Gustav Klimt - Danaë
How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other’s bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health–just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.
I love how Olds calls our feelings of love for our lover “lov[ing] the priest instead of God.” We have a tendency, needy humans as we are, of “mistaking the lover for [our] own pleasure.” The sex is good, so we think it’s the giver that is good. We’re human beings. Physical bodies. And in our aspiration to be trans-physical (is that even a real term?), in our need to be more than just pure body, in our endless desire and wishes to be more than what we are, we refuse to accept the simple, earthly, natural pleasure we find during the act of physical sex and insist on making it ‘more meaningful’ and more transcendental, so we insist that it is not just the body that we love, but the person (soul/body/mind) that comes with the body. Why can we enjoy a dish prepared by someone without guiltily thinking that we have to love that someone, yet we don’t do the same when it comes to sex?
But my own question goes in the opposite direction to that of Olds. How do they do it, the one who love without making love? Platonic love. Isn’t that what we call it? But isn’t it just partial love? Impaired love? Even flawed love? Isn’t it just preparation for real love? And if sex is such a necessary component of love (proven simply by the act of physically consummating a marriage as the ultimate goal of love), then why claim love to be more prophetic, more noble, more worthy of humanity? And why claim that love can exist without sex?
Hanan 