- by Arnaldo Jabor (translation by Adam Charles)
Saturday, I was taking a walk on the beach in search of inspiration for my newspaper article. I found two female friends on the sidewalk in Leblon. “Your article about love was a wreck…” – one of them told me. “That other one about women who shave down there too…I mean, what do you have against women who shave their parts?” – the other questioned. “Nothing…” – I respond, “I think its pretty, but I don’t find these parts attractive with a little mustache…it’s unavoidable…I start thinking of Hitler’s mustache, of Sarneys – they remind me of a little vertical Sarney on those nude models…and because of that, I think I still have more to write about sex…”
One of them (single and expressive) told me” “Sex and love are the same thing…” The other (married and practical) objects: “They aren’t exactly the same thing…” “Yes, no, yes, no” – A sweet debate was born right there on the seaside. I continued my walk and left the two pretty women discussing and drinking coconut water. And later I came to write about this old duality: sex and love. I started asking friends, both male and female, their opinions. No one really knew anything. The two categories screw themselves, leading towards either hypocrisy or cynicism; no one knew which was the chicken and which was the egg. I found that the more subtle ones defended love, as if “superior.” As for those more practical, sex is the only concrete thing.
With things the way they are, I’ll interject my own two cents. Love has a garden, a fence, a design. Sex invades everything. At the heart of it all, sex is against the natural law. Love depends on our desire, its a construction which we create. Sex doesn’t depend on our desire; our desire is what we have through it. No one masturbates for love. No one suffers with lust. Sex is a desire that pacifies love. Love is a type of after-the-fact gratitude for the pleasures of sex.
Love comes after. Sex comes before. In love, we lose our head, deliberately. In sex, the head loses us. Love requires thought. In sex, thoughts get in the way; unless used for fantasizing. Love dreams of salvation. Sex only thinks of prohibitions; there’s no such thing as permitted fantasies. Love is a desire to reach perfection. Sex is a desire to satisfy yourself with an end in sight. Love lives off an impossibility that could end at any moment. Sex is a desire to stop the impossibility. Love can get in the way of sex, but the opposite doesn’t happen. Sex comes with love, of course, but they never play together. Love is ownership. Sex is possession. Love is the law; sex is home invasion.
Love is the dream for a romantic spread of land to live on; but sex is homeless. Love is more narcissist, even in its “offerings”. Sex is more democratic, even while living on egoism. Love and sex are like the Greek word “farmakon”: remedy or venom. Love can be venom or a remedy. Sex also – everything depends on the adopted positions.
Love is a text. Sex is a sport. Love doesn’t demand the presence of the “other”; sex in the least needs a “hand”. Certain loves don’t need a partner; they flourish alone, in solitude or craziness. Sex, no – it’s more realistic. In this way, love is the search for illusion. sex is the brute will of truth. Love in many cases is like masturbation. Sex, no. Love comes from inside, but sex comes from outside. Love comes from ourselves while sex comes from others.
We aren’t victims of love; just of sex. “Sex is a jungle of epileptics” (Nelson Rodrigues) and “love, if not eternal, wasn’t love.” Love has the soul, eternity, language, and morals. Sex has morals too from outside its cage, where it roars. Love carries with it something ridiculous, pathetic, particularly in the great passions. Sex is quieter, like a cowboy – when he stops fighting, he comes and “eats”. They say “Make love, not war.” Sex wants war. Hate kills love, but hate can ignite sex. Love is egoistic; sex is altruistic. Love wants to beat death. In sex, death is there, in the mouth…Love says a lot. Sex screams, roars, but doesn’t explain itself. Sex always existed – from the caves of paradise to the massage parlors.
On the other hand, love was made by provincial poets of the the 12th century, and after, revitalized by American cinema from the Christan right. Love is literature. Sex is cinema. Love is prose; sex is poetry. Love is a woman; sex is a man – the perfect marriage is of the transvestite with itself. Domesticated love protects the production, salvage sex is a threat to the good functioning of the market. Because of this, the only way to control it is to program it, like the industries of the underworld. The market programs our fantasies. There aren’t “massage parlors” for love where the person enters and falls in love. However, in every brothel, one needs the pretense of a little love to get started. Love is becoming an hors-d’oeuvre for sex.
The problem with love is that it lasts a long time, while sex is over with much sooner. Love searches for a certain grandeur. Sex dreams of the lower extremities. The danger of sex is that you can fall in love. The danger of love is that it could turn to friendship. With a condom, there is “safe sex”, but there are no condoms for love.
Love dreams of purity. Sex needs sin. Love is the law. Sex is the transgression. Love is the single persons dream. Sex is the married persons dream. A lover satiates our true hunger, it kills our animal nostalgia. Sex needs something new and surprising. The greatest love one only feels through jealousy (Proust). The greatest sex one feels like the taking of power. Love is of the right. Sex is of the left (or not, depending on the political moment. Actually, sex is of the right. In the 60’s it was the opposite. Sex was the revolution and love was the tradition). Sex and love really try to take us far from death. Or not; who knows…
Tags: amor, amor é prosa, arnaldo jabor, arnaldo jabour, atrapalha sexo, brasil, brazil, brazilian politics, diabtribe, jornalista, journalist, poesia, prosa, truth, verdade
