The Friday Sex Blog [The Erotic Impulse]

Hola Everybody,
I’m still looking for work, got turned down by two organizations this week. The struggle continues.

A readers asks why I write about sex. This post is an answer to that question. 

The Erotic Impulse

The Birth of Venus, Sandro Bottecilli, tempera on canvas (ca. 1486)

My writing arises out of an erotic impulse that is an act of love.

 

For the most part, we live in a world of things and actions, of appointments and careers, of earning a living and cleaning the house, of embarking on tightly scheduled vacations, and going to the movies. It’s the world in which we turn to when we need to feel the ground under our feet. It’s the world we think of when we think we feel the need to reaffirm that there is something basic and immutable, something solid and unchanging that can provide a primal sense of stability in a decidedly amorphous and ever-changing world.

This gross base of existence is what we call the real world.

We all need stability in one form or another: it’s a matter of emotional survival. We need a fundamental pattern with which to define an ordered, reasonably predictable world over a reality that is essentially defined by chaos. Without an organizing principle everything becomes random, meaningless, uncertain. In order to avoid this senselessness, this sense of existential angst, we have been conditioned to turn to the world of reason, the world of conscious direction and illusory control. We call this, unequivocally, the real world, as if any other way of finding direction, setting our course, defining ourselves, and the world around us, were mere illusion.

What I have attempted with my Friday “Sex Blog” is to show that there is another, more subtle existence that lies beneath the rational world we acknowledge as real. It is a world of tremendous significance and power, no matter how much we try to discredit it as insignificant, delusional, sinful, or ephemeral. We often think this “world within the world” into nonexistence. In fact, we can (and often do) rationalize it to the point it dissolves before the analytical habit of our minds. But even as we use the tyranny of thought to think it away, we continue to feel both its power and essential authenticity. We may not be able to see it, but we cannot stop sensing it. We may not be able to easily label or categorize this world, but we remain aware that something is moving around down there, just underneath the surface, pre-verbal, pre-consciousness, something in the shadows just beyond the firelight, beyond the glare of the city lights. Perhaps some of us are attracted by what we sense out there/ down there, in there, seductive and elusive. Perhaps some of us are frightened by it. Perhaps both.

This world that we know exists, beyond the boundaries of science, the discursive mind, and reason, is what I address -- or try to address -- as the world of Eros. It is indeed a world of immense power and potential. This level of reality holds transformative potential in our lives, it contains energy, and personal growth when it is engaged with clarity and awareness. Conversely, it also holds a potential for great danger, confusion, and harm when engaged carelessly and mindlessly.

As some of us already know, the erotic world is one we have been taught to disrespect and fear so thoroughly that many have lost all but the most elementary ability to honor, trust, or vividly experience its many manifestations. Exploring the colors, shapes, and contours of erotic reality -- who we are and who we want to become as erotic beings -- something that should be a natural, organic process of personal growth, is transformed by our sexually fearful (erotophobic) culture into a spiritually and emotionally confusing project.

By necessity we have to become spiritual archeologists. We must dig through the imposed layers of sexual conditioning, digging through layers of fear, containment, control, and misunderstanding just to experience fully what was originally available to us naturally as breathing. We must become explorers simply to reclaim our rightful erotic impulse that is one of the most basic, life-affirming aspects of what it is to be human.

Hopefully, the essays, stories, personal statements, and poems of the Sex Blog will serve as an initial finger pointing at the moon. Perhaps some will gain a measure of insight, or some new perspective to help unravel the erotic Gordian Knot we find all around us. Grappling with the wonders and mysteries of Eros is one of the basic adventures of being alive. Eroticism is not something we will completely and totally understand or resolve in our lives. Rather it is the process by which we become more fully evolved as human beings.

Today we stand on the precipice of a realizing a new consciousness of Western erotic culture. A point in time when this whole aspect of life is being addressed and debated publicly as never before, probed and explored passionately with tremendous potential. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to submit that the issues around sex and eros are as fundamental as any other -- psychologically, culturally, socially, and even politically. We are at the edge of an evolutionary quantum leap and with every leap there is danger along with an emergence into a new consciousness. Much of the success of this leap will depend on whether we collectively choose to embrace Eros and all the possibility it represents, or regress once again into fearfully attempting to banish it to the shadows of our consciousness where it becomes warped beyond recognition and gains power over our actions.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…