Cheeky revel

The culture offers two roads: push the desire down, or run off with it. Each carries me somewhere I had no need to go. Cheeky revel is the third road, in which I look at the woman and go nowhere, and I regard the going-nowhere as the accomplishment.

The feeling arrives, the body grins, and because the outcome is off the table, nothing accrues. The squashing and the acting-out are both sidestepped. What remains is a man enjoying a private grin at a stranger in a café, and I have given that a name and a ladder.

The part that matters to me is that it is a skill, and a skill that makes itself redundant. It is a first step, never the destination — a launch-point into a fuller appreciation of the whole field. So it comes in rungs, and the better I get, the less of it I need:

1. Rung 0 — squash or squander. Desire fires and I either decline it, poker-faced, or run off with the fantasy. The old default. I have replaced it with a more refined version of looking.
2. Rung 1 — the full revel. The slow build, no rush: let it land, savour the cheek of it, let the room open around the grin. Faintly theatrical, but right for a beginner. This is the coffee-shop scene, which I have described at length and consider foundational.
3. Rung 2 — the launch-point. To the brink, then off elsewhere. The grin stops being somewhere to sit and becomes somewhere to push off from. Appreciation begins to mount here, by which I mean I feel even better.
4. Rung 3 — the quickie. Blink and you miss it. The energy is channelled for an instant before I am already in wide-eyed sensuosity. Barely a revel. I have nearly automated the looking.
5. Rung 4 — outgrown. All afterglow, no act required. Desire fires, registers, and I find I was already enjoying myself. The scaffolding is gone, and I am simply a man having a nice time near attractive strangers, which was the destination all along.

The dial turns one way only — toward needing it less — and the punchline is that one day you notice you forgot to launch, because you never left. I present a discipline whose perfected form is indistinguishable from not practising it, and I do not find this troubling.

A senior critic has read this page line by line. He files the correction I made — the pleasure was first called "sensual," then edited to "affective" — as incriminating.¹ He also says the larger thing is just endorsing good feelings.² He has the facts right and the reading upside down. The body grinning is not a remnant of anything; the body is the thing that grins. I consider this a complete answer and have nothing to add.