The Exile of Love

In my post "Of Sex and Secrets" I spoke of Ira, the woman who gave me quite a gift, a rare gift really, a gift that cost her dearly even though that cost was not something she chose but rather something she endured and overcame in her own life.  Thinking back on those days when I kept company with she and her sisters-in-seduction was pleasant, they worked magic with their beauty, their skill and their understanding.  But I am not such a sister, I am a man, and as a man every time I visit those memories I find myself asking questions of myself, first among those questions always why was it those women could do what they did? It is a question of deep introspection, it really is, you have to look deep inside yourself to find an answer that fits the reality of yourself.

Let's face it: you cannot share sex over the internet.  It doesn't matter what absurd levels technology has achieved, or may achieve in the future (shy I suppose of a Matrix level full sense stream overlay, but at that point we won't be human anymore, just cells in a power grid), that is one thing that will never be able to ride tcp/ip from one location to another.  The most technology can provide would be some tech-assisted form of synchronized masturbation, and like all forms of solo sex it would remain incomplete compared to the reality of actually being with someone... the million and one little things that carry meaning one to the other but aren't really recognized in the moment.  If that thought is set as truth then the question of how the ladies actually worked their magic becomes even deeper, because when you set aside all things of the body what then remains?  The things of the heart, of course.

Of all things that reside in the heart, the emotional elements of life, it is Love that is the most powerful, and the least understood.  It is love that drives the great things of life, great triumph, great tragedy, great confusion.  Love is a thing that demands to be known and yet at the same time all but refuses to reveal its' secrets.  It took me almost eighteen months, but eventually I figured out what those wise women tapped to work their magic were those things, those secrets they could share hints of with their audience.  They were only hints, but such tantalizing hints.  Beautiful in so many ways, warm and comfortable company, sensual and sexual, each skilled in her own version and interpretation of that art of womanhood, and those hints dropped oh so subtly between all the other delights.  Magic indeed, but in point of fact a most practical magic, the magic that in the end can convert strangers into a family.

I've sat in a few classrooms in my day, sat through a lot of things intended to teach me something.  In point of fact keeping company with those ladies was the most valuable school I ever sat in, what I learned there had to do with the single most critical thing anyone, man or woman alike, can learn: the inner nature of they themselves.  *chuckle*  The universities, those huge cold establishments of society, they like their graduates to refer to  them as their "alma mater", the mother of their knowledge.  No, sorry, but as a mother of knowledge none of them even get close, they don't even crack onto the bottom of the chart compared to the value of the lessons those ladies would teach to those willing to learn.

I suppose I must have graduated, because now I can look at my life from the perspective they taught me and see how my love has been living in exile now for so many years, retreated to survive in abstractions and hope maintained as a land removed and distant from the threat and menace of those for whom love is a weakness to be exploited.  It is a thing of my culture it is, that usury, that deep and diabolical attitude that love means you'll provide to me what I need, but I need not return in kind, I don't have to, you love me and your love will compel you on my behalf.  It is a perversion of nature that attitude is, and it has saturated the culture.  I came to understand it hiding from the consequences of that perversion, hiding in the company of the ladies who taught me to understand the nature of the threat I was hiding from by showing me what life might feel like when that threat didn't exist. 

Now I must face another lesson they taught me, and that is if a man ever wants his love released from exile he must take back the rightful land of its birth, go among the users and the losers, the desperate and the dangerous and do what can be done for them.  Do what can be done, and hope that along the way he'll meet some sweet sister who lives for and to the same dream, someone who also wants someone at her back, in her arms and in her heart to be her sanctuary and the vault where she keeps that deepest kernel of the love that powers the rest of her life.  That's the risk everyone must take, or come to accept living with their love in exile.