A potential space: Foreplay as a spiritual experience

“I like you,” the poet Anne Sexton wrote in a letter to Anne Clarke in early July of 1964, “your eyes are full of language.” Before the month was over, Ranger 7, a passenger-free spacecraft of NASA’s Apollo 16 mission sent the first live images of the lunar surface from as close as half a meter away. Photos in gray-scale, a slate-colored curve, dark waters with stilled ripples. Not yet three seconds after the last image was snapped, Ranger 7 crashed. The area was renamed, Mare Cognitum, “The sea that has become known.”

I think of this sea as the eyes Sexton must have seen, the quietude of their surface, clenching language. It’s a hot thought. Not just because the skin around the eye, lid, creases, tear ducts, are all part of a much overlooked erogenous zone (as noted by sexologist Dr. Jill McDevitt), not to mention the more niche erotic act of eye-licking, oculolinctus. But also this original moonscape brings to mind the way our sight reaches for the object with which it seeks to make contact. Jacques Lacan described the object of desire as located “in the blind spot” of our visual field, “the object of the lost object.” A frisson from that which is not there. In other words, foreplay.

Foreplay as we mostly know it today is situated in the je ne sais quoi of what is sex and not quite sex. This modern framework is heavily influenced by Western industrial ideals wherein the general focus and value of human effort is determined by the product of that effort. The trajectory of sex is therefore organized around the notion of output: penetration, ejaculation, and procreation. Add to this the dominant Christian view of the mortal body as originating in sin, and we have an inherent distrust of desire, the Foucauldian inner-eye surveying physical craving within disciplinary society. This “masculo-sexual” way of telling stories in literature and beyond, as the author Jane Alison puts it, privileges linear efficiency. But foreplay is a pesky dissident, defying the block of time and action to which it is contained.

The term “fooling around” evokes this subversive play, the shuffle between fooling and being fooled. Granted, there are facts. Charts. Diagrams. A physiological atlas of pleasure, mapping the particularly arousing ilioinguinal nerve that traces down the thigh, the skin below the ribcage that can cause the pelvic-floor muscles to contract, or the connection of the nipples’ nerve endings to the genital-cortex, the same area that is activated when the genitals are stimulated. It’s true, kissing, licking, sucking the right spot with the right person can significantly lower your body’s cortisol level, the stress hormone. Yet it is not the mere science of our erogenous zones that is responsible for our erotic revelry, as Roland Barthes explains, but the glimpse of a secret that slips out between the edges of what is mapped, “the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance.”

As the joke goes, the most powerful human sex organ is the brain. And yet, it is not the intellect that acts as a gateway to sexual gratification, but the capacity for a human to abstain from it. In Hindu and Buddhist tantra, sexual pleasure is seen as a means for egoic liberation, the disintegration of the thinking self. The Tantrasara, part of the Kashmir Shaivism philosophy of Hinduism, describes this experience as “the endless dance of creation, preservation and dissolution,” and the ancient Indian Sanskrit text, the Principles of Love or Kama Sutra, proposes a set of postures to both unite and dissipate the cognitive authority of the self. 

Tantric understanding revolves around stamina and endurance, the negative space of the orgasm. The American psychologist and psychotherapist Albert Ellis reckoned the essence of love as “the art of persistence,” rather than an achieved state, an approach to intimacy translated within a variety of communities. In the late 1800s, in upstate New York, the practice of karezza, or sex without orgasm, emerged from the Oneida Community. The interest in non-coital exploration of pleasure can be found in bonding rituals, such as a version of footsie in the Guajiro tribe of Colombia wherein a woman engages in a ceremonial dance during which she tries to trip her desired beau in order to make him literally fall in love with her. The toppled man is then obliged to have sex with her. Or in a different ritual dance in rural Austria, where young women perform choreography with apple slices in their armpits, and at the end each woman offers her slice to a man of her choosing and watches him eat it. The practice of erotic telepathy or frisky mental energetic transmission, dubbed “the sexth sense,” teases out the other five.

Flirting with contact is also a way of bending time. The ridges of the swollen tongue reaching deeper into a partner’s mouth. A caress that can outlast contact with the skin. Touch, touched, and always touching, a fusion of the tenses of being. The Kabbalistic teachings, which emphasize the force of intention and consciousness within desire rather than an attainment or possession, invoke a similar resonance between the ephemeral and the immortal. The concept of Ein Sof, meaning “without end,” alludes to the union between the finite, the human, and the infinite and unknowable, God, or in other terms, the transcendence of the isolated self. A sexy torment between pleasure that seems to be always arriving without ever having fully arrived. Sigmund Freud, opting for another metaphor of footwork, refers to sexual intimacy as “a paradoxical dance between longing for union and the preservation of the individuality.” The “what if” tickle of sexual fantasy is a delicious hypothetical—what would happen if I take off my clothes and you take off yours. But no risk, no pleasure. So we venture that Freudian double-dare of losing ourselves vs. losing the other. The psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott expands on this speculative seduction and names this metaphysical territory, “a potential space,” wherein the boundaries of the self and other can blur, “allowing for the emergence of creative and spiritual dimensions." The erotic touch exists in its non-material form, in a shadow of fingers approaching with no real hand in sight. A horny Plato’s Cave.

The libido draws with the mud of the earth as with the particles of galaxies. In Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, a space crew is launched to observe an oceanic planet with a supposed human consciousness. Strange sightings, inexplicable messages, the crew may have gone mad. A psychologist, Kris Kelvin, is sent up to take stock. In the course of his assessment, he himself begins to be swallowed into a hallucinatory schism, or what Lacan would describe as an “intertwining of desire and lack” which emulates “the dialectics of mystical experience.” It is no longer about the exploration of life elsewhere, but the power that an “elsewhere” has on life here. A sort of esoteric dirty talk.  “We have no need of other worlds,” writes the author of the book on which the film is based, Stanisław Lem, “we need mirrors.” Even if, for a start, it’s just above our bed.