Jesus Was a Sailor

I've always thought of Jesus as the sailor, because God wanted to know what was so interesting about being human, and the sea is this tide of events and ideas and emotions and women and men and change and death and life and birth and suffering that never stays in its stillness long enough for us to apprehend it, and so all men must dance on this heaving deck, this chaos that we balance upon, and geez... it's Friday night, and I feel like Milton trying to bore the Calvinists into believing that sex is for procreation! Is this what you wanted? To live in a house that is haunted... I think what really intrigued me about your post was the word "belly button". That woman's belly button is showing. I still remember the first really good view I got of a woman's-- not a girl's, but a woman's-- belly, and I never got over it. The curve, the gentle contours of muscle and flesh, the slight depression, and the punctuation mark-- bingo. Eureka. Ah! Let me draw little circles here with my tongue.... Let me be a sailor on this lovely swell, let me taste the foam beneath your shell on this wave of the sea, let me surf down to the hinge of your thighs.... I once did a college essay on the history of Romanticism, which is traceable back to the Moslems in Spain, and thence back to Persia. Along the way, I studied the ideal of "courtly love", which was supposed to be free of contamination by fleshly desires, devoted to the idealistic apprehension of the essense of the beloved's character. Uh huh. So you had the peasants doing their grunting in the dark, and then you had the noble Dante worshipping his Beatrice as she passed by on a bridge, so purely, that his loins were stilled and his heart pounded only in consideration of the possibility of sharing thoughts about the trinity together sometime. It was hoped that eventually the peasants would catch up to all this and begin to appreciate the higher, more moral things in life. Instead, the idealists came to appreciate the grunting. And few years later, you get Don Quixote, which so thoroughly parodied the whole idea that it died a quick and painless death. But not before leaving us the possibility of a Cohen, in three verses transversing Suzanne in her rooms by the harbour and Jesus on his cross and then the children leaning out for love and the mirror... and breaking the waves, in which the full realization of spiritual devotion depends on how near you sit to me in the bus, so mind-boggling that even the camera can't keep still, and the peasants, still grunting in the dark, must screech in protest, and all of history groans with this turning away and turning away.... and I fear sometimes that we become cold as new razor blades unless, like Nosferatu, we begin to be the razor blades, and cling to the darkness, and find our kisses are more nearly fatal. So, like Dante, I watch Beatrice pass by with her attendants and her servants and her gossip columnists, but she's wearing hip-huggers and a short sweater and I'm hoping to catch a glimpse... [Nov 6, 1998]

Updated
December 9, 1998