The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010) (26 page)

So the Buddhist concept of ‘mindfulness’ is also necessary for love. But it is necessary to remember why Buddha and other thinkers were frightened by love – there is also the wildness, the lunacy.

Love is supported by a tripod whose three legs are liking, respect and desire. If any leg buckles, the whole thing crashes down – but only liking and respect are subject to sweet reason. Desire is the joker in the pack, the dark force that renders everything volatile, complex and unstable.

Like weather and the stock market, marriage (or any live-in sexual relationship) is a chaotic system. This is a system driven by forces too complex to understand, and subject to long runs of similar behaviour which cannot be explained by randomness. So good or bad weather tends to go on being good or bad and a rising or falling market to persist in the trend. Similarly, in marriage, calm will tend to lead to more calm and quarrels to more quarrels. But another feature of chaotic systems is that the lengthy runs are abruptly terminated by something unpredictable and frequently trivial – a tiny change in input produces what seems a massively disproportionate change in output. This is the cliché of the butterfly fluttering its wings in South America causing a storm in northern Europe. For a marriage it means that everything can appear to be going well until one partner utters one wrong word and all hell breaks loose.

In other words the system goes into turbulence, where none of the normal laws applies. On his deathbed, the physicist Werner Heisenberg said that he had only one question for God:
why turbulence?
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Deceased lovers might be inclined to ask God the same question. How can everything turn instantaneously into its opposite – love into hatred, kindness into cruelty, the desire to please into the desire to wound, and the desire to look upon the beloved forever into the desire never to see this loathsome face ever again? A marital row is a strange and frightening phenomenon, a sudden cyclone that whips both parties off the ground, hurls them around the sky insanely for a time and finally dumps them back on earth, exhausted, drained and bewildered.
What the hell was all thaft
But the dynamics of the process are impossible to explain. Although every couple since Adam and Eve has had this experience, there are few convincing descriptions in literature of the authentic marital explosion. Like most writers, John Milton evades the problem, saying of Adam and Eve’s first quarrel, ‘Thus they in mutual accusation spent ⁄ The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning.’
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The explosive factor is sex. Any sexual relationship is inherently unstable. The problem is inordinate need combined with utter powerlessness over the object of this need; the result is a desperation that can make love instantaneously flip over into its opposite – a uniquely ugly hatred compounded by shame, disgust and rage at helplessness. So, the overwhelming urge to possess becomes suddenly an equally overwhelming urge to annihilate. An American judge has remarked that he is more concerned for his safety with divorcing couples than with violent criminals and that he and many other judges have panic buttons in their chambers for use when marital rage gets out of hand.
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Tension is at the heart of every sexual relationship because the animal and emotional needs are painfully urgent but never fully understood or under control. Yet the tension is central to the relationship. What threatens to blow it apart is also what makes it live. Although companionship is essential and companionable sex is one of the great consolations of maturity, a sexual relationship can never slip too far into mere friendliness. Equilibrium and stability may be tempting but they are the equilibrium and stability of death. There must always be an element of danger and risk. Every lover has to be a demon lover.

But demons are easily bored. When a relationship is in trouble, sex is usually the first thing to go. Frequently this falling-off is the first warning sign. So sex is the canary in the mineshaft: if it sings all is well; if it dies the atmosphere is becoming poisonous.

How to keep the canary singing? How to keep the demon involved? One of many problems with sex is that it is rarely about sex but often really about any number of other things including vanity, power, control, reassurance, habit, novelty, keeping up with fashion and getting what everyone else appears to be getting. And nowadays it is increasingly a branch of the entertainment industry – there are already sex theme parks in several countries. I may well belong to the last generation for whom sex is a mystery, a miracle, an inexhaustible source of wonder. Merely to be in the presence of a woman is to be touched by the sublime. Once everyone was thus ensorcelled, enraptured, enchanted. But now sex is just one more form of idle amusement.

Modern love is photographing yourself being sucked off and, with the help of the obliging technology, immediately circulating the photograph to your large circle of friends.

And we are jaded now. We have tested and tasted too much, urged on by advice endlessly stressing the importance of novelty, repeating that the secret of a successful relationship is making the sex varied and fresh. As with its political predecessors, the sexual revolution has become a kind of tyranny.

The original manual for the liberated age,
The Joy of Sex
, was published back in 1972
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and, though a revelation in its time (introducing the world to gourmet delights such as the flanquette, the Viennese oyster, and birdsong at morning), has had to be revised and extended to include over a hundred new positions and to acknowledge the growing importance of BDSM and the emergence of the anus as a major new heterosexual resource.
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In fact, the contemporary lover needs not just one but an entire collection of manuals – to include reference works on erotic furniture (love swings, smothering boxes, queening stools), erotic jewellery (nipple clamps, cock rings, butt plugs) and, of course, the rapidly evolving technology (the vibrating Rabbit strap-on, the multi-speed turbo bullet, the Teledildonic Sinulator). Already it must be time for a Museum of Sex Toys, where couples of a certain age weep bitter-sweet tears at the sight of the original Non-Doctor Vibrator in its 1970
s
packaging showing, on the front of the box, the heavily lipsticked and mascaraed model with backcombed, flicked-out, lacquered hair. The heartbreaking simplicity of it all in the old days! Now having sex is like putting on a Broadway musical – it requires an original script, costumes, props, a stage set, special lighting and, of course, a fit, energetic and enthusiastic all-singing and all-dancing cast of athletes and acrobats. Now everyone has to be a circus in bed…no, a circus all over the home.

And to guide bewildered lovers through all of this there is a growing army of therapists and counsellors, frequently offering advice on prime-time television. These men and women are bright-eyed, fervent believers on a contemporary quest for the Holy Grail of the G spot, a site as legendary, rich and difficult to find as the buried city of Atlantis. In fact, the G does not stand for Grail, but for the original G-man, Ernst Grafenberg, a German gynaecologist who speculated that there must be an erotic zone on the front wall of the vagina because the stimulating effect of doggy-style sex ‘must not be explained away…by the melodious movements of the testicles like a knocker on the clitoris’.
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And the new high priests of sex also worship a Holy Trinity. A conventional orgasm is not bad, concedes a radiant TV therapist, but much better is the ‘bigasm’ which involves both clitoris and G spot, and the ultimate goal is of course the ‘trigasm’ in which the Holy Trinity all participate – clitoris, G spot and anus uttering hosannas in unison.
Mord

The problem is that sex is losing touch with physical appetite and the body’s natural cycle and capability. Even sexual identity has become uncertain and fluid. Few are entirely sure of being straight, gay or both. There is always the haunting thought of missing out on fulfilment in some other identity. And, in losing contact with physical identity and needs, sex becomes increasingly cerebral, driven by concept and image, with the concepts supplied by fantasy and the images by pornography. And the fantasy is driven in turn by novelty and transgression, hence the fascination with anal sex – the anus is the new vagina – and the transgressive thrills of BDSM. It is certainly ironic, and possibly significant, that the age of liberation is increasingly turned on by bondage. One of the most popular products in the Ann Summers chain of sex shops is the Bondage Starter Kit. And the latest BDSM kick for the jaded is paying to have yourself kidnapped: as you walk along the street, a van suddenly screeches up and several burly men in balaclavas jump out and bundle you away to a basement where they inflict all the indignities specified in the contract. (Apparently there are national differences in abductor preference – the English love to be seized by American Deep South hillbillies.) The ingenious feature of this service is that it plays not just on the desire for bondage but also on the contemporary thrill of expectation – the customer never knows where or when the ‘customized abduction’ will happen, and has days or even weeks of delicious anticipation. And the waiting period can be further enhanced by surveillance and stalking, so that attention is added to expectation. Finally, the satisfied abductee is presented with a souvenir DVD of the experience (because an experience hasn’t happened unless it is captured on film). The genius who created this service should be a candidate for entrepreneur of the century.
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But where is the harm in such play-acting? The men in balaclavas are limited to specific contractual instructions; the Ann Summers handcuffs are lined with pink fur. The problem is that transgressive pleasure always requires more to reproduce the original kick. So one minute you’re being delightfully spanked with a silk slipper and the next minute you’re having your scrotum nailed to the floor.

And transsexuals are a new fascination because they embody maximum potential by combining identities, functions and equipment – human Swiss Army knives. They are not only concepts made images but made images of flesh and blood. A trannie is a walking, talking, living, breathing sex toy. And the concept is also exciting to consumers because it is a 2-for-l offer – buy one gender, get one free.

Another new factor is that the images that fuel all this, pornographic movies, once expensive, difficult and embarrassing to access, are now available free in the comfort of home. Porn certainly perks up the canary but its distortions are legion. Ironically, for the age of expectation, porn omits the most thrilling expectation of all – foreplay, the intoxication of proximity and fragrance, the electricity of worshipful touch, the enchanting glide of zips and the yielding of buttons, the stirring rustle and slither and soft fall of garments. Instead, porn cuts straight to naked pumping and sucking. The action must always be dramatic and visible. So, instead of tender union there is frantic driving, and it is always the man pumping madly, whereas to achieve orgasm the woman needs to control the rhythm and make it more gentle (although not at the end). And instead of orgasm within, there is always the money shot of ejaculation over the woman. Hence the new sweet nothing murmured by male lovers: ‘Can I come in your face?’

But the orifices and positions and combinations are limited. Soon everything human bodies are capable of will be available for viewing in everyone’s living room. Where then will we turn for transgressive excitement? Visionaries are already working on this problem. David Levy, an artificial intelligence researcher, promises that by the mid-twenty-first century, love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans, while the number of sexual acts and love-making positions commonly practised between humans will be extended, as robots teach more than is in all of the world’s sex manuals combined.’
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This contemporary obsession with variety as the way to prevent habituation is misplaced. In an experiment on appetite two groups of volunteers were invited to attend a laboratory once a week for tests, which were in fact a sham – the real experiment was the snack offered as a reward. One group was allowed to choose all their snacks in advance and so opted for variety; the others were given their favourite snack every week. When satisfaction ratings were compared at the end of the study, those on the same snack turned out to be more satisfied than those with variety.
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The explanation is that the time-lapse of a week was sufficient to renew the appeal of the old favourite. So rarity may be better than variety at beating the habituation trap, and the spice of life may not be variety but having what you enjoy most at appropriate intervals.

Also misplaced is the idea that love is the consequence of sexual fulfilment. It may well be the other way round. The most satisfying sex is an expression of tenderness, not a mastery of the techniques in the manual.

The deepest pleasures are those that have been earned, and it is no different with sex. So the most intense experiences come after difficulty, pain, anger and turbulence – in other words, after violent quarrelling. Reconciliation sex is the most sublime experience available to the human creature.

Of course, this is a rare bounty. For regular pleasure, here is a radical suggestion, to be implemented only at suitable intervals – the sex of simplicity, the sex of less, Zen sex. Let the lovers lie in bed at night, touching and marvelling, at intervals seeking each other’s mouths for silent but profound communication of gratitude. Eventually, moving slowly as one, they assume the missionary position and tenderly conjoin. Then, in sweet silence and practically motionless (with the minimal movement directed by the woman), they lie still and permit an autonomous ecstasy to steal slowly over them.

Perhaps this would be the ideal way to depart from life? There would also be the exquisite absurdity of simultaneously coming and going. But a lifetime of responsible and considerate behaviour would never permit leaving a lover with the nuisance of a corpse. That would
so
ruin the sweet, silent, still afterglow.