Beauties Of The Blush Poem by gershon hepner

Seduction cannot be secured by a caress,
because before the touch must be a glance
communicating feelings that confess
without intention and with nonchalance,
awareness of the other’s inner being
at which the glancer does not look askance
but hopes to be united with, while seeing
the opportunity for a romance.
Drinking in with loveglances the essence
of someone moved by love to the carousal
of yours provides desire omnipresence
that leads erotically to its arousal.
If to the glance or to the caress you rush,
both may be sealed with beauties of the blush.

Inspired by Roger Scruton’s Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson: 1994,23–4,65–66) :

Much ahs been written about the glance of love, which seems so imperiously to single out its object and so peremptorily to confront him with an intolerable choice. In truth, however, it is the glance of sexual interest that precipitates the movement of the soul, whereby two people come to stand outside the multitude in which they are presently moving, bound by a knowledge that cannot be expressed in words, and offering to each other a silent communication that ignores everything but themselves. It is as true of the glance of desire as it is of the glance of love that it concentrates into itself the whole life of the human being, constituting a direct appeal to the other to recognise my embodied existence….[W]e should expect the glance of desire to involve first an intention to arouse sexual interest, second that this first intention be recognized; thirdly, the intention that, through being recognized, it play a part in precipitating what is intended. However, although there are grounds for thinking that the intentional structure of meaning may sometimes exist in the glances of desire, reciprocity is normally of a lower order. In the normal case, the intention is that the other’s desire be reciprocated, not by recognition of my intention, but by recognition of desire….

A still more interesting (although increasingly rare) element in the sexual drama is blushing…Blushing is a response, intimately connected with our sense of how we appear in another’s perspective. It is therefore not necessary that the subject be observed by another: only that he believe himself to be assessed and judged by another…The thought of the blusher is: ‘I, as a responsible being, am represented in your perspective.’ It is for this reason that blushes are such important indices not only of guilt, but also of innocence:


How she would start, and blush, thus to be caught
Playing in the innocent of thought. (Kreats, ‘I Stood Tip-Toe”]

And in the blush of modesty the subject is showing himself answerable for his own sexual inclination, making its expression, so to speak, a matter of policy, a negotiation with the other, and not a matter of instinct or release.

8/17/08