Eros
It would seem that in modern times, Eros has gotten its due. Every means of art—cinema, theater, dance, literature, and much that is vastly less than art—has acknowledged the primacy of the erotic impulse. This is to say nothing of the psychoanalytic revolution or the feminist one. The slackening of censorship has let the words come out of the closet along with depictions of what the words evoke. The identification of people according to their sexual proclivity is made without a second thought. Eros would seem to trump race, class, ethnicity, and money.
And yet there is little sense that Eros bestows blessings that the human race should acknowledge much less bow down to. It’s a rare house that has a statue of a phallus or a fertility goddess in the front or backyard. The public acknowledgment of the power of Eros would seem to only go so far. The God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam has no use for that power. Eros belongs to the party of the Devil and has for the last two millennia. The media titillate but compared to the energy invested in witnessing, saving, praying, and confessing, the erotic impulse remains exactly that—an impulse, not a state of being. Fornication doesn’t save anyone and God is above it all anyway. The body’s pleasures are not even a divine afterthought.
Eros is indifferent to the grand human dilemmas of where we came from and where we are headed. The simmer in our blood is sufficient. If devotees of the evolutionary persuasion want to talk about the urge to procreate and nature’s indifference to how that happens, Eros is content to both nod and wink. For Eros, as the mechanical nature of pornography often painfully attests, is not only about doing it. Coitus is merely a large star in a large constellation of behaviors, some as outward as a leer and some as inward as horny longings.
Each day as we dress ourselves, smell one another, look at one another, and touch one another we are exhibiting those behaviors. We wonder about the skin beneath the clothes and that charged moment when the clothes disappear and something true emerges. This endless fortuitous imagining makes Eros impossible to pin down and easy to dismiss because it truly is second nature. An un-erotic world is a mummified one and literally a senseless one. Eros draws on the wiles and naïveté of stimulation. We are led on by what is vaster than any of us yet can be traced to a glimpse of flesh, a look in an eye or a tone of voice. Almost any minute presence can set off the trigger. Even absence, ringing some chime of memory, can do it.
Perhaps because most of us are in thrall to Eros, to recognize Eros as an entity deserving of our salutations seems pointless. Our attachment to our bodies goes without saying. The notorious waywardness of Eros also accounts for the public silence. It is hard to salute a force that can be so powerfully present one day and indifferent the next. Physical attraction is a sort of private math: new computations are always being made. And next to the erotic force, language is a lackey, an inferior who offers protestations, pleas, excuses, and, worst of all, reasons. Think of Shakespeare’s lovers and the purposes and cross-purposes that their language at once examines and conceals—all those country matters that are the stuff of groans, moans, cries, and gasps.
Those country matters never go away but they can be dishonored. This isn’t to suggest that the erotic impulse is holy. It isn’t. It is to suggest that in modern times the manias for efficiency, material perquisites, and ideology have shown little respect for the force of Eros. That seems understandable: Eros holds no answers to human destiny. Eros offers no salvation. Eros makes no grand calculations. Far from omniscient, Eros is impenitent yet importunate. Eros doesn’t care about Zeitgeist. “Down, wanton, down” is an apt acknowledgment.
None of the responsible work that human beings do is wanton. Human achievements typically rest on diligence. Eros errs, in that regard, on two counts, being at once sportive yet potentially frightful. From lust to obsession is a very small step. The control that modernity has proffered has nothing to do with that wanting. When a person indulges in auto-eroticism, a shadow remains: you could have shared that pleasure. Nothing equals the intensity of erotic intimacy, which is the literal dimension of E. M. Forster’s famous urging—“Only connect!”
To celebrate Eros is to say squarely that the uncertainty of passion is not a bad thing nor does the perishable body deserve to be labeled as profane—far from it. To celebrate Eros is to encourage a degree of honesty that the human race has not been good at. In the search for some sort of justification for earthly endeavors Eros gets pushed aside. For all its dominance, Eros has no knowledge to purvey beyond the arts of love, which are old, if ever-current. Ask Ovid.
Meanwhile, a tale such as that of Dominique Strauss-Kahn (remember him?) seems representative of the dodges of Eros. In his day job he directed the International Monetary Fund, a vast engine of worldwide capital. At various other times that were opportune and inopportune, his libido directed him. Which endeavor is more important? A guy can’t fornicate all day but he can go to offices and make decisions and have meetings and use his brains in certain narrow but seemingly important ways. We are supposed to feel that there could be no world without the International Monetary Fund, yet we can always fill in some organization for that super-necessitous role. The world of the sun and the moon, the wind and the rain would go on without that august entity. Someday, no doubt, the world will.
Anarchic Eros informs our days but does not tell us what to do with them. Eros speaks to and for the animal that can both make love and brutalize. Our revulsion to Eros gone bad—the desperate course of Othello’s jealousy or Phaedra’s deceptions—is genuine, yet any puritanical, prohibitionist attempt to subjugate Eros is bound to fail. The best we can do among consenting parties is to recognize the impulses and salute them as hopelessly human. The frank avowal of Eros leads to a live-and-let-live attitude. The disavowal of Eros leads down disingenuous paths. As Angelo says in Measure for Measure (a play written over four hundred years ago) after falling very hard for the chaste Isabella, “Ever till now / When men were fond, I smiled and wondered how.” His “snow-broth” blood changes temperature. Eros will not be denied.
“To celebrate Eros is to encourage a degree of honesty that the human race has not been good at.”
I love this essay. Frank, honest, clear-headed, and much needed by the human race.
Thank you.
Whatever art Eros has or had, we've lost. There is a scene in the film A Month in the Country where two people stand apart and just look at one another. It is the most powerful "sex" scene I've ever seen in a film. Another essay that will wind through my mind this week. Thanks, Baron.