A red-figure plate with Eros as a youth making an offering (c. 340–320 BC). Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
© By Ascoli Satriano Painter - Walters Art Museum (Public Domain) https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18791389
I

Whitehead's Infinitely Erotic God

In Whitehead's philosophy God has an appetite. God is hungry and thirsty for intensity of experience. Indeed, God's seeking of satisfaction is infinite and unbounded. This is God's primordial nature, says Whitehead. This is not all that God is. God is also tender and empathic, sharing in the suffering and joys of each finite entity. This is God's consequent nature. But God, too, seeks satisfaction. Indeed God seeks physical satisfaction: that is, the satisfaction of enjoying the experiences of actualities in the world as something God experiences directly, in physical feelings. God does not have a body of God's own, but the world itself is, as it were God's body; and God is satisfied in God's experiences of his/her/their body. In this sense God is erotic. We humans feel the eroticism of God as our own urge toward the future based on appetition in the present. Our eroticism is rooted in divine eroticism. Here are some relevant quotes from Process and Reality:

"God and the World are the contrasted opposites in terms of which Creativity achieves its supreme task of transforming disjoined multiplicity, with its diversities in opposition, into concrescent unity, with its diversities in contrast. In each actuality there are two concrescent poles of realization—‘ enjoyment’ and ‘appetition,’ that is, the ‘physical’ and the ‘conceptual.’

For God the conceptual is prior to the physical, for the World the physical poles are prior to the conceptual poles. A physical pole is in its own nature exclusive, bounded by contradiction: a conceptual pole is in its own nature all-embracing, unbounded by contradiction. The former derives its share of infinity from the infinity of appetition; the latter derives its share of limitation from the exclusiveness of enjoyment.

Thus, by reason of his priority of appetition, there can be but one primordial nature for God; and, by reason of their priority of enjoyment, there must be one history of many actualities in the physical world. God and the World stand over against each other, expressing the final metaphysical truth that appetitive vision and physical enjoyment have equal claim to priority in creation."

​*

"God's immanence in the world in respect to his primordial nature is an urge towards the future based upon an appetite in the present. Appetition is at once the conceptual valuation of an immediate physical feeling combined with the urge towards realization of the datum conceptually prehended. For example ‘thirst’ is an immediate physical feeling integrated with the conceptual prehension of its quenching." 

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) (p. 207). Free Press. Kindle Edition. ​

The point of the second quotation is that God seeks satisfaction through the intensities of worldly experience. God is erotic. This is one of many reasons why God would understand and appreciate the erotic poetry of Richie Hofman.

Temple of Desire
​
The Love Poetry of Richie Hofman

"Richie Hofmann writes about erotic love as the ancient Greeks envisioned it: an all-possessing force, a hammer that knocks you flat, simultaneously sweet and bitter, impossible to fight off, but also an organizing principle, a way of seeing and embracing the world... Thrillingly, deliciously frank... He constructs a temple to desire's shifting moods and meditates on the complications of loving and being loved."

So writes Stephen Tagle in a review of Richie Hofmann's "A Hundred Lovers." If Hofmann constructs a temple to desire and indeed a temple of desire through his poetry, I would like to add that the faith of this temple, the religion to which it is dedicated, is erotic love.

There is too little reflection on the part of process thinkers to the erotic and sexual side of life, despite the fact that Whitehead described the primordial nature of God as the Eros of the universe. For Whitehead, the Erotic side of God was completed by the Empathic side of God, which he called the "consequent nature of God." This side of God is gentle, tender, and non-violent. I believe a full-fledged faith needs to be rooted in the tender and gentle, but not at the expense of the adventurous and exploratory side. This note and page focuses on the latter. 

Paul Tillich is well known for defining people's faith as their ultimate concern. What is most important to us, he said, is what we have faith in. We center our lives around it. Objects of faith can include the ego, the nation, money, power, a career, and love. Almost all forms of love involve a desire for fulfillment, for satisfaction, but there are many kinds of loving fulfillment: erotic fulfillment, friendship fulfillment, and the fulfillment found in disregarding personal desires in the interests of helping others, sometimes called agape. Often, these forms are wrapped up together into a more general desire for connection, whether self-giving or self-receiving or both.

Still, one or another of these three forms can take precedence in a person's life. In erotic faith, the desire for erotic connection takes precedence. Friendship and agape are woven into the desire for erotic connection. Erotic faith itself is more like a hunger: a consuming desire to touch and be touched by another and, in that touch, to love and be loved. Through the lens of erotic faith, this desire becomes the framework through which people look at, and approach, the whole of life. The world is seen erotically.

At the heart of erotic faith is awe, wonder, and a sense of beauty. Beauty lies in loving and being loved, in being connected through sensuality and touch. This Beauty is not prettiness, and it is not unmixed pleasure. It includes agony, pain, and, ironically, a sense of separation. Separation from the beloved is as beautiful in its way as is being with the beloved. The beauty includes a tragic beauty.

One of the most intense forms of touch is sexual intimacy. Such intimacy brings with it agony, pain, and separation as well as experiences of fulfillment and pleasure. Hofman's "A Hundred Lovers" is a testimony to all of these emotions. All have their place in the temple of desire he constructs.

Christian theologians are not noted for their appreciation of erotic faith. Many carry with them inherited dualities between spirit and flesh, mind and body, discipline and passion. They often associate the Beauty of the whole, otherwise named God, with spirit, mind, and discipline, not flesh, body, and passion. Theirs is an Apollonian faith. Spirituality, for them, is a flight from the carnal into the heavenly.

But is it not possible that, for some people in some circumstances, faith is a journey into the carnal, not away from it, in search of beauty—sometimes found not only in sexual activity but also in the memory of it? And who is to say that the Beauty of the whole, the Beauty of God, isn't found in the carnal, even if the carnal sometimes includes the seemly? Wasn't Jesus himself an incarnation of God and, perhaps also, a carnalization of God?

And speaking of God, is it not possible that God, too, is appetitive? In "Process and Reality," the philosopher Whitehead speaks of the primordial nature of God as filled with appetition, with desire, for fulfillment and adds that the world itself is the source of that fulfillment. God seeks intensity, and the world provides it. Is this not a carnalization of a sort? Might even the sacred whole of the universe, might even God, find its home in the temple of desire?

But then there is the questions of ethics. Many of Hofman's poems describe the way in which consensual sex can include, in the words of one reviewer, a hunger for brutality as well as beauty. Is this, too, part of erotic faith? If so, does the good justify the harm?

These are questions raised by the amazingly beautiful poetry of Richie Hofman. His poems help us look at carnality with sensitive eyes and hear it with sensitive ears. The questions raised above are not his questions, but they are good questions, especially for those among us who believe that God is in, not apart from, the way of all flesh. Perhaps the God who is, in Whitehead's words, "a fellow sufferer who understands" partakes of the pleasures and pains of the bodies. Perhaps God, too, has a hundred lovers.  

- Jay McDaniel
​

See also "Sex, Eros, and Love: Whiteheadian Reflections"

​A Hundred Lovers

"A Hundred Lovers is a catalog of encounters, sublime, steamy, and frank. Inspired by French autofiction, the poems feel both sharp and diaristic; their lyrical, intimate world brings us everyday scenes imbued with sex. "Eros enters, where shame had lived," the speaker observes, as the poems explore risk and appetite, promiscuity and violence, and, in the wake of his marriage, questions about monogamy and desire.

Bringing us both the carefully knotted silk ties of the wedding pair and their undress in a series of Hockney-like interiors where passion colors every object, Hofmann speaks plainly of the saliva, tears, and guts of the carnal, just as he does of the sublime in works of art. A Hundred Lovers invites us to consider our own memories of pleasure and pain, which fill the generous white space the poet leaves open to us between his ravishing lines."

---

Reviews
​

“This is a book you take in with your feeling body; it’s full of textures and scents, redolent with music and art. The speaker of these poems, hungry for beauty and brutality, seeks out connection while haunted by the inviolable singleness of the self. One finds an almost lost tradition channeled in these brilliant poems, and also a sensibility that makes tradition startlingly new.” —Garth Greenwell

​“[In A Hundred Lovers] the grit and sacrifice required to understand the sense of beauty and sorrow are deftly captured in the book, and his poetry is an endeavor of commitment to the rendering and refinement of form. It’s a work that encapsulates, touching environment, carnal, psychic, and deeply erotic worlds.” —Mark William Norby, Bay Area Reporter

“A Hundred Lovers, [Hofmann’s] second collection, is ostensibly an inventory of erotic encounters, but these billets-doux are marbled with another form of love as well, one less carnal, though no less cardinal: the aesthete’s passion for art and beauty . . . Hofmann’s immense love of art, like his more carnal erotic entanglements, engorges his poetic imagery, deepening the mood and meaning.” —Tyler Malone, Poetry Foundation

“Richie Hofmann’s second poetry collection, A Hundred Lovers, and the experience of reading it, can be best described as a reverie, a state of pleasantly sinking in one’s thoughts as a daydream . . . Hofmann does not only explore the nature of (queer) desire but also imparts an approximation of desire to the reader by always leaving something to be carnally wanted, a backstory to the encounter, more sequential details, a clearer resolution. At a time when contemporary poetry often seeks affective responses that are limited to major emotions such as anger, sadness, happiness, and hope, Hofmann’s poetry expands the repertoire.” —Christos Kalli, The Hopkins Review

“Richie Hofmann writes about erotic love as the ancient Greeks envisioned it: an all-possessing force, a hammer that knocks you flat, simultaneously sweet and bitter, impossible to fight off, but also an organizing principle, a way of seeing and embracing the world . . . Thrillingly, deliciously frank . . . He constructs a temple to desire’s shifting moods and meditates on the complications of loving and being loved.” --Steven Tagle, BOMB

“Hofmann presents love—that whirlpool, whirlwind, and wandering emotion that makes life worth living and also ensures future anguish—in its many shades from Eros to Agape. His explorations—like the mythologies—aren’t cherubic, instead embracing both darkness and light. These poems are earthy and multisensory.” —Mandana Chaffa, Chicago Review of Books

Selected Poems

The Paris Review: “Armed Cavalier”

The New Yorker: “French Novel”

The Atlantic: “Night Star”

Poetry: “Breed Me”

Poetry: “Dolphin”

Poetry: “Pantheon”

Poets.org: “Lamb”

Features
​
On Ekphrasis for Nicholas Hall Gallery

On Craft and Cruising for Yale Review

On Sex and Poetry for McSweeney’s

On Focus for The Wall Street Journal

On Michelangelo and Mapplethorpe for The Paris Review
​
On Erotic Turmoil for the Poetry Magazine Podcast

​Things that are Rare

by Richie Hoffman
​

It is so easy to imagine your absence.
Maybe it is night, we are still handsome.
All the young are.
It is so easy. Another thing to be beautiful.
How gently the curtain falls back down
and the room is dark again, the season
of in-betweenities,
my eyes heavy, my lips numb.
Fingerprints on the unjacketed books.
Inside the collars
of the shirts in the open closet--
An affluent night.
You’ve touched everything in my small room.

​​A Discussion of "Things that are Rare"

Joanne Diaz and Abram Van Engen
​

Propositions
​

Hofman's poems present the intricacies of intimate connections, shedding light on less illuminated corners. Pleasure takes on an enigmatic quality, exposing the emotional complexities that often underlie seemingly voluntary unions. Moreover, his focus is not solely on the sexual acts themselves but more on the desire for sex and the memory of it. "Sex" is more than sex. It is memory, desire, and longing: the many becoming one.

The point can be put in terms of process philosophy. Influenced by Whitehead's cosmology as developed in "Process and Reality," process philosophers speak of two sides of experience: the physical pole and the mental pole. The physical pole consists of feeling the feelings of others in direct, palpable ways, as in sexual activity. The mental pole consists of feelings of possibilities that may or may not have been embodied in the past or that may be embodied in the future.

They also speak of an experiential datum that combines the two, which Whitehead calls "propositions." Propositions are proposals, ideas, memories that explore possibilities as juxtaposed with actualities, forming imaginatively felt contrasts. Such propositions function in human life as, in Whitehead's words, "lures for feeling."

Richie Hoffmann's poems present and explore erotically-charged lures for feeling as memories and desires. Not exactly happy memories and desires, but honest memories and desires: honest, indeed faithful, to ambiguity.

​His images are striking and beautiful: the smell of mint shampoo or paper money being put into a wallet, fingerprints on the unjacketed books inside the collars of the shirts in the open closet. His poems draw the reader into the concrete environments of where sex happens, and the way that desire itself is woven into the materials of a room. In his poems, propositions, lures for feeling, emerge from the collars of shirts.


- Jay McDaniel

Poems Charged with Erotic Potential

"Usually I feel like I’m writing about intimacy and attention. I feel these most potently in the desire for sex, and in the moments that precede and follow sex. I want my poems to feel charged with erotic potential, but often the most erotic moment from my memory that I want to recreate in a poem won’t be an instance of sex, but some other detail from the room, the day, the experience. The smell of mint shampoo or paper money being put into a wallet." 

​*

"For many people, but for homosexuals especially, sex can be a site of difference, loss, alienation. One feels forced into one’s body in ways that make life more painful but also richer. It seems always to have been this way, at least since Sappho. One of my favorite fragments, here translated by Anne Carson: “you came and I was crazy for you / and you cooled my mind that burned with longing.” In such a little poem, there is an “I” and a “you,” an interiority made vivid, made visceral with words of concrete, physical sensation; a broader narrative is implied, if not fully stated, and I feel immediately, urgently implicated in it.

I feel, in poems like these, a strong connection—if not with a living, breathing lover—then with the love story of someone else. I am not the “you” addressed in the poem; I am not the “I” from whom the verses flow forth. And yet, in the act of reading, I become the “you,” I become the “I” while remaining, always, at some safe distance from the consuming passion. I am the presence this erotic poem seeks. And you are mine, when you read mine."


Richie Hoffmann, from A Short Conversation with Jesse Nathan

Breed Me
​

Hear Richie Hofmann read his poem. Click here.
​

Breed Me 

BY RICHIE HOFMANN
​
My sweat soaked the sheets.

You used to be like everyone else

but then

the way you hurt me (fingers, teeth):

I grew accustomed to it

then I craved it

then I got bored

and other men tried to put death into my mouth.

Angelic Richie with bite marks

in such a clean room.

I deplore clutter but I do like flowers.

A tall drinking glass filled with peonies

the color of underwear.

I like hard and classical.

The ceiling black like Caravaggio’s wine.

Through the blinds, obscure gods shined,

making the outlines of my body

a kind of emptiness.

The ceiling fan

pushed heat around

even though it was snowing outside.

You forgave

my love of surfaces.

It’s not a tragedy we couldn’t have a child.

I had a pain inside me

and I needed you to deepen it.

Source: Poetry (July/August 2023)

This poem appears in:

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Dolphin

​
Hear Richie Hofmann read his poem. Click here.
​

Dolphin

BY RICHIE HOFMANN

A dolphin fell in love with me.
Probably because of my looks--
people always said, What a pretty boy you are.

I was coming home from Gymnasium,
I was so sweaty from running,
we all were, we all ran into the sea,
its freshness,

we gargled the water, we threw it from our hair--
I washed my limbs in the waves,
and I heard him calling.
I didn’t want the other boys to see.


But I kept glancing at the shimmering sea,
hoping he was there. My dolphin.
I dreamed about becoming
a dolphin, being carried

on the waves, doing flips while the boys clapped from the docks,
chasing the elegant boats,
making choreography in their wakes.

I dreamed.

The sight of a dolphin is always
a little bit magical,
even on our island.

But he liked that I was human.
That is why he fell in love with me.
Because I wasn’t a dolphin.

He liked my singing voice.
I blushed, but I knew he thought I was good
at singing made-up songs.

I never liked animals,
not really trusting something
that doesn’t talk.

But I knew what he felt.

One day I walked right into the water.
I was surprised by how his skin felt.

Pricklier than it looks.
He let me put my mouth to his blowhole
Oh my god
it was the saltiest thing I tasted.

I held onto his fin and we swam, he always dove up
so I could breathe.

I came home exhilarated.
My parents were mad I dripped all over the house,
dragging my wet feet across the floor,
dripping onto the pillows
and the white blankets.

Why are you swimming all evening?
When there’s homework to be done!

My mother said she could smell the salt
and it disgusted her.

Take a shower right now.

Night entered the sea.
Night where there is no future.
I imagined his gray body against the waves.

I sat in our courtyard with olive trees.
Gulls laughed at me,
the open door.

Waking from the incomplete dream,
I wanted to possess him--

What a weird thing for a child to say, I know.
Dolphins carried Dionysus to the underworld,
disappearing each winter--

Would mine carry me there?
Winter came. The constellations
disappeared.

It’s terrible what happens next, but our playing
turned rough. It was an accident.

I was bleeding
in the water, I hardly noticed at first,

but then the panic set in.
I started thrashing in the water.

My dolphin wanted to save me.
He hadn’t meant to cut my flesh
with his sharp fin,

the salt was stinging.
I blacked out.

I died on shore, my dolphin tossed me there.
And he flung himself there, too,
to die beside me.

I am a little famous.
I was loved by a dolphin.
They minted coins that showed us playing.

I never thought
they would miss me.

And they make songs about us,
the humans,
saying that dolphins were human once,
and charmed by singing.

Source: Poetry (July/August 2023)

​This poem appears in:

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