Eros is Eternal: Writing as an Act of Love

A love letter to my readers, my Substack as a love letter to women; through the work of Anne Carson, Audre Lorde, Byung-Chul Han, Ronald Barthes, and Andrea Dworkin

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Eros the Bittersweet

It was Sappho who first called eros “bittersweet”. No one who has been in love disputes her.

— Anne Carson —

Earlier this week, a new (paid) subscriber left a comment to the effect of “I noticed that you write about women”. This is the most succinct description of Unknown Canon. I love women, and how better to demonstrate that love than to write for women? Because taken as a whole, my Substack is a love letter to women.

The same irresistible charm, called peithō in Greek, is the mechanism of seduction of love and of persuasion in words; an ancient analogy between language and love…¹

There is analogous link between eros, romantic/sexual love, desire, and the goddess of persuasion, Peithō, companion of the goddess of love herself, Aphrodite. In her Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson explored the nature of love, but almost equally, drew upon the connection between writer, writing, and eros. What is love? For the ancient Greeks was “pleasure, pain, fear, memory of the past, apprehension of the future.”²

To create pleasure and pain at once is the novelist’s aim. We should dwell on this point for a moment. It is of some importance that, as readers, we are typically and repeatedly drawn into conflicted emotional response which approximates that of the lover’s soul divided by desire. ³

“Divided by desire”, because “when I desire you a part of me is gone: your lack is my lack”⁴. To desire and love is to give up something of yourself (you, the subject, as Ronald Barthes wrote in A Lover’s Discourse) to the object of your desire.

The relationship between love subject-object is analogous to that of the reader and writer, with the written work replacing love as the communication between writer and reader. As with lovers, the reader cannot truly know the writer, or the writer’s intent. As we read, we construct a facsimile of the writing in our mind, built upon our personal experiences and ourselves. As we write, we choose our subject, and bring in our experiences and consciousness into our writing. Thus, art is never entirely objective; thus, art cannot be separated from the artist. And the reader/viewer brings themselves, their experience, consciousness, their fickle emotions, too, into their experience when reading. But what of the spaces between the writer and reader?

What is erotic about reading (or writing) is the play of imagination called forth in the space between you and your object of knowledge. Poets and novelists, like lovers, touch that space to life with their metaphors and subterfuges. ⁵

The writing that I find best is the writing that I pull myself into, the writing that makes me think the most deeply, relate back to myself, and/or immerse and lose myself most fully into the world the writer created.

The Reader to the Writer, and Vice Versa

In Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck wrote about the writer’s role to make the not-obvious and not-known obvious/known. The best writers bring your attention to things you had not noticed prior.

Writing online, the writer and reader have a unique relationship: we speak directly to one another. The distance shrinks. In the last month or so, I have begun to receive more messages, notes, comments from readers. The comments follow certain patterns: that my interpretation of a book was different, but mostly and most of all, that my interpretation of feminism revealed something that the reader hadn’t known before, revealed a connection or something about the past and how it influences the future that the reader hadn’t put together prior. I receive a lot of messages from women who tell me they needed something like my writing, that I had changed their minds on feminism and made them more receptive to intersectional /inclusive feminism. Which means, in a very small way, I’m achieving my goals here. The messages/comments/notes often speak to the need for these revelations. For me, that means I’m achieving something, however small the scale.

When I started this project, the aim was simpler: to catalog “lesbian literature”. How it changed: my lived experience as someone who advocates for feminism (and survivors of sexual violence) crept into my writing and analysis. My reading choices were often intersectional. My readers again noticed and pointed this out long before I did, much in the same way that a reader also noticed that Unknown Canon is uniquely focused on women. Thus, my readers writing back to me also help me see what should have been obvious, make the not-obvious obvious.

The Writer to Her Writing and Her Ambitions

Feminism and lesbianism: two parts of a whole, two disparate ways to love women. As a reader as well as a writer, I have a sort of relationship to the writers whose works I read, too. When I read and write, I am a student and teacher. I stand on the shoulders of giants, of generations of women who also both loved women and who wrote to free women of sexist oppression: Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Adrienne Rich, Andrea Dworkin, Barbara Smith, Charlotte Bunch, Sara Ahmed, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga...

The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects — born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.⁶

Chaos, creative power, harmony, love: those capture a lot about my process for writing. I write my essays in a single sitting. When an idea for one comes to me, I feel as if I must, as urgently as possible, write out the idea. The idea feels discordant in my head, and writing helps me bring that chaos under control. I feel anxious and haunted by the idea until it’s written out. And when I’m writing, I lose myself. I cannot tell if an essay will be any good until I hit the publish button. When I awaken from the dream-state of writing, I am often left drained, breathless, but my restless, fiery mind finally quieted, finally satiated, the chaos of my mind calmed.

Eros may be a force through which we seek satisfaction, but he is not a kindly god. To go back to an idea of Anne Carson’s, desire leaves us divided, takes something of us. As a lover takes, a lover also gives back. Writing is a demanding lover: the way ideas are almost an intrusion on sane thought, then the processing of the ideas, sometimes I outline, then the research and data for each piece, and most of all, the maddening, beautiful process of constructing each sentence and arranging them into paragraphs.

Analogous to eros, I both hate and love that process. I hate that I desire it so much, hate that it won’t allow me rest. I love how fulfilling it is. When I went through a phase of reading about neuroscience, I remember reading that romantic love was like a highball: a mixture of cocaine and heroin, aggressive highs and deep lows. Love it or hate it, it’s addictive and there’s nothing quite like it.

The experience of eros is a study in ambiguities of time. Lovers are always waiting. They hate to wait; they love to wait. Wedged between these two feelings, lovers comes to think a great deal about time, and to understand it very well, in a perverse way. ⁷

“Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.”⁸

The obvious analogy would be the reader is the Object (in Barthes’ subject-object) that waits, and the subject is the writer the creator for whom they wait. What I am describing in my sentence above the quotes is something different: the writer as the subject, their ambitions in writing as the object. The reason for my impatience is that I have fallen in love with writing. This means that I find waiting to write maddening. Like any lover, I crave more of it, and more from it. It’s awakened some ambition in me, and I want more…books, more writing, more readers, to make the words and sentences obey my will, to be the mistress of words rather than their servant.

Why do I write, what do I want from it? I write, first and foremost, for myself. For the love of it. And yet, I also share my writing because I want to put forth certain messages into the world. What I do in life — through advocacy/activism — writing allows me to do on a grander scale, to (I hope) touch more people, to educate.

Writing as a Revolutionary Act of Love

In The Agony of Eros, Byung-Chul Han wrote that eros has become “gravely ill” because of our modern individualism. Eros was done in through the effort to determine the market value of everything, the set of monetary interests that govern all, the “achievement society. Combined, these have created a contemporary individualism that goes against the very spirit of love. Han’s concept of the Other is Barthes’s object — they are the person/object you desire. That concept of the Other has been eroded through “mounting narcissification of Self”, because love — which has the “power to wound and incite passion” — asks us to have the courage to set aside self for discovering the Other.

Instead, modern society reduces love to a formula and another measureable achievement. However, the nature of love is such that it cannot be controlled, it cannot be reduced to a formula for “enjoyment and consumption”, “devoid of risk and daring”. Byung-Chul Han brings up modern culture and capitalism as anti-erotic forces, and particularly that “pornography profanes the erotic”. Han very lightly touched upon what I believe even more strongly goes against love: modern therapy-speak and psychology as the underwriting of the formula. They attempt to remove the potential of wounding from love, to control the chaos, ask us to constantly center ourselves above the Other.

Decades prior, in the introduction to Woman Hating, Andrea Dworkin applied similar anti-capitalistic thinking to books and reading/writing.

As a writer with a revolutionary commitment, I am particularly pained by the kinds of books writers are writing, and the reasons why. I wanted write books because they are committed to the content of those books. I want writers to write books as actions. I want writers to write books that can make a difference in how, and even why, people live. I want writers to write books that are worth being jailed for, worth fighting for, and should it come to that in this country, worth dying for.

Books are for the most part in Amerika commercial ventures. People write them to make money, to become famous, to build or augment other careers….The notion is that there are idea, then art, then somewhere else, unrelated, life…Because of this strange schizopherenia, books and the writing of them have become embroidery on a dying way of life.⁹

I come back to that quote of Andrea’s often. She, too, wrote against pornography, but her opinions on pornography were not as well-received as Byung-Chul Han’s. Andrea Dworkin was an controversial radical feminist writing and activist during her lifetime, and Byung-Chul Han is very popular philosophy writer, particularly beloved in leftist intellectual circles. I can understand why: his writing a sort of clever yet dispassionate cynical quality, very masculine in the way that Slavoj Žižek is, so as to make the reader believe in their own rational, clever, cynicism, too. Despite that (or maybe because), Byung-Chul Han did not resonate with me. While his observations were insightful, they were also too obvious, his writing style was too emphatic without expansiveness, too hopeless in not offering solutions or a path forward. Han’s writing does not leave room for possibilities outside of the narrowness of his views.

Andrea doesn’t write in absolutes — she recognizes the trend of the uncultured reader, but knows that there’s an alternative. What I love about Andrea’s take is her passion, and her unmatched rhetorical style, which is driven by emotion and balanced with facts. She told it how it was, and then proceeded to write against how it was out of love — love for women, for writing, and as a means to incite a revolution that would sweep away oppression. I write for the same reasons that Andrea did.

Those of us who love reading and writing believe that being a writer is a sacred trust. It means telling the truth. It means being incorruptible. It means not being afraid, and never lying. Those of us who love reading and writing feel great pain because so many people have become cowards, clowns, and liars. Those of us who love reading and writing begin to feel a deadly contempt for books, because we see writers being bought and sold in the market place — we see them vending their tarnished wares on every street corner. Too many writers, in keeping with the Amerikan way of life, would sell their mothers for a dime.¹⁰

I believe both reading and writing are sacred (seriously, I take copious notes in notebooks, and keep my books pristine). Books are my only non-essential spending, and I’d argue that they are essential. I pay for books because I think writers should get paid for the work they do. I love the words books contain, but I love books themselves as objects too.

The specific niches that I write about, my background in activism, the intersections of my own identity… these go against the grain of what’s popular here on Substack. I do not follow the formulas for Substack success, nor fit neatly into a tried-and-true category. Instead, I draw upon academic writing, a lot of data (my excuse is that I studied economics, then law), and my writing isn’t incendiary and I bring greater objectivity than do the writers I most admire — though I chose quotes to include my writing that bring in greater emotionality. Add to that that I write about intersectional feminism and lesbian literature and history — I do not fit in either the existing feminist nor existing literature molds here on Substack. What I’m attempting is instead to “commit to the content” of what I write, and committed to the practice of writing. I did not expect to have readers.

Now that I’m writing consistently, I want to keep writing. I want to eventually write books. I have no doubt that they too will about women and the love of in some capacity or other. I’ve never been so certain of wanting something in my life, I have never quite fallen in love with something so hard.

And thank you, reader, for accompanying me on that journey, and for helping me discover that love.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.¹¹

1. Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Republished Dallas/Dublin: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998.) p. 55.

2. Ibid, p 95.

3. Ibid., p 94.

4. Ibid, p 35.

5. Ibid., p 123.

6. Lorde, Audre. Uses of the Erotic. From ed. Shulman, Alix Kates & Moore, Honor. Women’s Liberation! Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution & Still Can. (New York: Library of America. 2021). p 375.

7. Carson, p 131.

8. Barthes, Ronald. trans. Howard, Richard. A Lover’s Discourse. (New York: Hill & Wang. 1978).

9. Dworkin, Andrea. Woman Hating. (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1974. Republished New York: Picador, 2025.) p. 14.

10. Ibid, p 15.

11. Lorde, Audre. Poetry Is Not a Luxury.