....about these things.
That's what stands out right away (imho) about Anaïs Nin's "Delta of Venus" and "Little Birds," her two erotic classics.
(You think I was kidding about being enraged by that 'erotic novel' in the bookstore. Here's how not kidding I was: I am going to keep going on the real erotica, the deep-vein, necessary stuff, until further notice, pausing only to make those random observations or useless Enneagram-typings of Tolkien and Rowling characters as I may deem necessary for recreational purposes.)
But anyhow--that's what stands out to me, really, about "Delta of Venus" and "Little Birds"--the silences between the lovers. The silences within them. Their sexual worlds are made out of whispers overheard in darkness, rumors, stories, things they've glimpsed when they were where they shouldn't be. They keep these totems of found experience hidden most completely from each other; they come together less like lovers than like raindrops and thunder pelting at the behest of larger, unseen forces. They rarely dream of speaking the resulting revelations.
In this world of sex columnists and polyamory websites, where even fundamentalists are on the sex-positive, wholesome-frankness, work-on-it-together-for-joy bandwagon, the silences of Nin's people in their moments of communion are what mark them as belonging to another age. Another world, really. All the more so, the fact that they don't even see themselves that way. They think they are communicating. But only sometimes, very rarely, and by accident, are they right.
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I wonder if Nin's use of proper words (penis, vulva) in her stories was radical in a time when euphemisms were required for any careful public speech. It seems that, today, those words have sadly been reserved for "proper," clinical, official speech, and only their anti-euphemisms, their meaner sisters, are left for off-label use. Too bad. There's something naked about the 'real' words. Naked and vulnerable, stripping in an interesting way. De-mythologizing. That's helpful. You wouldn't want them for every single context...but you do want them.
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Interestingly, in her preface to "Little Birds," Nin herself claimed that writing erotica is inherently distorting: "It is one thing to include eroticism in a novel or a story and quite another to focus one's whole attention on it. The first is like life itself. It is, I might say, natural...But focusing wholly on the sexual life is not natural...[it is] an abnormal activity that ends by turning [the doer] away from the sexual."
Well, she and her friends were doing it for money, so that's her problem right there. Any kind of creative writing that you undertake solely for money, regardless of your feelings or inspiration, is going to take it out of you.
But there is a larger (and less negative) point lurking in there.
If you read Nin's brief, Calvino-like portraits, each of them hauntingly inconclusive, if you spend time with these imaginary people, you do come away covered with the dust of their souls. All their thunderous rolling does point beyond itself, taking you "away from the sexual" in a downright provocative way. Yes.
Humanism takes many forms. Tantra is a spiritual path.
