The many and varied shades of intimacy
The word means many things in many contexts, but we would be poorer without it
In his essay “The Future of Intimacy,” Torontonian Mark Kingwell informs us that our word “intimacy” derives from the Latin intimus, meaning inmost. To whom do you reveal your inmost self? With whom do you share your pillowtalk?
In-ti-ma-cy. You know it when you see it, you know it when you’re in it. Like love itself, it may be one of those things you only know by experience.
When you’re in it, you come to realize that there are different intensities, different degrees, so that the intimacy you have with one person is different from the intimacy you have with another. A spousal intimacy differs from intimacy with a friend. Intimacy with a son or daughter comes in yet another register.
The plural intimacies may be more useful than the singular collective noun intimacy, and more accurate.
Ah, the intricacies of intimacy. Silence, for instance, can be as important in intimacy as speech. I can take the train to Montreal and not exchange more than a few mouthfuls of words with my son. For both of us, the silence is comfortable, and reassuring. I can’t walk with my daughter to the traffic lights at Bendamere and Garth without a steady downpour of words. She, at this stage in her life, is uncomfortable with silence. She uses words as Inukshuks in the void; they secure her footing in the world, and make her less susceptible to doubt and fear. Silence with my son feels intimate to me; speech with my daughter feels intimate.
I know a lake in the mid-north of
Ontario called Mirage. In the morning, very early in the morning, the lake is enveloped in a heavy mist. You think you see things that aren’t there. Sometimes you don’t see anything at all.
I know the facts about the lake: it’s fringed by a mixed deciduous and coniferous forest; it’s about 25 feet deep in its centre; most of the lilypadded lake is shallow and fed by underground springs; it’s good for smallmouth bass fishing. I know this lake because my parents had a cottage on it and my sister and brother-in-law have converted the cottage into a home. I know this lake because I’ve swum in its waters, I’ve paddled a canoe along its shores and I’ve walked each of my dogs in succession around its perimeter.
To a degree I’m intimate with this lake, and yet not nearly as intimate with it as my sister. She lives on it, she knows its seasonal moods, its marshes and groves of weeds, its currents and temperatures. What is the secret of such intimacy? Love and time, I conjecture.
You need to care about someone or something for a long period of time. Caroline has loved this lake longer and deeper than I have, and is therefore more intimate with it. She knows the life stories of the cottagers, the resident animals from beaver to loon, the lake’s beauty and mystery in four seasons over decades.
Radio is more intimate to me than television or cinema because radio speaks directly to my ear. Is the ear not our most intimate erogenous organ? Theatre seems more intimate than film partly because the performing bodies on stage are real and the performing bodies on the screen are photographed and hence images of the real.
Wood generally feels more intimate than metal. Wood seems more intimate than stone. Wood has connections to the body. It has limbs, rings and a heart; it grows; it bleeds. Stone is cold, hard, unyielding. And yet for me stone is more intimate than wood because I associate it with my father. Stone calms me, reassures me, makes me feel at home. Like my father and his father, I was born under Belfast’s Black Mountain, and think of my father as stone: smooth, dark, eternal. Few sights delight me quite as much as stone — water-washed, sun-dried, windblown — flecked with the scars of life.
The homemade. The handmade. The heartmade. These things feel intimate. My mother’s knittedsweater on my back feels more intimate to me than a store-bought sweater manufactured overseas. My son or daughter’s voice in my ear feels more intimate than the voice of a stranger. My wife’s homemade vodka pasta tastes better than anything I’ve eaten in a restaurant.
Some disputes regarding intimacy, however, are almost impossible to resolve. My wife regards the sound of the reed instruments — the woodwinds — as the most intimate experience in music; my friend Dale votes for the strings. For Dale, a hand plucking a string conjures immediate intimacy. For Cheryl, lips blowing into a reed is the ultimate intimacy, a kind of kiss, a re-enactment of the first act of creation when the Creator blows the world into being by his articulate breath.