Tartuffe

Moliere’s Tartuffe parodied the idealization of soothsayers and seers who sell salvation. Tartuffe was for all intensive purposes trafficking in indulgences by which money would be paid for grace. Moliere’s play was not an attack on Catholicism, but surely it was characters like Tartuffe that Luther was complaining about when he tagged his 95 Theses up on the door of the church in Wittenberg. Today the lingua franca of salvation has shifted from the mind or soul to the body and it’s fitness instructors who are our new gurus. Devotees chase spinning instructors around gyms in Chicago, New York and LA, in the way they once sought out major chefs like Ducasse, Bouley, Batali or famous doormen like Marc Benecke of Studio 54, seeking out the grail of propreoceptivity. Near riot conditions have prevailed outside of some popular spin classes and there was even a legal suit when one agitated rider threw another off a bike at the 85^th branch of Equinox. Devotees of boot camps are willing to endure extremes of pain doled out by their drill sergeants while acolytes of great weightlifters practice their power clings, dead lifts and dips. Power lifting is what it’s called and if you feel that mass is for the pope you might go to see one of the practitoners of plyometrics (jumping and fast movements that are used by those training for the decathalon), pilates which employs a suspicious sounding instrument called the reformer or yoga. Naturally yoga has its own crowds of bona fide Indian gurus who practice Ashtanga Vinyassa. If that’s not enough for you, then you’re going to have to practice jiu jitsu, karate, thai boxing or MMA (mixed martial arts) where you will be seduced by the promise of submission. In von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel(1930), Professor Rath (Emil Jannings) falls in love with a beautiful cabaret singer Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) and sacrifices his dignity as his unrequited love turns him into a pitiable creature. A modern day sequel of The Blue Angel should be made about the aficionados of celebrity trainers teaching what in high school used to be a hated class called “gym.”

Kissing

Kissing is the ultimate form of intimacy. It’s not surprising that prostitutes will rarely consent to kiss a customer, though of course Marlene Dietrich, who plays a tawdry Weimar cabaret singer, does administer some pecks to her aging prey in Der Blaue Engel. But Herr Professor was not seeking sex; he was seeking love, a commodity that can’t be purchased, even in those precincts where civilization lays a cover of legitimacy on whoring. But getting back to kissing: sexual intercourse plays second fiddle to long hard kisses. There is simply no comparison. You can fuck anyone, but you can’t kiss everyone. It’s easy to understand the reasoning behind the hijab, which some Muslim women use to cover their faces. The lips of the mouth are the most explosively sexual of body parts. Labia are no match for the quivering sentries of the mouth, whether they are laced with collagens or not. And when it comes to orifices, the vulva can’t compete with the mouth, which also leaves the ears, nostrils, and anus far behind. A mouth is a world. Vaginas don’t talk, but the mouth is the receptacle for the emotions distilled by the higher brain, so that a kiss on the lips is, in fact, the instant where mind and body are united. There is nothing more vulnerable than the lips, and their power to transmit emotion is such that it creates a kind of temporary madness in which bad teeth, bad breath, and expectorate all lose their ability to produce an adverse impression. Love is the Trojan horse that allows the tongue entrance into the mouth.  When we think of French kissing, we are brought back to classic daguerreotypes of lovers on the Pont Neuf, but the kiss has a long and venerable provenance that goes back to the days when France was called Gaul.