" 'Here I am!' puts the lover rather than any such ego into play, insofar as the lover is radically individualized and unsubstitutable." JLM

This is what bothered him so much. This is why he had to leave that room, that situation, that world. "I'm coming!" She said it. He expected it. He said it too. "Here I am!"--me, the one, the only one--the only me. I'm coming--I'm on my way--I will be there soon--so get ready.

Why do we announce this at the height of sexual frenzy? What is the sense of yelling it--announcing it--proclaiming it? Why does one feel the need to announce their own coming--their arrival on the scene? Their being given their there?

And, how exactly does that happen? How does cumming equal coming? How do I become me--unsubstitutably and irreplaceably--through the coming of cumming?

"At the moment of loving, the lover can only believe what he or she says and does under a certain aspect of eternity. Or, more exactly, under an instantaneous eternity . . ."

That's it, isn't it? This instantaneous--even if only momentary--eternity. This is the key to the equation of cumming with coming. That moment or cluster of non-moments that signify me are wrapped up in a temporary eternity that is outside of or beyond time, language, and the world. In that momentous eternity I am transported out of me--into a non-place--a non-world--a nowhere--that somehow results in my arrival--my-self entering the scene. This makes no sense. But I don't think it is supposed to.

"Orgasm, the only miracle that the poorest human condition can definitely experience--for it requires neither talent, nor apprenticeship, but simply a bit of naturalness--nevertheless leaves nothing to see, nothing to say, and carries away everything with it, even its memory."

In one sense, maybe it is a miracle. Anything that can suspend me and thus give me me at the same time seems to fit the mode of miracle. In this way, the comparisons to the experience of mystical union with the divine, or even the revelation of the hidden-God so popular in 20th century Christian theology are not hard to make. After all, it is an experience of nothing that leaves nothing and effects nothing. It is nothing and everything all at the same time.

And, it always leaves me wanting more--I want more of me to arrive, I guess. I want to yell-scream--proclaim--my coming through cumming every chance I get. Is that right? Is that what is happening?

"Orgasm is not a summit, from which one would descend in stages; it resembles a cliff that opens onto a void, where one falls all at once."

Well, this is certainly up for debate. Certainly it is not a uniform experience across ages, genders, cultures, etc. But, despite the clumsy overreaching, there is something essential here--this arrival of me--the "Here I am!" of orgasm is indeed a summit--a summit like all human summits. It signals the end of a descent--the end of a journey that involves climbing, obstacles, thirst, sweat, and maybe even tears--but like all human summits, going up includes coming down. This experience--this experience of me--is only a temporary eternity. Its instantaneity signals its temporality. Me is only temporary.

"If eroticization were to last without end, it would suspend the world, its time and its space--the erotic reduction would thus tear me definitively from the world."

Here it is--the tragic truth of the me situation. I can only come temporarily. I don't last forever. And, if I were too last forever I would be torn definitively from the world that gives me the possibility of me being me at all.

That's right, I would be dead.

Death and desire always go together. Love and annihilation are not enemies, nor even distant relatives. They are always closer than we think.

And, this is why he had to leave.

If one is going to arrive--to come--to come to the world by leaving it--to experience their own-self, even if temporarily, can and should it happen amidst the neon glow of a mechanical, technologized, and pornographic domain? And, more than that, should it happen in a time--in an interaction between one's-self and an-other--that carries no burden of expectation--no hope that something unexpected, something new, something totally out of the question might happen?

"Tonight could be the best night of our lives." BO

Cliche? Of course. To be taken in jest? Always. But, if it couldn't--if you tell me it isn't possible--or that I shouldn't hope for it--or "tonight definitely not"--well, then, I don't want to play. I don't want to play and I certainly won't come.