A friend of mine who does not like jazz – espe­cially any­thing that has a sax­o­phone in it – told me once about a con­ver­sa­tion she and her ex-husband, a seri­ous jazz-lover, had over din­ner with a cou­ple, the male half of which also loved jazz, while the female half felt sim­i­larly to my friend. This sec­ond woman defined her dis­like by say­ing some­thing along the lines of, “I don’t need to sit and lis­ten to a bunch of men mas­tur­bat­ing,” a ref­er­ence both to the empha­sis in jazz on the impro­vised solo and to the fact that most jazz musi­cians – or maybe most well-known jazz musi­cians – seem to be men. My friend said she felt an imme­di­ate click of right­ness when her din­ner guest made this state­ment, which led to a long dis­cus­sion about the com­par­i­son between music and sex, between impro­vi­sa­tion and solo sex – though, of course, jazz impro­vi­sa­tion is not usu­ally done in soli­tude. I have writ­ten else­where about the con­nec­tion I made early on in my own sex­ual awak­en­ing between the orches­trat­ing of sex­ual plea­sure dur­ing love­mak­ing and music, but what my friend’s story made me think about was how, say, a cer­tain kind of jazz solo, where the musi­cian explores sub­tle nuances of melody and har­mony, or the var­i­ous ways in which you can slice up a beat to cre­ate dif­fer­ent rhyth­mic tex­tures, cor­re­sponds to the kind of mas­tur­ba­tion in which you use the plea­sure you are giv­ing your­self to explore your­self, either through the fan­tasies that arise while you mas­tur­bate or through the dif­fer­ent kinds of aware­ness your solo love­mak­ing gives you of your own body; and then I thought about how rock solos or blues solos or the large solo con­certs that Keith Jar­rett once gave all have an ana­log in mas­tur­ba­tion, from the kind that is just a release of sex­ual ten­sion to the kind that is an affir­ma­tion in deep sad­ness and/or joy – and/or the entire range of emo­tions it is pos­si­ble to feel dur­ing sex, which means pretty much all the emo­tions of which human beings are capa­ble – of the fact that you are alive, which for me is what defines the sound of the blues, to the kind that is large and com­plexly moti­vated and that you may never fully understand.

Mas­tur­ba­tion is, as all sex is, a work­ing through of who we are and how we feel about our­selves, of what we wish for, of what we wish to avoid, of the his­tory of our bod­ies, of every­thing that makes us human in the capac­ity of our bod­ies to expe­ri­ence that human­ity; and there is a way in which sex is the cre­ation of a sym­bol of that human­ity: in the plea­sures we move through on our way to orgasm, not because orgasm is the only and nec­es­sary goal of sex – though in mas­tur­ba­tion orgasm usu­ally is the point – but because each orgasm, whether we are con­scious of it or not, is some­thing to which we have to give mean­ing, and mean­ing requires his­tory, not only the spe­cific his­tory of the sen­sa­tions that brought you to this par­tic­u­lar orgasm, but the larger per­sonal and cul­tural his­tory that each of those sen­sa­tions taps into. I know I’ve had orgasms that changed me. Some were soli­tary and some were shared, but all of them cap­tured a truth about myself that I needed to face if I was going to grow, sex­u­ally and otherwise.

This sym­bolic aspect of sex – which may or may not be an accu­rate way of talk­ing about these things, but which makes sense to me – reminds me as well of some­thing I read a long time ago in Suzanne Langer’s book, Feel­ing and Form about how music is the sym­bolic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the process of human emo­tion and that it is this sym­bol which the com­poser cre­ates on the page and that the per­former plays into exis­tence when he or she per­forms; and so it occurs to me that sex, solo or oth­er­wise, is the play­ing into exis­tence of that part of our­selves that is wait­ing to become, and some­times we will under­stand what we are becom­ing in and through sex, and some­times sex is what opens us up to the fact that this under­stand­ing is what we need to find.

So I am won­der­ing: What have peo­ple out there under­stood? What have they found? Which are the orgasms that have changed you?

Cross posted on Alas.