The Erotic Comedies (Vassi Collection Volume XI) (24 page)

The girl's mother merely picked her up and asked, "Has she been crying long?"

"No," I answered truthfully, "she just started," relieved because I had long since understood that the best way to hide a dangerous truth was with an irrelevant one.

But when I looked up at my mother, my stomach dropped, and my breathing became rapid and shallow. Her face seemed demonic in its aspect. I was convinced that she knew what I had been doing and was refraining from punishing me only to protect the family honor in front of the neighbor. In retrospect, of course, I see that I was projecting, transforming my fear into her anger so that I might suffer punishment for what I had now to accept as a sin. Also, I was still prone to the common childhood practice of imbuing one's parents with omniscience.

However, I didn't have all these fancy insights at my disposal just then, I simply shrank away from her, and a great chasm of shame opened between us. It was a space I could not bridge, for it was unthinkable that I speak my heart and mind at that moment. In that instant, our closeness ended, not to be re-established for thirty years. My Mother had become Other. And within me, the shadow self was born.

No one who has relived such experiences will be surprised at how clearly my consciousness recorded the birth of the dissembling "I." It is only with subsequent covering-over that we lose the sharpness with which we saw ourselves split ourselves in two. I understood totally, in that clarity of childhood, that the person I was—the one who found no wrong in playing with and fondling that little girl—would always be a criminal in the eyes of a world that despised both its animal and angel natures. I suffered the same understanding several years later, when I had my first erotic encounter with one of the boys in the neighborhood. But by that time I had already learned to shift the stage scenery of my psyche so that I remained protected from the pain of loss.

My life settled into a pattern that might be described as a spastic sine wave. I alternated periods of stunning hypocrisy with outbursts of introspection and physical revolt. My cycles of construction involved gluing together an image acceptable to some portion of the world; my cycles of destruction produced Shivaite dances which burned the constraining hulk of social identity. The good little boy and the unconditioned monkey chased one another around the hyperbole.

I considered this my personal aberration until I realized that this inane fluctuation represented a parody of the essential life rhythm, an infantile melodrama that constituted the core of what we have been pleased to call civilization.

In attempting to find my true place amidst the confusion, I travelled through the classic dialectic described in Zen literature as, "Before I attained enlightenment, mountains were merely mountains; while I searched for enlightenment, mountains were no longer mountains; after enlightenment, mountains were once again mountains."

In the beginning existed the pure polymorphous perverse eroticism of the infant. When this was thwarted and mangled, and I found myself in a land of greyness and sterility, I began a long trek through the lengthy lists of variations on the theme of fragmentary fucking. Like a mystic searching for the Absolute, I yearned for the unsought and uncomplicated joy of baby delight. In the process I experienced and catalogued the entire range of erotic expression, sensation, and insight possible to a human being at the level of search.

But after the vegetative orgasms and orgy raptures, after the swoonings into conceptual sensuality, after the romance of domination and submission, after the surprisingly innocuous and often ludicrous prowlings through what have traditionally been considered the perversions, I found that only one thing had been accomplished:
I had come full circle around the wheel of human erotic experience in our time.

Beneath all that lay the unaltered ground of my original nature. And my task was nothing other than to walk that ground, now as an adult, with simplicity, affection, and true intelligence.

But this left me precisely where I ought to have been all along and, indeed, in exactly the same situation which faces every other human being on the planet, from celibate sages to transsexual coprophiliacs.

The entire spectrum of erotic play was open to me, yet that solved nothing. I still needed to find out which way was home.

To infuse the particulars of everyday life with a sense of wonder, or to seek new forms ... to see mystery in the obvious textures of our epochal myths, or to opt for an idiosyncratic existentialism ... to know the infinite through the limitations of morality, or to woo transcendence ... to enter eternity by the gateway of esoteric normality, or to become an illusion . . . these are the cunt-and-asshole, the cock-and-mouth of the smirking and caressing void.

Last week I was invited to serve as the metasexual conduit and catalyst for a fifteen-person extended family. Simultaneously, I was continuing a lengthy exploration of the meaning of monogamy.

Can the split be healed through choice, which involves denial, or shall I let myself be called by the beckoning voices into separate universes, so that, when the carcass has ceased from dreaming and the bones no longer hold together, it will be seen that from the very beginning, I have not been here at all?