The planet Venus resembles our idea of desire.
It is a scorching, volcanic body, the hottest in the solar system.
There each day lasts eight months: between sunset and sunrise an endless burning night passes.
Due to a stormy collision, it is a planet turned upside down, rotating backwards on its axis.
Contrary to the rest, the sun rises in the west.
Although they did not know its astronomical eccentricities, the ancients intuited something when giving it the name of their goddess of the passions.
Since Venus is Venus, desire is seen as the force that upsets the order.
For this reason, the pagan societies already established with strict norms who and how could enjoy sex.
The sphere of pleasure was not the home, since the marriage attended to the patrimony, not to the attraction.
Arranged by the families, it had its raison d'être in inheritance and alliances.
Slaves were forbidden to marry: it was a matter for the rich.
In that scheme, husband and wife could hopefully become friends, but too much caressing was frowned upon.
Seneca advised against treating the wife as a vulgar lover.
Under these repressive historical coordinates the erotic imaginary is born.
Intensity and emotion only occur in impossible relationships.
The unattainable is always yearned for.
Classical and Provencal poetry revolves around this paradox: what becomes reality ceases to be love.
“Everything was endless lack,” writes Annie Ernaux in
Pure Passion
.
Our thirst cannot be quenched, happy and lasting lovers are something from another planet.
"Gentlemen, would you like to hear a beautiful tale of love and death?"
Thus begins the medieval story of the knight Tristan and the blonde Iseo.
As Denis de Rougemont states in
Love and the West
, this legend expresses the symbiosis between passion and danger.
The protagonists fall in love at great risk, since she is the fiancée of King Marco, Tristán's uncle.
Reckless, they confess their desire for her and betray the king.
Even after the wedding they remain lovers.
One night they are discovered, and he is sentenced to die, she to a cruel punishment.
They miraculously escape to a hidden cabin in the woods, but when they can finally sleep together, they lie on their backs and Tristan plunges a naked sword between their bodies, separating them.
For three rough years, alone in retirement, they repent and long for court.
Upon her return, they obtain King Marco's pardon and she recovers the throne, but, of course, she continues to clandestinely sleep with her lover.
Tristán and Iseo are bold and contradictory.
If there are no obstacles, they invent them.
Their love is not a longing they want to live, but an obsession they are willing to die for.
Over and over again, the great myths —
Romeo and Juliet
,
Werther
,
Wuthering Heights
,
Blood Wedding
— culminate in death in youth.
In addition to the tragic aura, these stories leave us a legacy of subversion, capable of promoting historical changes.
The film
Loving
, by Jeff Nichols, recalls the real adventures of a couple, a black woman and a white man, who in the sixties faced prison sentences for getting married.
The struggle of the Loving —true and symbolic last name— against all obstacles made it possible to abolish the segregationist laws that prohibited interracial marriages in the United States.
An ancient literary legacy —together with movies, series and songs— celebrates neither with you nor without you, tearing my life from me and the cult of tormented evildoers.
It glorifies the outburst to such an extent that it seems to legitimize jealousy or violence.
Basically, it is a device for exalting thwarted passion that is hardly applicable where we enjoy freedom today.
Instead, no one seems to value desire without drama, as if serene relationships had no history, only boredom: the cliché that happy families are all the same.
Thanks to the Roman poet Martial we meet the controversial Sulpicia, a woman who dared to write erotic verses about herself and her husband, an unusual transgression.
Although we have lost all of her work, Sulpicia's audacity in questioning that ancient cliché still resonates:
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