The tension, in this case, uses its openness to match itself to that peculiarity of the other's closeness, namely, that the closeness in the other is also open.
The meeting of two self-contained entities results, therefore, in a common openness that transcends their individual openness, creating a new, shared isolation; within this shared isolation they can step out of their individual isolation, and conversely, their individual openness is enclosed within the shared isolation they had opened up for one another.
If this is indeed what happens, it would mean that the meeting of two bodies signifies far more than the aggregate of two bodies; they are present in each other in a way that adds up to more than their individual selves.
We are all slaves to our own as well as to other people's bodies; we signify more than we actually are only to the extent that freedom signifies more than slavery, and the community of slaves signifies less than the community of free men opting for slavery.
And nothing proves this more strikingly than a kiss itself.
For the mouth is the same kind of physical window of the body as the imagination is the spiritual window of the mind, both connecting one to the universe.
Within the closed system of the body the mouth is a functionless, in and of itself neutral sexual organ, possessing no inherently usable properties; only by coming in direct contact with the body of another individual can it realize its potential for the most sensual stimulation, display its exceptional sensitivity and its very close and intimate relationship to all the other inherently excitable sexual organs; we might even say that it is the only sexually active organ that, within the closed system, is naturally open, physically and universally, since there is constant, if dormant, readiness in it to be open to others; in this sense the mouth is the physical counterpart of intangible imagination.
The mouth, then, is a bodily organ that, because of properties it lacks, differs from all other organs involved in the procreative act, whereas the imagination is that faculty which ensures the functioning of the sexual organs even in the absence of a sexual partner.
Because of its unique and in some way deficient character, the mouth differs so much from other sex organs that in a certain sense it cannot really be classified as one, if only because the meeting of two mouths is neither a prerequisite nor a precondition of two individuals' sexual union; mouths can even be excluded from the closed process of such union; yet it is no accident that two individuals, imagining the openness of the other's body, showing mutual readiness to unite the closed systems of their respective bodies, prove their readiness and wish by first uniting those organs that are not indispensable to the union but are open to begin with: their mouths.
Naturally, and luckily for me, I wasn't thinking about all this in the car when Thea put her arms around my neck to prevent me from getting out; I am thinking about it now, while filling this page which, considering how these reconstructions work, is a rather perverted form of thinking; but back then I couldn't have thought of anything like this, because around the age of thirty you have a pretty fair idea how these organs function, you know from experience that they work more or less the way you want them to work, though you are also past the stage when you still act blindly, without control, and you are past it even if you allow instinct and experience to take over; in reality you flounder among associations and comparisons floating about in your memory, which is also a kind of thinking — so I can't claim that I wasn't thinking at all.
Teetering on the border of sheer abandon and conscious control, I decided that this was what I wanted now.
Or rather, I yielded to the weight, to that curious heaviness, that at moments like this gets hold of one's head, pulling by the forehead and pushing at the back of the neck, toward the other person's head, as if you had voluntarily relinquished the mechanism that normally allows you to see, breathe, and think; you just want to fall into something, give yourself, entrust yourself to something, and above all not to ask why, though in most cases that would be the right thing to do.
There is a half-open mouth before you, which is the question the other's body is asking you, and your mouth is also open, that's where you'll get the other body's answer; and when the two mouths meet, on those other lips you will find your breathing again, yes, you can consider it an answer, and there you will also recover your lost sight as well; you draw your breath from the other mouth, from the breath you gauge the possibilities of the body that is now turning toward you, the inner landscape of that body is unfolding before you, and that is just what the other person offers you: a void, a hollow space that can and must be filled, and that puts an end to the falling sensation, because the lips, caught on the rim of the hollow space, touch fragrant, slick, warm, rough, cold, and soft live matter; touching so many different things at once and at once in so many different ways that our mind, conditioned as it is to act, is properly stimulated.
Rushing to act, with lips dry and rough, eager and wild, we fell on each other as if in that fraction of a moment we wanted to make up for all the meaningless wasted time that was now behind us, all the time we had not spent together; in great haste we had to get around all the blind alleys and detours of our mutual attraction and aversion, we had to prevent any separation again; at the same time it seemed that all our previous detours now gained meaning precisely from this dry and hasty eagerness, as if we had to keep avoiding each other so that now, with all the obligatory pretense and falseness behind us, passion could be real passion, and dryness could be the parched longing for each other, a desert in which the only drink would be the other's mouth; and when lips met lips the encounter should take a new turn, one of tenderness, of leisurely, melting softness; and though each tiny dry crack could still be felt, let the joy of discovery relieve the tension and allow the separate streams of the saliva of anticipation to flow into each other.
Our tongues delivered, and out of each other's mouth we drank the fluid our lips needed.
Our arms followed suit in a spontaneous move to squeeze and hold tight.
With both hands she gripped the back of my head as if she wanted to stuff it all into her mouth, swallow it whole — how she used to make fun of just such things! — while I slipped my arms under her open coat and drew her close; this move was still the trickery of self-conscious thinking; as if we were trying, with fitful groping and exaggerated squeezes and holds, to avoid experiencing how closed our bodies still were; as is often the case, the energy spent on avoidance made us sense all the stronger what it was that we ought to be avoiding.
The mouth itself, however, made no attempt to avoid the unpleasant feeling of the body's frustrating confinement; the lips' parched desire for one another was so intense as to preclude all but the mutual quenching of their thirst; for the mouths there was nothing to avoid with their craving, with their irresistible coming together when, in the joyful moment of finding each other, their saliva of anticipation mingled and lubricated the two surfaces, the better to slip into and slide over each other, thus foreshadowing the possibility of even greater pleasure ahead, and, ignoring the grips and holds of the hands, alluded to the climactic moment of mutual gratification that every tension-racked body strives for.
For a fraction of a second, even the tips of our tongues cleaved together, and the feeling beyond joy found in this firmness, like a foretaste of what was to come, flooded our bodies, obliterating all selfish designs and willfulness; yielding to the heat that can relax the muscles and fill the blood vessels under the skin, both of us shuddering and enervated, we stepped across the protective layer of outer surfaces.