Reciprocity Poem by gershon hepner

Reciprocity



Preferring reasoned reciprocity,
to unilateral possession,
ideal for which I do not crave,
I think of love as the expression
of feelings that do not enslave
a couple they can tether
separately in shackles. Love
enables pairs to fly together,
reciprocally far above
unreasoned depths of animosity.

Inspired by Peter Green’s review of “Sex and Sensuality in the Ancient World, ” by Giulia Sissa in TNR, March 4,2009:

Giulia Sissa is too earnest to see the funny side of much that she describes. Her approach to this tradition is intellectually conventional, in that her dominant interest is in analyzing what theorists and writers thought was going on, rather than aiming for the historical actuality (sometimes, indeed, she treats the two as identical): but she is at the same time robustly opposed to much current conventional wisdom. In particular she objects to the phallic reductionism preached by Foucault and documented by Dover. Like Davidson, she sees this emphasis on the mechanics of erect sex as excluding a wide range of erotic emotions, above all that sensuality which she describes as “anguish and delight, want and anticipation, attraction and seduction, rapture and strategy.” Or, in sum, love as opposed to sex. In sharp contrast to Davidson, however, Sissa sees femininity as the stimulant source for all of these longings and relations-primarily in the female (she quotes Lucretius on “the woman who emanates love from her entire body, ' toto iactans e corpore amorem) , but also in the cinaedus, 'the male with an effeminate, languorous and loose-limbed body.” For her, the “pure virility” of primitive man needs a healthy additive of femininity to become civilized, to reach that point in human relationships where the ideal is a “longing for reciprocity rather than unilateral possession.” No surprise that one of her star witnesses is that subversively un-Roman poet Ovid.

2/21/09

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