The Erotic Comedies (Vassi Collection Volume XI) (13 page)

"That's right," he said, his expression smug. He hunched over, and his words came out quickly. "The fact of the matter is, earth is the only place in all of creation that has fucking. And so, while it isn't the most spectacular activity available, its rarity gives it a certain value. I've granted the boon of eternal life to several thousand others in the course of your history, and if you accept my offer, I will remove you to a planet that you will share with them. Once there, you can have the company of the greatest fuckers that the world has ever seen, or all the privacy you desire. And when I'm in the area, every few million years or so, I'll drop by."

"So I become your mistress."

"Call it what you like," he said. He looked into her eyes, holding her gaze, and went on in a chill voice. "The alternative, if you refuse, is to live out your days and end, like everyone else, in the grave." The last word sent shivers down her spine, and he finished, "What have you got to lose by saying yes, and what can you possibly gain by saying no?"

She waited a long moment and answered, "My integrity. A whore's a whore even if she's God's whore." And then let the breath out of her lungs with a loud sigh and added, "This is just like the scene with the tree in the garden. Where's Satan?"

"God laughed. "Don't you know? I'm Satan too. I just haven't bothered to split roles this time."

"Is this the only game you know?" she said, slightly disgusted.

"For humanity, it's the only game in town," he said. "If you are true to yourself, you will refuse the fuck, and die forever. But if you sell out, you get paradise as a reward."

She lay back down again, her whole being filled with the prospect of realizing the one dream that has haunted the species since it first became aware of death, the hope of immortality. She balanced it against every earthly value she had come to cherish. His hands stroked her calves as she wrestled with the problem. And without being fully aware of what was happening, she sank into a lassitude that was the prelude to capitulation.

Her mind swam lazily in its thoughts. The single word "forever" sounded in her psyche like a gong. And finally, she succumbed. The temptation was too strong, the offer too compelling.

"All right," she said, "you win."

Her thighs parted and her stomach swelled with a deep breath. "You can fuck me," she told him.

God moved forward until he was between her legs, her wet cunt staring up at him, her hips beginning to rotate. But as he approached, she put her hands on his shoulders and held him for a second. She looked him in the eyes.

"Just don't get me pregnant," she said. And then took God's huge hard cock into her, opening the doors to eternal life.

A COLLECTION OF BONES

essays on the erotic experience

Once upon a time, in ancient India, a woman ran away from her husband's house, and went along a road leading to the village where her parents lived. She saw an old man, a sage, sitting by the path, and, feeling reckless, smiled at him seductively. The man glanced up, and upon seeing her flashing teeth, realized that a skeleton stood before him, its flesh no more significant than the clothes the body wore.

A half hour later, the husband passed by the same spot. He stopped before the sage and asked, "Did you see a woman go by this way?"

The sage replied, "Whether what went along here was a man or a woman, I do not know. But a collection of bones is moving down this road."

Buddhist Tales

The true metaphysicians Qre found among the debauchees, not elsewhere.

E. M. Cioran

Author's Note

Since writing The Metasexual Manifesto, I have attempted, in my own life, to extirpate the entrenched linguistic prejudices rooted in the failure to make the necessary distinction between sex and metasex. This has proven extremely difficult, and my sympathies extend to those who, upon reading the essay, try to program a new semantic into their word-thought forms.

For a while, I toyed with the idea of going through all my previous works and substituting the word "metasex" where I had inaccurately used "sex." But this would have been a falsification of record, obscuring the outlines of the development of my erotic evolution, as well as a stylistic awkwardness, so I have let the original usage remain.

The essays may seem to contradict one another, but this is due to my having lived each erotic aspect through to its conclusion and articulating that conclusion in rather absolutist terms. Also, the works show the struggle to formulate an idea more than the polished presentation of an established concept. I hope the value of the thought renders the crudity of expression irrelevant.

The erotic descriptions in the essays contain no exaggeration. The notion of a state which transcends erotic duality is based on experience, not speculation.

Bodhi Is the Body

Perhaps the most common trap surrounding the notion of enlightenment is viewing it as a state divorced from the moment-to-moment experience of life, as though it were some kind of paradisical attainment which transcends earthly existence. People attempt to "reach it" in the same way they might run after a bus.

Enlightenment can be simply defined as an a-historical state of awareness shaped by the historical matrix within which it arises, having no meaning apart from the genetic structure of the individual who lives in that state. Thus, the understanding of a person of three thousand years ago is at once the same as and different from that of someone alive today.

One thing has, however, remained fairly constant throughout the ages, and that is the fact that enlightenment has been almost exclusively a man's game. Women have been considered at best irrelevant and at worst ruinous, in the quest for truth. In less hypocritical times, this was stated openly by the priests of all the major religions; today the notion has gone underground, but is more pernicious for just that reason.

The insight into this issue came to me, as many of my most acute visions do, while I was fucking. To describe what she and I did, the feelings which flowed, the passions that informed our behavior, would not be to the point. What takes place between a man and woman when they return to the Source is far deeper than language. We fucked and we made love; we did both, shifting from an activity in which two individuals act upon one another, to a movement of a single entity that no longer distinguished among its parts. The night was a reality with the quality of a dream, and hummed with that singular vibration of union, where subjective and objective interpenetrate like the blue and red of yin and yang.

The violet ecstasy of those hours entered me with all the significance of a childhood imprinting. As I lay in her arms, her body an undulating density of corduroy coils, the smells and sounds and textures of our dance conjured a realm of awareness in which the chains of time were shattered.

And with apparent incongruity, a line from an old book came into my consciousness: "When one is ready, the teacher will appear."

I was at a stage where I had been doing a particular kind of work, using Gurdjieffian methods of self observation, paying attention to the physical aspects of my being . . . posture, gesture, facial expressions, the sound of my voice, movements. Without any effort at changing myself in a given direction, I adhered simply to the discipline, and the work had begun to show a result. I was beinning to find many facets of my existence clarified, and doorways to so-called higher states were opening. Questions which had tortured me were seen through, and debilitating habits fell away. No decisions were involved; the process of self-observation made all things obvious. As I became aware of myself, the workings of the universe made themselves known.

Concurrently, I wondered from time to time whether some "master" would pop up one day to take me by the hand and lead me to realms of knowledge closed to ordinary mortals. But it was not until I spent that night with Julia that the basic prejudice which lies at the root of so many schools of enlightenment flashed in all its dimensions. Something about the concept of esoteric wisdom had long bothered me, and now I could see what it was: in its continual pointing to a condition removed from day-to-day life, most of the supposedly spiritual literature had dropped women to the status of hindrance. Without its being stated in so many words, it was assumed that no woman could ever be a teacher, or if one were, then would have to operate in the capacity of a man's role.

As we took to one another's arms and legs and eyes, and I was infused with a stinging alertness, I saw that she was giving me, at that very moment, lessons about the meaning of life that were as profound as anything any teacher or master had ever talked about. From terror to bliss, all the modes of being triumphed between us. She was providing me with the completion without which all verbal knowledge is fatuous mumbling. While I had vaguely been expecting a bearded and robed Indian expatriate, the truths I was so hungrily seeking were pressed tightly against me, in the shape of a mouth against my mouth, and a vortex of energy which called me into the hot wet center of her body. Singing and sweating the wondrous song of sex, we were joined in full intimate contact with the living embodiment of our primary reality as human beings.

"All this," I thought, "through contact with a woman. All this, through the vehicle of sex."

In a very important sense, my life had been a struggle to come to terms with women, beginning, of course, with my mother. In doing that I was, without articulating it as such, defining what it meant to be a man. I had spent many years in the boundless stretches of homosexuality, and despite the treasures I had found there, saw that that style of life, if followed exclusively, was, for me, ultimately sterile. It did not, by itself, replenish the juices I needed to sustain me.

With women, I had practiced a judicious promiscuity, and even when I lived with a woman for any length of time, I could not appreciate her as anything but a minor incident in my life. I was infected with the thought that someday I would meet a teacher, a man, who would show me the way. It took many years of work and the help of a woman therapist to point out that
the man I was looking for was myself.

Like so many of my generation, I ransacked the wardrobe of Eastern thought for answers, and found the same spectrum available as in the West, couched in different terminology. It went from folksy wisdom to obscure mystifications and occasionally, as in Ch'an Buddhism, a perfectly penetrating truth. But for all the value of these aphorisms and instructions, none of those hundreds of thousands of words helped fill the very real hole in my psyche. The greatest help I received from the East was the assurance that I wasn't the only one facing the thorny problems of living by attempting to contact the vibration of universal consciousness. The greatest damage done by my foray into Oriental attitudes was the perpetuation of the notion that enlightenment is a state which precludes, or ignores, continuing relationship with women.

The following story exemplifies this attitude in perhaps its mildest form. A Zen master and his disciple were walking along and came to a stream where a woman stood by the shore, not wanting to wet her robes in crossing. The master picked her up and carried her across. He and the student continued for several miles and the disciple finally burst out, "It is against all our teaching to have anything to do with women, and yet you picked her up in your arms." The master snorted, "I put her down at the far end of the stream, but you, it seems, have been carrying her in your mind all this way."

The story is used to point up the process whereby we are trapped by conceptual thought, and as such is a salutary tale. One is very prone to admire the old monk for his greater "humanity." But several questions are raised, such as, "What sort of teaching is it that treats women as a species of psychic lepers, to be avoided at all costs?" And, "What sort of society is it in which a woman comes to view herself as so inept and frail she can't cross a stream by herself?"

One here gets into the trickier question as to whether there is something in the nature of woman that is intrinsically disruptive to a man's peace of mind. God knows, any man who has become involved with a woman has certainly been tempted to quit their company forever and choose monastic seclusion as a viable alternative. But if peace of mind has to be bought at the price of the exclusion of half the species from meaningful social intercourse, then one must call into doubt any so-called higher state of consciousness available only under that condition.

Putting aside the contention of the sexual nihilists that men and women are inherently damaging to one another's well-being, the cause for such a split between male and female is to be sought in conditioned attitudes toward the problem. There are certainly times when a man must be alone, and times when he must be in the exclusive company of other men. But to raise such a cyclical psychological process to the level of a permanent and laudable condition, and then to bolster it with ideological argument, is pathological.

In the West, beginning with the Pauline misogyny, women have been held by official Christian spokesmen to be little better than slaves, and the sex with which they tempt men has been considered the most cunning work of the devil. To counterbalance this, the Church raised Mary to the status of supervirgin, making her equally unreal. Popes have blessed armies with holy water, sending them happily off to slaughter, and then promulgated laws which condemn teenagers for necking. I don't know why I expected anything better from the East. Stupidity is not the special province of any hemisphere or nation or creed. As in any given sampling of any portion of humanity, in this area there are a few who have attained wholeness, and the rest stumble along in different stages of waking sleep, using more or less satisfying rationalizations to hide their basic fear.

Enlightened men may choose, for their own reasons, to remove themselves from the company of women. In our time, Thomas Merton comes to mind. Others, equally fulfilled creatures, may not. Alan Watts is an example. It is when the private solution of a strong man is turned into a rule for others to live by that the damage is done. I knew a woman who was capable of total orgasmic release. She had no problem with the quibble as to whether orgasms are clitoral or vaginal. When she came, she came entirely, from her toes to her brain, shivering, bursting, melting, burning, climaxing fully. She began to study with a hatha yoga teacher, a sweet old man who had founded an institute and culled a following from several thousand of the disenfranchised young of America.