Once upon a time
I was naked with a naked woman
and we made love in ways
that felt like more than sex.
This actually happened.
More than once.
But here's the rub:
in the longer run,
these experiences, as profound
as they seemed at the time,
had no staying power and changed
nothing. Old barriers remained.
Old habits remained. It was as if
the experiences never happened.
I've long thought that herein
lies a tragic perversion of
human priority. Properly understood,
those experiences should have
inspired awe by their intensity,
spontaneity, physicality and
mystery. Being awe-some, they
should have been cherished as
amazing gifts of connection to
mysterious life forces, a modern
Saturnalia.
Instead, at best we recall them
as good sex and save "awesome" for
finding a penny on the ground
or getting a job promotion
or hearing the latest pop song
or any of hundreds of ordinary
moments in the day.
We've taken the awe out of awesome
and keep too busy and distracted
to consider what we are doing.
Thoreau said most men live lives
of quiet desperation.
I say most men live lives
of noisy distraction.
This is why Norman O. Brown said
Doing nothing, if properly understood,
is the supreme action.
He also said, Murder is
misdirected suicide
(which is awesome).
He also said, Personality is
the original personal property
(which is awesome)
He also said, To be is
to be vulnerable
which is awesome but
not as awesome as
a lover's passionate
cry in the night.
