A Natural History of the Senses (17 page)

According to the
pattern theory
, nerve impulses combine to telegraph those Morse-code-like messages of pain. Some pains just rush to the spinal cord, so that we can flinch if we touch a hot stove; and we call this a reflex, by which we mean that, as we always suspected, we can act without thinking and we frequently do. Acute pain—a ripped ligament, a burn—hurts so badly that we’ll immobilize part of the body long enough for it to heal. A prick of the skin may not hurt the most, but it hurts the fastest, the signal traveling to the brain at ninety-eight feet per second. Burning or aching travels slower (about six and a half feet per second). Leg pains sometimes travel at up to 290 miles per hour. We pay no attention to our internal workings unless something goes wrong, when we might feel hunger pangs, or headaches, or thirst. Still, scientists do not agree on exactly what pain is. Some say it’s a response of specific receptors to specific dangers—noxious chemicals, burning, stabbing or cutting, freezing—and others feel that it’s much more ambiguous, an extreme sensory stimulation of any kind, because, in the delicate ecosystem of our body, too much of anything will disturb the balance. So, in this sense, pain really is a sign that we’re out of harmony with Nature. When we’re in pain the localized place hurts but the entire body responds. We grow sweaty, our pupils dilate, our blood
pressure shoots up. Oddly enough, the same thing happens when we’re angry or scared. There is a deep emotional component to pain. If we’re badly hurt, we might also be afraid. And what are we to make of those individuals who are sadomasochists, who combine pleasure with pain?

In his famous experiments, Ivan Pavlov gave dogs a strong electric shock, which pained them severely. Then he fed them each day after a painful shock, conditioning them to associate the shock with something positive. Even when he increased the strength of the shock, they wagged their tails and salivated in expectation of dinner. In other experiments, he allowed cats to hit a switch that shocked them and fed them at the same time, and found they were eager to put up with the shock in order to get the food.

Kafka wrote short stories in which people endure pain professionally, as “hunger artists” or other self-mutilators; audiences often pay for the dubious privilege of watching someone suffer. There have always been performers of pain, artists of self-mutilation, to whom pain has a different meaning than for the rest of us. Edward Gibson, a turn-of-the-century vaudeville performer billed as “the human pincushion,” let customers stick pins into him and at one point acted out a crucifixion on stage, nails piercing his hands and feet. It was only because people in the audience started fainting that authorities stopped his performance. Then there was the notorious German self-mutilator, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, whose “performances” of self-inflicted razor slashes and knife wounds filled a public hungry for sadism with unparallelled horror. Do these people not feel pain at all? Are their pleasure and pain centers cross-wired by mistake? Or, like T. E. Lawrence, do they feel pain in all its molten terror and not mind?

Sex is the ultimate intimacy, the ultimate touching when, like two paramecia, we engulf one another. We play at devouring each other, digesting each other, we nurse on each other, drink each other’s fluids, actually get under each other’s skin. Kissing, we share one
breath, open the sealed fortress of our body to our lover. We shelter under a warm net of kisses. We drink from the well of each other’s mouths. Setting out on a kiss caravan of the other’s body, we map the new terrain with our fingertips and lips, pausing at the oasis of a nipple, the hillock of a thigh, the backbone’s meandering riverbed. It is a kind of pilgrimage of touch, which leads us to the temple of our desire.

We most often touch a lover’s genitals before we actually see them. For the most part, our leftover puritanism doesn’t condone exhibiting ourselves to each other naked before we’ve kissed and fondled first. There is an etiquette, a protocol, even in impetuous, runaway sex. But kissing can happen right away, and, if people care for each other, then it’s less a prelude to mating than a sign of deep regard. There are wild, hungry kisses or there are rollicking kisses, and there are kisses fluttery and soft as the feathers of cockatoos. It’s as if, in the complex language of love, there were a word that could only be spoken by lips when lips touch, a silent contract sealed with a kiss. One style of sex can be bare bones, fundamental and unromantic, but a kiss is the height of voluptuousness, an expense of time and an expanse of spirit in the sweet toil of romance, when one’s bones quiver, anticipation rockets, but gratification is kept at bay on purpose, in exquisite torment, to build to a succulent crescendo of emotion and passion.

When I was in high school in the early sixties, nice girls didn’t go all the way—most of us wouldn’t have known how to. But man, could we kiss! We kissed for hours in the busted-up front seat of a borrowed Chevy, which, in motion, sounded like a broken dinette set; we kissed inventively, clutching our boyfriends from behind as we straddled motorcycles, whose vibrations turned our hips to jelly; we kissed extravagantly beside a turtlearium in the park, or at the local rose garden or zoo; we kissed delicately, in waves of sipping and puckering; we kissed torridly, with tongues like hot pokers; we kissed timelessly, because lovers throughout the ages knew our longing; we kissed wildly, almost painfully, with tough, soul-stealing rigor; we kissed elaborately, as if we were inventing kisses for the first time; we kissed furtively when we met in the hallways between classes; we
kissed soulfully in the shadows at concerts, the way we thought musical knights of passion like The Righteous Brothers and their ladies did; we kissed articles of clothing or objects belonging to our boyfriends; we kissed our hands when we blew our boyfriends kisses across the street; we kissed our pillows at night, pretending they were mates; we kissed shamelessly, with all the robust sappiness of youth; we kissed as if kissing could save us from ourselves.

Just before I went off to summer camp, which is what fourteen-year-old girls in suburban Pennsylvania did to mark time, my boyfriend, whom my parents did not approve of (wrong religion) and had forbidden me to see, used to walk five miles across town each evening, and climb in through my bedroom window just to kiss me. These were not open-mouthed “French” kisses, which we didn’t know about, and they weren’t accompanied by groping. They were just earth-stopping, soulful, on-the-ledge-of-adolescence kissing, when you press your lips together and yearn so hard you feel faint. We wrote letters while I was away, but when school started again in the fall the affair seemed to fade of its own accord. I still remember those summer nights, how my boyfriend would hide in my closet if my parents or brother chanced in, and then kiss me for an hour or so and head back home before dark, and I marvel at his determination and the power of a kiss.

A kiss seems the smallest movement of the lips, yet it can capture emotions wild as kindling, or be a contract, or dash a mystery. Some cultures just don’t do much kissing. In
The Kiss and Its History
, Dr. Christopher Nyrop refers to Finnish tribes “which bathe together in a state of complete nudity,” but regard kissing “as something indecent.” Certain African tribes, whose lips are decorated, mutilated, stretched or in other ways deformed, don’t kiss. But they are unusual. Most people on the planet greet one another face to face; their greeting may take many forms, but it usually includes kissing, nose-kissing, or nose-saluting. There are many theories about how kissing began. Some authorities, as noted, believe it evolved from the act of smelling someone’s face, inhaling them out of friendship or love in order to gauge their mood and well-being. There are cultures
today in which people greet one another by putting their heads together and inhaling the other’s essence. Some sniff each other’s hands. The mucous membranes of the lips are exquisitely sensitive, and we often use the mouth to taste texture while using the nose to smell flavor. Animals frequently lick their masters or their young with relish, savoring the taste of a favorite’s identity.
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So we may indeed have begun kissing as a way to taste-and-smell someone. According to the Bible account, when Isaac grew old and lost his sight, he called his son Esau to kiss him and receive a blessing, but Jacob put on Esau’s clothing and, because he smelled like Esau to his blind father, received the kiss instead. In Mongolia, a father does not kiss his son; he smells his son’s head. Some cultures prefer just to rub noses (Inuits, Maoris, Polynesians, and others), while in some Malay tribes the word for “smell” means the same as “salute.” Here is how Charles Darwin describes the Malay nose-rubbing kiss: “The women squatted with their faces upturned; my attendants stood leaning over theirs, and commenced rubbing. It lasted somewhat longer than a hearty handshake with us. During this process they uttered a grunt of satisfaction.”

Some cultures kiss chastely, some kiss extravagantly, and some kiss more savagely, biting and sucking each other’s lips. In
The Customs of the Swahili People
, edited by J. W. T. Allen, it is reported that a Swahili husband and wife kiss on the lips if they are indoors, and will freely kiss young children. However, boys over the age of seven usually are not kissed by mother, aunt, sister-in-law, or sister. The father may kiss a son, but a brother or father shouldn’t kiss a girl. Furthermore,

How did mouth-kissing begin? To primitive peoples, the hot air wafting from their mouths may have seemed a magical embodiment of the soul, and a kiss a way to fuse two souls. Desmond Morris, who has been observing people with a keen zoologist’s eye for quite a while, is one of a number of authorities who claim this fascinating and, to me, plausible origin for French kissing:

Our lips are deliciously soft and responsive. Their touch sensations are represented by a large part of the brain, and what a boon that is to kissing. We don’t just kiss romantically, of course; we also kiss dice before we roll them, kiss our own hurt finger or that of a loved one, kiss a religious symbol or statue, kiss the flag of our homeland or the ground itself, kiss a good-luck charm, kiss a photograph, kiss the king’s or bishop’s ring, kiss our own fingers to signal farewell to someone. The ancient Romans used to deliver the “last kiss,” which
custom had it would capture a dying person’s soul.
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In America, we “kiss off” someone when we dump them, and they yell “Kiss my ass!” when angry. Young women press lipsticked mouths to the backs of envelopes so all the tiny lines will carry like fingerprint kisses to their sweethearts. We even refer to billiard balls as “kissing” when they touch delicately and glance away. Hershey sells small foil-wrapped candy “kisses,” so we can give love to ourselves or others with each morsel. Christian worship includes a “kiss of peace,” whether of a holy object—a relic or a cross—or of fellow worshippers, translated by some Christians into a rather more restrained handshake. William S. Walsh’s 1897 book,
Curiosities of Popular Customs
, quotes a Dean Stanley, writing in
Christian Institutions
, as reporting travelers who “have had their faces stroked and been kissed by the Coptic priest in the cathedral at Cairo, while at the same moment everybody else was kissing everybody throughout the church.” In ancient Egypt, the Orient, Rome, and Greece, honor used to dictate kissing the hem or feet or hands of important persons. Mary Magdalen kissed the feet of Jesus. A sultan often required subjects of varying ranks to kiss varying parts of his royal body: High officials might kiss the toe, others merely the fringe of his scarf. The riffraff just bowed to the ground. Drawing a row of XXXXXs at the bottom of a letter to represent kisses began in the Middle Ages, when so many people were illiterate that a cross was acceptable as a signature on a legal document. The cross did not represent the Crucifixion, nor was it an arbitrary scrawl; it stood for “St. Andrew’s mark,” and people vowed to be honest in his sacred name. To pledge their sincerity, they would kiss their signature. In time, the “X” became associated with the kiss alone.
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