Lust has a glittering attraction that makes it the starlet of sin. Lust is Sharon Stone, Billy Ray Cyrus, the construction guy from the Coke commercial and Sharon Stone.
If Lust went to a Halloween party, wouldn’t you want to see what she was wearing? Wouldn’t you want to meet her before you hooked up with Sloth or Gluttony?
Lust is appealing, basic and uncomplicated-until it gets adulterated by tricky things such as emotions and perspective.
Or so I’ve heard. It’s inadvisable to appear too well acquainted with lust. It wouldn’t look good if I spoke about lust from a really informed perspective, now would it? If I showed pictures and brought out charts and used an overhead projector? (I can sense that one or two of you wouldn’t actually mind this.) No, I can speak about gluttony, greed, pride and envy without really causing a raised eyebrow, but if I start talking about lust, then where will I be? Thrown among floozies and loose women and dancing girls. In other words, I’d be pretty much where I already am, and in excellent company as well. So here goes.
Lust can be great. Absolutely fabulous. Terrific. It can get you moving with the thumping persistence of the Energizer Bunny. It can wake you out of a physical slumber and suddenly remind you of the wonders of the flesh-the sheer joy of having fingertips and eyelashes and skin. Aroused, we can feel as if every single piece of us is being put into play (and we can play with every single piece).
Every generation thinks it invents lust, but that’s as cute and as false as every generation’s thinking its elders sat around carving wheels out of stone as the earth’s crust cooled. As long as people have been creating music, telling stories or making pictures, lust has been a primary player. Operas are about lust at least as much as they’re about love (consider “Carmen”); literature is shot through with lust (Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is certainly a handful, and that’s just for starters); the greatest art raises and refines lust into the gorgeous bodies reflecting a benevolent and joyous Maker (see Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Botticelli, coming soon to a museum near you). Lust isn’t confined to the young (see Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate”) or the attractive (see the truck driver in “Thelma and Louise”). We heard stories about it from the nursery onward. The prince waking Snow White with a kiss has to do with the powers of lust, which is why the wicked stepmother was so angry. The big, bad wolf waiting for Red Riding Hood could be a guy with a Harley making his motor purr outside your window. You might have to move off the Earth if anybody you know sees you get onto the back of that bike, but at the moment it seems worth it.
Lust is like that: It can pour warmth into a life that has chilled under enforced indifference and resurrect the passions once associated only with youth. Not that those initial forays into lust, clumsy and amateur as they were, were all bad, especially for those of us brought up a million years ago (as the Earth’s crust cooled), when feeling desire didn’t mean you had to act it out with a cast of thousands. Far from it.
Remember early lust, that warmth and flush of color that appears like a sunrise when you’re just skidding into adolescence? At first I think of Catholic Youth Organization dances where you and your partner had to leave enough room in your embrace for the presence of the Holy Ghost. As far as I remember, this strategy only made me think about what might actually happen if we danced up close, which no doubt made the distance as eroticized as any intimacy could be.
That was a first, and I think good, lesson about desire. It works well with distance; it feeds on delay and imagination. Postponement is most potent; scruples and ceremonies add spice. Given into quickly, it loses much of its appeal. This is why, in part, some of the best swooning romances exist between two people who barely touch each other: Heathcliff and Catherine in “Wuthering Heights,” Scarlett and Ashley in “Gone With the Wind” and Newland and Countess Olenska in “The Age of Innocence” still come to mind. (OK, so what if those novels are all written by women? You think it’s only women who write stories of melting desire dependent on distance? You do? So do I.)
Was our Prohibition-era lust perhaps the purest-the most exciting, the best lust of all? I think of Saturday nights when I was 17 in the long back seat of a car with a handsome, low-voiced boy. I remember kisses that went on for hours and the deep breaths that were somehow as shallow and as far-reaching as a stone skipped across a pond. And I remember being driven home after those kisses-literally, not metaphorically-and hugged good night again under the safety of a porch light. Is grown-up desire only an imitation of those moments, or were those steamy-windowed evenings only an intimation of what was waiting for us as adults? Was that a dress-or an undress-rehearsal or is this a faint echo?
Those first flash floods of desires, the trickling, tickling, irritating sensations of awareness can be spectacular. They’re right up there with a three-week vacation, a four-course meal and a five-star hotel. True, lust often coincides with those elements as well. This should not surprise us, given that lust is a luxury (and, like most luxuries, calls for its own form of payment). It’s an excess, an outpouring, an overflow, and it usually doesn’t overtake you when you’re under a deadline, under the weather or underfed. You can feel lustful watching a healthy young creature saunter across a golden beach, but lustful is not something you feel after waiting 40 minutes in the rain for a bus that’s late, crowded and damp.
Lust can be invigorating when it’s part of life’s healthy vitality, a good old visceral response to make sure all the systems are working. Setting fire to the emotional landscapes of our interior territories, lust can clear space so that great stuff can grow: affection, respect and the ordinary delights of regulated breathing. An old Italian saying that captures this process goes something like “Since the house is on fire, let us warm ourselves.” This is a proverb about resignation and must be said with a shrug of the shoulders and a slight smile. But lust can also burn down the house for no reason except its own consummation.
Because lust can lead to trouble, it has always received bad press. There was a student who, writing about “Paradise Lost,” noted that “after the fall, God made Adam and Eve cover their genial organs.” Somehow “genial organs,” mistake that it was, got it right. We’ve learned to disassociate our genital organs from the rest of us, to blame them for things that we, of course, would never do. Lust, it seems, frees us from responsibility for our own actions (Augustine called lust “an insubordination of the flesh,” bringing to mind images of rioting hormones and guerrilla gonads) and turns our sexuality into a foreign set of responses that don’t necessarily have anything to do with our real life. It’s as if our bodies are controlled by lust’s automatic pilot, and that the pilot light is too dangerously hot to handle.
As a tangent, or at least a musical interlude, it’s worth noting that this not only accounts for lust’s bad rep, but also explains the need for endless country songs saying, in effect, “I wasn’t responsible for what my arms/mouth/etc. did to that honey at the honky-tonk because they weren’t part of me, baby.” Country songs are nearly unbeatable when it comes to talking about lust. Consider such classics as “If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body (Would You Hold It Against Me?)” and “Shut Up and Kiss Me.” Of course, rock hasn’t done badly, either. Patti Smith belting out Bruce Springsteen’s line “Love is an angel disguised by lust” in “Because the Night” is even clearer in its declaration than the more obvious “Love the One You’re With.”
Lust can be just abrasive enough to polish a dull surface into a shine. But a little lust, like a little drunkenness, goes a long way and should not be encouraged as a habit. And, for anybody feeling a little too easy about their lack of fleshly appetites, it’s worth remembering that the bad habits of lust don’t necessarily orbit around (non-celestial) bodies. I’ve known men to lust after cars (which is why centerfolds in Road & Track are lit very much like centerfolds in Playboy). I’ve known women to lust after jewelry (it’s a diamond, you’ll remember, that’s a girl’s best friend, etc.). I’ve even known kids to lust after video games without using the “L” word but who are nevertheless consumed by a focused, unwavering and passionate desire few other words dare encompass.
Telling, isn’t it, that lust can be applied to things as well as to people? This is the unnerving part of lust: At its scariest, it reduces everything to a mere object, one to be acquired, then discarded when it’s used up or when it becomes boringly easy to get all the moves right. Contempt can follow so closely that it sometimes treads on lust’s red high heels. But it doesn’t have to; those heels can be kicked up in a dance or thrown off at the end of a long day. Lust can be as much a victory as a vice, as much part of comfortable love as of sizzling intimacy, if we learn how to do it right. And, luckily for all of us, that takes lots and lots of practice.
