Sexual language

There are those of us who have fallen terminally in love with language. We savor the step of a sentence that balances perfectly on the tongue. We taste the cadence of the well turned phrase, or the right word, rightly used. We lose sleep over our grammatical infelicities, a period that should have been a question mark, or some accidental misspelling. We agonize like wild over a comma, dropping it at ten o'clock in the morning, restoring it again at seven-thirty in the evening: a full day's work. We punctuate our grocery lists. For us, happy are excursions to the dictionary. Paradise is a vast library, or dipping a quill in a well of Italian ink. The pitter of fingers on a keyboard is a poor substitute for the scratch of a favored pen over heavy paper, or the ring and the zip and the slap of a typewriter. Still, it is music, and it is art.

But what is the language of sex?

I don't know.

Pleasure in bed is somehow transitory. It lasts for a time, and then it dissipates. We bathe in its radiance and find ourselves renewed, yet the afterglow fades. We remember fondly, but pleasure is always present tense. Indeed, the present tense that matters is not even our own. It is the pleasure we give that signifies. It is the heaviness of a lover's breath, the flushness that paints a lover's skin, the muttered imprecations offered back, grunts and groans and wet, squishy sounds, the sheen of sweat, the way the scents do change, the quickening pulse, how a lover's face contorts into a rictus in advance of the first spasm, and the ecstatic paroxysm, accompanied by its triumphal roar: these are what endow sex its quality. And what language is this?

We find sex in our nakedness, imperfections visible, and are received, flawed as we are. Sex is a binding touch. Skin pressing on skin, breathing conjoined, limbs entangled, we find acceptance in this act. What matters is that we are invited by another to share and to partake. We are offered the solace of companionship and asked to collaborate in its design. We are, for a time, no longer alone, and the fact of this having happened, we retain afterward. The names we give to the things that we do: futuere, pedicare, irrumare, gamahuching, tête-bêche, feuille de rose; fucking and licking and sucking and getting it on rough; other things unlisted and other things unnamed: these annunciate the truth and the accident of our redemption.

There are certain sounds, I have found, that are native to every language. Though they trip ineloquently from the tongue in moments of passion, in the instant of sudden and unexpected delight — these are my favorites.