Rebecca Goldstein
Random House Inc (1983)

Frigidity we call it in women, impotence in men. The terms reflect, I think, the male point of view. But there’s coldness and want of power on both sides. I certainly felt impotent, a thing of naught.

I briefly considered masturbation, as (and in much the same spirit) I considered jogging: as something that, no matter how unpleasant, might be good for me. For I thought it possible that my body would go quite dead, become incapable of ever feeling pleasure again; and that, at least according to collective opinion of the day, couldn’t be healthy. But then again perhaps a sexual death, if possible, would be the most reasonable solution. I had once read a former inmate’s account of prison life, and he had written that after several months of celibacy all desires have mercifully vanished. Prison had been much easier after that.

But could it all be made to disappear? Despite my respect for Naom’s views, and Naom’s contempt for Freud’s, I couldn’t rid my thinking of such concepts as repression. I had an image of molten libidinous matter, seething in the psychical depths, which could be buried but never destroyed. And eventually the volcanic eruptions in personality would come, the lava of the libido spewing forth in geyser-like behavioral aberrations. The best one could hope for would be sublimation (which might, if Freud was right, even make a genius of me). Is it possible to die a merciful sexual death? And where would that leave one?

Sartre says the object of sexual desire is a “double reciprocal incarnation,” most typically expressed by the caress: “I make myself flesh in order to impel the Other to realize for herself and for me her own flesh. My caress causes my flesh to be born for me insofar as it is the Other flesh causing her to be born as flesh.”

But it seems to me that even deeper than Sartre’s object lies another: a double reciprocal mattering, the most typical expression of which is the gaze. In gazing with desire on the Other I reveal how he, in my desire, permeates my sense of self; and in his gaze I see how I similarly matter to him, who himself matters at that moment so much. It’s this double reciprocal process that accounts, I think, for the psychological intensity of sexual experience. It answers to one of our deepest needs, a fundamental fact of human existence: the will to matter.

Noam had sadly missed the point in thinking the object of sexuality is no more, and no more interesting, than a sensation. His is the solipsistic view of sex, and it leaves out the complexity, the depth, and the reason this part of life matters so much to us. Without the Other and his gaze, the act is little more than clumsy masturbation. And so it was for me with Noam, who now was always turned away, psychically if not physically, like the man in the da Vinci sketch. Making love under such circumstances is hardly the powerful affirmation of mutual mattering it’s meant to be.

To matter. Not to be as naught. Is there any will deeper than that? It’s not just unqualified will, as Schopenhauer would have it, that makes us what we are; nor it is the will to power, Nietzsche, but something deeper, of which the will to power is a manifestation. (And who am I, daughter of a shtickele chazzen from Galicia, to argue with the likes of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche?) We want power because we want to matter. Neither sex nor power lies at the level of fundamental facts. Beneath are the heaving thrusts of the will to matter. And the will to create? to procreate? These too are expressions of the fundamental will. Deeper even than the will to survive. We don’t want to live when we become convinced that we don’t, can’t, will never matter. That is the state which most often precedes suicide–always, I think, when the cause of suicide lies within.

To matter, to mind. Curious to compare the verbs we have formed from the nouns. What we mind is in our power, but whether we matter may not be–and there’s the tragedy. Spinoza tried to help us out of it: We can make ourselves matter because of what we mind. No, no, rather: We shouldn’t mind that we don’t matter. It–of which we’re a part–matters. Dissolve the individual will to matter in the objective picture of the whole. It’s rather a drastic solution, but then perhaps nothing less will do. And does one thereby dissolve the individual? Is this the solution to the problem of personal identity? Is this will our very essence, with which we are and without which we are not? Perhaps. In any case, it’s very close to the realization of the self. We no sooner discover that we are, than we want that which we are to matter. In spite of Spinoza.

Can anyone truthfully say, I don’t matter and I don’t mind? Not I. Of all my many mind-body problems, the most personally and painfully felt has been this: Do I matter as a mind or do I matter as a body? This is the problem that produces the pattern, the pendulum swings of my dangling life. But somehow or other I must come out mattering.

And where was I now? I had hoped, like the good fairy tale taught, to save myself by marrying Noam. My mattering to him, who himself mattered so much, was going to do the trick. It had always been a battle against self-hate, and that’s a bloody battle. I certainly didn’t have the stuff to stand up to Noam’s attacks, his palpable contempt. If I have quaked before every idiot’s judgment, if the shrug of the shoulders always been a movement I’m incapable of executing, imagine how it was to be standing before the Highest Judge, the Genius, before whom no invalid inference could be hidden, and to hear the verdict delivered: You are damned, you are dumb.