These bodies, mechanical and predictable, have invented a bit of a lie:
Stretched out in lucid tumescence, remembering or anticipating the act of love, we begin by both logic and magic to illuminate the secret of the other. This body is of course attached to a name; this name invites a story; this story unmasks something greater, something unseen. There is the dull aching of the question. Always. The hidden requires explanation to be revealed. Imaginings, like the superstitious entertainments, of the ancient campfire have offered us a model for undressing our uncertainty. In trying to pin lanterns to the trees beyond the circle--those just beyond the reach of the flickering fingers of the fire pit--one infers that there is "something out there". The child's vigilance in looking in the closet and checking under the bed does not make the monster any more real, but to the primitive mind these actions do in fact give more credence to their possibility. What we do with the unlit outside is only giving shape to the fabric of the veil. Stare long enough into any window and it will soon become a mirror. Shutter your eyes, close the yawning awnings and when I look into them it will be my soul that I see not yours. Because the soul was invented by love and desire. That flash is the stranger's eyes, that smoldering fire in the beloved's stare, the depth in pupils turned igneous black and locked in sexual congress: these symptoms of love (just as love is a symptom of sexual desire) suggest to the lover that there is more to the other than mere body, more than flesh and boner. The source of this faith is the obsession. One's own longing to see beyond the mask of this other becomes the fuel for the belief in a being, totem and archetype, that we know to animate our hearts; the impossibility of knowing this individual becomes charged with our passion and ignites the X-ray that reveals the green fog that we decide to call a soul…
Stretched out in lucid tumescence, remembering or anticipating the act of love, we begin by both logic and magic to illuminate the secret of the other. This body is of course attached to a name; this name invites a story; this story unmasks something greater, something unseen. There is the dull aching of the question. Always. The hidden requires explanation to be revealed. Imaginings, like the superstitious entertainments, of the ancient campfire have offered us a model for undressing our uncertainty. In trying to pin lanterns to the trees beyond the circle--those just beyond the reach of the flickering fingers of the fire pit--one infers that there is "something out there". The child's vigilance in looking in the closet and checking under the bed does not make the monster any more real, but to the primitive mind these actions do in fact give more credence to their possibility. What we do with the unlit outside is only giving shape to the fabric of the veil. Stare long enough into any window and it will soon become a mirror. Shutter your eyes, close the yawning awnings and when I look into them it will be my soul that I see not yours. Because the soul was invented by love and desire. That flash is the stranger's eyes, that smoldering fire in the beloved's stare, the depth in pupils turned igneous black and locked in sexual congress: these symptoms of love (just as love is a symptom of sexual desire) suggest to the lover that there is more to the other than mere body, more than flesh and boner. The source of this faith is the obsession. One's own longing to see beyond the mask of this other becomes the fuel for the belief in a being, totem and archetype, that we know to animate our hearts; the impossibility of knowing this individual becomes charged with our passion and ignites the X-ray that reveals the green fog that we decide to call a soul…
but that really is only the vibrations coming through the wall of the refrigerator unit that sits in the employee break room of the poorly managed business downstairs.
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