Manifold Lovers on the Soft Grass of a New Town

The love is different here, this place I have travelled far from my home to.

The cities of this region contain an air, somehow, of romantic love like no other I have seen.  Though of course it manifests in dissimilar forms, for it is like all love and is manifold despite its commonalities.  But this dynamic, even its common features, are emphatically advanced; they have progressed in some way which I am trying hard to grasp and understand.

It is difficult, like trying to interpret stories from distant times.

The lovers here stop dead when they are in fluid motion, walking or talking or doing some such mundane thing, and kiss one another passionately.  Then they continue, without speaking.  I would say that the actions are enough, but it is more than that.  It is simply the actions themselves, performed thoughtlessly; it is not a symbol pointing to something deeper—it is ‘deeper’ itself.

Each and all in different ways, no doubt.  And the lovers here are not always in pairs, either.  Nor are they traditionalist, orthodox; there are men with men, women with women.  All is acceptable, here, now.

When the park is full of the homeless, families, kids—whoever—they do not hide their erotic love.  It is not hidden anywhere, for there is no thing to hide.  This does not imply pornographic scenery in these towns; erotic love, apparently, is far, far more than what is explicit.  It is implied in every tender action, every affectionate glance.  Later, it is consummated passionately, orgiastically, without hindrance.

In the region of my town, where my family raised me, I saw a colder love—though no less pure, in a funny sense.  Like the love I have met here, in this new place, the erotic love I see at home is not necessarily explicit, though often its very explicitness implies a lack; there is an ostentation to this love, an egoistic frivolity, that drains it of true romance.  Perhaps my words are harshly stated or presumptuous, but it seems as though such love is meant to be seen, rather than felt.

My town seems filled with people harbouring thoughts of ideal love; the drawing together of two set complementary ‘kindred spirits’, puzzle pieces that could fit nowhere else in the scheme of things but with each other.  They were ‘meant to be’.  But such love is consummated, final, absolute—trapped.  It is not free love, as I see here in this new land and which is gladly accepted as ephemeral, at least potentially.

Surety in the realm of love is a delusion, one which hinders passion and spontaneity—even traditional, monogamous love, if there is truly such a thing, in any manifold form.

At my home I see rational lovers; lovers comprised of two practically applied beings, set in this world, lacking any sense of eternal mystery.  Pairs of beings who feel something strong, but concentrate on other, more explicable things.  Embracing the strength of a love, a love of any type, be it familial, platonic, erotic, purely physical—to embrace its power truly is to face one’s naked self, accept its ephemerality, its impermanence, its no-thing-ness, and to cry with laugher at it.

At this point, perhaps, two lovers can stop mid-activity, forget the world of things, and kiss passionately.  Boundaries dissolve, within and without, and the connection is seen to be always moving.

There was a discomfort I found with this in my home town.  Pairs of eyes looked at one another, but saw only their own reflections, and were deeply turned on by this.  Their fucking, perhaps, ended; anticlimaxes reigned, because you can only fuck yourself so many times before realising you are lonely.  There, though I have admitted their love as true, the love is coated with sweet things with good taste but no substance; it is more a traditional love, handed down through the ages like the archaic heirloom of marriage or kingship, to be taken with grace and not really reflected upon.  In my old town, there was no poetry of thought; there was, rather, some sort of chilled expectation.

It was a good looking town, but the people did not realise how beautiful they were, and so the lovers, forever seeing a single unit of being, cemented in the grounds of their being, in one another, could not move on.  The love began to smell, grow stale, at times—even when it could have remained pure.  Bugs came and hungrily returned it to a state of nature, where all things were again equal and the manifestations of being were given a second chance; a third; a fourth; and so on.  Progress was reserved for other regions, other times, it seems.

Here people do not fuck one another; they become erotic pleasure and writhe together, as one thing, knowing that there is no force separating their own love from all love.  Fucking here is like the swinging of a universal metronome, keeping time, keeping rhythm, with all things; a single lover is but a petal in a flourishing field of flowers, forever renewing, forever recreating the ebb and flow of God herself, ethereal and corporeal, existent in things and no-things alike.  Knowing this makes fucking all the more pleasurable, for there is no egoistic expectation or self-awareness; just bliss, ecstasy­—love.  Maybe.

The flora smells nicer here, in this new, still slightly alien territory.  There is a playful softness to the grass on which the lovers lay, fondle; it is the same grass as my former home, but instilled with the ambience of unattached, eternal sentiment.  Wherever this love is present, the world of nature shines with it; the latter is, of course, not really a different thing.  It is the rational mind which deems it so.  Words like ‘I love you’, when they need to be said for consummation, differentiate when nothing is so different.

I think I will stay here, in this place.  I feel welcome here, where there is no shame, no self-consciousness of what is perhaps the most potent human intercourse.  This is a place antithetical to the clinic, the school, the modern industrial city—to a host of these layers we have in modernity.  I can move here, even alone; even alone, I can embrace the air of love that abounds, for I feel nothing but erotic on the grounds of this park, nothing but sated amidst the waves of this sea.

Here, we can roll about on the soft grass together, knowing of nothing yet feeling everything without the need to say it, to hide it—to do anything but be it.  Until it dies, as all things do, and we can walk away into another’s arms, content in the fact that love manifests always and everywhere, and that all we call evil or sad or empty is simply a lack of love.  Which is itself void of anything at all.