Dating Advice From . . . Glassblowers by Ariana Green Q: How does your job affect your skill set in the bedroom?
A: I work with beads, so I don't do much blowing. Working as a glassblower makes you immune to double entendres, by the way.
It's a standby among parlor-room conundrums: If you had to be deprived of all your senses save one, which would you keep? Taste, perhaps, if you were Paul Prudhomme and lived down the block from La Tour d'Argent; or smell, if Carolina wisteria bloomed outside your bay windows; some would say hearing, transfixed by the rapture of Beethoven or Bessie Smith; but most people would cling to sight, "the prime work of God" (as Milton called it after he lost his), and hope to fight back the haunting darkness.
Not I. For my money, if I could only retain one means of interacting with the world, it would be touch. Touch, soft like the powder on a moth's wing, the cool parabola of a slow-traced finger along my brow. I imagine myself blind as Borges, reading the Braille dots that circle a nipple or stroking the soft harp strings of down on my lover's belly. Deaf as the desert amid the seesaw scissoring of body on body, hearing through contact the syllables of joint and sinew, learning through movement the grammar of friction. My brain is full of visual images I won't soon forget; the jukebox of the mind contains innumerable tracks; I can recall the smell and taste of my favorite things almost at will; but of touch I require a constant transfusion. Something about touch defies memory — it is diffuse, complex and difficult to render in language. Aristotle was probably right that we receive all our knowledge through our senses, but touch is the only one I trust, and sex the language in which I'm least willing to lie. Fingers working like self-aware brushes on the electrified canvas of skin, a hundred million nerve endings in constant communion with the brain — that is the source of touch's appeal.
We've all temporarily experienced what it would be like to have only one sense (at least under ideal circumstances): headphones on and eyes closed, surrendering to the tweeter and woof, or full-mouthed and chewing, head thrown back in communion with the flavor of a morel. With porn, especially, we limit ourselves to a one-sense experience, even if more would be merrier. Internet smut is the worst: sitting unfeelingly in a desk chair, gazing through the blue flicker to unreachably distant, odorless, 2-D bodies gathering themselves in their pixels for our delight, the crotch and the eye connected by a single, throbbing nerve — not how I'd prefer my arousal. I don't think I'm alone in this opinion. Among allies in the cult of contact I think I can number the great Argentine writer, Julio Cortázar. Cortázar's chef d'oeuvre, the avant-garde novel Hopscotch, contains one of my favorite love scenes in modern literature. He paints it in a few hundred words, and in all five senses, but it's clear that touch is sovereign. Two eyes, two ears, one tongue, one nose, ten fingers. See what I mean? Reach out.
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from Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar, translated by Gregory Rabassa
Jack Murnighan's stories appeared in the Best American Erotica editions of 1999, 2000 and 2001. His weekly column for Nerve, Jack's Naughty Bits, was collected and released as two books. He was the editor-in-chief of Nerve from 1999 to 2001, before retiring to write full time and take seriously the quest for love.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
