Desire

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  13 The Sunday after the Saturday already described proved to be as bright as the weatherman had predicted. When putting the breakfast things back on the chair outside my room for my good landlady to remove at her convenience, I gleaned the following situation by listening from the landing across which I had softly crept to the bannisters in my old bedroom slippers—the only old things about me. There had been another row. Mrs. Hamilton had telephoned that her daughter “was running a temperature.” Mrs. Haze informed her daughter that the picnic would have to be postponed. Hot little Haze informed big cold Haze that, if so, she would not go with her to church. Mother said very well and left. I had come out on the landing straight after shaving, soapy-earlobed, still in my white pajamas with the cornflower blue (not the lilac) design on the back; I now wiped off the soap, perfumed my hair and armpits, slipped on a purple silk dressing gown, and, humming nervously, went down the stairs in quest of Lo. I want my learned readers to participate in the scene I am about to replay; I want them to examine its every detail and see for themselves how careful, how chaste, the whole wine-sweet event is if viewed with what my lawyer has called, in a private talk we have had, “impartial sympathy.” So let us get started. I have a difficult job before me. Main character: Humbert the Hummer. Time: Sunday morning in June. Place: sunlit living room. Props: old, candy-striped davenport, magazines, phonograph, Mexican knickknacks (the late Mr. Harold E. Haze—God bless the good man—had engendered my darling at the siesta hour in a blue-washed room, on a honeymoon trip to Vera Cruz, and mementoes, among these Dolores, were all over the place). She wore that day a pretty print dress that I had seen on her once before, ample in the skirt, tight in the bodice, short-sleeved, pink, checkered with darker pink, and, to complete the color scheme, she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple. She was not shod, however, for church. And her white Sunday purse lay discarded near the phonograph. My heart beat like a drum as she sat down, cool skirt ballooning, subsiding, on the sofa next to me, and played with her glossy fruit. She tossed it up into the sun-dusted air, and caught it—it made a cupped polished plop .

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  This is an excellent way of disguising how deeply you are manipulating him. The notion of danger, challenge, sometimes death, might seem out- dated, but danger is critical in seduction. It adds emotional spice and is particularly appealing to men today, who are normally so rational and re- pressed. Danger is present in the original myth of the Siren. In Homer's Odyssey, the hero Odysseus must sail by the rocks where the Sirens, strange To whom aw I compare the lovely girl, so blessed by fortune, if not to the Sirens, who with their lodestone draw the ships towards them? Thus, I imagine, did Isolde attract many thoughts and hearts that deemed themselves safe from love's disquietude. And indeed these two—anchorless ships and stray thoughts— provide a good comparison. They are both so seldom on a straight course, lie so often in unsure havens, pitching and tossing and heaving to and fro. Just so, in the same way, do aimless desire and random love-longing drift like an anchorless ship. This charming young princess, discreet and courteous Isolde, drew thoughts from the hearts that enshrined them as a lodestone draws in ships to the sound of the Sirens' song. She sang openly and secretly, in through ears and eyes to where many a heart was stirred. The song which she sang openly in this and other places was her own sweet singing and soft sounding of strings that echoed for all to hear through the kingdom of the ears deep down into the heart. But her secret song was her wondrous beauty that stole with its rapturous music hidden and unseen through the windows of the eyes into many noble hearts and smoothed on the magic which took thoughts prisoner suddenly, and, taking them, fettered them with desire! —GOTTFRIED VON STRASSBURG, TRISTAN, TRANSLATED BY A.T. HATTO The Siren • 13 female creatures, sing and beckon sailors to their destruction. They sing of the glories of the past, of a world like childhood, without responsibilities, a world of pure pleasure. Their voices are like water, liquid and inviting. Sailors would leap into the water to join them, and drown; or, distracted and entranced, they would steer their ship into the rocks. To protect his sailors from the Sirens, Odysseus has their ears filled with wax; he himself is tied to the mast, so he can both hear the Sirens and live to tell of it—a strange desire, since the thrill of the Sirens is giving in to the temptation to follow them. Just as the ancient sailors had to row and steer, ignoring all distractions, a man today must work and follow a straight path in life. The call of some- thing dangerous, emotional, unknown is all the more powerful because it is so forbidden.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  There is such a smell of mud." Mud was the boys' nick- name for Professor Mut. The professor seized Lohmann by the arm, twisted it hard, then banished him from the room. He later noticed that Lohmann had left his exercise book behind, and thumbing through it he saw a paragraph about an actress named Rosa Fröhlich. A plot hatched in Mut's mind: he would catch Lohmann cavorting with this actress, no doubt a woman of ill repute, and would get the boy kicked out of school. First he had to find out where she performed. He searched high and low, finally finding her name up outside a club called the Blue Angel. He went in. It was a smoke-filled place, full of the working-class types he looked down on. Rosa was onstage. She was singing a song; the way she looked everyone in the audience in the eye was rather brazen, but for some reason Mut found this disarming. He relaxed a little, had some wine. After her performance he made his way to her dressing room, determined to grill her about Lohmann. Once there he felt strangely uncomfortable, but he gathered up his courage, accused her of leading schoolboys astray, and threatened to get the police to close the place down. Rosa, however, was not intimidated. She turned all of Mut's sentences around: perhaps he was the one leading boys astray. Her tone was cajoling and teasing. Yes, Lohmann had bought her flowers and champagne—so what? No one had ever talked to Mut this way before; his authoritative tone usually made peo- ple give way. He should have felt offended: she was low class and a woman, and he was a schoolmaster, but she was talking to him as if they were equals. Instead, however, he neither got angry nor left—something com- pelled him to stay. Now she was silent. She picked up a stocking and started to darn it, ig- noring him; his eyes followed her every move, particularly the way she rubbed her bare knee. Finally he brought up Lohmann again, and the po- lice. "You've no idea what this life's like," she said. "Everyone who comes here thinks he's the only pebble on the beach. If you don't give them what they want they threaten you with the police!" "I certainly regret having hurt a lady's feelings," he replied sheepishly. As she got up from her chair, their knees rubbed, and he felt a shiver up his spine. Now she was nice to him again, and poured him some more wine. She invited him to come back, then left abruptly to perform another number. 342 • The Art of Seduction The next day he kept thinking about her words, her looks.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  To be the fatal Don Juan may be the dream of a few men; but to meet him is the dream of many women. —OSCAR MANDEL,"THE LEGEND OF DON JUAN," THE THEATRE OF DON JUAN 24 • The Art of Seduction feet. The words of the Rake are the equivalent of the bodily adornment of the Siren: a powerful sensual distraction, a narcotic. The Rake's use of lan- guage is demonic because it is designed not to communicate or convey in- formation but to persuade, flatter, stir emotional turmoil, much as the serpent in the Garden of Eden used words to lead Eve into temptation. The example of D'Annunzio reveals the link between the erotic Rake, who seduces women, and the political Rake, who seduces the masses. Both depend on words. Adapt the character of the Rake and you will find that the use of words as a subtle poison has infinite applications. Remember: it is the form that matters, not the content. The less your targets focus on what you say, and the more on how it makes them feel, the more seductive your effect. Give your words a lofty, spiritual, literary flavor the better to in- sinuate desire in your unwitting victims. But what is this force, then, by which Don Juan seduces? It is desire, the energy of sensuous desire. He desires in every woman the whole of womanhood. The reaction to this gigantic passion beautifies and develops the one de- sired, who flushes in enhanced beauty by his reflection. As the enthusiast's fire with seductive splendor illumines even those who stand in a casual relation to him, so Don Juan transfigures in a far deeper sense every girl. —SØREN KIERKEGAARD, EITHER/OR Keys to the Character A t first it may seem strange that a man who is clearly dishonest, disloyal, and has no interest in marriage would have any appeal to a woman. But throughout all of history, and in all cultures, this type has had a fatal ef- fect. What the Rake offers is what society normally does not allow women: an affair of pure pleasure, an exciting brush with danger. A woman is often deeply oppressed by the role she is expected to play She is supposed to be the tender, civilizing force in society, and to want commitment and lifelong loyalty. But often her marriages and relationships give her not romance and devotion but routine and an endlessly distracted mate. It remains an abiding female fantasy to meet a man who gives totally of himself, who lives for her, even if only for a while. This dark, repressed side of female desire found expression in the leg- end of Don Juan.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  They also train themselves to be sensitive to pleasure, knowing that feeling pleasure themselves will make it that much easier for them to infect the people around them. A seducer sees all of life as theater, everyone an actor. Most people feel they have constricted roles in life, which makes them unhappy. Seducers, on the other hand, can be anyone and can assume many roles. (The arche- type here is the god Zeus, insatiable seducer of young maidens, whose main weapon was the ability to assume the form of whatever person or ani- mal would most appeal to his victim.) Seducers take pleasure in performing and are not weighed down by their identity, or by some need to be them- selves, or to be natural. This freedom of theirs, this fluidity in body and spirit, is what makes them attractive. What people lack in life is not more reality but illusion, fantasy, play. The clothes that seducers wear, the places they take you to, their words and actions, are slightly heightened—not overly theatrical but with a delightful edge of unreality, as if the two of you were living out a piece of fiction or were characters in a film. Seduction is a kind of theater in real life, the meeting of illusion and reality. Finally, seducers are completely amoral in their approach to life. It is all a game, an arena for play. Knowing that the moralists, the crabbed repressed types who croak about the evils of the seducer, secretly envy their power, they do not concern themselves with other people's opinions. They do not deal in moral judgments—nothing could be less seductive. Everything is The disaffection, neurosis, anguish and frustration encountered by psychoanalysis comes no doubt from being unable to love or to be loved, from being unable to give or take pleasure, but the radical disenchantment comes from seduction and its failure. Only those who lie completely outside seduction are ill, even if they remain fully capable of loving and making love. Psychoanalysis believes it treats the disorder of sex and desire, but in reality it is dealing with the disorders of seduction. . . . The most serious deficiencies always concern charm and not pleasure, enchantment and not some vital or sexual satisfaction. —JEAN BAUDRILLARD, SEDUCTION Whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil. —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, TRANSLATED BY WALTER KAUFMANN xxiv • Preface pliant, fluid, like life itself. Seduction is a form of deception, but people want to be led astray, they yearn to be seduced. If they didn't, seducers would not find so many willing victims. Get rid of any moralizing tenden- cies, adopt the seducer's playful philosophy, and you will find the rest of the process easy and natural.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Since the era of John F. Kennedy, political figures are required to have a degree of charisma, a fasci- nating presence to keep their audience's attention, which is half the battle. The film world and media create a galaxy of seductive stars and images. We are saturated in the seductive. But even if much has changed in degree and scope, the essence of seduction is constant: never be forceful or direct; in- stead, use pleasure as bait, playing on people's emotions, stirring desire and confusion, inducing psychological surrender. In seduction as it is practiced today, the methods of Cleopatra still hold. People are constantly trying to influence us, to tell us what to do, and just as often we tune them out, resisting their attempts at persuasion. There is a moment in our lives, however, when we all act differently—when we are in love. We fall under a kind of spell. Our minds are usually preoccupied with our own concerns; now they become filled with thoughts of the loved one. We grow emotional, lose the ability to think straight, act in foolish ways that we would never do otherwise. If this goes on long enough something inside us gives way: we surrender to the will of the loved one, and to our desire to possess them. Seducers are people who understand the tremendous power contained in such moments of surrender. They analyze what happens when people are in love, study the psychological components of the process—what spurs the imagination, what casts a spell. By instinct and through practice they master the art of making people fall in love. As the first seductresses knew, it is much more effective to create love than lust. A person in love is emo- tional, pliable, and easily misled. (The origin of the word "seduction" is the Latin for "to lead astray") A person in lust is harder to control and, once satisfied, may easily leave you. Seducers take their time, create enchantment and the bonds of love, so that when sex ensues it only further enslaves the victim. Creating love and enchantment becomes the model for all seductions—sexual, social, political. A person in love will surrender. It is pointless to try to argue against such power, to imagine that you are not interested in it, or that it is evil and ugly. The harder you try to resist the lure of seduction—as an idea, as a form of power—the more you will find yourself fascinated. The reason is simple: most of us have known the power of having someone fall in love with us.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  honied in on a victim, he dropped everything else. The woman was made drifts to me \ Are mingled to feel that everything came second to her—his career, his friends, every-odors of the tamarind, \ thing. Then he would take her on a little trip, preferably with water — A n d all my soul is scent and melody. around. Slowly the rest of the world would fade into the background, and — C H A R L E S BAUDELAIRE, Flynn would take center stage. The more your targets think of you, the less " E X O T I C PERFUME," they are distracted by thoughts of work and duty. When the mind focuses THE FLOWERS OF EVIL, on one thing it relaxes, and when the mind relaxes, all the little paranoid TRANSLATED BY ALAN CONDER thoughts that we are prone to—do you really like me, am I intelligent or beautiful enough, what does the future hold—vanish from the surface. Remember: it all starts with you. Be undistracted, present in the moment, and the target will follow suit. The intense gaze of the hypnotist creates a similar reaction in the patient. Once the target's overactive mind starts to slow down, their senses will come to life, and your physical lures will have double their power. Now a heated glance will give them flush. You will have a tendency to employ physical lures that work primarily on the eyes, the sense we most rely on in our culture. Physical appearances are critical, but you are after a general agitation of the senses. La Belle Otero made sure men noticed her breasts, her figure, her perfume, her walk; no part was allowed to predominate. The senses are interconnected—an appeal to smell will trigger touch, an appeal to touch will trigger vision: casual or "accidental" contact—better a brushing of the skin than something more forceful right now—will create a jolt and activate the eyes. Subtly modulate the voice, make it slower and deeper. Living senses will crowd out rational thought. In the eighteenth-century libertine novel The Wayward Head and Heart, by Crébillon fils, Madame de Lursay is trying to seduce a younger man, Meilcour. Her weapons are several. One night at a party she is hosting, she wears a revealing gown; her hair is slightly tousled; she throws him heated glances; her voice trembles a bit. When they are alone, she innocently gets him to sit close to her, and talks more slowly; at one point she starts to cry. Meilcour has many reasons to resist her; he has fallen in love with a girl his own age, and he has heard rumors about Madame de Lursay that should make him distrust her. But the clothes, the looks, the perfume, the voice, the closeness of her body, the tears—it all begins to overwhelm him. "An indescribable agitation stirred my senses." Meilcour succumbs.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Our desire for another person almost always involves social considera- hungry, are just like tions: we are attracted to those who are attractive to other people. We want children in that they seek to possess them and steal them away. You can believe all the sentimental out the foods that others take. In their love affairs, nonsense you want to about desire, but in the end, much of it has to do they seek out the man or with vanity and greed. Do not whine and moralize about people's selfish- woman whom others find ness, but simply use it to your advantage. The illusion that you are desired attractive and abandon those who are not sought by others will make you more attractive to your victims than your beautiful after. When we say of a face or your perfect body. And the most effective way to create that illusion man or woman that he or is to create a triangle: impose another person between you and your victim, she is desirable, what we really mean is that others and subtly make your victim aware of how much this other person wants desire them. It is not that you. The third point on the triangle does not have to be just one person: they have some particular surround yourself with admirers, reveal your past conquests—in other quality, but because they words, envelop yourself in an aura of desirability. Make your targets com- conform to some currently modish model. pete with your past and your present. They will long to possess you all to — S E R G E MOSCOVICI, THE AGE themselves, giving you great power for as long as you elude their grasp. Fail OF THE CROWD:A HISTORICAL to make yourself an object of desire right from the start, and you will end TREATISE ON MASS PSYCHOL-up the sorry slave to the whims of your lovers—they will abandon you the OGY, TRANSLATED BY J. C. WHITEHOUSE moment they lose interest. [ A person] will desire any object so long as he is convinced that it is desired by another person whom he admires. It will be greatly to your advantage to entertain the —RENÉ GIRARD lady you would win with an account of the number of women who are in love with you, and of the Keys to Seduction decided advances which they have made to you; for this will not only prove We are social creatures, and are immensely influenced by the tastes and that you are a great favorite desires of other people. Imagine a large social gathering. You see a with the ladies, and a man man alone, whom nobody talks to for any length of time, and who is wan- of true honor, but it will dering around without company; isn't there a kind of self-fulfilling isola- convince her that she may have the honor of being

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  not dramatically beautiful; her body was boyish, and her style was garish • . . . His manner was so and tasteless. Even so, the most dashing men of Europe vied for her favors, gently persuasive that devils and demons could often ruining themselves in the process. It was Cora's spirit and attitude that not have gainsaid him. enthralled them. Spoiled by her father, she imagined that spoiling her was • . . . She was so small natural—that all men should do the same. The consequence was that, like a that he lifted her easily. As child, she never felt she had to try to please. It was Cora's powerful air of he passed through the doors to his own room, he came independence that made men want to possess her, tame her. She never pre- upon Chujo who had been tended to be anything more than a courtesan, so the brazenness that in a summoned earlier. He lady would have been uncivil in her seemed natural and fun. And as with a called out in surprise. Surprised in turn, Chujo spoiled child, a man's relationship with her was on her terms. The moment peered into the darkness. he tried to change that, she lost interest. This was the secret of her astound- The perfume that came ing success. from his robes like a cloud of smoke told her who he Spoiled children have an undeservedly bad reputation: while those who was. . . . [ Chujo] followed are spoiled with material things are indeed often insufferable, those who are after, but Genji was quite spoiled with affection know themselves to be deeply seductive. This be- unmoved by her pleas. • "Come for her in the comes a distinct advantage when they grow up. According to Freud (who morning," he said, sliding was speaking from experience, since he was his mother's darling), spoiled the doors closed. • The children have a confidence that stays with them all their lives. This quality lady was bathed in radiates outward, drawing others to them, and, in a circular process, making perspiration and quite beside herself at the people spoil them still more. Since their spirit and natural energy were thought of what Chujo, never tamed by a disciplining parent, as adults they are adventurous and and the others too, would bold, and often impish or brazen. be thinking. Genji had to feel sorry for her. Yet the The lesson is simple: it may be too late to be spoiled by a parent, but it sweet words poured forth, is never too late to make other people spoil you. It is all in your attitude. the whole gamut of pretty People are drawn to those who expect a lot out of life, whereas they tend devices for making a woman surrender. . . . •

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  believe I severed both his This letter had a stronger effect on Madame Sabatier than the others heart and his life. Those had. Perhaps it was his childlike sincerity, and the fact that he had finally two blows killed him, I think, and not any hired written to her directly; perhaps it was that he loved her but asked nothing killers. • "Ah God! Will I of her, unlike all the other men she knew who at some point had always be forgiven this murder, this turned out to want something. Whatever it was, she had an uncontrollable sin? Never! All the rivers desire to see him. The next day she invited him to her apartment, alone. Give Them Space to Fall— The Pursuer Is Pursued • 387 Baudelaire appeared at the appointed hour. He sat nervously in his seat, and the seas will dry up gazing at her with his large eyes, saying little, and what he did say was for- first! Oh, misery! How it would have brought me mal and polite. He seemed aloof. After he left a kind of panic seized comfort and healing if I Madame Sabatier, and the next day she wrote him a first letter of her own: had held him in my arms "Today I'm more calm, and I can feel more clearly the impression of our once before he died. How? Yes, quite naked next to Tuesday evening together. I can tell you, without the danger of your think- him, in order to enjoy him ing I'm exaggerating, that I'm the happiest woman on the face of the earth, fully. . . . " • . . . When that I've never felt more truly that I love you, and that I've never seen you they came within six or look more beautiful, more adorable, my divine friend!" seven leagues of the castle where King Bademagu was Madame Sabatier had never before written such a letter; she had always staying, news that was been the one who was pursued. Now she had lost her usual self-possession. pleasing came to him about And it only got worse: Baudelaire did not answer right away. When she saw Lancelot— news that he was glad to hear; Lancelot him next, he was colder than before. She had the feeling there was some- was alive and was one else, that his old mistress, Jeanne Duval, had suddenly reappeared in his returning, hale and hearty. life and was pulling him away from her. One night she turned aggressive, He behaved most properly in going to inform the embracing him, trying to kiss him, but he did not respond, and quickly queen. "Good sir," she found an excuse to leave. Why was he suddenly inaccessible? She began to told him, "I believe it, flood him with letters, begging him to come to her. Unable to sleep, she since you have told me. But were he dead, I assure

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  finally alone, in prison, these poetic images and associations burst forth in physical pleasure. Even the his mind. He idealized her madly; as far as he was concerned, she was no most reserved women blush longer an actress with a tawdry past. She seduced an entire nation the same to the whites of their eyes way. The secret was her dramatic poetic presence, combined with a touch at this moment of hope. The passion is so strong, of elusive distance; over time, you would see whatever you wanted to in and the pleasure so sharp, her. To this day people fantasize about what Eva was really like. that they betray themselves Familiarity destroys seduction. This rarely happens early on; there is so unmistakably. • 4. Love is born. To love is to enjoy much to learn about a new person. But a midpoint may arrive when the seeing, touching, and target has begun to idealize and fantasize about you, only to discover that sensing with all the senses, you are not what he or she thought. It is not a question of being seen too as closely as possible, a lovable object which loves often, of being too available, as some imagine. In fact, if your targets see in return. • 5. The first you too rarely, you give them nothing to feed on, and their attention may crystallization begins. If be caught by someone else; you have to occupy their mind. It is more a you are sure that a woman loves you, it is a pleasure matter of being too consistent, too obvious, too human and real. Your tar- to endow her with a gets cannot idealize you if they know too much about you, if they start to thousand perfections and to see you as all too human. Not only must you maintain a degree of distance, count your blessings with but there must be something fantastical and bewitching about you, sparking infinite satisfaction. In the end you overrate wildly, all kinds of delightful possibilities in their mind. The possibility Eva held and regard her as out was the possibility that she was what in Argentine culture was consid- something fallen from ered the ideal woman—devoted, motherly, saintly—but there are any num- Heaven, unknown as yet, but certain to be yours. • ber of poetic ideals you can try to embody. Chivalry, adventure, romance, Leave a lover with his and so on, are just as potent, and if you have a whiff of them about you, thoughts for twenty four you can breathe enough poetry into the air to fill people's minds with fan- hours, and this is what will happen: • At the salt tasies and dreams. At all costs, you must embody something, even if it is mines of Salzburg, they roguery and evil. Anything to avoid the taint of familiarity and commonness. throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the What I need is a woman who is something, anything; ei-abandoned workings. Two

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  letter can be. But it is important to learn how to incorporate letters in se- And Hera, with every duction. It is best not to begin your correspondence until at least several intention to deceive: \ "I'm weeks after your initial contact. Let your victims get an impression of you: off to visit the ends of the you seem intriguing, yet you show no particular interest in them. When earth \ And Father Ocean and Mother Tethys \ Who you sense that they are thinking about you, that is the time to hit them nursed and doted on me in with your first letter. Any desire you express for them will come as a sur-their house. . . . " \ And prise; their vanity will be tickled and they will want more. Now make your Zeus, clouds scudding about him: \ "You can go letters frequent, in fact more frequent than your personal appearances. This there later just as well. \ will give them the time and space to idealize you, which would be more Let's get in bed now ami difficult if you were always in their face. After they have fallen under your make love. \ No goddess or woman has ever \ Made spell, you can always take a step back, making the letters fewer—let them me feel so overwhelmed think you are losing interest and they will be hungry for more. with lust. . . . \ I've never Design your letters as homages to your targets. Make everything you loved anyone as I love you now, \ Never been in the write come back to them, as if they were all you could think about—a grip of desire so sweet. " \ delirious effect. If you tell an anecdote, make it somehow relate to them. And Hera, with every Your correspondence is a kind of mirror you are holding up to them—they intention to deceive: \ "What a thing to say, my get to see themselves reflected through your desire. If for some reason they awesome lord. \ The do not like you, write to them as if they did. Remember: the tone of your thought of us lying down letters is what will get under their skin. If your language is elevated, poetic, here on Ida \ Ami making creative in its praise, it will infect them despite themselves. Never argue, love outdoors in broad daylight! \ What if one of never defend yourself, never accuse them of being heartless. That would the Immortals saw us \ ruin the spell. Asleep, and went to all the A letter can suggest emotion by seeming disordered, rambling from one other gods \Aud told them? I could never get up subject to another. Clearly it is hard for you to think; your love has un- \ And go back home. It hinged you. Disordered thoughts are exciting thoughts. Do not waste time would be shameful. \ But if

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  also a hint of male cruelty. Women are narcissists, in love with the charms mine!" cried the nymph, of their own sex. By showing them feminine charm, a man can mesmerize and flinging aside her garments, plunged into the and disarm them, leaving them vulnerable to a bold, masculine move. heart of the pool. The boy The Feminine Dandy can seduce on a mass scale. No single woman fought against her, but she really possesses him—he is too elusive—but all can fantasize about doing so. held him, and snatched kisses as he struggled, The key is ambiguity: your sexuality is decidedly heterosexual, but your placing her hands beneath body and psychology float delightfully back and forth between the two him, stroking poles. his unwilling breast, and clinging to him, now on this side, and now on that. I am a woman. Every artist is a woman and should have a • Finally, in spite of ail his taste for other women. Artists who are homosexual cannot efforts to slip from her be true artists because they like men, and since they them-grasp, she twined around selves are women they are reverting to normality. him, like a serpent when it is being carried off into the —PABLO PICASSO air by the king of birds: for, as it hangs from the eagle's beak, the snake coils round his head and talons and The Masculine Dandy with its tail hampers his beating wings. . . ."You may fight, you rogue, but In the 1870s, Pastor Henrik Gillot was the darling of the St. Petersburg you will not escape. May intelligentsia. He was young, handsome, well-read in philosophy and lit- the gods grant me this, may erature, and he preached a kind of enlightened Christianity. Dozens of no time to come ever young girls had crushes on him and would flock to his sermons just to look separate him from me, or me from him!" Her prayers at him. In 1878, however, he met a girl who changed his life. Her name found favour with the gods: was Lou von Salomé (later known as Lou Andreas-Salomé), and she was for, as they lay together, seventeen; he was forty-two. their bodies were united and from being two persons Salomé was pretty, with radiant blue eyes. She had read a lot, particu- they became one. As when larly for a girl her age, and was interested in the gravest philosophical and a gardener grafts a branch religious issues. Her intensity, her intelligence, her responsiveness to ideas on to a tree, and sees the two unite as they grow, cast a spell over Gillot. When she entered his office for her increasingly fre- and come to maturity quent discussions with him, the place seemed brighter and more alive. Per- together, so when their haps she was flirting with him, in the unconscious manner of a young limbs met in that clinging embrace the nymph and the

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  on real information; focus on feelings and sensations, using expressions that you really do want to do this, \ There is the bedroom are ripe with connotation. Plant ideas by dropping hints, writing sugges-your dear son Hephaestus \ tively without explaining yourself. Never lecture, never seem intellectual or Built for you, with good superior—you will only make yourself pompous, which is deadly. Far bet- solid doors. Let's go \ ter to speak colloquially, though with a poetic edge to lift the language There and lie down, since you're in the mood. " \ above the commonplace. Do not become sentimental—it is tiring, and too 258 • The Art of Seduction And Zeus, who masses the direct. Better to suggest the effect your target has on you than to gush clouds, replied: \ "Hera, about how you feel. Stay vague and ambiguous, allowing the reader the don't worry about any god space to imagine and fantasize. The goal of your writing is not to ex-or man \ Seeing us. I'll enfold you in a cloud so press yourself but to create emotion in the reader, spreading confusion and dense \ And golden not desire. even Helios could spy on You will know that your letters are having the proper effect when your us, \ And his light is the sharpest vision there is." targets come to mirror your thoughts, repeating words you wrote, whether in their own letters or in person. This is the time to move to the more — H O M E R , THE ILIAD, TRANSLATED BY STANLEY physical and erotic. Use language that quivers with sexual connotation, or, LOMBARDO better still, suggest sexuality by making your letters shorter, more frequent, and even more disordered than before. There is nothing more erotic than the short abrupt note. Your thoughts are unfinished; they can only be com-ANTONY: Friends, pleted by the other person. Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; \ I come to Sganarelle to Don Juan: Well, what I have to say is . . . I bury Caesar, not to praise don't know what to say; for you turn things in such a him. \ The evil that men do lives after them; \ The manner with your words, that it seems that you are right; good is oft interred with and yet, the truth of it is, you are not. I had the finest their bones. \ So let it be thoughts in the world, and your words have totally scram-with Caesar. . . . \ I speak bled them up. not to disprove what Brutus spoke, \ But here I —MOLIÈRE am to speak what I do know. \ You all did love him once, not without cause. \ What cause Keys to Seduction withholds you then to mourn for him? \ O judgment, thou art fled to

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Sexuality is extremely disruptive. The insecurities and emotions it stirs up can often cut short a relationship that would otherwise be deeper and longer lasting. The Charmer's solution is to fulfill the aspects of sexuality that are so alluring and addictive—the focused attention, the boosted self-esteem, the pleasurable wooing, the understanding (real or illusory)—but subtract the sex itself. It's not that the Charmer represses Birds are taken with pipes or discourages sexuality; lurking beneath the surface of any attempt at that imitate their own charm is a sexual tease, a possibility. Charm cannot exist without a hint of voices, and men with those sayings that are most sexual tension. It cannot be maintained, however, unless sex is kept at bay agreeable to their own or in the background. opinions. The word "charm" comes from the Latin carmen, a song, but also an in- —SAMUEL BUTLER cantation tied to the casting of a magical spell. The Charmer implicitly grasps this history, casting a spell by giving people something that holds their attention, that fascinates them. And the secret to capturing people's Go with the bough, you'll attention, while lowering their powers of reason, is to strike at the things bend it; \ Use brute force, they have the least control over: their ego, their vanity, and their self- it'll snap. \ Go with the esteem. As Benjamin Disraeli said, "Talk to a man about himself and current: that's how to swim he will listen for hours." The strategy can never be obvious; subtlety is the across rivers— \ Fighting upstream's no good. \ Go Charmer's great skill. If the target is to be kept from seeing through easy with lions or tigers if the Charmer's efforts, and from growing suspicious, maybe even tiring of the you aim to tame them; \ attention, a light touch is essential. The Charmer is like a beam of light that The bull gets inured to the plough by slow degrees. . . . \ doesn't play directly on a target but throws a pleasantly diffused glow over it. So, yield if she shows Charm can be applied to a group as well as to an individual: a leader resistance: \ That way can charm the public. The dynamic is similar. The following are the laws of you'll win in the end. fust be sure to play \ The part charm, culled from the stories of the most successful charmers in history. she allots you. Censure the things she censures, \ Endorse her endorsements, echo her every word, \ Pro Make your target the center of attention. Charmers fade into the back- or con, and laugh whenever ground; their targets become the subject of their interest. To be a Charmer she laughs; remember, \ If you have to learn to listen and observe. Let your targets talk, revealing she weeps, to weep too: themselves in the process. As you find out more about them—their take your cue \ From her every expression. Suppose

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The film world and media create a galaxy of seductive stars and images. We are saturated in the seductive. But even if much has changed in degree and scope, the essence of seduction is constant: never be forceful or direct; instead, use pleasure as bait, playing on people's emotions, stirring desire and This important side-track, by which woman succeeded confusion, inducing psychological surrender. In seduction as it is practiced in evading man's strength today, the methods of Cleopatra still hold. and establishing herself in power, has not been given due consideration by People are constantly trying to influence us, to tell us what to do, and just historians. From the as often we tune them out, resisting their attempts at persuasion. There is a moment when the woman moment in our lives, however, when we all act differently—when we are in detached herself from the crowd, an individual love. We fall under a kind of spell. Our minds are usually preoccupied with finished product, offering our own concerns; now they become filled with thoughts of the loved one. delights which could not be We grow emotional, lose the ability to think straight, act in foolish ways obtained by force, but only that we would never do otherwise. If this goes on long enough something by flattery . . . . the reign of love's priestesses was inside us gives way: we surrender to the will of the loved one, and to our inaugurated. It was a desire to possess them. development of far-reaching Seducers are people who understand the tremendous power contained importance in the history of civilization. . . . Only by in such moments of surrender. They analyze what happens when people the circuitous route of the are in love, study the psychological components of the process—what spurs art of love could woman the imagination, what casts a spell. By instinct and through practice they again assert authority, and this she did by asserting master the art of making people fall in love. As the first seductresses knew, herself at the very point at it is much more effective to create love than lust. A person in love is emo- which she would normally tional, pliable, and easily misled. (The origin of the word "seduction" is the be a slave at the man's mercy. She had discovered Latin for "to lead astray") A person in lust is harder to control and, once the might of lust, the secret satisfied, may easily leave you. Seducers take their time, create enchantment of the art of love, the and the bonds of love, so that when sex ensues it only further enslaves daemonic power of a the victim. Creating love and enchantment becomes the model for all passion artificially aroused and never satiated. The seductions—sexual, social, political. A person in love will surrender. force tints unchained was

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The Dandy figure has a place in politics as well. John F. Kennedy was a strange mix of the masculine and feminine, virile in his toughness with the Russians, and in his White House lawn football games, yet feminine in his graceful and dapper appearance. This ambiguity was a large part of his appeal. Disraeli was an incorrigible Dandy in dress and manner; some were suspicious of him as a result, but his courage in not caring what people thought of him also won him respect. And women of course adored him, for women always adore a Dandy. They appreciated the gentleness of his manner, his aesthetic sense, his love of clothes—in other words, his feminine qualities. The mainstay of Disraeli's power was in fact a female fan: Queen Victoria. Do not be misled by the surface disapproval your Dandy pose may elicit. Society may publicize its distrust of androgyny (in Christian the-ology, Satan is often represented as androgynous), but this conceals its fascination; what is most seductive is often what is most repressed. Learn a playful dandyism and you will become the magnet for people's dark, unrealized yearnings. The key to such power is ambiguity. In a society where the roles everyone plays are obvious, the refusal to conform to any standard will excite interest. Be both masculine and feminine, impudent and charming, subtle and outrageous. Let other people worry about being socially acceptable; those types are a dime a dozen, and you are after a power greater than they can imagine. Symbol: The Orchid. Its shape and color oddly sug- gest both sexes, its odor is sweet and decadent — it is a tropical flower of evil. Delicate and highly cultivated, it is prized for its rarity; it is unlike any other flower. 52 • The Art of Seduction Dangers

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Everything was fine. There, in the lobby, she sat, deep in an overstuffed blood-red armchair, deep in a lurid movie magazine. A fellow of my age in tweeds (the genre of the place had changed overnight to a spurious country-squire atmosphere) was staring at my Lolita over his dead cigar and stale newspaper. She wore her professional white socks and saddle oxfords, and that bright print frock with the square throat; a splash of jaded lamplight brought out the golden down on her warm brown limbs. There she sat, her legs carelessly highcrossed, and her pale eyes skimming along the lines with every now and then a blink. Bill’s wife had worshiped him from afar long before they ever met: in fact, she used to secretly admire the famous young actor as he ate sundaes in Schwab’s drugstore. Nothing could have been more childish than her snubbed nose, freckled face or the purplish spot on her naked neck where a fairytale vampire had feasted, or the unconscious movement of her tongue exploring a touch of rosy rash around her swollen lips; nothing could be more harmless than to read about Jill, an energetic starlet who made her own clothes and was a student of serious literature; nothing could be more innocent than the part in that glossy brown hair with that silky sheen on the temple; nothing could be more naïve—But what sickening envy the lecherous fellow whoever he was—come to think of it, he resembled a little my Swiss uncle Gustave, also a great admirer of le découvert—would have experienced had he known that every nerve in me was still anointed and ringed with the feel of her body—the body of some immortal daemon disguised as a female child.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  One day, I remember, I offered to bring them cold drinks from the hotel, and went up the gravel path, and came back with two tall glasses of pineapple juice, soda and ice; and then a sudden void within my chest made me stop as I saw that the tennis court was deserted. I stooped to set down the glasses on a bench and for some reason, with a kind of icy vividness, saw Charlotte’s face in death, and I glanced around, and noticed Lo in white shorts receding through the speckled shadow of a garden path in the company of a tall man who carried two tennis rackets. I sprang after them, but as I was crashing through the shrubbery, I saw, in an alternate vision, as if life’s course constantly branched, Lo, in slacks, and her companion, in shorts, trudging up and down a small weedy area, and beating bushes with their rackets in listless search for their last lost ball. I itemize these sunny nothings mainly to prove to my judges that I did everything in my power to give my Lolita a really good time. How charming it was to see her, a child herself, showing another child some of her few accomplishments, such as for example a special way of jumping rope. With her right hand holding her left arm behind her untanned back, the lesser nymphet, a diaphanous darling, would be all eyes, as the pavonine sun was all eyes on the gravel under the flowering trees, while in the midst of that oculate paradise, my freckled and raffish lass skipped, repeating the movements of so many others I had gloated over on the sun-shot, watered, damp-smelling sidewalks and ramparts of ancient Europe. Presently, she would hand the rope back to her little Spanish friend, and watch in her turn the repeated lesson, and brush away the hair from her brow, and fold her arms, and step on one toe with the other, or drop her hands loosely upon her still unflared hips, and I would satisfy myself that the damned staff had at last finished cleaning up our cottage; whereupon, flashing a smile to the shy, dark-haired page girl of my princess and thrusting my fatherly fingers deep into Lo’s hair from behind, and then gently but firmly clasping them around the nape of her neck, I would lead my reluctant pet to our small home for a quick connection before dinner. “Whose cat has scratched poor you?” a full-blown fleshy handsome woman of the repulsive type to which I was particularly attractive might ask me at the “lodge,” during a table d’hôte dinner followed by dancing promised to Lo. This was one of the reasons why I tried to keep as far away from people as possible, while Lo, on the other hand, would do her utmost to draw as many potential witnesses into her orbit as she could.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  My lawyer has suggested I give a clear, frank account of the itinerary we followed, and I suppose I have reached here a point where I cannot avoid that chore. Roughly, during that mad year (August 1947 to August 1948), our route began with a series of wiggles and whorls in New England, then meandered south, up and down, east and west; dipped deep into ce qu’on appelle Dixieland, avoided Florida because the Farlows were there, veered west, zigzagged through corn belts and cotton belts (this is not too clear I am afraid, Clarence, but I did not keep any notes, and have at my disposal only an atrociously crippled tour book in three volumes, almost a symbol of my torn and tattered past, in which to check these recollections); crossed and recrossed the Rockies, straggled through southern deserts where we wintered; reached the Pacific, turned north through the pale lilac fluff of flowering shrubs along forest roads; almost reached the Canadian border; and proceeded east, across good lands and bad lands, back to agriculture on a grand scale, avoiding, despite little Lo’s strident remonstrations, little Lo’s birthplace, in a corn, coal and hog producing area; and finally returned to the fold of the East, petering out in the college town of Beardsley. 2 Now, in perusing what follows, the reader should bear in mind not only the general circuit as adumbrated above, with its many sidetrips and tourist traps, secondary circles and skittish deviations, but also the fact that far from being an indolent partie de plaisir , our tour was a hard, twisted, teleological growth, whose sole raison d’ětre (these French clichés are symptomatic) was to keep my companion in passable humor from kiss to kiss. Thumbing through that battered tour book, I dimly evoke that Magnolia Garden in a southern state which cost me four bucks and which, according to the ad in the book, you must visit for three reasons: because John Galsworthy (a stone-dead writer of sorts) acclaimed it as the world’s fairest garden; because in 1900 Baedeker’s Guide had marked it with a star; and finally, because … O, Reader, My Reader, guess! … because children (and by Jingo was not my Lolita a child!) will “walk starry-eyed and reverently through this foretaste of Heaven, drinking in beauty that can influence a life.” “Not mine,” said grim Lo, and settled down on a bench with the fillings of two Sunday papers in her lovely lap.