3am in the morning and chocolate milk and tortilla chips taste really great. fatty. salty.
holocene. the crowd at the club is young. it’s a young energy. and at first that energy is indescribable. men and women dancing together while djs from new york cooly spin. cool. as in relaxed, un-anxious, un-perturbed by the crowd. he wears a solid white t-shirt below his black curly hair and head-phones. a torrent of bodies below him as he cocks his head, listens to the beat, and bends down to mix beats.
the crowd here loves him. dancing. boys grinding on girls. boys dancing alone. girls with their gal friends. boys sharking through the crowd cruising for girls. the crowd is young, alive, and twenty-something, roiling in its twenty-something pheromones, revelling in its twenty-something sexuality. the youth of crowd seems odd and fantastic to me just because i generally find myself in a crowd with a greater age range, a different energy. adult contemporary. but the sight of all those boys and girls pressed close together under the pulpit is beautiful. the crush of bodies blurred and bouncing beneath a blanket of pixellated projected light.
he is in his early twenties. he’s young. he’s cute. he’s fit. he’s awkward, nervous, but i guess two men just meeting for the first time must be a little awkward like this. earlier in the evening before the dancing and drinking and red bull and laughter, i meet a young caller, a new friend. he comes to my house. we go to bluffs. we talk about our shared southern heritage growing up in alabama and arkansas. we drink pacificos. we make out and pull off each other’s clothes and roll around in bed.
emmanuel levinas thought that the erotic touch, being together sensually, may be a primordial relation allowing two living beings to extend outside their own experience, for one person to affect another person’s being directly, another’s person’s being and time and existence. and beyond the pleasure of sex, the excitement of sex may be generated directly from the way in which your existence brushes up and touches mine, changes and bends and shapes my own experiential trajectory.
“It is impossible to say just what I mean!/ But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen...”
we kiss, his hands on my skin, his mouth on me, the heft and shape of his body under me as we have sex. he bends my present, changes the possibilities of my future. he moves this way, so i respond that way. time dilates now. a flush under my skin, a rapid heart beat, the details of my surroundings seems to blur, my attention oscillates between my own pleasure and his own.
through sex we intentionally engage and affect present time, my own and another’s. drinking and dancing and partying together, we get caught up in another time warp, a strange collective shift. the crowd at holocene does not merge into one protoplasmic being, one consciousness. but the crowd collectively affects one another, the movement of one dancer affecting the present moment of another person, the movement of the crowd together affecting each individual within it. we dance and bump into one another, the rhythm binding our experience. a flush under my skin, a rapid heart beat, the details of my surroundings seems to blur, my attention oscillates between my own pleasure and his own. our visions blurs of color and figures and shadows.
parties and dancing and having sex: the nature of these activities allow our motions, our movements, our caresses to directly affect the trajectories of another’s present. these engagements exemplify some simple, physical gestures in which those involved escape the solipsism of the mind, of consciousness.
at home, i have to take care of my body. i’m hungry and tipsy and still excited by the party at holocene. three in the morning, i indulge in tortilla chips and chocolate milk, alone now. when it’s all said and done, each person lives alone with his or her thoughts and a biological body. susan sontag wrote in her notebook: "as consciousness is harnessed to flesh."
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