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By Wallace Shawn
For whatever reason, and I don't
remember how it happened, I am now what people call "64 years old", and
I have to admit that I started writing about sex almost as soon as I
realised that it was possible to do so - say, at the age of 14 - and I
still do it, even though I was in a way the wrong age then, and in a
different way I guess I'm the wrong age now. Various people have hinted
to me at different times in my life that an excessive preoccupation
with the subject of sex has harmed or even ruined my writing. They've
implied that it was sad, almost pitiful, that an adolescent obsession -
or maybe it was in fact a psychological compulsion - should have been
allowed to marginalise what they optimistically had hoped might have
been a serious body of work. Meanwhile, people I don't know very well
have tended over all those decades to break into a very particular
smile, one I recognise now, when they've learned that I've written
something that deals with sex - a winking smile that seems to suggest
that a trivial, silly, but rather amusing topic has been mentioned. I
suppose it goes without saying that James Joyce, DH Lawrence and others
were expanding the scope of literature and redrawing humanity's picture
of itself when they approached this subject in the earlier part of the
20th century. But by the time I came along, many of my friends were
embarrassed on my behalf precisely because the topic I was writing
about seemed so closely associated with an earlier era. So why have I
stuck with it? I suppose it has to do with the point I've heard
boringly expressed by writers in one way or another all of my life -
the thing they always say, while in a way always hoping that no one
will believe them, though what they're saying is true - some variation
of "I don't do my own writing". I personally sometimes express the
point, when pressed, by saying that I see my writing as a sort of
collaboration between my rational self ("me") and the voice that comes
from outside the window, the voice that comes in through the window,
whose words I write down in a state of weirded-out puzzlement,
thinking, "Jesus Christ, what is he saying?"
The collaboration is really quite an unequal partnership, I'd have to
admit. The voice contributes everything, and I contribute nothing,
frankly, except some modest organising abilities and (if I may say so)
a certain skill in finding, among the voice's many utterances, those
that are most interesting. Obviously, society has asked writers, as a
group, to take time out from normal labour to do this special listening
and transcribing, and each writer has been assigned a certain part of
the spectrum. No writer can know whether the section that's been
assigned to him contains the valuable code that will ultimately benefit
the human species or whether his section consists merely of the more
common noise or chatter. But obviously, the system can only work if
everyone dutifully struggles to do his best with the material that's
been given to him, rather than trying to do what has already been
assigned to somebody else.
The voice outside my own particular window has repeatedly come back to
the subject of sex. And sure, I regret it in a way, or it sometimes
upsets me. But if I were to conclude that the voice is fundamentally
not to be trusted, where would I be then? The enterprise of writing
would have to come to an end for me. So at a certain point - and with a
certain sadness, because of how I knew I would be seen by other people
- I decided I was going to trust the voice I was hearing. Why is sex
interesting to write about? To some, that might seem like a rather dumb
question. Obviously, when someone interested in geology is alone in a
room, he or she tends to think a lot about rocks. And I imagine that
when many geologists were children, they put pictures having to do with
rocks on their bedroom walls. And I would have to guess that geologists
find it fun to sit at a desk and write about rocks. So, yes, I find it
enjoyable. But apart from that, I still find myself wondering: why is
it interesting to write about sex? One reason is that sex is shocking.
Yes, it's still shocking, after all these years - isn't that
incredible? At least it's shocking to me. And I suppose I think it's
shocking because, even after all these years, most bourgeois people,
including me, still walk around with an image of themselves in their
heads that doesn't include - well - that. I'm vaguely aware that while
going about my daily round of behaviour I'm making use of various
mammalian processes, such as breathing, digesting and getting from
place to place by hobbling about on those odd legs we have. But the
fact is that when I form a picture of myself, I see myself doing the
sorts of things that humans do and only humans do - things like hailing
a taxi, going to a restaurant, voting for a candidate in an election,
or placing receipts in various piles and adding them up. If I'm
unexpectedly reminded that my soul and body are capable of being
totally swept up in a pursuit and an activity that pigs, flies, wolves,
lions and tigers also engage in, my normal picture of myself is
violently disrupted. In other words, consciously, I'm aware that I'm a
product of evolution, and I'm part of nature. But my unconscious mind
is still partially wandering in the early 19th century and doesn't know
these things yet. Writing about sex is really a variant of what
Wordsworth did, that is, it's a variant of writing about nature, or as
we call it now, "the environment". Sex is "the environment" coming
inside, coming into our home or apartment and taking root inside our
own minds. It comes out of the mud where the earliest creatures swam;
it comes up and appears in our brains in the form of feelings and
thoughts. It sometimes appears with such great force that it sweeps
other feelings and other thoughts completely out of the way. And on a
daily basis it quietly and patiently approaches the self and winds
itself around it and through it until no part of the self is
unconnected to it. Sex is an extraordinary meeting place of reality and
dream, and it's also - what is not perhaps exactly the same thing - an
extraordinary meeting place of the meaningful and the meaningless. The
big toe, for example, is one part of the human body, human flesh shaped
and constructed in a particular way. The penis is another part of the
body, located not too far away from the big toe and built out of
fundamentally the same materials. The act of sex, the particular shapes
of the penis and the vagina, are the way they are because natural
selection has made them that way. There may be an adaptive value to
each particular choice that evolution made, but from our point of view
as human beings living our lives, the evolutionary explanations are
unknown, and the various details present themselves to us as completely
arbitrary. It can only be seen as funny that men buy magazines
containing pictures of breasts, but not magazines with pictures of
knees or forearms. It can only be seen as funny that demagogues give
speeches denouncing men who insert their penises into other men's
anuses - and then go home to insert their own penises into their wives'
vaginas! (One might have thought it obvious that either both of these
acts are completely outrageous, or neither of them is.) And yet the
interplay and permutations of the apparently meaningless, the desire to
penetrate anus or vagina, the glimpse of the naked breast, the hope of
sexual intercourse or the failure of it, lead to joy, grief, happiness
or desperation for the human creature.
Perhaps it is the power of sex that has taught us to love the
meaningless and thereby turn it into the meaningful. Amazingly, the
love of what is arbitrary (which one could alternatively describe as
the love of reality) is something human beings are capable of feeling
(and perhaps even what we call the love of the beautiful is simply a
particular way of exercising this remarkable ability). So it might not
be absurd to say that if you love the body of another person, if you
love another person, if you love a meadow, if you love a horse, if you
love a painting or a piece of music or the sky at night, then the power
of sex is flowing through you.
Yes, some people go through life astounded every day by the beauty of
forests and animals; some are astounded more frequently by the beauty
of art; and others by the beauty of other human beings. But science
could one day discover that the ability to be astounded by the beauty
of other human beings came first, and to me it seems implausible to
imagine that these different types of astonishment or appreciation are
psychologically unrelated. It's also interesting to write about sex
because it's often noted that writers like to write about conflict, and
conflict is built into the theme of sex. A story about a person who
wants to have a plate of spaghetti might be interesting, but a story
about a person who wants to have another person - now, that is
potentially even more interesting, because the person who is wanted may
not want in return. But leaving aside the conflict involved in the fact
that people's desires are often at cross purposes, sex has always been
known to be such a powerful force that fragile humanity can't help but
be terribly nervous in front of it, so powerful barriers have been
devised to control it - taboos of all varieties, first of all, and then
all the emotions subsumed under the concepts of jealousy and
possessiveness, possessiveness being a sort of anticipatory form of
jealousy. (I noticed recently that a sociological survey of married
people in the US found that when asked the question "What is very
important for a successful marriage?", the quality mentioned most
frequently - by 93% of the respondents - was "faithfulness", while
"happy sexual relationship" came in with only 70%.) Sex seems capable
of creating anarchy, and those who are committed to predictability and
order find themselves either standing in opposition to it, or
occasionally trying to pretend to themselves that it doesn't even
exist. My local newspaper, the New York Times, for example, does not
include images of naked people. Many of its readers might enjoy it much
much more if it did, but those same readers still might not buy it if
those images were in it, because if it contained such images it
couldn't be the New York Times, it couldn't present the portrait of a
normal, stable, adequate world - a world not ideal, but still good
enough - which it's the function of the New York Times to present every
day. Nudity somehow seems to imply that anything could happen, but the
New York Times is committed to telling its readers that many things
will not happen, because the world is under control, benevolent people
are looking out for us, the situation is not as bad as we tend to
think, and while problems do exist, they can be solved by wise rulers.
The contemplation of nudity or sex could tend to bring up the alarming
idea that at any moment human passions might rise up and topple the
world we know. But perhaps it would be a good thing if people saw
themselves as a part of nature, connected to the environment in which
they live. Sex can be a very humbling, equalising force. It's often
been noted that naked people do not wear medals, and weapons are
forbidden inside the pleasure garden. When the sexuality of the
terrifying people we call "our leaders" is for some reason revealed,
they lose some of their power - sometimes all of it - because we're
reminded (and strangely, we need reminding) that they are merely
creatures like the ordinary worm or beetle that creeps along at the
edge of the pond. Sex really is a nation of its own. Those whose
allegiance is given to sex at a certain moment withdraw their loyalty
temporarily from other powers. It's a symbol of the possibility that we
might all defect for one reason or another from the obedient columns in
which we march. •
