The Violence of Desire JJS Harshaw Feedback appreciated at: jjsharshaw@yahoo.com (c) 2003, JJS Harshaw (nosex essay) "Which of us has not been stunned by the beauty of an animal's skin or its flexibility in motion." - Marianne Moore From Quotable Women of the 20th Century "The nights were palpable and fierce, razors, outlined so clearly as to be luminous. A different country, its landscape and currency plain: heat, fear, cold, pleasure, hunger, glut, pain, desire, overwhelming lust." - Elizabeth McNeill Nine and a Half Weeks "What makes a man or woman sexual? Is it a question of scent? Of pheromones? Or is it a question of evoking yearning?" - Unknown "...because two bodies, naked and entwined, leap over time they are invulnerable, nothing can touch them, they return to the source. There is no you, no I, no tomorrow, no yesterday, no names, the truth of two in a single body, a single soul, oh total being..." - Octavio Paz Sunstone * * * * * The day before September 11, 2001, I was in a hospital Cardiac cath lab having three titanium metal stents placed in the coronary arteries of my heart. I was 42. On December 12, 2001, my body having defeated the titanium springs keeping my arteries open; I had quadruple coronary bypass surgery. Known in the medical trade as a "Cabbage" or "Coronary Artery Graft Bypass." For four months after the surgery I was battling an infection in the leg where they harvested the vein grafts for the bypasses. The infection is gone but because of my immobility during the infection my heart is "deconditioned" and I get winded easily. It is rapidly approaching the one- year anniversary of my heart problems. In that year I may have made love with my wife once. Between the kids in the house, our schedules, my health, my wife's fear of causing something bad to happen to me - all these things have conspired to make our life together rather sexless. And yet. As I lie in bed at night and watch my wife, my lover, I am stunned by the beauty of her skin. Laying on her side in an old T-shirt, cotton panties and athletic socks, her face void of makeup and her hair tousled in sleep, I know the pleasure, the glut, the desire, the overwhelming lust that Elizabeth McNeill writes of in her book "Nine and a Half Weeks." My wife evokes a yearning in me that at times, especially deep in the night, can wake me. Overwhelm me. Quite literally make my dreams feverish with passion. In those moments I live in Octavio Paz's world: Invulnerable. I am at the source with her. There is no tomorrow, no yesterday. No names. I am consumed with desire, overwhelming lust. I may not have been physically intimate with my wife over the last year but in my mind, in my spirit, in the root of my soul, I have been with her daily. I see her face contort in pleasure as she cums. I hear her moans. I hear the obscenities she whispers as I fuck her in my mind. I smell her scent. I can taste the saltiness of her sex. I can recall the softness of her breasts and the way her nipples distend when she is aroused. I can feel the tightness of her anal ring as my finger invades and I suck her tongue into my mouth - urgently, roughly. Violently. I imagine her with all manner of men and women in all manner of circumstances; an extension of my sexuality, playing the whore, the virgin, the submissive, the dominant. And then,when the passion subsides somewhat and my head clears, I write stories and post them on the Internet. The feedback I receive is mostly positive but there are those who are put off by the violence in my stories. My wife calls most of my stories dark and rough. For using so much profanity in certain stories certain anonymous critics have chastised me. Certainly there are times in our bed where the lovemaking is slow and tender. Funny on occasion. The banter - between moans and gasps - is light. When I slowly drink in her beauty, her scent, and her body in toto. But there are times when we want to go to the source, to reach the place of no tomorrows and no yesterdays. To be fully and completely in the moment and let the heat of our blood possess us. To be possessed by the heat of another. In those moments words like "fuck," "cunt," "cock," "bitch," "whore," "slut," "cum," are the prelude to the grunts, gasps, moans, shrieks of passion that come with one person seeking to possess the other and to be possessed. They are sacred words, holy words in the divine passion of desire. They are the preludes and the intermezzos as two bodies urgently, violently entwine and wrestle with each other in their mutual desire. In the violence of their desire. It is true that the greatest pleasure is to give pleasure. It is true that the giving and receiving of pleasure is both a need and an ecstasy. And the pleasure, the need, the ecstasy is deeper than the deepest part of the oceans. Within our hearts, our very beings it is: primal, intense, violent. And, of course, it is always consensual.