Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (22 page)

(b)
No, an objective judgment of sorts can be made. Traveler
A
is a nerd, your sub-ordinary unreflective American tourist, not to be identified with and certainly not to be preferred.
B
is better off, but not much.
C
knows this, and though she may not be happy and may not have any expectations, she is nevertheless to be preferred to
A
or
B.
For she is at least coming to the end of her rope, the same rope
A
and
B
have hold of, and will at least find out what is at the end. It is better to know than not to know.

(
CHECK ONE
)

The expectations of the autonomous self, to be informed in its nothingness—if only I can get out of this old place and into the right new place, I can become a new person—pins a quasi-religious hope on, of all things, travel.

It is notable that when travel as a recreation mode is experienced vicariously through the media, it undergoes a shift toward the erotic. The old film travelogues of the 1930s give way to TV’s
The Love Boat
and
Fantasy Island,
where the boat of the former is an instrument not of travel but of liaison, and the fantasies of the latter are not insular but sexual.

It is otherwise with sports and the media. There, too, a shift has occurred, from active participation to the vicarious participation of spectatorship. Four people used to go bowling, but 100 million watch the Super Bowl. Football, where men try to hit and hurt, has replaced baseball as the national game. It is as if the demotion from participant to spectatorship and from live spectatorship to TV spectatorship has to be compensated by upping the ante in violence.

The passivity of TV and film watching contrasts with the violence with which the watcher identifies.

The two most popular film stars in the world are Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson. Each kills a great many people in each movie, the former casually, the latter by way of revenge.

Scene from
A Few Dollars More:
Clint Eastwood is a bounty hunter who is after a wanted man for the reward. As he closes in on his quarry in a saloon, three friends of the wanted man come to the latter’s rescue. Clint Eastwood kills all four without changing expression. This pleases us, even though Eastwood, unlike Ulysses or John Wayne, is killing just for money.

Recreational drugs offer a spectacular remedy to the disappointed self. Rock star to his chauffeur: “Don’t let anybody kid you—nothing, not sex, not music, not adulation, can compare with the rush of intravenous Dilaudid.” There are only these contraindications: expense, crime, illness, death.

There remains sex as the recreational mainstay, the cheapest, most available, and most pleasurable of recreational options. By “sex” let us specify the entire spectrum of the erotic, from the “romantic” encounter—cool Audrey Hepburn meeting testy Cary Grant by accident when their dogs’ leashes get entangled on the Left Bank—to the cruising homosexual fellating his five hundredth stranger in Buena Vista Park.

The mystery of the erotic is that it seems to be proof against the disappointments of other sectors of life and to transformation by the media. Travel may be eroticized by the media, but the erotic is never travelized.

Compare the disappointment of ordinary social life, the traditional recreation of society, with the erotic encounter.

Scene in one thousand movies: a party, formal stuffed-shirt party, NYC cocktail party, country club party, New Year’s Eve party, hippie party—any kind of party—but with the one common denominator of a failed festival, a collapsed and fragmented community. There is always the painfully perceived gap between what is and what might be. If there were such a device as a social-relationship indicator and one could quantify the relationship what-is/what-might-be, most parties would register less than 5 percent. Hence the booze. Unlike the use of spirits in the past, the purpose of alcohol is not to celebrate the festival but to anesthetize the failure of the festival. The locus of the failure is the self. Richard Pryor: Why free-basing? Because it wipes out the self.

But then at the party, the failed festival, one meets the eye of who else but a stranger and where else but across a crowded room. Eye contact, as the pathognomonic expression of the times goes, is maintained one tenth of a second longer than socially prescribed. It is enough. One approaches. A conversation takes place. Its chief characteristic is that, no matter how banal it is, it is charged with significance.

I feel that I know you.

I don’t think.

I feel that I do.

Do you know what I mean?

Yes.

The social-relationship indicator would jump to 95 percent.

The exit line is another one thousand movies: Why don’t we get out of here—I know a little Italian restaurant around the corner.

Change of scene: from a failed festival to the last remaining unfailed festival of the twentieth century: the erotic encounter.

A quiet place. Two glasses of wine. Now the alcohol celebrates the festival: The music? Perhaps the Muzak of the cocktail lounge, but it sounds like the dancing violins of Mozart. A touch of arm to arm. A brush of knee to knee. An arrangement. Could you meet me at— A liaison …

The sex and violence in Western life, especially American life, are commonplaces. But the important questions do not have commonplace answers. For example: What is the relation between the two? Are they merely, as one so often hears, the paired symptoms of a decaying society like the fifth-century Roman Empire? Or is there a reciprocal relationship? That is to say, is a thoroughly eroticized society less violent and a thoroughly violent society less erotic?

Or, the more ominous question: Suppose the erotic is the last and best recourse of the stranded self and suppose then that, through the sexual revolution, recreational sex becomes available to all ages and all classes. What if then even the erotic becomes devalued? What if it happens, as Paul Ricoeur put it, that, “at the same time that sexuality becomes insignificant, it becomes more imperative as a response to the disappointments experienced in other sectors of human life”?

What then? Does the self simply diminish, subside into apathy like laboratory animals deprived of sensory stimulation? Or does the demoniac spirit of the self, frustrated by the failure of Eros, turn in the end to the cold fury of Saturn?

It is no longer open to Clint Eastwood to do what Cary Grant did. In fact, Eastwood’s character, Dirty Harry, doesn’t like girls. But he has his .44 Magnum.

Will the bumper stickers of the 1990s read
Make Love Not War
or
Love Is Gone but War Remains?

Hold on, says the reader. Just a minute.

Yes?

Are there not plenty of good people left? decent folk who have no truck with what you call the spirit of the erotic and the spirit of violence? millions of people, in fact, such as those described by Charles Kuralt on the road in America, who are without exception good, kind, neighborly, generous, patriotic folk?

I am willing to believe it, but where do all the child molesters come from? Look out for benign types like Charlie Kuralt.

And are there not millions of ordinary American families with hardworking devoted husbands, loving wives, good kids, who live happy lives, have a good time without promiscuous sex, drugs, or violence, and on the whole turn out well?

Undoubtedly. In fact, I am amazed how extraordinarily nice most young people are, extraordinarily nice and extraordinarily ignorant.

And don’t some people fall in love with their heart’s desire, marry, and live reasonably happy lives?

Some. For a while. Maybe. I can’t say.

Don’t you believe in love?

Yes, but the word has been polluted. Beware of people who go around talking about loving and caring.

And are there not plenty of sincerely religious folk left, Christians and Jews, whose lives are filled with the joy of the love of God and who go about doing good?

Perhaps. Some, I suppose.

And are there not still religious folk, women who give their very lives to serve God and their fellowman, all for the love of God?

Well, some—though for every Mother Teresa, there seem to be 1,800 nutty American nuns, female Clint Eastwoods who have it in for men and are out to get the Pope.

Then what are you saying beyond the commonplace that there are now, just as there have always been, “good” people and “bad” people; or, if you prefer, people with traditional value systems and people with new life styles?

I am only trying to make sense of a peculiar phenomenon, hardly to be ignored: the sudden and unprecedented appearance of florid sexual behavior and the overt and covert practice of violence to the point of rendering cities unlivable, of nice people like Europeans and Americans killing each other by the millions—and with it, the very real possibility for the first time in history that we may destroy ourselves in the near future.

Decency is as may be, but decent or not, the autonomous self is devolving upon what seems to it a simple and reasonable view of sexuality. In view of its low cost and availability, the easy prevention of disease and pregnancy, could anything seem more reasonable than that the traditional Judaeo-Christian strictures against premarital and extramarital sex are anachronisms—especially the former in view of the fact that teenagers are at the height of their sexual powers? Even the good, gray
New York Times
takes it for granted. In an editorial protesting certain criticisms of the availability of contraceptive devices to teenagers without parental consent, the
Times
editorialist wrote: “Some Americans apparently find emotional satisfaction in encouraging teenagers to deny or postpone their sexuality. It is a costly fantasy, diverting attention and resources from a real world.”

Why indeed postpone or deny the sexuality of teenagers? Admitting the true state of affairs is surely more honest than retaining a Christian veneer and practicing the sexual mores of
Dallas
and
The Love Boat.

Does it only remain then to pause and wonder how such a mistaken view of sexuality could have informed the entire Western world for two thousand years? One needs to speak plainly here. It is, after all, not a small matter to discard such a traditional view so casually and so quickly. Nor should one deceive oneself about the consequences of “correcting” the mistake.

The deception may come from concealing from oneself the inevitable nature of sexuality in a post-Christian and technological society by substituting for the lost god and the lost commandment such surrogate goals as “responsible” sexuality, “commitment,” “sharing,” and so on.

These humane and in fact admirable properties of a good sexuality as opposed to a bad sexuality may in fact obtain, but it is necessary to note without prejudice that once sexual behavior is viewed objectively as an option of the autonomous self, it will also be viewed necessarily and quite reasonably as a source of pleasure and a need-satisfaction and as such subject to those techniques of the age by which such satisfactions are best arrived at and with the least damage to others. And why not? Cannot recreational sex be enjoyed responsibly, that is, without damage to one’s health or the health of others, physical health and emotional health? One can eat one’s cake and have it too. The words
responsibility, mutuality, sharing, caring,
are easily added, the cake’s icing.

A S
HORT
H
ISTORY OF THE
D
EMONIAC
S
PIRIT OF
THE
E
ROTIC AND THE
V
IOLENT IN THE
C
HRISTIAN
E
RA,
IN THE
T
RANSITION FROM
THE
C
HRISTIAN
E
RA TO THE
T
ECHNOLOGICAL
E
RA
,
AND
F
INALLY IN A
P
URELY
T
ECHNOLOGICAL
E
RA

St. Paul:
The triumph of the spirit over the flesh, but still bothered by a “thorn in the flesh” (unlike Socrates, who wouldn’t have worried).

St. Augustine:
The triumph of the love of God in the City of God over lust in the city of man, but—“Grant me the gift of continence, but not just yet.”

Dante:
Sexual sinners in the outermost, least punitive, circle of hell, storm-tossed, blown to and fro like birds on the winds of desire, yet still together and still in love. Cf. traitors and murderers in innermost circle, up to their necks in boiling pitch.

Chaucer’s Miller and Wife of Bath:
The frankly erotic harmonized comically and humanely as earthy transgressions, committed and recognized as sins, but without neurotic guilt and to be forgiven by the loving Lord and Master, the goal of the Canterbury pilgrimage.

Don Giovanni:
The appearance of the pure demoniac spirit of the erotic; the Don’s seduction of 1,003 women set to the joyful music of Mozart; yet this same spirit of the erotic posited by Christianity, e.g., the damnation of the Don and his descent before our eyes into the fires of hell.

Fanny Hill:
The spirit of the erotic in English pornography; the sinister charm of secret sex under the veneer of Christian proprieties and layers of Victorian clothes; the white skin of thighs against black stockings.

World War I:
Joyce Kilmer’s poetry, Colleen Moore in
Lilac Time, “
Mademoiselle from Armentières”; the erotic diminished to the sentimental and to good-natured sex between the doughboy and the French farm girl; with a decline in passion and the spirit of the erotic, and an increase in violence with the rise of technology; 20,000,000 dead.

World War II:
Betty Grable, Anne Frank, Adolf Eichmann, Stalin; the subsidence of the erotic in favor of a rise in the dispassionate, abstract violence of ideology, Fascism, Nazism, Communism; war increasingly in the hands of technicians; the decency of Truman and Oppenheimer contrasted with the death of 100,000 women and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Arendt’s banality of evil = the growing disparity between the monstrous violence of technology and the smallness of the technician-perpetrators; World War II as a transition period between the decline of the Christian era and the rise of the age of technology; 50,000,000 dead.