No Love Lost

My silence, as well as being caused by the wretched busy-ness, has been a symptom of a wider dis-ease: not the anti-slumming on expenses that has suddenly brought democracy down to where it belongs, but something far more mundane.

The absence of love.

Indeed, just as my philosophy is that of an agnostic physicist circa 1907, so my understanding of love was that of a middle aged man with unspoken Christian tendencies in an Iris Murdoch novel. In other words, I believed, truly, that love was real and that you loved someone and they loved you and there was noone else and you'd fight things together as they attacked you (both).

I now realise that this is not true. In fact everyone wants sex, not love. Given that I was as faithful as they came (or, more to the point, didn't come); I am now shocked to hear the women I have been with since the end of the only relationship of my life tell me that kissing is just something you do; that you snog anyone, even if they're in a relationship, if you want to; that sex is just sort of a power game that you give and take from.

In fact, all of this makes sense, but I am kind of sorry to hear it and to know it. When I went on a date a while ago, and snogged my date passionately, I thought it was because we had a real connection, and were clearly soulmates (ho ho) - in fact it was because that's what you do - it's an indication of a date, a signal of an attempt to create a more than friendly relationship, but not sign that that relationship exists. In other words, the beautiful deep kissing that characterised my relationship, and that I thought showed I was starting a new one, is in fact a non-verbal way of saying hello, and nothing else.

Why am I making this fuss about kissing: well, you don't often see it in porn (or so I am told) and in my relationship you only did it to show love, lots of love, and you held each other and you felt soft and liquid and it didn't quite mean sex but might lead to it, or it might not, and it meant you were realigning your selves.

Since I started again I have realised that in fact no-one is ever faithful: that no-one cares and that no-one actually believes in any of that bullshit about soulmates. The women I've been with and the men I've spoken to all know the true score - that you find Mr or Ms Now, and you fuck them, then you move on, or you don't and you die alone. Either way, generally speaking, you die alone.

But no-one is under any illusion about faith, or faithfulness. Neither of these things exist, but are passionately held to in ignorance, in nightmares, in sleepy silences, in the careless looks. They stalk our sexy world, our freedom to fuck. Always there is the idea of who it is you want, who it is you believe in, who it is you live for, but hiding behind it is the one you want to fuck, and he or she is always there, in your mind and eye, always your eye, the one who will make you so hot, the one to satisfy you. And from time to time you will kid yourself that this somehow ties in with love (where in fact it creates it); you will use it to leave a relationship or start one. Your orgasms will justify the fact that you have no-one to sit and be silent with.

Nor will you ever have, ever again. Not if you live to be ninety will you find that person who will sit with you in silence and occasionally stroke your arm, while you both look at the sunset, or sit and read. But you will find the people who will fuck you, there will be lots of those. And so you will conflate the two, and then you are lost, lost in the traffic. The traffic and its endless lost libidos, its casting eyes, the traffic and its car-pooling.

Love is the one who will clean you; love is the one who loves you for what you have achieved and what you might achieve; love is the one who clings to you when they are at their deepest hell; love is the one you feel across the clouds, and you sense her settling down, you hear her prayers and wishes and you can't quite distinguish between them; love is the shared beating you both take one late summer's day.

Love is the thing you have for a bit; but only for a bit. Then they get bored, and the cock is better or the pussy is wetter. There is always bigger cock and wetter pussy. There are always bigger tits. There are always more rippling muscles.

And so eventually we kill our delicate tapestries of feeling because feeling is nothing beside sheer physical necessity, and even less beside sheer physical necessity amplified and falsified by cynical media. But we live by cynical media, who want us to want to die rich, so we buy all the lies because they're what we want to hear. Porn is a cultural religion, with its ultra clean lines, its plastic perfect bodies and its meaningless noises, some kind of quasi spiritual vocalisations that are lies, and that everyone knows are lies, but that make us want to be part of it: all in all, quite the profane version of the mass, as practised now, at the end of time, just another end of time.

All the cock.

All the pussy.

All the tits.

All the power.

Nothing. Nothing. No feeling, no love, no world, no time. just noise. Noise.

No love lost.