The Erotic Philosophers

It’s a spring morning; sun pours in the window As I sit here drinking coffee, reading Augustine. And finding him, as always, newly minted From when I first encountered him in school. Today I’m overcome with astonishment At the way we girls denied all that was mean In those revered philosophers we studied; Who found us loathsome, loathsomely seductive; Irrelevant, at best, to noble discourse Among the sex, the only sex that counted. Wounded, we pretended not to mind it And wore tight sweaters to tease our shy professor. We sat in autumn sunshine “as the clouds arose From slimy desires of the flesh, and from Youth’s seething spring.” Thank you, Augustine. Attempting to seem blasé, our cheeks on fire, It didn’t occur to us to rush from the room. Instead we brushed aside “the briars of unclean desire” And struggled on through mires of misogyny Till we arrived at Kierkegaard, and began to see That though Saint A. and Søren had much in common Including fear and trembling before women, The Saint scared himself, while Søren was scared of us. Had we, poor girls, been flattered by their thralldom? Yes, it was always us, the rejected feminine From whom temptation came. It was our flesh With its deadly sweetness that led them on. Yet how could we not treasure Augustine, “Stuck fast in the bird-lime of pleasure”? That roomful of adolescent poets manqué Assuaged, bemused by music, let the meaning go. Swept by those psalmic cadences, we were seduced! Some of us tried for a while to be well-trained souls And pious seekers, enmeshed in the Saint’s dialectic: Responsible for our actions, yet utterly helpless. A sensible girl would have barked like a dog before God. We students, children still, were shocked to learn The children these men desired were younger than we! Augustine fancied a girl about eleven, The age of Adeodatus, Augustine’s son. Søren, like Poe, eyed his girl before she was sixteen, To impose his will on a malleable child, when She was not equipped to withstand or understand him. Ah, the Pygmalion instinct! Mold the clay! Create the compliant doll that can only obey, Expecting to be abandoned, minute by minute. It was then I abandoned philosophy, A minor loss, although I majored in it. But we were a group of sunny innocents. I don’t believe we knew what evil meant. Now I live with a well-trained soul who deals with evil, Including error, material or spiritual, Easily, like changing a lock on the kitchen door. He prays at set times and in chosen places (At meals, in church), while I Pray without thinking how or when to pray, In a low mumble, several times a day, Like running a continuous low fever; The sexual impulse for the most part being over. Believing I believe. Not banking on it ever. It’s afternoon. I sit here drinking kir And reading Kierkegaard: “All sin begins with fear.” (True. We lie first from terror of our parents.) In, I believe, an oblique crack at Augustine, Søren said by denying the erotic It was brought to the attention of the world. The rainbow curtain rises on the sensual: Christians must admit it before they can deny it. He reflected on his father’s fierce repression Of the sexual, which had bent him out of shape; Yet he had to pay obeisance to that power: He chose his father when he broke with his Regina. Søren said by denying the erotic It is brought to the attention of the world. You must admit it before you can deny it.