Feb 132013
 

Sydney Lea

Sydney Lea here attacks head on the dread subject of sex but manages somewhat quixotically to ride away (on a Shetland pony named Warrior Maiden) into utterly charming reminiscences about his youthful passion for Angie Morton (his version of Dulcinea del Toboso) and a shantytown and “Colored Graveyard” he would pass traveling to and from her house. This is an instance where an author makes a virtue out of necessity, doing a masterful job of being entertaining while not writing about what he doesn’t want to write about. As Syd writes, “Before I was able to publish the one and only novel I ever composed, for example, my agent had practically to horsewhip me into juicing up my characters’ erotic encounters.” Here are beautiful, lapidary lines: “Unrequitedness thus became, as I say, an expectation.” And a sweet reflection on the complexity of life which, yes, casts up metaphors that we spend the rest of our days decoding.

This essay, along with two others, “Unskunked” and “Becoming a Poet: A Way to Know,” published earlier on Numéro Cinq, are among Sydney Lea’s contributions to a book he has co-written with fellow poet laureate Fleda Brown. The book is called Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives and is forthcoming as an e-book in April from Autumn House Books. The pattern of the book is a call-and-response. As Sydney writes, “My friend Fleda Brown, lately poet laureate of Delaware but now escaped to northern Michigan, and I are writing a book together. She writes an essay on a topic (food, sex, clothes, houses, illness, and wild animals); then I write one on the same topic. Then I write one and she follows suit. Etc. It’s fun, though I don’t know who in Hell will publish it.” We have also published here one of  Fleda Brown’s essays from the book, her wonderful meditation on books and reading, “Books Made of Paper.” And in our March issue, we’ll have another. I will be sorry to see this series end for us. (But buy the book.)

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A tricky one for me, this subject. Its once-upon-a-time factor must start at ten years old or so, before I understood sexuality except by some vague surmise, In those days, I habitually rode Warrior Maiden, my fat little Shetland pony, past Angie Morton’s house.  Angie was sixteen, I think, and movie star beautiful, at least in my eyes. She was scarcely taller than I, and would never grow taller, but her figure was simply statuesque.  She had raven hair, almost chalk-white skin, and the most penetrating eyes, ice-blue, almost white themselves, I had ever seen or would ever see after.

My hope, often enough repaid, was to catch her in her yard or, far more exciting, for reasons I must also have dimly surmised, through her bedroom window. No, that’s not accurate:  the compensation for my hope was never adequate. True, I couldn’t conceive what satisfaction might entail, but I knew Angie’s languid wave or, on happier occasions, her desultory word or two of chitchat was not it.

So desperate was my need for this young woman, whatever that need comprised, that I frequently extended my rides just so I could pass her house more than a single time on a single ride. I remember tethering Warrior Maiden to an apple tree and simply sitting under it for as long as I could bear, gorging on the wormy windfalls till I made myself queasy.  At least I thought the fruit was to blame for how I felt.

These delaying maneuvers resulted once in a frightening but thrilling trip home after dark.  In our corner of Montgomery County lay a small settlement of southern-born blacks, who had made the hard trek north in search of better fortunes. Most of them went to work in an asbestos mill in Ambler, though a fair share took jobs on local farms, or, if they were women, they labored as domestics in the more prosperous households. I found their little dwellings fascinating and somehow foreboding: in the warmer months, the front doors seemed always open, but the interiors were kept so dark that I could never quite make out the figures inside. In one tiny house, a harmonica seemed always to be playing, though I couldn’t find the musician. Each shack seemed multi-generational: I could tell that much by the wide variety of human heights among the shadowy occupants.

The shantytown had an aroma of cuisine, exotic, at least to me, pungent, and attractive; but the truly unusual feature of the community was its cemetery, with those knife-thin, tilting headstones, each adorned and surrounded by shards of broken glass, and the bordering trees full of suspended bottles.  To ride by that half-acre graveyard plot after sunset, and after having laid my adoring eyes on Angie; to hear indistinct rustlings of nocturnal animals in the brush; to be forced to rely solely on the pony’s sense of where home lay: this mixture of adventure, reverence, mystery, fear and trespass would come to serve as a kind of under-aura to such sexual experiences as I would have in my adolescent years– and later ones too.

However strangely it strikes me today, I seem somehow to have believed that my life would never amount to anything, that I would never know that obscure condition people called happiness, if I couldn’t be with Angie, even if, as I’ve conceded, I didn’t understand what that sort of “being with” entailed.

The notion was absurd, of course, and yet it didn’t end as I came to maturity, at least of the physical kind.  For too many years, I would spot a woman in some public place– museum, train, airport, restaurant, campus– and would be convinced that if I could not know her in the Biblical sense my entire life would be no better than despair. The inane measures I took to guarantee myself, if not a conversation with her, at least a glimpse of my exalted Angie were paltry compared to the extraordinary lengths I went to in order to put my person in the way of these coveted women. I can’t even describe the sanest of those tactics, so embarrassed do I remain by reflection on them.

The tactics, of course, were almost always met with rebuff, or simple non-recognition. Indeed, such a response was no more than I expected, the expectation itself a carry-over from my horseback days.  Not that Angie ever cruelly rejected me.  I suspect she knew full well the profundity of my crush on her, but she spared me all mockery, let alone recourse to nasty words.  She appeared always to have enough time for a brief exchange of remarks, which I both craved and resented.

None of her acknowledgments was enough. However banal my part in the conversation, I always hoped she could read it allegorically somehow, could know that my commentary on the weather, for example, was freighted with double-entendre.  Alas, she never appeared to decode the allegory, and despite my knowing, even at ten, that her failure to do so owed itself to my own clumsiness and to no defect in her, I was free to regard the failure as a kind of dismissal. Unrequitedness thus became, as I say, an expectation, though being the oldest son of a mother whom I seemed always to disappoint must have factored into all this too. That, however, is another story. Or at least I choose to think so.

I will be forgiven for lacking the temerity as a child to declare my devotion to the paragon Angie. But that I should remain oblique, even prudish to this day when it comes to talking about sex seems an odd thing, so elaborate and ardent were my efforts as a young man to get as much of sex as permitted by such charm as I owned and by 1950s mores, which I felt both thrill and shame to violate when I could. Before I was able to publish the one and only novel I ever composed, for example, my agent had practically to horsewhip me into juicing up my characters’ erotic encounters. Though the first draft referred to those encounters, it stopped leagues short of depicting them. In forty years of teaching, for further instance, I never felt other than acutely uncomfortable when discussing student work that showed significant carnal content.

One problem that has always concerned me, at least in my avatar as prose essayist, is what I call the temptation to closure. That is, I may lay out a series of memories, emotions, and events, and then discover myself hunting for a way to herd them into a narrative corral. I don’t know if that’s what I am doing here. I honestly do not. In any case, I wonder if my unease in talking about sex out loud or on the page may go back to a certain horseback ride after dark, when – full of vague lust, longing, and melancholy– I passed what was then referred to as the Colored Graveyard. The sense, as I lingered under Angie Morton’s window, that I was on the brink of an exciting but forbidden trespass may have been further impressed on body and soul by my traveling on horseback by those darkened cabins, each so full of mystery, then under those suspended bottles, which seemed to betoken a universe I had no right to visit. That, after all, was what made it so scintillating to imagine.

—Sydney Lea

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SYDNEY LEA is Poet Laureate of Vermont. His selection of literary essays, A Hundred Himalayas, was published by the University of Michigan Press in September, 2012. Skyhorse Publications just brought out A North Country Life: Tales of Woodsmen, Waters and Wildlife, and in April, his eleventh poetry collection, I Was Thinking of Beauty, is due from Four Way Books. His most recent collection of poems is Six Sundays Toward a Seventh: Selected Spiritual Poems, from publishers Wipf and Stock. His 2011 collection is Young of the Year (Four Way Books).

He founded New England Review in 1977 and edited it till 1989. Of his nine previous poetry collections, Pursuit of a Wound (University of Illinois Press, 2000) was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The preceding volume, To the Bone: New and Selected Poems, was co-winner of the 1998 Poets’ Prize. In 1989, Lea also published the novel A Place in Mind with Scribner, and the book is still available in paper from Story Line Press. His 1994 collection of naturalist essays, Hunting the Whole Way Home, was re-issued in paper by the Lyons Press in 2003. Lea has received fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright and Guggenheim Foundations, and has taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Wesleyan, Vermont and Middlebury Colleges, as well as at Franklin College in Switzerland and the National Hungarian University in Budapest. His stories, poems, essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated and many other periodicals, as well as in more than forty anthologies. He lives in Newbury, Vermont, where he is active in statewide literacy and conservation efforts.

May 302011
 

Sam Lipsyte, © Robert Reynolds

The Ask
Sam Lipsyte
296 pp.
$25
ISBN  978-0-374-29891-3 

As a Canadian, I’m ashamed that American fiction, which is largely underwritten by a market, has a keener social eye than Canadian fiction, which is underwritten significantly by state-funded, supposedly arms-length grants. Contemporary American novels from maturing writers like Jonathan Franzen, Jennifer Egan, Michael Cunningham and Sam Lipsyte (author of this superb novel The Ask) as well as emerging novelists Joshua Ferris and Jonathan Dee examine, castigate and celebrate today, while my fellow Canadian writers remain obsessed with yester-year. Egan’s recent A Visit from the Goon Squad mocks celebrity culture and trophy marriages. Dee’s The Privileges boldly reasserts that novels about money are not the exclusive domain of the Victorian novel. Ferris’s chilling The Unnamed and Cunningham’s By Nightfall fearlessly plumb the life-time relationship. Here in Canada we get muskeg tales of outport woe (see February by Lisa Moore and/or Annabel by Kathleen Winter). With The Book of Negroes, a mega bestseller in Canada, Lawrence Hill digs deep to conclude that slavery was bad. Canadian writing grants that should make our fiction brave and bold too often leave it feeling like it was written (reluctantly) by a harried committee at a government ministry.

Sam Lipsyte’s searing, hilarious and moving new novel The Ask is able to judge the society it records without sounding as sanctimonious as a government recycling campaign. Most fiction writers at some point feel the pull of Chekhov’s claim (or Thornton Wilder’s paraphrase) that literature is not bound to answer questions but rather to pose them fairly. However, Chekhov’s advice can create a crippling rudderlessness that leaves superficial fiction misidrected and unengaged. Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad has an utterly condemning scene with a self-inflicted scar. Franzen’s The Corrections has that minor but unforgettable couple who lost their adult daughter to murder. The father responds by eventually deciding to never speak of the matter again. The mother draws the killer’s gun every day then rips up her (near perfect) drawing. Social portraiture is alive and well in American fiction. In The Ask, the multi-talented Sam Lipsyte laughs and cries along with the characters he condemns and condones.

Continue reading »

Apr 032011
 

Christopher Ryan, Ph.D. & Cacilda Jethá, M.D.

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Sex at Dawn: the Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá
Harper, 416 pp., $25.99
ISBN 9780061707803

John Gardner’s lovely On Becoming a Novelist claims that readers have two big incentives to get through long blocks of prose: story and/or argument. In Sex at Dawn: the Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, Christopher Ryan (PhD) and Cacilda Jethá (MD) offer a little of the former and plenty of the latter. With kilos of scientific homework, not home-wrecking confessions, they tell the polyamorous story of human evolution as an argument for contemporary tolerance for open relationships and other strategies for more sexual-social-spiritual contentment and less work for divorce lawyers.

Those of us who teach know that few lessons are as powerful as Thomas Kuhn’s revelatory paradigm shift. Ryan and Jethá start their polyamorous argument in a double bind: Western culture has been so thoroughly and punitively mired in the monogamy paradigm that even the scientists (from Darwin to Stephen Jay Gould) who should be helping create an accurate reflection of open human sexuality often misinterpret, misrepresent or misguide us with physiological and historical evidence that should be a clear argument for some divisions of sex, love and family. To their credit, Ryan and Jethá (a couple) turn this challenge into a key opportunity for this measured, informed account of human sexual mutability. This wake of human intellectual development and the social management of knowledge (plus 65 pages of notes and references) make Sex at Dawn much more than a martini-soaked argument for a key party.

Taccola’s Piston, 15th century

The antagonists of the Sex at Dawn story are (recent, proprietary) monogamy, close-mindedness and unwise policy. Its various protagonists are human and (other) primate anatomy, evolutionary survival, wide-eyed history, and brave honesty. In emphasizing that humans, our closest primate relatives, and proto-humans are physiologically hard-wired for polyamory, Ryan and Jethá make a historical and biological argument, not a revolutionary one. With fact after fact they demonstrate that we almost always have been polyamorous and are physically if not evolutionarily equipped to be so. Citing past precedent and current failure, their argument is much more palpable and significant than any proselytizing campaign. Sex at Dawn doesn’t argue that we should convert to polyamory; it argues that we almost always have been polyamorous and should be again given our current failure at monogamy. Their citation of Schopenhauer’s 1851 essay “On Women” gains additional relevance as we consider contemporary divorce rates, what American literature profs Carmine Sarracino and Kevin M. Scott call The Porning of America, and the global sex trade: “In London alone there are 80000 prostitutes [in 1851!]. Then what are these women who have come too quickly to this most terrible end but human sacrifices on the altar of monogamy?”

Ryan and Jethá’s attention to human sexual anatomy is crucial to their argument that if we want healthier bodies, relationships, and societies we should revert to polyamory. Their comparisons to other primate genitalia and sexual behaviour foreground that theirs is an argument from science, nothing faddish like ‘alternative lifestyles.’ A handy diagram summarizes their repeat and varied attention to the large penis and testicle size of polyamorous humans, bonobos, and chimps (where males aren’t too much bigger than females) compared to polygynous gorillas, where males tower over females to fight off other males then impregnate multiple females with their (relatively) miniscule penis and testicles [truck size joke anyone?]. Gibbons are monogamous and equally sized between the sexes, but they also don’t shag very often and don’t, unlike randy humans and bonobos, ever copulate facing each other. The testicle size issue is illuminating. Male gorillas fight to be the one inseminator of multiple females, so they have put their evolutionary work into arm and chest strength and have “kidney-bean sized” testicles buried up in their bodies. The primate playahs (humans, chimps and bonobos) have evolved sizeable testicles to frequently produce large volumes of ejaculate so their sperm, not their arms, compete within females who have multiple partners.

Vanessa Woods’s public image of the high-empathy bonobo.

Ryan and Jethá’s attention to male and female anatomy is illuminating [oh the back-pumping male penis; oh the attacking acids in the first spurt of male ejaculate], and they augment it with genuine curiosity and intellectual history. In a truly remarkable connection they observe the intellectual taint of biases and reception chronology shared between our current (misinformed) monogamy paradigm and the massive research preference for chimps over bonobos. Genetically, humans are equally similar to combative (and horny) chimps and cooperative (and really horny) bonobos. However, chimps were discovered and brought into comparative research earlier, and various lasting comparisons were cast. Their quotation of Frans de Waal’s Our Inner Ape is a cri de coeur for the social improvement, not just sexual adaptation, Ryan and Jethá advocate:

I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we’d known the bonobo first and chimpanzee only later or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare, and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring, and cooperation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!

As a (rational and compassionate) argument, Sex at Dawn draws as much evidence from history and anthropology as it does from anatomy. In a forthcoming book of poems about evolution, I use a corporeal dramatization of planetary evolution to illustrate the same evolutionary timeline so central to the Sex at Dawn argument. Stretch your arms wide and imagine the creation of Earth at your right fingertips. For the vast majority of planetary history, past your left shoulder, only bacteria existed. Sex didn’t evolve until past your left elbow, as complex plants began to reproduce sexually. Dinosaurs roamed around in the palm of your hand and humans arrived in just the end of your fingernail. Ryan and Jethá treat that fingernail paring forensically and anthropologically, stressing that the vast majority of proto-human and human evolution was spent pre-agriculturally in hunter-gatherer tribes. Nomads who needed to band together to survive were evolutionarily rewarded for cooperation and sharing. The vast majority of human history was spent sharing food, genes and child-rearing. Ryan and Jethá compare early humans and twentieth-century hunter-gatherer tribes in which rotating sexual partners meant any man could be the father of various children and therefore all men provided for all children. Later they contrast that cooperative child rearing with the high divorce rates and the very large fraction of single-parent families in contemporary America, citing studies which show that single-parent children under-perform on “every single significant outcome related to short-term well-being and long-term success.” As Ryan points out in one of his two stimulating appearances on Dan Savage’s sex-advice podcast, only with the very recent human switch to agriculture did humans shun cooperative, communal ownership (and polyamory) for private ownership of land, seeds and their heirs (through monogamous marriage).

How Reymont and Melusina were betrothed / And by the bishop were blessed in their bed on their wedlock. From the Melusine, 15th century.

While the thoroughness, variety and balance of Ryan and Jethá’s case are crucial to demonstrating what to many will still be a radical thesis, the abundance of evidence actually becomes a rhetorical challenge. Admittedly, logic and organizational ease do favour a loosely chronological development from proto-humans to (racier) later chapters on the West’s policing of the female orgasm. In general, the first half is more anthropological and the second, much more gripping half, is anatomical. Readers interested in—forgive me—hard persuasion may appreciate anthropological example after example, but there’s a risk of losing sight of the argumentative forest for its evidentiary trees. References to South American tribes, remote Chinese communities and enlightened Indian provinces are important reminders that divisions between sex and love are healthy and that human behaviour, not just anatomy and bonobos, favour multiple sexual partners. Nonetheless, chapter after chapter of anthropology may prevent readers from getting to the later, better chapters. Without Sex at Dawn, who would know that “By 1917, there were more vibrators than toasters in American homes”? The argumentative foreplay is great. For a while.

—Darryl Whetter

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Photo: Nicole Dixon

Darryl Whetter’s latest book is The Push & the Pull, a novel of bicycling and bisexuality. In April 2012, he will release a debut book of poems about evolution (including the evolution of sex). He’s also at work on a novel about polyamory.

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May 272010
 

In the dark days after the humiliating defeat of our villanelle, Paris and I have done some serious soul-searching.  The defeat weighs heavy on her (as it does on the author.)  She remains convinced that the Numero Cinq readership failed to identify the alternating motifs of pathos and love within the poem’s intricate structure.  But alas, as Paris tells me frequently, “Get over yourself.”  (Have truer words ever been spoken?)  We will be back, she vows.

So sex then.  An odd thing happened to me this semester:  almost all of my stories became highly sexualized.  I can’t blame my advisor for this, short of saying that he pressed me to build strong desire/resistance patterns in story structure.  He admonished me to make something happen in my stories, but didn’t say how.  As I reflected back on the stories I wrote this semester, I was surprised to see how I dealt with his guidance: I put a lot of sex in my stories.  This lead me to ponder, why?  I think the answer lies in a deeper, more complex relationship between the mind and the body, a relationship steeped in my culture and history as much as anything personal.

The Canadian poet, Steven Heighton, says that “violence is the sexuality of America.”  In his essay, “Body Found in Reservoir,” he explores how portrayals of violence in North American culture reflect a punishment of the body for its sexuality.  Another Canadian, songwriter Bruce Cockburn, put it this way in his song “Last Night of the World,”: “I learned as a child not to trust in my body//I’ve carried that burden through my life//But there’s a day when we all have to be pried loose.”  I didn’t consciously seek to ‘pry loose’ this mind-body contradiction in my stories this semester.  It arrived because I wanted to add a component of strong desire to my writing, but at what point does a torrid sex scene become, as my wife recently commented on one of my stories, gratuitous?   Heighton says this:

Violence is the sexuality of white North America because violence is all we have left.  The passions demand a physical outlet but in our bones we feel it’s somehow wrong to love the body.  So sex—no matter how aggressively marketed or universally portrayed, no matter how frankly and coolly discussed on talk shows or in the narcotic literature of self-help—remains fraught with an obscure gloom and guilt.”

Hollywood certainly offers up raw sexuality at every turn.  To return to my muse: Paris Hilton embodies this contradiction.   Her sexuality certainly calls attention to her body, but the mind seems a tad empty.  (Sorry P.)  Our culture in general offers the body willingly, with its ubiquitous promises of a perfect, unobtainable model (botox, liposuction, laser hair removal, Hair Club for Men, etc.)  Yet all these ‘cures’ seem to take us further away from the real body and into some hyped-up fantasy of perfection, which constantly implies that such perfection lies tantalizing close but always a hair-breadth out of reach.  Steven Heighton puts it more eloquently:

For the first few hundred years, it (the hiding of the body) worked.  Nowadays, if North Americans are still fundamentally puritanical, they show as much skin as anyone else—though in this seeming casualness there’s a strain of the frantic exhibitionism I mentioned before in regard to porn.  No group of people at peace with their bodies could muster such sad, huddled masses of anorexics and bulimics and the world’s highest per capita rate of abuse of steroids, sleeping pills, sedatives, and laxatives.

So back to my sexual drift this semester:  Did my use of sexuality in creating characters or situations reflect a healing of the mind-body?  Can I continue to write about sex without turning it into soft-porn?  The following sexual motifs appeared in my last four stories:  men masturbating each other in a foxhole, a threesome, oral sex in a parking lot, and S&M scenes between a husband and wife.  None of these stories was explicitly about sex, but these recurring situations gave me some pause.  Clearly a good sex scene ratchets ups the tension in a story, but writing about sex is certainly not daring anymore.  So what am I trying to accomplish with this?  A part of an answer might lie in Nancy Willard’s essay, “What We Write When We Write About Love.”  (Found in The Best Writing on Writing anthology edited by Jack Heffron.)  Willard describes a childhood scene where she is supposed to be watching a group of fraternity brothers serenading her sister as part of a courting ritual.  Instead of watching, she turns her binoculars onto a couple in the back seat of a car, doing what couples do in the backseat of cars.

Writing a love story is a little like finding yourself with a pair of binoculars in your hand, caught between passion and scruples, ceremony and sex.  If you err too far in either direction, you can end up on the side of pornography or romance.  The difference between a love story and a romance is one of intent.  When you write a romance, you carefully follow where many have trod, so that your readers can recognize the genre through its conventions.  But in a love story, you try to show love as if your characters had just invented it.  Follow your characters, and they will give you the story, but you can’t tell ahead of time where they’ll lead you.

What I draw from this is that sexuality becomes a matter of intent, not content.  It becomes a matter of healing, not manipulation.  It arcs toward love, toward the fusion of the mind-body gap.  It should celebrate, not denigrate.   Heighton says, “wherever the flesh is hated, or endangered, love is threatened as well.”

—Richard Farrell