Being Real

"Your hero is searching for the real. And that is something that doesn't exist in life. Only in art." "But for us art becomes more real than life." (Very rough paraphrase from Passing Strange, a flawed, and extraordinary new musical (hey, that sounds like me!). Go see it if you possibly can.)

So it got me thinking--what is it that I yearn for? To me, 'sex' in American culture is this commodified shell of what sex can really be. There is this deep eroticism that is so much larger than just body parts vibrating and frictionating. It is like the moment in Beethoven's 9th when the voice's break the form of the symphony and ordinary life becomes 'quotidian'--something of beauty and meaning; transformed and utterly the same, ordinary and sacred. It is this thing that happens in the mind, where the mind stops thinking. No thoughts. No analysis. Just light and the space of a shell unfolding to reveal itself. And then you look at this person. This ordinary, boring, average, extraordinarily beautiful person who can take you out of your own sense of self and into places you never dreamed of.

And then I wonder, am I asking for too much? Maybe, sex is just sex. Nothing about eros and the life force and the transcendental. Nothing all that special. Nouns verbing. Bodyparts adjectiving. Emotions adverbing. Cigarette. That's it--maybe I really just need to try drugs!

Maybe my quest for the 'real,' or really the thing I'm yearing for is the 'sublime,'--maybe it is unattainable. I spent years actively searching for God. Praying to believe. Trying to show up to find a mystical experience. Only to decide that the quest validated itself, but I could no longer continue on a quest I didn't believe in. Maybe "sex" is just sex and God is a metaphor or a myth. I don't know.

And yet, I've experienced flashes of that sublime (and when I say sublime, I mean it the way the Romantics used it, with terror and aws), with Peter (a guy from long before the blog, 2005) and with Steven. Only brief flashes, fleeting and ordinary and extraordinary and beautiful. But if I've experienced it (although never with a man I actually had sex with), then it must be possible? I hope the 'real' I seek can be found in life and not 'just' in art. But I know how to find it in art. Over and over. Beethoven's 9th. U2. The 7th track of Sunday in the Park with George, Silly Wizard. Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto. The Beatles. Gershwin & Kern & Michael John LaChuisa and Caroline or Change. I know the sublime is alive and well.

Music and sex are the two things that make the knowledge of our own mortality somewhat bearable. Probably drugs too although I don't think I'm wired to find joy there. We, as a species, have moved from wine, women and song to sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. We keep trying to reinvent the wheel, make it 'real' and make it our own because living only in art is a way of ignoring, killing part of your soul. We have to have it in our quoticial lives. We crave the real. We need to make it our own. And the quest for the real, like the quest for God, validates itself because it keeps our soul vital and real.