The Erotic Comedies (Vassi Collection Volume XI)

by Marco Vassi

  Too often we have taken the magic, mystery, and power of the erotic spell for granted. Fucking, the source of life and perhaps its most complete activity, is also our most comprehensive metaphor. Erotic energy is very pure, very fine, and comparable to the energy one develops while doing zazen or other meditational practices. In the act of fucking we pierce one another's flesh with flesh, breathe one another's breath, drink one another's fluids, swim in one another's souls, communing telepathically on all levels, tossed upon the same billowing waves of cosmic creation and thrust into the same intergalactic calms, speaking, weeping, smiling, listening to the cries and sighs of ecstasy which punctuate the profound silence of the erotic mood. It is unquestionably grand, a gift from the gods as well as a legacy from the animals. The major insight of the promiscuate, paradoxically, is that there is no such thing as a casual fuck.

  Simply because this vortex is so magnetic, it shines out of all proportion over the drab routines of our grey civilization, and we seem unable to deal with it sensibly. Celibacy, ideally, is the awareness of the splendor of eros, a decision to treat that ground as so sacred one will not walk upon it. But all too often it is practiced out of fear of opening oneself, or out of some misplaced notion of holiness. Marriage can be a pact between two people who find fucking so special they decide never to share it with anyone else. Or else it may become a clutching jealousy which ultimately smothers the erotic spark. Promiscuity also has two faces: one sees fucking as a sublime activity, its own raison d'etre, and structures human relationship as a vehicle of erotic worship; the other continually cheapens the erotic impulse by pretending that it has no meaning, seeing fucking merely as a way of scratching an itch.

  The exalted view of promiscuity, however, for all its lyrical charm, contains its own problems. The marriage reflex is the most trenchant, and it insidiously reappears whenever I feel it has been extirpated. Allied to this is the entire area of conflicting demands on my time and energy, a difficulty which prompted the notion of setting up a pecking order. Then there is the question of dumping. How does one tell one's Wife Surrogate that she has been cycled out and replaced by yesterday's Ad Hoc adventure? Specialization is perhaps the most thorny issue. Does one define the totality of one's erotic life in terms of the full range of people with whom one is involved, responding in part to each; or does one seek full expression with each every time?

  I have found no definitive answers yet. The bonding reflex, on the level of social conditioning, may be dealt with consciously; but as a biological mechanism it is intransigent. The pecking order situation may be eased by having the various individuals in the circles meet and come to an understanding in relation to excessive demands. The problem of termination is eased since each of the people I see has his or her own erotic web. Breaking off with someone doesn't exile that person to isolation, but simply occasions an alternation of his or her own erotic structure. Also, anyone in the inner circle can move into the second circle, not an uncomfortable location. The question of specialization, very subtle and complex, requires much more experience and analysis before I can define its elements.

  These and related difficulties indicate that the state of promiscuity presents a range of challenges as wide and deep as provided by marriage or celibacy. Those I have indicated represent first impressions, and I imagine that anyone entering this realm will find his or her own angles on the situation. My purpose in presenting, however sketchily, my current structure is to give an example of the model. My major concern lies in indicating that promiscuity offers a sane, adult, and compassionate alternative to marriage and celibacy, and one which requires research, self-awareness, strength, and a daring leap into a new realization of one's erotic makeup.

  Beyond this, once promiscuity is given its proper respect, there is the possibility of movement from one state to another with greater ease. The end of a marriage need not mean a leap into degradation or loneliness, but merely a sidestep into a different mode. Hybrid forms are possible. One gay couple I know has been together for five years, and since the first year they have not fucked one another, but maintained all erotic liaisons outside their relationship. Thus they have the emotional and psychological security of marriage, the austerity of mutual celibacy, and the erotic flexibility of promiscuity, all within a single life style.

  From my own experience, I feel it is essential that the promiscuate be widely understood as a separate and legitimate type, on a par with the married and the celibate. Such a person blends the solitary quality of celibacy with the bonding capacity of marriage, adding a third and unique ingredient, conceptual primacy. Up until now, promiscuity has been treated by society, by psychological opinion, and by its practitioners, as some form of aberration, or else as a fantasy fulfillment. Promiscuates fell into the mindless habit of fucking first and asking questions later, coming to despise themselves for qualities which seemed debased only because they were not being totally expressed, poisoning themselves with an unconscious wistful hankering for marriage or a secret idea that celibacy was the superior way.

  Once promiscuity is taken seriously, foolish and degrading behavior will be seen for what it is and one will have a much more difficult time justifying one's weakness and neurosis. Promiscuity is diametrically opposed to trashing, and perhaps the major reason why it has not been accepted as a viable lifestyle is that such an understanding might seal off an escape route for millions who have few other ways to deal with excessive levels of anxiety.

  For myself, this is the conclusion of my current phase of exploration. A year from now, I may be married again, or celibate, or have worked out a new synthesis. But for now, while I am promiscuous, I have no choice but to understand the nature of the condition and to define it in the most rigorous terms. To be at once a person, an individual, operating within finite parameters of human relationship, and a transpersonal manifestation of pure energy, a reflection of the primal mystery of being, a living coordinate on the grid of creation, to be the actual embodiment of the principle of both/and, to have solved the problem of duality in the acid bath of eros, this is the promise held out by the path of enlightened promiscuity.

  The Split Splits

  Although, as Reich observed, we may begin to develop characterological tensions from as early as three weeks of age, it usually isn't until we are from between three and seven years old that our essential malformation installs itself at crucial junctures in our psychophysical infrastructure. The child undergoes incremental increases of muscular tensions, breath suppression, and perceptual distortion until some single incident activates an autonomous armor system which has no function except the maintenance of its own defenses. We can see this in nations as easily as in individuals.

  This process of conditioned pathology has been variously described. In our attempt to understand why we are imperfectly made, we have evolved a full spectrum of rationalization. "Original sin" is no more or less explanatory than "cosmic ignorance" or "the emotional plague." And thousands of religions, therapies, schools of meditation, and political movements have been launched to delineate the causes of our stupidity as a species and to cure our disease.

  Most recently, Janov's concept of a primal split has provided a useful handle for grabbing on to the problem. I remember an event which may very well have been the central factor in deciding the contours and content of my erotic life, and in providing me with a highly personal yoga through which to bring myself back into touch with myself.

  I was eight years old. My mother and a neighbor woman were going shopping, and left the neighbor's two-year-old daughter with me to watch for a few minutes. My instructions were simply to see that she didn't get into mischief or hurt herself.

  But the moment they left, I was filled with a deep throbbing which began in my chest and spread into my legs, until my whole body was trembling as though with cold. The little girl was lying on the floor, staring vacantly at the ceiling. My desire was strong and clear, guided by a biological genius that had not as yet been permanently de
ranged. Desire unstrung me, although I knew that what I was being drawn to do would be considered an act which merited severe punishment.

  But with what fiendish cunning, at such an early age, I pieced together the understanding that since the girl was too young to speak, she could not report on anything I might do with her! While I couldn't articulate it as such, the relationship between truth and language stood forth in all its enticing complexity.

  I had no notion of harming the child; quite the contrary, my impulses were expansive and benign, even though selfishly motivated. With untutored instinct I grasped the principle of give-to-get that it took Masters and Johnson a laboratory and a hundred exhibitionists to demonstrate. The little girl turned me on, and I wanted to make her feel good so she would make me feel good.

  Taking the burden of responsibility for my need, I pulled the diaper down to her ankles. For a long while I gazed at the unformed cleft, knowing at once that any other notions of God would, for a large portion of my life, take second place to the mesmerizing appeal of that hole, I lay down next to her, unbuttoned my pants, and assumed my career as an erotic entity. I pressed my tiny penis against her crotch and rubbed myself on her, gently at first, and soon with mounting excitement.

  I became lost in the mild frenzy of the act, yet I remember that the girl was relaxed and smiling throughout, and seemed to be enjoying herself in that vague way of infants. We were sharing a primitive communion and I was taken with the revelation that this simple play was the nicest thing I'd ever done with anyone. The mutual exposure games I had encountered with girls my age had always been tinged with a tingling sense of naughtiness that at once added to their intensity and eroded their naturalness. Much later in life I was to realize that what our culture considers eroticism is really a more or less sophisticated resistance to the acceptance of the flow of pleasure.

  I was in the middle of a pretty good soft-cock-without-penetration fuck when I heard the front door open. I'm sure that no knock by police agents in the dead of night has even been as terrifying to anyone as that entrance was to me. It was my mother and her friend returning. My breath froze, the diaphragmatic paralysis which signals all psychic and emotional pathology. I pictured them descending on me, their faces horrible masks of anger, their curved fingers ready to tear at my eyes.

  That what I was doing, in itself harmless and pleasant, a bit of natural behavior which in a sane society would evoke nothing more than an indulgent smile, would be judged a crime by the world I lived in, now represented by these mothers, is a wedge of knowledge that must have entered me through a thousand informal channels during my childhood. Without an explicit word ever having been spoken to me, I had introjected the judgment of civilization on the body.

  I put my penis back and with fumbling fingers yanked the diaper back over the girl's legs. The suave lover of a few seconds earlier had rapidly disintegrated into a guilt-ridden, twitching bundle of insecurity. Perhaps if, at that instant, I had maintained myself bravely and continued in the authority of my innocence, I might have been physically beaten but would have retained my integrity. But I was a cowardly, intellectual youngster, and I capitulated without a contest.

  The child, sensing the sudden tension, began to cry. And I was barely able to sit on the floor next to her and pretend to be trying to quiet her before the two women walked into the room.

  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 w
as 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?

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1981 by Marco Vassi

  ISBN 978-1-4804-9608-8

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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