Eroticism of trace

بانت سعاد فقلبي اليوم متبول
متيم إثرها لم يفد مكبول

Su’ād has departed and thus my heart today yearns madly
For her traces, and is enslaved without redemption…

This auroral verse rings in my inner ear for so many years. I think this summer I should write about Arabian eroticism and about what makes it so distant and different in relation to the western world. Even more distant now than in Victorian times. In the age of instant whims, we lost the erotic meaning of absence.
In the meanwhile, the whole ancient and venerable tradition of Arabian eroticism is founded on celebration of absence. The famous talāl, remnants of the abandoned camp in the desert, are the oldest and the most powerful symbol. Al-hubb al-‘udhri is also playing on the contrast between being so close together and losing, blending and separation. The concept of erotic anachoresis, social death of the lover, as well as the bodily death from love, is on stage for centuries.
But there is also a counterattack, a tentative to build an eroticism of presence and of instantaneous present, explicitly contrasted with the tradition of cinders and traces. Such raid is magnificently carried out by Abu Nuwas.
The strongest desire is based upon accidental encounters, women who ask their way in the maze of backstreets, and the sudden disappearance of the object becomes the source of fascination. I notice a pronounced tendency to search for the impossible and the unavailable: unknown and untraceable women, other men… And on the other hand building absence and distance where things are just too simple. Ibn Hazm relates that a friend of his used to write love letters, even if he lived at few steps of his lover’s house, with whom he maintained regular and satisfactory intercourse. In the middle of the most perfect happiness, absence needs to be artificially incited.
The lover should be absent and absent-minded, according to what Ibn ‘Arabi says. Love tears him apart from the social, isolates him. It is thus a precondition of the inner path. The eroticism of absence culminates in the spiritual quest, becomes longing for God. Since Rabi’a al-Adawiyya, the mysticism of love, oscillating between the bodily and the sublime became a strong, even if somehow underlying tradition.
The Arabian eroticism flees the body, even if the body never became the filthy envelope of soul, such as in the Christian tradition. It flees the body assuming it as a starting point.