The Best American Essays 2012

by David Brooks

  “She would be invisible forever to all mortals, save those few who have minds to believe, eyes to see,” Follett wrote. “To these she is ever present, the spirit of Nature—a sprite of the meadow, a naiad of lakes, a nymph of the woods.”

  MARK DOTY

  Insatiable

  FROM Granta

  I only hope we may sometime meet and I shall be able perhaps to say what I cannot write.

  —Bram Stoker to Walt Whitman, February 1876

  You did well to write to me so unconventionally, so fresh, so manly, & so affectionately.

  —Walt Whitman to Bram Stoker, March 1876

  ONLY A SENTENCE, casually placed as a footnote in the back of Justin Kaplan’s thick 2003 biography of Walt Whitman, but it goes off like a little explosion: “Bram Stoker based the character of Dracula on Walt Whitman.”

  Come again? The quintessential poet of affirmation, singer of himself, celebrant of human vitality—what has he to do with the parasitical phantom, the children of the night? The poet of “Song of Myself” proclaims his solar confidence; he outgallops stallions, is “plumb in the uprights” and “braced in the beams” and even the smell of his own sweat famously delights him with “an aroma finer than prayer.”

  He seems himself a kind of sun, radiant, generous, aglow with an inner heat that seems composed of equal parts lust, good health, and fellow feeling.

  How could the embodiment of lunar pallor emerge from him?

  What thrilled Whitman was vitality, and Bram Stoker—who’d been championing the older man’s poems since his days at Trinity College, where he read them “with my door locked late at night”—must have sensed this. He first found the expurgated edition that William Michael Rossetti had published in England, then ordered an American edition of Leaves of Grass, and proceeded to write Whitman a fan letter—really more of an outcry—about finding in the poems a kindred soul. “I thank you for all the love and sympathy you have given me, in common with my kind,” Stoker wrote, and one can’t help but read “my kind” in a number of ways, which surely must have been what Stoker intended. The letter—a longish late-adolescent gush, which seems practically to fall over itself with hesitation, throat-clearing, and a tumult of feeling—was charged enough for its author that he didn’t manage to get it into the post for four years, which must place it right up there in the history of delayed correspondence. Whitman wrote an immediate reply; he was charmed by the letter and the note Stoker sent with it. Who wouldn’t be, by the description of himself Stoker included, one such a “keen physiognomist” as Whitman might desire?

  My friends call me Bram. I live at 43 Harcourt St., Dublin. I am a clerk in the service of the Crown on a small salary. I am twenty-four years old. Have been champion at our athletic sports (Trinity College, Dublin) and have won about a dozen cups. I have also been President of the College Philosophical Society and an art and theatrical critic of a daily paper. I am six feet two inches high and twelve stone weight naked and used to be forty-one or forty-two inches round the chest. I am ugly but strong and determined and have a large bump over my eyebrows. I have a heavy jaw and a big mouth and thick lips—sensitive nostrils—a snubnose and straight hair. I am equal in temper and cool in disposition and have a large amount of self control and am naturally secretive to the world. I take a delight in letting people I don’t like—people of mean or cruel or sneaking or cowardly disposition—see the worst side of me. I have a large number of acquaintances and some five or six friends—all of which latter body care much for me. Now I have told you all I know about myself.

  The novelist-to-be visited his hero the poet three times in the 1880s, when the theatrical company Stoker managed toured America. And although their conversations were summarized by Whitman’s devoted amanuensis Horace Traubel, who would collect his observations in the nine volumes of his Walt Whitman in Camden, I still find myself wondering what they talked about.

  Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

  I’ve always read Whitman’s startling claim, at the beginning of his greatest poem, as a generous statement. But if Stoker indeed based his legend of appetite on the poet, then he turns this notion inside out: Every atom belonging to you is mine, your sweat, your tears, your lymphatic fluids, your semen if you’re a man, your blood: I own you. That sentence in Kaplan’s footnote shocks not because it’s a stretch but because—despite the warmth we associate with Whitman and his legacy—it feels right somehow. I recognize him, the craving count, the barely bodied ancient thirst, inside the part of me that shares Whitman’s love for the vital ember, the glowing health, the muscle and vigor of men. I wish I didn’t. Every atom belonging to you: your semen, your blood. There he is in the mirror, shadow of the open-collared, slouch-hatted camerado.

  Insatiable is unsustainable: I’m in the parking lot at the natural foods store when the bumper sticker on the Toyota beside me stops me in my tracks. In context it’s about consumption and the environment, clearly—we can’t go on using more and more resources, producing and shopping and throwing things away, not if there’s going to be a lasting human presence on this planet.

  I get that, but what shakes me is that I’m reading the slogan in another, not entirely unrelated way. Because I have been insatiable—have forgotten, actually, what it might feel like to be satiated, or perhaps (it hurts to admit this) even to be satisfied. “Satisfaction” is something I stopped seeking in sex, more or less, at least in a physical sense; what I wanted, in my long careening tour through the bodies of countless men, through bathhouse and sex club and online hookups and meth, was something difficult to grasp. The rhetoric of addiction would describe it as an urge to flee my own sense of lack, seeking and seeking to disguise or ignore or fill an emptiness within—something like the way Carl Jung is supposed to have said to Bill W., “You were reaching for spirit, you just reached for the wrong kind.” And indeed that’s one way to view a deep, compelling attraction to bodies, a longing to touch and touch and enter.

  I was “partnered”—as postmodern parlance goes, or went, before same-sex marriage began to open different doors—to a man for sixteen years, and there was much pleasure and mutuality in our relation. And then there was, more clearly emergent over time, all that was left out, or wouldn’t fit. I found this difficult to describe, this sense that not all of me could be expressed within our marriage. I began to use the metaphor of bandwidth, feeling even as I did so that it was partial, barely adequate.

  If the self broadcasts on many channels, then Paul and I could clearly receive one another on, say, three of them, a nice midrange. Because we were both writers and thus shared a social and professional world of considerable fascination, a mandarin realm we could discuss at length with few others, and because we liked domestic tranquility and travel, and shared a deep pleasure in the work of description, trying to articulate what we saw—because of those things, we shared a mutual life. Outside of that: sex; adventure; the night; transgression; surprise; higher and lower pitches of experience. I need to be invited onto the back of a motorcycle and taken away now and then; I need a curtain pulled back, a hallway leading into some part of the world I’ve never seen. Paul feels that I have undervalued the midrange, the welcome and comfort of the intimacy that arose from our long association. My friend Carol says that’s what marriage is, there’s no way around it. Still, I can’t help but be hungry for the broader range of experience, the higher frequencies and the depths; I need, for whatever reasons, to live on that broader spectrum, or wither. I am coming to accept this about myself.

  The ex-con in construction boots and a towel, smoking a hash pipe, flicking tiny coals and bits of ash from the down of his belly outdoors by the pool, the water lights rippling over his torso.

  The stoned, angelic young man, muscled and pale, opening his body to me and coaxing my fist inside him.

  The oil worker who came in from days on the big oil rigs in the Gulf with his ears still ringing and his reddened skin hungry for touch.

 
The black man from the leather bar in Fresno who stood in front of me and came across my chest, then showed me a photo of his beautiful sixth-grade daughter and wept at how much he loved her.

  The beautiful lean-muscled doctor—the first man I snorted crystal with—who whispered in my ear for hours about how he wanted me to infect him, covertly, without him knowing it, leaking virus into his bloodstream.

  The landscaper who took me to his twenty-third-floor apartment, in a tower overlooking the park, and pissed on me on his terrace high above the lights of Houston while I lay on the concrete beneath him, entirely happy.

  The bare-chested weightlifter in the gym, shorter than I was, thickly built, who stood behind me and guided my arms through a chest exercise as I pulled the cables taut in front of me and squeezed, and then pushed his chest into my back, and held me there, intently, without moving, so that I could feel his sweat and the pulse of his heart.

  Men who wept about their fathers, their brothers, about bullies and gangs, about teachers and counselors and coaches, but fathers most of all, those fountainheads of male woundings, because they sensed I was someone in whose presence they could set down their guard, or just someone willing to listen without judgment. A beautiful, compact hairy young bear from New Jersey—fortysomething but nonetheless very young anyway—who shook in my arms, wearing just a clean white jockstrap, because no one had ever genuinely loved him. I didn’t judge; it was as if that were part of my purpose: I wanted to know the men who moved through my nights like passing comets, wanted them to feel the pleasure of being known.

  But do I want to describe myself as a sex addict? Doesn’t a label like that sit on one like a tight suit, an ill-fitting little cage of identity that must of necessity leave out so many of the regions of the self? That’s how I felt, sitting in a twelve-step meeting, talking with groups of fellow users of methamphetamine about the drug we had decided not to use: that we were collectively defining our identities by what we would not do, and that such an act of definition was a strange, subtle kind of self-murder. I understand that such a radical act might be necessary, in the face of an intractable self-destructiveness, to save one’s life—but nonetheless I can’t bring myself not to describe it as a kind of murder, because in any such act of self-definition (I’m Mark and I’m an addict) the other selves, some of whom are not named because they don’t belong in this context, and some of whom aren’t named because they cannot be, but remain phantoms, potentialities, shadows, little streams into the larger liquidity—well, all those aspects of oneself are more or less banished from the conversation, and they retreat a little further away, and then a little further again.

  Addiction is one way to think about it. But Lacan says that all desire is based in a sense of lack. Once we experienced ourselves as whole, separated neither from the world nor from ourselves by language, but once a self and other is perceived, or something is objectified by being named, then we fall from Eden, and forever after we’ll have the sense of something missing, of the irretrievable object—wholeness, oneself and the motherworld that bore us all of a piece. Therefore the veil is the figure of desire; if we tear it away, desire tends to disappear, but as soon as the veil is restored, the well of longing fills again.

  Behind every man I want to kiss lies that original desire, which it is my nature and my fate to displace. Though displacement seems hardly the right word, if there is nothing else one can do.

  When you have a lot of sex, sex becomes increasingly less narrative. There’s less of a story of connection and its development, and more a series of images, like the list I’ve just written, a photo album of sorts, in which still pictures stand for a succession of bodies in time, in their beautiful or awkward arcs or spasms. Like Cavafy’s poems, these remembered snapshots contained rooms of eros: a man who lay back in a sling in his darkened third-floor apartment, his shining red motorcycle spotlit beside him. Two identical tattooed men, tattooed rugby players, on their backs, side by side in a bare room in Seattle.

  A long green hallway, in an East Village apartment, down which one had to move laterally, since there wasn’t room to walk straight ahead, and at the end of it, a room entirely lined with, of all things, midcentury American pottery, arrayed on walls the sun had never touched.

  A list, is that what desire makes, finally? As in so many of Whitman’s poems, where line after line spins out a careening catalogue of what the poet sees, or is, or wishes to be. Ask the collector, the curator, the accumulator of sexual experience, the person who touches and touches what he desires: he is making, on paper or in his head or in his dream life, a list.

  To an American like Whitman (though there is no American like him, the progenitor of our hopes for ourselves too secret to quite name, the originator of the notion that democracy might be founded in the body, on the affection between bodies), elation in the face of the vital must have seemed an exhilarating rejection of the puritan heritage of division between body and soul. Was anyone ever so sanguine about sex? Blake, maybe, whose work Whitman read, though at what point in his career we don’t quite know.

  But to a European, perhaps this uprush of energy in the face of the body and its vital fluids had another cast altogether. For Stoker, it may have seemed that what was wan or dead in the self might be refreshed temporarily and, finally, horrifyingly, by the hot juices of those who were more immediately alive. Is vampirism a matter of the overly self-conscious being awakened to life by the vitality of those who are barely self-conscious at all? Is that why Whitman liked stevedores and streetcar conductors and Long Island baymen, the big guys at home in their bodies, who would never think to write a poem?

  Or let’s say Stoker, who married a woman Oscar Wilde had proposed to before Bram came along, found it necessary to suppress his own desires, to the degree that he would project them out onto a horrifying subhuman or posthuman creature, who has no firm foundation in biology, but must feed off the juices of others, without choice or sunlight. And in doing so, perhaps he reversed the gestures of his old idol. Where Whitman had written his beautiful poem of the sexual union between body and soul:

  I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning,

  How you settled your head athwart my hips,

  and gently turned over upon me,

  And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone,

  and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,

  And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.

  Stoker has offered us a parallel physical situation with an entirely inverted tone:

  He pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow.

  Whitman fuses the erotic and the spiritual, as the kiss to the bare chest begins an epiphanic experience, a moment of peace and of understanding, whereas the mouth is brought to Dracula’s chest in a kind of rape, a horrible force-feeding which can lead only to repulsion and contagion.

  And so there it is: the intersection of the chosen and the compulsive, of consuming and being consumed, of the celebratory and of erasure.

  Addiction is one way to think about it. But there’s also what seems to have been Whitman’s view—a mission, if you will, to seek out one’s cameradoes, to join in the community of lovers, bound together by desire and affection, to find the common good in our common skin. This vision comes most clear in the Calamus poems, and in parts of “Song of Myself.” It is primarily an imaginative union among men; Whitman’s women, unfortunately, seem either afterthoughts or engines of procreation. He comes close to granting them freely moving sexual desires, and a position as democratic citizens, but he cannot really seem to desire them, and thus they are excluded from the essential bond—eros—that holds his cameradoes together in the new democratic union.

  There are lists of men in Whitman’s papers, wit
h brief notations—an age, a bit of detail, a note about how they met. Not much. A collector’s catalogue, a record of the body’s travels? How else will I know the world, if not by touching as much of it as possible, finding in the bodies of my lovers and fellows my coordinates?

  Or there’s Teilhard de Chardin, brilliant radical Catholic, paleontologist, and physicist, who refashions the poet’s claim on our shared atoms this way: “However narrowly the heart of an atom may be circumscribed,” he writes, “its realm is co-extensive, at least potentially, with that of every other atom.” We are all coextensive, and our work is to move toward union; evolution, de Chardin posits, is a collective motion toward greater consciousness. “No evolutionary future,” he writes in The Phenomenon of Man, “awaits anyone except in association with everyone else.” We must know our fellows in order for everything to move forward; it is our spiritual imperative to connect, or else the destiny of the world cannot be completed.

  A theory of the popularity of vampire books and movies: we understand that in a consumer culture we are feasting on whatever brings us a feeling of life, that we hunger to be fed in this way, that our freedom to act upon our desires places us in the position of hungry consumers, seeking the next pleasure.

  Buy anything and what you’ve brought into your life has made the world a little less vital someplace else.