A Reader on Reading

In Shakespeare’s time, the erotic borrowing of the geographical vocabulary had become sufficiently common to be parodied. In The Comedy of Errors the slave Dromio of Syracuse describes to his master the dubious charms of the wench lusting after him — “she is spherical, like a globe; I could find out countries in her” — and proceeds to discover Ireland in her buttocks, Scotland in the barren palm of her hand, America upon her nose, “all o’er embellished with rubies, carbuncles, sapphires, declining their rich aspect to the hot breath of Spain.”

William Cartwright, the nebulous seventeenth-century author of The Royal Slave (a play that once received praise from both Charles I and Ben Jonson), deserves to be better remembered for the following lines, which return spiritual love to its authentic source:

I was that silly thing that once was wrought

To Practise this thin Love;

I climb’d from Sex to Soul, from Soul to Thought;

But thinking there to move,

Headlong I rowl’d from Thought to Soul, and then

From Soul I lighted at the Sex agen.

Occasionally, in my haphazard reading, I found that a single image could render a poem unforgettable. These are lines composed by a Sumerian poet circa 1700 B.c. She writes:

Going to my young husband—

I’ll become the apple

clinging to the bough,

surrounding the stem

with my sweet flesh.

In a few cases, all that is required is an absence of description to convey the erotic power of that which has been lost. An anonymous English poet wrote this most famous of quatrains sometime in the late Middle Ages:

Western wind, when will thou blow,

The small rain down can rain?

Christ, that my love were in my arms,

And I in my bed again.

Fiction, however, is another matter.

Of all the erotic literary genres, fiction, I think, has the hardest time of it. To tell an erotic story, a story whose subject is outside words and outside time, seems not only a futile task but an impossible one. It may be argued that any subject, in its sheer complexity or simplicity, makes its own telling impossible, that a chair or a cloud or a childhood memory is just as ineffable, just as indescribable, as lovemaking, as a dream, as music.

Not so.

We have in most languages a varied and rich vocabulary that conveys reasonably well, in the hands of an experienced craftsperson, the actions and the elements with which society is comfortable, the daily bric-a-brac of its political animals. But that which society fears or fails to understand, that which forced me to keep a wary eye on the door of my father’s library, that which becomes forbidden, even unmentionable in public is given no proper words with which to approach it. “To write a dream, which shall resemble the real course of a dream, with all its inconsistency, its eccentricities and aimlessness,” complained Nathaniel Hawthorne in his American Notebooks, “up to this old age of the world, no such thing has ever been written.” He could have said the same of the erotic act.

The English language in particular makes things difficult by simply not having an erotic vocabulary. The sexual organs, the sexual acts borrow the words to define them from either the science of biology or the lexicon of vituperation. Clinical or coarse, the words to describe the marvels of physical beauty and the exultation of pleasure condemn, asepticize, or deride that which should be celebrated in wonder. Spanish, German, Italian, and Portuguese suffer from this same weakness. French is, perhaps, a little more fortunate. Baiser for copulate, which borrows its semantics from the word “kiss;” verge for penis, the same word for “birch,” which in its association with trees gives verger, “orchard;” petite mort, “little death,” for the moment of ecstasy after achieving orgasm, in which the diminutive endearment takes the eternity out of dying but retains the sense of blissfully leaving this world have little of the nudge-nudge wink-wink quality of fuck, prick, and come. The vagina (surprise, surprise) receives in French as little respect as it does in English, and con is hardly better than cunt. To write an erotic story in English, or to translate one into English, requires from the writer new and crafty ways of making use of the medium, so that the reader is led, against the grain of meaning or through an entirely separate imagination of language, into an experience that society has decreed will remain unspoken. “We have placed sex,” said the wise Montaigne, “in the precincts of silence.”

But why have we decided that Psyche must not look upon Eros?