An avenue for the mind

Gay Beautiful Making-love

Recently I've felt the need to change for the good the conditions of my experience concerning to sex. And that's been caused by a visual experience. "So, what did you see?", you might ask. Well, it's about me browsing on the Internet, as I usually do. Going on and on I've found a pair of interesting links on a page I don't remember (and I don't care) to websites of erotic photography. I watched the first and felt a little pleased: some images of cute nude bodies in bright tones and evidently destined for contemplation, no porno. And it is clear that pornography is intended to cause sexual arousal in the viewer, so in its case it is fundamental to show people in sexual or at least genital activity, whether alone or in pairs (or even in groups). But those photos are just took to be contemplated and admired.

Well, that didn't satisfy me enough so I checked the other site. In my life I've let myself some fun by watching pornographic material, but usually with the consequence of feeling ashamed and deeply displeased at the end, as if I've been promised some great pleasure I have finally not be given. I consider this to be of relevance here, because what I watched at the other site taught me that this engaging with porno had been sowing seeds of unease in my sexual life. The 'porno' part of ourselves demands immediate and animal satisfaction, cries out for as much of our energy as possible and wastes it in such a way that the pleasure obtained is not very valuable in the long run. The 'porno' part of ourselves has genital claims; of course, I'm not going to deny that they are part of our sexual lives, but there should be ways of delaying and transforming their fulfillment much more than it is used to. And, indeed, I think that it is very worth trying.

Those are thougths I have had very long, but the very decision to give them authentic importance and to make them effective was caused by what I saw. A big surprise. As the first site, the second shows an artist collection sorted by galleries; but this one have serial galleries, what increased my interest. I decided to watch one of the series, pictured in B&W; more than 60 slides of two men gently caressing and kissing each other. So I supossed that was all and went on, but... For my suprise the situation was going slowly hotter and hotter... and hotter and hotter... Surprisingly, the tenderness of the first slides was intact and even intensified, not erased nor even stained, as the exhibition continued, though the thing had already become sexual. Wow! An artistic work indeed!

But how far did the artist (and the models) intend to go? That's what I felt curiosity to investigate, so I decided to watch the second part, almost three times longer. And then I discovered the same progressive tendency to reach the climax, that what we usually would only consider to be found for exhibition in porno. But the tenderness never fell, never faded out, never went corrupted by nothing. BY NOTHING at all. Glorious, I think, is barely a proper word to describe that. Glorious. Because it teaches us that the rough material of sex can be used to make a beatiful and delightful work of art, worth having in high esteem not just for minutes, but for years.

So I say: if we are going to live in the realm of desire and pleasure, at least let's do it in some way we can build the sublime, not just touch it. Good sex could be a matter of technique, strength, heat. But I don't feel this to be enough: make some changes and add a lot of pacience, a lot of tenderness, a lot of concentration in love (love continually and in the run). I talk now as if I had already experimented, which is not the case; but I can't help trust in the possibility. I remember sometime ago when I asked a German Buddhist disciple (from the Diamond Way School of Tibet) -who was in my campus giving a conference on Buddhism- how should we deal with sex according to his faith. "Enjoying so much...", he said, enjoying and compassively developing the intention of bringing happiness to the other person. A lesson which I come to learn again.

PS: I remember too that a friend of mine felt very pleased with my question to the disciple and with the disciple's answer. To you, I have to say I hope that you could have some benefit from these thoughts I have just tried to sketch here.

PS: "And what's the site's URL?", you might ask. OK, here it is the link.

posted by shaikai @ 10:08 AM