Cloud 9 Minus One

The other day I did a strange thing. In my mind I said the word ‘sex’. Now this is a commonplace enough word, and what is so strange about saying it. But as I spoke the word to myself, I realised how very little in life I’ve uttered the word ‘sex’. And as I repeated the word in my mind, a strange feeling suffused me. It was a feeling of, yes, ‘sexiness’. I felt all the elements of sexiness course through me. Desire, excitement, giddiness. I spoke, therefore I felt. This was different from reading it in books, or talking about it, or hearing panel discussions on the various aspects of sex as in ‘sex teaching for adolescents’, or reading in a woman’s magazine ‘ten ways to making your sex life more exciting’. It was different from telling my partner ‘let’s have sex’, though I bet that’s not how most of us begin foreplay. It was just the feel of the word on my tongue, the sibilant followed by the vowel, and then a more complex sibilant. It was about thinking of the word, and focusing on it, and allowing the mind to drift across all the emotions that the raw, naked word evoked. It was about, dare I say it? ‘connecting’ with the word, and all its images.
I wonder what would happen if I said the word ‘happy’. It is hard to say a word. It is hard to move away from the quotidian dictionary of banal communication and achieve communion with a single word, all by myself. It is hard to silence the mind and push it to focus on the kernel where such words and their images reside. It is hard to say, for instance, ‘I’m happy’ to another person, and mean it. Far easier to give in to exclamations and hyperbole, and flirtation with vocabulary.
In the beginning, it is said, there was The Word. Indeed there was. I’m trying to locate the beginning.