Sleeping like spoons:
Milhaven, John Giles
SLEEPING LIKE SPOONS A QUESTION OF EMBODIMENT JOHN GILES MILHAVEN The Philosopher's Question The other evening, I held forth to my friend Fergal, poet, fanner, and family man, on recent erotic...
...If you think of anything, let me know...
...SLEEPING LIKE SPOONS A QUESTION OF EMBODIMENT JOHN GILES MILHAVEN The Philosopher's Question The other evening, I held forth to my friend Fergal, poet, fanner, and family man, on recent erotic poetry by women, such as Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich, Susan Griffin, Judy Grahn, Maya Angelou, Erica Jong, and Marge Piercy...
...Through my head flow unchecked thoughts, arising from my day just past...
...I chose sleep and my sinking was voluptuous...
...I held out to Fergal my copy of Pleasures: Women Write Erotica (ed...
...Miller reports that a "familiar yet ever unexpected gesture" of her husband, sleeping in bed with her, continues to move her...
...This banal, undrarhatic, scarcely attended to, monotonously recurring moment of my life is one I feel happiest about and proudest of when I think of it...
...And I went on to Fergal: this raises the question that I am struggling with: But how...
...I could have read my Hopkins, which I had in my sack...
...Greater...
...Some hours left...
...How in our experiences of good bodily eros, sexual and otherwise, is the physical personal...
...But I am not conscious of this as Julie and I curl together...
...But much more, I need accounts of individual erotic experience that is not sexual...
...Sometimes the other...
...But good sex suggests how the rest of our eros is also thoroughly bodily, and its bodiliness is thoroughly personal...
...Our eros, therefore, is usually not sexual...
...You said you want in your writing and teaching to make clear the valuable things of human lives...
...Wrapped together in our bodily trust we slide into the abyss...
...I enjoy myself...
...I'm getting to the heart of it but I'm tired out...
...What of the ordinary bodiliness of most human lives above the poverty line...
...Sometimes-you may find this hard to believe-I murmur, "God is good...
...Good sexual lovemaking simply exemplifies it vividly...
...If we were both facing the wall, we both now face the window, still snugly fitting into each other...
...What is there in JOHN GILES MILHAVEN is professor of religious studies at Brown University...
...He embraces her...
...I don't think it's true to say: we sleep together...
...I hear little of this...
...The sacrificial, giving love, the Christian agape, is just another side of eros...
...But as I slope down with Julie to sleep, thoughts float off...
...I am a rich man...
...Julie and I are fearful persons...
...It must look comic since I'm a scarecrow and Julie is short and plump...
...These writers are right, I cried, and with the great mystical theologian of Christian East and West, Dionysius the Areopagite, I "dare to affirm" that God is eros...
...He considers her, bends over her, kisses her...
...And often during the night we come together out of sleep and go back in together...
...And yet...
...The congenial writings of Matthew Fox, Tom Driver, Sam Keen, and Charles Davis fall far short, it seems to me...
...I go to sleep immediately when we close together...
...I don't think of Julie as I go off to sleep...
...Nothing dramatic...
...We, too, know that touch of the hand Suzanne and Elliot know...
...You can talk to Julie if you want...
...From Griffin, Rich, Lorde, Dorothy Dinnerstein, and Haunani-Kay Trask, I have started to learn how consistently our civilization pushes our eros out of our sight...
...I don't think...
...Spoon-sleeping is not an I-Thou relation...
...Of higher value...
...We're tired together...
...The bed has my full weight on it...
...My experience of spoon-sleeping lasts a matter of Seconds...
...An effortless, sensuous shedding of all concerns, worries, even thoughts...
...During the night, we may wake and bob up, luxuriously relishing each other, and then bob down again with common will and desire...
...It's hard to describe since it lasts only seconds and I scarcely notice it happening...
...Could it be that this bodily tumult not only expresses the personal but is itself precious because it is peculiarly personal...
...I don't know...
...Part of that feeling is the dimming memory of last night's sleep...
...Are there not values here a Christian might tend to neglect and should appreciate more...
...How does unconsciousness appear so desirable to me that I dive into it with abandon...
...But it is, for the most part, an unexamined slogan...
...It happened last Friday in the upper field as I rested after lunch...
...The recent lecture by my teaching assistant, Diana Cates, on the erotic nature of her two home births, instructed me greatly...
...How much more erotic is falling asleep with Julie...
...Sex is only one helpful paradigm for eros...
...As I slide into oblivion, I seem to rejoin a hidden part of myself...
...I could have walked in the woods as I often do...
...I am ready to attempt the phenomenology myself, but first, I must listen further to individual, concrete experiences of eros...
...As I fade out, I feel larger in life...
...And do...
...Nothing holds back...
...What are the bodily feelings here...
...A perfection of pleasure...
...Not always as spoons...
...No subsequent let down or restlessness...
...She has read what follows and says it's pretty experience, "if I understand what you're saying...
...I think mainly of my going to sleep, and only peripherally, if at all, of Julie's...
...I just blissfully need and want to fall blissfully asleep...
...I have no idea what thoughts go through Julie's head...
...Or love of self...
...All of me falls...
...Only lying in touch with Julie can I count on getting swiftly that kinesthetic sense of security in sliding down...
...Nor should there be, that I can think of...
...Why do I call it erotic...
...Not in my head...
...They are important to me...
...We do it automatically, taking it for granted, hardly deciding...
...My point-I gestured vigorously to the patient Fergal-is not sex...
...For them, the bodily is good not for itself but because it expresses the personal...
...They detour around commonplace, vulgar, precious human eros...
...Which of the three is more important...
...Suzanne Miller, before going on to describe her experience of this gesture and its aftermath, remarks that she and Elliot "don't sleep like spoons...
...But she's in my legs, torso, and arms...
...Praising it vaguely, they look away from its peculiar nature and value...
...Friday's nap by the field was exceptional...
...Occasionally I am alone when I fall asleep this way...
...The resistance goes out of me...
...But it is true: We go together to sleep...
...I curl around Julie (or vice versa), feel her warm, silk heaviness with mine, and yield to sleep, scarcely knowing I do...
...We know each other letting go, giving in to sleep...
...Not in the hot weather...
...They're gorgeous this time of year...
...A sweetness of complete relaxing, of luxurious letting go of muscles, skins, nerves, and all...
...It remains true that sleeping like spoons with Julie is a jewel I have and softly hold...
...Why is this banal, run-of-the-mill falling to sleep so precious to you...
...after long resistance to the advances of a man she hardly knows and neither likes nor respects, is overcome by feeling for him...
...Better...
...When I drive out on a morning in my tractor, I feel rich...
...1 know her knowing me the same way...
...But I'd still be rich...
...But in the cool and cold weather most of the time...
...I cannot find ethicists who inquire in a coherent, sustained way: What is the bodily in making love...
...I have pleasure and nothing else...
...She stiffens in resistance...
...It is not sexual, at least not in a genital sense...
...Falling asleep with myself, I call an erotic experience...
...But if Julie's not there, it takes me close to an hour to fall asleep, as it did before I married and in the first years of marriage...
...The memory is only one of many riches, "values" if you will...
...I am amazed, when I start to describe this brief bit of routine, how many things I feel...
...Routine we don't pay attention to...
...I do not "encounter" Julie-that favorite verb of yours...
...She's not in my mind...
...Well, perhaps I know a bit of what I feel...
...I savor the moment, and then plunge with lusty, incredulous will...
...Our loss is disastrous...
...In all sorts of love, the bodily is precious for its own sake....Christian thinkers from the beginning and still today neglect this truth...
...Betty Miller, in Oh the Side of the Angels, identifies the moment when Claudia...
...Lonnie Barbach, Harper and Row, 1984),withamarkeratMiller's"Awakening...
...Other times I hold a moment...
...Whence our complacency...
...As usual, you will ask, "Why...
...What time is it...
...That is something like I feel when I curl up with Julie...
...But say what "we both feel," it's only what I feel we feel...
...As these writers illustrate in poetry and explicate in prose, the eros that makes good sex is the same eros that makes all good love in human life...
...They are sitting by a stream...
...Gluttonous, needy, triumphant desire of the enveloping darkness...
...I stretched out and in a moment was riding down from the sun shining through my eyelids, down into the black abyss...
...The nothingness of sleep has my full weight on it...
...Obvious: from our knowing we're together, going to sleep...
...Sometimes I fall back asleep instantly...
...It seems to be love of sleep rather than love of Julie...
...I am the kind of man who can't eat, drink, make love, play, or anything without simultaneously thinking about it...
...I live in a garden and I'm showing you three of the flowers...
...Elliot's hand comes to immediate and reassuring rest upon the small of my back, as it unfailingly does when he lies next to me as I stir into awakening...
...When during the night one wakes and turns, so does the other, both hitching then to maximal touching...
...And yet...
...If by some permanent ailment of one of us, Julie and I had to sleep in separate beds for the rest of our lives, I'd sure miss it...
...I don't understand how it comes about...
...Over beer and chips, I expounded my view that writing like this helps a Christian philosopher like me....The poems illustrate what is true of much more than sexual love...
...Falling asleep is not the most intense pleasure I experience in my life, but it is relatively rare inasmuch as it is complete pleasure...
...A spy, peering at us, would be amused at our danse militaire...
...Our feeling each other is not only sensual pleasure, but sensual trust...
...But by neglecting the bodily in sex and elsewhere, ethicists bypass a great good...
...I answer, as usual, "I don't know...
...Why then do lovers-spouses, for instance-happily and wisely will bodily excitement and satisfaction for its own sake, and not just for what it may express and serve...
...I whisper, who see little without glasses...
...Not every night, nor the whole night when we do...
...I feel more whole, more one...
...This is a plain fact of experience...
...As thoughts vanish and I slip gladly into the quicksand, Julie is out of my mind...
...All movements of creatures to unite with each other and, harmoniously, each in its own way, to rise toward God are nothing but their sharing of divine eros...
...Our minds are on sleep and this is the way we sleep...
...But, said I to Fergal, it is applied chiefly to the esoteric and aesthetic...
...She is not-not when we go to sleep anyway-a protective parent for me...
...I feel happy and proud of it all the time, whether I think of it or not...
...You talk about "values...
...It is a we-relation...
...1 don't know...
...It is personal: intrapersonal and interpersonal...
...Julie and 1 go together to encounter sleep...
...I try, in what follows, to describe just what I feel in spoon-sleeping, though I have always presumed Julie feels the same...
...I enter into a strain of my life that is inaccessible to me most of the time...
...It is a blissful giving way by bodily self to itself...
...I could go on...
...Nor I for her...
...Pioneering Christian ethicists, such as James Nelson, Karen Lebacqz, and Andre Guindon, have begun a phenomenology of the bodily in sex, but they have only begun...
...Fergal nodded, took the book, changed the subject, and a week later passed me the following: Fergal's Reply In the essay you gave me...
...We turn, staying joined...
...I can't rank them...
...Sip and savor my vin ordinaire with your conceptual spoons.y vin ordinaire with your conceptual spoons...
...We each sleep our private sleep...
...Sometimes one leads...
...Julie, my wife, and I sleep like spoons...
...What Christian today would not declare that the human body is good...
...The bliss is not just in the losing of tension, concerns, thoughts, etc...
...Without thinking of it, I know her there going to sleep like me...
...None whom I have read identifies what is so good about this bodiliness itself, what makes it peculiarly valuable for its own sake...
...I want a general phenomenology of eros, more explicit and systematic than my female teachers offer...
...But, as I try to anticipate your philosophical questions, it becomes mysterious...
...Nothing bad can happen right now, we fondly feel...
...I come upon and hug an old friend...
...Those are big values in my life: poetry reading, woods walking, and falling asleep...
...Some of what I feel, I would call "erotic...
...There is no sense to it...
...I am filled by the pleasure of swelling desire and the pleasure of desire collapsing into satisfaction...
...They're very different...
...Weighed down with sleep, I anticipate the joy of giving in totally...
...That is all I can think of for now...
...Even those who denounce a "dualistic" view of sex go on usually to see the sexual value of the bodily, not in itself, but in expressing something else, some deeper or higher value...
...When I hear praise of the bodily, the speaker or writer usually goes on to give as illustration forms of meditation or diet or exercise or spending time in nature or art appreciation or art creation...
...They each make my life more worthwhile...
...What brings about this quick fading of all fears...
...I greet me as I meet me, for that fleeting instant...
...Human love of all sorts is bodily...
...We go together to sleep...
...It makes no sense when I think about it...
...I relish even more the deliciousness of it when we wake during the night...
...That made me stop...
...For my going to sleep glued to Julie is obviously centered on myself...
...What takes over me that I drift so surely, so languorously, so complacently into that invisible vortex...
...I know of course that my biological nature forces sleep on me so my body can rest and replenish its forces...
...The heavy, sweet sleep I seep into is my sleep, not hers, but it is rarely so quickly overpowering as on feeling Julie and forgetting her...
...this turbulent, fleshy need and in this opaque, overwhelming pleasure that God sees is good...
...Just to point to some of the larger coffers: I have countless other ways of being with her, countless ways of being with our kids, countless ways of being with our land, friends, a nice pregnant daughter-in-law, health, house, weather, some material security...
...I mean: pure pleasure...
...Rarely do I fall to sleep so easily and voluptuously without Julie...
...This must be why that trust rises swiftly and fills us...
...I'm looking for something like Suzarlne Miller's essay here, said I to Fergal, but not sexual...
...Well, sleeping like spoons with Julie is one of mine...
...I leave it to you philosophers to answer...
...I need to reread the sexually erotic poems of women...
...This crass confidence in free fall...
...In all eros, I submit, the bodily does not merely express the personal...
...It is unbelievable that it is all right for me to yield totally to this languor...
...They may not seem to neglect it...
...We're together though our minds are elsewhere...
...Writing for philosophers is exhausting...
...Voluptuous fullness takes over me...
...I can't even compare them...
...But when we curl together at the end of the long day, the air becomes too thick for fears to penetrate...
...True, all Christians discoursing today on sex affirm the goodness of the bodily in making love...
...Writers call "bodily" the sexual values they affirm, but could not an angel experience what they go on to describe...
...For decades now, "body" has been "in...
...Is it irrelevant that in body we do not face each other, but ride on each other's back...
...The resistance went out of her, momentarily he had her full weight on his arm...
...Nothing else on my mind...
...I enjoy...
Vol. 116 • April 1989 • No. 7
