A Sensual Education

Elevate Hearts and Minds to the Portals of the Soul

The Father Who Falsely Thought He Had It All Figured Out

Playing Prometheus (Clay, Fire, and Henry James)

The novels of Henry James are not sold at Baby Super Stores. But is the Jamesian aesthetic of a “Sensual Education” more essential than butt cream and a diaper warmer?

(If you’ve already stopped reading. Wait! Please! My wife said I should take out Henry James for fear of literary snobbery. I’m not — at least — not anymore.)

Back to the children: Art and music were crucial for the fire-engine red-colored nursery. Would Infant Madison appreciate a compendium on the History of Art? Would she like to know the difference between a Monet and Manet before pre-school?

If she did, would she be bullied?

Her first book, still in utero, was People of the World.

“Look! All of us have bones, but some people actually put bones through noses!”

Henry James, someone, perhaps, and bear with me, who may not have appreciated bones as a fashion accessory, was an American novelist with one foot in the 19th century and the other in 20th century Modernism. He considered European capitals as models for a “Sensual Education.”

Whether it was the twilight reflected on the Old Port in Marseille, or the Campo De’ Fiori Market of Rome, or rain-drenched Rue Foyatier — Escalier de la Butte Montmartre, Henry James saw European sensibilities as the touchstone for a well-rounded education.

Classrooms and nurseries can provide only a surface appreciation of the senses.

Of course, Henry James had capital and no children. We had children and little capital. His children were his characters, his subjects, many times women: Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer, Milly Theale.

When I was poor and a college student, I had plenty of money to travel and live and study for a while in Europe.

I wondered: since such experiences helped me, and my wife, Mary Jane with our penniless perambulations before children, could a Sensual Education be provided in Southern New Jersey where the denizens proclaim “wooter” for water and “youze” for you?

Could I be a guide? Or would Mary Jane be better, with not a snobby bone in her body? Well, it’s a good thing about Yin-Yang.

Playing Prometheus, what trouble was I getting into?

The Sensual Education started not so much with the hands, but the bristles of my beard. When Madison’s tender face met my razor whiskers, she recoiled like Sid Vicious at a hoedown.

Mary Jane may have groused about my “picky face,” but within minutes, for Madeline, my face was smooth as Marvin Gaye.

In our Garden, The Sensual Education continued; I rubbed lavender under her nose. Then mint. Oregano. Maybe manure. Organic, of course.

When Mom was away, the house became a Barcelona nightclub. By then our second daughter Sarah had arrived. Sarah shook her “baby prison,” aka the Pack ‘n Play, violently to PSB’s “Sexy Northerner.” Did she want to free herself to the beats of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Led Zeppelin, Putumayo World Music, and The Pet Shop Boys?

In the Woods, Madison heard the squawk of a blue jay and felt the caress of a breeze. There, she uttered her first sentence, “I got a stick.” She commenced to club me on the head from her baby backpack.

Was this more about liberation than playing Ringo?

(Anyway, I sure hope you’re still here).

Clothing Prometheus (The Nudes Must be Clothed)

One Sunday afternoon, Madison, backpack no longer, sat on the cold tile of the Philadelphia Art Museum. She drew a picture of the gilded-goddess Diana — that prominent symbol of the hunt.

Meanwhile, Mary Jane chased Sarah — finding swimming in fountains more sensory than watching the broad strokes of Van Gogh.

The Augustus Saint-Gaudens statue of Diana was regilded and replaced at the Philadelphia Art Museum in 1932. For thirty-two years it commanded the heights of Madison Square Garden. I had read about the artist in David McCullough’s fine book The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris.

However, Madison drew Diana with frilly clothes of purple and pink.

“She must be cold,” she said.

Was it just too darn hot in Greece?

Such innocence, however, was short-lived.

Now with two teen daughters, I was fashioning myself as the Dragon at the Gate. Any potential beau would need to supply a list of favorite books, references from the priest, minister, or rabbi. A writing sample. In a thousand-word composition, please explain why you would make a suitable date for our daughter.

Rather than the Romantic in a Springsteen song, I was now the Antagonist. Young dudes may have been “on fire” with a “bad desire,” but I was now forever “daddy at home.”

The boorish and prescriptive, although well-meaning, Polonius.

Disrobing Prometheus (The Grounds for Sculpture, or How Many Bare Breasts Can You Count?)

The S.E. continued years later during a summer sojourn to the Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, New Jersey. A sign at the Park of a Million Breasts read it was fine to touch the sculptures, to interact with the art — the “canvas” now liberated to three dimensions.

To cup, to fondle, to caress the art, however, well, that seemed inappropriate — and not a role model for a Consummate Father, I admit, especially with my daughters and a wife and a mother-in-law walking up the path.

In fact, it was no big deal, right? We discovered two clothed men, having lunch on the grass — with a naked woman. By the shore, another woman, loosely adorned, was bent over by a near-sunken rowboat. The luncheon displayed metaphorical sex foods — oysters — clams — and avocados.

“Excuse us,” I told the sculptures, “we’re just passing through.”

The display was based on Edward Manet’s ‘Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe,’ or those not prolific in Google French, ‘The Luncheon on the Grass.’ The original 1863 hangs at the d’Orsay, which I recall viewing, thrice, a pretentious word for three, at least, in my own sensual wanderings.

Did I act, then, so much like a ten-year-old boy?

Why are fully clothed dudes ignoring the naked woman? Why is she staring at me? Want from me? And is that really what she wants? I’m the Consummate Father, not a father to consummate, at least not with a statue.

“Go ahead,” my wife said. “There’s no difference between you and those ten-year-olds we saw earlier. Go ahead. Touch them. Touch the breasts!”

“You know we’re from Mars, right?” I said. “You female Venusians just condescend to us male Martians. You are of a higher order of intellect.”

As my wife Mary Jane took a picture of me touching the pale-colored, bronzed breast, my sixteen-year-old daughter Madison said I was “a sick, sick man.”

Why were there so many naked women? “How about some naked men? I don’t think it’s fair.”

I agreed, in theory. We continued along the pond at the Grounds for Sculpture of the Million Breasts, admiring the Seward Johnsons, sitting down at tables, pretending to drink wine, taking pictures, wondering if a man on the ground was a statue or just an actual dude — resting. I took a picture anyway, wanting some handy bronze to forever immortalize him.

The Modern Scholar Series gave my “art lectures” more heft. Did I sound like a professor from the Fine Arts Academy? I held forth of the history of art, Greek and Roman sculptures, the beauty of the female form, and how most artists, especially Impressionists, with the notable exception of Mary Cassatt (who only painted an occasional baby naked), were men, and most men, with the notable exception of Michelangelo’s David, did not find the male penis a thing to elevate to High Art.

Why spend the cost of a home on an art history degree?

Madison wanted to paint a man nude. What happened to her clothed Diana? What had changed? Like a reminder from Poseidon, a different horror washed over me.

Why object to such shenanigans? I bristled at my own prudery. A Philistine gazes into the mirror of his own hypocrisy!

I could just see my daughter, a modern-day Alice Paul, making a bronze statue, and raising it on the swelling of the ground for all the girls — a penis fifty feet high — and no metaphorical penis either, an obelisk or a Doric column.

Dangling genitalia, I imagine, wouldn’t go over too well in New Jersey. Would anyone attend a Park of a Million Pricks?

This became an ongoing conversation. We observed men acting like boys: on the one sculpture high on a hill, a woman rests on a sofa, fully naked, a true Brobdingnagian, her breasts one foot wide. A girl took a picture of her guy holding his hands over the woman’s breasts.

His mischievous grin reveals our primitive, visual nature. By the new, kitschy, Forever Marilyn statue, an Amazon of a model, twenty-six feet high, a woman asks, “She’s wearing underwear, isn’t she?” Her young children dance underneath Marilyn’s blowing white dress. Guys peek under and laugh. They think it’s hilarious. The detail on the panties was definitely sexy.

Am I objectifying an object? Is that circular reasoning?

Madison’s boyfriend would “never be such a pervert.”

That comment passed without interjection. Oh, ye youth happy in grand illusions! As a man, of course, I have no problem walking around a popular park dedicated to popular art, art — this side of gauche and pedestrian, on a beautiful July afternoon, gazing at numerous nude or partially nude statues of women in various locales: small breasts, large breasts, white breasts, brown breasts, breasts with snakes around them, pert breasts, dangling-in-the-shower breasts (the best kind of breasts), medium-sized breasts on top of a hill on a sofa with a black cat, in jungles with serpents, by the lake with oysters shells.

But what about my girls, my wife, my mother-in-law? Every day they are bombarded with bodacious depictions of the idealized feminine form. I can’t open Groupon offerings without slender bodies and torsos of shapely tanned women advertising Brazilians.

“At least the women are natural-looking,” Madison said. “They have normal-sized proportions.” Sarah, 13, agreed.

Today, we would call — if you want to be nasty — the women in Renoir’s various “Bather” oil paintings fat; back then, they were fleshy, and Renoir wanted to celebrate the flesh, to fill the canvas with flesh. Remember that scene in A Room With a View? E.M. Forster shows males swimming naked — a homosexual topic that in 1908 many writers feared to tread.

At least my father-in-law, Bill agreed with me. He laughed when taking a gander at the woman taking a shower — her breasts forever dangling in the dripping water. “A woman’s breasts are very attractive,” he conceded. “It’s always been that way.

So ended our sensual afternoon at Grounds for Sculpture.

Shaving Prometheus (The Barnes, Pubic Hair, and Brazilians)

The S.E. continued that summer during a beautiful July afternoon in Philadelphia. The natural light was exquisite.

Sarah asked me about Barnes. I offered some glib answer.

“He was probably some 3rd generation spoiled brat from the Main Line,” I said.

During the film introduction, however, we learned that Barnes was an impoverished lad from Philadelphia. He was bright and went on to study chemistry and made a fortune. Sarah looked at me.

“Just as I said, a self-made man,” I said. “An American success story. Let that be a lesson to us, a lesson to us all.”

(Barnes was not on the Modern Scholar Series CD lectures). Until I know, I should keep my lectern sheathed. (Not intended as an inappropriate joke).

I was overjoyed when Sarah recognized Gertrude Stein. “That’s the woman who helped Hemingway. Oh, and Picasso.”

I smiled — as if every thirteen-year-old knows about The Lost Generation.

From room to room, we studied the art. And from room to room, more and more female flesh.

What about the nudes at the Grounds for Sculpture where boys made fools of themselves?

In an antiseptic, academic environment, this museum, devoid of adolescent men, the flesh did not provoke my Objectifying mind. I did not want to fondle the paintings.

“But what about the pubic hair?” Madison asked. “These women have no pubic hair!”

The Uncomfortable morphed into Discombobulation. “Maybe they shaved,” I said. “Maybe they waxed . . . a Brazilian, I think it’s called.”

Incredulity swelled in her eyes. “Well, at least Picasso has some pubic hair,” she said as a concession.

One painting, a woman was fully naked, a Van Gogh or Picasso perhaps, and I was looking straight into the Origin of the World, a woman’s Privates of most Privates — fully depicted. It reminded me of the painting L’Origine du monde (1866) by Gustave Courbet at the d’Orsay in Paris.

The first time in Paris I was a virgin, the second time in Paris, almost not a virgin, and third time, on my second honeymoon with Mary Jane, well… boy does experience change perspective in a Sensual Education.

What’s the next step beyond discombobulated? Fraught? Rattled?

“Wo wo wo,” I said, walking away. What was it about sexuality in the midst of family members that makes me so digress?

Is it the same idea of thinking of mom and dad getting funky on the shag carpet? Watching a heavy R-rated flick, and shouting, “Cover your eyes,” as I toss a throw pillow?

What would Henry James think?

Nancy thought it was funny that the women in the pictures with the fairly large bottoms had an actual wide chair placed just below them. She pointed out other inside clues and jokes from the Barnes exhibit.

“Imagine having your own art museum in your own house,” Sarah said.

The dizziness from Art Overload descended upon me like a psychedelic mist. Two hours in an Art Museum is about right for anyone.

Is there anything more beautiful than the female form? Nothing more natural? Nothing more balanced? Or is this just pre-2020 thinking? But still: beautiful women are the ones advertised meditating in white on the beach by the sea, not men, right?

Instead of male artists depicting the female form, what if the world contained more female artists, showcasing the male form? Would they even want to do such a thing? How would I feel confronting a smorgasbord of dangling male genitalia?

How about a gaggle of naked men taking a bath together, splashing each other, the way Whitman depicts in Section 11 of Song of Myself, sousing each other with spray? There is, after all, realistic male “butt” nudity in Thomas Eakins’ The Old Swimming Hole in 1885.

Are women simply more comfortable with the body? Or maybe — just numbed by it all? I don’t know. Maybe no one really has a problem, so what’s my hangup?

Leaving the Barnes, Madison said that she would start drawing nudes of men. Sarah chuckled. Did this whole Sensual Education have an unexpected outcome?

Liberating Prometheus (The Sensualist Must Jettison into the Universe)

What was this outcome? What did I expect? Education comes from experience and change because of the experience. I have known many who have traveled to Rome and Paris and Vienna and London — and didn’t change at all. Education comes from wanting to learn: not memorizing and not regurgitation. Yoda, after all, never taught Luke to memorize anything.

Viewing art from a textbook in a crib is a start. Listening to Debussy while sleeping in the bassinet is also cool. But that experience is not textualized or contextualized.

It’s the reason we visit Gettysburg. It’s the reason we stand on Concord Bridge and feel the stirrings of a nation. It’s the same reason we collect vinyl rather than solely relying on Spotify. It’s the same reason the smell of a book, the feel and soul of the book, satisfies much more than the ease of an LCD PDF.

The works themselves are art. The places rich in history, or places as simple as a neighborhood park, or a backyard birdhouse, are rich in sensuality. We see the art face to face. At a concert hall, the music penetrates us to our core, more than simply in our living rooms.

Because of our senses, the ale tastes better in a British pub than in my den. In our den, there are no chitter-chatter adjoining tables; no thuds of thrown darts, no Irish fiddle, no cute barmaid, a true African princess, as I recall from a local pub in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the North of England.

Sensual Education is the missing link to school-based education. Madeline and Nancy did well in school, in many cases, in spite of brick-celled school. They ventured outside the classroom.

Art and shade and light surround us in such simple ways. We just need to broaden our palette.

As I tell anyone who will listen, mostly my captive students: “If I had to rely on my education for my education, I’d be an idiot.”

Henry James would agree. And about his brother, William? The founder of modern psychology? Probably.

Every parent and educator should lift the heart and mind to the portals to the soul. Then let the child go forth as an adult into the universe.

*Names of my daughters have been changed.

Thank you for reading! For more of my work in Age of Awareness, see: