The Erotic Comedies (Vassi Collection Volume XI) (14 page)

His mastery of the asanas was unquestioned, and his desire to help humanity was sincere. Yet, he managed to insinuate such an atmosphere of ethereal pseudo-spirituality that his students saw giving up sex as a mark of progress toward some mystical goal. The woman, her eyes possibly blinded by the thick haze of incense which hung over the institute, lost sight of the fact that yoga is primarily a process for keeping the body strong, the mind clear, the heart capable of loving. She rejected sex, and commenced to spend much of her time in a trance-like state which she identified with cosmic calm. Half a year later, she was utterly dispirited, and despite the regularity of her new-found habits, she had let slip the
elan vital
, that spark of vivacity which is the sign of the sexually alert person. With the revivifying power of the orgasm denied her, her body no longer thrilled with energy. She lost her zest for living and became an automaton.

This is not to denounce yoga, but the imposition of a poorly understood worldview on a set of exercises. Nor is there anything necessarily wrong with celibacy. There are circumstances in which celibacy is the natural order of things. A person who loses a mate, for example, may not be able to fuck for a long period of time. This is simple bio-psychology. Or a person may be jaded through sexual overstimulation, and will need some time to lie fallow. Or a person may come to a point at which sex ceases to operate through the genital channels. And, of course, there is with age and/or wisdom, a gradual refinement of the uses of sexual energy altogether.

These are all organic processes. But to make an a priori value of celibacy, however, and to claim that to stop fucking will bring one closer to God or enlightenment, is, categorically, a pathological defense on the part of a person who is sick in his or her sex, and is reaching for the most grandiose rationalization by which to defend that perversion.

I returned to my own experience to find what was true for me. This much I knew: to fuck a woman that I care for and to melt into orgasm with her, subsumes all that is fine in life. In fact, I found that unless all the rest of my life was in order, I was not free to partake of that sublime experience. The orgasm is
the
life-enhancing process. From its physiological function of discharging tension and toning the organism, to its biological function of improving the quality of children that are born, to its spiritual function of putting one in touch with higher forms of energy, it contains all the keys anyone might want. Sex is a complete activity, bringing all the fragments into a whole, operating as the most subtle and immediate communication between human being and human being. It acts resoundingly to affirm the pulse of life; in its contractions and expansions, it is the pulse of life itself. How on earth, I wondered, could anyone view it as anything but a central factor in a person's attempts to live most fully?

It did not take too long to see that such an attitude arises through the failure of teachers and so-called holy men to come to terms with their feelings about women. Seemingly, they have not been able to deal with their fear, their confusion, their loathing, their need, their desire, their hidden worship, of women. With a shift that has become the mark of our history, they separated the genders in their own context, and made enlightenment a preserve for men only, in the same way that the Catholic Church has decreed that no woman is good enough to hold the consecrated host in her fingers. Those women who did try to crash the gates became grotesques, like St. Theresa, with her scorching visions of angels piercing her bowels with flaming spears, and Madam Blavatsky, who could out-think, out-curse, and out-maneuver any man who came into her vicinity, and won her theosophical spurs over the heads of men who were thrillingly eager to feel her psychic lash across their metaphysical buttocks. But such women only underscore the hidden thrust of the sacred teachings, the one sentence that probably has never been spoken, but lies at the core of all major religious systems: that one can not learn anything from a woman that is of any real value on the road to enlightenment, and that any sexual contact with women is at best a distraction from the process of seeking truth.

Although he never addressed himself to the problem directly, it was Wilhelm Reich who most forcefully, among men, cut through the obfuscation. To ring in such a complex and heroically tragic man with just a few words is perhaps unfair, and I can only pay my way toward doing that by urging the reading of his work. It was his observation that when the life energy which flows through us is blocked, distorted, or "armored" as a result of growing up in a particular civilization, total orgasmic release is impossible. So far as I know, he is the only one to differentiate between mere ejaculation for the male, or clitoral/vaginal stimulation for the female, and the full vegetative rush of complete orgasm. In a condition of orgastic impotence, the person will manifest one of two basic characterological states: fascism or mysticism. Either there will be a softening of the self-sense, in which the person loses all awareness of boundary; or there is a hardening, in which rigid boundaries become the central aspect of the life style. One need not be too sophisticated to see that these are indeed the ruling modes of social life in the world today. The governments and official institutions are almost totally fascistic in their machine-like quest to impose conformist order on all human beings, while the masses of people stagger around in an obscurantism relieved only by their vague mystical yearnings, their hope for salvation from above.

To extrapolate from that vision to the topic at hand, it is necessary only to point out that what has been denied to women is the acknowledgement that they are teachers of life in their very bodies. Very few women I have known have possessed this awareness of their own biological efficacy. The sickness of mankind has been the overwhelming importance placed on discursive thinking, to the detriment of the life processes at large. Women, who instinctively understand the severe limitations of conceptual thought, have not only been relegated to second place, but have been forced to deny their immediate perception of the true hierarchy of value. When a woman says in scorn and sorrow, "You only want me for my body, don't you?," neither she nor the man she addresses usually has any inkling of the profundity of the insight contained in the question.

For what the man wants is to
feel his own body
, and it is with practically automatic tropism that he reaches to a woman, to sense his palpable reality by embracing a person who is fully alive inside herself. Those women who have attained this awareness form the heart of the current phase of women's perpetual struggle for liberation. But these very women then refuse to serve as psychophysical wet nurses, to be available to men who are still allowing themselves to be transmogrified into robots.

What men need right now, more than anything, is the ability to be in touch with their own feelings. And the only men who, as a self-identified group, are freeing themselves to feel, are gays. There is a strong argument to be made for the notion that homosexuality should be the general sexual form of the future, with heterosexual unions forming a minority, but even if that were so, historical intransigence is unlikely to allow it. The majority, the heterosexuals who run the machines of civilization, will most likely grow more and more alienated from their animal sensibility, men becoming plastic automatons and women continuing to trudge behind, and produce either a world of grey uniformity or the next and utterly cataclysmic war.

To know oneself as a body is more important, at this moment in history, than to read the words of all the wise men who have ever lived. The enlightenment game, as it is classically played, has degenerated to a pathetic masturbation, fit only for men who are still seeking their lost fathers and afraid to accept the sexuality of their mothers. It is ironic that yoga has become such a fad, for the sense of the word is "to join," giving the idea of union. But the union most naturally available to us, the coupling in the sexual act, is losing its healing function. To deny this embrace, or to turn it into a sensual pastime, or to base it on ideas of conquest, is to kill any real chance of understanding what life is all about. For if in our time, a man and a woman cannot experience sex except as a symbol, then total insanity is upon us.

The truth of the matter is this: when one picks up a handful of earth, that dirt is the stuff of existence. Existence is not an idea. It is the air we breathe, the food we eat, the sun that warms us. Only the diseased imaginations of those who are incapable of orgasmic release produce fantasies of a reality other than that which explodes and murmurs within us and without us from moment to moment, on all its planes and levels, endlessly. Reality is known through the trembling awareness of the immediate now, a now which includes all that has been and all that will be. All allusions to things which are somehow "other," other dimensions, others beings, gods and goddesses, refer to manifestations which, if they have any existence, do not have existence independent of our own. To seek salvation by fleeing to another psychic state is like attempting to escape the ocean by switching from one raft to another. Anything which exists exists within the matrix of total creation. The stupefying wonder of the universe is not what it is, but THAT IT IS. The things which present themselves to our senses, including the mind sense, can be beautiful or ugly, intricate or simple, tremendous or trivial. And to the degree that we are scientists, we can spend our time in figuring how the different configurations of our energy relate. But to get so involved trying to negotiate some phantasmagoric psychic labyrinth to the detriment of the sense of wonder and awe, and to the point of distracting us from real questions, such as, "Does everyone have enough to eat?" is to miss the universe for the ego. How insane to be so busy searching for enlightenment that one can't see the glow of love in the eyes of a person just a few feet away.

The distinction between Existence and Being is clear. And insofar as our bodies are impermanent, we ought to not be attached to them, mistaking this momentary manifestation for total reality. Yet, there is no reality apart from the body. The body is the way in which one aspect of Being knows itself through Existence. To know the body is to know all that one can ever know, and to know what one cannot know.

Any process of enlightenment which degrades the fact of the body by rejecting sex is perverse. Any teacher who does not realize and admit the nature of women, as bodies, into his teaching, is a neurotic charlatan. If Adam and Eve do not find a way to get it together, the species will not survive.

The notion that women and sex have been excluded from the area of seeking truth might seem an overstatement, but consider the common prejudice which keeps most of us from wondering whether Buddha continued fucking after his satori. The legend has it that after he became enlightened, his wife became a nun. And what of Jesus? What mammoth insensitivity is involved in presuming that he had nothing to learn in the arms of Mary Magdalen? Did Meher Baba fuck? Does Krishnamurti fuck? These questions seem blasphemous. Yet why should that be if we were not so conditioned to believe that holiness and wisdom are incompatible with sexuality, that an enlightened man will no longer have intimate contact with a woman's body?

In the act of fucking, a woman can teach a man lessons of life he cannot find in any book or the rigamarole of any sect. If only he knows how to read them. If only she is aware of them herself. A man who cannot learn from a woman, a naked woman vibrantly alive with pure passion of living, is no longer human, no matter how elevated his station or glorious his rhetoric.

On that night with Julia, I felt that realization with a sense of homecoming. There, in the cock and cunt, in the heat and patterns, in the movement and stillness, in the sound and silence, in the pervasively private moments when male and female join to become a single entity, is the key to our search for meaning.

The Trucks

Eleven o'clock on a Friday night in early October on Greenwich Street. The warehouse district. The sidewalks are deserted, the air is close, polluted. Nearby, the Hudson River flows in turgid currents, sweeping its daily quotient of garbage and industrial waste into New York Bay.

I walk along quickly, my eyes darting ahead, ready to leap into the street at the first hint of attack and run for my life. Survival in the city parallels survival in the jungle: the existence of natural enemies is real. The chance that someone wanting to take my money or my life lurks in a hallway or behind a car is not so low that I can afford to be careless.

I am angry that I can't take a peaceful stroll at night without having my lungs filled with poison and my vibrations challenged by the threat of violence. I spit on the civilization which bore me: two thousand years of greed, bigotry, ugliness, alienation from the ground-of-being, and it ends by fouling its own nest, turning the verdant earth into a ghastly horror show.

Up ahead I see a group of five men lounging against a car. My heart begins to beat and the reflex adrenalin rushes start. It is amazing that I am so conditioned to violence that it is the first thing I expect in such circumstances. I realize that an overt attack might even be welcome after the daily round of deadened hostility which living in poverty and over-crowding engenders, the day-to-day situation of all but a precious few in the "empire city."

My realistic calculation is that little more than a barrage of hard glances will be hurled at me as I pass. More psychic damage. But as I approach, and they look at me, one of them smiles. I hesitate, slow down, and look into his eyes. His gaze is soft, relaxed. There isn't murder in his heart, but an invitation to tenderness.

At once I realize the truth. They are homosexuals. I am safe!

At that moment, the radical aspect of the gay life style flashed fully in my consciousness for the first time. For all the damage they share with the rest of society, manifesting as various forms of fear, confusion, and over-reaction, I had never witnessed an instance of unprovoked physical aggression on the part of any homosexual I have ever known or observed in my entire life. I remembered that when I was young, a boy who wouldn't fight was called a sissy, and that same perversion of values, whereby the violent are honored and the peaceful are mocked, was continuing through all strata of supposedly adult society.