A secular condom. Intimacy.

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Old friends are dying off more-and-more frequently and last week this led me to musing on the word 'intimacy'. It is at least triple-edged: from innermost nature; to observation, knowledge, friendship, acquaintance and close familiarity; through to a delicate euphemism for sexual intercourse. I am remembering an afternoon and evening (and night until closing time) in a bar called The Cambridge on the outskirts of Winnipeg which we renamed 'The Bellybutton of Canada' and 'Canada's 7th Chakra' when the conversation turned so deep and intense that the three of us thought we really would levitate the place. So. The notion here is that the shifting of intimacy's meaning from the days of Launcelot Andrewes to the present constitutes a kind of ironical secular condom. And then ... out spews the following approximately stupid dreck. Go figgure? Keeping in mind that the UN Human Rights Commission in general and this committee in particular hasn't quite got an untarnished reputation for abuse either.

 

"Just Louise, and her lover, so intwined."

Mommy I'm making roast chicken! I found a recipe book. [Frango assado is Brazilian slang for a sexual position resembling roast chicken.]

 

There is a lot in these images from tOad: Re-education of the kitten thrower. [In case you missed it, someone posted a YouTube video of throwing a kitten at a wall. I haven't seen it (either?). Our cartoonist has apparently also seen the 'Clockwork Orange' movie but it seems to me he has got them both wrong.]

Everyone demonstrates:         No state intervention in my family.         Don't touch my daughter.         Faithful to our traditions of excision. [Excision means cutting off body parts - in this case, sexual parts.]

 

She loves me. She loves me not. Intolerance:                                     Do we feel remorse?         Ridiculous! It was just a poor person. [No idea how Gilmar gets from hyenas to intolerance, none at all; cannot figgure out the connection. Maybe you can.] Safety in numbers: Intimacy then, as a word and, in a way, is degraded. Not through sexual admixture - sex, in all of its manifestations I have known includes at least some possibility of touching the eternal - but in another way. [As soon as they mention 'eternal' you know you've got them: Recidivist transcendental reprobates! Whoremongers! Praeterite!] Not to be blamed on several generations of pornographers either, particularly those with agendas: Hugh Hefner; Bob Guccione; wazizname, the guy who died recently (?) ... oh yeah, Al Goldstein ('Screw' magazine); the guy who runs Abby Winters (yes, apparently Abby Winters is run by a man ... named Garion Hall); who have simply shifted the context - merely contributing to the number-line that starts in The Vatican and runs off somewhere towards ... something else. Of course I am a snob, but the Roman Catholic 'position' as well as books like 'Kama Sutra' and 'The Joy of Sex' leave me thinking, "That's not what it is about at all," and wondering: "What is it about?" [And so this meditation, gentle reader - a roughly U-shaped trajectory (I very nearly trashed it towards the middle) - leaves me feeling surprised, strangely satisfied, smiling, humming a tune (Spiegel im spiegel) ... almost happy. Be well.] "The cops don't need you, and man, they expect the same."

 
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