WALLS

It has been almost a century since we know about the mystery of the infant’s sexuality. It is, as we already know, a perverse and polymorph kind of sexuality, not yet genital, whose desire is confused and like an unfulfilled echo that inhabits any following desire. Therefore, we learned to recognize the legitimacy of – almost – all the drives, and more and more unknown sexualities, whose needs and desires are more and more designated, identified, claimed, normalized, self-determined. Desire, now, represents the burning matter of identity, and what each of us is due to declare if we want to define what we are. Sex – that actually has the mysterious power to free us from identity, and to remind us of the ocean – is used as an identity vector, either in the patriarchal tradition, and in this current confused prehistoric present.
And yet some taboos are still valid, in force – is this a good thing? Condensed in infant’s sexuality we find some extreme of what our culture has at the same time, idealized and refused. Theologians have seen innocence and the original sin in it. But what about the elders’ sex? What is the desire of the elders for nymphs?
If we see case reports of more than one century ago, or if we look at the well-known Krafft-Ebing’s manual of Psycopatia sexualis, this state of old men’s stubborn desire, is not reckoned among the innocent official perversions. Was it, maybe, considered as normal? Or was it a kind of prudery towards the Fathers? There is something annoying in an old man with a young girl, or in a young girl accompanying an old man, or – even if with slightly different notes – in an agée woman with a young boy. Old people’s sex is indecent, even ridiculous, fiery, clumsy. What is it that annoys us? It is not about the elders considered separately; it is the act of coming together, their desire of mixing with young bodies. We are used to recognize in it a relation of power – whose power is acted upon? Would this scandal reduce to an almost aesthetic thirst for balance, for sexual relations with no social violence in them?
Myths are full of old satyrs and nymphs – especially the painted version, from the Renaissance, or from the 17th century. The old satyr and the nymph can be considered as two polarities of the psyche, two “ways of the mind”. It is fundamental to recognize the contemporaneity of these two ways. To turn towards these two myths is like to recognize a continent as still alive, since it is contradictory, dynamic, conflictual, unstandardized to a legal univocal discourse (as it happens with the Holy Writings). Like all mythical matter, these two figures act ceaselessly in our mind: in this very moment, in a psychic gloom – nymphs, Porfirio says, dwell in semi-dark caves – the elder repeats his eager pursuit, the nymphs her ceaseless flight. They touch slightly, almost joining each other, then they part again. This may be the first clue to our problem: the elder and the nymph seem to be united in an original relationship, that ties them strongly, though this is a relationship of desire and of flight at the same time. This also means, in a further look, that the sense of scandal towards the elder’s sexuality, and the eager pursuit of the nymph, have a strong foundation in the irresistible attraction of the old satyr for the young girl. Something ties them up and something takes them apart: it is a similar movement in their look, that unites and makes them part.
In the swings of this pendulum motion, something much stronger than a sexual intercourse happens. It is something that concerns us, though we are neither – are we so sure of it? – satyrs nor fleeing nymphs. According to Plato, it is thanks to the nymph that we experience a peculiar form of knowledge: the possession, aka nympholepsy, like the Greeks used to name it. It is a kind of metamorphic knowledge, like any other erotic fascination, something that nowadays would be considered closer to madness than to the “knowledge”, literary or scientific, we usually refer to. This transformation has at its core, not the progressive identification with something, but the flight and the running after, the young girl and the old man. With nympholepsy, therefore, there is no transformation of the lover into the beloved, nor a feeling of nostalgia for the missing part we want to go back to; on the contrary, there is a constant chase, the experience of a precarious and intermittent possession, of a desire that never gets to completely integrate with its own object. In this perspective, to have knowledge means to split, to seize, to slip again from each other. Love is not only made of the two dimensions of union and separation, closeness and distance: there are also, the flight, the run, a desire mixed with fear, and a fear moved by desire. In this unstable hybrid dimension, where any possession is unreal, and ghosts are made of flesh, something much more crucial for us than in the dimensions of union or separation, happens.
This mythical image lets us understand that we can not be ingenuous: all of our reactions, everything passing through us – either the attraction for the nymph and the repulsion for the old satyr, the perversion and the moralizing feeling of being scandalized, fear and desire – have a similar or identical legitimacy in our mind and body. Only through acknowledging this co-extension, this constitutive doubleness, it would be possible to go back to breathing, without chocking under the growing univocal and prescriptive morals. Every time, we play one or the other pole in the pendulum motion: we play the nymph or the old satyr, the young girl or the elder – then the dissolute or the moralist, the killer or the killed. And always, something out or within us (it is not so important), will play the opposing part, and will push the pendulum to the other side.

Text by Emanuele Dattilo