No One seems to be enjoying themselves: Marc Gafni

Since the sexual revolution, ostensibly uninhibited sex is available in infinite variety in almost every imaginable social or commercial context, and yet we do not seem any better for it. So much sex and so little pleasure. So many orgasms and so little satisfaction.

A few decades ago sociologist David Reisman called sex the last frontier. If this is true then we have crossed it and found it wanting. Psychologists report that patients rarely complain about sexual dysfunction or repression anymore; what seemed to be the most common complaint in the days of Freud. Rather the malaise of our time is the lack of feeling or passion. Sex is all around and yet no one really seems to be enjoying themselves. It was T.S. Eliot who summed it up best in his epic poem, “The Waste Land”,

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass;
“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone
(III:249 — 256)

The secret of the cherubs politely and pointedly rejects both of these schools. The cherubs call out a completely different, wise yet wildly provocative understanding of what love and sex are and what they are to each other. The temple is built by men whose mythical names are lovers, David and Solomon. In its center a flagrant sexual image. It is this very conundrum that is the secret of the Cherubs.

Implicit in the cherubs’ embrace is the call to be a lover. The Secret of the Cherubs is no less than a Hebrew mystical Tantra. It is a mystical, tantric vision of what it means to be a lover-warrior in every fiber and facet of your being.

marc gafni
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