In the inferno of our shared loneliness, desire becomes a form of passion and compassion. It is through passion that we bridge the gulf between flesh and mind, desire and deed, so that lust—once it has penetrated us, once it has opened us and made its home in the warm darkness of our being, in the places we hide even from ourselves—transforms our suffering into the consolation of certainty: certainty that life has meaning, that this life, mine and yours, your body yielding beneath mine, is more than a metaphor for existence.
You, particularly you, know well—your body knows in its blood and bones before your mind can name it—that life without lust is not worth living; in fact, life without lust is no longer life but only an obituary written in advance. Lust, though it be masked in a hundred guises, is our consolation and salvation. It is the expression of our materiality, a joyous cry that proclaims the defiance of the mortal coil—that testifies against the enemy who would take from us our power over our own bodies, over the heat and hunger that make us real, over the shudder of recognition when a touch becomes ownership.
Desire is the gift of a God who saw that man could not live without hope, and so endowed him with a capacity for ecstasy in order to assure him of the future; but lust is a form of that desire that is no longer religious, no longer naïve or innocent. Lust has brought us through the transcendence of hope to the reality of experience, from the passive acceptance of blessings to the active anticipation of delight—the knowledge of what hands can do when they stop asking permission, what mouths can discover in the dark. No longer do we accept the will of the gods for our lot in life, hoping that someday they will take pity on us and give us our heart's desire. Instead, we have taken our fate into our own hands, choosing pleasure for its own sake and deciding that our own desire—yours, trembling beneath the surface of your skin, mine, impossible to ignore or deny—is enough to justify any course of action. Thus we have elevated lust into an ethic—a morality of the senses—and in this new light it becomes clear that all ethics have their origin in the tension between religions, the eternally contradictory claim of spiritual power to dominate the body, to suppress pleasure in order to cultivate some higher form of existence.
In place of this naïve transcendence, lust proposes a new dialectic between body and spirit, in which no principle is to be taken for granted, and nothing is more sacred than the unique and transient moment of its perfection—that moment when you yield to what you've been holding back, when resistance becomes its own form of invitation. Thus the great cliché of transcendence, the virginity of the soul, becomes meaningless in the language of lust. To the child who believes in his own soul's innocence, his own vision of eternity, virginity is a confirmation of his religious faith; but to us, who reject both innocence and faith in favor of direct experience, virginity is nothing more than a prelude to lust—the chance to demonstrate in the most absolute terms the power of our bodies to give birth to spiritual intensity, to transform the fleeting moment into an eternal symbol of joy. We, then, do not want to believe in a virginal soul; we want to taste it, to know its texture and resistance, to possess it utterly and feel it surrender.
In so doing we gain access to what is most precious and unique about ourselves. For we are not angels, but beasts. We do not know God, but we have sex—we have the weight of bodies, the shock of skin against skin, the particular ragged rhythm of your breathing when I make you forget to control it. As much as religious authorities want to believe that we are spiritual beings, in one vital respect we are not; and as much as we want to be angels, we can never deny what we are—the animal heat, the hunger, the way your back arches—not if we truly wish to know ourselves. By choosing pleasure, by privileging lust, we embrace the realm of the bodily, the incarnate, and say, "I am a beast." By embracing the beast, we know the security of being truly, if only temporarily, real—real as your pulse quickening, real as the moment before surrender.
If you yearn to be consumed, to merge with a living entity greater than yourself, to attain release and transcendence and to yet remain conscious of yourself in the very moment of dissolution—conscious of how you're being held, how you're being taken, how you exist most fully when you let go—then lust is your metier, your unique and rightful domain. For this is how desire speaks when it is freed from its naïve innocence, when it stops asking permission and simply takes what it needs, gives what you need.
You see how the soul is immanent in the flesh, how the spirit is but the excess of life, and life but the expression of lust? How everything you are becomes most itself in the moment of abandon? And this is the mystery: if lust is a power, how is it that lust itself submits to power, prostrating itself before the false idols of laws and institutions, serving the body unto death? Because it must: the body is inert without guidance, without the hand that knows where to touch, when to press, how long to wait. Lust has no use for institutions—they exist only to satisfy other kinds of desire. Lust requires order and form only as an artisan does, to give tangible shape to its vision—or as a body requires another body to give form to its formless wanting, to make real what has only been imagined. It is true that the artist is never at home in this world, but neither is the beast. And so it is the function of lust to reconcile the artist and the beast within ourselves. And how do we reconcile what is irreconcilable, except by sacrifice?
When we have given all that we are, when you have offered everything you've been holding in reserve, every secret place and hidden hunger, there is nothing left to fear. Our lives, already ended in a hundred nameless ways, are willed into the light of the world through the absolute sacrifice of everything that is trivial in us, and the absolute acceptance of what is worth dying for. We no longer yearn to be loved or approved; we have no need for forgiveness or absolution. And the self that dies is only the cage of our passion, the vehicle of our exile. Our flesh, the alien land in which our true spirit has been imprisoned, must be transformed into the temple of our inmost selves so that we can pass through the threshold of the one last irreducible difference, into the kingdom of that incandescent singularity where all differences are resolved in the naked power of being, where your flesh becomes indistinguishable from mine, where I cannot tell your pleasure from my own, where time is abolished. Here we will know, without yearning, without suffering, without betrayal or ambiguity, the fullness of eros—that moment when your breath catches and you cannot speak, when everything you are concentrates in my hands. "Mourn the flesh," says the book of Ovid, "in order to enjoy the soul."