Kissing Revisited

A few days ago, I wrote about my experiences and confusion about kissing. I called it pointless because there didn't seem to be a final cause to it, but this just means I've emphasized this to the exclusion of the more phenomenal aspects to it. I focused on the final cause and purpose to the body parts and their acts, and thereby reduced the person to mere body parts. I suppose what I forgot was that when we kiss, or at least when I kiss, I kiss you because as you are an object of beauty, I want to be united to you not just as a body, but to you embodied, the distinction being that you are more than a sum of your parts. 

There are cases when we regularly focus on a physical part of person to represent that entire person. The Bible says that the eyes are the lamps of the body. It also says that out of the mouth the heart speaks. Modernly, we use the word "ass" like this all the time. I'm going to kick your ass, get your ass over here, I tapped that ass, look at my big ass house and my small ass car, and so on. The same is said about the mouth. When I say something bad, my mom smacks me in the mouth. She might put soap in your mouth, and tell you to watch your mouth. If you have nothing to say, we ask if the cat got your tongue, and if you have something witty to say, we say you have a sharp tongue. 

None of these things are supposed to be taken literally. If I kick your ass, I didn't just give you a swift kick in the rear, but I completely and utterly beat you. Putting soap in your mouth doesn't literally do anything to your vocabulary and doesn't make it unlikely that you'll be physically incapable of uttering whatever blasphemies children can think of, but it does symbolize a part of you that is central at that moment, a part that deserves recognition and emphasis, and the mouth constantly deserves attention. We keep our mouths closed when inactive, and we don't eat with them open. We wipe ourselves if we eat wings, and we cover them up if we somehow need to speak immediately, or we will wait until we have properly swallowed all of our food. We might not do the same if we had a small dab of bar-b-que sauce on our elbows. 

The mouth, and the face in general, is almost always used as shorthand to represent the entire person. So when we kiss, it's a short hand version of saying, I want to be united with you. The non-shorthand is sex, full body activity. I wonder what blogs I will write when I start experiencing that haha. Naw. I don't kiss and tell ;-)