September 25 2002

SEX, LIKE food, is a subject that doesn't exactly cry out for commemoration in language. People were screwing and eating long before whoever it was who grunted out the first intelligible syllable managed to be understood by a fellow grunter; the primary sensual experiences have been, since time out of mind, complete in themselves and do not need – do not benefit from – the clutter of words from which we assemble our cortical consciousnesses. Culture is basically chatter.

Desire of any sort, meanwhile, is outside of culture, and chatter. Anyone who's ever gone out trying to pick up men for sex will surely have noticed straightaway that nobody talks except from nervousness (and nervousness isn't sexy); words crash through the sullen, silent erotic spell like bricks through glass windows. They startle and disorient. No, in those situations you zip it (your set of lips, I mean, of course) if you hope to get any. If you don't, then blab away – but don't be surprised if everyone moves away from you, as if you smell bad.

The fact that erotic and gustatory experiences tend to elude capture in our shimmering, unwieldy net of language constitutes a perennial and irresistible temptation to writers. Like golf-course duffers determined to break 80 before we die, we struggle for the images and words that will convey to our fellow cognitive animals some sense of what our own animal lives are like, though – inconveniently – they are just like everybody else's. And when we don't succeed, when we've flung our clubs in frustration, we simply move to the next hole and tee it up again. And we wonder why writers so often take to drink, or worse?

Sex and eating are often compared, and in some respects they do resemble each other, but in some important respects they don't. Sexual experience seems to etch itself more powerfully into memory – at least my memory; the actual events can be so obliteratingly intense that it's only at a decent remove, in memory, that they can be considered.

Eating, on the other hand, is very much of the moment. You eat the food, you love the food, you save the recipe, but you don't feel a pang when you think about the meal six months later, if you remember it at all. You're more apt to remember who was sitting at the table with you, and what you talked about – because food is, after all, about, and for, talking. If the food was good enough, you might even have talked about sex, though there's so little, finally, to say on that elemental subject, except Please pass the wine.