drooling

All of you readers of my pretty dumb things will be happy to know that my Fifi has returned from the MacHospital, where she was tenderly nursed back to her usual robust health. This following post is just something really rather dumb that has been kicking around my little head…but whatever, I guess had had to write about it. Nothing like Sophomoric waxing on genitalia, I always say....

There are five components to the human sense of taste: salty, sweet, sour, bitter and umami. Salty and sweet are fairly straightforward—salt and sugar, basically. Sour and bitter are a bit more ambiguous—a lemon is sour, but its seeds are bitter, and often these two sensations are intermingled making it difficult to conceive of sourness and bitterness as distinct. But the most free-floating of the five is the most recent addition to our Western understanding of taste: umami.

Umami is that bass note of soy sauce, parmesan cheese, mushrooms and MSG'. It is also the taste of pussy.

Like any other taste, the taste of pussy is a concerto. Not just a mixture of the primary five, it blends as well the hundreds of other chemicals that our noses detect, and the combination of the primary five and the olfactory hundreds makes up the taste of pussy (or lemons, vichyssoise, bouillabaisse, Necco wafers or ear wax).

But pussy, I realized the other day as I was deepthroating my own juice from Donny’s cock, might very well be the epitome of umami.

Granted, pussy can have a bodega of other flavors partying on with the mysterious umami. I’ve drunk vast amounts of Diet Coke and tasted like the Real Thing. I’ve been a bit off and tasted a bit lemony and acridic. I’ve tasted other women who had a slight strawberry thing happening. Or, yet weirder, who tasted like nothing at all. Like water. Like air.

After leaving them, I would sniff my fingers and find…nothing. That was odd.

Historically, pussy often gets a bad rap, smell and taste-wise. And certainly, an unpleasantly wafty ‘gina is not a beautiful thing. It happens. It’s not a girl’s proudest moment, but sometimes biology goes awry and we and our genitalia are led away from the garden path of sweet-smellingness. It happens to cocks too. We all of us have bodies and sometimes our bodies, despite soaps and lotions and potions and all of our other best efforts, betray us.

But I think that what may be most failing us in talking about the taste of pussy is language. Wittgenstein asserted that the limits of our language are the limits of our world, and perhaps the taste of pussy has just historically fallen outside of these limits. Somewhere on the linguistic frontiers has lurked the right word for the pussy taste. And as we generally have a hard time articulating this ephemeral crossing of boundaries of sensual experience to linguistic utterance, it is hardly surprising that pussy would take the linguistic fall.

Umami itself is a gentle shape-shifter. It is not so much an exact chemical compound that we can put our finger on and point to and grunt: NaCl=salty. Sucrose and lactose=sweet. Umami can’t be nailed down in any exact science. MSG, what is most often pointed to as the clearest single indicator of umami, doesn’t so much have a taste itself as much as it makes other things taste better.

Synaesthesia, a neurological disorder I really wish I had, causes one sensory experience to cross with another. Synaesthetes “see” music or “feel” taste. When I think of umami, when I think of tastes that evoke this apparitional taste intensifier, I see shades of brown and earth, like the richness of mushroom barley soup, of gravy, of dark and fragrant mysteriousness.

And the saltysweetsexyfunkysilky taste of pussy.

Oooh, mami.

Comments

[O]

CG, this is why I love reading you. Where else can one find umami, pussy, Wittgenstein, MSG, and synaesthesia all in one post? Seriously though, the properties of sensuous experience are notoriously difficult to capture in language; they escape us like water, like air--but you do a better job nailing them down than anyone I know.

[ravenna]

"Oooh, mami."

Oh I was SO waiting for that last line, darling, you made me want it and wait for it, and you came through! (You always do. Like Hitchcock said about how to make movies: "Make 'em want it, make 'em wait.") And this was lovely. As a lifelong connoisseur of the pleasures of both cock and pussy, I second the delights of the varied flavors of each. And the two together: *That's* the Real Thing, what could be more real than semen and cunt juice, the waters of life? Make mine a double, with a champagne chaser.

PS. You're the Real Thing too, babe, and three cheers for The Return of Fifi!

[Ell]

We need a pussy language like a wine language perhaps? An undercurrent of flinty river stones infused with soft plum flavours...full, luscious on the tongue and palate...heady top notes with a fruity finish :)

[figleaf]

"I think that what may be most failing us in talking about the taste of pussy is language. Wittgenstein asserted that the limits of our language are the limits of our world, and perhaps the taste of pussy has just historically fallen outside of these limits."

Yup, that's just about right. If we knew Japanese we might have a better handle on it (since umami is their name for that flavor.) On the other hand even in Western Civilization we've had smell forever and our vocabulary for that is awfully limited, perhaps because smell is so elemental.

Though umami is a separate taste sensation (as the Japanese believe) I think it has more in common with the inarticulatability of smells.

You're so right about the taste of pussy. It's exactly like that -- not lobster, not ocean, but more like the unplacable MSG/Umami richness of Kombu, which has tons of it that crystalizes on its surface when it dries.

Pussy tastes maddening, etherial, indescribable. Maybe it's an acquired thing. Maybe it's why some people like it and other's don't.

There's another flavor you get when you've eaten someone for a long time, through multiple peaks, that's got a subtle, almost inky, maybe bleachy, maybe saffron-y quality I also can't really name -- the first time I tasted sea urchin I identified it intensely with cunnilingus but it's never so strong as that.

What a wonderful post, CG. I always feel like a nut for enjoying cunnilingus and I feel as if I have more of a basis for appreciating it just for itself. Thanks!

figleaf

[Ben]

Just wow. I really do love seeing how your mind works, and what you tend to process in those lovely synapses of yours. Quite revealing, and altogether intriguing.

Keep writing, and sharing (as if you could stop). You're a wonderment and we appreciate every syllable.

[chelsea girl]

Gosh, and here I was feeling so...dumb... writing this.

Proving that one should never believe one's tiny little Pugsly voices.

Thanks,
cg

[Goose]

Well put, ma'am. As usual. XO

[CurvaceousDee]

Gorgeous post - you've added a few new words to my vocabulary, and I'm going to be dipping my fingers in order to sniff and lick all day!

[MonMouth]

OK, this calls for a taste test. Fuck Wittgenstein - we need Nigella here. So I'm off to bed with a cup of miso and a horny wife.

This isn't really a comment, I guess. More like a prolegomenon to any future commenting.

*slurp*

Mon

[VS]

Mmmmm ...
Wow!!!

I love this post, and I think you're brill! Anyway, the thing I wanted to say is that I love the changing flavour of pussy ... I never know what I am going to taste like, which is why I always look forward to having a quick lick.