Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

There was a pounding in my dream. Could it be the surging chant of the Crystals’ killer line, “And then he kissed me”? It seemed to me I was about to have the wild gaze and wilder hair of Natalie Wood or Harpo Marx descend on me. But as I awoke I realized that the eager head was Lassie come home. Kissing can be pretty nice, you used to hear. Between the ages of ten and thirteen, in the dark, kiss-kiss scenes went from being squirm-making to I can’t get enough of this. There were teenagers in the back row at the Regal and the Astoria who seemed to be going further still. What a time! Where has that habit gone? Was it waning at the movies well before Covid? Had “sincere” love stories turned comical, shoved aside by deadpan ironies for kids to sneer at? There was a time when filmgoers wept over love stories. Past the age of fifty, you may recall the collisional rapture of two faces and the overflow of mouths. Did waves peak in oral caves? Tongues winding in the dark. The binge streaming with saliva. Are you beginning to be thrilled or nostalgic in our protocols of distancing? Or does such sensual language feel awkward now? Foreplay rhapsodies from 1959 are generally as dead as On the Beach or Ben-Hur. In that same year, Some Like it Hot served up sex as a buffet of custard and blancmange, but the sweets tasted sour to warn us that the old association with love was demented. Hot could be very cold. Still, I love the metamorphosis from Harpo to Lassie, and every station on that line. Even if we’ve forgotten the other creature’s name, we only have to close our eyes and inhale to regain the hesitation and its wondering — will the other mouth be open to us? Real kisses depend on risk. So here’s a cue. I won’t tell you yet where it comes from, except to say it seems more or less modern, though that could tell you how old-fashioned I am: “The voice fell low, sank into her breast and stretched the tight bodice over her heart as she came up close. He felt the young lips, her body sighing in relief against the arm growing stronger to hold her. There were now no more plans than if [X] had arbitrarily made some indissol-uble mixture, with atoms joined and inseparable; you could throw it all out but never again could they fit back into atomic scale. As he held her and tasted her, and as she curved in further and further toward him, with her own lips, new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant, he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes. ‘My God,’ he gasped, ‘you’re fun to kiss.’ ” Are you having fun, or imagining it? As I re-read this book during the pandemic time, I felt not just the fun but also the falling. Isn’t this [X] slipping into love, or into his adolescent scheme of that condition? And I felt yes, that’s what it can be like, even if the scene is confined to his point of view. He decides; he makes the move; he tastes her. She is there, no doubt: she curves in towards him; she has and uses her own lips. It’s possible that she detects “fun,” too, but we don’t quite know that as we brim with his feelings. I’m not yet saying where the passage comes from. But I feel its behavioral accuracy. Then as I read it over more slowly, I am unsure whether it deserves to be regarded as Serious Literature or romantic pot-boiler. In the age of movie, so many novels turned randy. A bodice is mentioned, and though it isn’t ripped you can feel it yielding. Or does that depend on the reader being male, or as “turned on” as I suspect the author was while writing it? The passage comes from a novel, and it does reproduce the awe and the urgency of a man in that situation. But it reminds me of how the movies used to do such scenes. The man is there, aroused , though literary propriety does not allow him a physical tumescence or require that he start to undress her and get to the matter of what was called “sex” for so long. Is he watching himself doing it, as in a movie? Had that cultural weight gathered by the time the passage was written? Maybe today she would undress him, a decisiveness that would once have been as shocking as nakedness on screen. You see, there was a time when going to the pictures was finding an impossible window to gaze on provocative strangers or other available views that you might be granted. You would stand before a prairie that could be your ranch, or a suave bedroom for amorous splendor; you might buzz a frisky auto down the highway, or land a single-engine aircraft on a rocky south American plateau. Or you might shift forward, more from desire’s magnetism than real motion, and collapse into the arms of Alain Delon or Doris Day. It cost a quarter to behold Colbert or Lombard in and out of Travis Banton gowns on Park Avenue. The cusp between absurd luxury and common poverty was as taunting as the one between your plain-faced envy and the sated narcissism of a movie star. The medium sighed, all the time: “Don’t you want us?” Can you believe how that innocent longing subdued Depression or war? The continent of old movies shines with all its absurd hopes. Isn’t that the special thing with humans – it can work with love and death – that wondering means the most? And so we swim against the current that says you could have him or her, or both of them, or you might die tonight. I am