Years ago my daughter-in-law, learning that I was heading off to California, had a T-shirt printed for me with the slogan “No-hug zone”. She was aware of Californians’ proclivity in these matters and she knew how I felt about unsolicited expressions of indiscriminate affection.
I wore the shirt sometimes in the United States — to minimal effect. But anyway, I have since been reconciled to off the peg hugging, despite the preposterous antics of footballers (and even cricketers these days, dear God).
At its best, of course, a hug is a generous gesture of friendship, reconciliation and shared enthusiasm but, even at its worst, I see it now as a harmless display of camaraderie, even of common fellowship in the family of man. Long ago it was a useful device for stabbing an enemy in the back, in the literal sense. Nowadays, even its hypocrisy is mild.
But profligate kissing is a different matter. To my mind a kiss means infinitely more than a hug. I know that it has always been employed around the world as a casual form of greeting but its adoption in the English-speaking nations has got out of hand. It must be curbed. Aesthetically, morally, hygienically, and even functionally, it has been degraded to a social cliché.
Today it is not only the theatrical sort who cry “Darling!” at plush restaurants and assault you with kisses. Everybody does it. Meet for a coffee at Starbucks and it starts and ends with kisses. Run into your next-door neighbour at the supermarket and you’re likely to get a smacker. Hardly have you been introduced to some total stranger than you are air kissed when you part. Who needs mistletoe?
But those sprigs of Christmas are a reminder of the marvellous and mysterious heritage of the kiss. It was no mere peck on the cheek, it was history’s most notorious moment of betrayal when the traitor Judas kissed Jesus in the garden.
A kiss is not something to be given lightly or even light-heartedly. It has to it the quality of a pledge, with intimations of destiny. When the clergyman says to the bridegroom “you may now kiss the bride”, he is (or should be) inviting them to remember Judas and seal their own solemn promise with the very talisman of trust, a kiss.
In high art, too, the symbolical power of the kiss has often expressed itself. The Kiss was the title Auguste Rodin gave to his iconic celebration of love’s meaning — two people in the ultimate embrace of embraces, physical sex and mental emotion transcendentally united in erotica. Gustav Klimt famously painted The Kiss, too, but in his version the lovers had actually become part of the kiss themselves, transformed by its golden sensuality.
But for most of us it’s just “Wow! Haven’t seen you for ages” and plonk! comes the inevitable kiss. It may not even be plonk! but only a near-miss kiss, or maybe one of the lubricious kind that leaves lipstick everywhere, or the careful sort where the combatants both wear spectacles, or the fastidious sort that is wary of flu or halitosis. Whatever kind it is, there is no nobility to it.
Of all the human gestures, the kiss from the heart, the kiss of conviction, the kiss of true love, the Kiss with a capital K is surely the noblest of all. Dumb down your humour, if you like, trivialise your bedroom sex, degrade your religion, infantilise your animals, but give your kisses the grand mystical respect they warrant. —