“Love as Music”

“Romance—and physical contact formed the pith of romance to the youth—was a matter of timelessness; one had to forget the world and time and lose oneself in the worship, the divine magic, of the loved one. One had to fall deeply into a trance of childlike discovery, encountering and appreciating each new treat as if it were, as it was, being experienced for the first time. Foreplay (and that was all he had ever known) was a graceful dance, with a rhythm of ebb and flow, with fortissimos and pianissimos, with echoic silences and the blare of trumpet-led charges. Expressing love meant cherishing the body of the beloved: playing it as if it were a Stradivarius, rare and precious and capable of fine, mellow music. Expressing love meant prostrating at the altar of the flesh-sheath of the beloved: using each touch, every caress, each kiss, and every lick and gentle bite to profess one’s adoration. Like composers who, with only a limited number of notes at their command, are yet able to bridge subtle and bold, silent and deafening, lonely and gregarious; who are able to transport listeners to the star-night of desert or the storm-dawn of sea; who are able to wring from that listener the cooing, satisfied gurgles of an infant just fed by its mother or the ranting bloodlust threats of a cuckolded, young husband—lovers, too, possess but a few steps with which to enact their ecstatic rites of love.”