Self-reflective Intrigue of the Day

“I have tried to describe a feeling that has often troubled me: I revenge myself on it by giving it publicity”

-Friedrich Nietzsche-

THE SOLIDARITY OF MIND-BODY-WORLD

MINDBODYWORLD

In my life, desire has been a ceaseless problem.

I have always possessed an unquenchable, ravenous, hunger for knowledge, relation & sex.

For the first time (in nearly 45 years) I can see it as a wholism.

I could read & reflect in the literature and learning of the world 18-20 hours a day without tiring.

I could engage & evince sexual fulfillment and bodily orgasm repeatedly without complaint.

I could interact & dialogue with another willing human around issues of being 18-20 hours a day without exhaustion.

These seem equalities; totalities; wholisms.

The refusal of dualities and scissions.

Inasmuch as my mindbody organism never tires and perpetually desires experiences of stimulation, information, novelty and introduction : research – literature – science – philosophy – style of expression – CONTENT-RICH, CURIOUS, CREATIVE, IDIOSYNCRATIC, NOURISHING, INFORMATIVE OR CHALLENGING...

so does my body: traditional/conventional intimate relationships seem characterized by graphable, chartable periods of intimate craving passion of new love (novelty) / regulation of growing familiarity (intimacy) / rhythmic relational ritual regarding sexual (bodily) ecstatic experience…yet NEVER has that satisfied me.  I have always longed for CONTENT-RICH, CURIOUS, CREATIVE, IDIOSYNCRATIC, NOURISHING, INFORMATIVE &/or CHALLENGING bodily pleasure AS MUCH AS I have for my learning mind…with my bodily experience.

As with sex, so with reading (& vice-versa): the IMPORT is the quality, stimulation & unique learning & fulfillment that each author / partner / interaction / experience brings…NOT a quest for repetition or sameness…

I can read Kafka, Dostoevsky, Musil, Proust, Scripture, Aquinas, Plato, Aristotle, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Foucault, Gendlin, Rilke – indeed THOUSANDS of thinkers/artists OVER AND OVER again NEVER tiring or failing to notice / learn / experience some new insight / perception / feeling / LEARNING / ecstasy 

LIKEWISE – physical human partners – I WOULD NEVER tire, grow used to, familiarize, exhaust, cease or lessen to crave, desire, starve for – unique, intriguing, wonderful physical bodies for stimulation, perception, experience, learning, ecstasy 

Seems a Wholism to me.  With what is GOOD – nourishing, stimulating, fulfilling – I NEVER CEASE TO CRAVE IT, & NEVER AM FULFILLED – or “accustomed,” “familiarized,” “apathetic,” “exhausted” of detail, inquiry, pursuit, exploration…

Long and long I have felt BAD about this:

feeling that I am weird, a sexually addicted person, uncannily erotic, unnaturally intellectual/abstract etc…

No more.  I realize my MIND and my BODY are the same thing: ONE THING : a PERSONand that exactly as much as I ache/lust/pine/hanker for intellectual stimulation and inexhaustibility in great works of human creativity and expression/reflection…SO I ache/lust/pine/hanker for stimulation and inexhaustible pleasure of bodily interaction… 

FOR ONCE…PERHAPS I AM NOT THE “WEIRD” ONE

The one desiring equally and inexhaustibly ecstasy of mind and body, untiringly, unceasingly, unsatisfiably…

The perpetual “quest” for the “endless joy of erotic experience”

MIND & BODY – Aristotle, Augustine, Heidegger, Agamben…

Sappho, Rumi, Rilke, Pessoa…

MIND & BODY EVER CRAVING

PERPETUAL DESIRE

PERPETUAL JOY 

impossible to fulfill

impossible to fail

ECSTASY

the perpetuation of joy and desire

WHOLLY

Well-matched, then.  Identical, then.  SELFSAME, then: mind & body

desire & fulfillment

joy and longing

selfsame in me

and I am not ashamed.

tricircle_fractal

LIFE: REALMS OF PERPETUAL DESIRE AND FULFILLMENT VIA THE JOY OF DESIRE AND PERPETUAL FULFILLMENT NEVER SATISFIED ALWAYS CRAVING ALWAYS NOURISHED CRAVING MORE 

PERPETUAL

DESIRE/FULFILLMENT

IDENTICAL

RECURSIVE

NO DESIRE WITHOUT FULFILLMENT

NO FULFILLMENT WITHOUT DESIRING

Ouroboros

WHAT I AM.

Voices of the Book of the Dead & Vitality

I have to agree that one major thing I have never been able either to tell when talking with others, nor explicate when trying to share – about writing, the activity – is the pleasure.  For me, if I can move my experience of the world into language and there let language create a new experience with world for me, whether I’m miserable or joyous, in tedium or ennervated, things feel alright with the universe.  Sometimes even if I’m just drawing letters onto paper, words or not, phrases or not, discernable meaning or not – I still feel fine.  But then, if there seems like a resonant flow – if the language available and the experience felt engage recursively – there truly IS nothing quite like it in my experience of life.  David Foster Wallace says it this way, and I’ve heard similar attempts come out of my mouth:

“When I discovered writing I discovered a thing that gave me a combination of fulfillment (moral/aesthetic/existential/etc.) and near-genital pleasure I’d not dared to hope for from anything”

that rang exactly true for me….and…

“when i’d sit down and look up and it would be hours later and there’d be this mess of filled-up notebook paper and I just felt wrung out and well-fucked and, well, blessed.”

I probably wouldn’t blog that term (“blessed” or “f*@ked”), but there it is, and again, it does come as close as I can think to that satisfied, dizzying, emptied loose feeling that comes from a safe and open, intense and releasing session of writing.  I am thinking that the words “combination” and “pleasure” and “fulfillment” do the most to describe the process and experience of experimenting and experiencing in language for me.  And it is very similar to sexual intimacy, because once you have moved into the other (in this case, language) – the other has as much to do with, as much control over, as much effective presence in, the beauty and sense of meaning of, content and activity of the process and results or engagement as you – the writer – do.

Making it with the world is one of those weird mysterious ecstasies that are incomparable and indescribable.  I would be deceptive if I said that anything were “better” than it, though it has (in our limited emotional/emotive base) many similarities to being “spent” with one’s spouse, or those rare and profound connections with one’s children – I guess it ought to make some sense that intimacy-with would draw from the same human wells.  There is a quiver of experiences that no one speaks of without a touch of awe, a befuddled amaze, or a glad bafflement, and for me, the activity of reading and writing is one of these.