That so much human struggle seems to take place in sexual terms is somewhat misleading. The ambiguity and uncertainties of fulfilling oneself as a man or as a woman sometimes mask the more profound anguish of simply being human.
Looking back, I realize that my loves were, in actuality, obsessions. They caused more pain than pleasure. Sometimes, I can’t distinguish between pain and ecstasy.
No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.
Man, we’re all the same cats, we’re all the same schmuck — Johnson, me, you, every putz has got that one chick, he’s yelling like a real dum-dum: “Please touch it once, touch it once.”
When a person has been loved early in life, he does not have to try to extract it from sex; sex can be what it is — an intimate relationship between two people who are attracted to each other. Does this mean that sex is something isolated from love? Not necessarily. A well person is not going to run around trying to get everyone in bed. He will want to share his self (and that includes his body) with a person he cares about. But he or she will not preface that relationship with some mystical concept of love. Sex will be a natural outgrowth of a relationship just like anything else. It does not have to be “justified” by love.
Never mind. The self is the least of it. Let our scars fall in love.
We’ve gone from neurotic sex to reasonably healthy sex and that’s really good. And if you’re living in the world, sex is a very beautiful part of existence. However, if you in truth want to go to God in this lifetime, then you start to direct your energies toward getting there. The predicament with sexuality is that no matter how nice your intentions are, the act itself is so powerful that it catches you in the gratification that comes from your separateness, which means sensual gratification. And in that sense it’s reinforcing your separateness. . . . The game is just to go into the reality where sex is like rubbing sticks together to make a fire. You get to the point where you’re already existing in that place where you were having sex to get to.
God is voluptuous and delicious.
Sex is a pot of fat. No — sex is a beast. A large, ugly-beautiful, and potentially very dangerous, beast. We defy him at our peril. Freud was wise to see . . . that we could transmogrify passion into anything — war, money-make, possession, control. And most of all, he was wise to see it as a function of one’s life starting from before the exit from the soft chamber of life. They say they’ve observed tiny boy babes, in the womb, with tiny hard-ons. Lust drives us from the start, and will drive us at the end. Little Richard says that it’s infectious. And some psychiatric doctors are giving clinics in how to defeat the habit of sex. A habit that can tear up relationships and marriages. I believe!
Here I am saying this, and yet at the very time I am saying this, I am thinking, “When I see a man, a lovely man without clothes — it’s like a blow to the gut. It’s the same old dumb passion I dealt with thirty years ago.” I may get older, but lust never ages. It is the same blow to the belly that it was the first time, a blow so strong and unstoppable that one reels in the wonder of its brute intellect-defeating power.
If we are unable to make passion a relationship of duration, surviving the destruction and erosions of daily life, it still does not divest passion of its power to transform, transfigure, transmute a human being from a rather limited, petty, fearful creature to a magnificent figure reaching at moments the status of a myth.
We all know that fucking is thus complex and contradictory, that people who can hardly bear each other have sex which is often by mutual consensus sensational, and couples wigged with pot, speed, and the pill fly out on sheer bazazz, “great lovemaking, great!”, whereas the nicest love of two fine minds in two fine bodies can come to nothing via fornication — sex is capable of too many a variation, love to some and lust to others! sex can lead to conception and be as rewarding as cold piss — the world is not filled for nothing with people who have faces like cold piss! — sex can be no more than a transaction for passing mutual use, yet heaven can hit your hip; there is no telling, there is never any telling. . . .
Fuck! I want love!
