Joe Cillo

Program 3 — Firebird — San Francisco Ballet Performance

February 28, 2014

 

 

Three ballets make up Program 3:  The Kingdom of the Shades, which comes from Act II of a ballet called La Bayadére, by Ludwig Minkus and Natalia Makarova; Ghosts, by Kip Winger and Christopher Wheeldon; and Firebird, by Igor Stravinsky and Yuri Possokhov.  They all have to do with male idealizations and conflicts about women.  They are psychological in that they deal with the internal, psychic representations of women in the male imagination rather than with stories, events, or women who might be real.  Firebird is by far and away the superior of the three.

The Kingdom of the Shades is a sublime display of dance technique at the highest level and great visual beauty.  According to the program notes, “The scene is the opium-induced hallucination of Solor, who grieves for his love, the murdered temple dancere (bayadére) Nikiya.”  However, you would never guess this upon watching the ballet.  There is no suggestion of opium influencing Solor (Denis Matvienko), who presents several impressive solos that show him perfectly sharp and at the top of his game.  There is also no suggestion that Nikiya (Maria Kochetkova) has been murdered, or that she is even dead.  What you get is the sense that Solor is dealing with an illusion about a woman, not any woman in particular, but an abstraction of woman, a phantasm.  Nikiya is not a woman who actually exists or ever did exist except in Solor’s imagination.  It is a naive, idealized conception of a woman by someone who doesn’t really know women very well.  The music starts out somber, nostalgic and conflicted, but morphs into a series of waltzes that grow progressively cheesier as they go along.  What saves the ballet is the technical brilliance of the dancers, which we have become spoiled into taking for granted at the San Francisco Ballet, and the visual beauty of the staging and choreography.  Once again the San Francisco Ballet has taken something that is short on substance and turned it into a pleasing visual spectacle.

Ghosts is a more interesting performance in my eyes and ears.  The music is more interesting and the choreography and staging have a greater sense of freedom and imagination.  The ballet is abstract.  The theme is Ghosts.  Well, what is that?   What you see are pairs of male-female couples, that stay pretty much in those pairs throughout the performance.  There are a couple of triangles with two men and a woman, but there is a strong sense of the male-female couple throughout this ballet.  And the couples are strongly interactive.  They look at each other and touch each other and are quite involved with one another physically and emotionally all the way through.

My understanding of a ghost is that it has to do with the past and with the imagination.  A ghost haunts one by intruding into ones consciousness unbidden and unsolicited.  An experience or person of some significance, but long past, continues to disrupt and influence ones present emotional balance and cannot be easily dismissed.  One does not get that sense from this ballet.  There is no sense of the past that I could discern.  And these ghosts were benign, whereas I think a ghost suggests something ominous.  A ghost is an unwelcome presence in my understanding.  This ballet has no such overtones.   One does not get a strong emotional fix on this ballet, but it is visually interesting and danced with a high degree of skill.

The highlight of the evening was Firebird, with music by Igor Stravinsky and choreography by Yuri Possokhov.  This ballet has an interesting concept and is beautifully staged and danced to high quality music.  The dance and the music complement one another very effectively, which is something I especially like to see in a dance performance.  This is one I would like to see again, because I don’t feel like I got it all on the first viewing.  It is a complex, ambiguous story that allows for a wide range of interpretation.  I might have to study this one some before I come to a clearer conception.

The Firebird is a mythical figure (female) who seems to fall in love with a prince.  They part on good terms for reasons that are not clear and the prince then takes up with a princess.  The relationship between the Firebird and the Princess is not clear, and I am wondering if they are the same in some sense?  A devil-like character, Kaschei, appears and brings discord to the romantic couple.  The nature of the discord is not clear, but the Firebird reappears to dispel Kaschei and restore the couple’s harmony and equilibrium.  The story ends with an apparent wedding and a happily ever after sequel.  According to the program notes it is supposed to represent the ultimate triumph of good over evil, something I am finding it increasingly hard to believe in the older I get, but the story is very positive and uplifting and danced and staged at a superb level of skill and taste.

What I can say now is that this story, like the previous two ballets, has to do with male psychology, with male conflicts and idealizations of women, and it represents them in much more depth and interest than the previous two ballets.  The Firebird seems to represent the sensual, sexualized woman of the male imagination.  It is she who rescues the beleaguered young couple beset by turmoil sown by Kaschei, the disruptive, dissatisfied, restless aspect of the young male.  It is the Princess’s ability to tap the sexual energy of the Firebird, the hidden Firebird within herself, that enables her tame Kaschei, to hold the male’s interest, and create a lasting, stable bond.  It is not exactly a triumph of good over evil, but rather a triumph of human connection through sexual bonding over disappointment and dissolution.  This is one you should go see, if you have a chance.  It is both mentally challenging and aesthetically satisfying.

Tim’s Vermeer

Directed by Teller

 

 

This is a film that is going to appeal mainly to people who have a special interest in art history or painting.  It may have some appeal to the museum-going general public, but the audience on the night I attended was sparse.  There is not a lot of action — no, that’s not right.  There is not any action, except the slow process of creating a painting stroke by stroke — sort of like watching ice melt, for those of you on the East Coast.  But that can be very interesting, and it is, but you have to be interested in painting.  If you have ever tried to paint anything with any kind of realistic likeness, you’ll understand what I mean.

This film is slow moving and cerebral.  It is a documentation, a realization, of a theory advanced by artist David Hockney and physicist Charles Falco in 2001 that Renaissance masters like Van Eyck and Vermeer and others across Europe used optical techniques incorporating lenses and mirrors to create their stunningly accurate realistic images.  They did not just eyeball their subjects to realize the kind of microscopic accuracy that characterizes the Dutch Masters style on a painted canvas.  Tim Jenison, an inventor from Texas with no particular ability in art or painting, became familiar with Hockney’s theory and hatched the crazy idea to replicate Jan Vermeer’s studio, materials, and techniques from scratch and recreate one of Vermeer’s masterpieces, The Music Lesson, himself, using the techniques suggested by Hockney and Falco.  The film documents this process with attention to all the minutiae one might find in one of Vermeer’s paintings.

I saw this when I was rather tired after a long, busy weekend, and I started feeling a sense of tedium even though the subject and the process were very interesting.  We get to see shots of mixing paint from pigments, grinding a lens, carving a table leg on a lathe, building a studio, and gradually watching the painting take shape a few strokes at a time over a period of, I think, 213 days.  The result is a flawless replica of a Vermeer masterpiece.  Jenison takes it to David Hockney, who grades it favorably, and there is a discussion of the process and the significance of Jenison’s experiment.

Jenison did not prove that Vermeer used lenses and mirrors in order to paint.  Jenison’s experiment is akin to Thor Heyerdahl’s sailing of Kon-tiki from the shores of Peru to Polynesia.  Heyerdahl’s experiment refuted skeptics who said such a voyage was not possible.  It did not prove that anyone ever did sail such a route in such a vessel, but it opened an avenue of interpretation of other evidence that might have been closed off by dismissal or the presumption of fantastical improbability.  Jenison showed that using only materials and techniques available during Vermeer’s time, he could indeed replicate Vermeer’s achievement as an untrained painter.  This does not show that Vermeer painted this way, because there is no documentation of how Vermeer worked, but coupled with the fact that there is no documentation of Vermeer ever having been trained as an artist, the absence of a drawing beneath the painting that would have served as a guide and which was customary in the work of other artists of that time, and, most tellingly, I think, that some small “mistakes” can be discerned in Vermeer’s image that reflect distortions created by the use of a lens, all give the argument weight and strengthened plausibility.

It is a very interesting film that should be noted by painters, historians, and art students.  It presents a compelling case, but not a final conclusion, and I think it indicates a fruitful direction for further historical research.

 

 

 

 

“Journey’s End” is a romantic title for the R. C. Sherriff play that just opened at The Barn Theatre in Ross.  To get a better idea of what it’s about, go up close to the stage, and examine the set. Rough beams cross the ceiling, sweaty-looking cots sit on either side, wrinkled old papers are pinned to the walls, dirt spreads over the floor, and a view through the curtained opening shows more dirt outside. “Journey’s End” is not an idyll; it’s a war story. This is a British dugout in W. W. I France,  and the trench outside leads into battle. One of the play’s first lines is, “It’s coming pretty soon now.” Flashes in the sky outside and booms from distant artillery confirm that. But when?

 

This mid-season production from Ross Valley Players departs from the rest of the season, especially from the two comedies that bracket it. “Journey’s End” shows the tedium of waiting for battle and the ways the plucky cook maintains service, no matter what food he has to work with.  Captain Stanhope, who’s been here three years and whose nerves are “battered to bits,” numbs his existence with alcohol, while a newly-arrived junior officer is excited about the prospect and thinks it’s “an amazing bit of luck” that he’s been assigned to Stanhope’s battalion.

 

This all sounds remarkably real, and it was. Sherriff served in the war and was twice wounded. It has been said that “Journey’s End” was his tribute to those who didn’t survive. It came to the stage in London in 1928, with an appropriately young Laurence Olivier in the role of Stanhope. The Ross Valley production was directed by James Dunn, who’d seen the play in London in 2005 and was determined to bring it to Ross Valley, where it is having a west coast premiere. Dunn’s respect for the material shows in every scene.

 

The British accents seem natural and the pronunciations unaffected. Stanhope is referred to as “Stanup;” the town of Ypres is called “Wipers.”

 

The set, so important to the mood of the story, was designed by Ron Krempetz and assembled by Ian Swift. The Army costumes, helmets included, were  collected by Michael Berg. Maureen Scheuenstuhl arranged the dugout’s props.

 

Stephen Dietz, who plays the self-controlled 2nd Lt. Trotter, also designed the very effective sound effects. Ellen Brooks and Ian Lamers did the lights, which become more important as the play goes on.

 

Francis Serpa has the role of idealistic young Lt. Raleigh. Tom Hudgens is Lt. Osborne, everybody’s “uncle,” and Philip Goleman is the terror-stricken Hibbard.

 

Sean Gunnell portrays Pvt. Mason, the tireless cook, with Jeff Taylor as the Company Sgt. Major. David Yen appears in the Olivier role as edgy  long-termer, Capt. Stanhope, explaining his alcohol consumption as, “I couldn’t bear to be fully conscious all the time.”

 

Two former Peninsula  lads — Ross Berger and Steve Price — are double-cast. Berger plays Lance Cpt. Broughton and a German soldier, and Price is both Capt. Hardy and the Colonel.

 

R. C. Sherriff, says James Dunn, didn’t set out to write a pacifist play, but that’s what he wrote. It’s a strong and moving piece of theatre, and it comes almost 100 years from the beginning of that war.

 

“Journey’s End” will play at The Barn Theatre in Ross Thursdays through Sunday, Feb. 16. Thursday performances are at 7:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. Ticket prices range from $13 (children and students on Thursday nights) to $22. A “Talkback” with director and actors will take place after matinee performances in February.

 

To order tickets, call the box office at 456-9555 or see the website, www.rossvalley.players.com.

 

 

 

Giselle

San Francisco Ballet Performance

January 27, 2014

 

 

This is a very strange story that ultimately doesn’t make sense.  Maybe I just don’t understand it.  A prince disguises himself as a peasant and moves to a village to court a peasant girl of irresistible charm.  It would be like Jamie Dimon disguising himself as a bus boy to court a waitress in a restaurant.  A rather odd concept, don’t you think?  Especially since the prince is already engaged to another woman — but we don’t find that out until later. 

It is a narrative, and I do like ballets that attempt to create a narrative line simply through dance without verbal support.  But the narrative here is convoluted and rather bizarre.  Without first reading the synopsis in the program, a viewer would be lost trying to figure out what is going on.

The first act, after doing a passable job of establishing the story gives way to a long cadenza-like display of dancing virtuosity.  I had trouble grasping what all this athleticism had to do with the story.  There is nothing wrong with virtuosic dance.  This is, after all, the San Francisco Ballet.  But virtuosity for its own sake, is self indulgent and risks becoming dull if it is overworked.  I think this ballet, since it had so little substance in the story line, relied a little too much on dazzle.

I don’t like scenes where one or a small group of dancers perform while a multitude of bystanders sits idle on the stage just watching.  This technique is employed to excess in this ballet.  My feeling is that if someone is on the stage they should be doing something besides being part of the scenery.  I don’t like spearholders.  If they are doing nothing, then they should be doing nothing for a good reason.  Inertness should speak.  But in this ballet it doesn’t, and you’ve got these vast stationary multitudes on stage serving as an adjunct to the audience of paid ticket holders while a few dancers hold court.

The prince’s rival is Hilarion, a “woodsman,” or hunter from the village.  He is a known quantity to Giselle and she finds him much less appealing than the disguised prince.  Hilarion exposes the prince’s disguise, reveals his true identity, and the fact that he is already engaged to Bathilde, a woman of his own class.  This puts the kibosh on Giselle, and instead of taking it in stride and chalking it up to experience (or taking up with Hilarion), she runs herself through with the prince’s sword and dies.  You can always tell a vacuous story by the need for phony melodrama to pump some life into it — in this case, killing off the heroine at the end of the first act.

The music is undistinguished and tends toward the banal and the schmaltzy. Visually, however, it is very beautiful.  The sets, costumes, configurations and choreography are interesting and make a pleasing impression.  The dancers are outstanding, as usual.  The San Francisco Ballet has done a superb job with mediocre material.  Apparently it is enough to seduce the audience.  The house was full and seemed to give a good response to this vapid nonsense.

The second act was way too long.  It could have been cut in half to a much more pleasing effect.  It takes place at midnight in a forest where Giselle’s grave is located.  Giselle returns as a ghost accompanied by a cohort of Wilis, forest spirits all decked out in pure white wedding dresses, to comport with the prince who has come to visit her grave — in the middle of the night.  The tenor of the whole second act seems to imply no hard feelings on the part of Giselle toward the prince, even though she was upset with him enough to kill herself with his sword at the end of the first act.  Now that she is dead, all is forgiven and they dance like they are freshly love struck.  It’s idiotic and extremely repetitious.  I was getting so tired of it, just waiting for it to end, and it went on and on.  The curtain call seemed overdone as well, but then, I didn’t feel much like applauding and wanted to get out of there.

The moral of the story seems to be: you should not look for love outside your own social class, and if you are a woman, you are bound to get the worst of any such liaison — a reassuring, conservative, message for all the stodgy Republicans in the San Francisco audience.

KNIT ONE, PURL TWO AND YOU’RE FREE

Properly practiced, knitting soothes the troubled spirit,
and it doesn’t hurt the untroubled spirit either.
Elizabeth Zimmerman

I was a nervous child.  I was terrified of the horrible dangers that lurked around every corner.  If I talked to strangers because they would abduct me; I must never argue with my mother or she would give me back to the Indians.  I couldn’t cross a street without risking my life; if I dared to boil water, the steam would blind me.  Touching the pan would cost a finger. Boys with nasty leers jumped out behind bushes at little girls like me, and teachers got angry for no reason at all.

Reality was too much for me to absorb.  My nerves were jangled and my nails bitten to the quick.  I jumped at an unexpected sound; I screamed when a light flashed; I hid under the couch when someone slammed the door.

My mother was a redhead with an attitude.  She was afraid of nothing. Danger actually thrilled her and she met it head on with eyes flashing and acid repartee that quelled the bravest among us.

And it was she who made me quiver and shake at the thought of facing another day with all its pitfalls.  It was she who reminded me that I might trip if I ran too fast; I might break that dish I was wiping; or jam the brush into my eye when I brushed my hair.  She couldn’t stand the fidgeting, the nail biting, and the twitches.  “This kid is driving me crazy,” she told my Aunt Hazel.  “She is a nervous wreck.”

My Aunt Hazel was a pragmatist.  When she didn’t get enough meat for dinner, she left home.  When she couldn’t earn enough money to support herself she married a bootlegger.  She was one of the first in that generation to think outside the box.  “Teach her to knit,” she told my mother.

“Are you crazy?” said my mother.  “She jiggles so much she’ll poke her eyes out with a knitting needled. “

“Well that’s one way to calm her down,” said Aunt Hazel.

So it was that my aunt took me with her to the Stitch In Time Knitting shop filled with yarn in every color and an oval table piled high with pattern books. Several ladies sat around that table drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes (this was 1943) chatting about the war effort and knitting scarves, mittens and caps for our servicemen.  Their needles clicked and they smiled and laughed as they worked.  As I watched these women moving those needles at the speed of light, I saw to my amazement that they were creating all kinds of garments: sweaters with lace sleeves, block patterns and colors, plaids and stripes and polka dots.

“I want to do that,” I told my aunt.

“I thought you would,” she said.  “What would you like to make?”

My aunt took me home that afternoon and told my mother, ”She’s knitting a scarf.  That will keep her in line.”

That was back in 1943, but my aunt’s wisdom holds truth even today.  In fact, a maximum-security prison in Brazil came to the same conclusion.  They have decided that if their inmates knit something for three days, it is worth one day off their sentence.  They know what my aunt figured out so many years ago.  Knitters don’t have time to get in trouble.  They might drop a stitch.

 

Wayne McGregor/ Random Dance

Dance Performance

Lam Research Center at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco

January 19, 2014

 

 

This is an abstract study in movement and agility.  It starts out with a male/female couple in a rather contentious vignette against a beautiful vocal sound track.  The opening segment was intriguing, however, the rest of the performance seemed to be a repudiation of this promising outset.  It was as if this opening represented something from the past that had given way to something much harsher, with less human connection and less emotional content.  Perhaps it is an oblique comment on modern life.  In any case the subsequent segments were set against  clashing, percussive electronic soundtracks that incorporated sounds like the din of a factory, passing trains, jet airplanes on an airport runway, cars with stereos thumping full blast.  Intrusive, noisy, discordant sounds.  Blaring strobe lights add to this grating atmosphere of unpleasantness in an aggressive frontal assault on the audience.  The dance that was set in front of all this was active, if not frenetic.  Movements are fluid, but staccato, disjointed, contorted and sometimes grotesque.  There is interaction between the dancers, but emotional connection seems shallow.  Bodies are emphasized by the almost nude costuming, but there is little eroticism.  The eroticism is fleeting and subdued.  There is a feeling of detachment and narcissism throughout, like the activity on the streets of a large city where people are busily and anxiously active, but completely self absorbed and indifferent to others with whom they might be sharing the street and even casually interacting.  This performance seemed determined to minimize emotional interaction.  The dancers did an admirable job with a physically demanding program.  It lasted one hour without an intermission — which I appreciated.  The length was just about right, because this strident, relentless cacophony gets to be taxing.  It was not exactly to my taste, but it did have interest.

 

 

The Invisible Woman

Directed by Ralph Fiennes

 

 

 

This movie is slow moving and hard to follow.  If you don’t know much about Charles Dickens — and most Americans don’t, let’s be real — it is very hard, especially at the outset (that is, for about the first forty-five minutes) to tell what is going on, who the characters are, or what their relationships are to one another.  It takes a long time to wind up the propeller on this airplane and get it off the ground.  The plot is very simple:  an unhappily married man in midlife meets a fresh young woman and has an affair with her.  The affair goes badly, however, and they end up separating.  That is about all that happens.  So in a story like that the interest is going to be in the psychological intricacies of the characters and their relationships to one another.  But this film does not succeed in that aspect.  It is called “The Invisible Woman.”  Presumably, that refers to Nellie (Felicity Jones), but it could more aptly refer to Charles Dickens’ wife, Mary, (Susanna Hislop), who is given short shrift in the movie, and presumably also in life.  More broadly, everyone in this movie is invisible, including Charles Dickens (Ralph Fiennes).  None of the characters are well drawn.  We do see Charles Dickens’ vitality, energy, and his love of celebrity and the acclaim he received for being a famous writer.  But we see nothing of what made him tick as a writer, why he wrote the things that he wrote, what inspired him, or the dynamics of his relationships with his women.  Nellie is an aloof, self-absorbed young woman, who seems oddly conservative for a man like Charles Dickens.  They seem to break up — sort of — after a train wreck in which Nellie is injured.  She goes on and establishes a life for herself after Dickens, but none of it has any rhyme or reason.  A lot of time and attention and expense has been spent on costumes, settings, and creating the cinematic spectacle.  The result, I feel, is rather overstaged.  This striving for cinematic perfection gives the film an unreal, illusory quality.  Perhaps it mirrors the way the characters and the affair have been portrayed.  The whole thing comes off as sanitized and romanticized, which the nineteenth century definitely wasn’t, nor was anything in Charles Dickens’ books.  I don’t believe anything in this movie, and it did not make me want to read the book.  It is the kind of movie where the more I think about it, the worse it gets.   I guess that is an indication that I should stop now, but you get the idea.

Falstaff

San Francisco Opera Performance

November 2, 2013

 

 

Every time I go to the opera I am struck by how conservative it is.  It has to be the most conservative art form in its philosophical and social outlook.  Falstaff exemplifies this beneath a rollicking, lighthearted surface.  It is a fast moving, involved plot line.  It is harder to follow on paper than in the stage realization.  If you just read the synopsis, it seems complicated, because there are so many characters and relationships to keep straight, but when you see it, everything is clear and natural.

The production is excellent.  The cast and orchestra are all of special merit.  The sets were not particularly imaginative or noteworthy, but they were effective and satisfactory.  Falstaff is the weighty center of the story.   His dominating presence carries the performance, very effectively portrayed by Bryn Terfel.  In contrast to The Flying Dutchman, which is a static, repetitious, psychological drama where almost nothing happens, Falstaff is nonstop action with a minimum of theorizing.  But it is not at all clear what the message is, or if there is one.  It seems rather confused and mixed up.

Falstaff is presented as an aging rogue, hopelessly deluded about himself, pursing younger (married) women whom he has no chance of winning.  The women take exception to his misguided interest and spend the whole play making sport of it and taking cruel, sadistic vengeance upon him.  It suggests the mean spirited side of Halloween.  Beneath the playful pretense, there is sharp-edged animosity.  Men are presented as bumbling fools (except for Fenton), Falstaff as delusionally grandiose, Ford as delusionally jealous.  Women are manipulative, conniving, controlling, and cruel, while superficially presenting as virtuous and innocent.  It is very simplistic and simpleminded.

I liked way the sadism and cruelty were emphasized in the third act.  During the scene at Herne’s Oak the fairies and goblins appear in white costumes with pointed hats reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan and carrying a cross to boot.  They then proceed to pepper Falstaff with all manner of abuse as he is lying helplessly on the ground.  It was rather excessively sadistic, I thought.  I was wondering if they were going to set that cross on fire.  I’m not one to insist on political correctness, but this was a rather odd sight to see in San Francisco:  the Ku Klux Klan torturing a helpless victim underneath a tree with the presumption of moral rectitude on the side of the torturers.  It was another graphic representation of the persecution of male desire that is so rampant in this society.  The whole community gangs up on old Falstaff just because he wants to have an affair with a miserably married woman whose jealous, possessive husband imagines her having affairs behind his back at every opportunity and regards marriage as the bane of his life.  It doesn’t really make sense, because if Falstaff is such a ridiculous figure who is not to be taken seriously, then why is it so necessary to mobilize the entire community to reign down this excessive punishment on him?  Maybe Falstaff is more of a threat than he is given credit for.  It is supposed to be comic and funny, but there really isn’t anything to laugh at.  Maybe my sense of humor has been poisoned by modern life.

In the end all is forgiven and we see the triumph of marriage after its being under withering attack throughout the whole drama.  This is what I mean by conservatism.  Traditional (Catholic Christian) values always seem to triumph in these operas.   Dissenters are vilified and punished and things are left pretty much the way they were at the outset.  If you like things the way they are, and have a generally cynical attitude toward life, you might go for this.

 

 

THE CLEAN PLATE CLUB

Life is uncertain;
Eat dessert first.
Ernestine Ulmer

Peter Svacha was halfway through eating his chocolate pudding, when the restaurant where he was eating told him it was closing time.  He was furious.  He left the place, got a chain saw, sliced a hole in the establishment’s door and crawled back to the table to finish his pudding.

I know exactly how he felt.  I too would obliterate anything that kept me from finishing my dessert.  I blame this determination on my mother.

My mother’s forte was creating yummy desserts.  She had one number that she always served after spaghetti dinner that was amazingly beautiful and absolutely luscious.  She would bake an angel food cake from scratch (my mother would have sooner danced nude on a fire hydrant than use a cake mix).  The finished product was so light she needed to weight it down to stay on the plate.  She whipped up a custard of eggs, milk, vanilla, sugar and pineapple juice and frosted her cake with it.  She decorated the entire production with pineapple slices, maraschino cherries and strawberries and served it with a lots of whipped cream and a flourish.

BUT there was a catch.  My mother never allowed us to touch dessert until we cleaned up everything she put on our dinner plates. Before we could tuck into her pineapple delight, we had to demolish spaghetti with meatballs, broccoli in a cheese sauce, a green salad and garlic bread. We suffered for that cake.  Indeed we suffered. We endured tummy aches, stomach spasms and guilt…but we managed to down it  and when we did, we finished it down to the last bit of pineapple.

My mother’s chocolate cake was the eighth wonder of the world.  It was made with six eggs, a ton of butter and enough chocolate to keep a candy store supplied for ten years. She topped it with a mint chocolate frosting to die for and set it in the middle of the dining room table so we could see what we had to look forward to at the end of the meal.

But first, we had to finish dinner. Remember?   She would serve us a huge slab of steak, potatoes with cheddar cheese, asparagus hollandaise, a tossed salad and wait until we cleaned our plates before we could touch that cake. I still feel the pain of forcing that cake into my packed middle but I know that even if my stomach burst, I would let absolutely nothing interfere with my demolishing that wonderfully melt in your mouth cake.

All I can say, is “go for it Peter Svacha. “ Finish that pudding and never count the cost.  For what is dinner without a sweet finish?? It is nothing more than duty with no reward, a rose with no fragrance, sex without climax. Life is to be lived, of course, but if it is to be savored, we must have dessert.

 

 

Intimacy, Sex, and Art

 

 

That what we are and can be as persons is bound up completely with the quality of our most important personal relationships should be so obvious as to need no proof.  (Guntrip, p. 194)

 

 

This is an article I wrote for young people who are starting to grapple with the issues of human relatedness.  It was published by Kendall Hunt in a textbook that is used in college level human sexuality courses.  Having been dissatisfied with the presentation of the article in that venue, I decided to repost it here, with some revisions.

 

The three topics: intimacy, sex, and art, are closely related.  In fact, I see them as variants on a long spectrum of modes of communication of the inward heart.  Because intimacy is the most profound form of human relating and basic to the other two types, it will serve as the starting point for this discussion.  Keep in mind that intimacy is essentially communication, and it is communication of the inward heart.  By this I mean the sharing of our private inner world of thoughts, feelings, sensations, intentions, dreams, fantasies, or ideas that are in most circumstances experienced and held private within ourselves.  We all have an inner life.  We all experience the world and each other subjectively.  That is, we not only have sensations and gather information by means of our senses, but we react to those experiences, we interpret them and respond to them, in light of our previous experiences and conditioning events.  These reactions and understandings and judgments we make about our experience is not readily evident to others, although those that are closely attuned to us may have a sense of our inner states.  But this is acquired through repeated experience and careful attention.  Our bodies and our demeanor may yield some clues to some of our inner states, but most of our thoughts, feelings, intentions, and imaginings are experienced privately within ourselves.   The sharing of that private world with another person or persons is intimacy.

We live in a culture that does not value the inner life of individuals and is uneasy with the exploration and sharing of that inner life.  Americans are very outward looking and outward directed.   We like action rather than reflection.  But intimate communication and the quality of that communication is the foundation of our personal lives and our closest relationships.  It affects the social and intellectual development of children, and is a powerful motivator in all aspects of human activity.  Intimate communication reveals the structure and style of one’s personality.   It requires at least two people to be intimate, but intimacy can include more than two.  There are many ways to share our inner experience: speech, touching, movements, gestures, actions, artworks, and sex are all modes of intimate communication.   One can think of intimacy as emotional and psychological disrobing.

A persona is a mode of presenting oneself publicly in order to promote smooth functioning in society.  It is not necessarily false, although personas can often be very misleading.  At best, it is only a very partial revelation of who we are.  A persona is like a suit of clothes that we wear to meet expectations others have of us.  It is only the top layer, which allows us to carry out daily activities without causing disturbance.  There is much that goes on within us that is not revealed in how we present ourselves publicly even to close friends and family members.  Intimacy is the process of revealing those deeper layers of our inner life.  The audience for such revelations is typically small, although art is an intimate revelation that aims for a wide audience, or an undefined audience.  We will discuss the peculiar qualities of artistic communication a little further on.  But for now we will think of intimacy as communication of the inner self occurring within an interpersonal context.

Intimacy has degrees.  In an interpersonal relationship intimacy is usually reciprocal to some extent, although that reciprocity will vary.  Intimacy is rarely balanced and it is never perfect and it is never complete.  A mother’s intimacy with her infant or young child is weighted toward the child.  The mother has greater awareness of the child’s needs than the child has of the mother’s.  The intimacy of a doctor or a psychiatrist with a patient is weighted toward the patient.  In every personal relationship the degree of transparency and opacity will vary considerably from one area to another.  I like to think of relationships as having doors and windows that open and close.  Some doors open and some remain closed.  Some are closed after they have once been open.  Some windows you can see through and some you can’t.  This is intimacy.  It is highly variable depending on the person and on the relationship.

We should avoid formulating an ideal of what intimacy should be like.  Such ideals and expectations tend to be used to criticize and evaluate, and this tends to undermine intimacy.  Intimacy depends on acceptance, which is a relaxation of our defenses, expectations, and preconceptions.  Openness and receptivity are prerequisites to intimacy.   One must suspend one’s assumptions and expectations of another person in order to be intimate.  Intimacy is always full of surprises, because you really know very little of what is inside another person, and a person’s inner landscape is always in flux.  To maintain an intimate connection with another person you have to pay attention.  Rather than being something one strives for, intimacy depends on relaxation and allowing what is normally kept inward to emerge and flow freely into the mutual awareness between oneself and another.  This can be very risky.  There are good reasons why we keep many things private to ourselves.  An outlook on life and on human beings heavily committed to moral strictures and/ or to an ideal of personal behavior is an impediment to intimacy.  When a person fears judgment and censure, it is hard to be revealing.  Creating an atmosphere where a person can feel comfortable sharing what is habitually kept inside and not outwardly expressed can take considerable time and skill.  In some situations with a new person intimacy seems to appear suddenly and spontaneously.  It may yield a feeling of elation or exhilaration.  But such intimacy is only partial and often turns out to be temporary.  Intimacy has a developmental line.  It can broaden and deepen over time creating ever greater mutual awareness and interdependence, or it can shrink.  It can ebb and flow like a tide that rises and falls.  Relationships that have become dull or boring, that seem have lost their vitality,  have probably lost their intimate connection.  Small rejections and disappointments cause the doors and windows of intimacy to close.  These small alterations in the avenues of inward communication accumulate over time.  They are quite often so small and subtle that they often go unnoticed.  But their cumulative effect is that the couple begins to lose interest in one another.  One or the other might start to look elsewhere for the kind of connection they need.

Intimacy in an interpersonal context is habitual communication which creates a bond of the emotions and one’s inner personhood.  Repeated contact maintains and enhances this bond.  Intimacy tends to establish patterns of relating, small unspoken understandings and agreements.  An intimate connection that has fallen into neglect can be revived, but disuse can allow alterations in ones internal configuration to establish themselves that may make a revival of a previous intimacy difficult.

Intimacy should probably be distinguished from dependence, which is very common.  Emotional dependence, the need for the reassuring presence of another, the need for constant attention, the desperate clinging to the attention and presence of another in response to a largely unconscious premonition of abandonment or loss, is a form of one-sided intimacy akin to that of a mother with her children.  Communication and understanding flow mostly in one direction.  This kind of connection is narcissistic in the negative sense, which I will explain a little further on. It is an unbalanced form of intimacy.

Despite the many obstacles to intimacy, it is something that occurs spontaneously and naturally among people.  People want to be closely and emotionally connected to one another.  Even the most paranoid or schizoid person wants to be understood and accepted on his or her own terms.  These great public conflagrations of rage and despair such as Adam Lanza’s, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s, Seung-Hui Cho’s, are meant to communicate with the entire society.  The perpetrators of these spectacles don’t want to just die, they want to be noticed.  I doubt if there is any hope or expectation of understanding left in such people.  Understanding is something they have had very little of in their lives and have long given up on.  These actions are spectacular exhibitions of destruction and despair.  Mass murder is intimate because it communicates and reveals the inward heart.  The bond it creates with its victims and society is its continuing legacy of destruction.

Empathy

Intimacy in its most mature form is related to empathy.  Empathy is the ability to accurately grasp the inner life of another person, to understand how another person feels in a particular situation, to grasp the logic of their motives, to be able to anticipate their reactions or behavior.  Empathy is not to be confused with sympathy, which is an attitude of benevolence or compassion toward another person.  Empathy is strictly informative.  It says nothing about how this accurate understanding another person’s inner life will be applied.  Salesmen need empathy, politicians need empathy, con men need empathy, torturers need empathy.  And so do doctors, mothers, artists, and lovers.  Empathy is only a tool.  Like a hammer, it can be used to build a house, or to kill somebody.

Because empathy informs one of strengths, weaknesses, vulnerabilities in another, intimacy informed by empathy carries considerable risk.  One becomes vulnerable in an intimate relationship.  A person who knows you well can hurt you, and they know best how to do it.  Exposure of one’s inner self carries with it natural vulnerability.  It takes courage and self-confidence to be intimate.  Many people who lack such inner strength and confidence have difficulty becoming intimate with another person.  Some people reach a certain level of intimacy and then panic at the realization of their own vulnerability.  They may inexplicably withdraw at the very moment when the relationship seems to be close and deepening.  Because of the high level of vulnerability entailed by intimacy, trust is an important ingredient in any intimate relationship.  It is almost a prerequisite.  People who are unable to trust others due to past injuries or painful relationships have difficulty forming intimate connections to others.

Paranoid and Schizoid Defenses 

Paranoia is an abiding condition of fear coupled with mobilization for defense that has been established through repeated attacks.  It is the great enemy of intimacy.  Paranoia is a defensive system that operates on the assumption that all human relations are essentially antagonistic and exploitative.  What it is defending against is an extreme sense of vulnerability, and rage against its many persecutors.  Paranoid people simply don’t believe in constructive, nurturing, benevolent relationships.  Every good and positive outreach toward them is converted into something hostile or manipulative.  If you succeed in penetrating the formidable defenses of a severely paranoid person, what you will find is a wounded, enraged person who sees himself as the victim of attacks from all directions.  You may find yourself playing a starring role in his persecutory delusions — not a position you want to be in.

Another common defensive system that seems to be increasingly popular in America is the schizoid.  The schizoid person withdraws from human contact.  They attempt to shrink the emotional life across the board keeping human interactions and emotional expression to an absolute minimum.  Intimacy tends to be avoided at all costs, and when ventured into is an area of great difficulty.  The schizoid challenge is disengagement.  You can’t reach the person on an intimate level.  The paranoid is engaged, but it is a hostile, destructive engagement.

They [the schizoids] are the people who have deep-seated doubts about the reality and viability of their very “self,” who are ultimately found to be suffering from varying degrees of depersonalization, unreality, the dread feeling of “not belonging,” of being fundamentally isolated and out of touch with their world.

The schizoid problem is the problem of those “who feel cut off, apart, different, unable to become involved in any real relationships.  (Guntrip, p. 148)

These two defensive styles in a range of degrees and combinations are very widespread in American society and have influenced our laws and our culture to the extent that intimate relationships are difficult to achieve and maintain in contemporary America.  Intimate relations are seen as hazardous — which they are — and this feeds the paranoid’s need for defense and the schizoid’s need to withdraw into isolation.  Intimate relationships are therefore not encouraged, or even actively discouraged, and sometimes persecuted — which tends to intensify the trend toward isolation.

The reasons for this increasing cultural trend are deep and complex and would make a good book, if someone out there wants to write it.  But one important piece of evidence, I think, is the growth and success of science and technology, especially over the last couple of centuries.  Science looks at the world in a totally impersonal way.  Explanations of natural phenomena are sought in terms of mechanical causes and effects, not for personal reasons having to do with the human world.  The success of this style of perceiving and relating to the natural world has enormously extended the human capacity to exploit, subdue, and control Nature to a degree unimaginable only a few centuries ago.  This success has encouraged its application to all areas of life.  Schizoid personalities are very common among scientists and mathematicians.  “Objectivity” means removing oneself from the matter at hand, perceiving and understanding a matter apart from one’s personal interest in it.  People are increasingly looking at one another in this depersonalized, utilitarian fashion.

This is consistent and very congenial to the values of corporate capitalism which are focused entirely on externals like production, exchange, transportation, organization, and profit.  The growth of corporations over the last century and a half, whose sole rationale and purpose for existence is to maximize profit, with all other values being subordinated to that overbearing imperative, have devalued the personal life of everyone in that economic system.  Personal happiness, interpersonal satisfaction, and sexual fulfillment, have no exchange value and therefore play no role in the economy.  Increasingly one’s personal life is forced to the sidelines as earning a living takes an ever greater proportion of time, energy, and attention.   Modern life creates numerous obstacles to forming intimate relationships and places great challenges upon them, and this has created a society full of lonely, disconnected people hungry for connection yet finding it increasingly difficult to make the kind of fulfilling connections they seek.

What is the value of intimacy?  Why strive for intimacy in our relations with others?  Intimacy is the antidote to loneliness.  Humans are by nature social.  We are a species that has always survived in groups rather than as isolated individuals, like, say, orangutans.  Humans need connection to others and that need is established in the earliest interactions between an infant and its mother.  The lack of such a connection is experienced as painful distress.  An abandoned infant will cry until it is exhausted.  The need for reassuring connection to other human beings is deep in our nature and intimacy fulfills that need for connection.  Our experience of ourselves is from the outset defined and established in relation to others, first and foremost, to our mothers.  This earliest intimacy with our mothers establishes the development of our sense of self, the narcissistic structure of our personalities.  This defines our need for intimacy and how that need is expressed and sought.

Narcissism

Narcissism in the broadest sense refers to how one experiences oneself as a human being.  It refers to one’s feelings about oneself and one’s abilities, one’s personal appearance, one’s physical capabilities and bodily integrity, and how one sees oneself in relation to others.  It has to do with how one feels about life in general.  Is it good?  Is it bad?  It is worthwhile, or not?  Should I continue living or not?  These are narcissistic issues because they refer back to the self and the engagement of the self in life. 

There are positive and negative aspects to narcissism.  Narcissism in the positive sense is the regard one feels for oneself and one’s own well being.  The care one takes of one’s own body, one’s attention to grooming and appearance, the sensitivity one has to the impression one makes on others, the care and attention one gives to one’s own health and well being, the satisfaction one feels in accomplishment or the realization of ambition, the sense of satisfaction one feels in helping others, teaching others, giving to others, one’s sense of participating and belonging to a larger group.  Good parenting is narcissism in the positive sense, the satisfaction one takes in seeing one’s children grow up healthy and constructively.  Narcissism in the positive sense is feeling a sense of abundance in oneself, having the ability and the resources to share with others and enhance the lives of others.  In a word, self-esteem.  The satisfaction one takes in giving an appropriate gift is a narcissistic satisfaction.  On the other hand, an inappropriate gift, a gift that is overly extravagant, or is otherwise not suited to the recipient shows a lack of empathy, a lack of understanding of the other person, a gift given to enhance the giver in his own eyes rather than from an appropriate understanding of the needs of the receiver is an example of narcissism in the negative sense, of deficient empathy and using others to enhance one’s own self-esteem or sense of grandiosity.  Pathological narcissism is obliviousness to the needs and feelings of others.  It is not necessarily malicious, although it often comes off that way.  It is actually a deficit in emotional perception.  Pathological narcissism cannot see beyond its own needs and interests because of a great underlying sense of vulnerability.  Pathological narcissism limits one’s capacity for intimacy because one’s need to enhance one’s own self image is so great it overwhelms and excludes the ability to be receptive and open to the needs and feelings of another.  Narcissism in the negative sense tends to exclude empathy or uses empathy selfishly and unsympathetically without consideration of the needs or feelings of others.  The narcissistic structure of one’s personality determines the degree of intimacy of which one is capable and the character of the intimate relations one is able to establish, whether constructive and enhancing, or destructive.

Art

Art is also communication of the inward heart.  An artist realizes his own inner self, or, let’s say, an aspect of it, in a work or performance that can be viewed or shared by a public audience.  This impulse to create and share one’s internal self is a narcissistic need.  Not everyone has this drive to create and share one’s inner heart through external symbolic representations.  It is a peculiarity of artists, the origins of which we will not explore here.  Art is a form of intimacy in the sense that the artist shares his or her inward self and exposes it to an external audience.  The size of the audience does not matter.  What is important is that art reaches out for connection.  Art is not masturbation.  It is not something you do for your own private comfort or amusement.  Art connects you to other people.  There is a narcissistic satisfaction in creating something with great technical skill that others can recognize and admire.  But what is essential to art is not this narcissistic satisfaction that the artist feels in his creative accomplishment, but rather the outreach to others from the core of the artist’s inner self that a work of art represents.   By creating something external to oneself, as opposed to simply daydreaming or fantasizing, one creates the possibility of a connection to others through their perception of one’s artwork.  When a person comes into contact with a work of art, they are coming into contact with a representation of the inner self of the artist who created it.  One does not create randomly.  This does not mean that a viewer can readily grasp the emotional and psychological meaning of a work of art upon encountering it.  It takes considerable time and experience to understand an artistic language, and artists are often deliberately obscure and idiosyncratic in how they present themselves in their work.  However, it is my view that artistic effectiveness is related to communicative effectiveness rather than to obscurity.

Architectural blueprints, anatomical diagrams, maps, graphs, are depictions of external reality.  They are meticulous assemblages of facts, measurements, and objective characteristics that can be seen and verified by anyone.  They are not usually thought of as art, because they do not reflect the inner self, the maker’s subjective reaction or perspective on the subject presented.  When Picasso did his painting of the Weeping Woman (1937) he was not trying to recreate this woman in a true to life rendering.  Rather, this image reflects how Picasso saw this woman and how he chose to depict her out of all the many ways he could have chosen to do this painting.  This painting is a subjective view of the woman, not an attempt to describe her body or her character with objective validity.  Art is about illusions.  It is about how the artist needs to see the world, not necessarily how the world is.  And that is entirely based on his personal psychology.  Even the Dutch masters who drew and painted meticulously accurate portraits of faces and people still had a personal style of their own.  They had to choose how to portray their subjects, what manner of dress they should wear, how they should be posed, the circumstances in which they are set, the intensity and direction of the light, the mood or facial expression to be portrayed.  These are all personal choices of the artist that go into the creation of a “realistic” portrait.  So in this sense art is always a reflection of the subjectivity of the artist.  Art is a partial intimacy because what the artist chooses to present of himself is carefully selected and meticulously prepared for public presentation to obtain a calculated effect.  The intimacy of art tends to flow in one direction, from the artist to the viewer.

Reciprocity, that is, the viewer’s experience or reaction to the artwork is not usually experienced directly by the artist, except for admiring applause or negative reviews.  But that is not the most important impact of art upon its audience.  The important and lasting impact of art is usually not expressed directly, and that is the expansion of the inner awareness of the viewer of an artwork, or an alteration in his or her perception and understanding of the external world, or of himself or herself.

I disagree with John Cage that art is non-intentional, that its purpose is to ” sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.” (John Cage, johncage.org/autobiographical statement )  This conception of artistic purpose rejects the communicative function of art and is the polar opposite from my own view.  My understanding of art is narcissistic in the sense that it starts from the self of the artist and connects the artist to other selves through the communicative means of the artwork.  Cage’s conception of art stems from Zen Buddhist ideas that seek the annihilation of the self.  Art becomes a means of “emptying” the self, reducing the self towards the ideal of nothingness.  Nothing could be further from or more opposed to the point of view I am advancing here.  My view is that life is a process of the growth of the self and the enhancement of the self through fulfilling connections to others, as stated in the epigraph at the outset.  Art is a means toward that enhancement and fulfillment as is intimacy in personal relationships.  Zen Buddhism essentially elevates the schizoid position of detachment and isolation to an ideal of human development, a view I am totally out of sympathy with.

What is the value of art?  Art expands one’s awareness of the internal life and enables one to perceive people, the external world, the social environment, and one’s inner life in new ways.  Art alters our way of looking at things and experiencing ourselves.  In that sense art can be educational in that it offers modes of experiencing ourselves and the external world that might not be available through other channels.  Art can change people in that it alters their perceptions and awakens them to aspects of inner and outer reality of which they may not be aware.  In that sense art is volatile and can be subversive if it seeks to illuminate that which is officially suppressed.  Art fosters intimacy by expanding awareness of the inner self and directing attention toward reflection on the inner life.  Failure to educate in the arts, minimizing attention to the arts, devaluing the arts, indicate a lack of value placed on the development of the inner self.

Sex

What does all of this have to do with sex?  Sex is also communication of the inward heart and an expression of the narcissistic structure of the personality.  It falls within the broader concept of intimacy, but it has peculiarities that set it apart from other forms of intimate communication.  Sex is communication through the body that seeks the satisfaction of lust.  Lust is a powerful connecting emotion.  Lust impels one to seek contact with another person, and it is contact of a particular kind, namely contact leading to sexual arousal and genital contact.  However, many other kinds of touch and many other aspects of intimacy occur within the context of sexual activity.  Touch, physical affection, and bodily closeness are enormously reassuring and comforting.  These needs for comfort, reassurance, and affection that occur alongside the satisfaction of lust are highly intimate and satisfy a deep longing for connection and bonding between people.  This is perhaps the deepest form of intimacy because it is a sharing of the most intensely felt bodily and psychological longings.  How one expresses and seeks to satisfy lust and the need for bodily closeness reflects the narcissistic structure of one’s personality.  Sex has a lot in common with art in that the mode in which one seeks to satisfy lust reflects one’s narcissistic needs just as the art that one produces reflects the narcissistic structure of the artist’s inner self.  Sex says a lot about who you are.  Sex is not only about the satisfaction of lust.  Sex is a paradigmatic expression of narcissism.  Because sex is communication, sex tells you where you are in a relationship with another person.  When sex is going well and people find satisfaction and mutual pleasure in one another, it signifies a strong bond and a positive avenue of communication and understanding.  Of course this is not the only aspect of a relationship that is important and it is not all there is to intimate communication.  Some people use sex to cover up or avoid other issues that may be a source of discomfort.  Sex can also be used to conceal and mislead.  A dishonest heart can use sex to manipulate and destroy.  The intimacy of sex is only partial.  Sex is one aspect of intimacy, but a very important one because it embodies the energetic connection of lust and sexual arousal.  But do not think that because you have sex with a person you know everything important about them.

Kissing

There are numerous theories on the origin of kissing, and kissing can, of course, have many different meanings.  Some cultures do not kiss at all, or very little.  References to kissing in Western culture go back to ancient times, and the era of exploration and colonialism, as well as modern media have spread the practice of kissing around the world.  Psychoanalytic theory sees the propensity to kiss stemming from the feelings of warmth, safety, nurturing, and well being in the infant’s nursing at the mother’s breast.  Clamping the mouth on the nipple is a means of incorporation, of sustenance, dependence and survival.  In adults the meanings and style of kissing can be many, but kissing always carries a message related to nurturing or incorporation.  Gentle kisses of affection, pecks on the cheek and so forth, impart a message of affection, good feeling, warmth, reassurance, and nurturing.  Kisses of passion and desire communicate a will to incorporate, to possess, consume, an emotional neediness, an inner longing and loneliness for which one is seeking solace in the other.  Kissing — or not kissing — reveals how attracted a person is to your body, how much they need you, how much they like you, their willingness to depend on you, and the degree to which they can reciprocate your feelings and empathize with your needs.  All of this can be communicated through kissing.  Oral sex is a further extension of these feelings and needs of both giving and incorporating through the mouth, but applied to the genitals and the emotions of sexual arousal.  The use of the mouth as a body connector is a very powerful and effective means of intimate communication.

Orgasm

Orgasm is understudied and not well understood.  Most of what is known about orgasm has issued from studies of epilepsy and people who have had nerve damage, spinal and/or brain injuries.  Physiologically, orgasm shares a lot of characteristics with epileptic seizures.  There is no scientific consensus on the definition of orgasm or how it should be conceptualized.  For this reason I am putting forward my own conceptualization of it here.

Sexual desire, lust, sexual arousal, and orgasm are hypnotic processes.  They shift our awareness to special subjective states that mobilize emotional and physical response systems that are normally dormant during everyday experience.  Sexual desire, or lust, is the perception of the sexuality of another person.  It is looking at another person and feeling the possibility of sexual activity, creating a visualization of the other in a sexual context.  It is a conscious awareness of desirable sexual interaction, which is a continuing state.  It is different, from simply perceiving a person’s existence, or the clothes they are wearing, or their ability to perform some task, or their physical characteristics.  What makes it different is that it mobilizes our personal emotional response system and prepares us for sexual arousal in a way that other kinds of perception do not, and therefore it is an altered mode of awareness.  Sexual arousal is the next level of intensification.  The body becomes mobilized in anticipation of sexual activity.  Internal physical sensations become more prominent in our awareness and other considerations that might inhibit sexual arousal tend to be excluded from consciousness.  Arousal is intensified through physical stimulation of the genitals and other regions of the body as well as psychic stimuli such as sound, scenario, internal visualization (fantasy), and perhaps smell.  At a certain threshold orgasm is triggered.  Involuntary physical processes are set in motion accompanied by intense awareness of pleasurable sensation that excludes nearly everything else.  Orgasm is a state where physical pleasure overwhelms consciousness and obliterates the ability to attend to other inputs to consciousness.  Some people see a relationship between orgasm and the  “loss of self” reported in some mystical experiences.  My feeling is that orgasm differs from these mystical experiences in that in orgasm the self does not disintegrate.  The self remains intact.  But normal consciousness, which ordinarily processes input from numerous internal and external sources simultaneously, becomes overwhelmed during orgasm by internal physical sensations which become extraordinarily dominant.  Other modes of perception and awareness are not extinguished.  One can still see and hear during orgasm, but, orgasm is a state where interoception (awareness of the internal state of one’s body) is magnified to a unique predominance.  This makes it special.  One must be able to relax one’s external and internal perceptual apparatus in order to orgasm.  Ordinarily we are bombarded by sensate experience from the external world as well as from our own internal thought processes.  In order to orgasm one must be able to allow those perceptions to recede from consciousness so that the physical pleasure of the orgasm occupies one’s awareness to the near exclusion of everything else.  This is a hypnotic process.  It is not entirely voluntary, but it is conditioned by experience.  It is the capability of awareness to shift in a specific way under the conditions of intense sexual stimulation.  One does not orgasm from driving a car or vacuuming the carpet.  Orgasm is a special type of conscious experience that can only occur under very specialized conditions.  In my view, this is the way orgasm should be understood.

Komisaruk, et al. (2006) argue that orgasm is not a reflex, but rather a perception,  (p. 237f.)  and I concur with this  valuable insight.  That is, orgasm is not generated by muscular contractions caused by genital stimulation, which, in turn, lead to a reflexive action in the spinal column.  Genital stimulation mobilizes neurons throughout the body sending greater and greater levels of excitation to the brain.  The muscular contractions are indeed reflexive and can be elicited in the spinal column even when the spinal cord is severed.  But orgasm is not produced unless those muscular contractions are perceived by the brain as sensations.  This supports my view that orgasm should be understood as essentially a psychological phenomenon, not simply as a physical process.  The physical concomitants of orgasm are, of course, noteworthy and important, but Komisaruk and his collaborators have shown that the physical processes themselves do not constitute orgasm.  They can occur without the experience of orgasm, and orgasm can occur independently of physical arousal.  Therefore orgasm must be understood as essentially a subjective experience, a particular state of altered awareness, that is usually (although not necessarily) accompanied by specific physiological processes under the conditions of intense sexual arousal.  Orgasm is therefore primarily a narcissistic experience rather than a communicative one, although sharing orgasms is a powerful bonding experience, because sharing the special ecstatic state of orgasm is highly intimate. 

Sadism and Masochism

Sadism is the pleasure we take in the suffering of another.  It is a spectrum that extends from gentle teasing to torturing someone to death.  Sadism reflects ambivalence.  It is essentially a hostile, destructive impulse that is mitigated by feelings of good will, love, guilt, and perhaps fear.  We need the person toward whom we feel hostility, so we don’t want to destroy them.  But it feels good to see them suffer.  It is the expression of the suppressed hostile impulse that is pleasurable.  The spectrum is defined by the mix of hostile and positive feelings toward the victim.  The greater the hostility, the greater the cruelty and the darker the expression. As the mitigating feelings tend toward zero, it becomes simply cruelty.  Mild sadism is ordinary and commonplace.  Jokes are often mildly sadistic and jokes that are overly hostile can lose their humor.  Sadism is intimate because it expresses our conflicted feelings toward another person, and the pleasure we feel in the pain or discomfort of another is something usually kept private.  Sadism is common in sexual activity to a greater or lesser degree, because sexual relationships are conflicted and often mixed with hostile aspects.

Masochism is using adversity to one’s advantage and seeking it out for that purpose.  I see it as a broader concept than sadism and it is related to depression and despair.  Masochism is an adaptation of people who are habituated to suffering and adversity.  The erotic aspect of it, feeling sexual arousal in response to pain, or pain as an intensifier of erotic feeling, comes from associating sexual arousal or love with painful experiences, neglect, disappointment, and abuse.  One learns that to love, or to be aroused, hurts, and one comes to expect, or even to need, that conjunction of feelings.  In my eyes, masochism is harder to understand than sadism because in order to understand it one must grasp a lifetime of painful experiences that may not be easily accessible.  In an erotic context it is not a neat complement to sadism, in general.  It is much more complicated, whereas sadism, although conflicted, is relatively straightforward.  For that reason I don’t like the term ‘sadomasochism’.  It squashes together two things that I think are very different and don’t necessarily complement one another.

Love

Love is a word that is used in many different ways to mean many different things.  I tend to avoid it because I always fear that I am giving the wrong impression.  People attach very different meanings to ‘love’ and it raises all sorts of expectations that may not be realistic.  However, it is enormously reassuring and people love to hear it, so we must deal with it.

I will start with my definition of love in the best sense.  Mature love is good will guided by empathy and tempered with a respect for the separateness and individuality of the other person.  Empathy is very important.  Empathy means you understand how the other person feels and what his or her real needs are.  Most of what is called ‘love’ is not empathic and this leads to all sorts of turmoil.  I disagree with defining love in terms of a willingness to sacrifice on behalf of the beloved.  This is masochistic.  It implies that you are giving up something you would rather not in order to benefit the beloved.  You are inflicting some suffering upon yourself in order that your loved one may enjoy some benefit.  Love is certainly characterized by a giving spirit and a desire to enhance and bestow advantage upon one’s beloved.  But rather than self denial, love represents a sharing of the abundance of one’s physical and emotional resources.  It does not necessarily expect anything in return, but it embodies a hope for attachment and good will and an intertwining with the life of the beloved.   Love is an expansion of the self, an attempt to complete the self through emotional resonances and attachment to what is valued and idealized in the other.  Whatever is done out of love does not occur beyond good and evil, as Nietzsche once suggested (Beyond Good and Evil, 153).  Love can never be an excuse for reckless or destructive actions.  Love lies squarely within the framework of our values and constructive human relationships.  Mature love is closely related to respect for others and responsibility for oneself. 

Our common notion of “romantic” love is characterized by strong emotion, passion, elation, anticipation, despair, jealousy, possessiveness, dependence and obsessive preoccupation with the beloved.  This is what people usually mean by being “in love.”  This kind of love tends to be self-centered and unempathic, often lacking a realistic perception of the beloved as a complete person, sometimes ignoring serious character flaws in the other, and often a maintaining distorted understanding of the relationship itself.  It is sometimes manifest as a furious, psychological dependence that devours and emotionally destroys the other through insatiable demands for attention and control.  This is not mature love, in any way, shape, or form.  However, these experiences can have great emotional and psychological significance.  Relationships that start out this way can sometimes evolve into more mature forms of love without losing the passion and zest with which they began.  This romantic kind of love brings people together, but it is not what keeps them together in a satisfying relationship over a long period of time.  Empathy, good will, and respect are much more important for healthy, durable loving relationships than “love.”  Intimacy is an important element in a healthy loving relationship because intimacy informs and bonds.  Intimacy enables one to be close to another person, to know the other person in depth, to be in touch with the other person’s feelings, concerns, and needs.  Intimacy gives a sense of connection, mutual dependence, and support.  We do not face the world alone, we face it together as a couple giving strength and support to one another, informed by our intimate knowledge of one another and energized by lust and sexual pleasure.  It’s a good way to live, if you can achieve it.

 

Notes

 

Cage, John (1990) johncage.org/autobiographical statement.

Guntrip, Harry (1973)  Psychoanalytic Theory, Therapy, and the Self.  New York:  Basic Books.

Kirshenbaum, Sheril (2011)  The Science of Kissing:  What Our Lips are Telling Us.  New York:  Hachette Book Group.

Komisaruk, Barry. R.; Beyer-Flores, Carlos; & Whipple, Beverly. (2006)  The Science of Orgasm.   Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press.

Nietzsche, Freidrich (1989 [1886])  Beyond Good and Evil.   Translated by Walter Kaufmann.  New York:  Vinage/Random House.