katerina, wednesday

Fortunately, the rewards of game-free intimacy, which is or should be the most perfect form of human living, are so great that even precariously balanced personalities can safely and joyfully relinquish their games if an appropriate partner can be found for the better relationship.

Because there is so little opportunity for intimacy in daily life, and because some forms of intimacy (especially if intense) are psychologically impossible for most people, the bulk of the time in serious social life is taken up with playing games. Hence games are both necessary and desirable, and the only problem at issue is whether the games played by an individual offer the best yield for him. In this connection it should be remembered that the essential feature of a game is its culmination, or payoff.

Pastimes and games are substitutes for the real living of real intimacy. Because of this they may be regarded as preliminary engagements rather than as unions, which is why they are characterized as poignant forms of play. Intimacy begins when individual (usually instinctual) programming becomes more intense, and both social patterning and ulterior restrictions and motives begin to give way. It is the only completely satisfying answer to stimulus-hunger, recognition-hunger and structure-hunger. Its prototype is the act of loving impregnation.

Desire is fueled, to a certain degree, by the possibility of not getting what you want. It depends on a certain distance and difficulty that must be overcome through one’s own effort.

Technology makes us lazy. We think our phones will do the work for us, but they don’t. Thoroughly exhausting ourselves intellectually and physically through productive work brings fulfillment, and with fulfillment comes peace.

We are tender in a raw sense, and not necessarily in a soft and gentle way. This tenderness is of a wounded nature.

Be terrified of the exposure and intensity of intimacy but search for it everywhere. Hold close the moments of being ashamed, feeling delicate in front of someone you like a lot.

last week my desire erupted from me and in it I saw my fear: I fear my desire will reveal my madness. That in living deep in my desire will show how far I have wandered, how deeply i have transformed, how wild i’ve become. I fear I will lose some attachment to reality that is necessary for my financial, social, or physical security. Like always I am craving safety —home — which time and time again, life reminds me i must make for myself.

and so i will, i will make a home for me ( for us ). I will invite you in and ask you to sit with me, to dine and look at all the colors.

sex as a form of consistent communication, a way I expected us to relate almost every time we saw each other

For some of us—presumably for her—powerful desire is the foundation of sex. Perhaps in a long-term relationship, powerful desire is not the foundation of sex every time, but the overall foundation of the relationship is the sense of a mutually circulating desire that remains alive and surfaces in waves.

In erotic ecology, the feeling of joy is an integral component part of a flourishing ecosystem. Every relationship within the network of life produces meaning, because for the creatures concerned, it involves their whole lives—their existential desire to inhabit a body as a self and to continue unfolding that self. Through this experience—and this is precisely what makes it erotic—every creature can perceive its reflection in every other, because we all have a sensitive, vulnerable body that depends as much on bonds as on the air we breathe. According to this deep principle, we know how other beings feel, because they have bodies like we do.

The affection of this body is mercy, not greed.

don't mistake desire for curiosity

Types of Intimacy

Emotional
* Empathy
* Respect
* Validation
* Communication
* Trust
* Vulnerability

Physical
* Cuddling
* Hand holding
* Nurturing touch
* Sensual
* Foreplay
* Sex

Intellectual
* Deep conversation
* Mental stimulation
* Opinions and beliefs
* Introspection
* Creativity
* Curiosity

Experiential
* Shared experiences
* Trying new things
* Routines
* Consistency
* Adventures
* Spontaneity

Spiritual
* Inner worlds
* Prayer/meditation
* Faith
* Higher Power
* Values
* Morals and ethics

@drelizabethfedrick

“Intimacy is not something that just happens between two people; it is a way of being alive. At every moment, we are choosing either to reveal ourselves or to protect ourselves, to value ourselves or to diminish ourselves, to tell the truth or to hide. To dive into life or to avoid it. Intimacy is making the choice to be connected to, rather than isolated from, our deepest truth at that moment.”

sex can't be disenchanted without terrible consequences

The sufis say that every desire is a disguised desire for God. It’s a disguised desire for ultimate satisfaction and fulfillment, and being completely who you are.

I will now take another moment to acknowledge something slightly different, but equally integral to my sense of self. It may seem slightly crass at first, but bear with me:

Let's take a moment to honour the act of masturbation.

Ok, alright, hear me out: let's take it back about ten years, around the time I was in the peak of the strain of becoming - my entire fourteen year old self straining against itself, twisted up in the terrible ordeal of being known, of having a body, of attempting to make sense of it's awkward obstinance: it would under no circumstances listen to my commands - it did whatever the fuck it wanted, and it was pure humiliation: left, right & centre. Desire, desire, desire; embarrassment after embarrassment. You get the picture.
It was in the midst of this (perhaps slightly drawn out) personal humiliation ritual that I discovered my body, entirely by accident, all at once. I remember feeling my first orgasm - the shock of it, the absolute irresistibility of it, the sudden power I had over my body. The very first power I ever had over my body, over anything maybe, discovering that it could speak for itself. It changed everything. It felt so unlikely, so lucky: so precise and strange. So beautiful and delicate. I had never known this pleasure existed. No one had ever told me. I actually don't think they had the faintest notion that it existed in the first place.

Of course it goes without saying that it was entirely hidden, private, secret and came with its own strange, slick sort of shame. That is a story for another day.

This moment is to acknowledge the privilege of discovering the body, the unprecedented discovery that I possess a sense of sexuality, the platform to explore desire, control, give and take, privacy, the playful anti-world of sexuality, it's infinite labyrinths and cave systems that are there for you to discover. That all of it was contained in my body, or could be, one day.

This may sound strange, but I grew up in a boarding school, girlhood-overdose, living in a house with sixty teenage girls, ten of them my age: although sex in all its forms was the predominant topic of conversation for about five years, I was the only one amongst my peers who had discovered my body so young. Or at all, for that matter. Many people I know still haven't. Their approaches to sex were so vastly different than mine, so superficial and male-centric, so stiff and false - it was bizarre to me. They were all bravado, of course, all certainty, but it was clear as day to me that they were all pretending. None of it was true. Their definitions of sex were limited, stunted - their roles minimised to a passive, receiving fragment. They had never ever discovered the power and divine pleasure within their own bodies.

I never even bothered with men, I was into women from the minute I was ready to truly be with someone else. It seemed strange to me that anyone would be interested in men in the first place, but most of them are still going strong, so I suppose maybe it really is a thing for people who grew up in normal families.

And now, at twenty-four, sixteen odd years after discovering sex and shame simultaneously, fifteen years after my first unsolicited dick pic, fourteen years after my first run in with pornography addiction, thirteen years after first being made to understand that my body is ugly and repulsive for it's sudden rebellion, ten years after discovering my beautiful, pristine body was mine, mine to use, mine to feel with, mine to touch - now, at twenty-four, after all these years of a healthy, playful, joyous relationship with my body, I am the happiest girl alive. I would be no-where if I had discovered my body any later than I did. I would be shame-wracked and torn. But I am not.
I am in love with my body and its remarkable beauty. Its erotic rhythms, its gravity, its contours, its strength, its confidence, its lyrical fluency, its loyalty, its severity, its lightness, its wide open sensuality, its thick pulse, its honesty.
Its playful power. Its animality. Its innocence. Its fullness.

I just wanted to put a thank-you out into the universe for the luck and privilege of discovering the strength and power of pleasure early, when I was so incredibly misfitting and I needed it most. But, in a true two-part, full-circle moment, I think I am perhaps starting to realise that my discovery had very little to do with luck, and had very much to do with my eternal, soul-thick, un-outrunable truth: I found it because I went fucking looking for it.

When we do like men, it’s often through the filter of ultra-specific portraits we’ve imagined ourselves to want: the myth of the 6’5 man in finance with blue eyes and a trust fund. Many of us, I think, haven’t the slightest clue what we’re really looking for, and instead allow social pressures and trends to dictate them for us. Rather than dig too far into our own desires, we allow ourselves to be prescribed them and be further disappointed when they go unfulfilled.

Indeed, in partnership-oriented societies, sex can be a form of sacrament, a peak experience, as here the sexual union of two human beings can be a reminder of the oneness of all life, a reaffirmation of the sacred bond between woman and man and between us and all forms of life.

Once again, this is not to say that partnership sex is always an act involving love or what we call higher consciousness, or that in the partnership model there are no rankings of any kind. But in societies that orient primarily to partnership rather than domination there is no structural requirement to implant the kinds of attitudes and behaviors needed to maintain a system based on rankings backed by force and the fear of pain.

I knew how to please his mouth, I thought. I will know how to please the rest of him.

“The Three of Cups is field synchronicity, where bodies touch each other and our souls transfer affirmation among each other. We share space at the same time, spinning in a dance of imagination. Our dancing animates spectrums of space from open fields, classrooms, living rooms, and bedrooms. The sanctuary is the club we create everywhere for queer liberation. The dance floor offers becoming a space of possibility.”

— Christopher Marmolejo, Red Tarot, 123

“The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling... The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honour and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves... This internal requirement toward excellence which we learn from the erotic must not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor from others. Such a demand incapacitates everyone in the process. For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavours bring us closest to that fullness.”

— Christopher Marmolejo, Red Tarot, 107

I have stated that sex isn’t overtly violent, but a quiet voice in your mind knows that this is not true all the time. In reality, because it mimics the human condition, there are aspects of sex that can express itself in the form of violence. There is a darkness, but it is not the same corrupted and insidious darkness that you see in the average hypersexualized individual and in porn.

Primitive rage, uproarious laughter, primal lust, and authentic expressions of sexual intimacy are states in which the psyche of a human being is laid bare and stripped to a tender nakedness.

There is no sanctity in fetish. Sex is not overly violent; it is not embellished in kinks and penetrative toys. There are no hidden tricks and there are no special techniques to entertain your appendages. It is not inflammatory or tainted by an aggressive sodomy. Every inch of violent perverted corporeal penetration leaves a microtear in your human spirit. It is not merely a brutish physical endeavour. It is animalistic and it is primal, but it does not extend beyond the human vessel into furry members of the animal kingdom. Its essence cannot be captured in pixelated images and displayed through an animated veneer. There is no replica.

Anyone who is truly honest with themselves will admit that if they have watched porn in the past, they have delved into darker and more degenerate forms to chase the excitement they initially felt.

This is hedonic adaptation, and it is the natural inclination of any human being for emotional regulation, so anybody who denies this is lying to themselves and to others.

Regardless of age (but not class) in the witch trials, there is a constant identification between female sexuality and bestiality.

The witch-hunt did not result in new sexual capacities or sublimated pleasures for women. Instead, it was the first step in the long march towards 'clean sex between clean sheets' and the transformation of female sexual activity into work, a service to men, and procreation. Central to this process was the banning, as anti-social and virtually demonic, of all non-productive, non-procreative forms of female sexuality.

We can also say that the production of the 'female pervert' was a step in the transformation of the female vis erotica into vis lavorativa – that is, a first step in the transformation of female sexuality into work.

Sexuality will only surrender its real depth and arouse its singular power to unite when it is surrounded with both the fire of passion and the reticence of purity.

Sex and sexuality, while they ideally should be the basis for deep friendship, often are the major hindrance to friendship.

There we long for something that’s ultimately deeper than sex—or that is sex in a fuller flowering. There’s a deep desire in us all (be that a deeper form of sexual desire or a desire for something that’s beyond sex) for a soulmate, for someone to sleep with morally. More deeply than we ache for a sexual partner, we ache for a moral partner, though these desires aren’t mutually exclusive, just hard to combine.

How bad can a good girl be? In my case, delectably bad. Imaginary badness, as Toni Morrison and Simone Weil both deftly put it, is romantic, seductive, intoxicating. It brings me to my knees, my imagined evil, my shadow-bad. It inebriates me, it turns me on. It makes a woman out of a girl. It puts the reigns squarely where I want them: in my hands.

I used to wear a cowboy hat when I was twenty-one...I wore it out everywhere. To bars, to parties, on walks. Everywhere. I felt younger than nineteen then, hiding behind a wide-brimmed hat, hiding behind my girlfriend's jeans. I felt small.

I think I had no darkness then, and I tried to invent it so that less people could see right through me. I got real tired of being seen through. I got real tired of owing everyone something, somehow - repaying debts I didn't incur, apologising for things I didn't do, on my best behaviour to repent for sins I didn't commit.

I suppose somewhere down the line I wanted to kick off from being seen, so I drew the thick, heavy darkness all around, turned a corner and vanished. Ugh, even this block bores me. What I wanted to convey to you was that I miss sex, and it's liquid perversion. I miss my power, the way I control girls, the way it can be effortless, sometimes - those molten moments of magnetism, I only have to look at them and I can see them unravel. I only have to make it clear what I want and they do it for me. Do you know how intoxicating, how blindly intoxicating, how exhilarating it is to seduce someone? When someone pauses for long enough to notice (and it takes a level of intelligence to do that), I can make her do anything. They worship me. I'm not kidding. I like it that way - the demand of it. I like to disarm, to rule, to reign. To be the architect, the one in control. I invent absurdities, I expand on them, deepen them, drawing on who the girl is, what she's on her knees for. I can be anything - dominant, submissive, kind, cruel, innocent, experienced, a woman, a man, jealous, uncaring, losing my mind, making you lose yours, older, younger, much younger, your cousin, your sister, your self.
You name it, I've come to the thought of it. I have my own personal preferences, of course, but I like to see what this does to girls, I like to them squirm, I like to make them yield. I like to see their eyes widen as I invert them with a smirk on my face.

However - and there is always, always a 'however' - this is all as pretend as it is real. True badness, evil, cruelty is barren, dry, tired. It lies outside my framework, outside my realm of consideration. To be the girl I speak of (a role, nothing more), I need a kind accomplice - someone who recognises the weird in me, who isn't repulsed by it or afraid of it. I need someone to play along. For every moment of cruelty, someone has to be innocent. For every inch of control I possess, I need someone to relent theirs. For every moment I am a woman, well. Someone else has to pretend they are one too. It's seldom entirely on one side or the other - it's more like a balancing scale. The only things that sex cannot exist without are kindness, curiosity and confidence.
I'm no big bad thing, I just have a wild imagination and a watering mouth. I'm just a little adventurous, is all. I cannot wait for someone who can go all the way there with me, all the darkness, light, control and submission - someone who, when we reach uncertainty, can pull back the mask a little, wink and smile at me with a sparkle of playfulness and kindness in their eyes. Someone who wants to find out what lies on the other side of curiosity. Someone who is confident enough to take my hand and lead my hand when I can't take another step.

He, who was still a boy as regards love and was inclined to plunge to the depths of it blindly and insatiably, was taught by her that one cannot have pleasure without giving it, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every single part of the body has its secret which can give pleasure to one who can understand.

She taught him that lovers should not separate from each other after making love without admiring each other, without being conquered as well as conquering, so that no feeling of satiation or desolation arises nor the horrid feeling of misusing or having been misused.

One of the most imaginative and aesthetically pleasing aspects of Taoist bedroom arts is the poetic terminology used to denote various sexual organs and activities. Unlike Western sexual jargon, which is either coldly clinical (penis, vagina, clitoris, etc.) or lewdly colloquial (cock, cunt, fuck, etc.), Chinese erotic terms conjure up all sorts of romantic and guilt-free images in the minds of the participants, and this imagery greatly enhances the ambiance of sexual intercourse. It also enabled Chinese poets and writers to discuss sexual relations at great length without offending conservative readers or breaking established literary conventions. For example, take ‘clouds and rain’, which is the Chinese poetic term for sexual intercourse. ‘Clouds’ symbolizes the gathering storm of female essence, while ‘rain’ refers to the ejaculation of male semen. Hence, Chinese writers could use these terms to describe sexual intercourse in detail without offending anyone, with such creative metaphors as ‘the clouds gathered but the rain never came’, ‘after the rain fell, the clouds dispersed’, ‘light drizzles’ ‘sudden downpours’, and so forth.

Sex attracts spirits.

This should be fairly intuitive. Sex is designed to bring a spirit into a body. It goes without saying then, that many spirits are attracted to sex… and not always for the purpose of incarnation.

Spirits flock to sex and sexual acts because they are doorways to physical expression & the material world.

These spirits can be:

Souls of the deceased / ancestors (most of these souls are seeking incarnation)

Hungry ghosts (Human souls trapped between dimensions. They have unfulfilled desires from their human lives, and create attachments to human hosts to fulfill these earthly desires.)

Demons (Astral or Lower World Entities – these spirits operate very similarly to hungry ghosts, only with more malefic & destructive desires.)

Nature Spirits (Spirits of the Devic Kingdom – plants, trees, flowers, elementals, fairy, fey & other mythical beings. Typically, nature spirits are drawn to playful, celebratory, outdoor, & ritual sex as an offering of nourishment, in honor of fertility rituals from ages past )

Deities & Celestials ( Beings of the Higher Worlds – can be invoked, honored and fed through sacred sex practice as well. In the case of Immaculate Conception, a Deity enters a sacred union – often making contact before love making, sometimes through an angel or other celestial attendant – for the purpose of Incarnation )

Knowing the kind and quality of spirit your sex is engaging can be quite important when it comes to your health, as many lower world spirits do drain life-force energy from human beings engaged in unconscious sex.

For spiritual health & safety in sexual practice, its therefore important to:

Choose partners who are spiritually healthy & strong and can remain present during love-making. (Otherwise, you might be having sex with an entity, not your partner!)

Have sex in places that feel good to you – even better if you cleanse and/or establish a sacred space before you engage in love making or sexual self pleasure.

Do not have sex while (heavily) intoxicated. This is a surefire way to attract lower world spirits & can damage your health or lead to states of possession.

Set clear focused intention before you engage in love making. Either no spirits and full presence! Or call in those positive spiritual energies you wish to feed, invoke or expand through your practice.

Remember: sex is a doorway to the Spirit (just as much as it is a portal to the physical world). Empower yourself to experience those fruits of the Spirit that serve you, and guard against those that don’t.

Desiring something is, without doubt, a move toward possession of that something (“possession” meaning that in some way or other the object should enter our orbit and become part of us). For this reason, desire automatically dies when it is fulfilled; it ends with satisfaction. Love, on the other hand, is enterally unsatisfied. Desire has a passive character; when I desire something, what I usually desire is that the object come to me. Being the center of gravity, I await things to fall down before me. Love… is the exact reverse of desire, for love is all activity. Instead of the object coming to me, it is I who go to the object and become a part of it. In the act of love, the person goes out of himself. Love is perhaps the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward something else. It does not gravitate toward me, but I toward it… Love is gravitation toward that which is loved.
[…]
In loving we abandon the tranquility and permanence within ourselves, and virtually migrate toward the object. And this constant state of migration is what it is to be in love.

The development of agriculture and trade likely led to more acquisitive cultures, and the majority of Earth Mother cults were wiped out by around 4000 BC. As the role of women became less important, the links between sexuality and the sacred began to fade. A priestess who engaged in sacred sexual worship became a whore, a derivative of the Goddess Hora.

Choose one of the following:

[Sex as ___ ]
1. an encounter with our capacity to evoke, embody, and emit pleasure through our physical selves.
2. a conversation with dichotomies, binaries, and polarities.
3. alchemy, as the marriage between hard and soft, wet and dry, firm and tender, slow and fast.
4. quiescence.
5. destination-free, never-ending, temporal, and transitory.
6. wavelengths, oscillations, and/or pendulums.
7. both a recognition of cycles of creation and destruction, of birth and demise, of youth and aging, of wilting and blooming.
8. the balancing of questions and answers.
9. the intersection between listening and being listened to.
10. speculative fabulation, as storytelling, as archaeology.

"Desire is part of the infrastructure"

Desire is instinctual and holy: it is only through desire that we bring about the immaculate conception.

Obsession is repetitive; passion is generative.

Obsession is a way to redirect desire, to avoid the intensity of your emotions by channeling them into something else;
Passion is a way for you to fully integrate what you feel.

We obsess as a way of mastering our desire: as Caroline Knapp writes in Appetite, “This was the infinite hunger for love and recognition, the hunger for sex and satisfaction and beauty, the hunger to be and known and fed, the hunger to take and take, and I had conquered it, mastered it, roped it like a steer."

I love seduction, I love sex, I love an exposed shoulder, the curves of the hip, the moment of realizing that under the top layer of clothing there’s no bra or boxers containing the body I am observing. I love the unspeakable heat of romance. I love all the ways we are sensual. I like to smell good, taste everything yummy, feel how alive skin is, listen to sounds of breath and pleasure, see the beauty of flesh and bones. Laugh uncontrollably. Play. Feel alive. My body has the capacity to sense immense pleasure, and as I get older I keep intentionally expanding my sensual awareness and decolonizing it so that I can sense more pleasure than capitalism believes in.

Sex as sustained ritual
Not a performance

Fuck Stuck

Do I fuck you or hate you?
It feels wrong in every limb
But I do it anyway
’Cause it feels right when you’re in.

Your generosity is perverse
And confined to your bed
The only thing you’ve given me freely
Is head.

Your attraction towards certain nodal points could be thought of as analogous to “desire lines,” or a path made by walking. It is a concept that is usually used to illustrate the difference between a design (like a sidewalk or a park path created by a landscape designer) and what a person using it actually does. A desire line usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. But the key factor for me (at least in the context of this line of thinking) is agency. A person is making the decision to move in a specific direction across a terrain.

"We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed?"

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Desperation in romantic relationships can yield amazing sex, but sustainable it is not. Fear of scarcity makes us misers of the ones we love, and miserliness is the opposite of generosity. Real love, I have come to understand, is enacted as a practice of ongoing generosity.

This is a dynamic I have observed not only in love, but in all areas of life. I think fear of losing what we have almost always causes us to waste it, ultimately. It is hard to enjoy a blessing that is hoarded. I want to love as though there is an endless supply of love, as if by enacting it, I multiply it.

The erotic world exists because this force desires to give life. To be a body, like we are and like every living being is, means to translate this deep desire into our own emotions and actions. Matter is not outside of the desire to give life and touch life, but it is its vehicle, its joy and eventually its suffering.

And yet, despite repeated assurances that women aren't particularly sexual creatures, in cultures around the world men have gone to extraordinary lengths to control female libido: female genital mutilation, head-to-toe chadors, medieval witch burnings, chastity belts, suffocating corsets, muttered insults about "insatiable" whores, pathologizing, paternalistic medical diagnoses of nymphomania or hysteria, the debilitating scorn heaped on any female who chooses to be generous with her sexuality... all parts of worldwide campaign to keep the supposedly low-key female libido under control. Why the electrified high-security razor-wire fence to contain a kitty-cat?

Timothy Taylor, author of The Prehistory of Sex, to state, "While hunter-gatherer sex had been modeled on the idea of sharing and complementarity, early agriculturalist sex was voyeuristic, repressive, homophobic, and focused on reproduction." "Afraid of the wild," he concludes, "farmers set out to destroy it." Land could now be possessed, owned, and passed down the generations. Food that had been hunted and gathered now had to be sowed, tended, harvested, stored, defended, bought, and sold, Fences, walls, and irrigation systems had to be built and reinforced; armies to defend it all had to be raised, fed, and controlled. Because of private property, for the first time in the history of our species, paternity became a crucial concern.

I know it's not that simple, tit for tap, but I don't want to give any more of my touch to language. I just want language to generate more touch.

– T Fleischmann, Time is the thing a body moves through

Intelligent Living

Epicureans did focus on seeking pleasure with knowledgeable consumption – but equating knowing what will make you happiest with knowing the best wine means Epicurus is misunderstood. His principles read as astonishingly modern, down to the physics.

-Everything is made of invisible particles,
-Space and time are infinite,
-Nature is an endless experiment,
-Human society began as a battle to survive,
-there is no afterlife,
-Religions are cruel delusions,
-And the universe has no clear purpose. The world is material – with a smidgen of free will.

How should we live? Rationally, by dropping illusion. False ideas largely make us unhappy. If we minimize the pain they cause, we maximize our pleasure.

Pleasures are poisoned when we require that they do not end. Epicurus was a hedonist, but encouraged the pursuit of a natural state of pleasure.

So, for example, it is natural to enjoy sex, but sex will make you unhappy if you hope to possess your lover for all time. Although he saw sex as natural, Epicurus advocated against marriage. He was against artificially produced desires that were meant to be suppressed if we want to achieve happiness.

Epicurus also seems uncannily modern in his attitude to parenting. Children are likely to bring at least as much pain as pleasure, he noted, so you might want to skip it. Modern couples who choose to be ‘child-free’ fit within the largely Epicurean culture we have today. Does it make sense to tell people to pursue their happiness and then expect them to take on decades of responsibility for other humans?

I Am So Full of Longing and Desire It Gushes Out of My Knees As They Scrape the Ground Upon Which I Crawl Toward You

Dear friend,

I heard that you are once again in distress, perhaps by illness or worry—I am sorry for that, and so I write to you to give you strength.

You must remember that yours is a soul whom I esteem highly, for your courage and strength I know are second to none.

I often thought about whether your gift was given to me in earnest or in jest, and I am very much taken to the former notion, which has made me smile so happily now and then.

(With) that having been written, I must confess that I am enchanted.

I am enchanted by your bravery, your sense of duty, your character; I am bewitched by your persistence and the faint echoes of a smile, which always seem to stir fancifully at your lips; I am fascinated with your resolve, and how much you believe in yourself; your confidence, your wit, everything about you and by you I find endlessly beautiful.

When the drudgeries of formal business are all done with and Apollo retires to his heavenly chambers, I too long for one with whom I may exchange words of languor and tired satisfaction.

I wish to run my hands through your ruffled hair, to undo the rigid formality you had so meticulously adorned yourself with; I wish to speak with you about trivial matters of no import, trifles which are curiously romantic and utterly useless; I wish to immerse myself in the lively river of your personality, your charm, your entire being.

And yet I am afraid to pursue you as madly as Apollo had with his forgotten fancies, for they all ended in metamorphoses, which left him so solitary.

In this bustling city of elegance and vulgarity, we are so often entangled in politics and disagreement, but let me reassure you that for you my door is always open.

For you my soul is green.

Caelius

Those are contributing factors, but the deep root of lust is often emptiness. Individuals may succumb to lust in a vain attempt to fill a vacancy in their life. Lust is a false emotion, a poor substitute for genuine love, true value, and enduring discipleship.

When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities and our differences. To refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience, and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd.

— Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Audre Lorde

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognised, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be al-tered. The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women.

— Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Audre Lorde

The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, harkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.

That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.

— Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Audre Lorde

The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects – born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.

— Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Audre Lorde

Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. And the lack of concern for the erotic root and satisfactions of our work is felt in our disaffection from so much of what we do. For in-stance, how often do we truly love our work even at its most difficult?

— Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Audre Lorde

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognising its power, in honour and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.

— Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Audre Lorde

But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasises sensation without feeling.

— Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Audre Lorde

As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibilities of it within themselves. So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters.

But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.

— Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Audre Lorde

We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society. On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence.

It is a short step from there to the false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong. But that strength is illusory, for it is fashioned within the context of male models of power.

— Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Audre Lorde

Feeling your skin on the skin of another, feeling theirs on yours - Focusing on that sensation, embodying it, and embracing that connection - is one of the truest ways to be completely present in the here and now.

Step 1. Laser focus on what you want and only what you want. Don't talk yourself or allow yourself to be talked out of your desire. Write it down. Don't let yourself get distracted.

Step 2. Question what you consciously and unconsciously believe about your desire. Limiting beliefs prevent us from getting what we desire. Practice self-mastery to overcome these limiting beliefs. This is important, because in life, we get what we believe about our desire, not what we actually desire. Line up your beliefs with what you want.

Step 3. Act, imagine and feel as if your desire has already manifested and from there, take the next step (take action) towards what you want. You must change on the inside before you can see changes on the outside.

I have already proposed that there are lovers who stand out from the rest because we experience them as so irreplaceable that even a definitive parting of ways does not entirely banish their imprint. The reason for this is that such lovers touch what I would like to call the "bedrock" of our desire. This bedrock is the deepest kernel of our being, articulating what is most archaic, least socialized (and therefore most idiosyncratic) about us, particularly about our ways of seeking satisfaction in the world. As a consequence, whenever a lover manages to awaken this kernel, he or she almost by definition cuts into unconscious layers of our interiority that are absolutely fundamental to our being yet also a little mysterious-shrouded, as they are, in the impenetrable mists of our prehistory. More specifically, such a lover activates currents of desire that are so essential to our sense of self that we would not recognize ourselves without them.

In chapter 1 l mentioned that although we may, across the span of our lives, meet numerous people who pique our curiosity, there are usually only a few who raise our passion to a feverish pitch. Those who do are the ones who-often unintentionally and without being fully aware of their power-brush against the bedrock of our desire. They stir our desire on such a primary level that we sense that our destiny is inextricably intertwined with theirs. This is how we sometimes come to feel that certain people are "fated" for us-that we do not have a choice but to respect the thrust of our desire even when this desire gets us in trouble.

| Mari Ruti, from The Summons of Love

This sort of consent rhetoric also in a way indicates that we can only be safe from sexual violence if we know what we want. And truth is, we don’t always know what we want – not least because a misogynistic culture makes that very difficult.

“Love and sex both cause mutation, just like I think desire isn't lack. It's surplus energy- a claustrophobia inside your skin -”

Making love is the worst description of sex. I'm thinking about Belle Hooks when she says that sex under patriarchy is fucking. And that we use the word "fucking" as a way to describe engaging in sexual acts and also engaging in violent behavior: "I fucking hate you," "I'm gonna fuck you up," "I can't wait to fuck you." And I'm thinking of Maggie Nelsons words, "Fucking leaves everything as it is. Fucking may in no way interfere with the actual use of language. For it can not give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is."

Now the next question is whether there is a difference between sex and fucking or a difference between sex and making love? Let me answer this by first backing up my initial prompt. Making love is an insufficient definition for the sex act because it implies that something will change. That a celibate couple will finally "become one" when they have sex on their wedding day. Or that the couple who hasn't been intimate in years, is going to bring love or excitement back into their lives by having sex. There is no promise involved in sex; not a promise of love, enjoyment, or even of sexual gratification.

If I were to re-define sex I would say that sex is the time away. Sex starts after the orgasm, after the fucking. It's at its climax when the couple is apart, yearning for each other. Sex is sexting...it has to be if we want sex to be this spiritual experience because the time away gives way to imagination, a place for the individual to dream of a perfect encounter, where both parties are in perfect harmony and they both know exactly how to make each other orgasm. The physical act of 'fucking' is grounded in reality, the dream stops and suddenly you're a body. You can learn to love reality, learn to love nature and it's imperfections but the only way for the fucking to get closer to "sex" (in it's most spiritual sense) is if there's room for fantasy. And the fantasy has to be built by each individual, over time, over space.

Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities.

| Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus

Lovers' reading of each other's bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeats itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against the moments, recovering time? (156)

I TOUCH your mouth, I touch the edge of your mouth with my finger, I am drawing it as if it were something my hand was sketching, as if for the first time your mouth opened up a little, and all I have to do is close my eyes to erase it and start all over again, every time I can make the mouth I want to appear, the mouth which my hand chooses and sketches on your face, and which by some change that I do not seek to understand coincides exactly with your mouth which smiles beneath the one my hand is sketching on you

You look at me, from close up you look at me, closer and closer and then we play cyclops, we look closer and closer at one another and our eyes get larger, they come closer, they merge into one and the two cyclopses look at each other, blending as they breathe, our mouths touch and struggle in gentle warmth, biting each other with their lips, barely holding their tongues on their teeth, playing in corners where a heavy air comes and goes with an old perfume and a silence. Then my hands go to sink into your hair, to cherish slowly the depth of your hair while we kiss as if our mouths were filled with flowers or with fish, with lively moments and dark fragrance. And if we bite each other the pain is sweet, and if we smother each other in a brief and terrible sucking in together of our breaths, that momentary death is beautiful. And there is but one saliva and one flavor of ripe fruit, and I feel you tremble against me like a moon on the water.

— Hopscotch §7, Julio Cortázar, trans. Gregory Rabassa