Dear Diary: L'heure bleue
The quiet life that I have taken up this summer — I’m “away,” even though I haven’t gone anywhere — has created a vacuum of sorts, and my mind is filling it up with all sorts of miscellaneous reflections. Some of the things that pop into my head are “live” issues that I’m “thinking” about, with a captial “T.” Others are scraps of memory — but they’re not what you’d call “memories.” They’re the ashes, or ghosts, or whatever, of old longings. I used to abound in longings. Now I have only one longing, and that is to live until tomorrow. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
Among the capital-T thoughts: Freud. For some time now, Freud has been regarded, by intelligent people, not as the radical sexologist who assured us that we all harbored unspeakable thoughts about our parents, but as a humanist who made it possible to talk about — sex. Look back at “the literature” (any literature!) before Freud, and you will find that sexuality pretty much equals bestiality, something that human beings, half-beast but also half-angel, ought to rise above. You will find that no responsible person prior to Freud had anything systematically positive to say about sex. (By “systematically positive,” I mean to exclude the occasional enthusiastic insight penned on a Greek-island junket.) Freud humanized sex — and the proof of his achievement is in the odd sound of that statement. How could sex be in need of humanizing? Trust me: it needed it, especially after Augustine was through with it.
Freud’s contribution, then, was to make talk about sex decent. It’s a staggering achievement. In a few short treatises on dreams and slips of the tongue and whatnot, Freud demolished three thousand years of patriarchal nonsense about carnality.
Almost everything that Freud had to say about sex, though, was wrong, at least as regards specifics. How many boys experience “the Oedipus complex”? I daresay that the lusts of small boys have no respectable Greek-myth correlative, and would look, if realized, a lot like Animal House.
Everybody knows that Freud is wrong about the particulars. But one problem remains. If, prior to Freud, only pathological misfits were obsessed by sex, after Freud, everybody was obsessed by sex. (As you can imagine, this universalization was vital, if Freud’s theories were to be decent.) But, just as only a handful of human beings prior to Freud were, fact, truly bestial, so, after Freud, only a handful of human beings were what Freud would have called “genital.” The rest of us having been spending fortunes on spas and vitamin supplements in hopes of becoming as fully sexualized as we “ought to be.”
Especially those of us who are not twenty years old.
What’s great about sex, when you get right down to it, is the very material evidence that you’re wanted, however briefly. Not only wanted, but permitted to want right back. Orgasm is nature’s way of putting this neediness away, at least for a while, while at the same time gratifying it.
So much for Thoughts. (I could have gone on about Freud all night!) As for Memory, I’m remembering the keen desire to Go Out.
The desire to Go Out, suffered to unspeakable degrees by almost everyone between the ages of 21 and 35, is strangely assymetrical. There is no corresponding desire to Go Home. If you actually want to go home, you are probably about to be arrested. You would rather go home than be detained by the police, which is almost certainly what you deserve — if you have reached the phase of wanting, truly, to Go Home.
Now that I no longer desire to Go Out (not at all), I’m surprised by the power of the view from the balcony (portion shown above) to remind me of the feeling without actually rekindling it. Why should the sight of a thousand windows, some of them lighted, slightly more of them not — and all of them signals of housebound domesticity — arouse a desire to freshen up, don an outfit, and venture forth in the cool summer evening?
Freud would have said it was sex. If only!
Â