The Devil's Ice Cream Spoon and the Devil's Flypaper

And there is the devaluation of the thing, which is taken for granted, because people are generally willfully blind. I see a great deal of worth in the thing, a spiritual dimension that opens, quite often, and in this (yes, transactional) super-surface of the joined bodies, I often see pathos, noblesse and sometimes even generosity (as in, say it: a marriage). Although this is the surface of Eros when it goes out walking, when it goes for a stroll. It is true that this is rarer between men and women in this context, but it is by no means absent. It depends on what there is and what one is seeing. The act does not vary. The perceiver fluctuates wildly. There must be the genuine. It is not an abomination to see pleasure or even kindness there, even if you believe it is Golgotha. We must allow for the human softness, as ubiquitous as the human armor. The question of projection is sometimes seen as the crux of the thing. But that's not a given. It depends on one's objectivity versus one's primal (some would run to "infantile") cathexis. But I am mostly talking of men. Men are perhaps more transactional. There's really no way to talk about it without some idiot reverting to the sexism meme. And it's double-edged. You're guilty of sexism if you acknowledge its worth, because women are generally prey in this world.  And to say men are capable of a form of transcendence, a workable empathy, in what the pure believe is Golgotha, you're guilty of a second sexism, of bronzing an inequity in performance or affect. Something like that. These are, admittedly, generalizations. There is everything to be seen there, in that creamy realm, good and bad. To pretend it is one thing is like pretending that literature is one thing. It's madness to talk about it as if there were a unified field theory concerning its ultimate structure. Its substructure. Probably there will never be an atomism. It's as random as all other human interactions. In this lies the possibility of human ugliness and/or human beauty. Schools of social fish will veer as one, in an anxious silvery pack of pure reflection, hoping to demonstrate how aversion is enacted. It's like the flexing of a muscle under the sea. It's pure automatism, the subconscious, fear. They are trying to school you. But to allow one's surface to become a mirror at that moment is to admit the absence of any true interiority. It is to be as dumb as a fish.