The Song of Solomon and Erotic Dysfunction

A “celebration of married sex” is the usual Christian description of the S.O.S.: you can Google it to see the kerffufliana and anxiety around its interpretation.  And to be very sure, the allegorical reading of the poem as a love-note between God and Israel (or the Church, or the Soul) is ancient, rabbinical, and classical.

I taught all that (except for the “married” part), but not until we’d uncovered its erotic characteristics.  And in my reading of the poem, it isn’t anything like a celebration of married love.   One aspect of the Song of Solomon though that’s underexplored is the enormous tension in it between sexual desire and the disapproval of the community.

Click to read more ...

Love, Limerence, and Judgment

“Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.” The medievals called it “hereos,” the moderns call it “limerence.” Whatever it is, everyone agrees with Humphrey Bogart that it sucks donkey-balls. But you must remember this: the fundamental things apply as time goes by.

“Andreas Cappelanus does add on the authority of Eleanor of Acquitaine that in love, jealousy is absolutely required.  Cappelanus argues that married people cannot be in love for this reason.  Serious or ironic?  You decide. 

“Fast forward to 2012, when our sexual / erotic culture is at least largely founded on Cappelanus’ treatise.  We do regard romantic love as ennobling, whereas a lot of cultures found it to be a suspicious and sometimes even dangerous breach of self-control and reason…. things change. Pressures come to bear on the lovers, and one or the other cracks, gets bored, moves on, or has to go assist her husband, the emblem of Nazi resistence, who is sick in a boxcar outside Paris. And the eternal thing, the illness-from-which-you-could-not-get-well lifts from one partner and seizes the other with four times the strength….”

Click to read more ...

The Flaw In The Design: Thinking About Falling In and Out Of Love

Heloise and Abelard, by Jenny Chi. Used by kind permission. It was a bad day in the twelfth century sometime when some men broke into Professor Peter Abelard’s cell and had him castrated….

… Giving the heart away is a risky business, because you really don’t know the quality of a person until the chips are down. And then you discover some shocking things. Most notably, you discover that very often when people say things in love, they only mean them while they’re in love.

Click to read more ...

A Few Observations On The Song of Solomon

Before the Song of Solomon was read allegorically, the poem was quite simply an erotic poem, filled with sensual imagery of a kind that surprises and often delights student-readers: it's not the disconnected individualistic sexual imagery of modern day fucking-around.  It's rooted in both the land and in the local community.   While it is wrong to say (as Christian books about it constantly do say) that "it's a celebration of married love" (details in the poem indicate the couple is not married), it would be right to suggest that the poem captures the psychology of marriage, the desire to be, and the necessity of bringing sexual energy into a productive relationship to protect it from the shame that it causes when it's left unregulated.

Click to read more ...