Sunday Snippet - Aphrodite, A Memoir of the Senses

One of my favorite books about food and eroticism is Isabel Allende's Aphrodite - A Memoir of the Senses, an unpretentious, witty, and earthy collection of stories, lore and recipes taken from history, art, literature, and life experience itself. I've snipped from this book in two or three previous posts but I lack the energy and time right now to link you to them, though you can, if you wish, do a search on the blog.

Below is an excerpt from Aphrodite about the perceived difference between eroticism and pornography, in the form of a letter written by Anaïs Nin to a consumer of pornography, with an introduction by Isabel Allende.

“Erotica is using a feather, pornography is using the whole chicken"

~ Isabel Allende

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 About Eroticism 

 In the forties, Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller survived for a while by writing erotic stories for a man who paid them by the page. This client, known to them only as the Collector, remained anonymous, piquing the indignant curiosity of the two great authors who lent their talents and their pens to satisfy his caprices. This collector of pornography did not appreciate style and repeatedly asked them to "cut the poetry" and concentrate on the sex, because that was all he was interested in. Nin wrote him a letter in which she masterfully defines the essence of eroticism:

Dear Collector:

     We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession.

      It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities.

     You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are the fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex is surprising textures, its subtle transformation, its aphrodisiac elements. you are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood.

     If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent man in the world. The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, mood, there are no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all of the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.

     How much do you lose by this periscope at the tip of your sex, when you could enjoy a harem of distinct and never-repeated wonders? No two hairs alike, but you will not let us waste words on a description of hair; no two odors, but if we expand on this you cry: Cut the poetry! No two skins with the same texture, and never the same light, temperature, shadows, never the same gestures; for a lover; when he is aroused by true love, can run the gamut of centuries of love lore. What a range, what changes of age, what variations of maturity and innocence, Perversity and art.

    We have sat around for hours and wondered how you look. If you have closed your senses upon silk, light, color, odor, character, temperament, you must by now be completely shriveled up. There are so many minor senses, all running like tributaries into the mainstream of sex, nourishing it. Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy. 

 Egon Schiele

Embrace

"The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware."

~ Henry Miller

Untitled

Margaret Atwood is one of my heroes because she uses her reputation and notoriety as a renowned writer and poet, to discuss issue regarding the survival the planet.




Both videos are posted with my friend Susan in mind but this next one, especially. She is much in my thoughts.

A Little Madness in the Spring

A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown -
Who ponders this tremendous scene -
This whole Experiment of Green -
As if it were his own!  

~~Emily Dickinson

For several years now,every April during my spring vacation I visit Emily Dickinson's garden at The Homestead. Emily is my neighbor to the southeast, less than a half hour's drive from where I live. This is one of my top favorite places in Western Massachusetts.

 Since childhood I've been fascinated by The Belle of Amherst. Her reclusiveness has been speculated upon by all manner of scholars, some of whom have made it their entire life's work to study her poems and letters, in an effort to understand who she really was.

A very private person, obviously. By her own instructions, her letters were burned after her death by her younger sister Lavinia, who while doing so, came upon a box of 1700 of Emily's poems. During her lifetime, Emily Dickinson felt uneasy about publishing her very personal and highly passionate writing. Perhaps she felt secure that her tiny bundles of poems, sewed together into little books, would one day be discovered and found to have merit.

I've always entertained a suspicion that Emily's reclusiveness was not a result of serious mental illness as was once highly speculated. The old stereotype of her as a frail, perhaps frigid spinster have more recently given way to a view of Emily much more after my own heart!  In thinking of someone like Dickinson, we assume that she was like a little mouse, never speaking to anyone, holing up in her upstairs bedroom to write, paranoid that anyone was watching her. In fact, Emily interacted fully with her own family, having close relationships with both her siblings and an adoration of her nieces and nephews. She tended the family garden and baked the family bread daily. Eccentric, yes. Yet busy and productive, with a sharpness of mind that is one of the trademarks of her poetry.

That her poems reveal, at times, a smoldering physical passion is obvious. Her relationship with God and religion  tentative and questioning, she was most comfortable worshiping nature in her garden. Her father and brother Austin, prominent citizens of Amherst, helped to found the Congregational Church, just across the street from the Dickinson home. Emily never stepped foot inside of it.

"I feel that the world holds a predominant place in my affections. I do not feel that I could give up all for Christ, were I called to die" (L13)

 I have not gone into a full biography, as others have done a much better job of it than I could possibly. For everything that is known about Emily, please visit The Homestead website, linked above. For many things speculated and invented, read Jerome Charyn's delightful novel The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson.

Here some more photos of Emily's garden in April, 2011. If you visit last year's post on this subject, you will notice a difference in how the garden is blooming. Spring is here, albeit somewhat delayed.

Scilla

Spring comes on the World—
I sight the Aprils—
Hueless to me until thou come
As, till the Bee
Blossoms stand negative
Touched to Conditions
By a Hum. 

~~Emily Dickinson

 

A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown -
Who ponders this tremendous scene -
This whole Experiment of Green -
As if it were his own!

 The path from the Dickinson Homestead to The Evergreens, Austin and Susan Dickinson's home.

Magnolia

Hyacinth

 

 

Wild Nights - Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile - the Winds -
To a Heart in port -
Done with the Compass -
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden -
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor - Tonight -
In Thee!

Linking to That's My World

Sunday Snippet

I write like

Gertrude Stein

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

 Gertrude Stein

(1874-1946)

I found the link for this thingy at my friend Dianne's blog Forks Off the Moment. Just for fun, I thought I'd include a snippet of the oetry of Gertrude Stein. Incidentally, she is one of my favorite literary "celebrities" who happens to be one of my least favorite poets. Perhaps I have not given her fiction a real chance but there is very little compelling me to do so.  Still, what a time she had in Europe with Alice B. Tokeless and all those intellectual and artistic types like Picasso and Hemingway!

This is a Stein poem in its entirety:

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

~Gertrude Stein

Sunday Snippet - Emily Dickinson

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside—

The Brain is deeper than the sea—
For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
The one the other will absorb—
As Sponges—Buckets—do—

The Brain is just the weight of God—
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
And they will differ—if they do—
As Syllable from Sound—

Emily Dickinson

Sunday Snippet

'Erotic is using a feather,'' she said. ''Pornography is when you use the whole bird.''

Isabel Allende 

This is the third snippet I've taken from the book Aphrodite - A Memoir of the Senses by Isabel Allende. If you're coming upon this series for the first time, you can click here and here for the two previous snippets.

In the recipe section on Hors d'Oeuvres Allende writes this...

Tidbits are to the table

what kisses are

to lovers: a delicate demonstration

of what is to come later,

when you slip into something more

comfortable. They are served to accompany a cocktail

or glass of white wine before moving

to the table. Or, in some cases,

when the urgency to make love

is so strong that

there is no time to lose,

they can take the place of a meal.

and includes several fine recipes. I have chose the one with figs, as I am a lover of figs. Specifically, figs bring me back to my childhood in Portugal, where fig trees are as abundant as apple trees in the Northeastern U.S. So for me, a fig is not just an item I can pick up at the grocery store for $2.50 per piece but the fruit I once picked in a friend's cultivated fig orchard in Portugal, along with my cousins, on a hot summer day in the late 90's. There were so many spoiling figs on the ground beneath each tree that our hostess insisted on getting us bags to take as many home as we wanted. I would have collected more, had I not been so busy eating them as I walked along, content to be in the moment with an abundance of my favorite fruit and the hot sunshine on my bare arms and neck. What a feeling!

I wish I'd known about this recipe then.

Widower's Figs

pg. 230

These tidbits lead to sin, and you always want more. The bursting figs suggest a certain urgency, and everyone appreciates the sensuality of the sweet and spicy combination.

Ingredients

 1 scant cup (8 ounces) semi-hard white cheese,                    

such asgoat cheese

1 tablespoon Salsa Picante

1 large apple or grapefruit 

4 large ripe figs

Preparation

Cut the cheese into 1/2 inch cubes and coat in the salsa picante. Spear on cocktail picks and insert into the apple or grapefruit (I prefer the grapefruit). Place in the center of a round plate and surround with peeled and quartered figs.

Sunday Snippet

 The second in a series of snippets from my current read Aphrodite (A Memoir of the Senses)
Last week's snippet is here.

From the Chapter

How to define an aphrodisiac? Let's say it is any substance or activity that piques amorous desire. Some have a scientific basis, but most are activated by the imagination. Cultures and individuals react to them in their own way. For thousands of years, humanity has experienced with countless possibilities in an incessant search for new stimuli, a search that led to pornography and the genesis of erotic art ancient as the dawn of millennary cave paintings. The difference between the two is a question of taste; what is erotic for one may be pornographic for another. For the Victorians, Evil was everywhere. They covered the legs of their tables to preclude bad thoughts, and a young lady was not allowed to hang a man's portrait on the walls of her room, for fear that the painting might look on as she was undressing. It didn't take much to excite those good folks.

Some aphrodisiacs function through analogy, like the vulva-shaped oyster or phallic asparagus; others by association, because they remind us of something erotic. They also work through suggestion, because they remind us of something erotic. They also work through suggestion, because we believe that when we eat the vital organ of another animal --- and in some cases, that of another human, as happens among cannibals ---we absorb their strength. In general, anything with a French name seems aphrodisiac. Serving mushrooms with garlic isn't at all the same as champignons a la Provencal, nor is ham and cheese comparable to croque-monsieur. The same criteria apply on the battlefields of love. It is a good idea to assign suggestive names to the different postures, as in the enlightened erotic manuals of Asia. It isn't necessary to remember the authentic terms; you can invent them and no one will be the wiser; delicate butterfly in somersault, swooning lotus flower in lake with ducks, and others of that ilk.  Of course, we cannot overlook therapeutic stimulants, plants, and hormones, but after testing a good number of them I believe that sensorial stimuli are more effective:  daring games, massages, shows, erotic literature and art.

February is a good time to visit a good grocery store or whole foods/gourmet market. I kept the winter blues at bay today by shopping for choice ingredients for dark chocolate mousse with roasted almonds. I also bought a used book and some French lavender soap.

Good weekend, everyone,

Pagan Sphinx