So I went to the the museum Sunday and realized why I really am so fascinated and enamored by slug sex. For your voyeuristic pleasure:
1. It's sparkly. (Step aside, Edward Cullen.)
2. They are utterly detached from the world. With the exception of that one branch from which they so precariously hang, nothing else is needed, nothing else matters. The only thing they are touching is each other. How romantic! <3
3. They fully intertwine and encompass one another in the process. Their bodies don't get in the way of closeness /intimacy because they are literally wrapped up and held in each other's physicality.
4. They both have penises which not only bloom (like sakura flowers in mid-spring! none of that phallic skyscraper-sword violence and power imagery nonsense) but also are used to fertilize the other's eggs. There is no uneven power dynamic. It's the ultimate act of mutual-ness.
I found this poem lying on my desk one morning . While I was in high school, my father still clung on to the hope of imparting me with a stronger interest in and better, if not full, knowledge of Chinese. At this moment in time, let's just say it remains half-baked. Hopefully not for long though!
Regardless, this poem has stuck to me. Maybe because it's so different from the Tang dynasty poems I was forced to memorize and mumble aloud as a little kid. Or maybe it's because Xu Zhimo was a Chinese kid like me who received a Western education (Warning!: over-simplification to the max. That thought is just what goes on in my silly head. I readily confess our backgrounds are nothing alike. But I can't help the way my simple brain likes me to relate to other people.) He apparently fell in love with Keats and Shelley while he was at Cambridge then returned to China where he led the modern poetry movement. Who knows, maybe I don't even like the poem that much but am just delighted that I can translate it and am frustrated that I haven't seen another translation that is close enough to my own understanding of it. Here goes:
Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher By: Barbara Guest
I just said I didn’t know And now you are holding me In your arms, How kind. Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher. Yet around the net I am floating Pink and pale blue fish are caught in it, They are beautiful, But they are not good for eating. Parachuted, my love, could carry us higher Than this mid-air in which we tremble, Having exercised our arms in swimming, Now the suspension, you say, Is exquisite. I do not know. There is coral below the surface, There is sand, and berried Like pomegranates grow. This wide net, I am treading water Near it, bubbles are rising and salt Drying on my lashes, yet I am no nearer Air than water. I am closer to you Than land and I am in a stranger ocean Than I wished.
But... but parachutes can't and don't take us higher. They only lessen the impact of our plummeting fall through space. I'm guessing she knows "my love could carry us higher," her love being the only thing that could actually lift them up from this suspended state. Yet she stubbornly inserts that second comma and assumes this reassuring and slightly patronizing tone by addressing her lover, allowing her to sublimate that knowledge and depend on this object which is external to her to save them from the fall. But what is "the fall"?
