“Come into my Parlor …”
Just you. And me. At least, in my virtual parlor, we can imagine that this is so. Please, make yourself comfortable. I’ve just moved in, and I’m still re-arranging the furniture. Forgive the piles of books and notebooks. Oops, I think you just sat on my pen. And wait, I’ll shut my lap-top. Wine? Or tea?
Come into my Parlour
Kore Desires is about intimacy. It is a space where words, curiosity and desire can kiss deeply. A space for erotica, sexual politics, musings on the dark and light of sexuality. And invitations from me to you to write. Write from your body, write from your longings. Write from the silences too. French feminist and forward-thinking seeress urged:
“Write yourself. Your body must be heard.”
― Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa
This is where I started. With the sensations and truth of my body. With the whispers in my cells. Of course, sooner or later I started wriitng about sex. Sex and desire. It had always been a subject I enjoyed writing about in my personal journals, but about 3 years ago, I dove deeper. I wrote an explicit, poetic piece about a sexual encounter, read it at an Open Mic event that very night – fresh off the crumpled afternoon-coffee draft – and had an immediate offer for it to feature on an erotica website.
My affair with erotica had begun, although I didn’t quite know it at the time. Currently, I’m in love with the short story form of erotica. I have passionate encounters with erotic poetry, casual flings with the occasional article, am steadily dating the draft for a themed collection of short erotica stories (all mine) and am regrettably, estranged from my novella project. I do, however have hopes of reconcilation in the near future.
Desire is one of my favourite words. I love the sound of the sigh in the middle of it, like the release of a lover’s breath after orgasm.
Desire is a mysterious force in the human psyche. Is it an emotion? A sensation? A thought? A compulsion?
I wonder if desire could be a meeting-place in our psyche of past memories of pleasure or trauma, present emotions and sensations, and an intuitive future-knowing of what we need to experience for integration, growth and healing? And for sheer pleasure, of course.
If this is so, then our pleasure is also associated with our growth and healing. Sounds like good news for the pursuit of more pleasure, and the shushing of those culturally conditioned little gremlin-voices of guilt, doesn’t it?
In my erotic wriitng, desire is always an underscore. My characters are either immersing themselves in it, or working out what is needed to get there. It could be the perfect seat on a train with a perfect view, or a cucumber curved just so, or the collision of hip bones with thigh, mouth with throat. Below, a morsel about desire from my poem Threshold:
You turn my hips to clash with yours
Your tongue and teeth interrogate secrets
Embedded long ago in arteries and skin,
forcing forth a staccato litany
of savage confessions;
Erupting outside of language
What turns you on? What do you long for? What haunts your dreams, causes you to glance again (perhaps furtively) at a book cover, or two people embracing in a bar?What are we compelled to return to in our imaginings, our bedrooms, again and again?
I’m curious. Another of my favourite words. Whisper it into my virtual ear. (More wine?)
Exploring the depths of our sexuality can allow us to get beyond our social masks, our more everyday perceptions of ourselves, to feel more fully our desires, our particular form of ‘genius’, our wounds, our beauty. The ability to practice sex as a ‘consciousness-making art’ could be said to be one of the things that distinguishes us, from other species of animals.
All of these things will linger here, in my virtual parlor. I hope you will too.
Ending with another word-kiss, from author and academic Nigel Krauth:
The sensual is not delivered superficially for its titillation; it is delved into for what it reveals about the human condiiton.
It’s just past the witching hour as I finish the first post for this, my first blog. Thank you for reading, wherever you are.
Sweet and sensual dreams … xxx
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