12/29/2024
Brilliant! Hope it’s ok to share. We’ll see….
S*X
is a word that deserves our deepest sympathy. S*x is a word that has never been able to do its job properly, because it never had a chance of carrying the meaning we ask of it. S*x is a poor, put-upon word that has been asked to carry on its too short back, in its single brief, appropriately flattening syllable, something it was never qualified to hold and something it was never qualified to explain. S*x is a salacious word exactly because it veils what it means, and simultaneously promises far more than it can ever deliver.
S*x is a word we use to describe something we have actually become afraid of understanding and therefore want to abstract into a false form of knowledge, hence, the falsity of the word. We mention that two people had s*x as if we know what actually might have happened between them, when in actual fact the couple in question rarely know what happened to them, either individually or as a temporary duo. What actually happened is calibrated by the presence or absence of incalculable physical and imaginative chemistry. S*x is how we describe something from the outside in; a word we use when we become afraid of investigating the very origins of attraction and passion itself, when we are afraid of carrying from our deeper and darker unspoken sources, the truer understandings that might transform our outer, light-filled world.
S*x is a word that should be retired so that it can rise again in another guise, its short flat vowel sound replaced by calling on a deeper, life-like range of language equal to the broad sensual spectrum of experiences we are trying to invoke. The very use of the word s*x means we have missed the point; no single word should be asked to carry the orchestral bodily ache, magnified by the imagination, spurred by the almost religious invitation, consummated by an astonishing physical melding, or by our hopes for a truer meeting with another or with ourselves: when we wish to disappear physically and psychologically, totally and completely in the astonishing oblivion of or**sm or near or**sm. The word only really describes what we experience in the absence of any of the above.
S*x as a word should be given a long holiday from our mouths and from our societies for the next hundred and fifty years, to make up for its terrible misuse in narrowing our minds over the last hundred and fifty years; it is a word that should be given back to its original use of scientific and s*xual classification, so that we can look back on the quaint, narrow attempt on the part of the last few generations to solidify in one word, something that actually carries the timeless tidal nature of life itself.
S*x is a prose word masking what only the volcanic vocabulary of poetry can describe. What is longing to be described in its literal eruptions and freeing, unrestrained wildness are words that carry the tidal fluidity of life, and that are equal to the overwhelming powers of s*xuality and sensuality itself. The single word s*x, like a lid on our understanding, hides what it is meant to uncover: half of what lies in our s*xual nature is taboo and always will be taboo to our human societies fighting against the constantly threatening and engulfing forces of life and death: what lies powerfully, broodingly, dormant beneath the word s*x is not amenable to the easy explanations of a single word. S*x is an isolating word, its brief annunciation unconsciously meant to insulate us from understanding and facing the overwhelming power of life wishing to create life itself, where our individual happiness is just a drop in the ocean of ongoing existence, a vain attempt to be constantly self-asserting, self-understanding and self-defining.
S*x is the word used by the part of the mind cut off from bodily experience: the body that actually experiences its true nature is a double doorway that leads both ways into life and death. Strangely, through the tiny deaths experienced in sensually meeting another we literally bring life into the world: what lies behind the word s*x is our early and repeated reconnaissance into the experience and disappearances of our own eventual death.
S*x is the word we use to describe our unconscious wish for boundaries and defences against the unbounded and the ultimately un-understandable: the wish to keep at bay in a simple word those constant seasonal powers that outline our own powerlessness against the eternal, tidal, violations of our sense of self that the boundary-less, tidal nature of the world constantly inflicts. S*x is the poor over-short, over-burdened word that has to carry the entire spectrum of human sensuality and human identity in all its appearances and disappearances, through all our pains and in all our ecstatic sorrows.
The word needs our help, and should have our sympathy when we hear it, but we should know that when we do hear the word, we are hearing a word, that almost always, by itself, and despite all the fuss, means next to nothing.
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S*X
From Consolations II
The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
© David Whyte & Many Rivers Press November 2024
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Morning Light
Photo © David Whyte
San Miguel de Allende
Mexico : 14th February 2014
