Are you a religious man and if so, are there any contradictions between being a religious man and being a porn star ?

Yes, I am religious. I am Christian: Baptist. I grew up in as close to a Cosby-show lifestyle as you can get. Doing porno, on a repeated basis, I am committing adultery; I'm not married, so I'm fornicating for a living; I'm paid to have sex, which means what? I'm prostituting by definition. These are things I have to reckon with with my God on a daily basis.

I knowingly do these things.My decision to do porno has forced me to take my religion within: because of my job I am stronger in my relationship with God, because now I take God with me everywhere I go; if I don't, I'll fail! I didn't know that god blessed me with an abnormally large penis that allows me to make porno. But I feel blessed. I believe I am blessed because I am meant to please one woman for the rest of our lives together. True, I haven't met her yet.

Imagine it's one day in the future and you're a father. Your son or daughter comes to you and says, "Dad, I want to be a pornographic movie star." What would your reaction be?

In no way would I recommend this job to my best-friend, let alone my children. Every day in this business you must decide to risk your life. When I came into this business in '98, 5 women were infected with HIV from one guy. It was a scary time. I would positively forbid my daughter from working in this industry. There is a measure of self-respect a sex performer gives away every single time he or she is on camera. I wouldn't want anyone so close to me to give away anything so important and valuable. When I have kids I will instruct them that their bodies are temples, and I don't want anyone walking up into and defiling their temples.

From http://www.getbig.com/iview/steele040315.htm

Meditation

"You like looking at my butt and seeing my arsehole, don't you, Tommy?"

"Uh, huh."

"Why don't you get closer and get a better look, then."

The boy climbed onto the bed with her and moved closer to put his face nearer her fat bottom. She flexed and wiggled her anal muscles for him as he gazed longingly at her hole.

"Why don't you hold my butt open, honey. It'll be easier for you since you're right there."

His hands were warm and moist when he gently placed them on the chubby globes of her arse, and he pushed softly on them to spread her cleft wider. With her own hands now free, Anne quietly worked one hand up underneath her and began to slowly stroke her tingling clit. Intense waves of pleasure flowed over her body and her juices flowed ever faster.

"Get closer, baby," she whispered.

Tommy crept nearer.

"You've been thinking a lot about my arsehole, haven't you, honey? Dreaming about seeing it, touching it..."

"Uh, huh," he murmured dreamily.

"Get real close."

She could feel his warm breath on the moist flesh around her anus, and a shiver ran through her body.

"Sniff it, Tommy. Smell my arsehole."

She heard her nephew take a long deep breath, inhaling the aroma of her butt. He held the breath for a moment and then slowly exhaled, causing her again to feel the warmth of his breath on her arse. He sniffed deeply again, releasing it at last in a long shuddering exhalation.

"That's it, baby. That's the beginning of what you've wanted for a long time, isn't it?"

"Uh, huh."

"You love my arse, don't you, sweetie?"

"Oh, yes, Aunt Ann, very much. I really do."

"Good, baby. Show me how much. Kiss my arsehole."

This was the moment of truth. She waited, holding her breath, to see if he would really follow through. It wasn't long before she felt him moving, and then felt the touch of his puckered lips pressing themselves against her nether opening.
Instantly an orgasm rippled through her body, and she moaned softly. The boy drew back quickly when he heard the sound, thinking he had done something wrong.

"I'm sorry, Aunt Ann. I didn't mean to hurt you."

"No, baby, it's all right. You didn't hurt me at all. It just felt so good. In fact, I want you to do it again, okay?"

Without a word he moved to obey. As his lips pressed themselves against her hole again she shivered with pleasure.

"Use you tongue, Tommy," she instructed. "Lick it. Stick your tongue in it."

She felt his tongue begin to circle around and lap at her hole before the boy opened his mouth wide and pressed the tip of his tongue through her anus. She squeezed his tongue with her rectal muscles and they both groaned in unison. She continued to massage his tongue with her sphincter as her fingers slithered in her dripping pussy. A series of little orgasms rolled over her like waves, and she knew she had to have more.

She slowly drew herself up onto her hands and knees. Tommy managed to keep his tongue in her arse throughout the transition of position. Her huge tits hung nearly to the bed with the tips of the erect nipples just grazing the surface of the sheets as the enormous jugs swung back and forth. Electric waves of pleasure jolted through her with each swing.

Anne reached one hand back between her thighs.

"Give me your hand, Tommy."

The boy place a hand in hers, taking care to keep his tongue sliding in and out of her arsehole as he did so. Anne took his hand and placed it on her wet pussy.

"Feel my pussy, Tommy. Feel how wet I am. My cunt gets that way when I'm very excited, just like your dick gets hard when you're excited."

She felt his hand sliding over her pussy, and his fingers slipping in between the puffy lips of her wet gash. She guided him to her clit.

"Feel that big bump, baby? That's my clit. You know how good it feels when you rub your dick when it's hard? Well, rubbing my clit when it's hard like that feels just as good to me. Rub it for me, sweetie. Gently..."

His fingers caressed her clit softly and she sighed with pleasure. She grabbed up one of her hanging tits and began to pinch and tug on the hard nipple as the erotic sensations of her nephew's tongue writhing in her arsehole as he stroked her sensitive clit pushed her through wave after wave of orgasmic pleasure. Lifting the big teat to her face she sucked her own nipple hard, thinking about how nice it was going to be to have a baby nursing on her tits, even if she didn't have any milk to give him.

Reaching between her legs again she took his hand and guided it to her hole.

"Do you feel that hole, honey? That's called a cunt hole."

She felt him start to explore it with his fingers, pushing several of them into her.

It felt so good to her, and she urged him to use more fingers and reach deeper.

Moments later she gasped with pleasant surprise as she felt his whole hand slide into her. She had heard of this before, but never thought she would get to experience it. What an incredibly great sensation to be filled the way she was.

"Oh, yesss, Tommy! That's very good! Now push your hand deeper."

She felt his hand and arm slide into her pussy until he had reached her cervix. She let him feel and explore the depths of her pussy, and explained that he was touching the outside of the womb. It was like having an enormous cock with fingers writhing in her pussy, and she felt herself beginning to lose control.

"Pull your hand back now, sweetie. Not all the way out, leave just the hand inside my hole. Now push it back in until you touch the cervix again. Yes, baby, like that!"

"Now do it again. This time make your hand into a fist, okay?"

She felt his hand move inside her as he complied and then moaned softly as she felt his fist begin to plunge back and forth in her deep hole.

"That's it, honey! Just like that. Keep doing it until I tell you to stop."

His arm and fist were thrusting in and out of the depths of her pussy like an enormous cock, and she quickly felt the onset of an orgasm like she had never known.

With every thrust of his fist into her she clamped her arsehole tight around his tongue, and she was squeezing and massaging his arm as it slid back and forth between her pussy lips as the 16-year-old fist fucked her. She looked forward to having him do the same thing to her arse one day soon, thinking how much he was going to love it, too.

Thinking about having her nephew's hand and arm in her shitter pushed her over the edge then, and a tremendous orgasm slammed through her body. She began bouncing around, thrusting herself back against the boy's arm and coating it with the juices, which she could feel pouring from her inner recesses. She collapsed onto her pillow, pressing her face into it to muffle the scream which was bursting from her throat; she didn't want to frighten her nephew or make him think he was hurting her. That might make him stop and that was the last thing she wanted him to do right then. She could feel him struggling to keep his tongue in her arse and at the same time continue the fist fucking he was giving her as she writhed with orgasmic pleasure, and she didn't want to complicate things any more.

At last the wave expended itself and she began to slowly wind down. She had her nephew push his hand as deep into her pussy as he could and told him to just leave it right there while she caught her breath. When she was through shivering she squeezed his tongue out of her rectum and then slowly had him pull his arm out of her pussy. Finally she flopped her heavy body over on her side and patted the bed near her.



From Auntie's Butt-Boy at Sodom Tales


Meditation

women who sleep with demons

Her eyes fluttered open in time to see him freeing his enormous phallus from the constraints of his breeches, then he reaches across and lifted her onto his lap. Clinging to his shoulders, she sat astride him, positioning herself so his member was nudging at the whorled entrance to her quim.

She lowered herself onto it an inch at time, enjoying the slow penetration, undulating her hips as she impaled herself on his throbbing column which felt hot and ramrod-hard. He kissed her deeply, letting her feel its virile throbbing, then as she began to move slowly on it, using it for an instrument of her own pleasure, he took her by the waist and assisted her.

She rode him gently at first, but then, as a smouldering heat grew high up in her groin, faster and more vigorously, until she was breathless and panting, the jolting of the coach adding to the impetus of her movements.

She came again in a delirious cresting wave of carnality, then cried out as hew he jammed her down hard on his engorged shaft and achieved his own discharge like a dam breaching its banks.



From "Evelina" by Louisa Campion in The Mammoth Book of Historical Erotica. ed. Maxim Jaubowski New York: Carrol and Graf 1998.1-21.15.


Eltheria was spent. She ached to collapse on the floor. Her weakened muscles gave out, but before she could sprawl on the ground, a hand caught her under her belly. The finger slipped out of her anus. She felt the swollen head of a cock press firmly up against her tight rear hole. That second of anticipation was the worst. She didn’t know what to expect. No man had ever penetrated her asshole. The idea of being buggered renewed her strength. A flame flickered within her, then rampantly spread like a brush fire.

The dagger-tip eased slowly past her elastic sphincter until the tick ridge of the cock-head was inside. Pain flashed through her body. She wanted to pull away, but didn’t dare. She breathed deeply and willed herself to relax. His entire penis was soon trapped inside her hot ass. It hurt. But it hurt good. She shuddered from the mixed sensations. Eltheia rotated on the rod. The lover took a few tentative strokes, then slammed into her. He stabbed her repeatedly with his flesh sword. His scrotum slapped loudly and wetly against her sopping labia.

The near withdrawal and then re-entry drove her to new heights of ecstasy. When the flange of his cock-head popped free of her sphincter, scraping the nerve endings around her anal opening, then scoured them back again on the way back in, she realized the pleasure of anal intercourse.


He reached under and felt her streaming nectar greasing her thighs. He rippled his fingers through her engorged petals, strummed her clitoris, then jammed three fingers into her vagina. She could almost feel his fingers touching his penis through the thin membrane between her vagina and anus. It seemed that her rear passage grew wider with each pump. She tightened her ass muscles around his cock, pulling him in deeper, holding him in longer. In wild abandon she slammed back against his groin.

He buggered her until she’d come twice.

When Ethelia was on the verge of her third orgasm, she clamped down tight. Her lover grunted in surprise. She felt a hot, delicious feeling swirl through her.

Then her mind blanked out in a surge of pulsing pleasure. The orgasm ripped through body, suddenly triggering his orgasm. They bucked and thrashed against each other, locking hips, straining. Blinding white light flashed before Ethelia’s eyes.

From "A Gods Wrath" by Olly Jansen in The Mammoth Book of Historical Erotica. ed. Maxim Jaubowski New York: Carrol and Graf.382-394.393-394.


Dancing couple above from the unforgetttable INMAGINE and PHOTOALTO.

The man and the woman are as naked as the day they were born, when God created them. Guided by the light of Dominique Douieb, their bodies sketch all the likely figures of a possible completeness. Masculine strength marries feminine harmony. The full forms of his muscles are wedded to the arches of her slender curves. Their destinies have always mingled together. Their interwoven bodies melt into a unity that the black and white treatment finishes to celebrate. Maximum amplitude on the scale of beauty

Description from

http://www.photoalto.com/index/fa/c.cd/pageTOP/1/go/go/cd/PA123/pageBOTTOM/1/lbox/__________

One night about ten years ago, while lying next to a lover and dear friend, I felt a shimmering in the air over my head, and as I looked at it, the shimmering condensed into a tangle of golden cords, as thick as fingers, arched above the two of us like a rainbow only moving and pulsating, as if a coil of strange, exotic snakes had found its way into our bedroom.

At first I was taken aback, almost frightened, but the cords were so radiant, so obviously benevolent that my fear dissolved. Listening I heard that they were making sounds, high and clear, producing a sweet strange music that filled me with energy.

When I looked down at my own body, I saw that half the cords were coming out of me, part from my chest more or less in the region of my heart and part from my abdomen around the area of my navel. Crossing the space between me and my lover, they had rooted in his heart and abdomen, attaching us together in a long, pulsating tangle. The other half of the cords was coming from my lover, rooting in me, grafting to my flesh, growing through my skin to my womb and stomach, until I could feel myself filled inside by hundreds of thin tendrils.

I saw all of this for a minute, maybe more, and then the cords disappeared, and our bed became merely a bed again in an ordinary room, in a perfectly ordinary town. The next morning I was sure I had only been dreaming-certainly the most reasonable explanation-but something had changed in me, something odd and slightly disturbing. Now, whenever we made love or were especially close, I felt new cords growing into my flesh; other times, when we were angry or separated,I felt an uncomfortable sensation as if someone were tugging at me. From time to time, I had a quick glimpse of the cords again, full of light when things were going well, dull and listless when there was tension and misunderstanding.

When my lover and I finally broke up for reasons beyond our control, I was in pain for a long time, unable to eat or sleep, full of nostalgia and regrets so intense that they verged on nausea. Everything reminded me of him: a red blouse I had worn on one particularly happy day we spent hiking, music we had listened to together, stir-fried vegetables with seaweed (one of his favourite dishes ),even the stars because we had once picked out the constellations together. The whole situation was both tragic and profoundly ridiculous. My friends shook their heads and offered calcium tablets and herb tea. I was advised to get on with my life, but from my point of view I had no life worth getting on with.

Then one evening crying over a plate of stir-fried vegetables in a Niagara of self-pity, I saw the cords again-or rather a set of cords and a set of scars. The scars were where my lover’s cords had entered my body; they were wounds, the size of pennies, half-healed but very painful. The remaining cords were mine. Suddenly I realized what was wrong: I was still attached to him, even though he was no longer attached to me. All my energy was running out of my body, and nothing was coming in. I was being dragged around as he moved into his new life, no longer considering me, the hundreds of miles between us stretching and pulling until they had very nearly pulled me apart.

I decided that whether these cords were imaginary or real, I had to cut them somehow simply to survive. After thinking the situation over, I decided that I would try fighting the vision with a vision; that is to say, I would try imagining a great pair of scissors slicing through every attachment I still had to my lover; I would pretend to see the cords snap, and then I would imagine them pulling back into me, rerooting myself in my own flesh and healing the scars.

Now that I knew that I had suffered not just a separation but a physical injury,I was more gentle with myself, more willing to give myself time to heal and recover, but day by day it seemed to work and I began to feel the relief of growing whole and self-contained.

The day finally came, of course, when all the cords were cut, but the experience taught me several things that I still do my best to remember. First, I became aware that sex is the major cause of cording-especially when sex comes in the form of a full-blown erotic attachment combined with love. Not all sex, of course, casts cords from one lover to another, but the potential is there and that knowledge makes me reluctant to be involved in casual relationships. I'm more humble now in a way, more aware that things may be happening on another level in some other dimension that I am only occasionally aware of. If the cords are real, who knows what unknown factors are produced by intimacy. Perhaps we dream each other's dreams at night; perhaps we have non-physical bodies; perhaps the electrical energies of our brains mingle; perhaps we are capable of tearing open each other's auras.

And perhaps, of course, all of the forgoing is nonsense. Perhaps my so-called vision is merely imagination heightened by sentimentality. I only know that cording is a useful way of explaining to myself both the pleasure of intimacy and the pain of separation. To tell the truth, I still see the cords occasionally, and the knowledge that I could become so physically entangled with another human being has made me very, very selective.

From "Golden Cords:Erotic Attachment and the Pain of Separation" by Mary Mackey in Deep Down: New Sensual Writing by Women. ed. Laura Chester.London: Faber and Faber.114-115.

‘Down’, she said. ‘Look down into the centre of it’. And I did, God help me, look down into the centre of that weird contraption.

…there was nothing I could see except a lot of swirling mist-the mist was dark instead of white. There was something about it that I didn’t like, a certain frightfulness to it, and I went to step away, but before I could take the step the dark mist inside the cubicle seemed to expand rapidly and engulf me.

The world went away from me and I was consciousness inside a blackness that seemed to hold neither time nor space, a medium that was suspended in a nothingness in which there was no room for anything or anyone but the consciousness-not the body, but the consciousness-of myself and Angela.

For she was still was with me in that black nothingness and I still could feel her hand in mine, although even as I felt the pressure of her hand, I told myself it could not be her hand, for in this place neither of us had hands; there was no place or room for hands. Once I had said that to myself, I realised that it was not her hand that I seemed to feel so much as the presence of her, the essence of her being, which seemed to be coalescing with my being as if we had ceased to be two personalities, but had in some strange way become a single personality, although not so much a part of one another as to have lost our identities.

I felt a scream rising in my throat, but I had no throat and I had no mouth and there was no way to scream. I wondered, in something close to terror, what had happened to my body and if I’d ever get it back. As I tried to scream I sensed Angela moving closer, as if she might be extending comfort. And there was comfort, certainly, in knowing she was there. I don’t think she spoke to me or actually did anything at all, but I seemed to realise somehow that there was no room for more than just the two of us; that here there was no place for fear or even for surprise.

Then the dark nothingness drained away, but the draining did not give us back our bodies. We were still were disembodied beings, hanging for a moment over a nightmarish landscape that was bleak and dark, a barren plain that swept away to jagged mountains notched against the sky. We hung there for a moment only, not really long enough to see where we were-as if a picture had been flashed upon a screen, then suddenly cut off. A glimpse was all I had.

Then we were back in the empty nothingness and Angela had her arms around me-all of her around me-and it was very strange, for she had no arms or body and neither did I, but it seemed to make no difference. The touch of her was comforting, as it had been before, but this time more than comforting, and in that nothingness my soul and mind and the memory of my body cried out to her as another human being and another life. Instinctively, I reached out for her-and reached out within everything I had or had ever had until the semblance of what we once had been intertwined and meshed and we melted into one another. Our beings came together, our minds, our souls, our bodies. In that moment, we knew one another in a way that would have been impossible under other circumstances. We crawled into one another until there were not two of us, but one. It was sexual, in part, but far more than sexual. It was the kind of experience that is sought in a sexual embrace but never quite achieved. It was complete fulfillment and did not subside. It reached a high and stayed there. It was an ecstasy that kept on and on, and it could have gone on forever, I suppose, if it had not been for that one little dirty corner of my busy brain that somehow stood aside and wondered how it might have been with someone other than a bitch like Angela.

That did it. The magic went away. The nothingness went away. We were back on the Lodge, standing beside the strange contraption. We were still holding hands, and she dropped my hand and turned to face me. Her face was white with fury, her voice cold.
'Remember this’, she said. 'No woman will ever be quite the same again.'


From “The Marathon Photograph” in The Marathon Photograph: Classic Fiction by the Science Fiction Grand Master by Clifford Simak

Naughty bikini lady from Wicked Weasel


Meditation

The sense of impish fun, suggested by the naughty grin and the carelessly cocked head, realized in the trespassing of taboos by revealing just a wee bit of shaved pubic flesh, is what strikes me in this picture. It evokes the sense of self exposure suggested in the story by the harmony of selves between the male narrator and Angela.
The lady in the picture, like all the contributors to Wicked Weasel’s competitions, are not posing as models but as ordinary users of Wicked Weasel’s women’s wear who send in their pictures to share their delight in the products and to participate in the firm’s competitions.
The pictures are, therefore, often taken by people intimate to the ladies who are photographed, often their boyfriends or husbands. This picture suggests the sharing of an intimate moment with a boyfriend- a moment transmitted to the world through the public presentation of the image on the Wicked Weasel site.
The bikini is allowed to slip only so far as to reveal the shaved pubis but to conceal the slit that is the entrance to the vagina. The image could thus be said to escape from pornography into simply being erotic.
Moving from the image to the science fiction text presented here, is the kind of unity of selves depicted in the story possible? Whether it is or not, it would seem to be the ideal people often look for in intimate relationships with those they are romantically engaged-a unity where their individuality remains distinct.
This image suggests an ease with one’s self and of the ease of the person whose gaze records the moment, with that self. Such ease between selves is likely to be the basis of intimacy of any depth. The story, however, also evokes, along with such intimacy, the paradox of the contradictions between intimacy, whether physical or psychological, or both, and the tensions between people who share that intimacy.

Truth is the "night of power"

Hidden among other nights,

In order to try the spirit of every night.

Not every night is that of power,O youth,

Nor is every night quite devoid of power.

Jalaluddin Rumi,

"Mo'Avia and Iblis",The Mathnawi,trans.E.H.Whinfield.

The legacy of real architecture is that it can affirm aspects of sensibility that otherwise might lie fallow, unsuspected. Chartres draws into salience the faculty of awe that in our secular age might never be awakened. An eighteenth-century drawing room makes one aware of one’s innate dignity, which might easily be forgotten in the age of the mall. The correlation between architecture and interior life allow us to relive past visions by simply entering the architecture those visions produced.

In a similar way, there was for me a correlation between the architecture of my family history and my inner life. In both something was hidden. In the beautiful environment of the family past, there was a magnificent figure who had gone out of control in ways destructive to those on his course-including his family-and ultimately to himself. Behind my memories of a blissful childhood in a beautiful place, there were also destructive forces that were blind and out of control, but unacknowledged. Yet to this inner truth and all its ramifications I had no access. This was the great role of family history to me. It made my hidden experience resonate, and by so doing delivered to me a whole self.

The family architecture also taught me how short time is, how close the generations are, how powerfully lives reverberate down through the structure of family, deeply affecting each other. This is the other part of the imperative to go back into the architecture of time, for with our response to those reverberations, whether witting or unwitting, we in turn create the unseen structure within which our children must live.

….I designed a tour for myself of Stanford’s architecture. My cousin Pamela was interested too, and joined me. With a little over a quarter century separating us, we were the oldest and the youngest of Stanford’s great-granddaughters. As it happened we both had red hair, as Stanford did, though mine was partially grey by this time and Pamela’s was a strawberry blond, quite unlike Stanford’s chestnut. Even so, this redness underscored the cat’s cradle of inter-generational connection: the tightness of it and the physical reality of it.

We started on a June morning in the area of small streets in downtown Manhattan where Chinatown and Little Italy intermingle. On Grand Street, a modest thoroughfare with narrow sidewalks further narrowed by stands of fruit and exotic vegetables, we came upon the magnificent and monumental neoclassical façade of the Bowery Savings Bank. The bank, completed in 1895, was the first of the firm’s neoclassical works to come primarily from Stanford’s hand.

….Inside, the bank was a world in itsef. The gilded and coffered ceiling had a skylight at its centre, with panes of deep yellow glass…The freestanding columns were of ochre marble with red and black veins, and in combination with the skylight they gave the room a sombre golden glow. The volume of cubical interior was made semisolid by that glow.

…After we had taken in the attributes of the building, Pamela remembered that she needed money. Looking around, Pamela spotted a cash machine against a far wall, and she set out toward it. As I watched her walking away from me across the mosaic floor, I shifted my weight from foot to foot, no longer paying close attention to the aesthetic features of the architecture. In a sense, I was off guard and, suddenly, the old fear set in. That quality in Stanford’s interiors which had caused me to avoid them in the past enveloped me, like a perfume triggering an allergic reaction: a swelling in the chest near the throat, a pressure of tears behind the eyes-and, above all, fear. The source of the fear was the very geniality of the architecture; its delicacy, its glow, its enspelling seductiveness.

Immediately, Pamela’s vulnerability was appallingly apparent. She looked so white, soft, and trusting as she performed her pedestrian chore. In an emotional reflex of aversion I mentally pushed her away. Horrified by my impulse I then searched for its source. At first there was blankness only, erasing even the bank. Then, out of the depths of forgetfulness rose the scene in the dark behind the barn. It was not really even a scene; there was no mental image-just a visceral acknowledgement of something very bad happening in the dark. With this acknowledgement my aversion left me and instead I found myself working strenuously to bring that scene out of darkness into the bank-to have in one worlds the disparate realities of our family life.

Within the magnificent enclosure of the bank the scene behind the barn seemed almost nonexistent. Even the space behind the barn seemed two-dimensional, paper-thin, conceptual. It was difficult to conjure particulars of a moment in a place-leaves stirring, clouds passing in front of a moon-or to sense the solidity and contours of the ground, much less to see the spot as a part of geography, as a location coextensive with other locations that could be pinpointed on a map. It was difficult to see it as a spot that existed in a continuous time, so that you could say of it the next day, ‘This is the spot where such-and-such happened last night.’ In that two-dimensionality, it was especially difficult to imagine a whole body, lungs rising and falling, much less two bodies and violence.

So unreal in the family environment had the event behind the barn been that William could confidently laugh and say, ‘Don’t worry. I won’t rape you again.’ The dense texture of the family was, for him, no more constricting than the beam of moving light that had fleetingly passed over him and his crime. But there in the bank the image of that moving beam turned, in my kind, into bars that caged the event like a beast. The bars of light gave me a purchase on the scene that allowed me to pull it out of the place of forgetfulness into the solidified golden light of the Bowery Savings Bank, where the bars dissolved and the scene in its three-dimensional reality was present-a rape.

Every aspect of the bank interior-the sure proportions, the sensuous, well- chosen marbles, the pilatsters, the columns-was working toward the effect of the whole, an effect of elegance, strength and authority. This was an architecture of stability and security, of lawfulness, of instititutional justice. The scene behind the barn was unlawful and uninstitutional, without justice, without any kind of elegance or aesthetic: it was the whirlwind. So there it was: The whirlwind in the calm-the very quality that I had felt in Stanford’s architecture for so long brought out of its lair. The familiar serenely beautiful environment in which there was terrifying danger, except that now the danger was seen. And the fright felt.

Afraid, I walked across the mosaic floor toward Pamela. It was a transformative passage, though one I had made before-in the meeting with my sisters-and one I would make again. This is a journey that is made in increments. One cannot easily break the habit of looking for protection to that which is powerful. One cannot in one motion cast one’s lot with the unprotected. One cannot in one day learn to see sanctuary and strength in that.

There was, I knew, a word for every little turn and variation in the highly articulated environment of the Bowery Savings Bank. The realm of experience that linked Pamela and myself, in contrast, has for most of human time been outside the architecture of civilisation as we understand it. But our experience is not, in fact, outside the architecture. It is in it, and always has been. It is embedded in the materials of the shelter that we have made for ourselves. We therefore cannot know ourselves truly without seeing where there is terror in harmony; without registering in our marrow a coldness that may feel like warmth or violence that presents as lust for life. We try to see these things not to demolish but to strive toward whole world, because an unwhole world is ghostly: no matter how beautiful it might be, no connection is possible there. We do this not to place blame but to make connection possible. We do this to live.


From The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family by Suzannah Lessard.



Meditation

The image above suggests the counterpart in human biology of the architectonic grandeur that galvanises Lessard’s reflections on the interaction in her mind between architectural form and individual and family history.The cave like shape constituted by the curves of the hips as they frame the prominent vaginal lips take the mind back to evocations of relationships between caves, as early dwelling places of the human race, from which we emerged to construct our own shelters, and the vagina as a biological cave, from where we emerge to begin the journey of this life, as well as with correlations between these images and the earth as cave of absorption, where the body enters into death, and, to look at it optimistically, perhaps leaving the spirit to ascend to other spheres or even to return to the world through the creative depths of the vagina.In the cave of the womb we are nurtured, through the cave of the space between the legs are we conceived, and through that same uterine darkness, charged with energies, do we enter the world.Watch over us,you of the double caves!

….Then the God of luminous splendour saw the sun on Sunrise Mountain, and he saw the lordly moon entering the sun.

…The God of the Hundred Sacrifices saw the dawn covered with blood-red clouds, and the lord observed that Varuna’s ocean was bloody. The fire was taking the oblation that had been offered with manifold spells and was entering the sun.

…After having performed according to the rules, an isti oblation into the well-kindled fire, the great spirited priests offered the oblation to all the Celestials. The Adbhuta fire was summoned from the orb of the sun, and the sovereign Fire came out and appeared, restraining its speech, according to the rules. Entering the ahavaniya hearth, into which the priests had offered with the requisite spells, the Carrier of the Oblation accepted the manifold offering from the seers, O best of the Bharatas, and proffered it to the Celestials.

As the Fire came out, he saw the wives of the great-spirited priests –who sat in their own hermitages-while they were bathing themselves at leisure, radiant like golden altars, spotless like a digit of the moon, glowing with the glow of fire, all marvellous like stars. Watching the wives of these Indras of priests, Fire became excited in his senses, and, his heart lost to them, fell under the power of lust. But he thought further: “It is not proper for me to be excited, for I am lusting after the good wives of eminent brahmins, and they are without passion. I cannot watch and touch them without cause-therefore I shall enter into the household fire and look at them perpetually”. Touching all these golden women, as it were, with his flames, and watching them too, Fire rejoiced in the household hearth, while he lived there and entrusted his heart to the beautiful women under whose spell he was. But then, when he did not obtain these brahmin wives, Fire’s heart was sick with love, and he set his mind on abandoning his life, resolved to abandon his corporeal form, he left for the forest.

Now Svaha, the daughter of Daksa,had been in love with Fire before, and for long the radiant girl had been looking for an opening, but yet the blameless woman had found none in the ever-vigilant God. When she learned that Fire had truly departed for the forest, and was indeed sick with lust, the radiant girl thought, “I shall assume the shapes of the wives of the seven seers, and when he has been deluded by their shapes, I shall make love to lust-plagued Fire. This done, he will be pleased, and my love will be satisfied.”

Markandeya said:

Now Siva was the wife of Angiras and endowed with a fine character, beauty, and virtue. It was her body the Goddess assumed first, my lord of the people, and the beautiful woman went to Fire and said, “Make love to me, Fire, I am ablaze with lust. If you will not, be sure that I shall die. I am Siva, O Eater of the Oblation, the wife of Angiras. I have come only after deliberating this decision with my friends”.

Fire said:
How did you know that I was sick with love, how did all the others you mention, the beloved wives of the seven seers?

Siva said:
You were always dear to us, but we were afraid of you. When we came to know your heart by your gestures, they sent me to you. I have come to lie with you here, now quickly make the love we want: the mothers are waiting for me to return, O Fire.

Markandeya said:
Thereupon Fire most happily and joyfully lay with this Siva; and overcome by pleasure the Goddess took his seed in her hand. She thought, “If people see this body in the forest, they will tell of the brahmin wives’ faithlessness with Fire. Therefore, in order to prevent this, I’ll become a Garuda bird, so I’ll escape easily from the woods”. She became a fair-winged bird and left the vast forest, and she saw Mount Sveta, all covered with reed stalks. The mountain was guarded by wondrous poison-eyed and seven-headed serpents, and peopled by Raksasas, Pisacas, and terrifying bands of ghosts, and by Raksasis and countless game and fowl.

She went to the inaccessible mountain ridge and hurriedly threw the seed into a golden basin, a golden lake on the peak of the White Mountain guarded by Rudra’s hosts. She assumed the guises of the other wives of the great-spirited seven seers, and then made love to Fire. But she was not able to assume the shape of Arundhati, because of the power of her austerities and her faithfulness to her husband. Six times did she cast down the seed of Fire,O best of the Kurus, did the loving Svaha, into the mountain basin, on the first day of the lunation. The spilled seed, gathered together in heat, engendered a son who was worshiped by the seers; and the spilled seed became Skanda. .


…Markandeya said:
The seers, however, upon witnessing terrifying portents of many kinds, were upset, and, being prosperers of the worlds, performed rites of appeasement for the worlds. The people who lived in the forest of Citraratha declared, “This Great calamity has been fetched to us by Fire, when he lay with the six wives of the seven seers”. Others, who had seen the Goddess at the time go about in that guise, said of the Garuda bird: “You have brought on this disaster!”. Not a person knew it had been the doing of Svaha. When the Garuda bird heard it said that Skanda was its son, it went up to him quietly and said: “I am your mother”. And upon hearing that a mighty son had been born the seven seers divorced the six wives, excepting the divine Arundhati. The forest dwellers called him the son of the six, but Svaha told the seven seers that he was her son. “I know it. The rest is not true!” she said again and again, O king”.

Some time later the six sages’ wives came to Skanda and told him that their husbands, thinking that Skanda had been born of them, had abandoned them. They begged Skanda to let then dwell for ever in heaven, and by his grace they became the constellation of the Krttikas, considered the mothers of Skanda. Then Svaha married Agni.

From The Mahabarata Book 3:The Book of the Forest trans.by J.A.B van Buitenen and Siva:The Erotic Ascetic by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty

Picture above of buxom Joi Ryda

Hold her down! Peter spoke peremptorily. Four pairs of hands clamped down on her.

"Jesus have mercy on my baby", muttered her father. The ex-policeman's eyes bulged.

"YOU!" Marianne screamed, as she lay pinned flat on the bed, her eyes open and blazing with anger. "YOU! Peter the Eater. Eat my flesh, said she. Suck my blood, said she. And you did! Peter the Eater! You’ll come with us, you freak. You’ll lick my arse and like it, Peeeeeeeeeetrrrrrrrrrr,” and her voice sank through the “rrr” to an animal gurgle.

Something started to ache in Peter’s brain. He missed a breath, panicked because he could not draw it, stopped and waited, swaying on his feet. Then he exhaled gratefully. To the younger priest he looked frail and vulnerable. Father James handed Peter his prayer book and they both turned to face Marianne. Peter was one of seven children. His father moved from Country Clare to Listow County, Kerry, where he prospered as wine merchant.


...Summers were spent at Beale Strand…………….
One such summer, his sixteenth, Peter had his only brush with sex. He had lain for hours among the sand dunes of Beal Trandv with Mae, a girl from Listowe whom he had known for about three years.

...Innocent flirting developed inn to simple love play and finally into a fervid exchange of kisses and caresses, until they both lay naked and awesomely happy beneath the early evening stars, the warmth undulating and glowing sweetly through their bodies as they huddled close together. Afterward, Mae –playfully nicknamed him “Peter the Eater”. To calm his fear, she added: “Don’t worry. No one will know how you made love to me. Only me”.

For about a year afterward, he was interested in girls and particularly in Mae. Then early in his eighteenth year, he began to think of the priesthood. By he time he funished schooling, his mind was made up. Peter had told me once: “When we said goodbye, that summer of 1992,Mae teased me: If you ever leave the seminary and don’t marry me, I'll tell everyone your nickname. She never told a human soul. But, of course, they knew. Peter’s sole but real enemies were the shadowy dwellers of “the Kingdom” whom he vaguely called “they”.

Lechach veniretha verith[Come!Let's make a deal]. The Hebrew words came off her lips quite intelligibly to Peter. "A deal", she continued. "Just you, Peter, and me. Peter the Eater".

A window opened in Peter’s,memory releasing a small sharp panic in him. It was like a bat zigzagging at him out of the night of memory. And like grain of grit thrown in his eye and stinging him to tears. "Don’t worry. No one will know. Only me". Mae’s face and voice were back with him for an instant from that distant summer evening. They were so dear in his memory. But Marianne’s voice seeped the memory to ashes.

"A deal, Peter! Let’s talk of the Un in the All-Holy.Aleph.Beth.Gimel.Daleth.Shin".

"Forget your Hebrew in all that hair and skin?" The tone was level, throaty, neither male nor female, grittily mocking.The grain of panic in Peter now became a boulder pushing him against the bars of his mind, as he sought refuge. He remembered the neat trap, and the words of Connor: “Nivir discuss me bhoy. Nicks a pasht mashter at it. Hell have yeh bet in wan tick uv lamb's tail”

Peter made a new effort at metal control. His panic receded.

“Marianne!”

But the Pretence continued. “Tscah! Peter! What’s a little Hebrew between you and me?” The voice was less throaty now, appealing even.
“In the name of Jesus, I command you, Marianne, to answer.”
“Why can’t we forget the past? You forget it. I forget it. So everybody’s happy, Peter”
“Marianne, you belong to the Most High…”
“Forget it, Peter!” The hard note again. “Don’t be a bore. This is, is, is Marianne. The real Marianne…”
“Marianne, we love you, and we know you. Jesus knows you. God knows you. Answer me in the name of Jesus who saved you.”
“If you’re thinking of that little pimply girl with no breast and heavy glasses and her silver cross and her calloused knees…”
“Only love can save and heal, Marianne. Peter knew that confrontation was being avoided, and the voice of Pretence went on.”…and her no-mother-yes-mother-no-father-yes-father-bless me-father-for-I have-sinned. Forget it, Peter”. The throaty tone had returned; but there was a silky snarl laced with contempt and, Peter felt, some tiny threat.

…“Peter. You okay?” She had a mocking solicitude in her tones. The rattling had ceased. “About that Un. What’s the difference?”
Peter clenched his teeth and decided to be assertive. “The All-Holy”, he said flatly, “is one”.
“Ah!. But to be complete, the All-Unholy goes with it”
“Dirt does not go with cleanliness”.
“Without darkness, no light, Peter. No light”.
“The All-Holy cannot go with the All-Unholy”.
“Wrong, Peter pet, pet, Peter”.

“Peter’s mental grip weakened for an instant, as he felt the claws of argument closing around his mind. Fatally his logic rose. Connor’s warning faded in a kind of cry to intellectual battle, and he blurted out; “Impossible-”
“Now, we’re on the ball”. Her voice rose, cut in triumphantly. “I know your fuddy-duddy medieval Principle of Contradictions. Esse set non-esse non possunt identificari [Being and nonbeing cannot be one and the same].Even know the Latin!. But that’s for now, Peter. see? Only for now. It can be different”.
Peter forced himself away from argument.

“Marianne!”
“No, Peter…”
“In the name…”
“Of the All-Unholy and, if you wish, the All-Holy. No objection.” Then that terrible little laugh. “Some day soon, your esse and your non-esse will be together like…”
“…of Jesus, Marianne…”
“…a cock in a cunt, like a hand in a glove. Mine do…did…will…”
Suddenly she vibrated in high pitched scream, shoulders, hips, thighs, feet, hands, all beating against the hands that held her down, like a woman driven to insanity with caresses but cut short of orgasm. “Will somebody fuck me, fuck the esse out of my ass, Peter. Put your esse in me and fuck me, fuck me.” She ended in a forlorn wail.

Marianne’s uncle gasped for air, as if throttled by a blow across the throat. Peter’s eardrums ached from that scream. He almost felt the hot tears of her father, who was now crying quietly, biting his lips as he held his daughter down.

….The voice that came from her throat now was youngish, full of interest, calm, as though reciting a lesson, cascading with soft syllables.

… “I have been on a simple quest. You see. No harm to anybody. Not even to myself. Only, I wanted to end all the [painful choos8ing.mummy and Daddy could not help me. Nor my teachers. Nor boyfriends. All of them were split with decisions. All of them tortured by their choices. Afraid. Yes. You see? They were afraid. Had fears.Likew dogs yapping at their heels. Is this right? Is this happy? Is this possible? Is this impossible? Miles and miles of yapping mongrel questions. I knew if I fund my real self, there would be no more need to respond to choices and therefore no fear of error. No more guilt”

… “Possible and impossible”, Marianne cooed, “make all human happenings impossible, posing suppurating distinctions and pat partisanships and perfunctory periods…”
“If a man has any love for me”, Peter read, “he will be true to my word”. He was battering against the confusion, the using use of words that lulled the mind toward nothingness. “And then he shall love my Father; and we shall both come to him and make our abode with him…”

“..in between us and our other halves,” Marianne interrupted. “Saying to the Yin in me: thou shalt not have thine Yang. Saying to the Yang in you; Thou shalt not have a Yin…”

Peter cut Marianne off again. “The branch that does not live on in the vine can yield no fruit of itself” The very simplicity of the words gave Peter new blood. His voice was calm. “No more than you…”

“…making a male the creature of his dangling ganglions,” screamed Marianne violently, “and a female the bed of her clit and her clots and her…”
“if you do not live on ion me, “Peter said at the top of his voice, “I am the vine; you its branches; if a man lives on in me, and I, in him, then he…”
“…tomby womb”.Marainne was now snarling the words in a hoarse yell. “He out. She in. And never the twain shall meet except in sweat and groans. Ugh! For out’s out…”
…Peter would not disengage. He went on, still knifing at the confusion, the verbal expression of the stink in the room, using the words that kept him free “…will yield abundant fruit; separated from me, you have no power to…”
“…and in in, “she broke across him. “This cut-and-dried business started long ago with all that crap of master and slave, creature and creator, god and man. The whole cotton-pickin,’ mother-fuckin’…”
“…anything,” Peter continued imperturbably with his text. “If a man does not live on in me, he can only…”
“…winners-and-losers game.” She paused slightly for a moment, as if listening. “The fella in that white robe with that camp-following whore and her vaseline. And then for us…”
“…be like the branch that is cast off and withers way. Such a branch is…”
“Mother Mary Maidenhead Virgilius announced that the impossible cant be possible”, Marianne was lying back one more on the bed. “You’re telling us, we chorused at her…”
Peter caught the sardonic tone. His voice went hard as he cut her off. “useless and cast into the fire, to burn there. I pray for those who are to find faith in me through their word; that they may be all one; that they too may be one in us, as thou, Father, art in me, and I…”
“…withered boobs and remembering her fallen womb and her pasty complexion at curse time every month”. Marianne’s voice was once again rising to a falsetto. “If only you had known, Mother dear! The impossible isn’t…”
Marianne was chuckling. Peter kept the hard note in his tone, as he took up the where she had cut him off; “…in thee; so that the world may believe that it is thou who has sent me”.

Still talking, Marianne now turned over on her side, relaxed. While she spoke, the doctor took her pulse as he was supposed to do every quarter of an hour, when her movements didn’t make this too difficult.

“…possible unless the impossible is actual. Otherwise the impossible would be impossible. Must be really impossible, though. Really.” Her tone was confidential. “For the possible to be possible, I mean. Must have both. Must have…”
“…both”.
She continued feverishly.
“The real is real because of the unreal. The clean, clean berceuse of the unclean. The full, full because of the empty. The perfume perfume because of the smelly. The holy, holy because of the unholy”. Then in an intense rush of words interspersed with grunts intent on hammering home contradictions, in an unholy pursuit of all that could confuse and confound human thought and open blankness in the mind “Sweet sweet huh bitter. What is is huh what isn’t. Life life huh death”. Each grunt preceded an opposite and sounded as though Marianne were being punched in the stomach each time. “Pleasure pleasure huh pain. Hot hot huh cold.” Then in a chain of words pasted together in a scream: “Updownfatthinhighlowhardsoftlongshortlightdarknessstopbottominsideoutsidealleachalleachalleachchchchchchchchch…”The piping voce died away on that long, coagulated mishmash as if choking on its breath. The effort had been so violent That Marianne seemed to be almost plucked off the bed,every part of her prone body straining upward.

….Marianne’s body relaxed. She rolled over jerkily on her other side. In a girlish voice, a seemingly instantaneous departure in anew direction: “Binaries, we need them, y’know? Yessir. Cybernetics has ‘em. Before and after. Plus and minus. Odd and even. Negative and positive. Always to be with us. But just as far as that: with us. Not splitting us.”

Peter would not be pulled aside to try to follow any easy sense of Marianne’s words.That same trap, that constant, easy invitation to defeat. He took up again: “He who rules this world has had sentence passed on him already. The spirit will bring honor to me because it is from me…”
“He who ,is not with me”, she took up, interrupting is a dreadfully mocking falsetto, “is against me, sez the Lord. No man can serve two masters, sez the Lord”. Lowering her tone: “Ever see two pricks in the ass and cunt of one broad and she pumping back and forth servicing two masters?” Her father turned his face away and leaned on the policeman’s shoulder.

Again the falsetto. “Whom do men say I am? sez he. Black and white,sez he”. Now the falsetto rose to a howl that pierced the ears of Peter and the others, making them wince and grimace. “You’re in, sez he. Your out,sez he. The Lord God of Ghosts. Sheep‘n’goats,sez he. Doves and devils, sez he. Golden clouds and bloody brimstone. Driving a nail in the heart. Opening up a gaping wound in my oneness”. Then, raising her pelvis up and own rhythmically and shouting at the top, of her voice: “Jeebum!Jeebum!Jeebum!”

“…the Father belongs to me”, said Peter calmly, finishing the interrupted sentence.
Marianne stopped as Peter said those words. Now he was standing by the window but facing into the room and watching Marianne on the bed. She whimpered piteously. “All I want is no more questions. No more challenges. No more choices. No more yeses and noes. Not even maybes. No thou-shalt-nots. In the Kingdom…” Then in a suddenly deep gurgle like a man who needs air but speaks through gallons of water…”in the Kingdom in the Kingdom in the Kingdom…”

…. “Jesus”, Marianne, “the name is…”
“Jeebum!Jesusass!Jeebum!Jesusass!Jeebum!”She was howling again..
…But there was no more shouting. It was the violence of the loathing in Marianne’s voice that was physically painful to Peter, as it continued studiously and quietly: “Yes…”A trailing pause, as if ruminating. Then: “Ah! Sixty-nine. Right? A handy image”
Peter winced at the tone and the mental picture. His memory was wilting his effort, and he prayed.

But Marianne went on with unruffled mercilessness as if reciting from a technical report. “And first the tongue, its apex like a single wet pink eye with a white iris, goes exploring; sliding its dorsum over each groin, every epithelial cell registering the ripples of the musckus gracilkis, following the tautened adductor longus, summoning saliva to glisten its course towards the darkling mountain, the mons veneris. Her saphena majora rustles and tickles with rushing blood”

A retort rushed to Peter’s mouth. He held it back.

Marianne continued. “Then, at the os pubis it lingers, all its papillae hungry,tensile,wet. Filiform cries to fungiform, fungiform to circumvallatae, circumvallatae to foliate; ‘On! Brothers! On’
The doctor whistled through his teeth and glanced at Peter. But Peter was dangerously abstracted from the scene. He could hear Mae’s sigh, that long-distant day in the sunshine, miles and decades apart from this evil encounter; he could see her lying on the slope of the sand dunes ,felt one hand lying in her coffin just before it closed forever[when she died of ]

Inexorably the recital went on. “amid his moans and her heaving, the tickling in his sacrum (Ah! Resurrection bone! Those rabbis had a word for it!), through his thighs; the corpus cavernosum fills up with thick red-black blood. The tongue stabbing within, and she closing around it, holding it.”

Smiler[the name of the demon]was now using Marianne’s voice in a soft, matter-of fact tone. There was a short pause of seconds. Then, with a burst of fierce contempt; “He is fucking her. And like the hyena with a dead deer”-the voice rose to a scream-“he starts with her anus, and she like a mother snake is swallowing her son. LOVE????? a piercing, shattering scream. The voice fell to a sneer; “Cunni-cunni-cunni-cunni! Peter the Eater.” Then casually, as one asks the time of day; “Tells us, Peter. Are you sorry? Did you miss it?”

Marianne’s father had his face buried in his hands; his shoulders heaved with sobbing. The ex-policeman and the banker stared red-faced at Peter. His young colleague leaned on the night table, his face ashen. The tirade, like a great, sprawling canvas, had thrown a mass of screaming cors and nonsensical patterns of thought and feelings over them all.

..Smiler, the cosmic joker, smears and tears at everything, Peter was thinking to himself, as he ruminated and groped towards his next step. Smiler, who turns memories to dirt and chokes you with them.

….He found himself reacting by instinct: “Silence! Smiler! Silence in the name of Jesus! I command you to desist, to leave her. Tell me that you will obey. That you will leave her. Speak!”

The other men in the room glanced at Peter, surprised at the force in his voice. The verbal assault had left them raw, ashamed of something vague, with a feeling that they had been filthied. They had expected Peter to wilt, to have been crushed. They had been willing to lose hope.
But now they took something from him.

….The other men I the room glanced at Peter, surprised at the force of his voice. They sensed what he knew, saw it on his face, and almost heard him telling them: “I may be engaged in this to my own humiliation. But Smiler is equally engaged in it and there is no escape for him. Just hold on”

Smiler spoke, but as if Peter had never spoken. “Well! Here we have a thing never seen in the Kingdom.”-the voice calm again- “a little drop of sea water pulls a little membrane around it and rots for a million years on an ancient forgotten shore, and sprouts little hair trigger nerves and puny little earthen mechanisms, and stands up to skies above and says again : ‘I am so beautiful’…”
“Silence! Desist!”
“You ugly sod! You smelly little animal…”
“And let the soul of Marianne be beautiful once more with the grace of…”
“Beautiful?” For the first time, the voice was raised almost an octave higher. “Beautiful?” Now it was shrill, high-pitched, and painful scream of questioning scorn. “You helpless, yelping, puking, licking, slavering, sweating, excreting little cur. You whipped mongrel. You constipated shit canister. You excuse for a being. You lump of urine and excrement and snot and mud born in a bed on bloody sheets, sticking your head out between a woman’s smelly legs and bawling when they slapped your arse and laughed at your little red balls”-the scream of high decibel invective ceased suddenly, followed by three syllables pronounced calmly and with loathing contempt- “You creature!”
“And so are you, too. You creature." Peter surprised himself at his own self- possession.

From Hostage to the Devil:The Possession and Exorcism of Five Living Americans by Malachi Martin

Their lovemaking steered between moments of tenderness-with David above her with such love on his face that he looked like he was in pain-and raw, hard sex that made her cling to the handmade oak bed frame so David’s thrusts wouldn’t send her off-balance, flying onto the floor as he pounded her from behind.

The sounds they made were part song, part call and response-from gasps to screams to whimpers. As their sounds mingled with the other night noises drifting through the open window, with her dripping perspiration and the damp scent diffused inside the breezer in the room, Jessica felt like one of the creatures outside, unashamed in the wilderness, doing what God intended creatures to do.

Afterward, they were both breathing hard, their slick chests rising and falling, and their flesh burned so hot that they couldn’t bear to touch. They fell away from each other and lay still on the blanket, smelling their heavy sex scent, their bodies moist from each other.

The only light in the room was from the moon. David looked like a shadow beside her, as though she could reach outher barm out and it would pass through him.

"I love you so much Jess", he said, a whine.

"Me, too", she said.

He’d caught only one bass for dinner, using bread for bait since he had forgotten to buy worms. They cut the fish in half after he fried it up. She’d eaten fresh fish and day old fried chicken with a slice of bread, and it had tasted like a feast.

They’d sat on the cabin’s steps, watching the blaze of the sunset light up their island in an orange bath while David’s radio played static-filled jazz that sounded like broadcast from a long time ago.

This is a dream, her mind told her as she witnessed the too-perfect sunset. I’m going to wake up soon.

David turned over in bed, facing her. She felt his rapid breaths against her forehead. “I have so many things I need to tell you,” he whispered, “but I’m scared out of my mind”.

She'd expected this. A part of her had realised from the start that the purpose of this unexpected vacation was to give David whatever he needed -whether it was distance or guts or escape-to tell her more about himself. So, even without realising it, she’d been prepared. His words did not alarm her. She touched his damp hair with her fingertips.

“You don’t have to be scared”.

“There’s so much you don’t know”, he said.

“I know that”, she said. “But I need to. Right?”

A nearby owl hooted so loudly it sounded like it was in the room with them, perched at the head of the bed. When the room fell silent, she noticed the chaotic chirping of the crickets. Everything around them was awake, it seemed. So was she. Her eyes were wide, trying to make out David’s features in the dark.

From My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due


Couple above from the great storehouses of images at INMAGINE and PHOTOALTO.



man and the woman are as naked as the day they were born, when God created them. Guided by the light of Dominique Douieb, their bodies sketch all the likely figures of a possible completeness. Masculine strength marries feminine harmony. The full forms of his muscles are wedded to the arches of her slender curves. Their destinies have always mingled together. Their interwoven bodies melt into a unity that the black and white treatment finishes to celebrate. Maximum amplitude on the scale of beauty.

From http://www.photoalto.com/index/fa/c.cd/pageTOP/1/go/go/cd/PA123/pageBOTTOM/1/lbox/__________

When sex is used for the wrong reasons a spiritual problem is created.

Charlotte Davis Kasil

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their won bodies conceal themselves?

Walt Whitman

Every Thursday at noon I have sex with Rick in room #213 of the Rainbow Motel.

...I open my eyes. He’s leaning over me, his palm on the pillow beside my head. I can hear the second hand of his watch ticking beside my ear. His breath numbs the hollow at the base of my neck. Sweat gathers on his temples. The necklace taps his chin as he fucks me. A gift from his wife?

I wonder. He kisses me. Strokes me. But this is just a repetition of all the other times with Rick. Nothing unusual. Just the basics. Routine sex. Hew doesn’t even bother to try to impress me with fancy positions like Crushing Spices. Flower in Bloom. Dear to Cupid. Just the missionary position. Sometimes sixty-nine-but all Rick wants is to get the job done. Quickly.

...Can’t I understand that this, what we do here, has only, ever, been numbed emotions of familiar strangers, fucking? Why can’t I accept the difference between this and love? How can love be two bodies wrapped in a sheet that’s singed by careless cigarettes, here, in a room with plastic curtains, tin ashtrays, base metal, stained carpet, bad alchemy, artificial air, and television promoting the same pornographic movies every hour on the hour? Here in a room when, by one o’clock, Rick looks depleted, the blue of his eyes seeming to have bled beneath the skin.

...For months, like a mantra, my therapist has told me, “These men are killing you”. I don’t know if he means emotionally, spiritually or physically. I don’t ask. He explains that I confuse sex with love, compulsively repeating this destructive pattern with one man after another. I do this because as a girl I learned from my father, the first dangerous man who sexually misloved me.

…Last Thursday at Rick’s house.

Rick and I didn’t meet at the Rainbow Motel. His son was home from school with the
flu, and Rick took the day off from work to stay with him. Rick and I undressed in the bedroom he shares with his wife, while his son slept in his room down the hall.

The house was hushed. The door to the bedroom locked. But then I heard a small sound; his son crying.

Rick heard him too. I expected Rick to rush to him. We wouldn’t have sex. Instead, we would read his son a story. Give him a glass of water. Press a washcloth to his cheeks. I paused; sure I felt his son’s fever, damp and urgent. He needed his father.

His father didn’t need him.

Rick’s hands tugged at belts and zippers; hurry. We will do this….even though his son might get out of bed, knock on the door, see me leave his parent’s bedroom. What

I then forced myself to know was this, this one careless act of sex, was more important to Rick than his son. And because I, too, couldn’t say no, because I feared Rick would leave me if I refused him sex, I began to know, had to accept, that sex was more important to me, too. In a moment of clarity I realized that, while the sober part of me wanted to attend to his son, a tangled, humid, inescapable part stopped me. Time stalled with Rick’s hands forever on his belt buckle; with my fingers always on the zipper of my skirt.

And a moment later, I no longer heard his son crying.

…“Dad, wait. My therapist says he’ll want to schedule a family session. I mean, I know you can’t come down here, but well do it on the phone. Like a conference call”.

“If he wants a meeting, tell him to send me an agenda”

“That’s not exactly how it’s done”

“Then how can I know what were going to talk about?”

The phone clicks.

I know well never have family session, even on the phone.

Mom?

“I’m still here”

“You think he’s really angry?

“Can’t you call him from the hospital without these therapists?”

My therapist has told me not to have any unsupervised contact with my father while in the hospital. No contact with Rick either.

“How about I'll send you flowers?”She adds.

I don’t want flowers. I don’t want presents. All you give are presents. You gave me as a present. To your husband. By feigning illness and staying in bed, your eyes shut, the door closed, you could pretend not to notice how you made me available to your husband-a gift-a little-girl wife.

Mother, I don’t want flowers. I want…..

The impossible: a real father; a mother who saw what she saw, knew what she knew.

Even though the last time my father touched me sexually was when I left home for college some twenty-five years ago, it feels as if I’ve never left that home at all.

“Just to get better”,I answer.

“Well, be sure to pack a warm robe and slippers”, my mother says. Bring plenty of vitamin C. You know how cold they keep those places”.

…Nancy, the nurse, talks about masks. She wants us to think of our addiction and the different masks we wear that keep out true selves hidden. Her voice is steady, direct, clear.

Nancy turns to each of us, asking. What do you see? What do people see when they look at your face? What do you want them to notice?

...There is a mask. Its mouth is desperate, famished, enraged: the face of my father.

The masks of the addict are varied. We switch to an addict face as easily as we change expressions. I am all pretence palimpsest, like theses strips of papier mache. I hide beneath layer after layer of lies, secrets, different lives: the Rainbow Motel image I show Rick; the pretend-I’m normal mask I show friends; the pretend I’m professional mask I’ve shown co-workers; the pretend I’m wife mask I’ve shown Andrew [my husband].

This exercise is a ritual. Masks suffocate. Remove the layers. Remove the masks. The false personas. Remove the addiction.

...Men have always pulsed through my mind, unceasing. But now, this eighth day in the hospital, there are thin units of time during breakfast, say, or group therapy, or spirituality, art therapy, game time,addicts don’t know how to relax, so we’re instructed to play cards or board games),when the static of fantasies diminishes.

Like the other day, playing monopoly, I land on Boardwalk, buy it, build hotels, collect money, and, in the joy of winning, I don’t immediately associate hotels with the Rainbow Motel. Rather, it’s as if for one moment I step outside my self and watch an unknown woman in an unfamiliar body perform one new unusually ordinary task; playing a game.

I lie down on top of the bedspread. I must practice how to refocus my mind, my senses. This is a test; see how long I can go without thinking about a man.I glance at the clock again.10:45.I concentrate on the word reduction. Reduce sight to what is before me.

...“There isn’t enough”, she says.
“Enough what?”Linda asks.
“Food”,Sheila says.
“You mean breakfast”,I say.

...“No”,Sheila says. “There isn’t enough food, period.Soon as I finish breakfast, it’ll be gone. Then there won’t be anymore food until lunch. Then dinner. Then that food will be gone. All I do after finishing breakfast is think about what Ill eat for lunch. Even when I’m home and can eat all the food in my house, it isn’t enough”
“What can we say to Sheila? She’s right. There never is enough”.

...Ted [the therapist] would tell us it is love were really after-that we don’t feel enough love, don’t know how to love. We use sex, food, alcohol, money-external objects of false gratification-to try to fill inner emptiness, loss, need-in this emotionally purblind world. Only if Sheila learned to love herself, felt complete, would there be enough.

...“Husbands. Mine thinks I’m a terrible person. A slut.
“But you’re not”,I say.
“Except you wouldn’t believe some of the awful things I’ve done”.She tells me that once, on a vacation to St. Simon’sIsland with her husband and kids, she had her lover drive down and check in to another motel room. And she went back and forth between the two rooms for the entire trip.

...I wonder if, back in my dorm, the phone might be ringing. I imagine it is. It could be the obscene phone caller. It could be the man in the Corvette, even though he doesn’t know my name or number. It could be Forrest, telling me his wife is no longer suspicious. It doesn’t matter which man. They all want sex as much as I want them to want it. It doesn’t matter where it happens. The essence of all the rooms is the same.

…No one has ever asked me if something is wrong, or if there is anything to talk about. So how would I even know if something is wrong? How could I answer?

…I try to be one of those housewives who are intimate with supermarkets and laundry. This woman who strives to be a wife, wants to obliterate that addictgirl- the girl who knows how to run away from home more than she knows how to stay there. The girl who’s great at beginnings. Endings are a surer bet for her, too. But it’s the long sober tedium of the middle that gets the girl every time. Eventually she’ll crave another man. So these two parts of me (wife and addictgirl) fight for control of one body.

So…..I stop on a dime. I no longer have sex. None. I eliminate men. I ration what I eat as if the world’s food supply is toxic. I am in total control, obsessed with the job of my body’s annihilation. Until I barely think about this troublesome body.

I don’t miss it.

Only this state of celibacy can cleanse me. Only the state of starvation) no fat, no nutrients, no protein, no carbohydrates) can dissolve my lungs, rinse my mind, drain my heart, formaldehyde the remains. On this afdefully tended, emaciated body, I wear plain oxford shirts buttoned tight to the collar. I slumber in the pure essence of arctic isolation-thin air, no food, no sounds, no sex, no colour-an anorexic, monochromatic would with nothing of the real world to tempt me. I am a one-woman famine.

...There must be a connection between the trade winds in the West Indies-and this breeze I wait for now.
But here on the Galveston jetty, I am too numb to understand how these decades link together. I am unable to glue the past and present together into a mosaic of understanding, not wanting to acknowledge that this wreck of a girl in the present is a mutation from the wreck of her childhood’s there is no reason to be here today: no breeze, no comfort, nothing. I return home.

…I projected love and spirituality onto Gabriel because I wanted him to be a spiritual person. I wanted to steal or borrow his because I have none of my own. I wanted a quick dose of soul. But Gabriel is only a bartender offering an alcoholic free drinks.

...Love is here every day! Before, “here” was a bar, a motel, a boardwalk. Now I must learn that love is where I carve out my own life.

From Lovesick:One Woman's Journey into Sexual Addiction by Sue Silverman