Between-places: On erotic asceticism

Some years ago, I found myself suddenly sequestered and alone in an unfamiliar European city. I spent six weeks in a perfect and untouched apartment that seemed designed for me. Coming out of a lockdown in the UK, I was magically transplanted into a new place that was half-empty, an unexpectedly rescheduled writing residency. I had forgotten what it was like to be alone, with nobody to answer to. Here, I could try on another kind of life without anyone witnessing it and this felt immediately intoxicating.

For the first week, I was quarantined so I couldn’t even leave the apartment. I marveled at how the sound echoed when I spoke to myself. The sun spilled across the floors, and I followed it, longing to be outside. I read voraciously and marked time by listening to the sounds outside. I cooked myself little meals with the food I was able to get delivered: eggs and tomatoes alongside unfamiliar snacks—savory and sweet. Waking up each morning, the light streaming through the window, I would sit at my desk and edit my novel. But working so hard and in such solitude—sometimes I didn’t speak to anyone all day—did not feel lonely. I felt calm and inside my body in a way I have rarely felt before or since. 

Once I could leave the apartment, I moved unseen and anonymous through the crowds. The city lent itself well to routines and so I learned to buy fresh flowers and pick apples from the trees that dotted the city, which I displayed in a large ceramic bowl I found in a cupboard. In the hot afternoons, I would pull myself into the huge windows and sit on the deep sills, my legs outstretched, my hands stroking the skin of my shins. Under these conditions, I started to find new ways into desire, too, riven between anonymity and exposure.

Living in this apartment in this city was an existence that was—technically—wildly chaste. Hardly anyone touched me in the several weeks I spent there, and if they did it was when they accidentally brushed past me on the street, or gave me the occasional hug—almost shocking in its strangeness. I missed touch, longed for it, but also started to feel as if I was learning to transcend it, as if I was retraining myself to be less needing or to be happier with different things. This state of involuntary withdrawal from the haptic became almost erotic, making me more alive to other sensations. Like the sunlight tracking its way over the floor, hot under my footsteps; or the shape of hard, curved apples arranged neatly in a bowl; or the way my hands, placed palms down on the grass in the park, became newly conscious of the tender green spokes of grass twisting against my skin.

Without the presence of another person, soon the boundaries between “real” life and dream-life began to blur. Though I was capable of new focus and attention, working for long stretches of time, I could also drift into fantasy at the drop of a hat. I would dream up scenarios, involving people I hadn’t seen in years, old memories drifting to the surface. The veil between the world of my imagination and the world of this city of sunlight and solitude felt permeable. Actually fulfilling these desires was impossible, but that didn’t seem to matter, existing so much as I did in this state of fantasy, of sensuousness divorced from erotic fulfillment.

A couple of times I took a trip to different cities or towns in this new country and I would stay in a hotel alone, sometimes for only a night. A hotel room with only one person in can feel transformative in both its strangeness and familiarity, disorienting, but still alive to possibility.

Perhaps this is why they tend to bring out the worst in me domestically: unmade beds, clothes strewn everywhere, as though the chaos of the private self is on pause, or the pressure to tidy for an imagined visitor is less urgent. And there is something especially eerie about a hotel room in the day, with the sound of the industrial vacuum cleaners in the corridors outside and the feeling that all the other hotel guests have left. A hotel room in the day feels like something magicked up, carved out from nothing, whether it’s for rest, a stopover, or an erotic assignation. It’s a place that serves its purpose, and then is wiped clean. What could be possible in a space that has this kind of plausible deniability, this slipperiness? Who can we be?

Transience makes everything possible, whether the erotic experience involves another, or whether it just involves yourself. Hotels aren’t normally zones of chastity, of course; anonymity lends itself to other uses. In Nina Leger’s 2017 novel The Collection (Mise en pièces), a series of daytime hotel rooms form the backdrop for the narrator’s fleeting, anonymous sexual escapades. She builds a “memory palace” of each space so that, in her mind, she can walk down the corridor of a hotel and open a door into her memory of each affair and, more importantly, the penis she encountered there. The hotel rooms are rendered with precision in the service of higher experience—a mysterious transcendence— that is never fully explained. The narrator, Jeanne, is given no backstory, no context other than the immediate and the physical. It’s all animal sensation, immediate as those apples under my hands in the apartment. The move from the city streets where she meets the men to these enclosed rooms, the ease with which she moves from one state to another, and then back, is a slipping between worlds. And yet nobody who witnesses her in the real world, the public world, knows anything about this other life.

Slipping between worlds, feeling unobserved and untouched, I think of these places now as set-pieces in which I could refigure my experience of solitude into something erotic, something slow and elemental. There was a fluidity, an elegiac quality, to how I experienced my time within both the apartment and the hotels. There would be another person after me in the apartment, with their own experiences of desire. In a hotel you are always one of many even if you’re alone, the bed practically still warm, but all evidence erased. 

When I left the apartment, it had started to feel like my home, and I had started to dip my toe into the world of social interaction, even touch. Solitude isn’t sustainable, and I’m not a naturally chaste person. The desire for real intimacy eventually couldn’t be ignored, and the sense of being in a kind of altered state started to dissipate. But I miss feeling like that, sometimes; the idea that my own sensual experience of the world could be enough, that I had found a new appreciation and knowledge of its pleasures.