Loved this eloquent exploration of how various writers approach the deepest mystery of the human condition. Or, at least, mine. There is nothing like sexual impulses for teasing out a desire for constant moral calibration, which often seems to be the externalisation of fear, shame and resentment. The determination to police what turns people on seems to be hard-wired, which suggests that it has an evolutionary basis. That makes it a minefield for writers. Thanks for this unusually thoughtful and dispassionate approach to the issue.
This is a thought-provoking essay. Thank you. I appreciate that this is pointing at the mysterious and transcendent root of our desires and emotions. We are mysterious creatures with feelings and urges and cognitive short-cuts and heuristics. But our emotions don't come with an error code that points to an owner's manual with pages explaining where the feeling came from, why we evolved to feel that way, or what we're supposed to do about it. So there's a lot of ad hoc reasoning, and trial and error, as we try to make sense of our experience. So there does seem to be a sense that to get underneath explanations is tapping into something real.
On the other hand, to focus only on the biologically-mysterious aspect of sex seems like a kind of selective attention. Is there an implicit argument there, that if you just don't write about the social or ethical aspects of sexuality, then you reveal the real, amoral, biological foundations of it? If the writer limits their focus to only the “real” amoral conditions of sexual desire, then you don’t have to talk about the ethical? Several times, you wrote about the importance of shedding shame, or writing without shame. But isn’t shame also a part of the mysterious human experience of sex? And also an important ethical aspect of sex? Had Blake Bailey's harmful and coercive desires been constrained by a stronger sense of shame, that seems like an overall positive. To that end, I appreciate the link from Anya to the story by Eve Crawford Peyton as a kind of counterpoint to the perspective of the essay.
I don't want to lose the unflinching stare into the abyss, to see and describe aspects of the human experience that blow apart our expectations and desire to control the uncontrollable through explanation and categorization, our desire to split things into dualities of right and wrong. And yet those are also aspects of our experience, and I'm not convinced that avoiding it really allows you to bypass ethical considerations, or account for the harm caused by unconstrained desires. What starts out sounding like a brave, unvarnished look at the realities of human sexuality, starts to look like Blake Bailey's excuse that he just couldn't help himself, the heart wants what it wants, and he wanted all of those women he raped from the very first moment he laid eyes on them… and wouldn’t it have been great had higher-order, regulating emotions and cognitions have intervened at some point? And why are those thoughts not also fair game for writers?
Thanks for the thought-provoking comment, Joe. I'm not here to defend Blake Bailey as a human being. You say he's a rapist. Yes, some of his victims say he raped them. The courts haven't corroborated that, as far as I know. So who do we believe? I leave that up to whoever wants to take a stand on the issue. My point in the essay is that his book fails when he tries to explain himself, even obliquely, with the parallel narrative about his relationship with his dad. My hunch is that, for the novelist or the memoirist, explaining or judging sex never convinces the most curious readers, only describing sex does that. And I'm not talking about pornography, but rather a detailed account of thoughts, actions, and dialogue, without bais--like in the scene I excerpt from DAYBOOK. Only then can the reader judge, drawing conclusions, for example, about shame or shamefullness. If you read the sex scenes in THE FUCK BUSINESS, THE LOVER, DAYBOOK, or even CANCELLED LIVES (when he just presents his facts) they are far more revealing than, for example, that scene I quote in THIRST FOR SALT, where the author seemed to want to influence my opinion, approving of the sex as correct, but almost on the sly. The description is so gushy and tendentious. You speak of shame. Knapp is quite eloquent on shame in DAYBOOK, and Troy quite eloquent on his odd lack of it, but neither of them weighs down his sex scenes by trying to explain them. They describe the act and then the aftermath, which are both messy, very messy. Maybe I'm only saying that sex is always so messy, so complicated.
Is sex our human condition. Is it more of an adolescent part-time, a frenzied joy. A joy of discovering. Not really learning, just behaving wrecklessly with love and longing. We want it, our primitive brains tell us we have to do it. Do we?
Loved this eloquent exploration of how various writers approach the deepest mystery of the human condition. Or, at least, mine. There is nothing like sexual impulses for teasing out a desire for constant moral calibration, which often seems to be the externalisation of fear, shame and resentment. The determination to police what turns people on seems to be hard-wired, which suggests that it has an evolutionary basis. That makes it a minefield for writers. Thanks for this unusually thoughtful and dispassionate approach to the issue.
I like your comment, Mike. Very well put.
This is a thought-provoking essay. Thank you. I appreciate that this is pointing at the mysterious and transcendent root of our desires and emotions. We are mysterious creatures with feelings and urges and cognitive short-cuts and heuristics. But our emotions don't come with an error code that points to an owner's manual with pages explaining where the feeling came from, why we evolved to feel that way, or what we're supposed to do about it. So there's a lot of ad hoc reasoning, and trial and error, as we try to make sense of our experience. So there does seem to be a sense that to get underneath explanations is tapping into something real.
On the other hand, to focus only on the biologically-mysterious aspect of sex seems like a kind of selective attention. Is there an implicit argument there, that if you just don't write about the social or ethical aspects of sexuality, then you reveal the real, amoral, biological foundations of it? If the writer limits their focus to only the “real” amoral conditions of sexual desire, then you don’t have to talk about the ethical? Several times, you wrote about the importance of shedding shame, or writing without shame. But isn’t shame also a part of the mysterious human experience of sex? And also an important ethical aspect of sex? Had Blake Bailey's harmful and coercive desires been constrained by a stronger sense of shame, that seems like an overall positive. To that end, I appreciate the link from Anya to the story by Eve Crawford Peyton as a kind of counterpoint to the perspective of the essay.
I don't want to lose the unflinching stare into the abyss, to see and describe aspects of the human experience that blow apart our expectations and desire to control the uncontrollable through explanation and categorization, our desire to split things into dualities of right and wrong. And yet those are also aspects of our experience, and I'm not convinced that avoiding it really allows you to bypass ethical considerations, or account for the harm caused by unconstrained desires. What starts out sounding like a brave, unvarnished look at the realities of human sexuality, starts to look like Blake Bailey's excuse that he just couldn't help himself, the heart wants what it wants, and he wanted all of those women he raped from the very first moment he laid eyes on them… and wouldn’t it have been great had higher-order, regulating emotions and cognitions have intervened at some point? And why are those thoughts not also fair game for writers?
Thanks for the thought-provoking comment, Joe. I'm not here to defend Blake Bailey as a human being. You say he's a rapist. Yes, some of his victims say he raped them. The courts haven't corroborated that, as far as I know. So who do we believe? I leave that up to whoever wants to take a stand on the issue. My point in the essay is that his book fails when he tries to explain himself, even obliquely, with the parallel narrative about his relationship with his dad. My hunch is that, for the novelist or the memoirist, explaining or judging sex never convinces the most curious readers, only describing sex does that. And I'm not talking about pornography, but rather a detailed account of thoughts, actions, and dialogue, without bais--like in the scene I excerpt from DAYBOOK. Only then can the reader judge, drawing conclusions, for example, about shame or shamefullness. If you read the sex scenes in THE FUCK BUSINESS, THE LOVER, DAYBOOK, or even CANCELLED LIVES (when he just presents his facts) they are far more revealing than, for example, that scene I quote in THIRST FOR SALT, where the author seemed to want to influence my opinion, approving of the sex as correct, but almost on the sly. The description is so gushy and tendentious. You speak of shame. Knapp is quite eloquent on shame in DAYBOOK, and Troy quite eloquent on his odd lack of it, but neither of them weighs down his sex scenes by trying to explain them. They describe the act and then the aftermath, which are both messy, very messy. Maybe I'm only saying that sex is always so messy, so complicated.
I think anyone who wants to understand Blake Bailey should read what one of his victims wrote. https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/04/blake-bailey-former-student-sexual-assault-essay.html
Is sex our human condition. Is it more of an adolescent part-time, a frenzied joy. A joy of discovering. Not really learning, just behaving wrecklessly with love and longing. We want it, our primitive brains tell us we have to do it. Do we?