Gustave Moreau, “Leda and the Swan”
Sports Saturday
Does sex count as a sport? How about if you compare it to pair skating or to long distance running? That’s what Sharon Olds does in her enigmatic and disturbing poem “Sex without Love.” To this day I’ve never been able to entirely wrap by mind around this poem, which uses stirring athletic analogies to make a case for sex without love.
On Valentine’s Day I discussed Blake’s “The Clod and the Pebble,” and Olds’ poem is about a pebble—which is to say, one that “seeketh only Self to please,/To bind another to its delight.” Perhaps because she leans toward the self-sacrificing clod herself—the clod doesn’t honor its own needs—Olds sounds somewhat admiring. There’s a purity in those who focus only on their own pleasure, who “come to the still waters” without loving their partner (“come” is a pun). They demonstrate the kind of singlemindedness that one finds in saints and professional athletes.
When Olds switches to a runner analogy, she continues to sound positive. Great sexual performers are alone against a series of factors, including “the road surface, the cold, the wind, the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-vascular health.” Then, however, Olds adds “partner in bed” to the list. Once the partner is seen as just another factor, the instrumental and dehumanized dimension of such coupling is exposed. “Every woman loves a fascist,” Sylvia Plath has written, and this love affair with oneself– “the single body alone in the universe against its own best time”—has the narcissism of the fascist.
As to the why clods find pebbles to be beautiful, maybe they find it beautiful to be hooked, thinking they can leach off a confidence that they themselves lack.
So how do the ones who make love without love do it? Olds gives us a clue in the reference to children “whose mothers are going to give them away.” Such people fear abandonment so deeply that they wall themselves off from humanity.
The price they pay is that they are alone in the universe.
Sex Without Love
By Sharon Olds
How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other’s bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health–just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.
