Herself, Her Naked Self

1
Why am I here? To be the mirror of the one loved. To think, if only — if only she could see herself the way I do now, if only she could see herself through my eyes.

The paradox: she is exactly like everybody else — which is to say, unlike anyone else. You’re the only one like you, says Barney, the children’s purple dinosaur character. So says your body. You can no more borrow someone else’s shape than you can someone else’s soul. (Shape is soul!) Formally, she has a singularity without which brute sexual desire may be possible, but not love.

If clothing allows us to fashion ourselves into something we’re not, nudity reveals us for exactly who we are. Looking at her, I get it all, the inner and the outer — the inner is the outer. I get it all, all at once, essence, aura and form, a luminous vision of the embodied, individual soul materializing like a photo print in the adoring bath of my gaze. (Okay, the self as narrative is missing; the sentimental and intelligent aspects; her particular view of the world.)

„All you get from me is the surface,“ says her body. „It’s all you need.” Wanting, of course, is another matter.

This triumph of flesh over thought, over pure abstraction, over any and all notions of purity — the wonder is that anything at all exists, that something rather than nothing is here, especially something as enthralling as this. This miracle of the manifest, adding surface to depth, bringing the soul to light, whose presence engenders such an acute awareness of what is there, not only on the outside, but in the head and heart — thoughts and feelings assume their own tangibility.

Actions speak louder than words. The body, naked, speaks loudest of all, like someone who can no longer live with his crimes. With what one poet has called all the silence of the world.

2

„Don’t even think about it,“ she tells me. „I’m not in the mood.“

I’m presumably intact, but I don’t feel that way. Legless, ball-less, disembowelled … one moment I’m whole, the next it’s as if I’ve triggered a landmine.

It doesn’t occur to me to leave her alone. Not in my job description.

The long legs and strong thighs, the full hips and narrow waist; the wedge of golden-brown pubic hair, like a slice of Streuselkuchen; the soft, slightly protuberant belly forming an oval around the deep pocket of her navel; the firm breasts with their tight little buds, their dark berries for nipples: the whole very substantial package never fails to dazzle me.

I want her, that’s all there is to it. Her and no other. She with the lavishly endowed figure, whom I can track with my eyes and enter with my sex, who leaves her subtly perfumed scent wherever she goes. (As opposed to the other one, nowhere as present — wrapped up in her moods and concerns, the entranced captive of her subjectivity, who pulls away from her body into the privacy of her experience. Who has a body — who has a body but no longer is a body.)

The dispassionate clarity at the core of my sexual hunger: to take what I want is not to have it. I can want it with all my might, I can affirm my right to have it, I can rail against not getting it, but I can’t take it. It can only be given to me — given freely and with as much selfishness as altruism.

I burn for you, baby, I tell her in my mind. Do you feel the heat?

All I can do is stay true to my desire. Don’t let it die out. Don’t let it turn into a conflagration. Stoke the fire, bank the fire.