What seems the whole of our earthly being, our ur-humanity released through our flesh as through the other’s flesh, our animality mastered and yet unleashed— recentering and transfiguring everything that we thought possible in human encounter—entails a spiritual surrender. And I think there ought to be no shame in living as innocents before it as we discover this power in the face of our objects of desire. We cradle one another. We rock one another. The expressiveness of kissing naturally takes on qualities of nursing and oral play. Tickling and teasing, ostensibly such instinctive games of childhood, become adult speech acts testing and pushing the limits of one’s self-definition.