Lately, I have been pondering what it means to kiss someone and why we, as a society, are so fixated on catching each other’s teeth. There is a hunger for love—this is nothing new. Everyone and their mother has been talking about cannibalism as a metaphor for love for a while now. But it still fascinates me as to why we measure love in the same quantities as we would a meal. We can feel so full of love, yet sometimes we feel so bereft and desperate for it. It is as if our bodies need it to fuel the fasciated neurons that make up the meat of our spirit. Love facilitates the metabolism of desire into action. Too much love and you may get restless and anxious. Too little, and you’ll sink into a pool of cold intolerance and depression.1 Love acts on a negative feedback loop. I’m sure of this now—I cannot go 24 hours without at least an ‘I love you’ I try to convince myself this isn’t dependence. But I cannot deny that I am physically better when I hear it.
The weather today is suddenly so hot I find myself trying to move as little as possible. So, I resorted to reading
. Dear ‘s latest piece, Pervert, cements itself in my psyche as a question: in what conditions does love arise from desire?†We’re not up to love every single person we’ve looked at and wanted to fuck. Ilya and his camera represent the wandering eye every lover obsesses over and detests. Arousal is unconditional—love is picky and requires many conditions to be met. This often makes me wonder where love sits in the sphere of our lizard brains. The limbic system is among the oldest parts of the brain in evolutionary terms. It is found in fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. The pleasure centre is located in the limbic system. It is involved in sexual arousal and in the "high" derived from certain recreational drugs.2 Some journals suggest love is here, too, in the hypothalamus—the centre of sensation: the touch-taste-feel-all-embracing-experience.3
In Pervert, Ilya and Tomas watch porn together on their first date.
“I sat in silence with Ilya, holding hands in an empty bowl with our knuckles buttered, eyes drawn to their sex. Flesh grunted and reveled as we followed the trails of the navel and sharp demarcations of the jaw. I began to feel, for once in an impossibly long time. Not the heat of cheap desires, but a deep rumble of something else ripping through underneath my chest. Our faces painted with bodies painted with sex. It was strange and far away, but unadultered and untempered. Is it love? Could it be? Is this the feeling I’ve been told to search for my entire life? For the first time, something broke through a wall of noise and grain and it felt real and it was bleeding and on fire.”
Tomas cowers in the face of intense nakedness. His eyes are fixed, and yet his mind wanders inward. His emotions confront him—the pang of love sits like a stake he turns over and over again, deeper into himself. He notes that what he feels is“not the head [of] cheap desires, but a rumble of something else ripping through underneath my chest.” This overwhelming feeling of being so close to having the first taste. He feels it race within him, and he can no longer keep up his front.
“As more was offered and accepted, I felt the veil between performance and reality thin and tear.”
†Love is desire subsumed. When the mind finally marries the body and moves in tandem. In this state, the body can never betray. No matter how shameful it becomes afterwards, the stain of love is one committed entirely with no remorse. If this is truly the case, then perhaps we kiss as an act of admission, as if to say, “Let it begin; heaven cannot wait forever.”4
The first recorded kiss originates in a Bronze Age manuscript deriving from South Asia (India), tentatively dated to 1500 BCE5. However, according to this journal article, we didn’t lock lips until about 2500 BCE onwards.6
The reason is vague. Legends here and there. Personally, I like this interpretation.
You may want to ponder what it means to you. Regardless of what it may end up being, there is probably a person out there who shares it, too.
-swan
I’ve been revising the endocrine system and have been trying to apply it everywhere.—hence, hypo/hyperthyroidism analogies
Martin JH. The limbic system and cerebral circuits for reward, emotions, and memory. In: Neuroanatomy: Text and Atlas. 5th ed. McGraw Hill, 2021
This article is very interesting—I’m not sure if I agree completely, but she has a medical degree, and I don’t … yet.
From “The First Taste” —Fiona Apple
S. Kirshenbaum, The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us (Grand Central Publishing, 2011).
Troels Pank Arbøll, Sophie Lund Rasmussen, The ancient history of kissing.Science380,688-690(2023).DOI:10.1126/science.adf0512
people were getting freaky at 1500 BCE
I love this!