I was going to drive for a long while today and thought better of it. Perhaps not better, but against, because it was not meant to be a drive representing escape or even a removal of self from inescapable surroundings. In opposition to everyone around me at this moment, I need to be ever-present especially in myself. I find that need for self-presence, for self-preservation, is more than ever a struggle couched in the body, in the movement and placement of limbs, of spatial reasoning: now I am standing here, in this light rain, and now I move a hand to wipe it from one cheek, and now some part of my center tilts slightly to the left, avoiding a puddle or the edge of the road. Symmetry is impossible: even in sleep I seem to be at angles dissonant to one another, one leg at ninety-degrees, the other straight, as if trying unconsciously to hold myself in assertion of who this body is, to whom it responds, to whom it has made love.
There's that too: sex.
That act is perhaps the truest I've engaged in, the wanted and willing of two bodies into and over each other, the ability to create life or even to want to at the heart of it, sheerly miraculous. What does denial of it ever bring us but confusion, that puritanical and torturous feeling that what we're doing (or thinking about desiring to do) is 'wrong' while ever natural and innate force in existence pushes against it. Who among us truly believes that the body is necessarily and merely a vessel for the soul? Would that there were no such thing as 'base' or 'low' or 'crude'. That carnality could give way to its simplest of manifestation: hands in other hands, mouths on mouths, without this residual, religious scrutiny. Who are we but proximal to and always in desperate need of each other, of the blissful disconnect it is when, at last, we are connected so completely to each other and to ourselves and our physical bodies that we cannot help but burst?
Proximity. Distance. These are things heart-driven, catalogs of the spaces people fill, or that memories do, the mileage and acreage of the ways we once brought ourselves together. The inexorable need of the mind to cling to that which was felt and can only be consumed by the body-even in attempting to separate ourselves from this flesh, we use terms that can only be understood through physicality. We do not say we transcend. We say we feel.
Having been raised under the tenets of Catholicism, I do still on occasion entrench myself too firmly in its guilts. Morning-after syndrome. Yet I no longer succumb to its hurtfulness, that doctrine which relegates the mind and the body to separate compartments, attempts to elevate one above the other, is ruthless in its persecution of the physical self. Instead I have gratitude for this body, for its attuning to intensity, to pleasure and to pain. Its indescribable strength, after all it has been through. What it is and what it contains are one and the same. What use be it to say that it is not, in fact, the body that is the seat of all feeling? I want to experience life as a series of cataclysms in the body, excursions into endurance and sensuality and thrill, the bottom dropping out from under the feet so that to find solid ground again precipitates a wild relief akin to joy, so that the mind is able to reach some new conclusion about the weight of a stone or the taste of having bitten the inside of the mouth.
Last week might have been the most eye-opening instance of the kind of wholly consuming experience I hope to continue to have, in one fashion or another: the purely-opened feeling one can sometimes attain only by having an encounter with another person in their entirety. It is not spiritual. It's too decadent for that. Some, I suppose, might more accurately akin it to a perfectly executed five-course meal, or an indescribably fine wine, some sense of illicitness and total indulgence required for the mind and body to meld in their engagement and finally in their understanding of what's taken place. It was a set of courses, of sorts, a meeting not at all by chance but certainly, in the end, not by design, the sort of meeting whose assumed innocence implies that its ending must, out of irony and the world's sense of humor, always be one of resist-resist-give in: a testament to temptation and that which we cannot continue to deny.
Recklessness played a part, no doubt, but really, I was glad and grateful for it, for the certainty that was under the surface all night, for the gentleness and then for what was rough and right and ready to be moved from the speculative to the real. Isn't it the only mystery we are capable of solving?: what that particular skin might feel like under one hand, what angle it is that best expresses our need, what the shape of a mouth says about what can be done against it? To exist in a state of feeling becomes empirical: we know what our limbs know, our state a state of the constance of muscle memory, inextricable from the hum and dance of it all stretched out before and after us, the universe contained in a single human body, there in the bed of on the grass or under cover of semi-darkness, ready to explore and be explored.
I mention that I feel gratitude, when I should say that I also ache, with the ache of the romantic and selfish: I want to see this man again, to feel the room open up like so many mountainsides giving way to glaciers, which is to say that the naturalness of it I had not felt before, the feeling of hardness and unease being eroded. He smiles. It's bright and I can somehow picture a thousand more nights spent doing things very similarly. This must be the enactment of that old cliche-the meeting of kindred spirits.
Then (and over and over) I realize how foolish it all sounds and I have to laugh at myself, at the parody of myself that I become when I allow myself to think this way, allow the idea of anything close to domesticity and its bliss to infiltrate all my tirades about borders and infinity and stepping outside myself ruined by all the musings I have about this one man and then I recall how little it took for him to win me over, how there were wide streaks of bronze in his dark hair, and I think that this, too, is the world, this one entity, who has a name and a unique taste and has set foot on the earth in places that I have not, the totality of him, and of us, and of what unfolds when two such beings meet and come together, finding that the horizon has no span so great as their two bodies, and so begin to search for what it is to feel and therefore to be.
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