Sex

is a word that deserves our deepest sympathy . . .

Photo: © David Whyte

SEX

is a word that deserves our deepest sympathy. Sex is a word that has never been able to do its job properly, because it never had a chance of carrying the meaning we ask of it. Sex is a poor, put-upon word that has been asked to carry on its too short back, in its single brief, appropriately flattening syllable, something it was never qualified to hold and something it was never qualified to explain. Sex is a salacious word exactly because it veils what it means, and simultaneously promises far more than it can ever deliver.

Sex is a word we use to describe something we have actually become afraid of understanding and therefore want to abstract into a false form of knowledge, hence, the falsity of the word. We mention that two people had sex as if we know what actually might have happened between them, when in actual fact the couple in question rarely know what happened to them, either individually or as a temporary duo. What actually happened is calibrated by the presence or absence of incalculable physical and imaginative chemistry. Sex is how we describe something from the outside in; a word we use when we become afraid of investigating the very origins of attraction and passion itself, when we are afraid of carrying from our deeper and darker unspoken sources, the truer understandings that might transform our outer, light-filled world.