Seven times seven

A photo taken late in the afternoon, as I walked up the stairs of my old house.
This is what my life feels like to me.
Unfinished beauty, seen through cracked glass;
much time has passed, and the light falling slantwise.

Grouper - Wind Return

Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves

I do not care if
Our lovemaking is exposed
As the rainbow over
The Yasaka dam at Ikaho
If only I can suck and suck you.

-from the Manyoshu (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves),  an anthology of ancient Japanese poetry composed between the period between 347AD and 759AD

The wound of incompleteness

“The wound of incompleteness opens me up. Through what could be called incompleteness or animal nakedness or the wound, the different separate beings communicate, acquiring life by losing it in communication with each other. The fate of finite beings leaves them at the edge of themselves … And this edge is [always already] torn.” 
 

—	Georges Bataille, L’Expérience intérieure

In this world

In this world
we walk on the roof of hell,
gazing at flowers.

-Kobayashi Issa

you are like the snow only
purer fleeter,like the rain
only sweeter frailer you

e.e. cummings

Ah Romance. You deceitful Bitch.

I am an admitted Romantic.  But I am no longer a believer.  Though I cannot help my own romantic feelings and tendencies, I no longer believe that romance is what it promises us.  It is not a path to human emotional fulfillment, or happiness.  It is not the door to life-long intimacy and a shared inner life with another.  It does not answer our sense of loneliness, our need to feel connected inwardly to another, for very long.  It does not lead where the feelings it produces suggest that it will lead.  

It is, rather, just an evolutionary ruse.  Bait, for the soul - as beauty is for the eye and pleasure is for the body - to persuade us to procreation.  After which it has no more use for us.  It is a chemical meth lab in our own brain, a precisely targeted drug, as addictive as any opiate, which, after luring us to mate, leaves us to wallow in withdrawal.

The same man who wrote this:

"I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright." 

..the very same man, who could pen such romantic, effusive expressions of love; this profoundly Romantic man abandoned, forsook, and rejected the young bride who had given her all to him. 

 

Romance.  I wonder if perhaps it was the first sin of Adam.  After all, whether you believe the story to be some form of truth or not, the scriptures do seem to make much of the fact that it was Eve who was deceived, who thought that the tree indeed held something good, but that Adam acted with clear understanding of the lie and the act before him.

So in the context of this story, if he knew the fruit was forbidden, if he knew that God was not withholding something "good" from them, if he knew that it would make him unhappy, and lead to death and separation from the creator, why on earth would he take it?  What could possibly motivate him to act in complete opposition to what he knew to be true, and good, and would lead to his own happiness, peace, and fulfillment?  What could entice him to do something that he knew, without doubt, that he would regret?

Perhaps he took the fruit from her hand, because he could not bear to see his relationship with his beloved severed.  Perhaps he had to share everything she experienced, had to remain one with her, had to cleave to her, even if it meant following her to hell.  Perhaps he valued his connection to his bride above all else.  Above truth, above God, above even life itself.  Perhaps Adam's sin, the first sin of a man, was to be a Romantic.

intimacy

"Dearest — my body is simply crazy with wanting you — If you don’t come tomorrow — I don’t see how I can wait for you — I wonder if your body wants mine the way mine wants yours — the kisses — the hotness — the wetness — all melting together — the being held so tight that it hurts — the strangle and the struggle." 

— Excerpt of a letter from Georgia O’Keeffe to Alfred Stieglitz

It is not physical pleasure that I seek exactly, though this passage is obviously focused on it.  But the passion I hear in this, the longing.... I utterly identify with it.  What I long to find is someone who understands that physical desire is - or can be - a metaphor for something even more profound.

In Hebrew, to engage in sexual intercourse literally means “to know.”   In the book of Genesis, for instance, we are told that "...Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth..."  I have heard it said that the reason the bible uses this phrase is because the writers were uncomfortable with explicit descriptions of human sexuality.  But based on other passages and accounts found in it, I am persuaded that this is not true.   This is not the modest euphemism of a culture uneasy with raw sexuality.   On the contrary, it seems evident that the writers understood, perhaps better than our own culture does, that sex is an act of the entire person.  Not, at least in most cases, just an act of the body.  

It is well known, and no coincidence I believe, that the most vulnerable part of a man's body are his exposed sexual organs.  And the human penis is somewhat unique among mammals in that the mechanism by which it is held erect is entirely the work of the circulatory system.  It becomes, literally and metaphorically, an extension of his heart.  The heart, pumping blood, holds it out not primarily as a demand for pleasure, but as an offering of what is inside him.  It is an exposing, a baring, of the source of his inner life.  It is a raised flag, an unequivocal declaration of love.  If, in some fairy realm, the same man were able to approach his beloved with his hand outstretched, his beating heart lying pulsing in his palm...  the romance of it would be clear.  And once inside the woman, his pulse is actually beating inside her body.  One heart, during this holy ritual, shared within two bodies.  Two souls, momentarily inhabiting one joined flesh.  Sex is a symbol of the crossing, the momentary dissolving, of the boundaries of self.  An intertwining of personhood.  A vehicle so that two souls may caress one another, braid themselves together.  It is communion.  In fact the word "communion" in Latin means "with-oneness".

 

Yes, I am a guy.  Yes, I have happily had sex that was ostensibly "meaningless", and evasive of the deeper emotional entanglements that it lends itself to.  I know that sex can be just play, and I enjoy it as such.  But finding physical pleasure is actually quite easy.  Finding someone who sees, understands, and embraces my inner life as tightly and passionately as my outward form; finding someone with whom I wish to linger, gazing in wonder, in that intimate space created by physical sex; someone with whom I want to be naked and vulnerable - seen - not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually; finding someone who wants to know, and be known... I find that rather less common.

Some thoughts this Father's Day...

From a conversation with a friend, on the nature of romance...

"Ah, perhaps.  It has happened a couple of times, I thought, though it has never led to a lasting relationship.  I am on a long-term experiment (some 30 years now?) to see if the feelings of connection are anything more than an evolutionary ruse designed to compel us to procreate.  An addiction to the oxycontin that my own brain produces for itself, in response to that subtle concoction of grace, inner life, and physical geometry I call "soulmate".  My own personal heroin factory, that leads nowhere once my genetic material has been harvested.  Like an exhausted male praying mantis, sacrificing it's head for the sake of (the illusion of?) union."

Esse quam videri malim

"I should wish to be, rather than to seem."


"...we men of cold politeness

shall never melt into that kindness of yours
no matter how we try

you say "why weep over what?"
we say weep until the weeping's done
and we shall weep for another day

for what binds us to our grief
binds the sculptor to his clay..."

a single kiss may contain worlds...

"She embraces me elaborately, ...casually as a breeze, softly as one caresses a flower; she kisses me as dispassionately as heaven kisses the sea, softly and quietly as dew kisses a flower, solemnly as the sea kisses the image of the moon."

-Soren Kierkegaard

Lush

undertow 

So you want to be alone

Run and hide inside your home

Watch you fall away from me

Sinking into misery

Taste your smile and hold my hand

Make you laugh and make you dance I remember this

Everything was in our kiss

Sink my hands into the sea

Reach your fingers up to me

Trust me one more time I can only try

Throw yourself to me

And I'll try to pull you free

Let me try to pull you free

-lush

"There is a crack, a crack in everything.  That's how the light gets in."
- Leonard Cohen

The only reason I have been able to continue to believe in god, is that when life is at it's worst I look over and see him hanging next to me.

After visiting a beloved friend who has been in my life for some 25 years, I find myself, on my return, longing again for her company.  Four leisurely days of lingering over coffee and knitting in front of a roaring New England fire had left me accustomed to her quiet presence.  One recent morning, I woke to find this message from her waiting for me...

"This morning I am reading Rilke's writings on Rodin, who he met and befriended. Every word is worth copying out to you for its beauty, sensitivity, elegance, truth and beautiful detail. I'll have to get you the book, or share mine.

Here is what touched me particularly this morning. On Rodin's hands:

"We remember how small human hands are, how quickly they tire and how little time is given to them to create. We long to see these hands, which have lived the life of hundreds of hands, of a nation of hands that rose before dawn to brave the long path of this work."

(And here, "things" refers to his sculptures):

"And the forms in Rodin's work are pure and intact; without questioning, he transferred them to his things, which look as if they have never been touched when he finishes with them. Light and shadow grow soft around them as they do around very fresh fruit, and more alive with movement, as of the morning wind had brought them."

In Rodin's words: "And this is because I devoted myself seriously to something. He who understands one thing understands everything, for the same laws are in all."

The quote by Rodin brought to mind something profoundly beautiful by an author whom I love most dearly.  The following passage is from the short, perfect little jewel of a book by George MacDonald, The Golden Key.  In it, one of the protagonists finds herself deep within the earth after a difficult and arduous journey:

"At the long last, the stair ended at a rude archway in an all but glowing rock. Through this archway Tangle fell exhausted into a cool mossy cave. The floor and walls were covered with moss--green, soft, and damp. A little stream spouted from a rent in the rock and fell into a basin of moss. She plunged her face into it and drank. Then she lifted her head and looked around. Then she rose and looked again. She saw no one in the cave. But the moment she stood upright she had a marvelous sense that she was in the secret of the earth and all its ways. Everything she had seen, or learned from books; all that her grandmother had said or sung to her; all the talk of the beasts, birds, and fishes; all that had happened to her on her journey with Mossy, and since then in the heart of the earth with the Old man and the Older man--all was plain: she understood it all, and saw that everything meant the same thing, though she could not have put it into words again."

Ariadne's thread

"Where is the string that Theseus laid, [to] find me out this labyrinth place." - P. Murphy

a castaway

"I want to lie upon your heart like a castaway on an island... Listening to the beating of your heart like waves washing to shore..."