April 29th, 2009 @ 08:49
Eros
The words sex and erotic keep, ahem, popping up in relation to my work. I wrote a short article about my relationship to writing sexuality for Goose Lane’s blog Branta. I am not sure about the graphic; I find myself weirdly shocked by it. But that aside, the topic doesn’t seem to go away. The other night, at the Free Speech gig, the curator of the series, Johan Hultqvist, mentioned that he’d read a story I recently published online, called Our Children Would Not Kill Us. He said he liked it, but wasn’t sure he understood it, and that he had continued to think about it after the fact, and I supposed he meant that he was trying to parse that thing in it that he didn’t quite grasp.
I am happy he did not entirely get it. I wish for my work to never be entirely got. That is eros.
In Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift, he writes: The gift is an emanation of Eros, and therefore to speak of gifts that survive their use is to describe a natural fact: libido is not lost when it is given away. Eros never wastes his lovers. When we give ourselves in the spirit of the god, he does not leave off his attentions; it is only when we fall to calculations that he remains hidden and no body will satisfy. Satisfaction derives not merely from being filled but from being filled with a current that will not cease. With the gift, as in love, our satisfaction sets us at ease because we know that somehow its use at once assures its plenty. (p. 27)
He also writes: We have, on the one hand, imagination, synthetic thought, gift exchange, use value, and gift-increase, all of which are linked by the common element of eros, or relationship, bonding, “shaping into one.” And we have, on the other hand, analytic thought, self-reflection, logic, market exchange, exchange value, and interest on loans, all of which share a touch of logos, of differentiating into parts.
Neither of these poles, the joining or the splitting, is more important or more powerful than its opposite. Each has its own sphere of ascendancy, and it is not impossible to strike a balance between the two. But the harmony is easily lost. (p. 201)
Hyde is talking about market use superceding creative force, here, as I understand it. But there is another relationship between the two that I gather in for my own use. The writer forms, from disparate ideas, one through-line. The reader disseminates, wishing to understand. And, to my mind, the gift, the extra value added to the story (its meaning rather than its plot) retains its wholeness, and therefore its mystery, when a portion of it cannot be fully dissected. The exquisite relationship between the reader and the text is that portion. And I would argue, too, that the exquisite relationship between the writer and the text is that same thing — the mystery of how the disparity formed.
Ah, creation!