Sunlight in a Jar

We’ve never been much chop at all that sensual stuff
One of us always seems to stop before the other’s had enough
Like a self-help manual that’s been written in Braille
It seems the more that we touch, the more we learn about our failings

I’m struck speechless by the nape of your neck
But your requests and suggestions have a similar effect
A litany of prettiness and pettiness too
I reckon every second second we come up with something new

I tried to write an opera for us
But I didn’t get that far
’Cause trying to sum you up in song
Is like catching sunlight in a jar

Complex, completely credible love
The kind that is made not handed to you from above
Is difficult to talk about and harder to write
Like the rhythm of a pulse, or the contours of firelight

Overblown libretto and a sumptuous score
Could never contain the contradictions I adore
We can just be chaos and then something aligns
It’s so hard to contain, maintain it or define it

I tried to write another chorus
But I didn’t get that far
’Cause trying to sum you up in song
Is like catching sunlight in a jar
It’s like catching sunlight in a jar
- The Lucksmiths

It is cheesy and soppy but I love this song. It is part what I want out of a relationship, the concept of being struck speechless by the nape of someone's neck (or them of mine), the inability to ever capture, contain or even know the other person and the concept of a 'complex, completely credible love' as the 'kind that is made not handed to you from above' cuts so close to the relationships I have been in that even vaguely worked and what I want out of future relationships.

But listening to it today I began thinking about it in terms of the work on sexual learning that I am using in my thesis. Like most of my academic work I am going through a process of 'feeling' the theory to see if intuitively it accounts for the processes and phenomena it describes.

McInnes, Bollen and Race (2002) argue that within contexts of sexual adventurism, defined as any sexual activity which extends an individual's existing sexual repertoire, a process of affective learning takes place. This learning process has its locus in the body and its interactivity with other bodies. Affective learning provides a model for understanding how bodies accumulate and live our experiences, particularly within interactions such as sexual scenes (for a better description see conference paper).

There is something about this song which today, in my mind, captured an everyday process of sexual learning in a relationship. The learning which takes place in any new sexual relationship operates in a similar manner as the ‘sexual adventurism’ McInnes, Bollen and Race talk about, but there is a sense of the everyday that their work misses in its focus on acts which dramatically extend an existing sexual repertoire. They talk a lot about the newness of the particular sexual acts or experience for the individual rather than the newness of previous acts with a particular person, and the creation of a repertoire of acts which align rather than stopping before someone has had enough.

I am not sure where this leads me, but I think that if I am going to continue using this model of sexual learning to think about the delivery of safe sex messages I need to think about how the model works in non-sexually adventurous (there is so much wrong with that categorisation I know – tomorrow I will attempt to ascertain a better way of explaining it!) context. As well as the experiences of fear and interest that often seem to mark sexual attraction and relationship development.

Tali White who wrote this song is also one of my remaining boy crushes.