Original: Thu, October 5, 2006 - 10:22 PMRevised 12-31-2008
In kissing do you render or receive?
--Shakespeare “Troilus and Cressida”
[On the occasion that some people ring in the new year with a kiss, I’ve retrieved this from the archive.]
Kissing is like the forms of love: storge, philia, eros, and agape, or familial, friendly, sexual, and charitable. Kiss my boo-boo, says the child to the mother like an invoking of a magic potion; kissing as greeting between friends like in France (the other French kiss probably means a different kind of intimacy) or in Middle Eastern cultures; kiss me you fool, bessame mucho; or Judas’ kiss of Christ as the felix culpa. Kisses can mean so much. When I was in Vienna in the winter of 2004, I stopped by the Belvedere to see the Klimt painting. It seems that everybody else had the same idea that day (incidentally, my favorite painting was Adolf Hiremy-Hirschl’s Die Seelen des Acheron, 1898).
Getting back to The Kiss. Here was this painting in large and splendid form—much better in person that could ever dreamt in thousands of coed dorm rooms across the universe—dedicated to the erotic kiss, or was it a familial kiss, or a charitable kiss? The ambiguity in lips touching, a rendered kiss and a received kiss—he is, after all, kissing her cheek. I didn’t know which it was. Most people assume the erotic. We like the erotic kiss. The first erotic kiss is the second first impression. As Adam Phillips writes in his essay “Plotting for Kisses,” the way somebody kisses and likes to be kissed says something about his character.
…and yet fewer have curiosity or benevolence to struggle long against the first impression.
--Samuel Johnson Rambler (October 19, 1751)
Each first kiss is a chapter in itself. They are incredibly memorable; they symbolize a kind of bodily memory for the rest of one’s ability to remember. And they cannot be repeated. There is no “do-over” even though we are constantly attempting to do it over. I remember my first kiss. I was 18 years old sitting on the deck of a boat for the college’s annual “boat dance” aka “Booze Cruise.” The effect of the latter loosened lips enough for that seemingly magical moment as the boat was pulling into the dock at Tiburon. It was a first kiss. My reaction was “So this is it, wow.” I never saw the girl again. It didn’t matter. I felt as if I had entered into something new. A world full of promise. Or so I felt for an hour or so afterwards. My second reaction was “I like the way her nose touches my nose. Her lips are a little dry, her breath tastes of vodka, and why is her tongue in my mouth.” So much the better. I was ‘alls growns up.’ My next kiss was a couple months later. The nose nuzzling seemed to be the cue. I was learning. Cold tips of noses. Eskimo kissing, is that what they call it? Her lips were again, a little dry, her breath, it didn’t matter, tasted of cigarettes and white wine.
Kissing is like an introduction to the other’s physical self. You can talk philosophy, art, psychology, what-have-you, you may even talk sex to each other but kissing introduces another realm. A private space. A mysterious space. How many of us are learned kissers? How many of us actually have “it” down, or is it all a matter of taste, so to speak. Kissing is funny this way—each of us has to know enough but too much knowing may betray something about our character—geez, he’s forward, aggressive; Oh, she’s forward, aggressive. Not enough, too timid, unless it is done intentionally, is also a turn-off. Nobody wants to be bored kissing. In the early days of one’s kissing, there is an electricity it seems about the contact—our lips touch and magic happens. Eros is blind with his bow but knowing in our lips. Kissing in those early explorations is a brave new world even if this is the umpteenth person you’ve kissed. Once you kiss, you may never go back before it.
There are some people who leave impressions not so lasting as the imprint of an oar upon the water.
--Kate Chopin
This leads me to a question: what about the heavy make-out session? Once when I was young, perhaps 16, my friends and I went to Disneyland. We were the bad kids, the alternative crowd. We had a Melrose Avenue street urchin with us named “Fingers.” He was some kind of thief. We piled onto the Small World ride and took the ride (I always think of the Simpsons where they go to the Duff Beer amusement park and Lisa drinks some of the small world ride water and trips out). Fingers was in the front row with a girl we’d met in line. They started kissing. Heavy kissing, lots of smacking, and licking, and tongues going in spastic directions. I sat back in the next row watching with transfixed amazement. This guy just met this girl! How did that happen? Was there something equally casual about kissing? Like sparing for change and bumming smokes? My universe was redefined in that moment. Except for the fact that I never experienced it myself. Even the first kiss on the deck of the bay tour boat was not a heavy make-out session. It lasted no more than one minute and afterward, it led to nothing. I believe it was less Eros and more Agape. Perhaps she was the angel sent to exercise charity on my unkissed face. That’s what I tell myself now. Back then I would have said, “Thank God! Eros!” I still can’t believe that kissing can be a casual exchange, a mouth-to-mouth frivolity like telling a joke at a dinner party or smiling at a stranger.
I like kissing. Sometimes it is better than sex. To kiss is to make an impression and leave an imprint.
