In the principled effort of honesty, and in service of the Great American Tradition of unflinching self-reckoning, I’m going to tell you a story about myself: a tired, fucking hungry, aching-with-Whitman’s-‘amorous-love,’ good ol’American girl—the kind you can bring home to mama and rail in the back of your Grand Jeep Cherokee—Marlboro red in my mouth, Whitman in yours, and right as you were about to finish I’d say: “Beef Stroganoff! Beef Stroganoff! Beef Stroganoff!”
The Penis Joke is a staple of American culture, and I’m no further removed from it than a middle school boy.
Horrible penis jokes aside, I won’t claim moral superiority just because I floss and gave a speech last Tuesday in favor of the Yale Political Union’s Resolution: Embrace Asceticism. The Union overwhelmingly decided to embrace indulgence, excess, and a deep-seated fear of self-denial in favor of what I believe a few party members referred to as ‘Big Booty Hoes.’ If you and the rest of the student body missed it in favor of sex and drugs, fighting wars in countries being bombed in the name of blood money by corporations that fund our Gothic Yale, homework (probably), or jacking off to a picture of Ben Affleck smoking a cigarette on your wall—that’s deeply unbecoming. Good luck getting in my pants, unless you hail from Poland and row a boat.
As a general rule of thumb, I don’t lay myself bare to someone until I’ve examined the contents of their mind and restrained my appetite for at least one full ovulatory cycle. It’s called courting. Hookup culture is a parody of doing anything less. But to be clear, ‘hookup culture’ is not the enemy. It’s a symptom of a deeper political and spiritual unrest festering in the student body. We consume one another the way we consume plastic and rainforest beef: briefly and thoughtlessly. Forgetting one another like we forgot Nelson Mandela was still alive. He’s dead now; I checked.
This brings me to Sasha Baron Cohen, somehow. Who I also forgot was alive, until I met him in Greece while crouched down in a pit of dirt, dusting off a chunk of 7th-century Before Christ clay. By the time my excavation team realized the pale, stacheless Brit was Borat, he was halfway to the Temple of Apollo. All I could mutter in that hot Grecian summer heat was, ‘Very Nice! Very Nice!’
My friend Jesse, a fan of his “early stuff,” chased him down and brought him back for signatures, an inconvenience we felt entitled to after he berated Americans for being “lazy diggers.” Now, thanks to Jesse—the one and only boy whose fingers I sucked a sea urchin out of—the inside cover of my copy of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time reads: I LIKE SEX. And it’s true, I do. But for the past year, I’ve been preparing my body for a spiritual reckoning. Translation: radical fucking celibacy.
I haven’t had sex in over a year in preparation for what was supposed to be a summer making whiskey with Spanish Benedictine nuns. Whether you think I’m being dramatic in a subtle, Mary Magdalene kind of way or not, this ascetic martyrdom stems from the unwavering impulse to interrogate my soul. It’s a boycott of the violence and apathy of surface-level affairs.
However, after a year of ideological rebellion, I’m valiantly and reluctantly throwing in the towel, and I’m getting myself a shirt that reads ‘Born-Again Virgin Open For Business.’ Abstinence, as much as I hoped it might, did not shake my spiritual resolve—all it did was make me incredibly horny.
I thought I could starve the desire out of me. I thought asceticism would clean me out, that God would move in if I left enough space for Jesus. But love does not starve. It takes root deep inside your belly, nourishing you, lingering until you look away–and then it strikes!
Here’s the part I didn’t want to write—the love story.
After three years and one rainy afternoon in the cemetery, two weeks before spring break, I was shaken by something I can only call love.
As a baby, I had trouble grasping the concept of a kiss. Not in the way Stephen Dedalus has trouble grasping its meaning as a little boy, but physically. My instinct was to devour, to cannibalize the person holding me in their arms. They’d plant rapid wet pecks all over my chubby arms and legs, but I must have had a very primal confusion about love and consumption, because instead of pecking back, I would open my mouth like a snake unhinging its jaw around an egg and press my face to their cheek, gnawing like a fat little cannibal. I didn’t yet know that a kiss could be soft, symbolic, restrained. But without the finesse of social meaning—and without teeth—my cannibalism was largely victimless.
I can’t decide whether my trouble understanding a kiss was a reflection of something truer than the choreography of kissing we adopt later with boys in post-punk jazz bands, or if I’m just a hungry, greedy man-eater at heart. Georges Bataille supposedly said, “Every kiss begins with cannibalism.” No one seems to know where he said it, but maybe that’s all love is: cannibalism with grace. Consumption without teeth. I think about that sometimes when I bite my lovers or take in their breath like I’m taking in their soul.
But maybe I didn’t want a kiss. Maybe I wanted communion.
Song of Myself, Whitman 52
‘I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the
grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
I stop somewhere waiting for you.’
I grew up reading Whitman, and after that rainy afternoon in the Grove Street cemetery, I found myself returning to Leaves of Grass like someone returns to scripture for spiritual comprehension. I almost expected the sky to split open for me.
He gave me cities, bullfights, and poems. I gave him a version of myself with all the jagged edges taped off. There were no candles. No gentle hands. Just mud, gravestones, and a boy who didn’t flinch when I said the word God.
We tried. Twice.
I wanted to possess him. I had no intention of love. I found him abrasive and pretentious at first. But I was a fool to think that I could lie naked next to him and listen to stories of his childhood and not fall in love—however late it came. And now that I’ve finally felt that self-nourishing, deep-in-the-belly kind of ecstasy, I’ve released him. Our love is only possible through its impossibility. Kierkegaard would call this infinite resignation—but really, it’s devotion. Or really bad fucking timing.
I could say more, but I won’t. Because there’s a Polish boy in my philosophy lecture whom I feel the universe wants me to know. And God help me—I want to devour his face.
To the Polish boy in the boat,
A look!
unspoken recognition.
Strange to me—
Strange to you?
I know your name before I know your voice.
You look like a workhorse,
Decent and honest, silly and kind
Maybe you have a temper—I do not know.
Maybe you taste like honey.
Maybe you snore.
Maybe you’ll hurt me.
Maybe I’ll hurt you.
To the boy in the boat,
I’m learning Polish and I need a tutor—
Może Ty, może my.