The Force of Character by James Hillman

Author:James Hillman [Hillman, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-82859-0
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

Erotics

Of all problems eroticism is the most mysterious,

the most general and the least straightforward.

For the [person] … whose life is open to exuberance,

eroticism is the greatest problem of all.

Georges Bataille

Eh, mister! Your fly is open, mister.

James Joyce

According to a tradition that goes back to the Problemata attributed to Aristotle, old age is the period of life when lust becomes most extravagant. The old are under the influence of Saturn and therefore succumb easily to the furor melancholicus, a condition of the psyche that fosters creative art, prophecy, and exaggerated emotional instability. Other terms used for this visionary possession are “excess of pneuma” (too much airy spirit) and “heightening of the vis imaginativa” (force of imagination). As physical powers wane, imagination cuts loose and runs wild. On the one hand, impotence, misogyny, and depressive isolation; on the other, the lewd fantasies of the dirty old man, that old goat.

“Melancholies” were susceptible “especially to visual images.”1 “Mental pictures or images (phantasmata) affected the mind [of the melancholic] more strongly and were more compelling than was the case with other people.” “This exaggerated irritability of the imagining power (vis imaginativa) was later believed … to enhance the power of visual imagination.”2 According to this Aristotelian physiology, “all really outstanding men, whether in the realm of the arts or in those of poetry, philosophy or statesmanship—even Socrates and Plato—, were melancholies.”3

The ancient physiology explains quite rationally why airy fantasies (phantasmata) literally affect the genitals: “For the sexual act is connected with the generation of air, as is shown by the fact that the virile organ quickly increases from a small size by inflation.”4 Lustful thoughts and images swell the organs.

Leonardo da Vinci at the beginnings of modern scientific experimentation graphically demonstrated this ancient pneumatic physiology. His cross-sectional drawings of the penis (based on anatomical dissection) showed two passages, one for seminal fluids, the other for the pneuma or aura seminalis.5 Erection required imagination.

Today’s physiology tells a different story. It leaves out the heightened vis imaginativa, reporting only that “the ovaries in women and the sexual capacity of men decline faster than perhaps anything else in the body.”6 As female lubrication dries and male erection withers, performance anxiety increases, thereby increasing performance failure, thereby increasing performance anxiety, ad infinitum. The comic tragedy of old bodies trying to get it on.

While performance subsides, the range of erotic fantasy extends and enlivens. Samuel Atkin, psychoanalyst, afflicted with Parkinson’s, reports in his faithfully honest diary:

Dec. 1st … Awoke in a state of sexual excitement. Hurray! The erotic impulse still operates. Although my Parkinsonian exhaustion leaves me weak, a barely audible voice, dizzy, practically unable to move or to write, in pain, I feel “zestful.” I am having a good time. Here is victory over decay.… New antics. This erotic upsurge. A creative impulse. Pratfalls. A clown. (The tragic clown.)

Feb 10th—I started my day in a depressed state—half dead. I will end it in glory. Erotic thoughts: I possess three things—(1) an active mind, perhaps less capable of

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