Intercourse (7 page)

“Naked came I from my mother’s womb, ” says Job, “and naked shall I return” (Job 1: 21). Naked, stripped down to the elemental human, fragile, exposed and delicate, in birth and in sex and in death, the human condition is minimally this nakedness; being human is also, as Leo Steinberg writes in his essay on the sexuality of Christ as portrayed in many paintings, “the condition of being both deathbound and sexed. ”
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Sex is the dim echo of that original nakedness, primal, before anything else that is also human; later, isolated in an identity, hidden by it, insensate because of it, one is a social human being ruled by conformity and convention, not naked. Intercourse recalls the first nakedness, innocent and basic, but the innocence itself is not recoverable; the nakedness is never again synonymous with being human. One’s skin takes on a social function—even naked, one is not purely naked; social

identity becomes a new, tough, impermeable skin; one’s nakedness is covered over by layers of social self and emotional pain, rituals and rules, habits of being that are antithetical to any pure experience of being. Questions of
what is human,
what is being
, suggest questions of
what is naked, what is sexed
. Questions of metaphysics are questions of sex: especially because in intercourse two separate people physically fuse; break out of the prison of separateness and into the prison of physical need for another; experience the pain of being separate and then the pain of not being separate enough. Intercourse creates a need for society, for humans outside oneself; it pushes one toward others, who are in the world, separate, different. But that society interposes itself—by creating the necessity for identity, by making rules—between two humans, keeping them separate, even during intercourse. This tension is painful, lonely—apart or in sex, the sex being doomed by the necessity, the inevitability, of becoming separate, absolutely separate, again. The skin mediates between separation and fusion. “Assuming that man has a soul, ” writes Abe in
The Woman in the Dunes, “it must, in all likelihood, be housed in the skin”; the skin is “a soft, downlike bandage for the soul. ”
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Abe asks what it means to be human in human skin, and what it means to love, past the boundaries of identity. In his work, sexual intercourse is a metaphor for the human condition, and it is also, as a literal, physical experience, at the heart of human life and meaning.

In
The Woman in the Dunes, a man gets lost in sand dunes and is trapped with a woman in a deep hole in the dunes where she lives; he is kept prisoner there, to keep clearing away the sand (“The village keeps going because we never let up clearing away the sand... ”’),
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to have sex with her; the sand rots everything, including his skin; it is a pervasive physical reality, coarse, intensifying every physical feeling and movement, every moment of survival; he has sex with the woman that is different from the sex in civilization; he tries to escape, fights the sand, is brought back; the hole is the woman, being in it is like being in her; the sand is the burying, enveloping, suffocating, killing quality of sex with a woman, being surrounded by her; the sand on the skin, in the mouth, on her labia, brings the skin to life, to feeling, to intensity, to sex that is not alienated or abstract; in the end, the man chooses to stay in the hole in the dune with the woman.

In
The Face of Another,
a man has lost the skin on his face; the socially tame sex he has with his wife stops because she is repelled; he makes a mask, the face of another, and sleeps with her; he wants to know her, he wants sex beyond the constraints of his identity, but first his real face, then his mask, keep it from happening; his wife has sex with the mask, but it is not breakthrough or abandonment; in the end, she has known him all along—it is his selfishness, she says, that keeps him from getting outside his skin and near her; he insists it is the mask. To overcome the humiliation of having been known by her, fucked yet kept at a distance, he shoots her.

In Abe’s
The Box Man, a man gives up society and lives in a box; the box is his skin; he gives up the box finally to have sex with a woman; they are skinless together—he is skinless without his box, she is skinless naked; when she dresses, their love is over, which is unbearable, so he locks her in the building where they have been living and cuts off the electricity so that in the dark it will be as if she were naked. In the end, he has cut off all routes of escape and he sits in the dark waiting for her to find him.

What one feels on the skin is overwhelming, sensual, dramatic, extreme even when ordinary: “He was melting away like wax. His pores were gorged with perspiration. ”
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The feelings have carnal associations, meanings out of a psychic depth. The man trapped in the hole in the dunes wants to punish the woman who helped trap him there:

At the very thought his hair bristled and his skin felt scratchy like dry paper. “Skin” seemed to establish an association of ideas with the word “force. ” Suddenly she became a silhouette cut out from its background. A man of twenty is sexually aroused by a thought. A man of forty is sexually aroused on the surface of his skin. But for a man of thirty a woman who is only a silhouette is the most dangerous. He could embrace it as easily as embracing himself, couldn’t he?
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He wants to force her, to hurt her; punishment evokes sexual feelings in him; skin is logically connected in his mind with force, because sex is what he feels when he feels the urge to hurt her. The different codes of arousal he describes are a gradual concretization of erotic need: thought to silhouette to getting aroused on the surface of the skin. Force is suggested by the skin, because both to him mean real touch; but as someone still conditioned by civilization to have abstract sexual impulses, he is drawn most by the silhouette, halfway between the Active and the real. In his mind, he is nearly a shadow, as unreal to himself as she is to him; there is a shape but no substance; more than a thought, less than a person.

The skin suggests passion, force, or morbid fear. Or skin houses the soul; this is repeated in more than one Abe book. Or skin is the mask that love strips away; in love, there is the pleasure of removing the mask, so that the lover is truly naked, beyond disguise, unable to hide. The skin is intimate, personal; those who know its meaning revere it, keeping it from casual violation by those who are indifferent to it:

The box with its resident gone was like a deserted house. The aging process had apparently been rapid, and the box had weathered to the color of withered grapes. But at a glance I was able to distinguish that it was the discarded skin of a box man. 
... I instinctively inserted myself into the space and concealed this sloughed-off skin from the gaze of those passing by.
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The skin, dead, is a human remain, with the soul gone, still fragile, what was human in it transformed; “[t]he corpse of the box became a butterfly (if a butterfly is too romantic, then a cicada will do, or a May fly), the cast-off skin of a chrysalis that has flown away. ”
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The skin encases the living thing; the skin, peeled away, still signifies the life that was inside it.

The box man, whose naked human skin is under the box without light or care—think of the skin of the infant, buried alive—is tortured by the skin decomposing: “The itching of disintegrating skin is more difficult to stand than any visceral pain. ”
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Torture where people are tarred or the situation of so-called dancing girls painted in gold who go mad because of the asphyxiation of the skin remind him of his own condition: imprisoned in human skin, unable to get rid of it, disintegrating. He wants “to strip off my own skin including the box the way one peels off the skin of a fig. ”
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And when he and the woman are together, in the heat of love with no barrier between them,

—A sultry wind is blowing between you and me now. A sensual, burning wind is blowing around us.... In the force of the wind and in the heat I seem to have lost my sense of time.

But in any case I realize too that the direction of the wind will probably change. Suddenly it will turn into a cool westerly wind. And then this hot wind will be stripped away from my skin like a mirage, and I shall not even be able to recollect it. Yes, the hot wind is too violent. Within itself is concealed the premonition of its end.
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The heat envelops them, outside time; and when love is gone, there will be no memory of it, no way of bringing it back through memory either, it will have the quality of a hallucination that has disappeared; a cool wind will come, the skin will be stripped of the heat—as if the heat would be forcibly torn from the skin—and once stripped of the heat, it will be stripped of memory; and this end, this cool wind and no memory and the heat being stripped from the skin, is implicit in the intensity and the violence of the experience; the end of passionate love is built into its very intensity.

Being enveloped, weighted down by something outside one that is overwhelmingly encompassing, is the experience of this sexual passion outside identity, the passion outside the control of the ego, which is the servant of routinized civilization. In
The Woman in the Dunes, the captive is outraged by the indifference of the dunes and its people to his established identity: “Was it permissible to snare, exactly like a mouse or insect, a man who had his certificate of medical insurance, someone who had paid his taxes, who was employed, and whose family records were in order? ”
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The animal quality of life, with humans living in the unmediated brutality of the real physical world, not a physical world of human artifacts, is merciless, without compassion for these identities people construct in civilization. One lives or dies according to an impersonal, random fate: human fate is not temporized by mental events; there are the hard exigencies of physical survival, which do not bend in deference to individual human personalities. In passion too, the human does not have the benefit of personality. Instead, the wind or the sand or the heat beats down on the body, a metaphor for the vast feeling of necessity that encloses the body, making personality and individuality meaningless; the skin, the human periphery, melts or evaporates or hurts under the force of it. The sand in
The Woman in the Dunes
is life itself with its crushing disregard for personality or fairness or reason or the defenses built up against its unceasing and formless flow: life here is precisely identical with sexuality, also crushing, formless, shapeless, merciless. Sand, formlessness, “the antithesis of all form, ”
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is played against, pushed against, made an antagonist of, skin, which is form; the crushing density of life, moving on past us and over us, burying us underneath it, is formless in its movement, but “[t]hings with form were empty when placed beside sand ”
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Form, barricaded, human form, skin, seems empty against the density of the endlessly moving, formless sand: which is life and its inevitable, massive, incomprehensible brutalities; which is sex, with the brutality of its omnipresent, incorrigible, massive demands. Carried by life and sex toward death, the human experience is one of being pushed until crushed: “No matter how sand flowed, it was still different from water. One could swim in water, but sand would enfold a man and crush him to death. ”
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The sand, because it is relentless and inescapable, forces an abandonment of the abstract mental thinking and self-involvement that pass for feeling, especially sexual feeling, in men in civilization. It forces the person to live wholly in the body, in the present, without mental evasion or self-preoccupied introspection or free-floating anxiety. At first, close to civilization and its ways, the man’s sexuality is in looking: “A sand-covered woman was perhaps attractive to look at but hardly to touch. ”
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But the pure physicality of the sand slowly makes him concretize his own responses; the body is real in the sand; abstraction is useless. What he feels, he feels physically. The sand is so extreme, so intense, so much itself, so absolute, that it determines the quality and boundaries of his consciousness, which changes from being vaguely, dully mental to being acutely, if painfully, alive in physical labor, physical feeling, physical survival. This is not pleasant or nice; it cannot be judged from a comfortable mental distance as physical experience in civilization is in fact judged; there is no escape into equivocation or effete human arrogance:

And then his feet began to sink into the sand. Before he knew whether he was making progress or not, he was buried up to his knees and seemed to have lost all power of movement. Then he attempted frantically to scramble up on all fours. The burning sand scorched his palms. Sweat poured from his whole body. Sand and sweat blinded him. Soon he had cramps in his legs and was unable to move them at all.
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The sand causes physical response, even erection: “A little flow of sand, along with his trousers, slid over the base of his member and fell along his thighs.... Slowly, but surely, with a pumping like that of a water pipe in which the water has been turned off, his member began to fill again. ”
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The sand causes tenderness, introduces physical intimacy, between him and the woman: “he joined the woman in helping to brush the sand from her body. She laughed in a husky voice. His hands became more and more insistent as they passed from her breasts under her arms and from there around her loins. ”
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Sand is carnal; his memory of it is carnal; he remembers “the sense of shame in scraping away, with a finger he had wet in his mouth, the sand like burnt rubber that had gathered on the dark lips of her vulva ”
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And then, there is the final triumph, the final superiority, of the sand and the woman, a physical triumph over him, achieved when he tries to rape her in front of the villagers who have promised to let him go if he lets them watch. She physically beats him and carries him inside, and he recognizes that there is an intrinsic rightness in her victory, his failure: