“He felt he had touched the most savage state of his nature. . . . How poets and all the others tell lies! They make you believe that they need sentiment, whereas the thing which they need more is that acute, destructive, tremendous sensuality . . . sensuality without phrases, pure, burning sensuality.”
D.H. Lawrence
“You’re reserved, but you’re passionate,” Stephanie told me as she drew her naked body close to mine.
Words others have frequently used to describe me are “quiet,” “reserved,” “reticent.” I don’t easily express emotions. I can come across as aloof.
It is only in the realm of sex where my passions are unfettered.
The raw physicality of sex entices me. All my senses are engaged. My general discomfort with physical contact with others disappears during sex. During sex I’m unconstrained, unbridled, enthusiastic. There is no more physical act than entering a woman’s body.
Rhonda remarked that I intellectualize the world around me. I’m decidedly left-brained. I usually live in my head. My commitment to rationality is swept away by sexual passion, an act that by its very nature obliterates reason. To be carnal is to be of the flesh, that is, in the body. Alan Goldman writes, “Sexual desire lets us know that we are physical beings, and, indeed, animals.” Is my deepest, most hidden yet truest self revealed in the sexual act?
D.H. Lawrence thought sex “is our deepest form of consciousness…. It is pure blood-consciousness.” By “blood-consciousness” Lawrence means pre-reflective, pre-cognitive, subconsciousness. “The ecstasy of copulation,” in Schopenhauer’s words, causes us to evacuate self-consciousness. The Greek word ekstasis means literally “standing outside oneself.” Only to the extent that the intellect can be disengaged is ecstasy possible. Perhaps the most distinguishing mark of homo sapiens is the capacity for reason, for conscious thought. This capacity disappears in sexual ecstasy. One’s sense of individuality is attenuated as two physical bodies merge together. Instinct, not reason, controls the body. Bestial noises are made by the participants. In sex we surrender our intellect and self-consciousness and open ourselves to our primal self—so that we become animals.
I live from what Lawrence called the “upper centres,” the level of self-conscious thought. Most of the time I’m wary of passion and slightly embarrassed by bodily functions. I try to defy the primal self. Is this, however, all simply an false denial of my primal self? Sex is a refuge from tyranny of the intellect. Lawrence argued that in sex we are most true to who we really are. “Sex is our deepest form of consciousness.”
“My religion is belief in the blood and the flesh, which are wiser than the intellect.”
D.H. Lawrence
Benedictine monk Sebastian Moore said that we must acknowledge that even our animalistic desires are God-given.
During one of our earliest encounters, Stephanie speculated that my reserve concealed something more primal. “There must be an animal in there somewhere,” she said with an impish smile.
Then Stephanie said in her irresistibly sweet girlish voice, “Sometimes a girl just wants to get fucked.”
Animal lust soon consumed us. We yielded to sexual abandon. Stephanie got on her hands and knees. I knelt behind her, marveling at her round buttocks and arching back. I wrapped my hands firmly around her waist, squeezed her soft flesh and entered her from behind. Soon I was feverishly thrusting into her. Fucking doggie style, in the manner of animals, we abandoned any pretense to dignity. Both of us emitted the most primitive, inarticulate sounds. I grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled her back onto me as I thrust, fucking her even more intensely. The Wild Man had taken over, released from the cage of propriety, his masculine primal power on full display.
Later, Stephanie complimented me on unleashing my “wild side.”
Lutheran Guilt 