“in the presence of the Other”

Alas, why does my mind, even in its best days, never possess but a particle of the assimilative powers of the body?

I used to once believe that a certain feeling for beauty would serve me in place of virtue, and would render me immune from solicitations of the coarsest kind. But I was mistaken. The lover of beauty ends by finding it everywhere about him, a vein of gold in the basest of ores; by handling fragmentary masterpieces, though stained or broken, he comes to know a collector’s pleasure in being the sole seeker after pottery which is commonly passed by.

The cynics and the moralists agree in placing the pleasures of love among the enjoyments termed gross, that is, between the desire for drinking and the need for eating, though at the same time they call love less indispensable, since it is something which, they assert, one can go without. I expect about anything from the moralist, but am astonished that the cynic should go thus astray. Probably both fear their own demons, whether resisting or surrendering to them, and they oblige themselves to scorn their pleasure in order to reduce its almost terrifying power, which overwhelms them, and its strange mystery, wherein they feel lost. I shall never believe in the classification of love among the purely physical joys (supposing that any such things exist) until I see a gourmet sobbing with delight over his favorite dish like a lover gasping on a young shoulder. Of all our games, love’s play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul, and is also the only one in which the player has to abandon himself to the body’s ecstasy. To put reason aside is not indispensable for a drinker, but the lover who leaves reason in control does not follow his god to the end. In every act save that of love, abstinence and excess alike involve but one person; any step in the direction of sensuality, however, places us in the presence of the Other, and involves us in the demands and servitudes to which our choice binds us. I know no decision which a man makes for simpler and more inevitable reasons, where the object chosen is weighed more exactly for its balance of sheer pleasure, or where the seeker after truth has a better chance to judge the naked human being. Each time, from a stripping down as absolute as that of death, and from a humility which surpasses that of defeat and of prayer, I marvel to see again reforming the complex web of experiences shared and refused, of mutual responsibilities, awkward avowals, transparent lies, and passionate compromises between my pleasures and those of the Other, so many bonds impossible to break but nevertheless so quickly loosened. The mysterious play which extends from love of a body to love of an entire person has seemed to me noble enough to consecrate to it one part of my life. Words for it are deceiving, since the word for pleasure covers contradictory realities comprising notions of warmth, sweetness, and intimacy of bodies, but also feelings of violence and agony, and the sound of a cry. The short and obscene sentence of Poseidonius about the rubbing together of two small pieces of flesh, which I have seen you copy in your exercise books with the application of a good schoolboy, does no more to define the phenomenon of love than the taut cord touched by the finger accounts for the infinite miracle of sounds. Such a dictum is less an insult to pleasure than to the flesh itself, that amazing instrument of muscles, blood, and skin, that red-tinged cloud whose lightning is the soul.



MARGUERITE YOURCENAR, Memoirs of Hadrian New York : Farrar, 2005.

Less than twenty pages into it and already wanting to quote/read you the book in its entirety, the above being but a paragraph and a bit. Lucid gems illumine every page. Thank you for the gift, Warren.

Photo: Pakonectar

Worthy

“…only he who is willing to give his body for the sake of the world is fit to be entrusted with the world. Only he who can do it with love is worthy of being the steward of the world.”

-Tao Te Ching

Pictured: “ifun” @ dudesnude

Gear

What moves you?*

 

Don’t keep calm and carry on., originally uploaded by moleitau.

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work and the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will, through work, bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never dream up if you were just sitting around looking for a great art idea. And that a belief in that the process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel everyday. Today you know what you will do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday and tomorrow you are going to do what you did today and at least for a certain period of time if you can just work to hang in there, you will get somewhere.

CHUCK CLOSE interviewed by Joe Fig, Plus Ultra Gallery, NY

While basically unmoved by Chuck Close’s duly regarded body of work, novelist Philip Roth referenced this interview in his brilliant, stark treatise on aging and the human body, Everyman, and when searching for the original text, found an oft used question with an equally penetrating response by photographer Matt Niebuhr. Also of note, Twyla Tharp’s “get to work” primer, The Creative Habit.

*…examining the threshold at which ordinary visibility ends and perception begins…

A good place.

By a good story I mean that the reader will arrive at a different place from where they started—a good place. It’s not necessarily that the story has a moral, or a happy ending; not saying this is right, this is wrong. The difference must be that it leaves a kind of memory. I believe memory is a kind of petrol in your life, in your body, in your will to live. My memories help me a lot to live on, to survive.

HARUKI MURAKAMI, from an interview with Mick Brown, Daily Telegraph Magazine, 16 August 2003.

Artist: Books made by Lucy Brank

The noise the brain makes.

 

God, she thought. What does it mean to say that word? Are you born with God? If you never hear the word or observe the ritual, do you feel the breath alive inside you, in brain waves or pounding heart?
 

     She thought that the hovering possible presence of God was the thing that created loneliness and doubt in the soul and she also thought that God was the thing, the entity existing outside space and time that resolved this doubt in the tonal power of a word, a voice.

     God is the voice that says, “I am not here.”

     She was arguing with herself but it wasn’t argument, just the noise the brain makes.

     She has normal morphology. Then late one night, undressing, she yanked a clean green T-shirt over her head and it wasn’t sweat she smelled or maybe just a faint trace but not the sour reek of the morning run. It was just her, the body through and through. It was the body and everything it carried, inside and out, identity and memory and human heat. It wasn’t even something she smelled so much as knew. It was something she’d always known. The child was in it, the girl who wanted to be other people, and obscure things she could not name. It was a small moment, already passing, the kind of moment that is always only seconds from forgetting.

DON DeLILLO, Falling Man

Photo: “Patrick”

Long division.

 

 

There is a soul in me

It is asking

to be given its body

 

LOUISE GLÜCK

Vespers ["once I believed in you"]

A Myth of Innocence

It’s so obviously the most miraculous thing to do

Mary Karr on Glück

We are both unbelievers…*

You were my garden when I was a
stranger in the land.

___

Take me behind your eyes….
Restore the color of my face,
my body’s warmth,
the light of heart and eye
and salt of bread and song
and taste of earth.

from A Lover from Palestine

MARMOUD DARWISH

* in the impossible.

the most beautiful part of a man’s body

the most beautiful part of a man’s body
I think it must be there,
where the torso sits on and, into the hips,
those twin delineating curves,
feminine in grace, girdling the trunk,
guiding the eyes downwards
to their intersection,
the point of pleasure.

DUANE MICHALS, from The Nature of Desire

Duane Michals at Pace/Macgill

Today man has no physical body.*

Today we experience, in reverse, what pre-literate man faced with the advent of writing.

Literate man, civi-
lized man,
tends to restrict and to
separate functions,
whereas tribal man has
freely extended the
form of his body
to include the universe.

Language
does for intelligence
what the wheel does for the feet and body.
It enables them to move from
thing to thing
with greater ease and speed
and less involvement.

MARSHALL McLUHAN
& DAVID CARSON, The Book of Probes

Pictured: “hornymantic” @ dudesnude

*Today man has no physical body. He is translated into information, or an image.