Nice Because It's Nasty

1.    Protocol

The book most people have asked “have you read this” this year has been Aaron Kunin’s Love Three. What is Love Three? Kunin’s work has always been challenging for me, for its nuance and density. This book has a similar pacing as a book of aphorisms. 

A book with a slow wind-up, Kunin expresses his fetish for rhetorical power; the speaker is a subordinate, and Kunin walks us through his own a rhetorical maze.

We are told on the first page: “Try to think of it as a third kind of love. The first kind is nice. The second kind is nasty. Another kind is nice because it’s nasty. Love three.” The thick book, Kunin lays out the protocols for the book: a self-described study of George Herbert’s seventeenth-century devotional poem “Love (3),” an essay on eroticizing power, and a “memory palace of sexual experiences, fantasies, preferences, and limits, with Herbert’s poem as the key.”

Herbert’s poem says:

You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:
                                 So I did sit and eat.

Kunin examines how power flows here: “What powers does Love have and what powers do I give? … Mainly Love dominates me verbally.”  “Is power interesting to me only when a woman has it?” And later: “I should look at my relationship to my mother to explain why I want to give power to a woman.” Kunin examines the power (sovereignty) given to those whose approval is sought. “Someone as worthy as you would be another you. As smart, funny, powerful, and sweet as you. Why would you want that? You already have those gifts. You don’t need them from me.

“I can still give you something, My submission.”

***

2.    Ritual Forms

Elias Canetti’s book Crowds and Power is brought in to Love Three to deepen these dimensions Kunin is building. Canetti maneuvers psychoanalysis, such that foods decenters sex as the organizing principle of the psyche. For Canetti, Desire is unilateral and non-consensual, and the phallus is not the icon of power. One is consumed during the penetration of the other, “Becoming food.” (recall the imperative running through the book like a clothesline: You must sit down and taste my meat. “The mother feeding an infant penetrates the infant.”)

A “you” appears halfway through the text. “I think of the ways you humiliated me with food,” but Kunin knows how to top from the bottom. Service renders the other into debt, and gratitude can be used to overpower the giver. Kunin makes inquiries into how power floers. “I sexualize power. Therefore I mystify it.” Ideology mystifies power; ideology, that invisible network of social strata to which there is no outside to the apparatus. Said elsewhere, “The beauty of ideology, as you know, is that if it’s working right, you think you’re above it.” My understanding comes from Marcuse. To paraphrase: “Economics determines the conditions of existence.” Money. To have a lot of it is to have a lot of power. Consider Kunin’s series of propositions on how power corrupts:

No one should have this much power
 
But I can do something good with it
 
And I would do anything to keep it
 
And I don’t care what happens to you if you try to take it away

***

3.     Aftercare

Kunin tells us a moral of the story: This is the lesson of consensual sadomasochism for students of human relationships: compatibility is more important than mutuality.

I think the different values we bring to the relationship (power, trust, and love) make for an endlessly changing, surprising, and fascinating surface, so that, while remaining in place, we seem to go everywhere, and, out of ourselves alone, receive all experiences.

He sweetly ties the knot on these 166 sections by expressing the beauty of mutual desires that decenter PIV (penis-in-vagina) sex towards one of mutual interests. “You bring power to the relationship and I bring trust, and we both bring love.” There’s a wink at the end as well, the author acknowledging the disingenuous nature of consenting to submission—there’s suspension of disbelief thereafter. One wonders if this slant demonstration of power and position is present in interpreting Herbert; the author generates the text, but the reader consumes it. The reader has the power to interpret. 

I recommend this book to anyone curious about new forms in poetry, poetry scholarship, close reading, ekphrastic writing, and anyone blocked in their own work. Kunin’s reworking of Herbert’s sweetly voiced poem is a gift to writers of contemporary poetry; he gives us a hermeneutics we can use.