Eroticism

[softbird]

View attachment 2558828

Borders are beautiful, they are liminal.. there, we find the most erotic of things.. in Firenze once, I was in the train station waiting for the train to take me to Sienna. The announcements on the platform were blaring words, so beautiful, because they meant something, but my Italian is, at best, nil! And so, like a dreamer, I imagined my Italian lover, imagined, whispering words to me over the loudspeaker, ah! The romantic tones of train announcements!

But people began to move, run, the platform suddenly a flurry of bodies, and so I joined them, ran through the tunnel, following this wave. Old nuns sped past me, how fast these women could run!

And I remember thinking these words are magical, and ai felt myself running as in a dream.

We found the train, and I crashed into a seat, breathless, not knowing if I had followed these people to the wrong train. Should I have stayed at the platform. For a full hour I was in liminal space. Unknowing. And then my Italian lover said the word over the carriage speaker, Sienna, and I felt like I had come home!

 

[Coconutty70]

Borders are beautiful, they are liminal.. there, we find the most erotic of things.. in Firenze once, I was in the train station waiting for the train to take me to Sienna. The announcements on the platform were blaring words, so beautiful, because they meant something, but my Italian is, at best, nil! And so, like a dreamer, I imagined my Italian lover, imagined, whispering words to me over the loudspeaker, ah! The romantic tones of train announcements!

But people began to move, run, the platform suddenly a flurry of bodies, and so I joined them, ran through the tunnel, following this wave. Old nuns sped past me, how fast these women could run!

And I remember thinking these words are magical, and ai felt myself running as in a dream.

We found the train, and I crashed into a seat, breathless, not knowing if I had followed these people to the wrong train. Should I have stayed at the platform. For a full hour I was in liminal space. Unknowing. And then my Italian lover said the word over the carriage speaker, Sienna, and I felt like I had come home!

I have also taken this train from Florence to Sienna! It’s a beautiful place! Much more relaxed than Florence, and I thought the art was much less grandiose, with all of the lovely artist galleries. I recall there being some good contemporary art galleries. The grappa was good too!

I have coincidentally also run through Firenze train station, for me it was to catch a train to Venice. I didn’t have an Italian lover though… I had a jester! The departures board listed the train to Venice 30 minutes before departure, and when we arrived at the platform we were alone. Then, five minutes before departure, the jester changed the platform to one across the other side of the station. We ran… I was faster, so I went ahead of my partner, shouting “Scusi!” and parting the sea of people as I went. Quite chaotic for a liminal, transitory moment! We caught the train… only just… in a panic. It left us breathless and sweating. I had first class tickets, so a kind waiter provided us water and I conceded that I had to change my shirt, when I finally cooled down.

Not necessarily erotic! But I couldn’t resist sharing, given the coincidence.

 

[softbird]

It must be a thing then, this chasing down trains. Of its happened twice to two different people at two different times!

 

[softbird]

Light is the greatest gift the universe has given us, because it etches its ink on the canvas of our bodies. See how the landscape changes, so how it speaks.

I have often thought of the eroticism of poetry written on my body, in the inside of my thighs, under the hanging curves of my breasts, in the hollow crook of my underarms.





View attachment 2559011
View attachment 2559012

 

[shewantsmore]

More than anything, I love the way lines are drawn on our bodies, the soft fabric harnesses that cross us like erotic grids on a map, vast and cosmic - the strap of the shoulder, the clasping arms of a brassiere, the clinging embrace of a panty line. They are avaricious, but they are also subtle angels of form, shaping our contours, sculpting us

View attachment 2558728
View attachment 2558729

View attachment 2558730

View attachment 2558731

View attachment 2558811

View attachment 2558732

love the chain and almost her twiggy style hair

 

[softbird]

The unsaid - how delectable it is! Language steps in the way of meaning. Because words, while beautiful, poetic, cadenced, are always like the stars in the sky. They are merely reflections of light emanating from the stars which are light years away.




View attachment 2559026

 

[jonnoback]

Light is the greatest gift the universe has given us, because it etches its ink on the canvas of our bodies. See how the landscape changes, so how it speaks.

I have often thought of the eroticism of poetry written on my body, in the inside of my thighs, under the hanging curves of my breasts, in the hollow crook of my underarms.

View attachment 2559009

View attachment 2559010

View attachment 2559011
View attachment 2559012

You choose some fabulous images.

 

[Cultivateddesires]

There is so much to love here.

 

[softbird]

Feet are the lost souls, their little quintuplet rivulets carrying the burden of the body, the pains of the soul.

They see so much of the world that the world hardly understands itself - the cracks, the fissures, the forgotten crevices from which other lost creatures sprout. Soldiers, our very own version of bees, silent, buzzing constellations.

The high arches and the extreme plaxar flexion are the swans of our bodies..

 

[softbird]

Sometimes, I sit still and silent in the afternoon sun and listen.

In the silence, I hear a different kind of music, perhaps it is a yearning, my yearning that makes that music, and perhaps we are all cave dwellers, denizens in Plato’s cavernous universe.

Whatever that music may be, it is a child of silence. In silence, you hear yourself, pulsing with the world.

 

[bookworm69]

Light is the greatest gift the universe has given us, because it etches its ink on the canvas of our bodies. See how the landscape changes, so how it speaks.

I have often thought of the eroticism of poetry written on my body, in the inside of my thighs, under the hanging curves of my breasts, in the hollow crook of my underarms.

View attachment 2559009

View attachment 2559010

View attachment 2559011
View attachment 2559012

Yes, yes … your body in light and shadow IS erotic poetry … in motion because it lives and breathes, and it is ever changing. To look away, even for a moment, some poetry will be missed.

The poetry of the body, in a word, lingers in the mind.

 

[bookworm69]

The unsaid - how delectable it is! Language steps in the way of meaning. Because words, while beautiful, poetic, cadenced, are always like the stars in the sky. They are merely reflections of light emanating from the stars which are light years away.

View attachment 2559024
View attachment 2559025

View attachment 2559026

Yes, O Wise One … the unsaid has such power … if lived in the moment.

 

[bookworm69]

Sometimes, I sit still and silent in the afternoon sun and listen.

In the silence, I hear a different kind of music, perhaps it is a yearning, my yearning that makes that music, and perhaps we are all cave dwellers, denizens in Plato’s cavernous universe.

Whatever that music may be, it is a child of silence. In silence, you hear yourself, pulsing with the world.

Much wisdom and wonder in you, Youngling. Please continue to grow … and share. We are all in Plato’s cave.

 

[Coconutty70]

Much wisdom and wonder in you, Youngling. Please continue to grow … and share. We are all in Plato’s cave.

I think if these images and poetic words are the shadows on the wall, then I pity the fool who tries to come and drag us out!

[edit] Come to think of it… is @softbird trying to imprison us here? I can think of worse prisons.

 

[bookworm69]

Feet are the lost souls, their little quintuplet rivulets carrying the burden of the body, the pains of the soul.

They see so much of the world that the world hardly understands itself - the cracks, the fissures, the forgotten crevices from which other lost creatures sprout. Soldiers, our very own version of bees, silent, buzzing constellations.

The high arches and the extreme plaxar flexion are the swans of our bodies..

And the feet work so hard! Ignored so often, taken for granted. They should be taken care of and pampered. Thanks for this reminder of their burden and beauty.

 

[softbird]

I think if these images and poetic words are the shadows on the wall, then I pity the fool who tries to come and drag us out!

[edit] Come to think of it… is @softbird trying to imprison us here? I can think of worse prisons.

View attachment 2559093

You have worked out my evil plans, the machiavel that I am.. yet, who is the real prisoner? Am I not also imprisoned in your adoration?

 

[Coconutty70]

Am I not also imprisoned in your adoration?

Said like a true Godess!
Wait… wasn’t Machiavelli a Florentine? You have us caught up in a clever web!

Who is in control here.. and who is doing the others bidding? I don’t think this is as it first seems.

View attachment 2559153

(I’d love for those hands to be mine: silently directive and firmly decisive, but unquestionably adoring! There would be no escape!)

 

[softbird]

Virginia Woolf said once that it was all in the contrast. How right she was! She was, of course, talking about writing, and literature, but I think, the contrasts make us human. Consider the way we see the world - High/low, good/bad, beautiful/ugly, madonna/whore. Binaries, coded into the very way we see the world, into the very codes that fuel our technologies.

I venture that these binaries, these contrasts are where the erotic is born, the crucible from which something is revealed, prised open, blossoms, like a wound, like an insight, like a vision. The contrasts turn the mundane and the banal into sublimity.





View attachment 2559196
View attachment 2559197

View attachment 2559198

These are contrasts between straight lines and meanedring ones, black and white, backward and forward, up and down, light and dark

 

[bookworm69]

Virginia Woolf said once that it was all in the contrast. How right she was! She was, of course, talking about writing, and literature, but I think, the contrasts make us human. Consider the way we see the world - High/low, good/bad, beautiful/ugly, madonna/whore. Binaries, coded into the very way we see the world, into the very codes that fuel our technologies.

I venture that these binaries, these contrasts are where the erotic is born, the crucible from which something is revealed, prised open, blossoms, like a wound, like an insight, like a vision. The contrasts turn the mundane and the banal into sublimity.

View attachment 2559194

View attachment 2559195

View attachment 2559196
View attachment 2559197

View attachment 2559198

These are contrasts between straight lines and meanedring ones, black and white, backward and forward, up and down, light and dark

All lovely subjects. Three stark in their challenge to any viewer; two with their faces unseen, apparently not caring about any viewer. All at ease, comfortable with their bodies.

In this context, for me, the contrast represents confidence in their femininity notwithstanding need of any observers.

Neat presentation.

 

[softbird]

When I look in the mirror, I am filled with dread, dread. Because the mirror splits the ‘I’ and makes it ‘the Other’, l’autre, as Lacan would say.

And when I see myself as Other in the mirror, I step out of myself, and into the shoes of the world, and I begin to see myself as the world sees me. It is both self-recognition and alienation

I am no longer pure emotion, pure subjectivity, but mere mirror image for the world to pour its desires, its longing into me.

But mirrors are also doubling, and unsettles. It is me, and yet not me. Somewhere, between the space of my eye and the mirror’s surface, I become art, I become imagination

 

[redsnowbunny]

So, I think there is a difference between Eroticism and pure sexuality. While the sexual can also be erotic, the erotic is often not necessarily sexual.
George Battaile said once that eroticism as thriving when it breaks prohibitions, goes beyond the physical, into something else, something we can’t express but feel. Perhaps, he is referring to o something similar to what the Romantics called the sublime.

So this thread is about the erotic, moving away from the sexual to something being it, something more sublime.

Hopefully we can work out what eroticism actually

While partial to visual language, that is my bread and butter, I think Eroticism starts in the mind.

Erotic is something that titillates fantasies, tugging at deep desires , pushing subconscious triggers of our sexual identity.

Erotica is a soft whisper that manages to echo inside your head, a delicate brushing of skin on skin, the lingering of a delicate trace of perfume, a sheer fabric suggesting, but not showing.
It enflames desire, and it keeps burning, under ashes, for years.

 

[bookworm69]

While partial to visual language, that is my bread and butter, I think Eroticism starts in the mind.

Erotic is something that titillates fantasies, tugging at deep desires , pushing subconscious triggers of our sexual identity.

Erotica is a soft whisper that manages to echo inside your head, a delicate brushing of skin on skin, the lingering of a delicate trace of perfume, a sheer fabric suggesting, but not showing.
It enflames desire, and it keeps burning, under ashes, for years.

Yes, Erotic captures a moment… not only visually, but with a touch, a scent or a thought. Yet, somehow the after image, years later, endures unbidden as vivid as the breath last taken.

 

[Coconutty70]

Yes, Erotic captures a moment… not only visually, but with a touch, a scent or a thought. Yet, somehow the after image, years later, endures unbidden as vivid as the breath last taken.

Is it the image that remains (like a snapshot) which reinvigorates, or is it the memory of the sensation and feeling of it? Or all of the above? Curious to know for you. For me, it is the image (I’m quite a visual person) and that relights things and starts a chain reaction.

 

[softbird]

Is it the image that remains (like a snapshot) which reinvigorates, or is it the memory of the sensation and feeling of it? Or all of the above? Curious to know for you. For me, it is the image (I’m quite a visual person) and that relights things and starts a chain reaction.

I think we see and think in images. Not the visual kind, but in subtle flashes of constructed light and bodies in our subconscious...and then they take shape, attach themselves to visual stimuli we had encountered in the past.

 

[softbird]

I have been a little busy, and so have not been posting. It's a busy stretch at work, but I've recently been interested in Ellen von Unwerth's photography. Her world of women fascinates me because they capture women in their different guises. yet, under all these captures, I see in von Unwerth's vision a fragility, a sensual fragility. I want to love the women she captures because they are fragile, becauzse I see my own fragility in them. This is not the fragility of a physical kind, nor moral or emotional. But its a fragility that stems from the awareness of being woman, the awareness of one's constant hounding, constant surveillance, and the subterranean voices and impulses.

I see the awareness, my awareness of my constructedness. That I am, and always will be a moment of pure desire.