Ecstasy
In the wake of the Thomas-Hill catastrophe in Washington, the New York Times Sunday Magazine contained a skin lotion advertisement that displayed a photograph of the naked torso of a woman. From a feminist point of iew, this headless and footless body represents the male chauvinist’s sexual ideal: a woman who cannot think and cannot escape. From a point of view somewhat more comprehensive—the point of view of community—it represents also the commercial ideal of the industrial economy: the completely seducible consumer, unable either to judge or to resist.
The headlessness of this lotionable lady suggests also another tleling indication of the devaluation of sexual love in modern times—that is, the gravitation of attention from the countenance, especially the eys, to teh specifically sexual anatomy. The difference, of course, is that the countenance is both physical and spiritual. There is much testimony to this in the poetic tradition and elsewhere. Looking to one another’s eyes, lovers recognize their encounter as a meeting not merely of two bodies but of two living souls. In one another’s eyes, moreover, they see themselves reflected not narcissisticly but as singular beings, separate and small, far inferior to the creature that they together make.
In this meeting of eyes, there is an acknowledgment that love is more than sex:
‘This Ecstasy done unperplex,’
We said, “and tell us what we love;
We see by this it was not sex;
We see we saw not what did move.
These lines are from John Donne’s poem “The Ecstasy,” in which the lovers have been joined by the “double string” of their mutual gaze. This is not a disembodied love. Far from it. For love is finally seen in the poem as “that subtle knot, which makes us man” by joining body and soul together, just as it joins the two lovers. Sexual love is thus understood as both fact and mystery, physical motion and spiritual motive. That this complex love should be reduced simply to sex has always seemed a fearful thing to the poets.
Wendell Berry
