On Concupiscence

"Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers".
—Wallace Stevens, "The Emperor of Ice Cream"

If I had some sort of “thought” history with which I could record my meanderings throughout any given day, it would be safe to conclude—and I conclude this with the greatest possible regret—that the resulting list would be a most shameful compilation of banalities and vulgarities.

When I ride the bus, I do not use free time wisely: it should be a period for magnanimous musings on the divine—or, in the very least, a time to plan out work. But no: I draw back from such activities like a cat from water: I can’t help but feel slightly detached from abstract theories, from thought, from any intellectual activity. The truth is that such things tire me. Those stories of the great minds permanently cloistered in the unsullied realms of science and mathematics baffle me: one thinks of Feynman’s unhappy first wife, whose motive for divorce was that “day and night, all he ever thought about was calculus”.  But I possess neither the staggering intellect nor the keenness of that eminent luminary: I require a certain vulgarity in my quintessential thoughts. They do not even (as I am woe to admit) possess the dignity to be called thoughts: they are observations—and, even as observations, they are remarkably shallow.

My mind should be wading in pensive streams of enlightenment: I could be, for example, contemplating the thanatophobia of Mahler’s symphonies, the vagaries of Quantum Mechanics, the elegant universality of Plato’s Forms. But sex (maybe too strong a word—physical attraction would describe more aptly what I think about), like some unstoppably invasive species, wipes out all these great intellectual pillars in one fell swoop.

When I ride the bus, women are the only real thing in my mental periphery. Not so much their personalities—God no, those are much, much too hard to grasp for a social buffoon like me—, but their physical attributes.  The faces, heights, weights and fashions of the opposite gender crowd my mind. It hurts my ego terribly to say this, but the daily bus ride is for me what Florence was for Stendhal: an obsessive fascination.  The porcelain features of a red-lipped belle; her svelte physique draped in sunny chiffon or wrapped tightly in a raincoat (depending on the clime of the day): these are the things that preoccupy my mind; that make it buzz with satisfied fervour.

I’ll spare you that clichéd and remarkably pathetic excuse; one so often uttered in defense by those who gaze as I do: that the beauty of a woman, like a great work of art, can be admired safely from a distance sans remords. I do feel, however, that it is important to remark upon the inherent falseness—not to mention the inherent sickness—of such a defense. I never did quite comprehend that moment in Middlemarch where Ladislaw (the archetypal artist as a young man), upon sighting Dorothea for the first time in Rome, becomes enraptured with her painterly visage and sets out to win her affections. My dissatisfaction with Ladislaw’s instantaneous love for Dorothea lay in its utter obliviousness to the desires of the human body: was it not possible that the lofty descriptions he was waxing about her were only a façade for something more carnal; that his artistic admiration for her was only a thin veil for the raging sea that is human sexuality?

It is in rather poor taste, I think, to nitpick Middlemarch alone. Examples of this pitiful “love at first sight” drudgery can be found in a variety of works, ranging from Romeo and Juliet to Les Misérables to Lolita (the latter, of course, hilariously annihilates the notion of “love” itself). In any case, one cannot love-- much less ascertain the value of a person-- merely by sight. I know this maxim to be true, having experienced its rather unpleasant consequences firsthand (it is a personally acknowledged truth that the most attractive people are, more often than not, also the most vapid)—yet, day after day, like an idiotic fly that gravitates towards its incandescent demise, I fall into the same vicious cycle:  I search— not unlike Ladislaw—for a Dorothea, only to be continuously disappointed (not to mention extremely creeped out at my own behaviour).

Does all this make me an immoral man? I cannot shy away, as it seems, from such a damning verdict. And yet, I get the feeling that if I ever told people what I think of myself—namely that I am a depraved ogler at heart—they’d laugh in my face: “You? No way!”  I am, in the eyes of those who know me, desexualised, incapable of deviancy. And so I carry out my silent perversity in anonymity—which, to be honest, is probably a good thing.

If anything, this new-found hobby of mine (how I shudder to call it that!) proves something that I’ve been meaning to prove for a while: that I am not an intellectual; that, given the opportunity to fritter away my life on base, sensual things, I would do so without nary an afterthought nor regret.