The Erotic Comedies (Vassi Collection Volume XI) (21 page)

In this situation, aware of themselves as in and of the universe entire, they become the channels for all roles. They fuck archetypally, passing through the guises of gods and goddesses, demons, animals, ancient and modern races, historical entities, mythic figures, and all life forms in general. Perhaps the poetic vision which most completely evokes the theatrical mode in its total richness is that of The Dance of Shiva.

The theatrical mode ranges, then, from the literal use of theatrical props, dramatic structures, and audience, to the cosmic awareness of the universe-as-theatre. It is at once potentially the most mundane and most encompassing of all the modes.

3. The Therapeutic Mode: is the trickiest, since it simultaneously liberates repressed feelings and perpetuates the expression of those feelings. By doing the first, one makes the unconscious conscious and grows saner and healthier; by the second, one reinforces restrictive habit patterns. The point of this mode is to allow the first while dissolving the second.

My first contact with this mode came one evening when, during a long and frenzied spell of metasex, the woman I was with burst first into sobs, then began wailing, and finally released a skin-prickling scream that shrivelled my erection. It was some years before the publication of
The Primal Scream
, so I had no handy metaphor with which to understand the phenomenon. I learned more about this mode during a period of neo-Reichian therapy, working on breaking through the body armor, the deep organic tensions which form the defense system against feeling and perception.

I started to realize that when I became, through regression, a baby reaching up for mother's embrace and breast, the motions and sounds I made—gurgling, cooing, pursing my lips, yearning with my chest—were exactly what I often did while sucking cock. Again, in the midst of reviving an old anger, as I lay on the therapeutic mattress, my fists clenched, whipping my head from side to side, shouting "no" over and over again, I saw that this was indistinguishable from expressions I made while being fucked and from expressions made by others while I fucked them.

It did not take too long to see that erotic energy was the equivalent of the therapeutic ambience, therapeutic technique, or drugs, in releasing repressed states of being. The one difference was that during metasex, one did not ordinarily link the resultant feelings with incidents and patterns of one's life. Thus, metasex could provide abreaction, but usually did not allow integration. Yet, if used consciously and correctly, it might provide the most powerful therapeutic tool at our disposal.

I suffered some ambivalence for a while, since it seemed profane to use the eroticum as a vehicle for therapy, but when I had understood the concept of mode more profoundly, the difficulty dissolved. It occured to me that this paradigm was a potent mythic structure within which to pursue greater self knowledge. For a while, fucking was not unlike going to see an analyst. I began to link certain postures with the expression of repressed states, and as that took place, my very behavior in bed underwent a transformation.

With those partners to whom I was able to explain these ideas, metasex in the therapeutic mode became an exciting and sometimes devastating activity. We could proceed openly to explore the psychosomatic ground of our personalities. There was the added advantage of dispensing with expensive, professional help. And there was an interesting side-effect: once a given manifestation, say, spanking, was seen as a need for punishment born of childhood fixation, then I became free to experience that activity
an sich
, within itself. Once the energy is generated and the etiology revealed, one is the master of the wide range of erotic forms.

Within each adult, the child lives. It is necessary to let the child come forth and be, to exercise its faculties, especially those which were distorted through negative conditioning at an early age. In the therapeutic mode, one allows these usually hidden aspects of the self to find their expression, and in so doing creates perhaps the most poignantly beautiful gestures of the body and face in the entire realm of erotic response, as well as discovers feelings which give the metasexual act a unique depth and texture.

4. The Romantic Mode: lies embedded in western historical consciousness. It is linked, inextricably, with the word "love", a concept outside the eroticum per se. To fuck with someone one is romantically in love with is undoubtedly the most exhilirating form of metasex. There is a totality, a joy, an overall sensation of rapture unparalleled in the other modes. This is the kingdom of yearning fulfilled and unfulfilled.

The basic requirement for this mode is a willingness to follow the emotions to their heights and depths. This imparts a recklessness to the romantic mode that must be reckoned with, for one becomes prone to extreme statements. The words, "I love you," or "Marry me," or

"I want to be with you forever," come easily to the lips. This is a natural phenomenon, for at moments of great feeling only great declarations will satisfy.

Here the question of truth enters in. To say something so definite in a moment of passion has the ring of truth. However, when the feeling disappears, the description of that feeling, the testament to permanence, is oddly bereft of meaning. It is certainly a grand thing to mean in the morning what one has said the night before, but that need not be a precondition to saying such things. If the romantic mode is understood among the participants, then they may enjoy a lifetime of ecstasy in a single encounter, and when the encounter is finished, return to a different vibration without feeling that their words must continue to haunt them.

In this mode, one is free to wax poetic, and the effect on language can be dazzling. This is especially true for first meetings, although it can be enjoyed by old married couples. There are the classic settings: ships at sea, foreign countries, mountaintop meadows. And there is a prediliction for certain props, such as wine, marijuana, and music. Its special season is spring. Lowered lids, palpitations, rushes, languorous limbs, and fragile fucking are marks of the mode. As in everything, of course, styles may vary, in the way that Wordsworth is different from Scriabin.

The romantic mode generates such powerful feelings that there is the constant danger of its transforming, or infecting, one's life as a whole. The most extreme examples are those Japanese lovers who, forbidden to have one another, tie themselves together and hurl themselves off cliffs, to die clenched in one another's arms. Also, this kind of metasex can be so addictive that one forsakes all other modes, and becomes monomaniacal. The guiding principle of this mode is ultimate union, and thus has overtones of mysticism.

5. The Masturbatory Mode: is in many ways the home mode. Giving ourselves pleasure through touch is one of our first activities, and masturbation itself is often our introduction to eroticism. Much has been made of this form of gratification's being a substitute for "the real thing," but again, this is a sexual judgement upon a metasexual matter. Metasexually, someone choosing masturbation as a sometime or often or even total means of expression is no more or less valid than any other way of doing it.

All who have masturbated without guilt know that it can provide the most intense orgasms, clear searing explosions which take one out of the body altogether and into a different consciousness. Also, the masturbatory mode does not limit one to masturbation. Two or more people can perform the motions of fucking or sucking or stroking and have the thing be simply a more complex way of having everyone bring himself or herself off. This is a subtle and delicate game, involving responsibility for one's own cycles, yet requiring sensitivity to the inner workings of the other(s).

Behaviorally, the masturbatory mode favors the tendency to celibacy, which is the final step in auto-eroticism. Not by repression, but by progression, one learns to cycle the erotic energy totally within one's body, and thus becomes self-contained. This homeostasis is considered by some to be the highest form of erotic evolution.

6. The Zen Mode: is produced through transmodality. An act may begin in the theatrical mode and shift to the therapeutic. Or different participants may play different modes at the same time, something like a piece of music played by instruments in different keys. Dissonance is seen to be nothing other than a special form of harmony. The concept of mode is itself shaken, and finally bursts open, until the conceptual curtain lifts and all imagery dissolves. As with the Zen experience proper, there is little to say about this mode. It carries a unique sense of the moment's utter reality, and within that there lie all the joy and terror of coming face to face with The Nakedness.

III

As against my massive involvement in metasexual activity, my experience of sex has been limited. My metasexual fucking resulted in three unwanted pregnancies, but until recently I had never fucked with the intention of making a baby. Through that experience, I came upon the notions of responsibility and reverence as the basis of sexual behavior.

Sex implies morality, by which I do not mean conventional morality which, as Mr. Krishnamurti rightly points out, is immorality. I mean conscience, that quality of sensitivity which distinguishes right from wrong not on the basis of some orthodox code or preconceived ideal, but through an awareness of the nature of life in general and of humanity in particular. To use the current phrase, it is an ecological consciousness. The mode of sex, reverence, is nothing other than a profound susceptibility to all the implications of having a child. This requires shunning sentimentality on one hand and callousness on the other. To raise a child is the most difficult yoga we have, and requires that one's own life be so firmly rooted in righteousness, that one's organism be so finely attuned, that the task flows naturally from one's deepest sources, without thought. For the moment one fucks to make a baby, one asks, "And in what sort of a world will this child be born?" And then a thorough and unceasing questioning begins.

In my own situation, Lucinda, the woman with whom I planned to have a child, and I, discontinued our birth control measures, and entered the fields of sex. We first noticed a change in the priorities. Although we still experienced sensual pleasure, orgasm and the waves of excitation and release, these qualities took second place to the serious realization that we were performing the holy and awe-inspiring ritual of actually creating another human being. Puny, awkward creatures that we were, we had within us the power to bring another person to life, a person who would grow and become very much like ourselves and pick up the cycle of life where we left off. In the process of that recognition, we saw our own deaths quite clearly.

A far-reaching chain of insight coiled about us. For suddenly, issues that had seemed academic became vital. A line from Dylan came to mind: "You've hurled the worst fear/that can ever be hurled/the fear to bring children/into the world." At once, not only the species, but we as individuals, were on trial, and on all counts from the personal to the geopolitical. For example, we both smoke, and are guilty about being enslaved by a self-destructive habit. Now the question: will the nicotine we ingest into our blood streams infect the child? And more subtly: shall the child have parents who are still prey to debilitating habits?

Further, will I, knowing the extraordinary effect for ill which lurks in any implicit or explicit dishonesty about erotic feelings by parent toward child, be able to love my child physically? That is, to hold and fondle it, and accept the heavy erotic component of that behavior, and maintain what erections may come, and still not damage or limit its psyche by imposing too strong an impress while it is still young? And when it is older? What are my real feelings about incest? Do I believe it is categorically wrong?

And what of the fact that almost any school I send the child to will be a factory run by mindless conformists, processing human beings on a conveyor belt of pseudo-knowledge the way automobile parts are run through on an assembly line? What of the fact that we live in a world where only a few know even of liberty, much less freedom? And what of the realities of monstrous warfare, and unwholesome food, and foul water, and filthy air? The human species is making a concerted effort to prove conclusively that it is the lowest form of life on earth, and into such a situation, what is the purpose of bringing a child?

Such thoughts put a definite cast on the quality of our fucking. Ranging from existential speculation to ecological evaluation to character analysis, I was unable to rouse the dragon of psychophysical lust. Our sex became tentative, and on a number of occasions we did not make a sound, but coupled in stillness, as though we were listening for something other than what was going on in the two of us.

When Lucinda's first period of fertility passed, we were, by definition, returned to our metasexual playground, to our moaning and heavy breathing, to our pyrotechnics. We became, once again, a man and a woman picking their way through the erotic monkeybars of our epoch. From anal intercourse to small orgies, we continued in the annotated routines of the carnal circus. We turned to an exploration of the metasexual modes, discovering the nuances of theatrical fucking and the dynamics of the therapeutic attitude.

Then, the menses, and the realization that we had missed the first time around, and would try again. The next cycle provided a different and deeper angle of penetration into the nature of sex. One night I was on top and plowed her like a farmer burrowing in soft earth. Another night she was on top and took me fiercely, while I, sensate and inert, felt the seed sucked from my body. It seemed certain that a child conceived during one kind of fucking would be quite different from one conceived during the other. And a new element of study entered in, and we began to examine, in a way we hadn't before, what it is that we actually do when we fuck, and when we come. What thoughts do we have, what feelings? Who, in short, are we when we merge our bodies and our minds in that singular way? For, with the purpose of our fucking so clearly defined, the epiphenomenal aspects stood out in sharp light.