learn), suggests a knowledge-based underpinning to the legend.

            There were many Christians in the first three centuries of the Christian era, called Gnostics, who believed that the Christian message, beyond the elements known and obvious to all, also contained “hidden” insight or some “other” wisdom that was knowable only to the initiated or to true believers; this is the meaning of the Greek gnosis.  So it will be interesting to note that later gnostic Christians advanced a reading of the Genesis Adam and Eve story that was profoundly informed by the Prometheus legend. The cast of characters on this Hellenized gnostic telling will be, of course, Adam and Eve as mankind—the beneficiaries of knowledge; God, of “you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die,” fame, who does not want man to have knowledge (in the role of mean and unfair Zeus); and the Serpent, the dispenser of knowledge or wisdom (fire), who generously thinks Man should not be left in the darkness of ignorance.

            Unlike the Hebrew story, where knowledge was to become a stain on the human condition, on this gnostic telling knowledge would become a sacred trust from the benevolent god. Later echoes of this gnostic tradition, which put the accent on the umbilical and life-giving link between “true” knowledge and Men’s unsated thirst or desire to acquire that knowledge, will arise in the period of German romanticism, inspiring, notably, Goethe’s poetic hero Faust (cf. Kapitel 4), who ponders on the profundity of his ignorance and on how to live within the confines of sorely limited, and ultimately useless human knowledge.

            Because poetry is such a voluptuous language-event, and because of the suggestive way poetic word-play and imagery penetrates into the secret places of our imagination and tempts us to “wonder” at the foreignness of its subject, both the original language and the translation of poems are here included—for the sheer and unadulterated pleasure of the words, both known and unknown.

Habe nun, ach! Philosophie,
Juristerei und Medizin,

Und leider auch Theologie

Durchaus studiert, mit heißem Bemühn.
Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor!
Und bin so klug als wie zuvor;
Heiße Magister, heiße Doktor gar
Und ziehe schon an die zehen Jahr
Herauf, herab und quer und krumm
Meine Schüler an der Nase herum –
Und sehe, daß wir nichts wissen können!
Das will mir schier das Herz verbrennen.

[Faust. Have now, alas! quite studied through
Philosophy and Medicine,
And Law, and ah! Theology, too,
With hot desire the truth to win!
And here, at last, I stand, poor fool!
As wise as when I entered school;
Am called Magister, Doctor, indeed,—
Ten livelong years cease not to lead
Backward and forward, to and fro,
My scholars by the nose—and lo!
Just nothing, I see, is the sum of our learning,
To the very core of my heart 'tis burning.]

Then, of course, there are also more physical erotic traditions in our narrative heritage. In the Inferno, for example, the 13^th century poet Dante Alighieri immortalizes for us (in Canto V) the lovers Paolo & Francesca, who are remanded to the second level of hell for their illicit love. Dante’s depiction is both beautiful and insightful, because the very lust that brought these two lovers illicitly together would forever after remain to poison the well of their love, whereby Dante reminds us to love for this life, but with honor and purity. Vulgarly translated: beware what you wish for…

Poi mi rivolsi a loro e parla’ io,
e cominciai: «Francesca, i tuoi martìri
a lagrimar mi fanno tristo e pio.

Ma dimmi: al tempo d’i dolci sospiri,
a che e come concedette amore
che conosceste i dubbiosi disiri?».¹²⁰

E quella a me: «Nessun maggior dolore
che ricordarsi del tempo felice
ne la miseria; e ciò sa ’l tuo dottore.

Ma s’a conoscer la prima radice
del nostro amor tu hai cotanto affetto,
dirò come colui che piange e dice.

Noi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto
di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse;
soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto.

Per più fïate li occhi ci sospinse¹³⁰
quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso;
ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse.

Quando leggemmo il disïato riso
esser basciato da cotanto amante,
questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,

la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante.
Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse:
quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante».

Mentre che l’uno spirto questo disse,
l’altro piangëa; sì che di pietade¹⁴⁰
io venni men così com’ io morisse.

E caddi come corpo morto cade.

[Then unto them I turned me, and I spake…: "Thine agonies, Francesca,
Sad and compassionate to weeping make me.

But tell me, at the time of those sweet sighs,
By what and in what manner Love conceded,
That you should know your dubious desires?"¹²⁰

And she to me: "There is no greater sorrow
Than to be mindful of the happy time
In misery, and that thy Teacher knows.

But, if to recognise the earliest root
Of love in us thou hast so great desire,
I will do even as he who weeps and speaks.

One day we reading were for our delight
Of Launcelot, how Love did him enthral.
Alone we were and without any fear.

Full many a time our eyes together drew¹³⁰
That reading, and drove the colour from our faces;
But one point only was it that o'ercame us.

When as we read of the much-longed-for smile
Being by such a noble lover kissed,
This one, who ne'er from me shall be divided,

Kissed me upon the mouth all palpitating.
Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it.
That day no farther did we read therein."

And all the while one spirit uttered this,
The other one did weep so…]

In Romeo & Juliet Shakespeare stages for our viewing pleasure the eros, the elemental attraction, that binds one person to another, one family to another, one group to another, and dis-plays for us the idea that as love destroys destructive and mistaken opinion and prejudice, so it is also the causal force that brings new life to a community. From the same period, and in a depiction of perhaps the most erotic Villain of literature, Milton shows us a Satan in Book 9 of Paradise Lost, whose villainy is absolutely dumbfounded in the presence of the Beauty Desired—Eve.

If chance with Nymphlike step fair Virgin pass,
What pleasing seemd, for her now pleases more,
She most, and in her look summs all Delight.
Such Pleasure took the Serpent to behold [ 455 ]
This Flourie Plat, the sweet recess of Eve
Thus earlie, thus alone; her Heav'nly forme
Angelic, but more soft, and Feminine,
Her graceful Innocence, her every Aire
Of gesture or lest action overawd [ 460 ]
His Malice, and with rapine sweet bereav'd
His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought:
That space the Evil one abstracted stood
From his own evil, and for the time remaind
Stupidly good, of enmitie disarm'd, [ 465 ]
Of guile, of hate, of envie, of revenge;
But the hot Hell that alwayes in him burnes,
Though in mid Heav'n, soon ended his delight,
And tortures him now more, the more he sees
Of pleasure not for him ordain'd: then soon [ 470 ]
Fierce hate he recollects, and all his thoughts
Of mischief, gratulating, thus excites.

One of the most truly inspired, and philosophically informative erotic narratives of world literatures, however, comes out of a general reading of Plato’s philosophical dialogues, in which he rehearses for our viewing pleasure and edification the life of Socrates. In the Phaedrus, for example, the premise of the narrative is anchored in an analogy of a horse-drawn chariot, which may perhaps seem to be the least erotic of all possible analogies. And yet it is with precisely this un-erotic analogy that we arrive at the crux of Socrates’ argument concerning eros, which is that Men are empowered, moved, and motivated, in their most fundamental self, by erotic forces; and that if they respond with nobility and goodness to that eros, and control their erotic, essential madness with reason (the well-trained horse), then they become philosophers. If however they respond basely to eros and give reign to their essential appetites (the wild horse), then it will be the madness that controls the man, in which event he will become tyrannos or tyrant. On this telling, the dichotomy between the philosopher and the tyrant is the split between the reasoned life and the life of faith. The erotic man is the philo-sopher, while the mad, the irrational man, is the tyrant.

The dialogue in the Platonic corpus that penetrates most directly to the erotic heart of the question of Eros/eros, is of course the Symposium, a text that has been used in association with all manner of peripheral agendas, from justifying the idea of soul-mates, to ongoing conversations on sexuality, eroticism and pornography, to a defense of the gay rights platforms. And while one may certainly debate the particular interpretative spin given to this dialogue in relation to any of these cursory agendas, the handiness of the Symposium to the question of sexuality is certainly obvious—because the Symposium is in fact about sex, broadly conceived!

            When we read the Symposium as a debate about what constitutes the very best type of sexual or erotic activity, it becomes clear that not all sex is really sexy at all; and Plato’s multi-layered vision of eroticism seems to have found resonance in later “science,” which regularly suggests through its popularizing internet voice, that the only sex organ not to be ignored is the one firmly nestled between the ears!

            So the Symposium is about how to determine what is the best kind of sexy sex in a world full of sexual opportunities. There can be no disagreement with Arieti’s conclusion about the Symposium in his 1991 book, Interpreting Plato (p.99), that “each speaker takes the topic of sex and etherealizes it until we get the quintessential transformation of sex into philosophy by Socrates.”

           

Now instead of going into the more superficial details about the assorted rhetorical forms the speeches take in the Symposium, and the philosophical merits of whatever particular points of view might be represented in the 6 (+ 1) speeches, let us just step away from the various minutiae in order to focus on the bigger philosophical canvas that Plato seems to be painting for us in this dialogue. There are six speakers anticipated, according to order, in the evening’s festivities: Phaedrus (1), Pausanias (2), Aristophanes (3),  Eryximachus (4), Agathon (5), and Socrates (6). The normal positions of emphasis are, of course, the first speaker, the middle speaker, and the last speaker, which would mean we should look for especial significance in the speeches of Phaedrus (1), Aristophanes (3), and, predictably, in Plato’s regular hero, Socrates (6). But then two events occurs: Aristophanes (3) is overtaken by an almost life-threatening case of the hiccups, which means the order is inverted, becoming (1) (2) (4) (3) (5) (6) with  Eryximachus (4) becoming emphatic; and then a drunken Alcibiades (7) crashes the party and decides to add his two-cents’ worth of encomium in praise of Eros, making the final order: (1) (2) (4) (3) (5) (6) + (7).

            What does this ordering and disordering in terms of our conversation about Eros/eros mean to us? At the very least the inversion and the addition of a 7^th speaker changes the emphatic positions of the speakers—we still have Phaedrus (1), but we now revert once again to Aristophanes (originally (3), then changed to 4^th position due to hiccups, but now firmly sandwiched in the middle again with 7 speakers (1)-(2)-(4), Aristophanes, (5)-(6)-(7)), and we close the dialogue with Alcibiades (7) instead of the much anticipated Socrates. Likewise, we seem to have lost Socrates in the Symposium, as astonishing as that might seem; for on an evening devoid of any feminine presence, Socrates chooses to mask his speech behind the persona of a woman called Diotima, a wise priestess, and behind her rather other-worldly framing of Eros/eros. So it is from a woman after all, from Diotima’s reported speech, that we hear that the highest form of erotic activity is the desire or lust for learning and wisdom and the beautiful.

            So what do we learn philosophically about Eros/eros from Plato’s Symposium? From Phaedrus (1), Pausanias (2), Aristophanes (3),  Eryximachus (4), and Agathon (5), we learn about this-worldly forms of eroticism ranging from heroic motivation to male love; from truly homo-erotic love, the desire for the true self as the complete self, which is at the heart of Aristophanes’ image of soul-mates, to  Eryximachus’ metaphorical understanding of the art of the healer as essentially erotic, as a bringing again into bodily harmony that which was disharmonious or dis-eased; to Agathon, who, although speaking rather religiously about great Eros, thinks of himself, winner of the prestigious drama prize in Athens, as the Beloved of the city—the Poet as the embodiment of the Erotic.

            From the first five speakers in the Symposium we learn about physical and emotional types of eros. From Diotima/Socrates, however, we learn that this type of materially anchored eros is limited because it does not take us, either ultimately or even eventually, to satiety or to happiness, but only back again to desire, to a wanting appetite, which reveals within us a lack of that which is desired, and which, given the nature of materiality, will remain unsated until the death of the body.  So by Diotima via Socrates we are lifted up one rung on the ladder of understanding eros as we learn that the thirst for learning or wisdom or the Beautiful Good is a higher form of eros than a simpler body form of eros, and that pursuing this type of higher thirst, this soulish eros, which ennobles our souls, will in turn make us beautiful with its noble beauty.

            Then there is Alcibiades (7)… what are we ever to make of this drunken, symposium-crashing noble, arguably the most physically beautiful and desirable man of Athens and general of her armies? In crashing this symposium on the subject of Eros/eros, and in deciding to make a speech as well, what does this uninvited intruder, Alcibiades, choose to talk about? Socrates. So it is to be from Alcibiades, then, the most physically desirable man of Athens, that we learn that Socrates, arguably the ugliest man of Athens, is actually the most desirable, the most erotic man of Athens, because he embodies what is truly beautiful to the highest degree—the beauty of the virtuous soul seeking the good and the beautiful.

            On the big philosophical canvas of our lives, then, Plato’s contribution to our thinking about the Erotic Life is to show us how to reason our way to higher forms of erotic activity, and then to the very highest level of eros, which is to pursue the life of the Socratic philosopher—ever desiring for and yearning after the Just Life, the Honorable Life, the Good and Beautiful Life.

In our life we will always have before us the opportunity to transform our-Selves into works of art. Our palette of colors, of course, will not be composed of greens and reds and yellows, but rather of the various Goals & Purposes that we try to sketch out for ourselves, and that we try to pursue as we wander through the playgrounds of our Life. There can be many meanings to our life—each one the creation of our own private artistic inventiveness. There can also be many purposes to our life—each as beautiful as the Will to Beauty that moves us to etch our soulish portrait into the shifting mandala of time. Such is the alchemy of the erotic life.