I hope you have been to the shops and stocked up on your stationery because, unbelievably, autumn term is upon us. Even though we knew it had to come, there’s sure to be someone who turns up on day one without a pencil.
Don’t let that be you.
The readiness is all.
Let us breathe together, and gently return to our studied with a meditation on the very origin of kissing.
Imagine, if you will, a time before writing - 540 million years ago when we were all little deuterostomes floating about the world. Back then, of course, we had no hands so writing simply wasn’t an option. In fact, all we could do was wriggle.
Imagine.
Later, when we found words, we would call this earliest version of ourselves the Saccorhytus Coronarius.
The Coronarii lived in the sea.
Our mouths were enormous in relation to our tiny bodies (which measured about 1mm across) and we kept our lips open all the time. In those heady days, we lived unconstrained by law and love so we let our spittle drift out of us into the waters and from there, it found its way into the open mouths of our friends and colleagues.
Now, take a moment to imagine yourself, floating about, open mouthed in the ancient ocean.
Arguably, the biggest kiss in history.
Some years later, the Coronarii began to evolve and thinking began.
Our first thought was that we wanted to be alone and so we crawled onto the land and we closed our lips.
And so it followed that our first possession was saliva.
We would grow to be very proud of this, our first possession, and we imbued it with immense spiritual value. I am drawn, here, to share the words of the French anthropologist, Marcel Griaule:
One can be hit full in the face by a truncheon or an automatic pistol without incurring any dishonor; one can similarly be disfigured by a bowl of vitriol. But one can’t accept spittle without shame, whether voluntarily or involuntarily dispatched.
For spittle is more than the product of a gland. It must possess a magical nature because, if it bestows ignominy, it is also a miracle-maker: Christ’s saliva opened the eyes of the blind, and a mother’s “heart’s balm” heals the bumps of small children.
Spittle, too, accompanies breath, which can exit the mouth only when permeated with it. Now, breath is soul, so much so that certain peoples have the notion of “the soul before the face,” which ceases where breath can no longer be felt.
Saliva is the deposit of the soul; spittle is the soul in movement.
And so we come to our first idea.
Our first idea was the soul.
It was a really good idea, although sadly it resulted in war. So we had to have another idea - making up. In time, this would lead to yet another idea (an idea buried deep within our ancestral brain) - a willingness, even a desire, to open our mouths to each other once again.
To kiss.
This was perhaps our best idea ever.
But whose idea was it?
Very old history is shrouded by veils of forgetfulness but it’s our job to lift these veils and peer at the face beneath.
And what we discover under the veil is that the kiss is first described around 1500 BC in Vedic Sanskrit poetry and it crops up throughout ancient Indian literature. In the Mahabarata is written, ‘she set her mouth to my mouth and made a noise that produced pleasure in me.’ It is widely believed that Europeans knew little of the kiss until Alexander the Great went to visit the Elephants and happened upon one under a Banyan tree.
I want you to take a moment to imagine yourself in the full warmth of an Indian summer - inventing the kiss.
Inspired by the East, the Ancient Greeks started to kiss and then they put one in the Iliad. The Romans saw it and stole it like they stole everything else. When the Romans built an empire, they used the kiss to make up for all the violence that that entailed. And everyone loved kissing, so the Roman Empire was a great success.
Take a moment to imagine yourself an ancient Briton on the banks of the Thames, seeing a kiss for the first time in your life.
What would it look like?
What would it feel like?
I posit that, deep within their occupied bones, the Britons, the Gauls and the Hispanics hold a memory of that first kiss - the kiss that stole their soul, the kiss that would make them forever, in a sense, Roman. And they took this memory into their own age of empire. So it was that, when their turn came, these colonisers took kissing across the world, hoping not only for the world’s gold but for something infinitely more precious.
It was effective.
But only up to a point.
For many cultures simply didn’t want to return to their ancient sea roots. As late as 1929, the anthropologist, Henri Junod, documented the attitude of the Tsonga people of South Africa to the European kiss: ‘These people,’ said the Tsonganese, ‘they suck each other. They eat each other’s saliva and dirt.’ Indeed, throughout Africa, the Americas and the nations of the Pacific, it seems that the kiss, as the camera, was greeted with as much suspicion as delight.
Take a moment to imagine yourself closing your lips to protect your soul.
And now I want you to take a moment to ask yourself -
Has a kiss ever stolen my soul?
Has a kiss ever stolen my soul?
And here - our meditation ends.
And here we are in the second wave.
The new term.
I will see you for our first lesson soon enough.
Don’t forget your pencil.
Date of publication : 5.10.20