Date of publication : 10.11.20
There is nowhere to go but deeper….
Deeper into your studies.
Deeper into your studies.
Deeper into your studies.
Deeper into your studies.
Deeper into your studies.
Deeper into your studies.
Deeper into your studies.
But I can’t.
You can.
You just need to find the way to go deeper.
Deeper into your studies.
Deeper into your studies.
Deeper into your studies.
Deeper into your studies.
Deeper into your studies.
Deeper into your studies.
How can I go deeper without a guide?
I had a teacher once she said - There are loads of different ways to learn honey loads of different ways to learn.
There is theory.
There is practice.
There is following.
There is leading.
O honey there are loads of different ways to learn.
All you have to do is go deeper.
She was my guru.
.
.
.
.
.
.
She said -
Just think about the first kiss back in India all those years ago…
Do you imagine those kids studied in books?
Did they write proposals?
Apply for grants?
No.
She told me two lovers were sniffing each other one day and they slipped. A happy accident - she said - like penicillin.
She called them the great innovators and spoke of them only with her eyes closed.
And she’d invite me to do the same.
.
.
.
And when did this happen?
I would ask.
Three or four thousand years ago…
She would say.
And sigh.
The first kiss.
As if she’d been there.
.
.
.
She reminded me how our first record of kiss-like activity is found in Vedic Sanskrit. It translates literally into English as - smelling with the mouth - and this gave rise to the theory of a sniff that became a kiss - the sniff that slipped. In fact - she would say - some anthropologists believe that this Indian kiss does not even count as a strict kiss at all - and here she would throw her hands in the air - but what do I care for man-words and who is Edward Washburn Hopkins anyway?
And when I asked - who is Edward Washburn Hopkins - she’d say -
O honey.
And she would go on -
In 1907, Edward Washburn Hopkins, in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 28, wrote an article - The Sniff-Kiss in Ancient India. He explains that this sniff was a matter of family law in the Vedic texts. The law required that a father of a new born baby must three times sniff the head of the child to bless it with long life. Now you know - she’d say - that in Sanskrit - the word for breath - Ātman - also infers the Soul just as - she’d say - the Ancient Greek word Pneuma - also meaning breath - also infers the Soul - or the spirit - or the holy spirit - in the Gospel of St John - she was brought up a Catholic my teacher, though she was a long time lapsed - Kissing is Breath and Breath is Soul - she’d say - And in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad we learn that when we embrace we forget the whole world we forget all that is within and without. But - she’d warn me - if you embrace only the self then you will know neither within nor without. You must forget to know - my child - and forgetting is a different way to learn - and she would see my poor confused brow and -
Take a pause.
She’d say -
And forget everything that had I have said.
.
.
.
You will not find the kiss - she’d say - in books.
But in breath.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Saliva in motion.
And in those days in ancient India - she’d say - if a father were to go on a long journey away from home for many months, then the law of the Vedic texts required that, on his return, he sniff once again at the heads of his little ones and low like a cow.
.
.
.
And we would smoke and think on this awhile.
.
.
.
.
.
.
One day she lent over me, kissed the hair on my head three times, and then left me forever.
She was my guru.
The one who takes you from the darkness into the light.
.
.
.
.
.
.
And now I sit alone at my desk in 2021 and it’s cold outside and I open her well worn copy of The Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1907, Vol. 28 and turn to The Sniff-Kiss in Ancient India by Edward Washburn Hopkins and I scan the old familiar words. Hopkins claims the first truly modern kiss is to be found in Sanskrit at the close of the Vedic period (around 400BCE) and I’m in no position to argue with him. I never learnt Sanskrit because I mistakenly imagined there were loads of different ways to learn when I was young.
Edward Washburn Hopkins translates, from the oldest metrical Dharmaśāstra, this phrase -
Drinking the moisture of the lips …
And there it is. The first written kiss in history. For context, we are told that a man is caught and punished for drinking the moisture of the lips of a slave woman. He is punished for touching his lips to the lips of his inferior and this is against the law.
The first kiss.
We are no longer little deuterostomes floating about in the ocean with open mouths, sharing our saliva thoughtlessly and generously.
We are civilised.
It is said that when Alexander the Great rode across to India in 327 BCE, he knew nothing of elephants and he knew nothing of kissing. But soon he learned, for this was the Golden Age of Indian Literature. India offered no less that twenty-six types of kisses - all to be documented within the Kama Sutra. My favourite category is kissing ‘from a distance’ - a sophisticated kiss which involves touching your lips to the reflection of your beloved in a mirror or in the still pool of a fountain or - if your lover has no reflection - maybe just kissing a wall and thinking of them but I'll stop here - for you are all quite capable of researching the details yourselves. The English language Kama Sutra is no longer hidden away from polite society within the 1888 publication for private circulation as it was during the Colonial era. And it is now more than half a century since the publishing houses of London and New York raced around obscenity laws to release a new edition for the dawn of the Age of Aquarius. And there is no longer any need to sneakily thumb through this 1963 print between the bookcases of the University Library. For after the sixties came the seventies came the eighties came the internet.
And it is all there.
.
.
.
So many different ways to learn.
.
.
.
The internet is huge. It seems infinite. I am wandering through its halls with no guide - searching for the first kiss…
My teacher would have laughed at me.
O honey.
She’d say.
You won’t find it here! A faulty map will never guide you to your destination -
But she’d be wrong!
Here it is! The first kiss -
O no. This is not the first kiss, but the first Kiss of Love protest in Kerala, India. Activists kissing each other in the streets to protest against harsh moral and sexual policing. I learn how the kissers are torn from each other by religious and political conservatives who beat them with canes. More protests. More public kissing. The movement grows until in Kolkatta it takes on a slogan -
HOKCHUMBAN!
(LET US KISS!)
The conservatives retaliate -
PASHCHIMI SABHYATA VAAPAS JAO!
(WESTERN CULTURE GO BACK!)
But where should the kiss go back to?
Where is the origin?
For it came to the West from the East
.
.
.
.
.
.
I hear once again the words of my teacher through half remembered veils of smoke…
There is nowhere to go but deeper.
Deeper.
Deeper.
Deeper.
And I know it in my heart - we will not find the first kiss on the internet.
Because no one wrote it down and no one took a picture.
There is only one way.
.
.
.
And that is to close your eyes and go deeper and listen to the sound of your breath and go deeper and low like a cow.
And let be.
EXERCISE LESSON NINE
Let be.
Poster design : Obsession ‘77 LP (1981)
Jeux de Dames - Pari de Zobeide : Leonor Fini (1975)
Representation of Cow and Family : Artist Unknown
Blaze (Detail) : Bridget Riley (1964)
Krishna and Radha exchange clothes in the moonlight: Artist Unknown : From the Fitzwilliam Museum collection
A selection of gathered ancient paintings and carvings of the Khajuraho temple (circa 950-1050)
And a picture from Time magazine
And some anonymous lips
Fragment of Urbino Monte World Map
A Lady Playing the Tanpura, India (circa 1735)
Date of publication : 10.11.20