only because the bodies remain Two that the kiss is possible. A rapid descent of the stairs or a mountain valley, of a drop onto the sea. The plunging heart.
I kiss you as if wrapped in a spring breeze, and I pour my whole tongue, my entire world, my very being into you. My whole being is in the tongue that kisses you and talks to you. I am in every point of your mouth, of your voice, of your body, of the unknown words of your tongue.
I maintain the kiss in the dark of night and the light of day. I maintain it in the time that passes. I maintain it in the burning rage of the world, in all its ferociousness. Lovers carve out their hiding holes, finding their peace from war, from the infinite pain of being. When they kiss the noise of the world is silenced, its laws broken, time is stolen from its normal continuity. They fall together in their distinct, embraced tongues.
I carry my first kiss from when I was a boy with me like an amulet. When I kissed the girl for the first time, she tasted of mint. She had pulled close to me in the dark oratory cinema room. Our hearts between us, beating. I had passed a threshold, and no other has ever been so sweet and mysterious. My tongue was in hers. I can still see her half-closed eyes and her face abandoning themselves on my shoulders. I found a tongue I knew nothing about. Did it even have an alphabet? A dictionary? A code?
Though there are long, drawn-out kisses, kissing competitions, Guinness world record kisses, the kiss is only ever fleeting when compared to the love story of the Two. The extinction of the kiss and, most importantly, of the desire to kiss one’s beloved is always an indication of a crisis, announcing the imminent demise of love.
To maintain the kiss means keeping the promise of the tongue, the promise of a secret that cannot be dissolved. The foreign and inappropriable nature of the tongue as that of the Other.
In the exercise Arianna asked me to do, a tension that came from the contraction of the abdominal muscles should have kept the knees from drawing apart. Indeed, as she explained, a certain tension is required to ensure an ‘enduring kiss’, to maintain that kiss. This tension is the same one that overwhelms lovers: will they know how to keep the secret of their foreign tongues? Will they know how to value the direction of their travel, the continual creation and dissolution of their kisses?
You know that when I kiss you, you who did not share that first kiss, you who became my woman, my wife, every one of our kisses is like the first. You know that when I kiss you, I still feel my heart in my tongue like in that first kiss. So, I maintain our kiss, holding my knees tight. I still hold your heart on my tongue and my heart on yours.
Is it really possible to give lessons on love? Obviously not. It is never possible to explain love, never possible to reduce love to a concept. It is, however, possible and necessary to speak of love, to keep on speaking of love, to the point that we can even say speaking of love is the only thing we can do when it comes to love. We speak so much of love because no one knows what it is. This book talks about love using a number of lessons that are not, in fact, lessons at all. It actually comes from a sort of ‘script’ written for the television series shown on Italy’s national broadcaster, Rai 3, entitled Lessico Amoroso [Lexicon of Love] (January–March 2019). A script that was so extensive, so rich in references, thoughts and themes, that it could not be fully developed using this format, given the fatal limitations of television.
So, here we have a series of seven brief ‘lessons’ that investigate the mystery and miracle of love, from the contingent event of the encounter to that of its end or its endurance, as mysterious and miraculous as the event of every first encounter.
Milan, January 2019
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