TOWARD A WHOLE-MINDED SEX DREAM
an essay, plus a review of Adam Johnson’s Blaze Kimber
TOWARD A WHOLE-MINDED SEX DREAM
I am a subcontractor for erotic romance novels. I write sex scenes for paid insertion into other novelist’s manuscripts. These other novelists are like ghostly presences that haunt the imagination, taking the credit but also taking the blame:
“Her pointed feet made dents, divots in the mattress and she gripped the back of his strong neck, fingers intertwined as though she was climbing the trunk of a tree.”
“On her back, her large buttocks acted like shocks on which to roll her body’s carriage with each stroke.”
“She see-sawed on his long erection half-inside her, creating a fulcrum to mash her g-spot with.”
“He held her big breasts, pushing her nipples as close together as possible to each other, then running his wet open mouth rapidly side to side over them like a bluesman playing frenzied scales on a harmonica.”
I dreamt we had sex. It was hot. No talking, you insisted. I guess you don’t like to talk during. You were wearing a t-shirt and bikini bottoms which you did not undo the side strings of nor remove but you pushed aside to let me in. It was a big factor of it to look at your face and verify it was you across the dream barrier into the registry of faces I’ve seen while awake: how I identified you. You made good sex faces, the evidence of pleasure that sometimes looks like agitation or stress but was also blended with wanting to be seen as attractive, pouting and fluttering eyelids and the forehead corrugated. Some women’s faces lose their attraction during sex; maybe during those awakened trysts it was a lack of sensitivity on my part as a lover, that had led me to misunderstand.
The dream mechanism — that personalized force from outside our conscious selves operating the levers, editing and directing — did not right away replicate the sensation of penetrating your woman’s body, not right away at least. That auteur did not include in his storyboards the penile sensation signifying that sexual contact of skin on skin was achieved. That is what I must feel happening to know I has the title of intercourse, and what I wanted to talk to you about but on which you silenced me. I fear I am not erect enough, the dream becomes flavored with the nightmare of erotic performance anxiety hidden within that “check engine” forgottenness.
Your face knew it was being looked at and let protective energies, demure modesty, fall away and allowed itself to be naked. Faces are not naked typically. Your face in the dream allowed affection to flow back and forth between us partners like a shuttle in a loom. Laying on our sides, me behind you, you lift a leg and I flex it back, point it up toward the ceiling, and kiss a path upwards from calf to ankle to foot-arch. It’s a humiliation for me to kiss the foot but I want to do it in a dream boudoir where the dream mechanic making it all happen does not allow shame to exist.
The scientific results of sexual orgasm and post-orgasmic catatonia and neurasthenia were as replicable as any scientific experiment under live conditions — same results to the experiment, which really wasn’t a dispassionate experiment but an act of desire, a thing spontaneous (or so I thought while dreaming and defenseless against my neurotic hang-ups), that sneaks up on me. It did not have the well-known deleterious effect that awake, conscious “live fire” orgasm has in my personal mythology since orgasm seldom seems to come in dreams and is in fact a perpetually delayed plot point in the pornographic TV program, edited out by awakening.
Curiously, another related annex of the dream that night supplies fodder for the 21st century Freudian: The perplexing problem of getting up the courage to ask for extra dream video store/library stock, why I needed second dub of a CD I was too lazy to retrieve from my Walkman: the audiobook of our sex act in the erotic romance novel I ghost-wrote.
Sex dreams are a rarity in my middle-aged mind palace, a place of relative celibacy. This scarcity of sexual adventure in the dream world highlights a certainty that the phenomenal eruption of the past week contains a lesson about my waking preoccupation with my mind: how to write my way into getting a more comprehensive grasp on the mysterious control panel, to use a further mechanical metaphor.
To dream about sex, to wish to go into an erotic experience in your dreams, seems to me to be akin to wanting to create, to do creative writing. It’s the height of mental activity accessible to the average person. Unconscious suburbia is a good sector to excavate creatively to gain control of the mind.
Who are you, the dream seems to ask, and why is your mind so frustratingly quicksilver and mutable? Why the fickle attention span? Is it bipolarity or just the human condition? To be frail and have zero will or direction while spending conscious time?
***
I wake up and experience the texture of a day. “The thing that is wrong with you,” the sinewave of a personal flux, a bipolar oscillation. Bipolarity hilarity. Why are some days so devoid of mind? Why is my mind like an hourglass broken and leaking irrevocable sand ground from all the glass mirrors of my imagination? Instead of being like a steel trap? They say reading and writing will sharpen the mind.
When the entropy of social media algorithms don’t bring you what you want it mirrors, mimics that noticeable dissolution of mind felt by the writer who can’t align the lasers enough to write. I struggle to focus the mind after fragmentation and dulling from what Romanian philosopher Alexandru Dragomir called the “everyday metempsychosis” of awakening from sleep each day (after no sex, with which it would be even more shattering). It is impossible to deal with the mind in an extended state of duration as a unit, a cohesive unity fleshed out with homogeneity, a looming piece of architecture. Ornate capital of the plinth. A fragment of a statue, a ruin casting a shadow. Never will there be a total object of the mind, a clear view giving a perspective of an entirety. Holistic gestalt. The planes and facets of the whole mind never tilt to face you, the way that, in our reductive attention economy of the moment, Instagram photos do in order to eagerly catch your eye and direct you towards an illusory mirage of online personhood.
The mind, does it even exist when nothing is happening, in the expanse of boredom in a workweek? Like a cyborg I am trapped in machine metaphors that push their way inward and insist on one thing: the hardware of mind will never be adequate, never truly live beyond whatever software is being run at that particular moment and then discarded. Books, music, movie, media only are illuminated while I consume them and are then forgotten into a deadened library, at least consciously. Whole mind, if it ever could be achieved, is like a retaining wall or dam casting shadows. The body distracts from this elemental truth, this shadow cast by consciousness. Why do I dream sex lives with you in the midst of mental drifts and quotidian pains my body is an antenna tuned for?
The 17th century French philosopher La Rochefoucauld, always a gloomy commentator on humanity, had an aphorism: “Few people are wise enough to prefer useful criticism to treacherous praise.” In hopes of offering the former and avoiding the latter, I have been wrestling for weeks with contemplating a book review of Adam Johnson’s poetry booklet Blaze Kimber published recently by Pig Roast Publishing. There is no compositional agony quite like that felt by the reviewer discussing a flawed book written by a good friend. I have read the book through twice, and I feel I should reiterate that as a sometime book critic struggling to attain a holistic mind (see above), any moderated review of Blaze Kimber is derived from it just being the luck of the draw, affect-wise. Once I was open to the book, once I was peeved for external reasons, and both readings have colored my interpretation that I hope will be seen as balanced and honest.
At crucial crossroads, the text spoke to me. I will quote liberally from those sections.
The long poem is an extended mass of phrases, sentences, jotted notes laced through with fragments of a private narrative. “I am in my notes app at the bottom of the sea,” Johnson writes in this long poem. I related this style of writing, in a review of his previous book of poetry Covered in Sharpie and Suing for Peace, to the continents of plastic garbage floating in the oceans of Planet Earth, archipelagos of detritus cast off by a culture in decline. There’s a buoyant yet frightening quality to the prose poetry that keeps you aloft, but you don’t quite know why, until you read a line from the author that reads: “It all makes sense in my head in some nasty alcoholic way.” Elsewhere, “My writing is a swindling trick, the artifice of a beggar…Then call me two-penny sublime.” The legal dramas prevalent on Johnson’s poetry are still there, the after-hours court stenography informally foregoing “transcribing all your bar talk” for “transcribing the human race”: disembodied voices ask each other questions like “How many bailiffs have jumped from the second story?” and tell terrible tales of murder and/or suicide. “I’m not in my prime but I am making a living and saving for a college that will destroy my children’s minds. New MacBook. Then river cliff SHOVE, and dead (Adam Johnson) was worth one million under the policy. Burn him up quick because smooth old case cats like to exhume. Everyone knows this already.”
“It all makes sense if you count every seventh letter,” we’re told, which indicates the encipherment that the long poem seems to be encased in. “You have to put in the work to read me. You have to be willing to go all the way.” I felt like I was being addressed by such lines; an appeal was being made which I attempted to fulfill. “I have the entire world in my head.” That’s a chilling thought which I will return to, and it helped me to try to observe the whole motion and structure of the poem. “I am asked why I write only sounds and I reply that there is nothing else. I know this isn’t true. I am lying to myself. An easy task.” A personality is there in the book, a suffering self-acknowledgement that unfolds depths in the text: maybe another island formed of more spiritual garbage is concealed a mile beneath the surface of the plastic one we’re left to sift through? Maybe here is the generosity and translucence that the words otherwise seem to deny us? “I am everyone I’ve ever met. I don’t even have my own laugh. I adopt the laugh of the person I am with in the moment. Dead serious. I’m a chameleon. So Sad.” Excoriations multiply when Johnson gives us further soulful benchmarks: “The tribulations of adult modernity episode 1,001. Try me. Except the battery is dead and I’m still in the box.”
When I say that this latest book of Johnson’s has a challenging hermeticism, what do I mean? Something is enigmatic, something portcullis-down that won’t let me in no matter how many keys I try to use on the outer doors. It would be less vexing if this wasn’t a friend, someone I care about, whose own whole mind I have an interest in getting to know. I’ve told Adam in private communications that I wish his new writing was slightly more linear. I think it has been an academic discussion but a friendly one, I hope. An academic discussion in that it can be easily discarded by the mind. I see hints of what could be if there was just an extra measure of a gift given to the reader.
Another way of putting this that I hope will not be taken as insulting, that I hope will in a larger sense convey my desire to read more of Johnson’s work is that his later books have been composed in such a way as to stick somewhat in the craw like a peanut butter sandwich, without any liquid refreshment to wash them down. And I love peanut butter, let that be clearly understood! I love the flavor, and will eat peanut butter sandwiches again. The texture and consistency can create an obstacle, though.
***
