In (TOO) The Jungle

Tonight I tried to take the book with me, out of the room, after the boys drifted off to sleep.  I sometimes tell myself I will take the book so I can quote it directly.  But, tonight, I forgot, again.  It was The Jungle Book.  Not the Disneyfied version of the original story (and not the original either).  But the CostCo pop-out version with the intricate pictures, all derived in telling, from the original.  

What I notice that I want to share is that in the Disney version Mowgli is drawn out of the Jungle by a lovely young lady from the village, "fetching water"  he is drawn into the sway of her hips and the batt of her lashes as she does her chore.

In the original, it is not a young woman that pulls Mowgli with desire from the depths of the wild.  No, it is the mother figure--old, and gray, but nevertheless, a mother and "the light" which Mowgli seeks.

We sometimes too easily buy into the notion of a species driven to reproduce and, so then, invested in reproductive sex. Of course, this particular evolution of the species mediates reproduction in diverse ways.  Reproduction's prevention frees sex to become sex for pleasure.

O.k. , didn't know I would go there, must be cause I talked to my great gay grad buddy Chris today.

My point is this:  We buy into the love affair, when maybe it is just a searching for a reminiscent reminder of motherly love and adoration of the womb that is at the core of our most human instinct.  Maybe, in that way, Mowgli was not drawn away from the wild by a domesticated spirit, but rather a basic animal desire to seek the comfort of the origin.  If, as was not the case in this story, the mother had still been wild, so too, would the boy have stayed so.