(Another thought-piece, this from those halcyon days of November 28, 1978)
Writing is thinking; yet the writing of fiction entails a great deal of feeling. More precisely, one of the reasons we enjoy the reading is to vicariously experience a wide range of thoughts, viewpoints, situations, emotions, physical feelings, etc. (Does this spring from a desire to be freed of the narrow cage of our own individual skulls?) Thus pornography fails: because it is the emotions with which writing deals much better. The emotional peak of the seduction does not come with orgasm or even with the act of sex – it comes with, on the part of the reluctant partner, the decision to surrender; and on the part of the aggressive partner, the knowledge that the other has surrendered and that now the seduction is a foregone conclusion. Thus we can say that from the writer’s point of view the only thing that is of interest is what occurs through the point of the decision to have sex, and in the emotional repercussions pursuant to the sexual activities (those moments, e.g., when the pair like together without defenses, without inhibitions, without self-consciousness, without passion without desire without jealousy without ambition – all of these blasted aside with the selves’ outer shells in the explosive violence of orgasm – leaving the two like crossing currents lapping at the same corner of the beach, intermingling essences, emotionally beating with one heart for the too-brief moment, until a word, gesture or sound, causes them suddenly to recoil once again into strangerhood). The specifics of sex are thus (generally) not emotional but only of physiological significance. And thus pornography (like any aspect of the Dream) will tend to gravitate towards those forms of presentation whose strengths are best suited to evoke the desired results – that is, here, from poetry to fiction to film to play to live-sex acts, and finally completing a sort of circle drawing the reader/viewer back into the role of participant (unless of course the direct stimulation of the mental synapses appropriate could be devised).
