The Kiss

The kiss is perhaps one of  art’s most ubiquitous themes. Auguste Rodin, Gustav Klimt, Konstantin Brancusi, they all did “the kiss”. And yes, you can Google if you feel like it. These works are icons of the contemporary. As for movies and tele-novelas, the kiss has become universal post-climactic obligation. Say Meryl Streep kissing Robert Redford. What pops into your mind but the movie “Out of Africa”? What about Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart? That would have to be Casablanca. The “kissing scene” is in the half-lit room above the bar that doubles as office. Here the doomed lovers finally stop pretending they knew each other in the not so distant past.

But what truly is in a kiss? What does one get from it besides Burt Bacharach’s suggested list: enough germs to catch pneumonia, a guy with a pin to burst your bubbles, lies and pains and sorrow?

The kiss are lips touching. They touch as if to resolve some ill-defined problem inevitably involving a deep feeling of some sort. Love perhaps. Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss. A sweet hairy little peck on the cheek, one must suppose, to signal the guards whom to arrest. That would have been only one of its most pragmatic functions. God only knows what would have happened if they arrested one of the apostles instead. But to be betrayed with a kiss seems the most poetic irony.

A kiss after all is symbolic of the giving and accepting of love. For Jesus to have accepted this kiss tells us that even though Judas was handing him over to his enemies, this act of betrayal was understood if not forgiven even before it was done. And Judas must have felt something too to have kissed the Saviour as his last act between them. He could have just pointed to him and said in a loud voice, “That’s him. That’s the man!”

But that would have been a big let-down for everyone including every director who ever had to recreate this scene on a set. Such a let-down as would seem funny. “That’s him. That’s the man!” How would that sit in the bible not to mention Mel Gibson’s epic movie?

And so as the bible has it Judas walks over to Jesus who is praying in the still of night and bends over to plant a hairy if gentle one ever so lightly on his cheek as men do. And as Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber would have it Jesus turns to him to ask, “Judas must you betray me with a kiss?”

Epic scene and one good question. Why indeed a kiss? Could it be that one always comes closest to betrayal when one loves? Are they only the inevitable two sides of a single coin? Both as of betrayal and as of love, the kiss is only really after all just a kiss. As a sigh is just a sigh. And as the song goes: the fundamental things apply, and so on.

But what is its most fundamental thing? Two lips come to each other and for the duration of time as one might be able to minimize breathing without passing out the universe comes together in an exchange of things beyond just warm saliva. The act is both symbolic and real.The kiss is to have another person in one’s mouth. What could it taste like?

It always depends. The context defines both its meanings and its taste. Is the kiss, the first act of intimacy between two lovers or is it their last? Are they doomed? Or is this some sort of Barbie fairy tale where they live happily forever and ever? What sort of kiss is this?

One ought never forget there are many. And the many may be done in a host of possible localities ranging from park benches to jeepneys and beds, each one becoming memory in the course of time. Yes, they do mark space and the passage of time.

And yes. The kiss remembered is always the most romantic of all. No unwelcome wetness to deal with here. Just the sweetness assumed by all things recalled in memory. And one never remembers the physical strain of assuming the rather uncomfortably twisted anatomical position every kiss requires. Face it. Nobody kisses for too long. It is perfectly understandable and hopefully forgivable if after an appropriate duration of time one moves on to other things perhaps more important.

The wine, for instance, is after all only either half empty or half full. The evening is only beginning. An we, at least, started well.