MAXWELL› Yes. But I do not wish to speak about that.
ERIN› What do you want to say?
MAXWELL› I have a perverse impulse to tell you of my failings. My wounds. My darkest journeys.
ERIN› Why focus on your failings?
MAXWELL› Do you understand the essential difference between man and woman? Woman can simply BE. She gains identity through existence itself, through the biological imperative. She merely waits for completion, as you do. But man must BECOME. He must create himself. He must tear himself away from his mother, sever the umbilical, and project himself into the world BEYOND that wholeness. Man must exile himself from comfort and completion. You see that, don’t you?
ERIN› I suppose so.
MAXWELL› It can be a dark journey. I was no normal adolescent, Erin. I saw Elvis Presley as a cartoon Dionysus for bourgeois America. When the Beatles burst on the scene I ignored them. Too chipper, too happy. But then the world changed. The Rolling Stones, the Doors, Hendrix. I immersed myself in the drug subculture. Richard had always been a libertine, and by profession was an expert on pharmacology. He’d traveled down the hallucinogenic highway before Leary ever heard of LSD. He shepherded me in this, as in all things. I was the right age for Vietnam, but my hemophilia disqualified me from the draft, as it had my father before me. I was wealthy, in an Ivy League school, on the fast track for medicine. But in one area I remained unfulfilled. The area which EROS exists to explore.
ERIN› Sex?
MAXWELL› Yes. We are all slaves to our childhoods, and I was no exception. Because my hemophilia was my only limitation, it grew to terrifying scale in my mind. I strengthened my body through ceaseless swimming, a sport in which the chance of sustaining a bleeding injury was very low. My mention of Cellini’s
My body attracted women, but whenever matters progressed to an overtly sexual level, I found myself put off by their carnality, by their very vitality. I felt revulsion, fear, nausea, and did not understand why. My father’s erotic exploits proved that sex was possible for men like us. I masturbated, albeit carefully, and for two semesters in college I had a male roommate who would suck me to climax whenever I needed relief. He disgusted me, but it accomplished the goal. Still, I feared what might happen in the unguarded thrusting and writhing of real sex.
Then, at a college party, I mistakenly walked into a bedroom where a drunken girl had passed out. As I stared at her closed eyelids, the near-motionless breasts beneath her sweater, I felt my pulse quickening, a twinge of tumescence. I closed the door, moved to her, and pushed my hands clumsily under her sweater as my heart thundered in my chest. Terrified that someone would come in, I groped beneath her clothing for a few moments, soiled my trousers, then fled from the house. It sounds pathetic, doesn’t it?
ERIN› I’ve heard stranger things.
MAXWELL› Naturally I found a way to put myself into a similar situation again, only this time I removed the girl’s pants and actually penetrated her. The third time, the chosen girl awakened and I ran. She was unable to identify me, but the experience frightened me enough to make me stop. It also forced me to diagnose my own neurosis. All my life, I had been carrying around a psychosexual template of my dead mother in my head. It was my last vision of her, lying motionless in her coffin, pale and perfect, waiting for the flames of cremation. These women I had touched were but gross reflections of the anima in my mind. Of course, diagnosis and cure are different things. An acrophobe who knows he is afraid of heights cannot suddenly shed his fear. My anima remained with me, and it had faces I had yet to perceive.
ERIN› In four years of college you never once fell in love?
MAXWELL› Love? My mind was in chains! Whenever I thought I was making progress, another incident would occur. In medical school, seven other students and I were paraded into an operating room where an anesthetized young woman was about to be given a hysterectomy. We were to practice vaginal examinations, using her as our patient. This is common practice in teaching hospitals, if your husband hasn’t told you. As I stood in line, watching my fellow students force their gloved fingers into the pale, still body, I felt fury at the institutional violation of this defenseless woman. But then I sensed a terrific pressure beneath my lab coat. When my turn came to examine her, my hands were trembling. This was so out of character that the attending physician remarked on it. I bumbled through the exam, then raced into a rest room to relieve my distress. As I did, I visualized the anesthetized woman, the most perfect image I had yet encountered of my mother. I knew then that I was not yet free-that I might never be free-of her.
ERIN› Your father never sensed your problems?
MAXWELL› Of course he did! Richard blamed himself completely! For eulogizing my mother long after her death. For not having the courage to marry the woman he loved. If he had, he knew, he might have given me the gift he’d been granted-a sister with whom I could share all. Worse, by denying me that sister, he had also crippled the powerful gene line that had been concentrated in me. He begged me to turn outward, to search for someone who might fill the need he had not provided for, and give me heirs worthy of our genes.
ERIN› Did you?
MAXWELL› I tried. But I was meant to walk a different path, Erin. Summers during college, I began to travel abroad with my father. I had been to Europe, of course, but never to the East. And the East was Richard’s great passion. He was obsessed with the fertility cults of the Indus Valley cities, the bloody rituals of sex and death around which Indian culture had developed. He’d been raised by an authoritarian father, a paragon of the sky cult of Christianity, which of course had been grafted onto the sky cult of Germanic warrior culture. Yet he had seen his father break, and commit suicide under the stress of bad fortune. Richard sought a greater strength. Thus was he drawn to India, the great fount and faithful preserver of the Mother principle.
In India my illusions were stripped away. The strong ruled, the weak served or perished. I found women there who would do anything I wished for pitiful sums. The fact that I would be miles away the next day allowed me to overcome my anxieties and couple with them, but always there was a problem. Indian women are dark of skin and hair. They did not fit my template, ethereal Catherine lying in her martyr’s coffin.
Back in America, my sexual problems continued, but they did not interfere with my academic advancement. I was like a man aflame. Even as my genius was proclaimed from the heights, I was hiring prostitutes to lie passive in white gowns while I gently mounted them. I believe I was going slowly mad. Even those whores, who had seen so much depravity, were frightened by something in me. One lost her composure during the act and attacked me, and I had to be hospitalized for clotting factor therapy. Suicidal thoughts possessed me. It was then that Richard intervened. He stuffed me with amphetamines, whisked me off to India, and changed my life forever.
ERIN› What was different about that trip?
MAXWELL› I found someone.
ERIN› A woman?
MAXWELL› Yes.
ERIN› Like your mother?
MAXWELL› No. I found a woman who was death in life. Do you understand? Christianity preaches eternal life through death, but that is a false and exhausted dream. It is on the road of death that we find life eternal.
ERIN› I’m not sure I understand.
MAXWELL› You will. On that final trip to India, we crisscrossed the subcontinent in search of rituals and cults which had been outlawed by the British long before, but which rumor claimed still flourished in remote areas. Richard was no Western dilettante. He had friends all over the country, from the teeming cities to the village-dotted plains. At an isolated tribal village we were allowed to see a young boy dragged through the fields while a crowd of farmers hacked the flesh from his body in strips, which they then buried in their fields to ensure fertility.
From there, we trekked to a high village where a certain Shakti cult was known to practice Tantrism
