Wow. Looks like the last third of the book is going to be the best. Okay, so I flipped through and scanned to see what was coming up and realized that before we get into the sex, we have to recognize it as a metaphor and understand what’s going on here.
Isn’t making love merely an eternal repetition of the same? (p. 199)
(Which then would make it something of meaning, at least in Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return)
Not at all. There is always the small part that is unimaginable. When he saw a woman in her clothes, he could naturally imagine more or less what she would look like naked (his experience as a doctor supplementing his experience as a lover), but between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.
Ah, the "small gap of the unimaginable," is bound to intrigue. There we may find the hyperlink, the individuality of being that each reader writes with his own imagination because it leads to the unknown; unknown, because it is hidden from view and thus dependent upon what experience the reader/user brings with him. Does he then in fact change that which is hidden into a new ‘history’ for himself?
What is unique about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual "I" is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.
Sex being the metaphor, I would think, for the mind, the individual patterns of thinking and experience that makes us ourselves. Does communication then become foreplay? Does it depend upon how much effort one puts into it?
Yeah, this is going to be an interesting part of the book.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology