Tosh's Journal: September 21 (Henri Bergson & Sex)

TOSH’S JOURNAL

September 21

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.” When I think of my past, I immediately get an erection. The only thing I care to remember is my series of sexual conquests. Everything else is not essential. I used to know the names of my conquests, but now, all I can remember are their bodies, face, and intelligence. I was never a big fan of names because I have a hard time connecting something verbally to a face. It’s uncommon for a writer to admit this, but the visual image is far more important to me than the vocabulary. I think back to countless women I have touched, both in the literal and spiritual sense, and every one of them offered me great pleasure, that can’t be recorded by words on a page.

When I close my eyes, it is like being in H. G. Wells’ Time Machine, where I set the dials to a specific time and place, and go there. I can visit ancient civilization or the pre-war Paris years, by just imagining what it would be just like. I don’t need to be there, but just knowing a few names, for instance, Boris Vian, Juliette Gréco and of that sort, I already have a place and time in mind. So my time machine is me closing my eyes and transporting myself to that world. My sexual time-travelling sort of works the same. Some are real memories of actual fuck sessions, and others are “imagined” get-togethers where I focus on a beauty of my choice.

There is a secret club, only for men of a certain age, that I belong to called “Gas, Grass, & Ass,” where we discuss our sexual conquests among ourselves. It’s rude to discuss these things in an open forum or even in public, but within this club, we can freely discuss in detail our sexual adventures. The one rule is the fact that we never mention the name of the woman, or give any personal background on her, except what she is like in bed, and after all, we are gentlemen of a certain age and time.

One of the things we like to talk about is if we were in, or had the use of a Time Machine, who would we revisit for sexual pleasure. The irony is that this club only focuses on the past.  So in a sense, I’m in a room full of men who live in or for the past. Some say one cannot live in the past, but I think we all know that is not exactly true. The present only exists because there is a past.   How we perceive that “past” is how we see our present. The future we never know.

“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.” The one thing we all agree with is that each woman has her particular scent. I commented that I had a fantasy of sitting in a room blindfolded and the women that I share intimacy with comes in. I identify each one by their natural sexual scent. To be wrong, would be fatal! Nevertheless, it is interesting that all of us men at the club have a highly sense of smell, and that it’s a big part of our sexuality or desire. When I get home from our weekly meetings, I feel exhausted — drained even. The only thing that makes any sense to me is that “the pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already a memory.”