LOVE AND CULTURE

 by W. B. Macomber

 Chapter Nine) PAUSANIAS: THE LOGOS OF EROTICISM

How theory kills tragedy, the dichotomy of seeing and being; the conflict of morality and history; the macro- and micro-economics of love; the role of society in our likes and dislikes; jealousy as the model of rationalism; the unique as unintelligible; how Christianity (and then mechanism or determinism) breaks the reciprocity of the living  being and its environment; the value of frustration; whether cultural achievement and personal satisfaction pull in opposite directions; the strip-tease and the nudist colony; obstacle and postponement as the principle of eroticism; how Christianity makes us more erotic; the difficulties of cohabiting, not to mention marrying.

With Pausanias we have a man of theory for the first time. Young Phaedrus, the romantic dreamer, doesn't give us a theory but a vision. There is a theory underlying his attitude, which I call romanticism, but he himself does not have it, and would very likely not be interested in it. Theories explain, and eventually explain away. Young Phaedrus doesn't want to explain the beauty and fascination of the beloved.

If you dismantle a mechanical duck into its parts—wheels, axles, gears, springs, etc.—you will see how it functions, what makes it work, but you'll no longer have a duck, only a pile of wheels, axles, gears, springs, etc. This seems to be the fate of the western passion for knowledge, pure theory, objectivity, the truth at any price. Our enlightened knowledge sees through everything, and we are forever catching ourselves out. Western knowledge becomes essentially key-hole peeking, in Hamlet, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, Freud, Kafka, and Sartre.

The project of “pure theory” first kills tragedy, Nietzsche claims, as we explain the hero, the being who is bigger than life. When we understand him, by general principles of human motivation, we see that he's just like everyone else, only in a particularly favorable juxtaposition of circumstances. "No man is a hero to his valet," we say. But, Hegel insists, that need not mean that there are no heroes, only that we who presume to  "understand" great men are valets.

So young Phaedrus is a dreamer, not a theoretician—and, one might surmise, by choice as well as technical inadequacy or lack of training. Phaedrus is wholly immersed in life, or his dream of life. With Pausanias, for the first time, we have the cool detachment of speculation and reflective control. Here we become deliberate, reflective, and systematic for the first time—in a word, scientific.

Pausanias is a representation of the new Sophist movement in Athens. Phaedrus thinks in the symbolic language of myth, with the fervor of passion, and with values which are aristocratic through and through. Pausanias speaks the abstract language of theory, with the detachment of the pure spectator, and with democratic, egalitarian values. For Phaedrus love is a supernatural power, beyond human comprehension, the source of divine inspiration; with Pausanias it becomes a (natural) force, the principle of human motivation, which can be understood, and systematically manipulated and controlled.

The movement from Phaedrus to Pausanias reflects the transition in western history from mediaeval Christianity to the spirit of enlightenment and modern science. The whole world used to emanate from a single Supreme Being, to whom man was absolutely beholden; now it is seen to consist of a system of forces which can be understood and controlled—so that we become, in Descartes' words, “lords and masters of creation.”

Notice I am not taking sides here. I'm not saying who's right and who's wrong, or “what we believe nowadays.” You will have to learn to do this too, if you want to come to grips with the great cultural tradition of which you are part and product. It's called “phenomenological description”: simply indicating what's going on, without taking sides, without allowing one's vision to be distorted by the prejudices of identification, and seeing history as the conflict of good and evil, or those who are right and those who are wrong.

Little Big Man brought this home with immense impact: where are the right and wrongs there? What should anyone do? So I maintain that Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke do not refute St. Thomas' final causes; they simply flatten them. And when our culture comes into contact with other cultures, I don't presume to judge between the two, to weigh and assess their gods; I simply say that our God gives us muskets.

Well, the process of cultural aggression proceeds in three waves, as I see it. First come the missionaries with their bibles, then the commercial traders with their trinkets, and finally the technologists with blueprints and bulldozers. Anyway we simply flatten other cultures. Egypt, China and Japan are all westernizing at the most rapid rate possible, without really knowing what they're getting into, just because our God gives us muskets. And by the time we get around to giving them muskets, we're playing with Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and launching rockets to the moon.

The future of mankind will doubtless be decided in the next century, and only men who participate in the western cultural project will contribute to the decision. This is why I ask you to believe in our great, collective cultural undertaking, which Ezra Pound calls that “tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work.” I call on you to believe in the West—and not in other cultures—because there is nothing else in which to believe, because, as I submit, only the hand which has inflicted the wound can conceivably heal the wound.

I see you jumping off into the past by the droves, in the hope of finding something—anything else—like rats deserting a sinking ship, each anxious to save himself at all costs. And I strike at this with my criticism of the idea of personal immortality, which I maintain many of you still harbor (without knowing it) and exhibit in your behavior.

But actually all this is playful and imaginary. The real question is how you can get the most out of life, and I believe it's by staying with the West, and its colorful, graphic, dramatic cultural achievements—Plato, Kant, Marx, Freud, Shakespeare, Stendhal, D. H. Lawrence, B.F. Skinner, James Baldwin—instead of curling up in the fetal position around gray, drab books of Eastern wisdom, which may be ideally suited to the banks of the Ganges but not to the penthouses of Manhattan and the apartment complexes of Isla Vista. I am, of course, speaking out of my own life, of what I find inexhaustibly exciting—“Stepping Westward” in Wordsworth's terms. But I digress.

With Pausanias we have “pure theory” for the first time, replete with hypotheses, inferences and evidence. Pausanias might be a sociologist. What he gives us, at any rate, is very close to a theory of society, and how it works, or generally a theory of human relations, both individual and corporate. This is what gives his speech unity, when it seems to fall apart, on first viewing, into two halves which have virtually nothing to do with one another. On the one hand, like Freud, Wilhelm Reich, and Herbert Marcuse, Pausanias analyses the social implications of sexual mores, and the manipulability of sexual instinct, which can be harnessed and put to work, once we understand how it works. On the other hand, like Kierkegaard, Stendhal, and Proust, he dissects and minutely examines our most intimate and subjective personal relations, to understand what's going on.

Pausanias might be an economist, economics being fundamental to sociology. In the era of Adam Smith, economics was hailed as the new “universal science” to replace metaphysics, and its practitioners quickly rose to the top of the pecking order at Oxford and Cambridge. What they exhibited was now what it was to “know.” The new science did not purport to be a theory of values but of how value changes hands, the theory of who gets what, both among individuals and nations. Who gets what is fundamental to how we live together and relate. That's what's important, and men throw themselves into it in the 18th century with a vengeance, so that Kant is driven to complain, in the Preface to the Critique of Judgment, that philosophy is no longer drawing the best minds.

At any rate, economics immediately breaks up into two great halves (like Aristotle's Ethics-cum-Politics): macro-economics, or the theory of the division of wealth in society (and between societies), and micro-economics, or the flow of wealth between individual members of a society, the theory of economic competition in the marketplace. This gives us Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and von Neumann and Morgenstern's theory of games.

The economist works with input and output, motivation or incentive and reward. This is basically how Pausanias' mind works, though Phaedrus would be incapable of this sort of careful calculation. If we regard “love” as the force which draws people together in pursuit of their self-interest, the two parts of Pausanias' speech, which at first seem to have nothing to do with one another, represent a theory of the macro- and micro-economics of love. In the first part of his speech, Pausanias captures the argument of Freud's Civilization and its Discontents; in the  second, his analysis of eroticism prefigures Stendhal's theory of  “crystallization,” Kierkegaard's “Diary of a Seducer,” and  Proust's dissection of the “love game” in Remembrance of Things Past. Phaedrus now represents naive romanticism, which requires ruthless dissection and analysis.

Phaedrus talks of a great love relationship and human relations generally, as though they occurred in isolation and out of the blue. Our sexual desires and subjective preferences are simply given and “love” happens to us without our being able to do anything about it, except give ourselves to it entirely, come what may. But individual relationships and subjective preferences don't occur in isolation and at random but against the background or in the context of society, and for good reasons (once we understand them). Everything is determined, you might say, from our taste for hamburgers and dry martinis, Mozart or Mantovani  (depending on the class to which you happen to belong), to our choice of love-object and life-companion. Why is it that all the teen-agers go for the Monkees and the Stones and all the older generation for Brigitte Bardot and Marilyn Monroe? However subjective our taste in beauty and sensual pleasure, it's not accidental or arbitrary whether you go for the Rubens or the Twiggy type. All three things work with the precision of mathematics and an exact mechanism. That's what the enlightened Pausanias is onto. Young Phaedrus thinks it all just happens, and there is nothing but the facade. Pausanias sees individual human relationships in a larger context and peers behind the facade in what I parody as keyhole-peeking, to see what's really going on, what really makes us tick. Here society is at work, shaping our tastes, desires, thoughts and behavior.

“Behind” human behavior Pausanias sees the motive and general principles of human motivation. We do and say everything for some purpose and the purpose may be more important than what we actually do or say. So it's said that psychology teaches us that, when we think a thing, the thing we think is not the thing we think we think, but the thing that makes us think the thing we think we think. When we become psychological, we wonder what makes a person say or do certain things; we wonder what he's driving at, what he really means, what he “has in mind.” This is particularly true in love relationships, where our crucial self-evolution is at stake. In the phenomenon of jealousy, there is the sharpest possible distinction between the facade and what's behind the facade, and we read life and others reactions to us like a diplomatic note. This is also the rationalist approach to experience, where what is decisive is always beneath the surface,  a “drama behind the drama,” something quite different from what appears to be the case—like natural selection, class conflict, libidinous desire, conspicuous consumption. That's why jealousy is a fitting theme for a work of the magnitude of Remembrance of Things Past.

Phaedrus was interested in the facade (or image) too, remember, but there was nothing behind the facade, which was to be explained by a being outside itself, of which it was the reflection, the power of the beloved. Now the being outside us is reduced to the status of an occasion or triggering mechanism, and we attempt to get behind our reaction to it (him or her). Now it's the other being, the beloved, who becomes the mirror of a drama going on behind our backs.

Our love relationships inevitably involve a drama of self-importance. It's still the same old story, a fight for love and glory. We have already seen this in Phaedrus. Only Pausanias is aware of it. There is a pecking order of sensual attraction and social importance, and we are all maneuvering for the highest possible position in it. To be an object of love is an absolutely vital element in our self-esteem. This is why the love relationship either has to be stabilized by legal contract or may fluctuate so drastically that everything appears in retrospect to have been false. Our feelings for another person can change as sharply as a landlord's toward a tenant who no longer pays his rent. It all looks so different in the first flush of romance from when we're going for the furniture.

In lethargic communities, like Elis and Boeotia, sexual mores are lax, to stimulate activity and promote self-esteem. In despotic communities, like the tyrannies of Asia Minor, sexual mores are straight-laced and repressive, since there is little scope for individual activity and self-esteem. Pausanias stops short at the customs and institutions which shape life in any society, but he might have gone on to trace these back to geographic and climatic conditions which produce them. He might be talking about the differences between the 18th and 20th centuries, or Sweden and Italy. Our ways of doing things don't just happen, any more than things in nature, of which they're an extension (unless there's a Christian God). As Hippocrates, the father of medicine, said, “In nature all things are alike in this, that they can all be traced to preceding causes.” This is at any rate the assumption of the theoretician in his eternal search for explanation.

Man is a social animal and society shapes every dimension of his being. We are all programmed. We can see this at a glance in cultural history. Denn wahrlich leben wir in Figuren. But if we're all programmed (boo!), it's also we who do the programming (hurrah!)—and we ought to do it consciously and systematically (boo!). This is B.F. Skinner, full-blown, in 4th century B.C. Athens.

Pausanias stops short at customs and institutions where I push on to climate and geography, knowing (or believing), with Hippocrates, that “all things can be traced to preceding causes,” not only in “nature,” as it's called, but in history and human life as well—I mean your life and my life. Free will and personal responsibility for being the way we are—the thing Barry Goldwater appears to believe in—are of a piece with the old transcendent God who controls things from above and without, so to speak, the God who winds our sun-dials. God, freedom, immortality—Kant says—they are all of a piece. I would add:  transcendent God, individual freedom, personal immortality.

The notion that you do things individually—that all your actions are not woven into a web of connections into which you fit as snugly as the planets in their orbits—is as unintelligible as that God does everything in nature. “The fact is that invoking the gods to explain diseases and other natural events,” Hippocrates goes on, “is all nonsense.” And so, I would argue, is invoking a notion of “you,” in isolation from the world around you, and all the forces working on you, which can equally well claim credit or be blamed for what you are at any moment: energetic or shiftless, virtuous or vicious, graceful or sinful (depending on society's attitude towards the behavior you find yourself exhibiting). This type of talk simply doesn't explain anything—that's what's “wrong” with it. One can't do anything with the ineffable you.

To say that Mozart is the way he is because he's talented or “elect” or has his hearing in the right place or is in touch with cosmic harmony simply leaves the matter unexplained, draws an arbitrary line where inquiry stops. I want to know what produces a Hitler or a Mozart—though I never assume that they are not there or are mechanisms or anything like that. As Aristotle says, “All knowledge is of the universal.” He understands things insofar as they are like other things, sharing all their predicates in common. Anything utterly unique simply can't be part of the game. You have to cherish that for yourself, I'm afraid.

The great debate of grace vs. free will (or “good works”) is the 17th and 18th centuries’ nonsense because it's cast in nonsensical terms: God does it (and you get no credit) or you do it (and you do). (In the later form of this debate, God is replaced by blind mechanical forces.) Both alternatives are cast in the same individual, unintelligible terms; both are unecological. Consequently we can't look for any resolution of the dispute—ever. Wherever there is an irreconcilable controversy, the philosopher Ian Ramsey says, the competing claims must unwittingly share some common assumption which is false. If a question is unanswerable, it must be misconceived. That's Ramsey's Maxim, and you ought to remember it, for you will get into a lot of irreconcilable arguments.

Now we haven't discarded this form of thinking, even though we've largely discarded the faith from which it derives. You don't get rid of a Puritan background simply by throwing over the Church. We still think in individual, Cartesian terms: we think of ourselves as a “ghost in a machine,” a butterfly in a suit of armor—each man an island unto himself, trying to communicate. We're still imprisoned in the notion of individual responsibility, and each man is out to save himself, whichever way he leaps. We don't think of the things we read in literature and theory as applying to us—or else we get all up-tight about it. (Ramsey's Maxim!)

We have no conception how thoroughly our lives are woven with others and ultimately with the entire community and tradition of which we're all part and product. We're all immersed in a “fallen world,” which produces us and is the real source of evil (as well as all good) in life, rather than any individual defect in our minds, hearts, or souls.

Christianity, with the notions of a transcendent God, personal immortality, and a fallen world, breaks the natural bond between the living, conscious being, and his environment or community. Then we have a being which simply happens to be in its world—that's mediaeval Christianity—or a being which is simply produced by the world with no being of its own—that's modern determinism. Determinism is the backlash of a dream that failed, but still prey to the same confusion, trying to suppress one side of an essential equation. Pausanias reminds us that a conscious being and its environment are thoroughly reciprocal.

We can't get away from other people and our society nearly as readily as St. Paul, Descartes, Hamlet, and Faust are all deluded into believing. The confusion has not gone away simply because Christianity no longer plays a very decisive role in our thinking; it's simply gone underground, where it's harder to get at. The fact is we haven't yet found any system of values to replace Christianity, in which we all believed for better than half our collective history and only really began throwing overboard in earnest in this century. Until we find a general system of values to vie with Christianity, we all remain Christian, whatever we may individually “believe.” We still live in a Christian world.

Now Pausanias is onto the reciprocity of being. Young Phaedrus had talked of human relations as though they occurred in isolation and not in the context of society, which shapes and moulds them. No good loving the Boeotians and hating the Ionians, or vice-versa—crying “Yea, Yea!” to this and “Nay, Nay!” to that. The important question is how they got that way, and this leads Pausanias to analyze their customs and institutions, in order to learn from them so that we in Athens (or America) can do it better.

Athens already does it best, in Pausanias' view. While sex is simply promoted among the torpid Boeotians and simply kept in a straight-jacket among the oppressed Ionians, in Athens there is a “double standard,” and the lover is encouraged to pursue the object of his desires, who is encouraged to reject his advances. What's the good of that? It looks as though Athenian customs and institutions systematically promote frustration. If you encourage both pursuit and flight, you're promoting frustration, and what's the good of that? It's young Phaedrus' ideal of “unrequited love” again, isn't it? It's what I call the coquette syndrome, so prevalent in America. If a girl isn't popular with the boys, her mother is on her to dress more attractively, use a bit of make-up, go to parties more often, (hardly ever, I suspect, to change dentifrice). But if she should ever fall prey to circumstances and say “Yes!” instead of “No!”—God help her. Isn't that what Pausanias is talking about and praising Athens for? Why, then? What's the point?

Well, love (or sensual attraction) does produce energy—young Phaedrus is quite right about that. But the question is not simply how to produce energy, but how to channel, harness, and utilize it. The energy itself, Pausanias insists, like any natural force, is neutral (as I say of desires), and the real question is what we do with it (or them). The same sort of natural energy, the same drive, produces Mozart and Hitler, creates great works of art and fritters itself away in dissipation. As Baudelaire says, many a great work has been lost for a teaspoon of semen. This is why we have to be careful about the sort of passion and transport, which Phaedrus recommends without qualification.

The point of frustration, or dissatisfaction, is that it can lead to creativity and achievement, by the mysterious process which Freud calls “sublimation.” If we simply succeed in satisfying our desires, our being goes slack and we roll over and go to sleep. This is what the South Sea Islanders are all about. “Caught in that sensual music, all neglect monuments of unaging intellect.” So the star athlete in high school is likely to spend his life pumping gas, while the bookworm next door goes on to argue cases before the Supreme Court. We in the West have always understood this, and Pausanias has a theory about it: A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's heaven for?

Satisfaction and achievement, it appears, pull in opposite directions. Per aspera ad astra. I take it this is the point of Pausanias' distinction between the heavenly and earthly Aphrodite, which can't be two different sources of energy, like heaven and hell (which William Blake wants to wed), but two different directions which our energies can take, like poles of a compass, which I identify as satisfaction and achievement. You can become sated and bored pursuing pleasure and satisfaction, or you can remain eternally hungry, striving, and aware. This is why theologians put down pleasures—especially the teaspoon of semen—because they want us to work and achieve and never stop working and achieving (the thing I want too). This is the best reason I can find for the Christian virtue of self-abnegation. Schopenhauer captures this approach when he says, “Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim.” If personal satisfaction and cultural achievement pull in opposite directions, we can see why it's important to distinguish between the heavenly and earthly Aphrodite, and why frustration and disappointment (like self-denial) might be thought to be positive.

So Pausanias' theory of motivation makes perfect sense. It is not simply a rationalization of coquetry. It's Freud's theory of sublimation, full-blown. Desire produces energy, and when it is thwarted in pursuit of its immediate or primary object, or what I would call first-order gratification, the energy is deflected (“upwards”) to abstract, imaginary and cultural objectives, or second-order gratification. This is why great thinkers and artists have traditionally had a hard time with the first order, why they're so often oversexed and maladjusted.

In artists and thinkers, there is typically a massive deflection of energy from the objects most men pursue to objects most men could never understand. It's at this point that William Butler Yeats sets sail for Byzantium. For 1600 years of our tradition, all the men devoted to culture, the clergy, had to pledge to give up sexual satisfaction altogether. The energy which most men direct towards the pursuit of sexual gratification was to be harnessed to cultural objectives and put in the service of God, administering to one's fellow man. “Aut Liberi aut Libri,” Nietzsche says: children or books (not both). So Gandhi had to leave his wife and child to live entirely for India. This is why the Christian superior man gives up sex for God, satisfaction for achievement. Pausanias has caught it, two millennia before Freud. Kierkegaard has to remind his fellow Christian that what he gives up he should not put down. What for most men is the greatest thing in life the celibate priest makes a gift to his God and we only spoil by regarding it as lowly or degraded and not really worth  having at all.

So Athens' cultural splendor, in contrast with Sparta and the cities of Asia Minor, derives from the fact that its customs encourage sexual frustration, or promote hunger, and the hunger issues in creativity. Our longing for love creates energy, and when it fails to find satisfaction in the real world, explodes in temples and statuary and tragedies and systems of mathematics and the excitement of the Olympic Games. In all these ways, in effect, we run it out. Freud works out the theory in detail in Civilization and Its Discontents.

The first half of Pausanias' speech, treating what I call the macro-economics of love, evolves the theory of sublimation to explain cultural creativity, anticipating Freud. The assumption, in Pausanias as in Freud (and, I would argue, in the Christian tradition generally), is that personal satisfaction and cultural achievement necessarily pull in opposite directions, or that the substitutive (cultural) objects to which our energies are deflected in the process of sublimation cannot yield genuine satisfaction. Because an object (a novel or play or poem or theory) is “imaginary,” it does not follow that the satisfaction attending it cannot be real. A party at the Capulets or Rostovs is not a pale substitute for real parties in Isla Vista and Gary, Indiana—though I thought that for years before I learned to read. I first went into teaching, first deflected all my energies to a cultural object, because I couldn't make it in the real world, in the quest for love and power. But this doesn't mean that what I've found is a substitute for what Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon have found.

It's not at all clear that personal satisfaction and cultural achievement pull in opposite directions, though I take this to the deepest assumption of the western tradition, which Schopenhauer gives its supreme formulation. This would mean that the Gothic cathedrals are monuments of sexual frustration, and that is a very discouraging insight. Of course, they may be that, but not just that. So, one might say, my life is a monument of sexual frustration. I have never known love in the way most men use the term and have almost never had sex. But I would argue that it's not just that.

Of course there is a stage of our development—and it is likely to be a very long stage—where satisfaction and achievement do pull in opposite directions. We must decide at any given moment whether to spend our time working or relaxing and enjoying ourselves, whether to spend a dollar or to bank it. When I was in high school and college, I had to decide whether to go to parties or stay home, studying my Shakespeare. For almost 20 years, study was predominately sacrifice—until, as I say, I began to learn how to read. For 20 years I'd rather have been at parties (especially if I could only have been the “life” of them) than to read about them. But now I say I'd just as much go to a party by Shakespeare or Tolstoy than to a real party.

In the process of education, the expansion of our powers, satisfaction and achievement begin by pulling in opposite directions, and, at this stage, as Dean Macdonald used to say, if you're coasting, you're surely going downhill. You have to pour hundreds of thousands of hours into learning German before the language springs to life and becomes a joy. You have to spend hundreds or thousands of hours minding your wheel before you come to have a real relationship with your pots and can express and find yourself in them. But eventually all creative work, which necessarily begins in drudgery, can become joyous and rewarding in itself. The same activity which was initially a sacrifice (as for me reading and study) then becomes a pleasure. This is why we no longer need “heaven” or a system of rewards and punishments to bind us to our life-work. Labor is dancing or blossoming where “the body is not bruised to pleasure soul, nor beauty born out of its own despair, nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.”

In his analysis of personal relations Pausanias assumes that satisfaction and achievement pull in opposite directions, so that a love relationship represents an exchange of benefits and sacrifices. Hence all the talk of “granting favors” or acceding to one another's desires when we are supposed to be talking about a noble and chaste sort of love utterly different from the coarse sensual and sexual desires which drive most men. This is the basic assumption of Hobbes' state of nature, that our interests can never be mutual, so that one man's pleasure must inevitably be another man's loss. This is obvious if we're partaking in a pie but not if we're partaking in a chess-game or conversation or making love, where there is one thing which we both have, so that there can be no proper exchange of anything, much less sacrifices and benefits.

Pausanias assumes that personal relations cannot ultimately be satisfying and are therefore essentially transitory. Whereas Phaedrus had given us a romantic vision of “eternal love,” Pausanias analyzes the “love-affair” and assumes that it is to-an-end, like all living things, doomed eventually to die. Instead of the “timeless moment,” we now have a theory of strategy applicable to a project in time; we're dealing with courting and conquest, and we always have one eye on the future. Now, for the first time, we might be said to have something “in mind.”

Phaedrus has given us the theory of romanticism; Pausanias now goes on to give us the theory of eroticism. Young Phaedrus is romantic; Pausanias is older and wiser, and a mature erotic. He knows that all things change with the passage of time, and he wants to play it deliberately to maximize his pleasure and achievement in some combination. Eroticism one might call reflective sensuality. It makes man's sensuality quite different  from the beast's, western man's quite different from the men of other cultures, and the privileged or cultured man's quite different from the common man's.

We become erotic when, consciously or unconsciously, we take a hand in our own feelings, a kind of self-stimulation, deliberately creating intensity and excitement. It involves what Stendhal calls “crystallization,” the play of imagination around the given.  It's the difference between the strip-tease and the nudist colony, which has no mystery, no excitement, and no scope for imagination. The nudist colony is not erotic, and neither, ordinarily, is the brothel. Religious and respectable people quite misunderstand the brothel, which is sad and does not need punishment.

The game of “musical beds,” which we ordinarily identify with the jet-set, is the most straightforward and primitive form of eroticism. It's what we call the “love game”—but notice it requires the monogamistic sexual ethic of Des Moines, Iowa or there would be no game. From monogamy, it is said, we evolve the institution of successive monogamy; from one woman to one woman at a time. Then we can keep switching around, like international realignments. This occurs, presumably, when we have a greater need for excitement than life in Des Moines, Iowa allows. It's at this point that Pausanias enters the scene, with his analysis of what's going on as we jump into and out of bed with one another or generally fall into and out of love.

Eroticism is the technique of pumping interest and excitement into life, when it would otherwise be drab and boring. Phaedrus simply falls into excitement and describes the experience of “falling in love”; Pausanias plays it more systematically and fosters and manipulates excitement. He has been burned several times, no doubt, and approaches the thing more cautiously. After Phaedrus, he sounds like the older generation preaching to the younger, Polonius to Laertes or Lord Chesterfield to his son. He misunderstands Phaedrus' passion as sexual, rather than imaginary, because sex is the only thing in his life which he has not brought nicely under control. So he warns us against being swept away by our passions. If it's a passion for Mozart or mathematics, that's okay, but not dark earthy passion or carnal desire. That's why he distinguishes the heavenly and earthly Aphrodite, the things we admire and the things we desire, and that's where all the trouble begins.

Behind the facade of respectability, however, Pausanias is clearly a “dirty old man,” an “old lecher with a love on every wind.”  He's always “giving himself away” with talk of “granting favors,” etc. The tenor of Pausanias' remarks leaves little doubt that he is buying sexual gratification with his immense culture—what Socrates refuses to do in his relationship to Alcibiades, to allow the relationship to be seen as an exchange. He is Faust with the tastes of Don Juan. The proper Prof. Paul Shorey, after a paragraph account, comments on Pausanias' “touches of humor and Greek sentiment distasteful to modern readers.” Poor Prof. Shorey at that banquet—it's like Billy Graham or the Pope at a fraternity stag-party (the ones where they show the movies), or reading Ulysses or Remembrances of Things Past or Les fleures du  mal.

Any explicit discussion of erotic themes is likely to be “distasteful to the modern reader.” We are an immensely prudish, prurient society, when all is said and done. Life is becoming less erotic, I believe, as we come more and more to find anything erotic simply an embarrassment. It's part and parcel of our immense uneasiness with the intimate, personal, and subjective. I believe erotic relations may disappear altogether in a generation or two, as youth come to pursue chaste, simple (somewhat brotherly-sisterly) relations, close to the earth. The sleazy cocktail lounge, sexy clothing, and pornography are all in trouble, along with the ladies' hairdresser. If Eastern mysticism triumphs, we will all lead quite chaste lives and can more or less forget about sex and competition. They're both so painful: as St. Paul says, you either marry or you burn.

I see loose, comfortable clothing as for ourselves, tight, sexy clothing as for others, and therefore properly Christian. Especially if, as I suspect, physical attractiveness (as a spring-board to dreaming) is one of the nicest things we give one another. I only recommend the principle, Die Kunst der Kunst ist sich zu verstecken (The art of art is to conceal itself). Contrast clothing nowadays with previous centuries in this regard. Sartor Resartus is no joke.

Eroticism, as I say, always has one eye on the future. Its principle is: more to come. Here the clock emerges in our affective life. There was no clock in Phaedrus; that was “timeless” love, or the dream of the “timeless moment.” This concern with the future sharpens Pausanias' vision, and he can virtually see through garments. He really begins noticing; as he tells us, with the first sign of the beard—certainly one of the notes which must be “distasteful to the modern reader.” As the young man beings to ripen and come into the fullness of his power, he becomes an object of both pederasty and pedagogy, both sexually and spiritually exciting, and the ambiguity runs throughout Pausanias' thinking, as much as he tries to distinguish the two, in keeping with his sharp distinction between the heavenly and earthly Aphrodite. There are Freudian slips all over the place. There was one great Freudian slip at the end of Phaedrus' speech, the discussion of  Achilles and Patroclus, but in Pausanias it is smashed into tiny fragments and spattered all over the canvas. The man reminds us of Nietzsche, "On Chastity":

Chastity is a virtue in some, but almost a vice in many. They abstain, but the bitch, sensuality, leers enviously out of everything they do. Even to the heights of their virtue and the cold regions of the spirit this beast follows them with her lack of peace.

And he concludes with a marvelous portrayal of sublimation, without the assumption that its satisfaction is substitutive and illusory:

And how nicely the bitch sensuality, knows how to beg for a piece of spirit when denied a  piece of meat.

The principle of erotic stimulation, as Pausanias sees, is delay and postponement, or in general—obstacles. This is the difference between the strip-tease and the nudist colony. Getting there is all the fun: “Take it off, take it off,” and we are all eyeballs. This is a new—the enlightened, reflective, disillusioned—sense of the “beyond.” Locke's scarcity theory of value, however well it may work with diamonds and water, orchids, and daisies, is the basic principle of most amatory relations: you make yourself valuable by making yourself scarce.

Traditionally passionate love-affairs have taken place against the background of an extraordinarily straight-laced and repressive society, and it's not clear where they will derive their intensity any more, now that we all might as well be living in Elis or Boeotia and can pop into bed together any time we like, no longer seeing why in the world we shouldn't. If so, we will no longer have the Anna Karenina thing, or the Faust-Margarete thing, or the Tristan and Isolde thing.

So now we have another reason for appreciating abstinence and frustration. Hunger, it appears, not only drives us to activity and achievement but heightens our awareness and our pleasures and can keep us lusting and ogling and striving all our lives.

Oh happy love, oh happy, happy love,

Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,

Forever panting and forever young . . .

The erotic principle is that postponed satisfaction yields a greater intensity of pleasure. When satisfaction is postponed beyond the grave, we have the ideals of celibacy and chastity. When we negate and repress our natural sensuality, as we do with Christianity, we become more, not less, erotic. The upshot of our long Christian tradition of repressing sexual desire is to leave us immensely more erotic than men of other cultures—part of the thing today's youth are reacting against.

The most erotic love in this sense is homosexual, which traditionally must be veiled eternally in secrecy and deception, a dance we do on the brink of utter disgrace, the love which “dares not speak its name.” Nor is there any final equilibrium which it can reach, like the family, of which Kierkegaard says, “The woman demands a proof of passion, so she gets the proof and loses the passion.” But, beyond this, society has vitiated the love of man and woman by denying the woman access to any cultural stature which might cast her physical beauty in an aura of excitement and imagination. So Gottfried von Strasbourg writes in the 12th century, waxing ecstatic over the great romantic love of Tristan and Isolde, “when Isolde behaved in this way, she was a woman in name only, but in spirit she was a man!” Pretty shocking stuff, which must put in question whether Gottfried was “alright.”

Admittedly SK is, in our terms, a “male Chauvinist pig,” but his point is still worth making. It is immensely difficult keeping excitement alive in a relationship, even—or especially—when we decide to live together. The relationship is then de-romanticized in a very short space of time, and is prey to familiarity and habit. I am working on all these problems, as I'm not happy with the simple commune arrangement, and want to keep excitement and individuality, romanticism and eroticism, alive. If you do cohabit or marry, I would advise you to consider the possibility of separate bedrooms and periods when you go apart to lead separate lives and each “do your own thing.” It's immensely difficult even touring Europe together, if we share all our experiences and have no separate lives to tell one another about. And the same in life, if we do everything together—“become one,” as we say. Years ago I wrote my friends John and Parry Carroll, on the occasion of their marriage, “If you two become one, the loss will be irretrievable.” It happens, you know.

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