La Tannière du Loup-Graou

Flame my silver lyre on, Oh! Cynthia, and from your moonlit throne, grant me some of your thin dim beams so that I can, like an arrow on a bow, replace the missing strings and hum airs inspired from above. And although you have been praised and courted by greater spirits since the dawn of arts, spare some sparks for that poor bird with crooked claws who was born under a crescent moon to sing his personal Tales of Sin. Proud epics and mournful elegies have never been my calling, the kings knowing much better than hiring an ill-made vagabond who would only pause to howl a dire dirge of the soul, thrusting his awkward tunes into the empty shells who sit around that scornful Table of Humanity, and harpooning back to conscience what was laying dormant inside those noble braggarts. So, please, Oh! Lunatic Muse, make my silver lyre shine for some lost pairs of eyes, transform those words of poverty into a small elegant lighthouse which will illuminate the shadows of the mind for some of the travellers who will willingly stop by.

Errantry was once erected as the gallant standard of virtue, or at least as one of a noble spirit. But who was left in that fleeting castle as fragile as flesh to give their full support and protect its walls when it was besieged by the shadowy tendrils of doubt and betrayal which were coming out from the deep dark surrounding forest of the multitude? And who was there to lend his hands and shoulders in order to build it up again, bricks turned red onto another? And when those proud, shallow, chivalrous men would come back to the nest, they would only find a shattered kingdom inhabited by grinning scavengers and noisy gossipmongers. It was then the only logical issue that those melancholic white figures were to find in blaming the poor walking beggar for infinite affection that I am, accusing me of not being as noble as they were, suing me for not giving my life to protect what was rightfully theirs –not mine- accusing me for being the worst felon in humanity, whipping my soul for being an heresy among the sacrosanct learned animals roaming in that flat wasteland… Shunned, scorned and stoned by men for just being a man.

It hurts, of course, and my heart aches and begs to pour my love on them, although one tainted with the bitter tears of a judgemental daemon that has been possessing me since that fatidic night when I finally took the sinful decision to dip deep my longest finger into that fragrant red cauldron who was such a promise of sapience and bliss, pain mixed with pleasure, and such an illusory feeling of relief when done. I was thirsty for that knowledge, and I greedily tasted that fake glimpse of the divine, leaving me hungry for more, coveting an artificial paradise made of lust and ending up in sloth. But what I had built up as a deceiving spiritual sense of pride has then left me since the day of lethal betrayal with a shivering body stuffed with wrath. And I clearly saw the moment when I cut a way off from that poisonous web, I being lent a glimmering sparkle of strength coming down, a divine ray of light, a speck of a moment lasting an eternal second, when I could cut one of the strings of my blissful harp loose, leaving my melancholic heart sounding like an empty cavern when hurt by that fateful earthquake that we call crushed passion.

So, what is left today beside our sour memories? Or is it that we have not come to understand yet, like that old green bard – a romantic butler of yeats - sung it sadly, that we quaesitors of truth, when holding the muscatel cup, would drink with our gross palates the whole wine instead of the wine-breath? We have become ghosts of men but we have not been able to caress the sweet immateriality of the divine yet. This is why, Oh! Cruel Lunar Inspirer, let me once again squeak sharp words like a magpie, my fist clenched on your silvery beams with so much strength that my blood will flow for sure, and like that poor ancient carpenter, allow what I am spilling to heal, and make those small crimson rivulets my anchor to the multitude, I, lonely hobo, to a world of wasted men. And when I will have torn those thin lines out from what I had dug deep in the recesses of my experience, please Oh! Almighty One! Transform those evanescent chains into a strong girdle of jade that I can wear with a proud, rid of all vanity, stance, making each word that I will utter in the future, even at such an advanced age, of my life the humming tunes of a holy prelude.

“The horror, the horror!” is what they all have kept on crying since their birth, and no one would ever listen to their plea while being all ears. Who would care anyway? We are entitled to hear, not to pay attention to their whimpers. People are credited as being human, which does not mean that we must respect their self though. And because every one knows the answer, they all forgot the essential question that would heal me, I, poor shallow hexagram, ancient king who used to possess a formidable wealth of wits and who only owns a reed cane and a boat today. But how could I ever recover from my impediment if everyone I meet who knows the answer are not the slightest able to ask the right question?

And here I am, on this placid Lamartinean lake, fishing lines of sentencing verses, dragging out from the obscure depths of an unknown still stretch of water food for my soul. Time has passed by, love has died on these bloody heathen rocks whereupon evanescent nymphs used to genuinely loathe and play, pure naked creatures who would just be, and who just could not possibly understand why they were hunted by hollow holy men whose lust for fleshly penance would have them focusing on the corpo reale when preaching the immanence of our everlasting soul. They would be a reminder of how happy I should be each time my lady comes out from the lake to soothe the pain of my impediment… my shrouded lux divina.

Unfortunately, I have now to use the seven strings of my harp to fish and catch my sustenance, sailing against the wild western waves, obstacles to my healing on this still huge pond, filled with a mystic mist that would allow me to watch all of you, knights questing for an illusory cup the which I hold and possess, the matter and the secret, amounting to nothing except the experience each one of you would create to fill with your spiritual blood that emptiness that has created so many plagues. But would one will ever be able to understand that the symbol will never stand for what lies below, the content? A platter will remain a platter, and be it held by a god, it would be plain idolatry to quest for an item. No spirit can be constrained in a statue, be it a man.

And here I sit, in this boat, my line thrusting into the shallow waters of this lake that has seen many chivalrous beings passing by, like this man, sailing on a swan, who would twirl those white misty shadows to create hexagrams of conflicts, or like this one who would stare for years to tiny drops of blood spread on the cold white snow covering the floor, the most hopeful one among the current hopes. I also watched the strongest ones failing, like the thrice-praised god and the purest friend, most valorous men in that lame kingdom so sick of itself. And they all left their castle in quest of what they blatantly put behind: they cannot know how empty our souls are until they fill their own one. And what about that errand bum, begging for a cursed affection he would never know?

So many times had I watched him roaming on these still shores, raving words of prophecy that would get caught in my lines. And I beheld the very moment of his sweet but wounding imprisonment in the jade. So many loved ones crossed our paths, leaving us scarred and maimed, bringing us up to the highest of ourselves, just to vanish when we were about to strengthen our position, the fortress of our heart, and leaving a void that would make all of us fall down to the pits of a hellish despair that takes its form in the mirrors that each one of our mask create out of our injured souls. I am a lame king, fishing on a still pond that knows no wave but the ones that my sweet Lux Divina creates when she comes out from the green blue depths below, my lady, my company in that dire lake, soothing my pain by creating new ones, my delicious tormentor, my burning half.

And here I sing, moaning cries of melancholic happiness, to awaken the pain of my wounds, so that I can feel my limbs alive, knowing no relief but that way to have me feel whole, even though it needs a formidable dolorous stroke on my thighs to open my wounds again and see the blood our Lord put in my veins, the same blood that each one of us has ever been partaking since His sacrifice, the song of songs of that bloody red night on the hill of the skull. But why has He not revealed us that living His legacy alone would cut our legs? Why is it that when I held His Holy Mystery I fell down, my face straight in the mud, my soul lashed and left forever numb? And why, when I woke up from that dire moment, instead of a sword given by the waters, I found a harp on which strings were missing?

I’m ashamed I had to destroy you my friend, the last but the noblest from a very long line. I was having a very long look at your helmet, and there was nothing I could do, not being myself, I, being mad, jailed, gripped, grasped by the clutches of folly. Taking a last look at you, I knew that there was nothing else I could do. By slaying your armour, you took me away, making me a prisoner at the very moment I sent your soul to the otherworld. Free me right now! I have been trapped in the clutches of sloth and lechery for too long. My whole being shivers in sorrow now, and I can’t help, my body is possessed by a power that goes beyond me, but which comes from the burning underworld below!

We had won all the wars, our world was at peace, but we thought too high of ourselves, becoming the god of our self, secretly yearning to assay our dominion over the God of old and onto the other gods that were rising to take hold of the human gentry. We have become pagans of the psyche, adoring, worshiping the divine spark of our own soul, the navel of our fleshly cathedral, looking upward when gazing at our own reflection. How could we stand the presence of others when they would threaten the almightiness of our most holy existence? By bringing up the round fellowship of the Table of Humanity, we have blown up the cohesion of the world, shattering individuals without realizing that we all would bring lies to the Altar and worship them as Truth.

They all saw in me a model, their words of praise being the flying cherry petals that would merrily land at my feet, meant for me to tread on them each time I would come back. The eulogies, the loud laudatory songs, they were all red tapestries aimed at giving me that soft feeling that I would be wrapped up by love and friendship again, that they would make my loneliness a distant memory… When a man lies, he murders some part of the world, and their sweet whispers, fake hands of an idolatrous narcissism, were the knives which would dig round into my heart and ransack my soul. Praising my errantry was all devilish prayers that ended up in mesmerizing my spirit to make me fall in slumber.

Younger, I would call myself an ill-made knight, fearing mirrors but speeding my soul in this sea of shadows that we call the civilized world. I would genuinely live among the eight trigrams of reality without understanding that the sky had already collapsed onto the unity that we struggled to create, leaving a heap of broken lines, knaves being granted knives of cheap concepts to make us believe that we would overcome our feeling of inferiority by building up new babelian towers in order to un-throne the One Lord, blaming our misdeeds on Him, trying Him for allowing us to be free devils, accusing Him for letting us do our way, crying out our hatred, blinded in our melancholia to the fact that our anger was only caused by ourselves.

I’m not frightened anymore! I had to fail that bloody quest when I was the one who was looked up to bring salvation back, but His breath left me aback, almost dead, drowning in that muddy swamp of self-compliancy, I, choking, struggling to swim up and swallow some air when the pernicious tendrils of vain materiality would drag me deep into the obscure nightmare that we still call the lights of reason. No, I had to open my eyes and see beyond darkness, that the Light was still there, not inside me, but deep inside up. No, no wooden cup would quench our thirst, but He forever would, as He already did. Take my hand, please, Oh! My Virgil and guide me up again across the dark thick forest meandering in my body and spiralling into my soul. I am hell, you are Heaven, the world being our purgatory.

And One will come, already better than I’ve ever been. He will be the first of a very long line, healing and leaving, to heal again, and showing how to. He will free us from the unconscious self-imposed constriction of the shell that we call our armour, we, inborn yet wearing thousands of masks. He will shatter the mirror so that we can look at ourselves under the light of Truth, to understand that we are not one with ourselves, and that we cannot pretend today that we are one with the world. He will be our step upward, showing us how the perfection of ourselves that we cheaply bought was only the dirt with which we covered our face, to hide that horrible truth: without Him, we are only one lost loose shard in His Holy Book of Nature.

They said I would throw myself away, that they were just decoys after all, illusions for retarded wanderers lacking stability, endlessly roaming always suspicious. And why is it that people would always gather around a man wearing the metal cap of a lifelong exile while leaving an empty space between I and them? For that bitter mixture of moist curiosity and dry defiance would speak by itself, they would then give me the fatal blow by looking down at me, warm smiles of contempt, words of affection filled with disgust… Why cannot they understand that the sixty-six scripts and scrolls in my right hand is the only way I would ever have to help me bearing the dire weight that one shadow of sixty-four hexagrams that are yet eloquently pressing on my shoulders? I would like to befriend them whole-heartedly, they make me cowardly hide and trick. I would like to love them silently, they have me truly prove and speak.

Rhetoricians, priests, prophets, philosophers, they would all come to show me how astray I have always been, I, the wrathchild, the forlorn seer who would keep throwing the three smallest coins on the floor to foretell the greatest happenings, and the smallest as well. Everywhere I would pause, when I feel like they want to burn the grid of their fallacies on my face, the hard way, it’s for my good they would whisper, not as half convinced of their own word as their pleads would require. Are they at a loss with me? Are they afraid of me? According to them, I conflagrate time, being younger than wisdom although too old to fit in. And in their superimposing syncretism over the flow that human nature is fated to experience, for they would assume the immanence of my modest existence is an insult to all that the notion of civilization can mean. So superb indeed, to know that the fight for freedom of our predecessor would end up in such a slavery of free, never-compulsory rights, drawing borders, pulling lines inside the very existence of existence itself.

Time is a human concept felt and defined by human beings, just as much as it can be twisted by them. While a child, I would be considered old, and now older I am said to act a child’s play. But I am ageless, conflating all the frontiers into that one point in my belly, the source of all contractions and expansions, being an empire by myself, as valuable as a grain of sand, as lonely as a tree in a forest, one in a thousand, but being barely able to touch and see all. I would be the counsellor of king Hastur, asked to interpret events and dreams like the one in which two dragons, and red one and a white one would bite each other in a deadly embrace. But the truth would never be one easy to accept, and again I would err, an outcast in a world that would create such an interface of emptiness, because of such a feeling of awe mixed with fright.

Magpies would forebode every one of my arrivals, flying in couple to build a nest on the roof of temples and castles, or resting on a twig to look at me straight in the eyes, leaving a feather of hope sometimes, the hope that I would find the everlasting relief I was promised one night when I first saw the silver string bathing in that obscure swamp that I call my soul. And digging deep inside that sea of shadows is the show that the commons would pay for attending my demonstrations, being a circus of freaks by myself, a clown, an animal, a fortune-teller, a magister, an actor, an entertainer… They would build a safe stage for me just with a little scaffold backstage for them to feel secure if I happened to become wild again, running naked as I once did in the forests beyond the big wall of civilization, with people of pictures, to escape the cruel reality of this world by eating my own mind and throwing my faith away.

So how have I ended up being constricted in this rock of jade now? All I know is that what is roaming aimlessly hither and thither these days is but a shadow of a shadow since the day I have been entrapped by the deceiving words of La Belle Dame Sans Merci. She lured me when she promised she would make a poetic knight out from the erring boy that I was. She tricked me by leading me onto the other side of the hill where spectres of dead faiths could only endure tortured. And my fate would be to feel jailed without her noticing that I had already had a glimmer of Divine Light which would pierce the rock into a crack, allowing one finger to move and write with my own blood my letters of my plights and hopes, speeding an illusion of myself to the world, waiting for the day when Heaven will free my soul from its shackles of dirt so that I will be able to embrace the world completely, and not just with mere words.

Yes indeed I felt compelled to leave the Castle of Innocence, the safe haven of blind devotion, to roam on twisted roads so that I could sail across the shores of many different worlds. I didn’t even realize that I fell trapped by the mesmerizing words of La Belle Dame Sans Merci from the dream-land of Faëry. And as the spring of my youth was coming to an end, by seeing the forebodings of a passionate summer crying out loud the blossoming of love, suddenly my life turned to winter as she was leading me toward the Limbos of non-existence, by depriving me of my Acts of Faith, asserting that I should put my eyes on her only, as if I strayed upward I would lose her. How deceived I was then when I realized that she turned me into an image to be placed in her poor museum of lame victims fallen because of tricks that she could not even control. Was I fated to end up in this plain at that moment to see that a river was flowing further on?

The white shadows spinning into the thick fog hovering over the river by which I was sitting were promising many subtle secrets if I only put the tips of my fingers to help them unravelling out. But I knew that if I played with the mystics of the icebergs I might miss my bark for the other side, which was yet out of sight. But I kept playing with the construction of twist just to de-constrict them afterwards. The fanged serpents here created would bite me back to suck vampirically the poison of venomous love in my veins instilled, red rivers of powerful emotions which only met a weak resolve. I needed to be drained of my tainted blood indeed. I needed to be completely emptied so that the fangs of the Dragon would pierce my armour and fly up, deeply carving a Wagnerian swan in my demanding heart.

I never knew my father, eloping to Heaven without leaving any legacy but me. How many speculations have been floating here and there, rumours spinning and transforming grief into a feeling of hatred that I could only witness silently? Why did everybody forget that he loved The Unique Tanned Pearl of Africa, a wild Queen of Heart and gentleness? What did he leave beside the two brown spots on my thigh which would accomplish that dreamed prophecy wherein a stained ox hiding among one hundred white ones, the which would mean that a repenting sinner would cross the road of many saints, without ever being able to belong to any temple? And what about the hundred Righteous ones left who were brandishing their purity as a white flag of intolerance, waging wars through words of peace?

On my right, by the bawn of the forest was standing a wild old man, a weird wolf, a friend of mine, howling his faith to every stranger, with whispers of love. The fur would become white, the prerogative of age, the eyes would not be hazy, gifted by the Spirit, his body weak but his arm holding the fiery flaming sword of words that struck my soul every time I would meet him by a strange change called providence. I never intended to walk on this road, leaving directions to destiny. He would not be the seer who claimed that I was born between the six lines of conflict, but he would liven up my faith with strange words, urging me to keep my eyes locked at the lighthouse for He was my light shepherding me out from the ivory illusions of a hazy stagnation.

Is it a swan that I can see now coming on my direction, feathers of quicksilver piercing the choking whiteness of a dull atmosphere? Today I realized that ivory does not necessarily reflects purity. The birds are sick, just as men have been. Everything is so bright, shadows upon shadows, masks upon masks, and we are given the illusion of a safety hardly won thanks to the suspicious expansion of man’s humanity. That clarity is a shroud that has made us blind and turned the world into blight. And what do people perceive beyond the smoggy twirls and twists of that intoxicating veil beside the comforting illusions that those images that can be played in and with are the sublime reality that would deify them, living being stuffed by the recurrent lies that they would be able to become Gods in Babel if they wished?

Thank you my wild friend, thank you for still being alive, thank you for being the one who tore my vanity down with these simple words: “never stray away from the lighthouse”. We will all die one day, you, I, everybody, but others will come, who will keep uttering our words. We are no god, only men. We have been taught that we could transcend ourselves, you showed me that we would better being transient. The holiness of modesty hardly gets along with the vacuity of godliness. And now it is high time to set sail for the other shore as my sweet swan, feathers of silver and eyes of jade, is nodding at me allowing me to ride her back. And although an Elsa is waiting for me to find the keys to her kingdom, I know now that what lies beyond will yet be another mere step toward my Lux Divina. Farewell for now old world, as I will be carried away to lands unknown wherein I will delight in being anonymous as a new-born child, beginning everything once again, all my life long.

I wouldn’t pretend that I’m reflecting upon everything I do, because I would be boasting here, but I would also give you the grim impression that I lack spontaneity. No, but sometimes I have these little moments of epiphany, as would say James Joyce: my eyes would open suddenly as I realize that what I do conveys much more meaning than the first layer of the onion. And yes indeed, onion has its part to play too, hahaha!!! Well, earlier on, at noon, I became quite hungry, just like anyone else at the same time of the day, so I endeavoured to prepare a big bowl of noodle soup as I wouldn’t cook a more complex dish on this bright and sunny Sunday which incites way too much to laziness. Then I begin by cutting an onion and by frying it, the which I add all those small pieces to the noodle soup which is on fire, ready to receive all those little snorkels to choke them with the compulsory but unavoidable thin threads of Chinese pasta that would make my day… And this is when I finally understood!

Some would say that I’ve always been a proponent of the “simply complex” philosophy that I made mine this motto on pleasure lying in simple things, although I am the kind of person who has a twisted personality. The song “Simple Man” by Lynyrd Skynyrd never misses to bring me to tears. Deep inside I’ve always sought for this simplicity that I felt being cut off because of some fateful curse, the bad witch poking my cheek at birth, wishing evil at me. For all the ones who know my life since I’m born, you would then be eager to say that here I’m half lying, being not that far from the truth. But there is always a counter-spell in the tales.

Is Cup Noodle that trick that is allowing me to write now about realizing that I was delighted by making simple useless things myself? I don’t think so, as I’m still trying to express that moment of illumination in such a complex prose that I know I haven’t said a thing yet on what I felt at that moment nor I have begun to come to the real point of this blog entry. Am I unconsciously building up a decoy to prevent you to look at me? If yes, please look at the empty spots where I really am.

Here is the point: sailing up to the lighthouse, creating those little moments of everlasting life where and when we could feel infinite by doing simple things that brings pleasure to our life, as wrote Virginia Woolf in such a tortuous way to teach us such in simple thing: go where the light is, even if it means sailing against the strong waves of a cruel yet blind nature who wouldn’t care a peanut if you were dead or alive. But I care! Please forget all the “sensible fallacy” in which we still indulge ourselves a bit too much, thinking that the world around us conspires to our happiness when we really wish it, etc… All that Paolo Coelho crap was also the game of the Romantic poets who, on the rationale that metaphorical displacement of our powerful feelings on the force of Nature would help us attain a greater symbiosis with the world, only cut us off from the real force at work!

As I wrote last time, I have faith in God. I know that that thin silver thread is the one key hidden in the complex tapestry weaved between my Self and the universe, the angular stone that keeps me caring about how alive I can be thanks to one simple shining string. I wouldn't close my eyes to Nature for a penny, but I wouldn’t displace the Holy Spirit into the trees and the mountains either. I do see them alive, however I wouldn’t believe them being influential on my life up to the degree of the super-natural. But the Lord is, and I am…

By cooking this noodle soup and cutting this onion, I realized how eternal I was at that very moment, how happy I felt to feel alive by bringing up a share of that joy into what would sustain me. At that moment, that simple act of cooking in simplicity had become sacred, transcendental. My soul was attuned to that Emmersonian “iron string” that links every soul down here. By cooking and eating, call me crazy if you want, I just fell in love with all of you in a fleeting moment which ‘everlasted’ for some minutes, making me so close to you then. Thanks to the Almighty for giving me such a blessing on this delicious Sunday. Amen.

I try, I try, I try…. And I’m trying again to write for this new blog entry. I even have a topic which is broad enough to say everything I want without unveiling too much from myself, but I can’t write… I’ve erased this page so many times, and it seems that what I’m only able to dissert about is my capacity to doubt. Is it because of doubt that I lost so much time in my life? Is it because I cannot put a straightforward confidence in anything and anyone that I’m still walking on many byways? I don’t have a regular life, which appears to be suspicious for the majority around me. For others, I’m a tragic hero who’s living a pitiful life because I never wanted to swim on the mainstream, but whose hope is as a candlelight that makes me moving forward… Do you see what I mean, because I don’t? Sorry but these days I caught a bad cold so I have the utmost difficulties to think logically, or even to concentrate properly. Is my mind so empty that I can’t utter an interesting discourse which could give you some points to think about, or at least some happiness –maybe?

Or is this emptiness the crack on my mask where I could finally see myself? I remember that, in a previous entry, I wrote that I was looking at the empty spaces in order to go beyond people’s shelters, but could it happen that I omitted to look at my own empty spots? Nobody really knows himself, just as you can’t pretend knowing the others. But is it narcissism to look at yourself in the mirror, not only to see your face, your body and your soul, but also what lies dormant in your mind? Because if it is narcissism, that couldn’t be that bad in a sense. It could even be a good remedy against a latent felling of melancholia, when you feel that nothing is really of importance, beginning with your own thoughts. I’m not sure that what I think is right, I’m not sure that what I believe in makes any sense at all. But there is one good point at least: I have faith. I have faith in God, I have faith in a better tomorrow, and what makes this faith pleasurable is that it is neither an attempt at autosuggestion to feel better through any kind of spiritual placebo nor it is any indoctrination from exterior people feeling some concern about my soteriological future. No, this faith is immanent, like the Almighty, no beginning, no end. And when I speak about my faith, I have this image of a thin thread of silver meandering in dark waters, but getting straight when need be. I know this is a weird thing to explain, maybe the most bizarre detail about myself, and that trying to put it down would result in a greater confusion, but don’t forget that today I’m sick, and that I’m taking the right to indulge myself in some form of automatic writing, hahaha!!!

Well, for someone who doesn’t have any inspiration today, I think that I’ve already written a lot. It maybe nonsense, it may be empty of any kind of philosophical theory, but here it is, a reflection of what is clinging on my soul these days. And I think that I have become more and more attached to that psychology of looking at the empty spaces. Somehow I could curse myself that I ever read Jacques Derrida, I never should have as it was like eating a forbidden fruit which was so tasty that my eyes bulged all of a sudden. I wouldn’t say that I’m deconstructing everything now, as it would mean that I’m both being pretentious and insane, but if there is one thing I assimilated is that nothing is unimportant in a chain of signifiers, that even the unsaid which, logically speaking, doesn’t exist, has its importance. It has become a very common attitude these days to say things like “read between the lines”, being one of the premises of any intelligent reading of anything in life, but it has been used to such an extent that we have begun to think too highly of ourselves, wiping away what would appear trivial, childish, petty, whimsical, or, to sum up, looking down contemptuously at all the little form of sensibilities that constitute a real person.

I try, I try, I try and I will try to be a human being, a good-hearted one. Not because of any sense of duty I would feel, I would be the worst then, and a hypocritical kind of one. Not because I could fell low and less than human, that I’d try to stuck again the broken pieces of my shattered self through the means of being friendly, no… Just because I feel in everybody such an amount of love they are afraid to vent because they don’t want to look like they were weak or something. Just because I feel too much love for I don’t know who or why or what and I don’t really care. Just because I want to better myself in the perspective to sail one day up to the lighthouse with all my friends in the same boat, just because Love is…..

Yesterday was Valentines Day and can you guess on what I am going to be talking about? Sex… Yup, I’m going to write about sex… Ok, ok!! I can already see some of you coming, from far, I can hear complaints like I’m spoiling those nice memories of fragrant flowers exchanged, of a tasteful restaurant table where woes of love are whispered again, swearing eternal faithfulness to each other, and of a long lasting kiss, to the point you can feel the early beginnings of two hearts beating with the same sweet symphony. But I will talk about sex….

Well, what’s my point with that? Since I began chatting here and there online, I’ve become quite aware that sex would always be a topic which would come out one day or another, with just anybody. It can be somebody who is just trying to lure you in showing the attributes particular to your gender, it can be somebody trying to play with your reactions, to test how far you are ready to go, but I would dare say that I am lucky enough I became acquainted with people who are free from those kinds of digital lust. However, the topic comes out with them too, as they have their own experiences, they have met people who can’t keep from uttering sexual innuendos, or even asking for more…

Besides, I have recently met, online, somebody with whom I began to chat about sexual imageries in various works of art, and for whom I’m writing this blog entry right now. I would like her to understand that it’s not a matter of seeing phallic or vaginal symbols in everything we see, but a matter of looking at the piece of work according to the context in which it has been produced, and in what way it can relate to everything sex can be coupled with. Everybody can see a penis in I and a vagina in O, but it’s only because you want to see that. On the contrary, when you have a poem wherein the author writes about his desire for the lady he’s courting, in a time when bleak language wouldn’t be allowed, a word measured on itself alone would give a literal meaning. But if you look at the movements the verbs convey, here you can see one of the metaphorical dimensions.

But sexual imagery is not only used to vent a desire for sexual expression. It is a good means to define sexuality and gender issues. One could say that the teleology of love is the sexual encounter, but I wouldn’t agree on that point, it would be forgetful of “agape”. But in a time when the traditional parochial, marital, patriarchal, hierarchical orders are shaken and still in movement, one needs to define himself AND herself by what one has, that is to say: the experience of sex. When movements for the rights of women began to appear, one strong motto was the right to contraception, and the right they have on their body. It’s really easy to understand what sex has to do here, then. But to come back to the imagery topic, I would say that although women were and are still struggling, a movement I strongly support when it doesn’t go overboard, we have today many works done in favour of gender recognition, transgenders being one of them, but it’s also in relation with sexual orientations and their recognition (of course, when it’s an orientation that is built on the premises of mutual respect!!). Then, go through the books, watch closely the movies, decode the paintings, you will find at one time or another some sexual imagery if not innuendos. And do you know why? Because when it comes to fleshly love, one shouldn’t be forgetful of his and / or her body, and more importantly, because if you want to speak “agape”, if you want do deal on the ground of pure love, just remember that it transcends gender, age, social class and anything material… and that this is where and when you will find God.

Here follows a poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt where you will find pleasure, I hope, but also some good exercise to apply the sexual imagery grid to your reading of it. Enjoy.

THE LOVER COMPLAINETH THE UNKINDNESS OF HIS LOVE.

“My lute awake, perform the last
   Labour, that thou and I shall waste,
   And end that I have now begun :
    And when this song is sung and past,
My lute ! be still, for I have done.
    As to be heard where ear is none ;
As lead to grave in marble stone ;
My song may pierce her heart as soon.
Should we then sigh, or sing, or moan ?
No, no, my lute !  for I have done.
    The rocks do not so cruelly
Repulse the waves continually,
As she my suit and affection :
So that I am past remedy ;
Whereby  my lute and I have done.
    Proud of the spoil that thou hast got
Of simple hearts through Love's shot,
By whom, unkind, thou hast them won :
Think not he hath his bow forgot,
Although my lute and I have done.
    Vengeance shall fall on thy disdain,
That makest but game on earnest pain ;
Think not alone under the sun
Unquit  to cause thy lovers plain ;
Although my lute and I have done.
    May chance thee lie withered and old
The winter nights, that are so cold,
Plaining in vain unto the moon ;
Thy wishes then dare not be told :
Care then who list, for I have done.
    And then may chance thee to repent
The time that thou hast lost and spent,
To cause thy lovers sigh and swoon :
Then shalt thou know beauty but lent,
And wish and want as I have done.
    Now cease, my lute !  this is the last
Labour, that thou and I shall waste ;
And ended is that we begun :
Now is this song both sung and past ;
My lute !  be still, for I have done.”

Sir Thomas Wyatt