In My Secret Life (c. 1890), that classic work of late Victorian pornography, the author, an anonymous gentleman with a raging libido and the compulsion to repeat and record his amatory adventures, writes, “Providence has made the continuation of the species depend on a process of coupling the sexes, called fucking. . . . It is not a graceful operation – in fact it is not more elegant than pissing, or shitting, and is more ridiculous; but it is one giving the intensest pleasure to the parties operating together, and most people try to do as much of it as they can.” The artless simplicity of these sentences is their charm, though they are more complicated than meets the eye. Notice the relation of “coupling” to the perpetuation of the species on the one hand and to superlative pleasure on the other. The conjugation of the bodies is the observance of a sacrament, a religious imperative, but it also involves the unrelentingly gross human body in an “operation” no finer than urination or defecation, and “more ridiculous.”
Call it “fucking” or call it “making love”: the “process of coupling” is the fact at the center of all erotic speculation. “Fucking” remains the ultimate profanity. The word’s effect is like that of the Tarot card of the Lovers dealt upside down: the same meaning in the form of its negative inversion. But any word or phrase for sexual intercourse, euphemistic and genteel, or clinical and precise, or lewd and graphic, will prove inadequate to the ramifications of the act. The many possible ways of talking about it, that great pronoun -- or, as Freud would have it, Id -- suggests that contradictory impulses are at work, or contradictory ways of presenting the same impulse. An instance of heterosexual love, for example, can be depicted as the union of yin and yang, husband and wife engaged in the blessed task of procreation, or contrarily as an anomalous episode during a temporary truce in the battle between the sexes. In any case, we know that sexual desire is a drive that seems to trump all others and dictate human behavior, sometimes against all reason or beyond any rational explanation. We know that it is the most intense and irresistible of bawdy pleasures, that it makes fools and rascals and buffoons of us and often lowers the attitudinal level from tragic postures and epic vistas to bedroom farces and comedies of Eros. Yet as Anonymous noted in 1890, “most people try to do as much of it as they can,” and everyone thinks about it more than anyone will admit.
Classical images of Eros, or Cupid as the Romans renamed him, show an infant archer or, in Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting, an impishly grinning young man with angel’s wings beside his sleeping beauty, Psyche, embodiment of the eternal feminine. It is not difficult to decode the symbolism in all of this. That Cupid is depicted as a baby points to the inevitable consequences of sex, and you are left to wonder whether the child to come is a penalty for a guilty pleasure, an extra mouth to feed, or a reward. According to Apuleius in The Golden Ass, Psyche can link with her lover Cupid only at night, and on condition that she not see his face. Given that Psyche means “mind” or “soul” in Greek, can the myth be a parable in disguise? Not that use of a blindfold may produce excellent results, but that the soul’s yearning for erotic fulfillment can and does happen, albeit with strings attached that are easy to break, as Psyche learns to her consternation in Apuleius.
[from The Best American Erotic Poems ed. David Lehman (Scribner, 2008), which contains much wonderful writing, including what one creepy critic called "the worst poem ever written on any subject," illuminating Wittgenstein's concept of nonsense]
My Secret Life and Lady Chatterley's Lover---erotic, forbidden texts with the power to blow the minds of adolescents in the mid 20th Century. Or so I've heard.
Posted by: Terence Winch | June 09, 2018 at 08:53 AM