On the Writing of Erotomania: A Romance

Actual sexuality, what occurs between one or more persons in the bedroom, the bathroom, the cell, has little to do with the imagination of sexuality. The emphasis on bodily functions that characterizes the early part of Erotomania is an expression of the condition of man as animal. I don’t think as I write. In fact I work myself up into a state through weight lifting and karate practice that is meant to induce the illusion that I am writing with little concern or respect for my cognitive faculties. Essentially the unconscious is totally ruled by urges and drives that contravene the Enlightenment notion of man as rational animal. The imagery of this so-called “primary process” thinking is colored by instinct. That is why much of the speech of psychotic patients is laced with often disturbing erotic, sometimes violent imagery. In my writing regimen, I stick to a rational and repetitive practice, much like Zen or psychoanalysis, where I can enter this dangerous world in a disciplined manner—at the same time every day, 365 days a year. I think artists and psychotics have much in common, only the artist is able to move freely between the worlds of his conscious and unconscious while the psychotic is trapped. I make this daily appointment with myself in the early morning hours, and my unconscious is ready for me.

Years ago, when I was a freelancer, I interviewed Bertolucci for a piece I was writing. I asked if the incidents of Last Tango in Paris were taken from his life experience. He told me if he had lived them, he wouldn’t have been able to turn them into art. That’s the way I feel about Erotomania. Every artistic act is autobiographical in the sense that it reflects the concerns of the writer, but in terms of happenstance I have never delved into any of the areas that Erotomania describes with the exception of marriage counseling, nor have I even been to any of the places, including the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo or Akron. And while I once visited Key West, and in fact spent a night at the Casa Marina hotel, I never enjoyed any of the colorful night life that transpires on Key West’s famed Duval Street, nor have I ever visited a gay barbecue joint of any sort, especially one named The Golden Cock with a sister establishment named Sticky Fingers, nor a restaurant catering to gay farmhands in Kansas called Cock ’N Bull. I have never met any of the Russian avant-garde artists I describe inhabiting the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, nor do I know if such a community exists.

In a way the narrative of Erotomania is like what I do every day which is to go into a nether world, coming out and rejoining my life as a member of human society. My two main characters, Monica and James, basically are not people at the start of the book. They are walking id’s costumed as humans and by the end, they have developed character and consciousness. In this sense the book is about the emergence of consciousness from the animal state; it’s an evolutionary tract with evolution envisioned as an ontogenic process. Though scientists have had remarkable luck in making parrots learn up to l00 words, most animals remain animals for the entirely of their natural lives. Using writer’s license, I have created animals who turn into people. There is a part of the novel when my two protagonists are chimeras, man/beasts who are conflicted, as we all are, only more so. But for the most part I start with a couple who scent each other out without either the delight or restrictions of consciousness and end with a pair of humans who go to therapy to deal with their relationship problems. Erotomania may have a realistic veneer in that there are recognizable sights like the Holocaust Museum, but it is hardly a work that frames reality in a proscenium, presenting a kind of art that imitates the perception of so called reality. The provenance of the work is more Dalí and Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, which presents a dreamlike universe tinged with violence, desire, and hopefully a good deal of humor.