Psych-Out

Her seven button
Blouse…
Three undone.

Jeffrey Winke, Coquette (a collection of sensual Haiku)

The erotic is the arousal of our sexual sense through the slowing of attention. The erotic is sexuality, not sex. The erotic refuses to rush past. It rebels against compartmentalizing sexuality to sex, or the bedroom, or erections and orgasms. It slows us down, takes notice, can happen beneath the covers, in a crowded restaurant, cooking a meal, or over a game of chess.

The erotic pays attention. It notices a fold, a texture, a scent, a nuanced gesture with a wink of delight. The erotic is neither the whip nor the whisper, but the lingering of attention to how either, or both, strikes the senses.

Stop the rush of time to notice that peach’s texture as you take your first bite…

…and the feel of a pair of fresh nylons slipping up over your legs…

…and how her hands work the knife when slicing a fresh vegetable.

Lean in and whisper to your spouse, lover, or friend when it would be just as easy to speak in your normal voice. Lay in bed before your morning shower, attuning yourself to the sparrow, neighbor’s voice, and that passing car. And when you finally step into that shower, notice where skin-pleasure inclines you to let the water fall.

The erotic requires no end other than drawing a moment out with a sensory detail. The erotic can see the universe in a grain of sand and satisfy a craving for love through the subtle touch of the hand. “We are obsessed with an insatiable appetite for ever more vivid sensations,” Isabel Allende writes in her book Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses. “…a subtle caress, the pleasure of skin against skin, or of sharing a peach is not enough anymore.”

The erotic is our body electric carefully listening, touching, tasting, smelling – stopping time and refusing to not take notice.

The Dream, Henri Rousseau.  1910

“We are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.” Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

For most of our 2 million year evolutionary history, we lived as hunters and gatherers.  We became fully human around 250,000 years ago - give or take 100,000 years.    We were nomadic.  Lived in wide open spaces, and in tribes of no more than 150.  Seldom, if ever, would our tribe run into other tribes, and if so we probably just moved on.

What was there to fight for?

Other humans were few; grazeable land was plentiful.  We gathered nuts and other wild vegetation.  We chased down birds, insects, fish, rodents, and an occasional bear or elk.  And when the food gave out?  Or, some natural catastrophe struck — like a flood, fire, or volcano eruption?   The survivors ambled on — following their eyes and noses to more ample pastures.  The earth was our oyster.  No pollution, oil spills, trespassing signs, fences, private property, militarized zones, or cars to dodge.

Richard Lee’s work on the !Kung Sun bushmen of the Kalahari Desert wrote that these hunter-gatherers spend only fifteen hours a week gathering food — the rest is down time.  And this in the desert, no less.   “A woman gathers on one day enough food to feed her family for three days, and spends the rest of her time resting in camp, doing embroidery, visiting other camps, or entertaining visitors.”

If you can wrap your mind around the thought that humans of 250,000 years ago were not that different emotionally and mentally from humans today, you can imagine how it must have been to have plenty of time to lay back.  (Or can you?)  A day or two of light work followed by three days off trying to figure what to do with yourself.  Imagine.  No e-mail to check.  No text messages.  No deadlines, traffic jams, jaunts to the gym, mortgage payments, supermarkets, or business lunches. Plenty of time to just stare out into space.  Fool around.  Daydream.  Play.  Mate.  Contemplate.  This life is our evolutionary heritage.  It’s how we are wired to live.

The Wild, Barnett Newman.  1950

Have the demands of modern life robbed us of our healthy inclination to sit and ponder for hours on end?  This question was among the thoughts that struck me when we were stopped in our tracks by the painting, The Wild by Barnett Newman, at the Museum of Modern Art.   It looks like a painted tomato stake, but it’s truly a stretched canvas.  8 feet high.  1 1/2 inches wide.  Cadmium red down the center with gray-blue down each side.

We had been provoked out of our rushed ways.  Our art-at-a-trot pace came to an abrupt halt.

My daughter and I stood in front of this piece contemplating — is it art, is it not?  Why is it here?  Why shouldn’t it be?  What if a third grader would have painted that same thing?  What is its intent?  How does this absurd 8 x 1 1/2 canvas reflect the entirety of the history of art and the conversation art has with itself?  It was a contemplative brawl we ended up taking out into the streets.

Jeanette Winterson in her book Art Objects:  Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, challenges us to consider what it would be to spend one entire hour with just one painting.  We’d soon get irritated.  Impatient.  The speed of our daily lives won’t allow it.  “Why doesn’t the picture do something!”  The same could be said for a poem.  A petroglyph.  A cloud.  A mountain.  A stream.  A spiderweb.  A bird’s flight.  A blade of grass.  Look!  Move on!  Get to the next sensation — quick!  There are things to do, places to go, emails to get to!

We’ve filled ourselves with the self-importance of so much work-a-day activity.  And when we’re not on the move, how many of us fully sink into the healing, contemplative joy of doing nothing?  There’s always the next thing, or that thing undone yapping at the screen door of our conscious awareness.

Stop.  Give yourself permission.  Fart around.  Paint a tomato stake red and call it art.  In the quiet stillness of doing nothing but pondering the complexity or simplicity of whatever happens to be in front of you, maybe you’ll find what our ancestors had at their fingertips every day…

…a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

From Auguries of innocence, by William Blake

In 1974, Philippe Petit stepped out of the ordinary and onto a tightrope that he’d secured between the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center. 200 feet of empty space from tower to tower. 110 stories up. No net. No harness. 6 years of planning. 6 years of patience, risk, setbacks, and heartaches. All for over an hour of daring.

As for the onlookers below? They, too, had been shaken out of their ordinary worlds as they watched the man dancing on the tightrope more than a quarter of a mile above their heads. “Is he crazy?” Who wouldn’t have asked it? “Of course…he has to be!” Still, no one could deny it was 45 minutes of awe — of beauty.

“Why? Why? Why did you do it?” he was asked over and over. Was it his childhood? An absent parent? Toilet training? Was he thumbing his nose at authority? Was he a harmless sociopath? Did he harbor a death wish? We had to have an explanation.

“There is no ‘why’,” he answered. Philippe Petit refused to cut it to pieces. He refused to make it easy to figure for the rest of us who choose to live on life’s sideline.

We are questioners. We are storytellers. When something strikes us as out of the ordinary, we are compelled by over two hundred thousand years of evolutionary history to fill what we can’t understand with a story. We are driven by a desire to make sense of our world, to reduce it to a single idea so that we can make life’s absurdities comprehensible.

The stories we tell will bring us comfort. Our world will seem less uncertain — more predictable. We will come up with that one answer that explains to us what on the surface may appear to be crazy. We will take the extraordinary and make it seem to be ordinary by bringing it to a predictable formula. The story doesn’t have to be accurate, only that we believe it to be so.

Jon Krakauer wrote, “So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation…”

You wake up every morning at 7. Get to work by 9. Eat lunch at noon. Come home at 6. Plant yourself in front of the TV or computer screen until you fall asleep — then, the next day, and the next day after that for months and years, do it all over again. You will owe the world no explanation. And no one will think to ask you why.

But what if you decide to go backpacking in Nepal for a year, or spike your hair and join a rock n roll band, or suddenly take up comedy improvisation, or string a tightrope between two towers and walk from one end to another? The question will start to roll. Why? Why? Give us an explanation, please?

We all take comfort in the story of Sisyphus who was doomed to an eternity of rolling that rock up the hill day in and day out, only to have it roll back down. We take comfort in it, even as we curse it as our own fate. Sisyphus had no doubt what his eternity of tomorrows would bring. How many ideas do we nip at the bud because they seem to ourselves, our friends, and our families to be just a little crazy, or that they may bring that dreaded uncertainty to everyone’s life.

Unlike that cursed son of a king, we can even for a moment each day, week, or month of our lives step out from behind that rock.

Change a routine. Break from the chains of our predictable day to day. To be able to wake up to a day of uncertainty may be cause for our greatest anxiety — yet it can also open some door to our greatest joy.

As Philippe Petit said, “Life should be lived on the edge of life. You have to exercise rebellion. To refuse to taper yourself to rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge, and then you live your life on a tightrope.”

10:37pm…midwinter…20007. An ice storm cut through Ann Arbor downing our electricity for days. Gone the incessant humming, buzzing, and chatter of TVs, microwave ovens, radios, computers, digital clocks, lamps, and the refrigerator. Other than the occasional snapping and popping of a perky fireplace fire, the house was doused in the sudden immensity of silence.

Silence soothes us. Silence unsettles us. Silence both widens our attention and focuses it at the same time. Not because of what we can’t hear, but because of what suddenly we can. At 2 a.m. a silent house  can be an unsettling house. It creaks. It clicks. It shuffles. It’s not that we hear nothing. We hear everything. Each and every unintended noise draws our attention. A silent house jumps to life.

The composer John Cage once entered a soundproof chamber at Harvard University with the intention of listening to absolute silence. “I literally expected to hear nothing,” he said. Instead of nothing, he heard the whooshing and gurgling of his nervous system and circulating blood. When he emerged he declared that silence does not exist.

What we think of as silence is actually the absence of manmade noise. Kathleen Moore in her article in Search of Silence wrote, “It’s not easy to find silence in the modern world. If a quiet place is one where you can listen for 15 minutes in daylight hours without hearing a human-created sound, there are no quiet places left in Europe. There are none east of the Mississippi River. And in the American West? Maybe 12.”

Natural sound has a different quality and texture than man-made sound. There’s randomness. It’s stripped of intention. Think of the difference between the sound of a river or the continuous roaring and splashing of a waterfall, to that of shopping center music, a nearby freeway, or even white noise machines. Man-made noise dulls us. Thought narrows. Sitting by a river, or waterfall, or on a secluded stretch of beach thought becomes expansive. Our nervous system slows and soothes.  We all become philosophers;  we see and hear with clarity life’s bigger picture. (Listen to Caney Creek, Kansas.) Turn off the lights.  Quiet our appliances. Light a candle.  Meditate on the Zen mondo:

‘Do you hear the rushing of the river?’

‘Yes, Master,’

‘That is the Way.”

Gordon Hempton in his sound journey across America noticed that in a dense moss covered forest you can follow the sound of a rain drop as it tumbles from leaf to branch to leaf. “A drop of rain may hit 20 times before it reaches the ground, and each impact—against a cedar  bough, a vine-maple leaf, a snag—makes its own sound.” And each impact that drop makes you will hear with deafening precision. It’s not the sound itself, but the silence surrounding it. Silence is not the absence of sound, but the amplification sound. (Listen to the evening silence in Amazonia, Brazil.)

In 1952 John Cage’s work 4’33” was performed by the young pianist David Tudor in at Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York. Maverick Concert Hall was ideal for Cage’s 4’33” because the back of the hall was open to the surrounding forest. The piece was four minutes and thirty three seconds of the pianist sitting at the keyboard without playing a single note. Four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. The first movement sounded only the wind in the trees outside the auditorium. The second movement brought raindrops pattering the roof. The third — whispers and mutterings. The piece was a requiem to unintended sound.

Cage said, “People began whispering to one another, and some people began to walk out. They didn’t laugh — they were just irritated when they realized nothing was going to happen, and they haven’t forgotten it 30 years later: they’re still angry.” When Tudor finished, raising the keyboard lid and himself from the piano, the audience burst into an uproar — “infuriated and dismayed,” according to the reports.

But Cage’s work wasn’t silent at all. It’s not that nothing happened. For those who actually widened their awareness and listened, they would have heard a world of unintended sound.

Feel daring? In the wee hours of the night, go to your electrical box and flip the circuitry of the entire house to OFF. Sit. Let your awareness widen. Free yourself from intention. Hear the immensity of the surrounding silence.

‘Do you hear the rushing of the river?’

‘Yes, Master.’

‘That is the way.’

–EndFragment–>

Augostino Carracci, Achilles and Briseis, (1557-1602)

Pornography is dead.

I know — anyone with a camera, a computer, a few willing naked bodies, mingled with the wonders of the internet, bring what we now call pornography to more peepers than ever. Men. Women. Teenagers. Grandpas. Middle-aged soccer moms. Christians, Moslems, Buddhists. Liberals. Conservatives. Probably your minister, cleaning woman, and psychotherapist. Everyone is doing it. And a lot of it, a lot of the time.

We are exposed to more naked bodies engaged in more kinds of sex than any time in the history of humankind. If you’ve fantasized it, it’s a click away. And if you haven’t, it may very well find you. We don’t even have to go out in sunglasses and a raincoat. Hallelujah! Throw open the blinds and curtains. Give us all a peek!

Still, pornography is dead. Not the arguments, but the thing itself.

Titian, Venus of Urbino (1538)

In the beginning, (somewhere around 16th century Italy), the most highly literate thinkers used the shock of sex as a challenge to political, religious, and moral absolutists. Genitals were bared in the boldest of language. Sexual acts and perversions of all kinds were shown or described in shocking detail. Taboos were violated. Battle lines were drawn. Writers, philosophers, artists and engravers on one side; clergymen, policemen, and state officials on the other.

Not only creating it, but buying it was a subversive act. (Some of us may still remember the days when we had to work hard to see a picture of even just a scantily clad body!  Sears catalogues were often a good source for the desperate.)

Early pornography found rich soil in the art, science and natural philosophy of the Renaissance. It was born of a newer understanding of nature, which challenged the very foundation of the old moral and political order. The earth was no longer the center of the universe. God was not so absolute or involved. Our place in the universe was marginal. Sexual appetite is natural. Repression is unnatural. And damn the hypocracies and vices of priests, politicians, and aristocrats.

Caravaggio, Amor Vincit Omnia, (1602)

Early pornographers were scientists, philosophers, and political thinkers. (Far from today’s “two guys and a camera.”) They wrote about “things lascivious and obscene” to vent their outrage at society’s ills. Early pornography not only forced us to think of sex, but to think of things other than sex. To steal a phrase from the celebrated 18th century philosopher, Denis Diderot (a writer of porn himself), pornographers saw “a little bit of testicle” at the bottom of everything - from hypocritical political and moral pronouncements, to our most sublime and tenderest feelings.

Arsiccio, in Vignali’s La Cazzaria, asserts, “Making yourself touch your prick with your hand is one of the first things one should learn in philosophy.”

They looked into our souls and told us what we least wanted to hear. Our noble impulses are a hoax. And the hoax is at it’s cruelest in our halls of religion and power. Nanna, the prostitute narrator, in Pietro Aretino’s 16th century work Ragionamenti, proclaimed, “A pair of luscious buttocks can accomplish more than all that the philosophers, astrologists, alchemists, and necromancers have ever wrought.”

Pietro Aretino, 1480-1534

You want to bring down a man in power?  Don’t challenge his ideas.  Simply find him in the arms of an illicit lover. Make him a figure for our own pornographic imaginations.

Early pornography often took the form of narrative dialogue between women — one of them older, experienced, financially independent, beholden to no one, and often a prostitute. The word pornography springs from the Greek pornographos — writing about prostitutes. From their privileged vantage point, prostitutes knew first hand the most intimate secrets and desires driving the keepers of power. They saw behind the walls of the established order and into the secrets of their bedchambers.

If you don’t think that’s the case, ask any of the sex workers who work the floors of Republican and Democratic National conventions!

Pornography culminated, and some may say ended, in the writings of the Marquis De Sade. When entering De Sade’s bizarre sexual world, there is no intellectual or political indifference. While you are shaking your fists at his evil genius, you find your own boundaries becoming unwittingly stretched. Not just sexual boundaries, mind you, but moral, intellectual, political and even spiritual. Reading De Sade is like strapping your imagination to an explosive devise and detonating it inside your head.

Marquis De Sade

What we regard as pornography today can be arousing, titillating, and sometimes disturbing. Yet, where our bodies may be jostled into gusts of arousal, the endless stream of visual imagery hypnotizes us into a kind of mental numbing. Not so with the pornography of old. You’ll be aroused, disgusted, fascinated while at the same time your ponderings about the nature of humankind will be shocked to life. Far from mental numbing, you will be dared to think, and then to take sides.

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Old School Pornography

Aretino, Pietro — the Secret Lives of Wives

Beccadelli, Antonio — Hermaphroditus

Cleland, John –Memoires of a Woman of Pleasure

De Sade — Juliette

Vignali, Antonio — La Cazzaria:  The Book of the Prick

WORDS
by anne sexton

Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be as good as fingers.
They can be as trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises.

Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.

Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren’t good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.

But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair.

Peter Gabriel & Anne Sexton:  Mercy Street - All My Pretty Ones

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