Any Ideas? (V)

[We continue our inventory of Leading Ideas.]

(8) […Your contribution here…]

           

            The list is getting abstract  more quickly than I had planned, so let us pause and consider rather the great mystery, Sex.  Since all of us  have, at one time or another, spent a great deal of time and energy related to this topic, and since its centrality and phenomenology may be met with in all eras and cultures, one would hope that we could come up with at least one related Idea.  This alas turns out to be difficult.  Of purported Lessons Learned  there may be several (beyond the agnostic “Women – I’ll never understand them” or the universal-negative-existential, “There is nothing like a dame”), but these, I fear, are more than usually subject to individual relativism, and even (worse) to self-deception or bad faith. 

            The best I can come up with at the moment (though if  you counter with a better, I shall quickly say I knew that), is that -- lust aside -- there really and truly and lastingly is, a sort of…  cleavage…well, no, let us choose a different word…a -- a cleft, -- no -- a slit – a, a clit -- no, that won’t do…an interstice, a fissure, a scissura  at the center of the species, which is never ultimately bridged.  In this  it differs from disparities of race or religion or nationality, which initially may present more of a hurdle between would-be communicants  than difference of gender (indeed there is a period, in early childhood, where the latter hurdle is notably low) but which tend to dissipate with increased familiarity, and which (importantly) admit of intergradations (an ancestry half-French, half-Spanish is normal; half-man, half-woman, a monster).  In the former cases, the closer you both come to perfect understanding, the closer you *can* come; whereas in the latter, when it seems that the nuclei are truly about to fuse, you fall in love, and everything blows up in the air.

[Fortsetzung hier.]