Eroticism

[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.

 

[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.

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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?

 

[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.





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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.

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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.

 

[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.

 

[bookworm69]

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.

For me, the image is visual married with sensation and feeling. Caveat, the image can be corrupted by time and any overlapping memory (& feelings). After all the brain, constantly collating everything is a complex organism.

 

[bookworm69]

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.

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Beautiful, gorgeous images. I never considered the fragility that you speak of. But, I can see what you’re saying. From a male perspective, that’s rather eye-opening and I’ll be thinking of it in the future.

Thank you.

 

[softbird]

This is a raw form of eroticism, dark, gritty, flawed, imperfect, but so tantalisingly desirable. Daïdo Moriyama’s work is so compelling, because it believes, has faith in the beauty of the banal.

 

[softbird]

Do you love me because you see me, engulf me in your avarice, because I am your Frankensteinian monster? Or do you love me because I see you, because my eyes acknowledge your presence?

Is the erotic possible only when it embraces, or is it distance that brings it to life?

 

[bookworm69]

MMmm ... that's an interesting question -- do I love you because I wish to engulf you, seize you ... or do I love you because you acknowledge my presence?

As a male, the subordinate of the species, I have to say the latter. While you may fit in a given acceptable template of desire, most males walk through life invisible. So, when our presence is acknowledged .... ahhh .... that's where love begins. Look in the animal kingdom. Look, for instance, at birds, the male has to do the courting ... making sure that the female believes that she has picked the strongest, prettiest or the one who has built the best nest. Clearly, the male has to be acknowledged.

The answer to the second question is the erotic must be embraced. It is only possible where a moment has to be taken to appreciate. A moment where the senses and the mind have been seized and where the erotic is considered. While there may be some distance involved, the look or the presentation say, "reckon with me." While there may be some distances in the images above, see Image Nos. 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6. All the women have a look that say, "look at me; I am someone you should see."

 

[kneelingagain]

Do you love me because you see me, engulf me in your avarice, because I am your Frankensteinian monster? Or do you love me because I see you, because my eyes acknowledge your presence?

Is the erotic possible only when it embraces, or is it distance that brings it to life?

these are gorgeous

 

[softbird]

these are gorgeous

Aren’t they?

 

[softbird]

When she walks away from me, I feel the earth abandon everything, I feel the wrath of loneliness, but also, the sweet ache of what was.

 

[bookworm69]

When she walks away from me, I feel the earth abandon everything, I feel the wrath of loneliness, but also, the sweet ache of what was.

All too true. Although that "sweet ache" ... is overcome by the enormity of the abandonment.

 

[softbird]

All too true. Although that "sweet ache" ... is overcome by the enormity of the abandonment.

But that there was once sweetness...is this not enough? Do you think the sweetness is defenceless against emptiness...?

 

[softbird]

These are moments when the calmness of the mind, coalesces with sun-kissed contemplation.

 

[softbird]

I feel, increasingly, that the erotic lies somewhere in the silences between things, the moment before the finger touches skin, before lips say prayers to flesh, before sunlight marks my body wrapped in sleep.

 

[softbird]

Here is a thought - the history of the world is the history of men's love affair, one bordering on obsession, with the woman's body.

 

[softbird]

Having discovered that you had been looking at her, when all she wished was for the world to turn away, she stared back, almost as if challenging, goading you to unsettle the hornet's nest.

 

[Cultivateddesires]

I feel, increasingly, that the erotic lies somewhere in the silences between things, the moment before the finger touches skin, before lips say prayers to flesh, before sunlight marks my body wrapped in sleep.

But also in the unexpected eroticism of that touch you weren’t expecting, brushing past someone, or the glimpse between shirt buttons that disappeared as quickly as it came.