Consumption and Consummation

The world is cold, but I am warm. I navigate with the currency of temperature. My warmth sets me apart from the cold world and those who live the temperature ambient.

Warmth is radiation — the emission of announcement, the propagation of invitation, the extension of engagement. Warmth is reception and the redemption that comes with it.

As mammals, our family tree branches are umbilical cords; our inheritance is both genetic and epigenetic. Love builds over generations, altering genes, telling secrets to lovers read between the amino acid lines; carrying that special cargo of lightness that accrues, yet makes the vehicle more solidly planted on life's paths and not unwieldy.

Our life is warmth, as if rendered, fueled, and maintained by volcanism.

When we hold a body without warmth, it is immediately recognized as something that has joined the nonviable, the cold world — the cruel world. An interruption of connection, with us, is instantly sensed: a sick feeling; a sensation of loss; a push away; the cutting of the cord.

We are born to envision intimacy. We are born to embrace.

There are, first, the simple words — childen's words, e.g., snuggle, cuddle, nuzzle — which convey the child's thrills at contact and mutual engagement with another; and which are the homunculi of adult words, e.g., wriggle, straddle, and bedazzle.

We have evolved with senses that are attuned to two things, survival and reproduction; but these are the same thing. What separates us from other species are that we do survival and reproduction for a sentimental sum that is more than the addition of the parts. We're the same on an evolutionary level, so we're all together.

When one of us comes across a novel feeling, one of longing without a name, one of reaching without a reason, and one of giving without taking inventory, then there is an undercurrent, an undertow. It is a feeling that cannot be reasoned with or bargained with. It is a Terminator that terminates you: you are a new person.

You have evolved.

You have mutated into something better, superior to your former self. Both you and the one with whom you interweave are welded into another entity perfectly, by the mutucal warmth that beats with each contraction of the heart.

That novel sensibility is love.

It is the only bargain which both gives more than it gets and takes more than it yields. The senses are on fire!

Vision is filtered through the lens of the mind's eye.

Hearing turns on listening like at no time previously.

Olfactory recognition amplifies the forebrain with currents that waft all the way back to the soul.

Taste is delicious and rekindles the oral fixations with which we're all hungrily born.

Touch is the consummate sensitivity.

Touch is contact.

Touch is intimacy. Touch is heat conduction with a warmth that goes beyond the rising mercury. The closer we touch together, the higher that sensitivity. Closer and closer and closer, until we are inside another. And behind and in front of them at the same time. With them, for them; below and above them. Leading and following them.

Is there any more closeness than consumption of another — of their mind, their spirit, their actualization, their happiness? (And consumption of their sight, their sounds, their smells, their tastes, and their contact?) Is it cannibalistic to become the one you consume?

No, because that implies destruction. The consumption of love is not destructive, but additive, even exponential, with no ceilings in the way as you rise above all. It is communion, not unlike how the Eucharist is explained theologically. Consumption engendering a new holy beast is communion with a Supreme Being with whom you both partner. You are a Trinity.

Love is ominpotent, omniscient, and all merciful. Love is glorious. It smacks of an otherworldly happiness. It is its own reward. And it is the reason for all the serendipities that result in each one of us. And each two of us.

And each Three of us: Love is apotheosis; it is deification.

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See the companion poem to this piece, "Sum > Addition of the Parts," at https://vocal.media/poets/sum-addition-of-the-parts.