Murakami is right.  You need exercise, for energy, for discipline, for clarity of mind.  Helps you keep tethered to the peace of thinking your own thoughts.

Einstein called himself early in his career an 'official ink-pisser,' a civil servant by day, a bit of a drop out as far as landing a gig in the academy.  In his desk drawer, he kept his own "department of theoretical physics."  He was one of those people, an independent thinker, on the rare order of those who come along and change the way we think in the direction of accuracy and insight.  Interestingly enough, and not surprisingly, as a young fellow he played violin for his women friends and seems to have been a bit of a ladies man, to use an archaic term, hopefully without offense.  He had a certain energy about him.

And so it's not a bad call on the part of Marilyn Monroe to regard Abraham Lincoln as the sexiest man in American History (from the New York Times Civil War Timeline's piece of on the growth of Presidential whiskers.)   Takes one to know one.  We read, in the same piece, that Picasso kept pictures of Lincoln, regarding him as the height of American elegance, important to a Spaniard.  One abundant creative force recognizing another across history, challenges and occupations.  A great writer, a great thinker, an artist, really, and it shows.  Could it be that thinking deep thoughts, fleshing out beautiful theories, that writing immortal lines of balance and power and truth is, well, part and parcel of abundant hotness, tied to a certain observable sexual vitality.

Kerouac did his headstands (good for the chakras.)  JFK, the modern artist of statecraft, of charming and formidable intellect, of grace and power, of great clarity of public thought, was a bit of a life-long sex addict, it seems.  What can you do?  Hemingway was dumped by his nurse, and all that energy had to go somewhere, channeling back into Nick Adams adventures big and small, some of them quite frankly sexual.  Of course he tried to work it all out, his once happy relationship with Agnes Von Kurowsky, in A Farewell to Arms, to whatever extent he could, not that it necessarily did him all good.

The physicists are discovering that the force of gravity and that of the weak force operating on the atomic level are basically one and the same, just operating in different fields.  It is a bit of a poetic stretch to see that the form of big thinking, the kind we rightly get remembered for, and the form of little thinking, which healthily happens quite often and every day (and sometimes preoccupying) and much more privately, are of the same.

Well, duh.  Yoga began as an enhancement of the sexual.  Maybe writing and thinking broadly and independently, with as much originality as one cares to claim, are the same sort of happy chakra business.  And maybe that's why people write.


Now naturally people, with all this energy coursing through them, will find ways to let it out.  They will misbehave, even the most modest and pure of motive, even the socially adept, the energy's abundance leading them to alternative ways of well being.  They'll go out and sometimes act like fools and have more wine than is good for them as they are taken with the mood of liberation.  Less restrained, bawdiness will come out. And so the energy is put into love letters, poetry, and symphonies, which may be, practically speaking just as foolish and ineffectual and even counterproductive.  And this is, I suppose, why there is the forgiveness, why there is religion.  And of course, there is, after all, the great almost surprising utter cleanliness of sex, the healthiest thing for you, as 'dirty' as it may be.