Kissing without sound

I just wrote a blog entry. I just abandoned it. I felt like I couldn’t say what I wanted to say and I guess I didn’t see any point in it either. I was trying to make cogent and intelligent observations about certain things I’ve been musing on of late – things about sex and myself and life – but it just wasn’t coming. That’s the problem with trying to be intelligent – it takes a bit of effort.

Sex blah blah: here’s what I wrote about ‘kissing’:

Mostly what I’ve been thinking about the last few days is new ideas about what the passing of time is doing to me. It started through musings on sex, deconstructing that. That started with musings and experiments on kissing, which yielded perhaps startling results. Perhaps you would like to try my experiments for yourself?

Kiss someone. Give them a good proper kiss. Tongues and lips and sloppy wet saliva juicening up the action. You stop. You break. You go back into it. You stop again.

What do you notice at that stop?

A noise. The sound of lips smacking. The sound of a kiss.

Now do exactly the self-same kiss but without making the noise.

What do you notice then?

What I notice is that the kiss no longer feels like a kiss, but something else. Like people slopping their mouths on each other. Like ‘chewing face’. Like some strange wet ritual of licking.

Kisses without the noise at the end sort of fall flat. Like, oh, what were we just doing? What was the point in that?

And yet, there’s no reason why it should be that way – because, for ninety percent of the kiss, they are identical. In fact, the kiss that you are enjoying so much is the exact same kiss as the noiseless one – it can hardly be defined by what it may or may not sound like in the future – not logically – and yet it appears to be.

The kiss is in the noise we make at the end. And it’s important to note that it is a noise we make: it doesn’t come naturally. We add it in. We really are some very strange creatures.

Not that I’m saying I don’t like kissing. ;-)

And then I tried to get onto sex, deconstructing that, saying something or other about how it’s mostly in the mind – though not entirely – and the older I get the more I seem to be realising this, like for real, and then I also wanted to say similar things about the experience of reading, of watching movies, things like that. Just the ideas of some musings I had that once upon a time I believed that movies and books would prove endlessly fascinating and would take me deeper and deeper into something – and that now they seem to have reached a plateau or even a peak and – yes, a peak I think it is, for there is nowhere else to go with it. It’s like I’ve come to a point where everything’s repeating and the repeating’s just no fun, becomes less about learning something and growing and experiencing something new, and more about filling time in a way that feels kinds of mundane.

Not that this in any way depresses me. I believe in the ever onward and upward progression of life – evolution, I believe it’s called – and that things are always getting better. The door closes, but it is a door that closes behind us, if we let it. If we are able to let go, of what we have been, and of what no longer appeals. If we relinquish our previous realities and move on with faith into the land of uncertainty, which bridges our present and our future.

I suddenly feel like I don’t know what I’m saying. Perhaps writing has reached this point too. Certainly, that’s the way it’s been going – and again, I rejoice to see it. Everything old and unappealing is expendable – even the things we love. Kill your darlings, right? If they cease to serve the story.

And the story is life.

What I really need to do is look up something about the stages of life. New Agers have this idea that things go in seven-year cycles and here I am, into my sixth one of those, and things are tangibly changing. Certainly, the ages 0, 7, 14, 21, and 28 are pretty pivotal – but what of 35? What does that represent?