NOTES: TOWARD A NEW EROTICISM

Gabriele: Thanks for bringing the God Eros into the room here!  He has been lurking outside and wondering when we would invite him.

This is a splendid discussion and I am wondering if maybe we should maintain a special forum of its own for both musings and creative work in this modality, so the faint-hearted would be warned in advance that, as it used to say on the ancient maritime maps, there be dragons here.

I went through a dilettantish and quite hilarious delusion for awhile that I wanted to be an erotic writer in the genre of Anais Nin, (who for me stands as one of the great writers of all time).  I loved Henry Miller's adventures, along with the erotically charged works of D.H. Lawrence and John Donne.

But I kept coming up against a unique problem: Erotica qua erotica gets real boring real fast for me. Perhaps that is simply a function of the fact that I live more in my body than in my mind and I can only deal with the abstract for so long before I check out entirely, even in the best erotic writing.

As Korzybski reminds us (and I love quoting this):“The map is not the territory.”  I found the “territory” much, much more interesting than writing about it…:) In fact, I believe that writing erotica can often be a substitute for having a healthy and healing sex life. Maybe one of the missions of erotic literature for our time would be to see that it is more supportive of sexual healing and play, rather than sexual violence. 

What tends to happen now, it seems (and I study this stuff from time to time, as a Cultural Anthropologist must do!) is that writers, to hold on to their readers, find it necessary to continue to escalate the strange, the harmful, the violent and the bizarre - for sheer shock value.

But what goes on in these books, (revealing and mapping in often nauseating detail some of the more extreme and sick sexual practices of our time), is neither sane nor healthy, and more often than not ends up in a most grim and depressing place, with  suicides, murders or extreme physical mayhem.  (Tie in here perhaps to the rising and deplorable tend toward extreme violence toward women in recent films.) 

Some of the most acclaimed erotic writers of our time have been totally mixed up, sexually confused, without boundaries, and have ultimately ended up in very sad and bad places, and dead of AIDS. 

In my own experience, I found that as a writer, I was much more suited to be what I might call an “Erotic Satirist.”  After all, there is a lot that is just plain silly about the sexual act when it is relentlessly mapped on paper. Is this all there is, one must eventually ask?

Soon after I started trying to be an amalgam of Nin and Henry Miller, I got crashingly bored, and couldn't not write funny, which my friends thought was marvelous, but even that got old soon and I moved on to what we might call “Referential Erotica.” 

Referential Erotica, for me, is perhaps a more tantric, tasteful and Victorian approach, in which you work at the metaphorical level, playfully, and enjoy the literary game of having fun with the oldest game in the world.  Even the Kama Sutra, after all, has its limits. You will see Referential Erotica having some juicy fun in my story  THE KING AND QUEEN OF ROLLER DISCO - 2, “They Met on the Net.” and there is more to come (no pun intended).

But Referential Erotica is a challenge, as it calls for skill, style,  imagination, subtlety, taste,  humor and a touch of mischief, along with literary sensibility that you cannot achieve when you are basically documenting full frontal effing.  Yawn.

I would suggest that the REAL challenge (and opportunity) here for us Deep Divers is to see how much true art and writerly craft we can bring to those places in our writing where we want to add a pinch of curry and a dab of deliciousness to a poem or a story. 

This is just my personal preference for my own work, and anyone can have at it in any way that defines erotic writing for them.  But as aspiring literary folk here,  and sincere change agents, I suggest that the challenge of maintaining some discretion and refinement in our work trumps “getting it on.”

One of my favorite Cultural Anthropologists says, often: “ART IS LANGUAGE ABOUT CULTURE.”  What we see in our art today, whether we like it or not, is language about who we are, how we value life and each other, how we love, how we see ourselves in community and in the world.  In the books, stories, films, songs,videos and other media that focus on the pornographic, the perverted, and the depraved,  the “language” does not have very much to report that bodes well for the future.

Perhaps the most vivid symbol of where we are right now is in an institute in San Francisco, in a crash course geared to bust  people out of their inherent sexual taboos.  It is called the “Efforama” (fill in the blank) and consists of days and days of dawn to dusk  watching of films of every imaginable sexual act, practice, perversion and posture.  Days and days, nine to five. Hello? This is supposed to help people?  Has it gotten this bad?

I suspect that the victims of this sex-crash therapy stagger from the experience like dying wasps on a summer windowsill and end up taking vows of celibacy in Cistercian and Poor Clare monastaries and convents. But  there is perhaps a message here for us about the sorry  place at which we have arrived in terms of rock bottom. We need to start coming up for air.

The landscape is not pretty. It is generally grotesque and bloodied.  From the horrors of internet predators and child porn, to the aforementioned extreme violence against women in film that is becoming so prevalent, we live in a culture that is coming apart at the seams, and there is a need for a few brave souls to step up and try to fix things.

Are you perhaps willing to be one of them?

 A real good place to start fixing things is in this whole shock-jock environment of pornography and its cousin, erotica.  We are writers, we have the power of the word at our command. Are we going to write words that lead to healing, understanding and compassion, or are we going to just “go with the flow,” and write trivial titillation that will only demand escalating extremes to hold its readers and sell books? 

What is our deep purpose as writers, anyway?  How we define our purpose will have everything to do with how we move through the world on a mission of healing and transformation.

Writers today who wish to include the erotic in their work have a unique opportunity, and it is nothing less than the much needed transformation of our culture. Only a few brave souls will venture forth into the Kingdom of Eros with a higher purpose than characterizes most erotic writing today.  But I believe there is a need for a New Eroticism, an eroticism which heals, not sets lovers against each other.  We need a new eroticism, an eroticism of love. (Eros is, after all, the God of Love.)  It is time for an eroticism of refinement, play and innocence...an eroticism of Paradise Found, not Paradise Lost.

To this end I would suggest a reading of James Carse's remarkable FINITE AND INFINITE GAMES, with special attention to the section on sexuality as an Infinite Game.  As Carse writes, Finite Players play to win. Infinite Players play to keep the game going.  Shouldn't our sexuality be more about 'keeping the game going' than about 'winning'? Sex really is not about a battle to be won or lost, but about a game of loving, communing, healing.  Do we dare, do we dare, mirror this in our writing?

 It is, perhaps, time for the New Erotics to change our current  worn out, sorry and dysfunctional paradigm that is taking our culture down into a very dark, Satanic place.  New Eroticism, as I would hope for it, will map and model a healthy sexuality, and create sexual healing in its compassionate, caring and awakened approach. 

This may mean that those who would be New Erotic writers have to do a lot of homework in terms of more refined sexual practices and sacred sexuality,  in order to know how to map a new literature of erotica, but why can there not be stories, novels and movies about a higher, kinder, and more loving relation between lovers than we  have now?  Are not lovers supposed to love? Is this a radical concept?

The Poet Robert Bly tells us that the word “stories” comes from the word “store.” Our “stories” are where we “store” our culture. Look around. In terms of sexuality, what are we “storing.”?  Is it any wonder that things sexual are in such a mess these days?

Bottom line: Are we as writers interested in creating some new ways of being with sexuality in our work, when that is appropriate to a literary objective?  Are we willing to pioneer some ground that just may help restore balance into the “life out of balance” that we are dealing with today?  Are we willing to put forth into the world words that will bring sexual healing rather than sexual suicide?

What we might call the path of New Eroticism is not for everyone, but it may be for a few of us.  It surely is something to consider as we move forward with work that we intend to share with the world in order to bring greater compassion, healing, awareness, respect, and unconditional love.

How we handle the erotic in our work is always a choice, nothing more and nothing less.  How we handle the erotic will no doubt reflect, au fond, who we are and how we understand ourselves and walk the world as spiritual beings in sexual bodies. But we do have a choice, and if we are purposed with higher goals of service to humanity and transformation of culture, it is worth some thought and quality time in discussions like we are having here.

All of you, your thinking here is powerful and much needed. it is an honor to get to hang out on a Saturday morning with such distinguished folk.  I thank you!