The erotics of writing
Finding the bliss of the mystery
This is a story about how I discovered God’s erotic side.
Last summer I was fortunate to serve for a week as a “writer in residence” at the Chautauqua Institute, and I had to give a reading of my work to begin the week. It’s always easiest to read my strongest stories, of course, because they have a better chance of delivering, but I try to shake things up and read different stories to experiment and make each reading more interesting for me.
I was feeling a little ornery on this particular day. I’d recently published a somewhat erotic story, “Studies of the Body,” which was about two amateur photographers who were interested in nudes, but had never photographed anyone nude, so they decided to pose for each other.
The house I was staying in was across the street from the Hall of Philosophy, where I was going to read. It’s a type of open-air Greek temple with stone columns that sits in a canopy of trees. I’d heard church services going on there earlier in the day, so I questioned if I should read my erotic story, but then it occurred to me: God was an erotic creature.
An intensely erotic creature, in fact, because it takes an intensely erotic creature to create the world, right?
I told the audience this all as a way to introduce my story, and I also quoted Audre Lorde, who said, “There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.”
That’s the way I like to think of making art, but I don’t think the audience bought it. They looked uncomfortable, both with my interpretation of God’s erotic proclivities and my take on creativity as an erotic act.
We still live in a culture that is skittish when it comes to Eros’s ways with us. A culture that suppresses the erotic pulse that beats within us all. But just shifting God from a creature of rules and judgments into a creature driven by the erotic makes God into such a more inviting creature to be around for me.
Since I’ve been exploring what “writing with love” means in several of my recent newsletter pieces, I thought it only appropriate to explore the erotics of writing today—because the erotics of writing provides a pathway to an aesthetic of love.
What is it to be erotic?
The word “erotic” is generally charged with sex, lust, and carnality, but there’s an erotics that transcends any physical sensations. In her ground-breaking essay, “Uses of the Erotic,” Lorde describes the erotic as “the nurturer or nursemaid of our deepest knowledge.”
The erotic is a source of wisdom just as it’s a source of pleasure. One definition of pornography is that it’s about sensation without feeling. The erotic is focused on the feeling itself. It’s about the transformation of sensation, in fact.
Ordinary actions aren’t ordinary if done erotically. You can wash dishes erotically. You can plant flowers erotically. You can even clean the bathroom erotically.
I think of the way Thich Nhat Hanh drinks tea as an erotic act: “Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves—slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.”
Touch. Savor. Listen. And a new power will emerge. The power of self, you might say, but self with others, part of others, part of the world. A self in touch. Literally.
In her book All About Love, bell hooks says that the erotic strengthens connections with others and becomes the grounding for solidarity to resist systems of oppression and reclaim one's identity.
The erotic is fundamentally rebellious, ornery, and sneaky because it alters the patterns in our lives. The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, which is born of Chaos and personifies creative power and harmony. Eros lives to change—sometimes just through a simple caress.
Writing erotically
To write erotically is to write to touch. You’re not writing just to tell your story, to hand it down to another with the “authoritarian” part of your authorness, but to touch the reader and create something new together: a new and different intimacy.
Intimacy is an invitation of revelation, a space of comfort and care. With intimacy, fears are released and wounds can be revealed. Intimacy holds the deepest form of trust.
It’s easy to live a life where we become comfortable building walls against touching. In fact, at its worst, when the trust of intimacy is betrayed, we tend to dull its ache with substances or distractions that only distance ourselves from ourselves. The erotic is the opposite of that, though—not a numbing, but an enlivening.
“To become human is to become visible, while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others,” said the poet David Whyte.
To write erotically is to give that gift. That is why we shouldn’t seek boundaries to live within, but to trust in going beyond boundaries.
All true intimacy opens into a new understanding of ourselves so that “we learn that what we thought we knew is not equal to what we are discovering … that who we thought we were is not who we are now,” said Whyte.
Whereas desire holds the urge to possess and consume, the erotic sensibility is about exploring, making, and giving. It is a desire to go out of ourselves, to create love, to join.
To write erotically is to try to transcend our limits. Our words have trappings, limitations, but an erotic sensibility invites us to use them in ways to transcend those limitations.
In my book, The Art of Brevity, I wrote that as much as a writer might want to tell the whole story, to achieve comprehensiveness, to possess with the passion of a lover, a good story is created around hints and fleeting appearances. The words and images of a story are akin to the lingering glance or the brush of a hand from a lover. A good story should live in the bliss of its mystery.
All art should live in the “bliss of its mystery.”
It’s also a beautiful way to drink tea.
For more on the erotics of writing, read this excerpt from The Art of Brevity.
This week’s challenge: be erotic
“The way her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke,” wrote Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things. Write a story of attraction that includes just one touch, but not a sexual touch. The story has to reside in the oblique, the tantalizing, the unspoken.
After you write your story, ask yourself how thinking of the form of your story as sensuous, as something to feel, changed it? How does it feel to be an author who isn’t dominating or ruling the story but touching and feeling it?
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What is erotic? Some quotes …
“What is erotic? The acrobatic play of the imagination. The sea of memories in which we bathe. The way we caress and worship things with our eyes. Our willingness to be stirred by the sight of the voluptuous. What is erotic is our passion for the liveliness of life.”
—Diane Ackerman
“Erotic intelligence stretches far beyond a repertoire of sexual techniques. It is an intelligence that celebrates curiosity and play, the power of the imagination, and our infinite fascination with what is hidden and mysterious.”
—Esther Perel
“We lie in each other's arms eyes shut and fingers open and all the colors of the world pass through our bodies like strings of fire.”
—Marge Piercy
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Because writing with love
Here are some of the other pieces I’ve written in my “writing with love” series:
Because I’d love you to read one of my books
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Because an erotic photo
I love William Eggleston …
Beautiful. I've often thought of the intimacy of writing. Portraying it as erotic as you suggest rang perfectly with me, and amazed me that I hadn't made that connection before, so thank you!
Yes, I've felt this way too about writing, about living. I love that quote, "the erotic is about our passion for living", and for mystery and what is hidden too, as you say. Thank you for sharing this.