How is the Erotic necessarily linked with creative activity? As, in the beginning, the dawn of consciousness and self-realization divides humanity from pure instinct, it also arouses desire and lack, the specific seeds of human creativity. Creativity and the Erotic are intimately connected through their common central foci of imagination and desire. As Octavio Paz notes in The Double Flame, eroticism is only human and defined as "sexuality socialized and transfigured by the imagination and the will of human beings."(9) As the imagination is a driving thirst for any creation, the erotic act combines its force with natural animal sexuality to constantly transform their definitions and put them into play. Paz distinguishes the sexual activity of the human and animal on the extremes of a continuum, and notes that within the species, " However odd animal copulations may be, some tender and some fierce, there is no variation in them," and that they are " A terrifying and prodigious monotony, which in the human world becomes a terrifying and prodigious diversity."(10)The game of the erotic is thus a shimmering text, becoming ever-new through the creation and interpretation of each individual. The metamorphosing quality is interwoven with the continually shifting golden threads of desire which elude every glance that try to define its composition.

Desire's metaphors are called forth in the literary embrace, and in the erotic nature of the body's narrative. Paz brings forth the creative transformations of sexuality to construct an equation of eroticism being the poetry of sex. His conception indicates that poetry, which uses everyday language, is as to the Erotic which uses ubiquitous instinctual sexuality. He notes that imagination's play with the Erotic is composed of forms "derived from the sexual instinct: crystallizations, sublimations, perversions, and condensations which transform sexuality, very often into something unknowable."(7) In this way, the erotic encounter's creativity is unlimited and extends beyond its origin in the senses. As the multifarious couplings of desire, language, and the imagination flow together with the senses, they pool into the creative fountain. This life source, unifies the endeavors of literature and the Erotic.

In Erotic Literature, Jane Mills reemphasizes the similar nature of literature and the erotic within the space of the imagination. She notes that:

What the lover wants from love and what the reader wants from reading are very similar experiences, both embodying a reaching out for the unknown. 'What is erotic about reading (or writing)', Carson explains, 'is the play of imagination called forth in the space between you and your object of knowledge. Poets and novelists, like lovers, touch that space to life with their metaphors…'. At the core of desire is imagination, and imagination is at the core of metaphor. It is essential to sexual love and to the activity of reading. (5)

It is important that the creative Erotic and erotic creativity seek the identical ends of "the unknown," which can also be referring to the Other. The space between us and the compelling "unknown" as it can be approached by imagination and metaphor, it can be disintegrated in the moment of sexual ecstasy. With this erotic moment, the knowledge of the conscious division is detached, and we fuse metaphorically with the lover, the object of desire, as in reading/writing, we fuse past the uncertain signs and words to become enraptured by the "object of knowledge." The lack that composes desire, specifically that lack of the unknown Other, is thus a challenge that erotic literature faces in its creative means and in its chosen subject. As this lack is inherent in both artistic and erotic encounters, both sculpt attempts to bridge the conscious division and to reach toward the Other.

In The Double Flame, Paz the brings the connection of creativity and desire into the external histoical and culture influences on the literary realm. He notes how our image of love, which could also be our metaphoric creation/conception of the erotic "portrays the changes of society. The history of love is the history of a passion but also of a literary genre--of the images that writers give us."(167) The way the resonating images of love and the erotic are portrayed thus parallel society's conception of them. For Paz, changes in these creative expressions of desire correspond to changes in the movements of literature. As he notes, "Literature paves the way for them, reflects them, converts them into high ideals." (168) The search for the unknown Other in erotic literature is thus influenced by its cultural context. We must note literature influences the imagination's seeking, not by merely giving it objects of thought/desire, but also through transforming its desires into "ideals." Literature's creation of a face for desire, of its metaphoric representation through an image, thus becomes a powerful force for the embodiment of desire, as noted above in Butler's sifting of desire.

Creativity's specific relation to the realm of the ideal is also prevalent in Paz. He notes how the spectrum of desire's creative aspects in Plato's Symposium ranges between solely natural procreation and imaginative creation's search for a higher form:

Procreation, Plato says, is divine, among animals and humans alike. But the other mode of procreation is higher: for the soul engenders in another soul imperishable ideas and feelings. Those who are "fecund by way of the soul" conceive through thought: poets, artists, sages..." 46

 

 

 

Diotima in discourse: love of body-->beauty-->virtuous soul-->of idea of beauty (relate to Venus)

******man/masc. vs. woman/fem.--unity in act::Platonic ideal: Eros, desire makes us turn away from material world to seek transcendent union

frailness of human being/body compared to soul/pure, intense emotions

This concept of the ideal strongly gravitates to the conception that Deleuze elucidates in Coldness and Cruelty of the progression from the body to art to the ideal.

In this combination, the physical/sexual interaction becomes a path that in releasing rational thinking to ecstasy, points to the divine and transcendent. Thus, an instinctual, first-degree experience that in its pushes away language, gains an astounding character when its mystery is consciously transformed. Bataille notes that with this transformation, a mere act of the physical becomes a reunion with the sacred that mortals gain in their consciousness of death. The contemplation of the mysterious reunion, when developed by one who is aware of their own finity, thus becomes a creative expression. (larmes)

The ability to play allows conscient humanity to transform its actions into meaningful creations and destructions.

Artistic creation, being both action and work, thus has the erotic quality of a game that answers passion towards the end of satisfaction . (39)

DE BEAUVOIR

female sublimation of energies under repression/boredom p. 296

necessity felt to reproduce--woman’s function as a mother/wife

396 reproductive function vs. erotic pleasure

unspeakable--hard to describe, stifled, censored, mystery, taboo

mystery of the erotic: reach something out of grasp

representation of sex has become: defamiliarized, medicalized, generalized, condemned, put into metaphor

metaphor of the body and its parts in the sexual act

medicalization of parts and functions vs. the literary metaphoric transformation to deal with the sexual act

IDENTITY creativity: making oneself’s expression amongst moral homogeneity

Through reflection, the expression of the erotic mystery is thus appropriately enigmatic in its representation through literature. The language of desire and the limited expression of the erotic experience's mystery which pervades it becomes an expression of an erotic and philosophical identity. The sexual instinct explodes with the complexity of humanity and is distilled into revelation and art.