“From Butterfly Kisses To Blunderbusses”

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“Kissing is a pleasant reminder that two heads are better than one.” —Rex Prouty

“Never let a fool kiss you or a kiss fool you.” —Joey Adams        

Clemson, SC—(Weekly Hubris)—5/31/10—It’s long seemed odd to me that while Jacob kisses his son Isaac in Genesis, and Paul advises his followers in Rome to “greet one another with a brotherly kiss,” Christians as a rule do not brush lips when they meet family or friends. In part, the medieval repugnance for Judas’s kiss of betrayal led to the brotherly handshake. There are exceptions, of course, in Catholic South America and Orthodox Russia, but in most Northern European and English-speaking countries, the chaste pumping of right hands is the rule. Muslims must consider us hopelessly aloof.

I was reared in part by a victim of Dr. John Watson’s don’t-spoil-the-baby-by-kissing-it policy, but a Southern mother, several girl friends, my wife, and our children helped me overcome a slow start. Approaching family and close friends now, I lead with my lips and arms extended chest high, instead of extending my right hand from the hip like a gunfighter. Approaching a potential kissing situation, I’ve found that it helps to keep the eyes open in the event of the stray hand bent on shaking. In that case, I can change course, and we can shake or, as often happens, the right hands shake while the left hands hug the back.

Unlike their Northern and Midwestern neighbors, American Southerners often greet each other with a hug and a kiss of the “air” variety. If this virtual variety is an inferior kiss, how is one to judge the real thing?

Lord Byron thought a proper kiss should produce a “heartquake,” but that partakes too much of a cardiac event for me. John Paul Sartre thought that a mustache was as necessary to a good kiss as salt is to a boiled egg. Having never kissed a mustachioed lip, I shall refrain from any judgment but, since an unsalted egg is “”pert nigh” inedible, as we say in Pickens County, I’ll assume he’s right. Though not in the same league as Byron or Sartre, Johnny Hart, creator of B.C., argues in one strip that a good kiss makes your toes tingle, while a great kiss ignites your shoe laces. I’ve melted the ends of a few nylon laces in my day, but I’ve never given or received an oral hotfoot.

The best description of a great kiss comes from the anonymous comic who observed that his girl friend “kissed like a vacuum cleaner with all the right attachments.” That being the case, how did “suck” become a pejorative?

Since all of the above are the vagaries of poets, comics, and philosophers—what examples do the sciences offer? Chimps and moose are often seen nuzzling platonically during the mating season, while bonobos act like honeymooning crack addicts. But none of these beasts comes close to the tender passion of the paramecium. These one-celled animalcules conjugate so intimately that when their “kissing” is over they share each others’ genetic material and soon split into four.

Having illustrated the good kiss, the “anatomical juxtaposition of two orbicular muscles in a state of contraction” should be easy. Unlike Henry Gibbons, whom I just quoted, Sigmund Freud was serious when he defined a kiss as “one special form of contact, which consists of the mutual approximation of the lips’ mucous membranes . . . .”

I apologize for attacking one of the great minds of the 20th century, but mucous should have no part in kissing. The vigorous exchange of saliva is another matter, but I would not discuss that point at any length with my loved ones, nor would I in the boudoir ever use such colloquialisms as “tonsil hockey,” “suck face,” “face rape,” or “going for sushi.”

Other worst-case scenarios include Sylvia Plath drawing blood the first time she kissed Ted Hughes; Ben Affleck ogling another woman as he kissed his gorgeous wife (they divorced a short while later); Chico Marx explaining that he wasn’t kissing a woman; he was “whispering in her mouth”; and the oscular greeting of two women who reminded H.L. Mencken of “prizefighters shaking hands.”

Perhaps the worst kiss of all was not the one Judas Iscariot planted on the cheek of Jesus of Nazareth or the ass-kissing we see in the halls of Congress. It was bestowed in Saguenay, Quebec in 2005 when a 15-year-old girl kissed her boy friend who’d just finished a peanut-butter cracker. Poor Christina Desforges died of anaphylactic shock occasioned by an acute peanut allergy.

Art, both high and low, provides some convenient markers for judging a kiss. Photography offers numerous examples, but Robert Doisneau’s posed embrace outside the Hôtel de Ville is clearly inferior to the spontaneous kiss captured by Alfred Eisenstaedt in Times Square on V-J Day. [By the way, all of these images may be found at Google Image.]

Likewise Hollywood films, built on the “kiss-kiss-bang-bang” premise according to Pauline Kael, offer several pairings for consideration. But Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr’s kiss in the surf is surely a better model than Rudolph Valentino’s eyebrow semaphore of his intent to kiss Vilma Banky. Sculpture has fewer examples to draw from, but they are often more memorable than film. Constantin Brancusi’s lock-jawed couple (are their orthodontic braces hooked?), while amusing does not favorably compare to Auguste Rodin’s sensuously entwined lovers. Finally, painting offers a wealth of famous examples. Gustav Klimt’s kiss, which is almost lost in the gorgeous fabrics of the lovers’ attire, finishes a poor second to Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Pygmalion and Galatea, where mortal lips give life to marble.

Ambrose Bierce had a sad notion that kiss is just a word coined by poets to rime with bliss. But one’s first stolen kiss provides the benchmark by which the cynic is put to shame and all successors are judged. Surely that was the case for me.

Forty-eight years ago, I was walking Ingrid home after dining at the Ratskeller and dancing at the Kajüte in Helmstedt, West Germany. We were following a broad, raised path built on the ruins of a 10th-century wall that once circled the town. On a cool night in May as poplar down swirled about us, the stars flickered like distant strobe lights between the beech branches. Entranced by the moment and impelled by the cosmos, I mustered the courage to bend down and kiss my lovely softly on the lips. As I raised my head, she pulled me down again without a word. Translated in our warm breadth, her sharp tug and the kiss that followed was a language lesson I happily took to heart.