Will you still need me
Will you still feed me
When I’m sixty-four?
The Beatles
Do the old need sex? The short answer is ‘Yes’. Everyone needs to be needed. Everyone deserves to be fed, in all senses of ‘feeding’. Do not call me a dirty, old man. I am not dirty, not old and not a man. I am a passively gay poet-professor turning 64 this year with an active sex life from which I get my gay poems.
When students counsel that I give up sex in my Vanaprastha ashrama, I counter: “I may be slow but not yet dead”. One needs sex till the day one dies. Anais Nin, novelist and my teacher, made her second husband promise just that. (Everything else she could do without him.) During my condolence visit to him, he said: “I kept my promise to her. I made love to her the night before she went to hospital where she died.” (He was 20 years younger and outlived her by 25 years). On the other hand, playwright Dina Mehta, then in her 60s, said her Bombay women-friends were “whipping up sex” to try and feel young.
The four ashramas are for the householder, not for the gay man who does not marry. It is true that man’s reality is his spirit but the householder’s body lives on in his children; only sometimes his spirit too survives in them. The unmarried, gay poet-teacher’s progeny are his students and his poems. The poems come out of bodily experience just as children do.
Preachers who rail against the body, use the tongue and the mouth to do so. After a lifetime of Cartesian living, Sartre in his last interview at 76 to the French newspaper Le Monde said he needed the body to become a philosopher: “Words are formed by a tongue in a mouth”. Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’ was countered in the same ‘rational’ 18th century France by de Sade’s ‘I f***k, therefore I am’. Sade gave us Philosophy in the Bedroom. His life itself was an orgy. Sartre, during the World War II Nazi occupation of France invented existentialism. At the end of World War II, Kitaro Nishida pronounced existentialism for a defeated Japan. Even in nothingness the body had primacy. Nishida writes:
‘‘We are born from Nothingness and go into Nothingness, passing through this Nothingness, which is the world.
But we are not born with nothing; we are born with a body: Eyes to see, ears to hear, a mouth to speak, a brain to think, a heart to feel, hands to catch, hold,
lull, free; legs to walk away....”
As a child, the writer Arturo Vivante, son of the philosopher Leon Vivante of Siena, was given asylum in London since the Jewish family had to flee from Mussolini’s Fascism. London housed them in a camp for enemy aliens during Hitler’s Blitz. In the showers, little Arturo saw and hated for the first time the
naked, old male body. As a young doctor in post-War Rome, he fell in love with Ingrid Bergman, while assisting at the delivery of her love-child by Rossellini. “I want this man out of my room,” Bergman ordered. He injected her with anaesthetics. “Then the poor woman passed out,” Arturo said, retelling this story 60 years on. I recount it here to tell of the power of a beautiful body even on an ageing imagination.
Arturo, who was my Creative Writing teacher at Purdue University, told us schoolboy jokes over Pernod, an aniseed liquor: A boy slept with a mother and her daughter. ‘The mother was better’, he said. Another slept with daughter, mother, grandmother. ‘The grandmother was best’. Rossellini’s Rome, Open City and Pasolini’s Mama Roma are films on the havoc caused by invading Allied armies on the Italian family of the 1940s. Mothers had to prostitute themselves to American GIs for very scarce Lucky Strike cigarettes for their children’s fathers. As a young man, Arturo had seen women in Rome’s night-alleys lying under customer after customer for hours engaging in sex, ‘without tiring’ as he said with male envy for a woman’s sexual endurance. “You passive gays must be like that,” Arturo had said enviously then to me. The male is no sooner roused than spent. The Hyderabad gay take on this is: ‘An ass never grows old.’ It is to be stressed here that sex as recreation can only be indulged in by the moneyed class. ‘Vaishyas alone practise sexual intercourse,’ say the Shastras.
My mentor and hero Anais Nin writes in her last diary at 60: ‘I dance topless in Tahiti in a hula skirt. My nipples are still those of a young girl, small, firm and pink.’ She answered my fan mail with a photograph of herself in a long, red dress ‘dancing on the beach at Puerto Vallarta’, at 62. She died at 73 of cervical cancer, caused by early and much love. She felt no guilt. ‘I am a pagan’, wrote this lapsed Spanish Catholic whom the poet Diana Wakoski called ‘the nearest thing to Venus walking among us.’
Sappho of Lesbos, after whom lesbianism is named, when very old, leapt to her death from a rock into the sea for the love, wonder of wonders, of a man!
I’m reminded of Chirkeen, the late 18th century Uttar Pradeshi poet-bawd who, one night fell drunkenly into a freshly dug grave, and fell asleep only to be awakened by a woman pissing on him, squatting astride the pit. He burst into bawdiness: ‘God! Even in the grave your marvels are unspent!/Resurrected now I am dazzled by c**t.’
I joke that I winked at the doctor who pulled me out of my mother and I hope to wink at the undertaker who will put me into the earth.
Hoshang Merchant is a queer poet .