Making the Profane Sacred

In this excerpt from my memoir, The Stooge, George is my male self:

George and Cedar grew closer without the distraction of his fiancée. For years they carried on an evolving conversation that integrated art, dance, music, culture, spirituality, philosophy, mythology, sex, dreams, psychology, history, and the like. Both men aspired toward the sacred and helped each other clear the path to it through their discussions. Their friendship enriched them immensely.

As Cedar aged, he came to believe that sex should only be divinely compelled and so had become effectively celibate. He would have sex intra-maritally and then only to conceive a child. The emasculation implicit in such restraint effectively sickened George. Sex was the one activity where he felt in possession of himself as a man. He believed repressing sexual desire was unhealthy and wrong.

George revered sex as a cosmically exalted act, yet considered himself a pervert, though he was truly not. He felt like one because he intuitively and habitually embraced whatever made other people squeamish. For George, the path to the sacred was incomplete without the inclusion of the profane.

He would proclaim to Cedar, “I love fucking.” Cedar chafed at this, though he himself in his youth had partaken of the impassioned sex George was profanely and lovingly advocating. Cedar disapproved of the profane. George believed the profane would never be mastered unless it was accepted. For Cedar, this was a denial of God. For George, it was life-affirming.

George was known for speaking about sex and poop with delightful silliness and candor. He demystified the profane, making light of it in social contexts and bringing light to it in the bedroom through explorations with girlfriends. Eventually his openness lost its vitality. His humor and sexual explorations became rote exercises. The profane then offered nothing more to discover.

A flaw in George’s preoccupation with the profane was that it kept him from taking himself seriously. The profane is without dignity if it was too important. Yet fidelity to the profane would serve George well after he stopped trying to manipulate it, and once he was humble enough to let it be a teacher.

On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.