A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  And while looking out through this opening, and seeing everything suddenly turn dark—for prompted by simultaneous pushing and pulling, yielding and receiving, another triangle clings not quite symmetrically but somewhat aslant to the triangular opening of our hiding place, in sum, a kiss is happening—we get the feeling that in the darkness of the two interlocking caverns, God's one eye is looking into the other eye of God.

  We tend to dampen the joy of this discovery with pangs of doubt, asking even at this exalted moment whether the joining of two pairs of lips is really an event of such significance, during which God's single eye looks into God's other single eye?

  When grappling with doubt, we try to dig up useful knowledge and experiences with which to deny or confirm our doubt, but to unearth evidence in this instance, we must first explore the body—anyway, we are in it already!—and take a look at those organs that play a role in one's love life.

  A close inspection of these organs and their properties will lead us to the curious and for some people no doubt scandalous conclusion that sexual pleasure, though a prerequisite of our instinct for self-preservation, may be induced in any individual, male or female, through the manipulation of the sexual organs and, by means of self-stimulation, orgasm may be achieved without the presence of another individual.

  Isolation and self-gratification, touching oneself while fantasizing about touching another, is something we all know from personal experience.

  Neurotic, inhibited, or bashful individuals do not even have to touch their private parts to be aroused, it's enough if the palm of a hand grazes their naked thigh or belly or pelvic region; there the friction between the body and its own skin produces, accidentally as it were, the mutuality needed for sexual excitement; in the case of women we might include touching the breasts, the nipples, and the dark areolae, which may be followed, or accompanied, by stroke-like pressure applied to the mons veneris; without intending it, the stroking will grow more rhythmic, and that will increase the blood pressure, quicken the rate of breathing; this pressure corresponds, in the male, to the gentle groping men begin at the root of their thighs, and then transfer to the testicles and bulb of the penis; women can touch the tiny body of the clitoris, though not its supersensitive head, which at times can be painful; similarly, men can also take hold, with a slightly rougher grasp, of their hollowed member and, rhythmically pulling back the foreskin, free and then re-cover the bulb of the penis, the motion causing the excitement that releases the tiny valves through which arterial blood rushes in to fill the hollows of the shaft.

  And since this is an individual activity to suit personal needs, and promises private satisfaction, the activity's form and the methods used may vary greatly.

  The variety of ways used to induce physical pleasure cannot obscure the fact that, from a strictly somatological point of view, the same process takes place in every instance and in every individual; at most its intensity, efficacy, and, above all, results differ, for the process itself always creates a physically predetermined and closed organic unity, and it seems irrelevant whether the act takes place between two individuals of different sexes or the same sex, whether some external stimulus or mere fantasizing is at work, or if the same result is achieved by fantasy-induced self-stimulation.

  Yet, however closed this unity created by the factors responsible for inducing, maintaining, and gratifying physical pleasure, certain effects appear even when the process seems entirely self-generated—in the case of masturbation or in nocturnal seminal emission—and these effects disrupt the apparently closed and from a physiological point of view perfectly self-sufficient system.

  It is as if nature opposed a system that completely isolated the individual from others; during masturbation imagination steps in, and during nocturnal emission a dream is at work; imagination and dream connect the individual, and the ostensibly self-sufficient act, to another individual, or at the very least presuppose the presence of one.

  This is the most, and also the least, that can be said of an individual's dependent relationships.

  We might add, though, that an impulse is also at work in all of us that manages to create simultaneously feelings of isolation and self-absorption and of openness and dependence on others; isolation hampers while openness fosters the establishment of relationships, and the two feelings function in an inseparable tension that makes up the whole of the impulse.

  If two individuals unite those of their organs which, though meant for another, can also function in isolation, if, in other words, two individuals wish to relieve or overcome their own isolation not by relying on imagination or dreams but in the possible openness of the other, then the resulting meeting is that of two closed units, each consisting of identical elements maintained in the tension of openness and closeness.

  The tension, in this case, uses its openness to match itself to that peculiarity of the other's closeness, namely, that the closeness in the other is also open.

  The meeting of two self-contained entities results, therefore, in a common openness that transcends their individual openness, creating a new, shared isolation; within this shared isolation they can step out of their individual isolation, and conversely, their individual openness is enclosed within the shared isolation they had opened up for one another.

  If this is indeed what happens, it would mean that the meeting of two bodies signifies far more than the aggregate of two bodies; they are present in each other in a way that adds up to more than their individual selves.

  We are all slaves to our own as well as to other people's bodies; we signify more than we actually are only to the extent that freedom signifies more than slavery, and the community of slaves signifies less than the community of free men opting for slavery.

  And nothing proves this more strikingly than a kiss itself.

  For the mouth is the same kind of physical window of the body as the imagination is the spiritual window of the mind, both connecting one to the universe.

  Within the closed system of the body the mouth is a functionless, in and of itself neutral sexual organ, possessing no inherently usable properties; only by coming in direct contact with the body of another individual can it realize its potential for the most sensual stimulation, display its exceptional sensitivity and its very close and intimate relationship to all the other inherently excitable sexual organs; we might even say that it is the only sexually active organ that, within the closed system, is naturally open, physically and universally, since there is constant, if dormant, readiness in it to be open to others; in this sense the mouth is the physical counterpart of intangible imagination.

  The mouth, then, is a bodily organ that, because of properties it lacks, differs from all other organs involved in the procreative act, whereas the imagination is that faculty which ensures the functioning of the sexual organs even in the absence of a sexual partner.

  Because of its unique and in some way deficient character, the mouth differs so much from other sex organs that in a certain sense it cannot really be classified as one, if only because the meeting of two mouths is neither a prerequisite nor a precondition of two individuals' sexual union; mouths can even be excluded from the closed process of such union; yet it is no accident that two individuals, imagining the openness of the other's body, showing mutual readiness to unite the closed systems of their respective bodies, prove their readiness and wish by first uniting those organs that are not indispensable to the union but are open to begin with: their mouths.

  Naturally, and luckily for me, I wasn't thinking about all this in the car when Thea put her arms around my neck to prevent me from getting out; I am thinking about it now, while filling this page which, considering how these reconstructions work, is a rather perverted form of thinking; but back then I couldn't have thought of anything like this, because around the age of thirty you have a pretty fair idea how these organs function, you know from experience that they work more or less the way you want them to work, though you are also past the stage w
hen you still act blindly, without control, and you are past it even if you allow instinct and experience to take over; in reality you flounder among associations and comparisons floating about in your memory, which is also a kind of thinking—so I can't claim that I wasn't thinking at all.

  Teetering on the border of sheer abandon and conscious control, I decided that this was what I wanted now.

  Or rather, I yielded to the weight, to that curious heaviness, that at moments like this gets hold of one's head, pulling by the forehead and pushing at the back of the neck, toward the other person's head, as if you had voluntarily relinquished the mechanism that normally allows you to see, breathe, and think; you just want to fall into something, give yourself, entrust yourself to something, and above all not to ask why, though in most cases that would be the right thing to do.

  There is a half-open mouth before you, which is the question the other's body is asking you, and your mouth is also open, that's where you'll get the other body's answer; and when the two mouths meet, on those other lips you will find your breathing again, yes, you can consider it an answer, and there you will also recover your lost sight as well; you draw your breath from the other mouth, from the breath you gauge the possibilities of the body that is now turning toward you, the inner landscape of that body is unfolding before you, and that is just what the other person offers you: a void, a hollow space that can and must be filled, and that puts an end to the falling sensation, because the lips, caught on the rim of the hollow space, touch fragrant, slick, warm, rough, cold, and soft live matter; touching so many different things at once and at once in so many different ways that our mind, conditioned as it is to act, is properly stimulated.

  Rushing to act, with lips dry and rough, eager and wild, we fell on each other as if in that fraction of a moment we wanted to make up for all the meaningless wasted time that was now behind us, all the time we had not spent together; in great haste we had to get around all the blind alleys and detours of our mutual attraction and aversion, we had to prevent any separation again; at the same time it seemed that all our previous detours now gained meaning precisely from this dry and hasty eagerness, as if we had to keep avoiding each other so that now, with all the obligatory pretense and falseness behind us, passion could be real passion, and dryness could be the parched longing for each other, a desert in which the only drink would be the other's mouth; and when lips met lips the encounter should take a new turn, one of tenderness, of leisurely, melting softness; and though each tiny dry crack could still be felt, let the joy of discovery relieve the tension and allow the separate streams of the saliva of anticipation to flow into each other.

  Our tongues delivered, and out of each other's mouth we drank the fluid our lips needed.

  Our arms followed suit in a spontaneous move to squeeze and hold tight.

  With both hands she gripped the back of my head as if she wanted to stuff it all into her mouth, swallow it whole—how she used to make fun of just such things!—while I slipped my arms under her open coat and drew her close; this move was still the trickery of self-conscious thinking; as if we were trying, with fitful groping and exaggerated squeezes and holds, to avoid experiencing how closed our bodies still were; as is often the case, the energy spent on avoidance made us sense all the stronger what it was that we ought to be avoiding.

  The mouth itself, however, made no attempt to avoid the unpleasant feeling of the body's frustrating confinement; the lips' parched desire for one another was so intense as to preclude all but the mutual quenching of their thirst; for the mouths there was nothing to avoid with their craving, with their irresistible coming together when, in the joyful moment of finding each other, their saliva of anticipation mingled and lubricated the two surfaces, the better to slip into and slide over each other, thus foreshadowing the possibility of even greater pleasure ahead, and, ignoring the grips and holds of the hands, alluded to the climactic moment of mutual gratification that every tension-racked body strives for.

  For a fraction of a second, even the tips of our tongues cleaved together, and the feeling beyond joy found in this firmness, like a foretaste of what was to come, flooded our bodies, obliterating all selfish designs and willfulness; yielding to the heat that can relax the muscles and fill the blood vessels under the skin, both of us shuddering and enervated, we stepped across the protective layer of outer surfaces.

  In the interior landscape opened up by a kiss everything is sharply visible yet suspended in a mutable state; nothing resembles the external landscape our eyes are used to.

  It is a feeling of being in an empty space; of course, one tries involuntarily to define one's place in it, and relative to one's position there is up and down, and background and foreground can also be distinguished; the background is generally dark or a blurred gray; there are no palpable landmarks, no forms familiar from dreams or reveries, only spots, flashes, and glimmers that, being in an empty space, appear to be flat rather than round, and they seem to follow a geometrical pattern as they separate from and then blend into the soft, probably infinite background of existence.

  It's as though every sensation had its geometrical equivalent, and in these forms and shapes, in these visual codes, I could recognize another person's emotions and sensory capacities, needs and peculiarities, for in this interior landscape the boundary between me and the Other is blurred, the two merge, yet the feeling remains that the Other is the empty space and I a single spot or shape or streak in it.

  She is the space and I am a restlessly but not impatiently moving configuration in it, ready to adapt myself to her space.

  I am the space and she is a restlessly but not impatiently moving configuration in it, ready to adapt herself to my space.

  Her promise is my promise.

  And this promise, made to each other's body, we did honor, quite recklessly, a few days later.

  The Nights of Our Secret Delight

  I would have said no and no, and again no, if someone at that moment, in the words of the ancient philosopher, had called life a rushing river, insisting that nothing could ever be repeated, the water was always different, and you couldn't dip your hand in the same river twice; what was is already gone, and replacing the old was something new, itself becoming old instantly, and then new again.

  If it were really so, if we could experience the irresistible rush of the new unaffected by anything else, if the old did not cast its shadow on the new, our life would be one ceaseless wonder; every moment between day and night, between birth and death, would be a thrilling miracle; we couldn't distinguish between pain and pleasure, hot and cold, sweet and sour; there would be no boundaries, no borderlines between our most extreme sensations, because there would be no in between, and thus we'd have no word for the moment, no division between day and night, and out of the wet warmth of our mother's womb we wouldn't come wailing into this cold, dry world; and in death we'd only crumble like stones scorched by the sun and lashed by icy rain, for there would be no slow decay, and no dread, and no language either, for words can name only recurring phenomena; in the absence of recurrence we wouldn't have what we like to call intelligent discourse, only the divine gift, the ineffable joy, of permanent impermanence.

  And even if it were so, for as children we all felt the urge, in a darkening room, to catch time at its word, to really understand just when, at what precise point, day turned into night; in the invisible and vanishing dimness we did try to grasp and hold on to the apparently simple meaning of words, so even if we did make ourselves believe that there were no boundaries, no division between day and night, even then, after a time, yes, after a time, slipping off the hard wall of divinely permanent impermanence and running back to the softer realm of human thought, we'd have to concede that it is night, even though we couldn't tell just when it got dark; the eyes perceive the difference but never the dividing line, and maybe there is no such thing at all; yet it is night, because it is dark, it is night because it isn't day, just as it happened yesterday and the d
ay before, and we fall asleep in the reassuring yet disappointing knowledge that soon it will be light again.

  The sense of the permanent and the sense of the eternal may be part of our divine inheritance, yet I feel that it's just the other way around: our human senses and the emotions stemming from them are too crude not to feel the familiarly old in everything new, not to sense the future in the present, not to discover in every new physical experience a story already known to our body.

  Although not in a divine manner, time does seem to stop at such moments; it's as if our foot did not step into a rushing river but trod desperately on some sinking, soft marsh, trying to stay on the surface of deadly boring repetitions, which nevertheless appear to be the single most acceptable proof of life, until our foot loses the battle and quite literally tramples itself to death.

  But far be it from me to affect philosophical airs; the only reason I mention all this is to give some idea of an especially overwrought emotional state in which things appear startlingly new and at the same time stiflingly familiar; I found myself in just such a curious state at the end of my two-month stay in Heiligendamm, as I was standing by the handsome white desk in my room—no, it's no mistake, I had stood and sat in such a state before, in my robe, unshaven, unwashed, waiting for some fateful judgment; now, however, prompted by the coolly inquisitive and somewhat watery eyes of a police inspector, I began to read my fiancée's letter, and even if the situation were not so strikingly similar yet different, even if I hadn't felt those commanding eyes on me, eyes that could read a criminal's mind, her opening line would still have stunned me or, more precisely, would have deepened my astonishment in this wakeful state of bewilderment.