ABSTRACT
This riff or mini chapter explores the proposition that wandering attracts the erotic. People who fall out of love tend to wander, and people who fall in love tend to wander. The erotic is not identical with sex. “Sexual reproductive activity is common to sexual animals and men,” as Georges Bataille he writes, “but only men appear to have turned their sexual activity into erotic activity.” Erotic wandering takes many trajectories and three serve here as placeholders: loss, risk, and catastrophe. John Lee Hooker’s “Wandering Blues” (1950) offers an initial instance of loss, as does Robert Burns’s traditional song of farewell, “Red Red Rose” (c. 1792). Risk is represented in the romantic memoir No Baggage (2016) by Clara Bensen. Erotic catastrophe needs no single representative: it runs a public course from the House of Atreus to Martha Dickenson’s forgotten Wandering Eros (1925). The largest question may be whether wandering—except perhaps fugitive flight and exile—almost always includes erotic dimensions implicit in free, unconfined, risky wanderings on the open road of the inner life, with their renegade departures from everything staid, constraining, dull, and straight.
