Lost in the Cosmos

need-satisfaction and as such subject to those techniques of the age by which such satisfactions are best arrived at and with the least damage to others. And why not? Cannot recreational sex be enjoyed responsibly, that is, without damage to one’s health or the health of others, physical health and emotional health? One can eat one’s cake and have it too. The words responsibility, mutuality, sharing, caring, are easily added, the cake’s icing.
    A S HORT H ISTORY OF THE D EMONIAC S PIRIT OF
THE E ROTIC AND THE V IOLENT IN THE C HRISTIAN
E RA,
IN THE T RANSITION FROM
THE C HRISTIAN E RA TO THE T ECHNOLOGICAL E RA ,
AND F INALLY IN A P URELY T ECHNOLOGICAL E RA

    St. Paul: The triumph of the spirit over the flesh, but still bothered by a “thorn in the flesh” (unlike Socrates, who wouldn’t have worried).
    St. Augustine: The triumph of the love of God in the City of God over lust in the city of man, but—“Grant me the gift of continence, but not just yet.”
    Dante: Sexual sinners in the outermost, least punitive, circle of hell, storm-tossed, blown to and fro like birds on the winds of desire, yet still together and still in love. Cf. traitors and murderers in innermost circle, up to their necks in boiling pitch.
    Chaucer’s Miller and Wife of Bath: The frankly erotic harmonized comically and humanely as earthy transgressions, committed and recognized as sins, but without neurotic guilt and to be forgiven by the loving Lord and Master, the goal of the Canterbury pilgrimage.
    Don Giovanni: The appearance of the pure demoniac spirit of the erotic; the Don’s seduction of 1,003 women set to the joyful music of Mozart; yet this same spirit of the erotic posited by Christianity, e.g., the damnation of the Don and his descent before our eyes into the fires of hell.
    Fanny Hill: The spirit of the erotic in English pornography; the sinister charm of secret sex under the veneer of Christian proprieties and layers of Victorian clothes; the white skin of thighs against black stockings.
    World War I: Joyce Kilmer’s poetry, Colleen Moore in Lilac Time, “ Mademoiselle from Armentières”; the erotic diminished to the sentimental and to good-natured sex between the doughboy and the French farm girl; with a decline in passion and the spirit of the erotic, and an increase in violence with the rise of technology; 20,000,000 dead.
    World War II: Betty Grable, Anne Frank, Adolf Eichmann, Stalin; the subsidence of the erotic in favor of a rise in the dispassionate, abstract violence of ideology, Fascism, Nazism, Communism; war increasingly in the hands of technicians; the decency of Truman and Oppenheimer contrasted with the death of 100,000 women and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Arendt’s banality of evil = the growing disparity between the monstrous violence of technology and the smallness of the technician-perpetrators; World War II as a transition period between the decline of the Christian era and the rise of the age of technology; 50,000,000 dead.
    Period between World War II and World War III: The ascendancy of the erotic; the eroticization of all sectors of culture: work and play, films, TV, novels, plays, commercials; yet the spirit of the erotic is still posited and specified by lingering Christianity, e.g., the charm of the secrecy of sex under clothes, the charm of “forbidden” sex, liaisons, pornography; pornography as “dirty” yet interesting, or rather, “dirty,” therefore interesting; the hypocrisy of some critics: critics who say that pornography is dull, whereas in fact pornography is for many readers the last resort of interest after the disappointments of age; the critic, of all people, knows that the non-pornographic novel is generally so boring that he hopes for the “dirty part” like a schoolboy looking for the “good parts” of Ulysses.
    The spirit of violence vented in spectatorship sport, either through mass TV viewership or surrogate participation, e.g., 100 million people watching the Super-Bowl; Little League moms screaming curses at umpires, and dads punching out other dads and later beating up their own kids; the ultimate inadequacy of the spectatorship safety valve: thirty-eight dead in a riot at a Buenos Aires soccer game; war.
    World War III: The year 2000 +, the demoniac spirit of the erotic no longer posited by Christianity but triumphant in its own right, perfected as genital technique but deprived of the charm of the forbidden, the secret, the “dirty,”