This is the the sixth of eight articles on love, sex and gender. As with the others, it stands on its own, but you can read through part 1, on man and woman, part 2 on sex and excitement, part 3 on emotion and habit, part 4, on courtship and woo, part 5 on solipsism and sex, part 7 on marriage and part 8 on eternal love.
Foreplay all Day
Love, being selfless, is not made with selves. There is therefore, ultimately, no emotion in love-making, nor any rational self-awareness, because the love that is made ‘precedes’ emotionality and rationality. It cannot be grasped with thought or desire. It is mysterious, which is why it is proper to call it sacred.
Drained of the sacred, love-making becomes solipsistic fucking, with as much mystery to it as scratching an itch. Modern herbivores rarely have enough spirit to leave the house, let alone find someone to have sex with, but when they do stir from their solitude, they usually find a shared coffee provides more intimacy.
And so making love begins with a sense of the sacred. If this does not exist in the house, there is no hope for love. Sacredness is not religion, which in itself is just as profane as the basest forms of atheism, but a sense of living mystery,1 manifest in myth and metaphor, that pervades qualitative life.
By qualitative life I do not mean the abstract, quantitative idol that the sacrilegious world worships.2 This spiritless ‘thing life’ is not experienced in the body, it is an abstract statistical object that is measured, manipulated and managed so that the body, and beyond that existence itself, can be controlled.
Nor, by life do I mean mere living. Living, worldly existence, comes and goes, but life does not. Life, unlike living, doesn’t need to get things to be. It is not weighed down with fear, nor does it need hope to get through the day. It is not a thing that has been left behind or is on its way. Life, unlike mere living, is here, all day.