Free Libido


"All right, give me the intro."
"I don't do intro. I'm the Extro version."
"Okay, skip the intro."

As I've been writing this column I've felt structure coming off like a bandage unwound from the invisible man, so that you can see right through him.



I start to sit down on Sunday and write something that has structure and some kind of informational value and then I look up and see the Wizard of Oz, all fire and smoke and dramatic presentation, and, behind the facade, a child is watching a man and a woman in a vicious argument.

He has no consciousness that they are exchanging libido, as overwhelming force meets its obsequious mate. Repressed libido has many forms.

They are shadows dancing on the walls. I am making the shadows dance, and they aren't the real people and they aren't the memory of real people. They are images which are animated by libido. Writers use it to create stories, artists use it to create images, musicians use it to make music.

Libido is the finest tonic in existence. It will heal the sick, raise the dead, make the little girls talk out of their heads. Not only that, it's generic.

It is often a source of embarrassment, in that it acts in conjunction with the libidos of other people, and that is why taboos were set up, so that everybody wouldn't be ... well, without them sexual relationships would be like Norman Mailer's Egyptology. But I guess that's not so much different from the Jerry Springer Show.

I was watching just in passing a history of sex on the History Channel. They were in Rome, and some professor was saying that the Romans were probably just attributing their behavior to the Greeks, but they were doing it anyway, and using the Greek connection as a lame excuse.

"It" was pretty much letting the libidinous relationships with other people be without taboo.

Sometimes libidinous family relationships are used for especially genius comic work.

Sometimes you see something you couldn't see because you were inside it, like a fish can't see the water. The narrator talked about Roman sexuality being based in attraction between power and submission. And I thought, "No kidding? Isn't that always the case?" I paused to consider the question.

I have become familiar enough with libido to know that there are hidden wells of energy, and that what wants to come to the surface can attach itself to the sexuality, because it reaches down into the deeply instinctual body. But perhaps what was once deep beneath the surface is fully conscious, now, and it's useless to keep casting in that pool. You caught that fish.

"I didn't grab Nurse Duckett by the bosom," said Yossarian.

"I grabbed her by the bosom," said Dunbar.


"Are you both crazy?" the doctor cried shrilly, backing away in paling confusion.


"Yes, he really is crazy, Doc," Dunbar assured him. "Every night he dreams he's holding a live fish in his hands."


The doctor stopped in his tracks with a look of elegant amazement and distaste, and the ward grew still. "He does what?" he demanded.


"He dreams he's holding a live fish in his hand."


"What kind of fish?" the doctor inquired sternly of Yossarian.


"I don't know," Yossarian answered. "I can't tell one kind of fish from another."


"In which hand do you hold them?"


"It varies," answered Yossarian.


"It varies with the fish," Dunbar added helpfully.


The colonel turned and stared down at Dunbar suspiciously with a narrow squint. "Yes? And how come you seem to know so much about it?"


"I'm in the dream," Dunbar answered without cracking a smile.


The colonel's face flushed with embarrassment. He glared at them both with cold, unforgiving resentment. "Get up off the floor and into your bed," he directed Dunbar through thin lips. "And I don't want to hear another word about this dream from either one of you. I've got a man on my staff to listen to disgusting bilge like this."


The libido can flow along pre-existing paths or, with conscious intent, it can be re-channeled. Libido can be channeled into creative enterprise, romance, or fishing or what have you.



"What'll you have?"

Aggressive sex is frictional, and often fictional, as well, while tantric sex involves a careful balance of give and take, to use alternating current to turn on the lights.



"This doesn't lie ..."

Joseph Henderson said that libido isn't sex per se. It is, more accurately, relational energy. It's what changes two separate systems into one system with two polarities. The first and most obvious polarity is extrovert and introvert. But a lot of introverts are with other introverts and extroverts can pair together and sing "Ring of Fire."

When I was with an extroverted woman I had dreams in which fire was burning out of control. I think it was my stomach burning out of control. I've never really recovered.

I have learned that I can feel passion in places I could never live. Libido is often a tourist. It can be an enthusiastic visitor but doesn't want to depart from the itinerary. It can turn negative. While I cannot now remember the poem, Joseph once talked about a story in which the hunter comes back from the woods and has been poisoned. His mother is asking him where he went and who he saw, trying to get to the source of the poisoning.

There is often a woman in the woods with poison for the hunter who just can't stay out of there. He gets around to the witch's house eventually. Or if you've a more classical bent, he comes across Artemis in her bath and his own hounds tear him to pieces.

As to what makes a witch a witch, the best explanation I have read is that a witch is a woman with such a weak ego it continually collapses, leaving father, mother and child. Any one of them can come up at any instant, depending on which has the most libido at the moment. This both fascinates a man and draws him into his own ego regression as he moves under the spell. A weak ego can't resist addiction.

In Neumann's "The Great Mother," he tries to make the structure of the female archetype understandable by dividing it into two fields of energy. One field is between Mary, positive mother, and the Old Witch (death). This is the ancient, the uroboric feminine, where there is no conscious division between mother and child. The other field is the eros, or relational, feminine. At the positive polarity is Sophia, who lifts a man's libido upward into civilizing power. At the other polarity is the young witch, who draws the libido into addiction and madness through her seductive powers. At the extremes, any one of these turns to its opposite.

Beatrice could not show Dante heaven before he had gained a passing knowledge of hell.

"When I met my wife," Joseph said, "I dreamed of a fire that was burning, and it was just right, hot enough but contained in the fireplace."

Sometimes the fire's going just right and a man will piss on it from some ancient power drive. In fact, there is serious anthropological assumption that not pissing on the fire was the first civilized act. If you had to look after the fire and not let it go out, but got a kick out of the personal power of pissing on it, what to do? It was sort of minimal requirement that you defer to the good of the group and piss on the cold cold ground, having to be content with melting some ice.

It's always more satisfying to piss in a urinal that has ice cubes in it.

My introverted wife is in her office. She's very happy to be by herself. Introverts get energy from inside themselves, and dealing with people exhausts them. I don't know whether I'm extroverted or introverted, because I seem to adjust. If there are people around I can get extroverted and energized, but if there's not anybody around I don't mind entertaining myself.

It's the same libido, no matter what you do with it.

Sometimes you have to let it go inside and fight off a cold, drink some whiskey to kill the germs, and wait for the war to be over.

It's one of those days.

Posted: Sun - November 19, 2006 at 03:52 PM