LOVE AND SEX: A MEDITATION
“Love” has become a concept like “God” that despite its amorphous resistance to definition is a theory of salvation, a portmanteau for what a person wants, an emotional response, and — least of all — what think it is: a sub-category of attachment.
Earlier I wrote that reptiles have no nipples because they don’t nurture (feed and warm) their young which don’t drink milk and have cold blood. Reptiles do not fall in love. It’s a mammalian thing. Mammal mothers evolved to “love” their babies which survive because of mom’s fur, nipples, licking, and cuddling. But that’s still not human love.
Human love includes all the mammal features. (We’re told that inuit mothers lick their babies to keep them clean because there are no bathtubs in an igloo.) But what makes a human more than just a mammal is the prefrontal lobe of the brain where love becomes the source of war and renewal, poetry and despair, both the reward and punishment of existence. Whew.
What can we humans “do” with our capacity to elaborate and subvert mammalian survival strategies? Sex detached from love versus the embodiment of attachment. Control as a way of always being the mama bear and never allowing individuation, which is also a mammalan strategy for survival. Force to the point of violence to get all the love (wealth and status) or whatever “love” others refuse to give. It’s a great merchandizing strategy. It can be “done” from a distance. It can happen without invitation or pleasure. It can be a damnation.
Sex comes before love, out of the drive to physically connect to another being in fertile union, even if it isn’t fertile. It’s a drive supported by organs and the hormones they secrete, the brain-guided systems of conviction, and the simple autonomic pleasure we can even perform alone. Sex is as polymorphic as love. If fertility is the object, in parallel is sex without any possibility of fertility, entirely detached from consequences, and yet it can act through the attachment-nurturing received at birth to make a human being unfold as surely as a moth coming out of a chrysalis and unfurling its wings. Sex is about the pumping of blood and sometimes about hemorrhaging to death, murder.
Since sex is about blood, whether menstrual, tearing of tissue, or engorgement of lust, it is also about oxygen but we can’t see oxygen except with instruments. Neither reptile nor mammal can live without oxygen, that mysterious gas only recently named and described. No living animal can operate without oxygen carried by blood, circulating rather than clotting. So is sex the blood and love the oxygen, the combination becoming life? It’s a pretty idea.
Cells, and the cooperative of cells called an individual are governed by DNA which is double-helixes arranged in chromosomes. Animals, humans and bugs are the product of these coils which are able to unwind themselves, separate, and then rewind half with someone else’s half-a-helix.
In this risky and only recently known process, there are stutters, mistakes, dropouts, doubles and sometimes fragments from another source. This is the enabling of evolution. Most of the products die early but a few have been accidentally improved and take hold as new mutations. We have never been so aware of that as we try to keep up with the mutations of Covid. One could propose that a virus is looking for love and sex but finding death. A virus can become attached — indeed, embedded — and on its own terms it is fertile. Viruses survive throughout the world.
But viruses are parasitic, dependent on other beings, and this is one of the perversions of what we call “love” as an emotion, as defined by our culture. Prairie voles and mountain voles are the same basic rodent as tailored by mutation to the places they live. The prairie ones are faithful to their sex partners in the kind of loyalty our culture calls love. The mountain males go from one female to another, scattering their helixes in a way that survives in a dangerous place. Surprisingly, human DNA supports both strategies.
Among birds, nurturing in the sense of building a nest and bringing food, even covering with one’s body as protection, is one cultural pattern, but in birds it is so mechanized, made into instinct, that a strange other kind of bird can smuggle an egg into a family nest and the nest builders will feed it along with the rest. Adopt it, in human terms. I recently saw a charming vid of a broody hen gently lifted to reveal a batch of warm and blinking kittens. Some folk near waterways have black labs who bring home lines of ducklings who hatched, saw a big moving object, and set out to follow it as determined by instinct. They hurry to keep up and eat by instinct.
Humans also have instincts and habits that shape both fertility-originating sex and nurturing-necessary love. These two performances determine what kind of person is created and how they metaphorically manage their blood and oxygen — merely to survive or instead to attach to the world in all its panoply of pleasures and dangers.
Some cultures can be crucifying, nailing everything binary into the quadratic pattern it forces. Other cultures can teach how to swim and even how to fly — not in airplanes but in parasails, using terrain to launch on the wind.
When we stop imposing what we used to think on what we actually see, it turns out that every binary can be a continuum, so that it’s the ends that are thick and the middle that is thin, as well as being a graphic hill. But the human binary of sex and love is deeply related to terrain because we are creatures originally invented as an Emergence from the earth/water, possibly mud but not shaped by supernatural hands, rather by a myriad of molecular-level couplings and foldings.
The miracle is that we can feel all this, sometimes intensely and even in opposition to the culture supported by the prefrontal cortex, reasonable as it might be, in mutations of feeling that connect us in survival through both good times and bad in a deep holiness.
