Chapter 8
The readers of my books fall usually into two distinct classes—those who are disgusted by the strong element of sexuality and those who rejoice in discovering that this element forms such a large ingredient…. Only a few discerning souls seem to be able to reconcile the so-called contradictory aspects of my being as revealed through my writing.
— HENRY MILLER, THE WORLD OF SEX
IN 1974, A PUBLISHER wrote to Miller to ask him whether I he would be interested in conspiring with me on a book to be called A Rap on Sex. Margaret Mead and James Baldwin had just published A Rap on Race, and it seemed a likely and promotable idea.
Miller didn’t mince words in responding to this possibly lucrative proposal. “I think it stinks,” he wrote back. “In the first place I am not an expert [on sex] as you dub me and secondly, though it may well be profitable, there is something about the idea that stinks.”
So much for those commentators who say that Henry would do anything for money or that he put in the sex to make it sell. As he said repeatedly, he would rather not have written unpublishable books:
Here I was begging the Muse not to get me into trouble with the powers that be, not to make me write out all those “filthy” words, all those scandalous, scabrous lines, pointing out in that deaf and dumb language which I employed when dealing with the Voice that soon, like Marco Polo, Cervantes, Bunyan et alii, I would have to write my books in jail or at the foot of the gallows … and these holy cows deep in clover, failing to recognize dross from gold, render a verdict of guilty, guilty of dreaming it up “to make money!”
What did sex mean to Henry Miller and why was he willing to risk everything to describe it so vividly in his books? Most of his contemporaries—Margaret Mitchell, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf (to name just a few)—made the conscious or unconscious decision to facilitate publication by referring only obliquely to sexual acts in their books. In the decision to be explicit whatever the price, Miller stands in a tiny crowd: D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, William Burroughs. Why was depicting sex more important to him than anything else? What did he think sex was? Why did he think it mattered so deeply to human life?
He answers the question clearly in The World of Sex:
Sometimes in the recording of a bald sexual incident great significance adheres. Sometimes the sexual becomes a writhing, pulsating facade such as we see on Indian temples. Sometimes it is a fresco hidden in a sacred cave where one may sit and contemplate on things of the spirit. There is nothing I can possibly prohibit myself from doing in this realm of sex. It is a world unto itself…. It is a cold fire which burns in us like a sun. It is never dead, even though the sun may become a moon. There are no dead things in the universe—it is only our way of thinking which makes death.
This “cold fire” of sexuality was equivalent to the life force for Miller. It was what he had in common with Lawrence, and why he labored so long and so maddeningly over The World of Lawrence. He shared with Lawrence the pagan sense of sex—sex as primal flux, sex as the gyre of birth, sex as the DNA of existence, the matrix of all creativity. Miller used the word sex in a cosmic, not a genital sense. And he was surprised to discover that the world did not agree with him.
But he did not start at this point.
He started in Brooklyn, full of the same sexual neuroses and inhibitions that bedeviled the rest of his contemporaries. That was why he was so keen to free himself. Only the most enslaved of us longs with such intensity to be free. Working his way through letters, vignettes, Clipped Wings, Moloch, and Crazy Cock to the new life of Tropic of Cancer, he gradually liberated himself to partake of life’s cosmic sexual dance, thereby coming to understand that only by such participation could freedom be won.
The only way Henry could write, finally, was by listening to the divine dictation of the Voice. He had to write what that Voice dictated, or risk writing nothing at all. He did not choose his subject matter; it chose him. He discovered he was nothing but a medium, a channel, and he let language flow through him.
What was sex to him? It was precisely this flow, this flux, this seeming chaos out of which life springs. If he suppressed it, he would suppress all expression. He had no choice but to write about sex.
Miller’s book on Lawrence, written and rewritten in the early thirties, was abandoned after the publication of Tropic of Cancer (though never definitively: he continued to work on it through the mid-forties). It was finally published in 1980, becoming his last book rather than what he had intended to be his first. The World of Lawrence gives us many important clues as to Miller’s understanding of sex and its role in his writing.
Is Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscene? If so, how is this obscenity justified? Miller asks. No justification is necessary, he concludes: “Life is obscene and miraculous, and neither is there any justification for life.”
Obscenity is a divine prerogative of man, and is always to be used carelessly, heedlessly, without scruple or qualms, without religious or aesthetic defense. When the body becomes sacred, obscenity comes into its own. Purity of speech is as much bosh as purity of action—there is no such thing. Obscenity is stomped down when the body is degraded, when the soul is made to usurp the body’s proper function.
In discussing Lawrence, Miller does a mini-survey of the history of civilization and its varying attitudes toward sexuality. He notes how sex changes from an open, natural act to one performed in shameful privacy as Christianity overtakes the pagan world. He blames Christianity and its dualism for our culture’s rejection of the body and all its wants.
“Obscenity,” he notes, “figures large and heavily, magnificently and awesomely, in all primitive peoples….” Miller observes that in so-called primitive cultures, where people are in touch with their instinctual selves, religion and ritual always contain powerful elements of both sex and death. Why? Because sex and death are fiercely important parts of life, evoking our deepest pleasures and our deepest fears.
Why is sex important? The answer is so obvious as to need immense obfuscation and denial to be ignored. Sex is important because it is at the very root of life.
The savage is not a sick man. The savage retains his sense of awe, mystery, his love of action, his right to behave like the animal he is …
That animal, lacking the self-consciousness which names things, puts no veil between itself and sex, between itself and death. Sex just is—namelessly. So is death.
Sex is the great Janus-faced symbol of life and death. It is never one or the other, it is always both. The great lie of life here comes to the surface; the contradiction refuses to be resolved.
At the front of The World of Lawrence is one of Miller’s distinctive diagrams, the kind he used to guide himself while writing. He draws a tree of life at whose base are the words: “GRAVE = WOMB.” Below that: “Mother Earth.” Below that: “He embraces his animal nature in a primal frenzy for livingness.” Up above, where the tree begins to open heavenward, are these words: “Fear of death becomes fear of life. By embracing death the artist restores life.”
Miller is ostensibly referring to Lawrence here, but he more likely is referring to himself. Miller never wrote about another writer (Rimbaud, Lawrence, Nin, me) without writing about himself. And the same, no doubt, may be said of all of us.
When we embrace sex, we are also symbolically embracing our own mortality. Fear of sex is therefore also the fear of death. And for many men, the fear of woman is equivalent to the recognition of mortality. It is woman’s fecundity that reminds man of the everlasting dance of birth and death.
Miller himself states this baldly:
Ah, and man’s coition, how ironic, mocking, comic it is in the last analysis—man lying on top of woman, dominating her, subjugating her, man the great fighting cock, the strong master of the world. He triumphs cruelly when he enters her and makes her obey, but it is the short triumph of a moment or two, just enough for nature to play her role, to wreak her havoc; and woman submits, submits so willingly (this alone ought to make him suspicious of her), submits so easily (and not just with him but with any one … the great whore that she is) because she is accomplishing her destiny. … The moment the child is born, however, she is through with man; as far as she is concerned now, as woman, he is finished, he can croak.
This is a perfect summation of misogyny—the same misogyny that justified blaming Eve for the expulsion from Paradise, burning witches, denying women the vote, denying them, even today, equal legal rights, equal pay, equal health care, equal right to have total control over their own bodies, equal right to life and limb in public and private spaces.
If woman is womb, the misogynist reasons, she is also tomb. If woman is life, she is also death. But the “primitive,” the “savage,” accepts this dichotomy unjudgmentally, making woman both the goddess of life and death; Kali; the Great Mother; Venus of Willendorf; the Goddess-Creatrix of the universe and everything in it. Woman is also the door to death, and to the afterlife. How much less primitive is the primitive than we are! The primitive is neither sexomaniac or sexophobic: both these states are aspects of one another. The primitive embraces the whole spectrum of his or her humanity.
We know now, as Miller and Lawrence could not—except in the truth of the unconscious—that the equation of woman with death is a patriarchal slander, made to deliberately discredit one half the human race.
Patriarchal societies are founded upon a crime, the crime is not the murder of the father, as Freud would have us believe. It is the rape and scorn of the mother.
Miller’s equation of womb with death is not an inevitable one; it is patriarchal one. By extension, it implies that only the wombless members of the human race can embody an imperishable spirit. It therefore designates men alone as prophets, preachers, and artists. Women are condemned to be vessels—vessels of birth and also vessels of death.
We are so used to this worldview that we forget we could easily see the world otherwise, if we chose. We could see woman and man as two halves of an organism that can, in harmony, produce and sustain life. We could see deity as androgynous, as in fact the Hindus do. We could see death as inherent in all living things, not only in the female of the species. We could go beyond the trap of patriarchy, the rosy pseudomythology of supposedly perfect ancient matriarchies, and try to create a world in which sex was not allied with death and therefore did not have to be discarded in the discarded body of a woman.
But as yet we do not have such a world. We are still dealing with the ignominious world of patriarchy, whose tentacles have entwined themselves around all our minds. Sex, in this world, is death, is woman, is disease.
These false ideas have been reinforced in our time by the plague of sexually transmitted diseases that announced itself right after the sexual revolution. A causal connection was made between sexual freedom and disease, a causal connection we never stopped to question. The sexual revolution was made the cause of AIDS because such causation fitted in perfectly with our puritanical notions of retribution for pleasure. Whether the AIDS virus evolved “naturally” or was deliberately invented by a governmental germ-warfare lab to squelch homosexuality and free sexual expression by heterosexuals, it has become a political force to be reckoned with. (See David Black’s challenging book The Plague Years, published in 1986, for a study of the way AIDS fulfills our sexual stereotypes.) Sex has again become the root of all evil—and with it has come a ferocious backlash against women, against gays, against blacks, against Hispanics, against all those who do not conform to a white male ideal of sexless and bloodless spirituality.
Even though Miller was trapped in a misogynistic worldview, he was still able to see spirituality in woman; he was still able to see sexuality as a force for life as well as death. Though he can express almost textbook vignettes of misogyny and does so in The World of Lawrence, he can also accept fecundating female sexuality, as in his essay on Anaïs Nin, “Un Etre Etoilique,” and elsewhere. Miller is, in fact, perfect proof that male rage is part and parcel of patriarchy, that the need to dominate and symbolically or literally kill the mother is at the root of all patriarchal evil.
Miller understood that fear of sex projected onto the woman was one of the ills of society. He struggled with this fear and then transcended it. Again, he says this of himself, using what he writes about Lawrence as a code:
… Strindberg remained a misogynist whereas Lawrence (perhaps because of his latent femininity) arrived at a higher or deeper understanding. His abuse goes out equally to man and to woman; he stresses continually the need for each to accentuate their sex, to insist upon polarity, so as to strengthen the sexual connection which can renew and revive all the other forces, the major forces that are necessary for the development of the whole being, to stay the waste of contemporary disintegration.
Both sexes, Lawrence felt, Miller felt, were equally to blame for the sexual degradation of modern life.
… and the real cause lies deeper than this surface war between the sexes…. The real cause issues from the evil seed of the Christian ideal …
In this aperçu, Miller shows himself in perfect agreement with such feminist thinkers as Mary Daley, writing in Beyond God the Father and other books, who analyze the whore/Madonna split in our culture, a split that has fed the fires of unending sex war between woman and man, and has led to a puritanical rejection of both sexuality and woman as being merely screens for death.
A new paradigm for the sexes is needed, one that sees women and men holistically rather than as battling armies. Such paradigms exist, but they have been deliberately buried for centuries, first by Judeo-Christian brainwashing—and now by Moslem brainwashing.
No one is really looking at the problem in terms of root causes. It is our own worldview that we must change, preparatory to changing the world. This is why I fear that the reductive, antisexual view of Miller’s work—whether by male chauvinist prudes or feminist prudes—is merely another symptom of the distorted worldview he was seeking, above all, to change.
When he looked at Lawrence, Miller understood himself:
His hatred of his own mother, of her influence, and the Church’s influence, is the admission of defeat at women’s hands.
He also revealed his own definition of sex by revealing Lawrence’s:
a sensuality rooted in a primitive apprehension of one’s relation with the universe, with woman, with man. Sensuality is the animal instincts, which he wanted to bring out again; sexuality, the false cultural attitude which he wanted to overthrow.
Perhaps we should call it Sex (with a capital S) to differentiate it from the smarmy world of porno parlors and stroke books with which, in our puritanical, sexomaniacal culture, it is nearly always confused.
Anyone who writes about sex in a puritanical, sex-hating, sexomaniacal culture falls into the trap of being equated with those who peddle the frivolous titillations of sex-for-sale. Once a writer says “sex,” the reader projects his own view of sex upon the word. Changing definitions is always the hardest task for any writer. One is often accused of exactly what one is attempting to change.
This was the case with Lawrence, with Miller, with Joyce. Joyce and Lawrence have been rescued by the academics, but Miller has been caught in a trap of timing: first he was unprintable; now he is politically incorrect.
Unfortunately, there is a strong anti-sex tendency in contemporary feminism, a tendency that fits in nicely with the differently rooted anti-sex tendency of puritanism and reactionary politics. It is ironic that a contemporary feminist movement that began with such free spirits as Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger—whose sense of sex as life force was not so different from Miller’s or Lawrence’s—should now have evolved such an anti-sexual cast.
How on earth did this occur? How on earth did rejection of the penis, the equation of all maleness with violence and rape, and the deep mistrust of heterosexuality become dominant themes during the second wave of the feminist movement? How did a movement rooted in the same libertarian ethos as anarchism and free love become, fifty years later, a sort of anti-sex league?
There were various reasons. First, it was historically necessary to liberate both female and male homosexuality from stigma and to raise consciousness about the omnipresence of rape and violence against women in our culture. These were—and still are—worthy aims. But a false causal connection was made between heterosexual maleness and rape. Because male heterosexuals are often rapists, maleness itself was equated with rape. This would only be true if patriarchal attitudes were immutable forces of nature, the very forces of nature modern feminists seek to dispute. Feminists, who claim that all men are rapists, are thus caught in a tautological trap. But as a result of their equation of maleness with rape, only lesbianism or impotence became wholly acceptable politically. Any man was guilty of rape until proven innocent. Not only did this reductio ad absurdum serve to alienate from feminism millions of women who continued to sleep with men, but it also, sadly, made feminism appear to be a fringe ideology rather than the belief of the majority of both women and men, which, in fact, it is. This unfortunate misrepresentation has been more useful to the enemies of feminism than to its proponents.
In a sane world, lesbianism would not be seen as superior to heterosexuality, but as another, equal, choice. Just as male homosexuality would be one viable choice—neither penalized by tax laws nor property laws—lesbianism and lesbian motherhood would both be given full legal protection. But political belief would not rest only on one’s behavior in bed, in love, in pair-bonding. The personal is political, but politics has a rainbow of colors, including shades of gray. By identifying itself so uncompromisingly with the lesbian nation, feminism unwittingly played into the hands of the evangelical right wing.
Of course, it is easy to understand why lesbian feminists are freer politically than women who live with men, are freer to choose their lives, even under patriarchy. They need not please or pander to men—an admirable independence. They are outsiders with nothing to lose, so they cannot easily be co-opted by patriarchal attitudes. Heterosexual women are always in danger of being sold out by their sexuality.
But by linking politics with sexual orientation, the second wave of feminism fell into a trap: in a sex-hating, woman-hating culture, it was unknowingly reinforcing the same Judeo-Christian dualism that excoriated women’s fertility because of its association with death.
If women want to be truly free to embrace all options, they must abolish dualism first. To insist that all men are rapists, all penises violent organs, and only like-minded lesbian lovers are capable of a peaceable queendom, is to fall hopelessly under the influence of the dualistic heresy.
Two sexes are posited, one good, one bad. The patriarchal paradigm sees men as good, as pure, as spiritual, and sees women as vessels of mortality. The matriarchal paradigm sees men as violent killers, armed with clubs and cocks. Neither paradigm is new, hopeful, or has a prayer of defeating dualism. Both paradigms continue the age-old war.
Let us try to imagine a new paradigm. Imagine a culture in which sexual orientation and politics were dissociated, in which women might bear children parthenogenically, by artificial insemination, or even the old-fashioned way, with a known father with whom they cohabited. Just as health care and styles of birthing vary, people would be able to choose natural uterine birth, artificial uterine birth, or eventually father-birth by means of soon-to-be-invented artificial wombs.
Suppose that men and women could also choose various forms of pair-bonding, of differing legal weights—a suggestion Margaret Mead made years ago. (People would marry for different lengths of time depending on their intention to bear children or not. There would be three degrees of marriage: one for students or beginners in life, one for householder-parents, and one for older people whose children were grown.)
Suppose that lesbian women and gay men could have the identical three degrees of marriage. Then imagine that gender became totally neutral as an economic and legal issue, that men and women (gay or straight) were finally totally equal under the law.
People would form pair-bonds out of desire rather than economic and legal need, and children would be equally parented by all sexes. Men would not need to escape the mother, and women would not fear domination or abuse by the father. Eventually, we would have a variety of forms of child-rearing. Father-reared children would be as numerous as mother-reared children. Children of gay couples would suffer no stigma, and eventually we would have a society of immense diversity. No child’s right to love and security would depend upon conformity to outmoded ideals of the patriarchal family. The truth is we cannot afford the luxury of patriarchal ideologies. We must accept sexual diversity and learn to nurture all the too-numerous babies born on this fragile planet.
This will take an immense revolution in consciousness, but nothing except such a revolution can save our world. We can no longer afford nostalgia for patriarchy, with its unwanted and abused children no one has time to rear with love. It is essential that we become a multisexual society, one that accepts all varieties of parenting. We must also foster the idea that not everyone need be a biological parent. Some women and men are clearly much happier being childfree.
In truth, Miller’s cosmic view of sex has never been more needed. We have gone through a decade of backlash against the sexual revolution, against women’s rights, against gay rights. During this decade we have also experienced a population boom and a widespread attack on reproductive freedom. Now the tide is beginning to turn. This decade has already become one of social ferment, of feminism and change. Let us not make the mistakes we made in the last such decade—the sixties. Let us not equate sexuality with a narrow promiscuity, but rather learn to see it in a cosmic Millerian sense. It is critical that we expand rather than narrow our notions of sexuality. And Miller can guide us. Sexuality can be an attitude, an openness to the world, to the cosmos beyond.
In his fascinating book The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture, Walter Kendrick surveys the role of sexuality in Western culture and its expression in art and literature.
He observes that there was a drastic difference between the ancient and modern worlds in their attitude toward sexuality. Across the lustiness of Catullus and Ovid, the happy and lighthearted eroticism of the Pompeian frescoes, the good-humored sensuality of Chaucer, the sexuality of Rabelais, even of Byron (who in this respect is a far more eighteenth-than nineteenth-century figure) fell the shadow of the Victorian Age and the banishment of the obscene to the rare-book room. “Though the nineteenth-century invented ‘pornography,’ it did not invent the obscene,” says Walter Kendrick.
While most cultures, as Kendrick points out, did not give equal access to the obscene to all groups, the art of all cultures expressed it. The rise of bourgeois culture in the nineteenth century condemned sexuality to the Secret Museum. What had been joyous and healthy to the Greeks, licentious and full of opportunities for biting satire to the Romans, full of life and the possibility for ridicule to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Fielding, and Byron, became now furtive and secretive, pathologically devious.
We are not yet free of the spell of this nineteenth-century sexophobia. The common view of Miller, above all, shows us this. It also proves to us that sexomania and sexophobia are but two sides of the same coin, mirror images of each other.
In our sex-hating culture, we look to blame sex for everything from AIDS to abortion-on-demand. We are in the grip of Mrs. Grundy and Mr. Comstock still. And the so-called sexual revolution of the sixties (which, as we see, was no revolution in consciousness at all) swiftly became little more than an excuse for the biggest backlash of all time.
What shall we do with our sexophobia? It manifests itself on all sides of the political spectrum—from Women Against Pornography to the fundamentalist right. Our sexophobia impedes medical research for contraception, impedes needed reforms of women’s health care, even impedes our ability to prepare teenagers to enjoy their sexuality safely in an overpopulated world.
When I was thirteen, kids were terrified of sex because abortion was illegal and one might die of a back-street abortion. Now my thirteen-year-old daughter and her friends are terrified of sex because of AIDS. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Must we conclude that we have created a society in which teenagers are compelled to hate their own most powerful urges, their own bodies, their own drives? Must we conclude that the excuses vary but the sexophobia remains constant? Must we conclude that on some deep level we want such a world?
Sexophobia is ever present, stronger every day. We are creating a sexually tormented younger generation just as our grandparents and great-grandparents did. We no longer say that masturbation causes blindness. We merely say that sex causes death.
In the years since the AIDS epidemic began, I have been accosted again and again by well-meaning journalists who ask me, regarding my early novels, “What about AIDS?”
“What about it?” I say.
“Well—how can you write sexual books in the age of AIDS?”
The reasoning is clear. Sex still equals death. A writer who writes about sex is somehow promoting death. In other words, nothing has changed in the essential paradigm, except that now we have AIDS to prove that sex equals death. If AIDS did not exist, we would have invented it, so powerful is that paradigm.
I usually answer my well-meaning journalists by saying that I shall stop writing about sex when people stop caring about it. As long as it remains a powerful force in people’s lives, it cannot but be a powerful force in novels.
Why is our society so sex-hating, so sex fearing? This is a big question, and one seldom even asked. Why should sex be more despised than hunger, aggression, or any other basic drive? I think we must look to the eighteenth century, to the industrial revolution and the consumerism that even today keeps it humming. There is little doubt that sexophobia became entrenched along with the entrenchment of bourgeois culture. Before that, sex was seen as part of life, rather than as disease. The rich in England and America could have it, the poor could not be stopped from having it, and an amused wink or shrug greeted sexual matters there then as it does in Italy and France today. But in the eighteenth century, the English and American middle class coalesced, finding its basic function as cannon fodder and as consumers of industrial goods. Sex was increasingly seen as a dangerous opiate—a force for revolution. Better drug the masses with gin and cheap entertainments. At least these promote docility.
Miller saw this sexophobia as early as the twenties and related it, even then, to money, consumerism, and war. Money drives out sex, as we all know: the anxiety about getting and spending is an aphrodisiac. The more we focus on money, the less free we are, the less lusty, and the less revolutionary. As Miller himself says regarding Tropic of Cancer in The World of Sex, “The problem of the author was never one of sex, nor even of religion, but of self-liberation.”
And what was he liberating himself from? The bourgeois need to be a getter and spender, a cog in the wheel of life. When Miller left the Cosmodemonic and went to Paris with June, he was declaring himself free of consumerism. When he became a beggar, he was declaring himself no longer in the thrall of the great god Money. Miller’s economic and his sexual ideologies are totally related. Your money or your life force, says the great god Lucre! Your money or your balls. You can’t have both.
Miller’s detractors understand this better than they let on. If they thought him just a garden-variety pornographer, they would hardly blame him for the death of Western civilization as we know it. It is precisely because they understand, on some deep level, that he is talking about self-liberation, that they attack him.
Miller’s self-liberation is sexual in the cosmic, not the genital sense. Yes, he writes of genital sexuality in the Tropics, in Clichy, in Black Spring, in The Rosy Crucifixion, but as he explains in The World of Sex, the sexual is the first step towards the spiritual:
In that first year or so in Paris I literally died, was literally annihilated—and resurrected as a new man. The Tropic of Cancer is a sort of human document, written in blood, recording the struggle in the womb of death. The strong sexual odor is, if anything, the aroma of birth, disagreeable, repulsive even, when dissociated from its significance. The Tropic of Capricorn represents another death and birth, the transition, if I may say so, from the conscious artist to the budding spiritual being which is the last phase of evolution….
Henry was wise enough to know that the sexual and the spiritual were twins. He was wise enough to know that by flinging ourselves with utter abandon into the sexual we find that the spiritual beckons. “The road of excess leads to the place of wisdom,” as Blake said. Or, as Miller says, on a similar theme, “Like every man, I am my own worst enemy, but unlike most men I know too that I am my own saviour.”
What does sex have in common with salvation for Miller? Each is liberating. Miller often said that his only subject was self-emancipation. He was right. The sexuality of his books points the way to self-liberation. So does the spirituality.
What is it about sex that is so freeing? It is an affirmation of I am; an affirmation of life, and at once an affirmation of flux and change.
We go along thinking the world to be thus and so. We are not thinking, of course, or the picture would be different every moment. When we go along thus we are merely preserving a dead image of a live moment in the past. However … let us say we meet a woman. We enter into her. Everything is changed. What changed? We do not know precisely. It seems as if everything had changed. It might be that we never see the woman again, or it might be that we never separate. She may lead us to hell or she may open the doors of the world for us….
It is this transforming power of sex that led Miller to focus on it in his books. Above all, transformation interests him, and above all, transformation is what the world of sex offers.
Sex galvanizes the individual spheres of being which clash and conflict. It makes the external world in which we are wrapped shed its death-like folds. It affords us glimpses of that stark durable reality which is neither beneficent or cruel.
Sex, in other words, puts us in touch with the center of existence, makes us see the dance of molecules, makes us feel truly alive.
If men would stop to think about this great activity which animates the earth and all the heavens, would they give themselves to thoughts of death? Would a man withhold himself in any way if he realized that dead or alive this frenzied activity goes on ceaselessly and remorselessly? If death is nothing, what fear then should we have of sex? The gods came down from above to fornicate with human kind and with animals and trees, with the earth itself. Why are we so particular? Why can we not love—and do all the other things which give us pleasure too? Why can we not give ourselves in all directions at once: What is it we fear? We fear to lose ourselves. And yet, until we lose ourselves, there can be no hope of finding ourselves….
This is a message not so different from Dante’s, who also found himself lost in a dark wood in the middle of his life, and who also emerged to see the stars, having discovered that love is what moves them.
Miller is more mystic than pornographer. He uses the obscene to shock and to awaken, but once we are awake, he wants to take us to the stars.
“I did a service to people,” he said to Mike Wallace during our 60 Minutes interview. “That was my motive in writing. I was beating down the barriers.”
He did not mean linguistic barriers or publishing barriers; he meant barriers to self-liberation. A real sexual revolution—as opposed to the bogus sexual revolution that we had in the sixties—would recognize this liberation as coming from the role of sex in our lives. It would not reduce sex to promiscuity, abandon it to stroke books, porno parlors, and X-rated videos. It would recognize it as one of the great revolutionary forces of our lives, a force that has the power to open eyes and souls.
Is there a place for such sex in “The Age of AIDS”? Of course there is. Sex is more than mere compulsive acting-out, an accumulation of meaningless experiences and deadly viruses. If we are truly open to our own sexuality in the cosmic sense, we are also open to our creativity, our religious awareness, our sense of self-liberation.
In the days when Fear of Flying was the new sensation, I used to argue in vain that I was not advocating promiscuity, but rather an openness to erotic fantasy. The novel itself concentrated more on the heroine’s erotic daydreams than on her escapades, which often proved hopelessly disappointing because her swains proved impotent or clumsy or mechanical. But the idea of an erotically motivated, actively fantasizing woman was, in itself, so shocking at that time that my protests fell on deaf ears. My denigrators were sexophobic, and attacked me for persisting in my belief that sex is a force for life.
How may we be sexual in the Age of AIDS? Let me count the ways. We live in a time when telephone and computer sex (“Hottalk” they call it), costumes, role-playing, and mutual masturbation are apparently proliferating—along with (good grief) monogamy!
HOT MONOGAMY reads the headline on a current magazine. Apparently you can even get off with your own spouse if you have a vivid imagination! Human sexuality is that dazzling in its variety. I know a dominatrix who advertises and sells safe sex—with no exchange of bodily fluids—because the clients can only look and sniff and whip or be whipped. The sixties equation of sexual revolution with quantitative promiscuity is too innocent. If we are open to the world of fantasy, we can liberate ourselves with one partner or no partner at all. The recent novel Vox by Nicholson Baker describes a man and a woman who have sex on the telephone that is, if anything, hotter than sex in the flesh because there is no reality to block the fantasy.
Eventually we will have virtual-reality sets which will enable us to simulate sex with any famous lover of the past. Women will be able to choose anyone from Mark Antony to Shakespeare to Casanova to Byron, and men, like Dr. Faustus, will have their digitally simulated Helens of Troy.
“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?” they’ll ask their computer screens. The mind has an infinite capacity for self-liberation and is, after all, our main erogenous zone. Miller himself would have agreed.