Another engagement with Sarah in a hotel by the airport. I’ve visited her at least a dozen times, but the erotic delights she provides do not get tiresome. When I was younger and striving for purity, I thought the fascination with sex must wear off after repeated exposure. I discovered instead that my erotic appetite is insatiable.
Now I’m behind her on the bed. I grab her hips, then slowly push my cock inside her. I hear her moan. I begin pumping my cock into her slowly. My fingers dig into her waist. “God….” she sighs breathily. My cock rhythmically moves in and out, in and out. Her moans are like music, and I keep thrusting, harder and deeper. I’m getting lost in the moment. The cosmos is concentrated in this hotel room, on this bed, in this woman. It’s just the two of us right there, and I’m losing myself in her. As pleasure overwhelms me, my rational faculties dim. My hips instinctually rotate back and forth in a muscular frenzy. Grunts and groans escape my mouth without permission. I start to feel that “faintness” and “abandon” described by Shelley.
Bataille insisted that the “whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives.” In my normal life I put a premium on self-control. I’m obsessed with propriety. I rigidly schedule my time. I’m excessively rational. I’m painfully self-conscious. I’m stuck in my head. What is so frightening, and exhilarating, about eroticism is that it forces me to “let go” and plunge into ecstasy. It’s a release from my ordinary repressed self and my mundane concerns. In the heat of passion, no longer subsumed by my identities, I’m reduced to my erection. There’s an absence of moral judgment. It’s as if I enter an erotic trance, and “what was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell” (Whitman) is banished from my consciousness.
Orgasm is surrendering to the experience. Philosopher Sara Heinamaa observes, “Orgasmic experience does not manifest the threefold structure of experienced time.” The temporal order of past, present, and future organizes most experience. Memories of prior events and the anticipated future mold the contours of the here and now. The experience of orgasm is different. “It dislocates the experiencing subject temporarily and seems to raise her above time or press her underneath its surface,” according to Heinamaa. Orgasm is experienced as a loss of consciousness (la petite mort) and is analogous to artistic inspiration, spiritual illumination, and even madness. It is the experience “of stepping outside oneself and transcending one’s limits.” Ekstasis. No wonder films have commonly alluded to orgasm through depictions of naturalistic “images of overflow and explosion” such as waterfalls and fireworks.
Afterwards with Sarah, I tried to recollect myself. Post coitum omne animalium triste est. Her itinerary will next take her to Orlando. I quietly dressed. She gave me a kiss on the cheek, then I exited her room.
Lutheran Guilt 