Tag: Pleasure

Upon a Queer Imbolc Night

My therapist wants me to have fun. Astrologers and tarot readers suggest “big-big-love” once Mercury stations direct — as in that Pixies song, “Gigantic.” All I know is, I am ready for my body to be used in new ways in pursuit of joy. Pleasure, art, ecstasy. Dance, delicious meals, Dionysian revelry: all of these await. Meanwhile a fire rages at a fertilizer plant, disrupting campus affairs, forcing evacuations and cancellations of classes. Calendars will need adjustment in wake of this wild Imbolc. Neuroplastic rewirings and rewildings. I cook up a pot of soup: cauliflower & turmeric, finished with sprinklings of bacon. I’ve felt like Cabiria from Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957) of late, walking teary-eyed amid a partying mass of singers and dancers, mascara running down her cheek. A friend wraps legs around me and lifts me up, heals me of my sorrow. Hugs me, says c’mere, cuddles me as we watch Carla Del Poggio, star of another of Fellini’s films, Variety Lights (1950). Rubs my neck. Feeds me cherries. Treats me right. Here on this queer Imbolc night, let us read Joy Harjo’s “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings” and go for walks. Hard not to hear in the Harjo poem a reply to Margaret Cavendish. From this day hence, let us forgive each other. Let us love each other. Let us wake at dawn and want more.

Monday June 14, 2021

Harmonica on the beach. And a golden sun at the center of the sky gleams down. Mind clear, inner chatter silenced, I listen to the waves. We trade rides on a store-bought boogie board. The world hisses, sprays / spits with love. Day of summer, day of sizzle. Application of coconut oil to bare skin. Afterwards I sit on the deck feeling “happy, happy, happy!” as the baby’s fond of saying here at our macrame / woven-art Airbnb. When Sarah returns from taking Frankie to the park down the street, I take over and do the same. Frankie marches me around, marches up slides, climbs a set of plastic mountains, majesty arranging herself to her liking on a swing. Birds sing as wind rustles the leaves of a neighbor’s palm tree. What a life. “What we need,” you say, “are places like this, but free.”

Wednesday May 23, 2018

Sarah passes on to me along our walk gleanings from her readings on occult philosophy in Elizabethan England. We pass a bluebird, a cardinal, roses, peonies, neighborhood flora and fauna offering to the senses an abundance of sights and scents and sounds as sunlight yellows the greens of a world ripening its way toward summer. Afterwards I purchase a new shirt for myself in preparation for an upcoming trip to Los Angeles—and for once, I allow myself to disengage a bit from the grudge I usually hold (and thus the tensions I usually bear in my back, chest, and shoulders) in reaction to the wage relation, so as to enjoy for a few moments both the cerebral and the sensorial pleasures, the simple bodily procedures and the imaginative comparison and assessment of potential fashionings of self, involved in the act of shopping. Nonjudgmental receptivity of this sort is essential now and then if one’s hope is to grow, I tell myself. In his essay “Eupsychia—The Good Society,” Abraham Maslow suggests as a guide for this mode of being a book by British psychoanalyst Marion Milner called A Life of One’s Own. Milner’s book is the product of a seven-year experiment in introspective journaling — a technique that resonates, of course, with the one informing these trance-scripts.