Joy, Day 1
Some say that seducing a woman is easy, others that it is hard. Some claim that seduction doesn’t exist, others that it is the only way to establish a relation between people. Some maintain that one doesn’t seduce but is being seduced, others that it all happens by accident. Some say it is mutual, others that it is a one-sided power interplay. Some call it a game, others call it a war. With such a fluctuating set of opinions in the matter, with such a diversity in the veil that conceals the source of a judgment on this topic, who can know for sure just what occurs when a man ‘courts’ a woman. Each veil is sown from different material; this one here for instance is made of silk, that one there of wool, the one adjacent to it of fur and so on with each veil. A judgment, especially of this sort, cannot be universalized. Why – because interest contaminates universality. This source here likes to fight in trenches, that one there in marshlands, the one next to it in the jungle, while that peculiar one of there standing alone at the corner of the room enjoys a mountainous terrain. Where there is taste, where these is personal flavour, ye shall find diversity; only in this is there diversity. What could be more taste-full than the seduction of a woman. One thing is guaranteed though: something is happening, a process is taking place – call it whatever you fancy. I myself am a fervent seducer, so much so that I don’t even know I am doing it. This one time however, this one woman, I will be as aware of my actions as I can. This one woman deserves the attention, the attention to detail, so much attention that even my actions become detailed.
A seduction is like a game of chess, two things are essential: patience and attention. Every seduction or seducer has his/her own way of approaching the endeavour, his/her own manner of seduction. Yet, the endeavour itself has one key component: the person being seduced. Each move makes a difference and it begins in your own mind. Complete clarity of thought is essential. One gains it by simply answering the question: what do I want from this person? With this in mind, the seduction can begin. In a game of chess, there is only one outcome, but many many means of getting to it. The outcome of chess, like that of seduction, is surrender. The key to seduction is to understand the surrender that one requires from the seduced. To get to this understanding, one must know the seduced, his/her weakness and strengths, hopes and desires, disappointments and joys, past and future. Of course, the more of each one knows, the easier it is, but only a little bit of each is necessary to reach surrender. For surrender requires one belief and one belief alone from the seduced, which will be manifest in thoughts that take the form of: “this person does not mean to harm me, it is me who thinks that they do and I need to overcome this for I may never find such a person again in this world”. This is what one would call falling in love. This is also the place where a seducer seeks to bring their seduced. It is a confusion and a polemic that springs from within and with oneself. Only in such inner turmoil can the seduced surrender. The best check-mate is that which allows the opponent no option but to pave the way to the loss of their king. This is best done, when the move one makes seems harmless and becomes an opportunity for the person to attack. Upon that attack and with that previous move, one leads the opponent astray and surprisingly check-mates them. The best check-mates are unexpected, the best surrenders are willed by the person surrendering. The best seduction is no seduction at all, at least in the eyes of the seduced.
Day 1 ,
I frequent this place. It is always filled with people, either passing or enjoying a Sunday afternoon drink after meeting undesired family members, or a heavy night out into the central office for the animal-behaviour that has become a necessity of our age. I grow weary of that life. People are always in turmoil and struggle with themselves, and seduction has become boring and much too easy. In the past, a drink has been enough to achieve physical surrender. In other situations, only a few well strung sentences and well observed directions of conversation, as well as attention to the person’s desires and aspirations has been enough to make them fall completely under my spell. In a world where inner struggle is a given seduction becomes the norm, no more an art or a difficulty. In certain situations it is enough for a person to be social; enter a room, small talk as many people as you can in the setting and the gaze of desire turns in your direction like a flag in the direction of the wind. It is most wearisome. I’ve fathomed many ways to make my seductions interesting. In some cases I’ve allowed myself to be seduced entirely without a single effort save mere presence and subtle speech. In others, I have merely thrown a suggestive look and a head glance in a direction, and surrender has been given. It is most wearisome, and mediocre. I yearn a challenge. Something worth the work and the pursuit, maybe even a new manner of pursuit completely. I feel like that chess-master who has won too many opponents to even be bothered to play. A hubris has descended on me that goes beyond all hubris, a hubris that has nothing to prove, no raison d’etre. I desire something else.
There is one woman that interests me and that frequents this place. As yet, I do not know her name. She is always the most withdrawn and unavailable from her friends. Usually attends here with a group of two or three women, enjoys a drink or two and leaves – she is always the first to arrive and leave. Interesting windows in which to converse with her, but also signs of impatience, but at the same time respect to her friends in her efficiency. We haven’t made eye-contact yet, thankfully. Her left hand is somewhat naked, which shows a lack of explicit commitment. It itself being either a very good or a very bad sign – often, married or engaged women are the easiest, depending on the length and duration of both. Her friends are very outgoing and very open to influence as well as attention – an interesting sign, for she bears no resemblance to it. Yet, they being her friends either implies that she secretly yearns to be as such, or that she has done so in the past, but has grown weary of the endeavour. Weary of it, but still harbours the residue of a friendship with such people. I hope for the latter, as the former is easier and less interesting to deal with. This time I shall find out her name. A name is always important before the woman utters it, for it gives her significance and makes you more drawn to the endeavour. Her behaviour fascinates me, she always sits facing her friends and with her back to the rest of the world, also the most involved in the discussions. Such attention-giving to her immediate situation is most becoming, but also fascinating as it could prove to be a challenge when we finally converse. She harbours a self-independence and pride that is quite rare, especially to this degree. I wonder if it conceals disappointment as is usually the case, or on the contrary a drive towards something other than the immediate people in her life, for example a career or other such ambition. The latter would make for a glorious seduction.
A very subtle and slow approach would do for such a woman, her radar is very on tune, she would notice anything explicit and throw it away. Perhaps, it is best if I approach one of her friends. In order to know who, it is best to listen in on their conversation. Listen in on the person she most powerfully competes with, this way I may know if she is heavily invested in her pride. There is a blonde girl that sits with her, an American, Amber is her name. She seems to always enter a quasi-intellectual discussion with her as her friends commence with the usual babble of ‘other people’s lives’. In such moments, she and Amber go silent or converse on the side in matters regarding current global or local events – often politics, but every now and then film and glamour. She harbours an artistic bone it would seem; Joy is her name. Amber seems to challenge Joy, but also to interest her the most – perhaps it’s the only reason why she sits in such company. I have not yet decided how to approach this, I have to listen in a little more if I am to know for sure…
We’ve worshipped…
… many many things, from weird to normal, from possible to impossible – alas, even the actual, whatever that may be and what interpretation holds it steadfast. We’ve worshipped systems, ideas, thoughts. We’ve worshipped things that were, things that are not, things that may be, and then things that should be. The past, the future. Deities, men, women. Animals, plants. Planets, Stars, rocks. Our own constructions, other people’s. So many things we’ve worshipped, so many things we’ve placed above ourselves. Our fervid worshipping bone has not been without our hands placed together palm to palm infront of our face, eyes closed, tears flowing and sighs igniting our whole body such that each hair on our arms, neck, back and legs stand erect and at the ready.
We’ve worshipped.
We’ve done so with fervent humility, unbeknown to us that hidden concealed behind each prayer, each hope, each worship, each passion, lays a most conspicuous pride. Behind the humility of the masses lays the most numbing pride. With every worship, we’ve worshipped ourselves. The furthest worshipped thing from us is by far the closest to us. We’ve never worshipped anything but ourselves, we know nothing else. Yet, this is the monstrous paradox of the humility of worship – it conceals the most monstrous of prides. Each prayer is a prayer to oneself for oneself, and we pretend to worship another. How pretentious the worshipping human bone is, how anthropomorphic. Yet, the few, the very few, who have the courage to break free and say with utter conviction and honesty,
“I worship nothing but myself, I trust entirely in myself and that which I am a part of, that which bore me and is me. I am it. It is not other than me. My pride is true, it is not conveniently concealed to console you squeamish, to seduce you, to seduce myself and prolong my ‘ultimately’ undesired state. I am proud; pride is me. This is my humility; the humility of honesty, the courage of honesty. The one and only social courage.”
Those strong few who have the ‘heart’, the energy, to break free from seeing through another’s eyes, to segregate from and divorce the returning gaze. They, in their misfortune, harbour gazes that return with malice, whose true form in its naked disclosure is fear. Those lucky and apparently malicious few, whom with such profound anger we acquaint, they are the authentic, the ‘real’, the ‘ideal’ – or at the very least, the closest thing. A vision that turns fully inwards is what each prayer is directed at, and each one that misses it is left gazing once more at another in search for itself. It turns to its malignant spouse, to that satire of satires, to the returning gaze. Those few, they are the true worshippers, they know the one and only deity, the deity we all worship but conceal it from ourselves.
Have I convinced you? Need I do so? Can’t experience do the job for itself? Look you at the many deities, and the differences between each. Then look you at their similarities. They are all other than oneself, but so important to oneself. Each deity is constitutive and constructed from one’s immediate state, their immediate condition, their immediate mode of life – alter that immediacy and you alter the deity. The differences between deities is manifest in the differences between modes of life – and that is all. Nothing more special than that. They are all directed at oneself and one-self’s interests – their life. That self that worships itself by pretending to worship another, that delusional self, as a friend of mine would say. The delusional self that needs to go to somewhere other than oneself in order to be itself, to be at one with itself. That delusional self that in so doing does nothing but the obvious: worship itself.
Why does it do this? Why else. To establish an authority for being itself, to have a ’reason’ for being oneself. To ‘give’ oneself meaning. It reasons and contends, foolishly, that it can’t have meaning in and of itself, it needs to mediate the process. Only in mediation, in the injection of otherness, can meaning for this delusional self be established. Meaning in immediacy has been something that we, as delusional selves, have forgotten. We fight ourselves in this forgetting, we reject our immediacy in the belief that only mediation is real, only mediation is the true, the self is only in and through mediation. That is where, for our delusions, lies the deity – the worshipped. This is where, for me, Wittgenstein went horribly wrong and horribly right, both in different ways and degrees.
There lays a most profound irony in all this: our immediacy seeks to foolishly find itself through mediation. Like a mirror that places itself in front of another mirror, but sees nothing but eternity in repetition. There is enough comedy in this to amuse us forever. There also lays enough tragedy in it to make us weep without end. A toast to mediation, a toast to delusion and a toast to you, my humble reader.
Maybe
Maybe you think about others more than you think about yourself because you are afraid of seeing yourself, of facing yourself, of facing your past. Maybe your prioritization of your social life over and beyond your private life is a cunning attempt at escape from the one priority that you can’t escape from: yourself. You may run into others, and even hide in their image. You may live through and for others; for your reputation, bound by their returning gaze. Yet, how far can you run before yourself catches up with you. How far before your past ’accidentally’ repeats itself in an attempt to get you to deal with it and accept it? The tear that yearns to be shed will find its way, at the price of your own demise.
Your principle becomes the wind’s whisper which silently and with a velvet movement sends out this proclamation, “to avoid myself I shall find another, in whom and for whom I may live in total security of my one fear and my one disappointment: myself”.
We are fascinating creatures.
They say…
…it’s difficult to trust someone who is not aware of themselves. It is likewise supposed equally distrustful to be fully aware of oneself due to the risk of calculation. How remarkable that the world is either a jungle where ‘anything’ goes, or a monarchic court where all are going ’somewhere’…
A new language
We need a new language… this one doesn’t do the job it once upon a time professed. It is deceptive and cancerous; hopefully, eventually, to itself. A new language is needed that bypasses the brain-organ, and reaches straight to the rest of the body, to the liver, lungs, heart etc. A language that cares not for thought-processes, belief structures and reasoning, but fires straight at the heart of it all: the living-body and its movements. The brain-organ is a delaying organ that is more prone to constancy in movement and death as opposed to constant movement and life. The body suffers immensely at the hand of the brain-organ and its prima qualitá: reason. The new language would be most interesting for it would make possible a rebirth, a new mode of life, a different encounter with the world, and existence would take on a different flavour. A more innocent and celebratory flavour: an innocently celebratory flavour.
The amorous blessing…
…beware of it. It stands shadowed in the distance, yet brimming with an enthralling shine, forcing you to ardently desire to close that distance. So, in response, you set one step over another. Slowly you make your way closer and closer, in anticipation of the conspicuous figure’s source of such an exquisite shine. Each step is seen by the figure, in the shadows it smiles and in return it considers, it prepares your arrival and its subsequent exposition – it designs a game for you. What a game indeed! Upon your arrival or a given proximity, the shadow loses its shine entirely and you experience nothing but a darkness that overwhelms you with fear. The closer you get, the more fear grips you, the further away you move the more that overwhelming shine comes back from the depths, from the shadows, somehow shoves aside that fear and forces you to doubt it once more. This is when you experience the most profound state a human being is open to – an ambivalence that is the most interesting in comparison to any other creature that inhabits our humble planet, and this is no anthropomorphism. You know not no more, and you find yourself chosing between madness and eternal purgatory.
Yet, there is a way out of this amorous trap: the blessing itself. In your approach the shadow merely plays a game of masquerade with you – a Venetian masquerade. It merely conceals itself in the most fascinating manner upon your arrival, a manner that traps you, as a coquette traps a poor and emotionally turbulent soul – like Josephine trapped Napoleon. The shadow brings out your most loyal friend, the one who’s kept you ’safe’ and ‘alive’ until now, the one who’s interested only in your happiness. The one who, in truth, is merely interested in your unhappiness, its absence, leaving you disinterested as concerns pleasure and peace, but fully interested in the negative. That friend who would much rather experience no-pain, than happiness given all the pain in the world. This is what the shadow is masterful at, it mirrors your soul and as such your position of power entirely. Its masquerade brings out your fear, but only in a given proximity, for it knows that inside you lays the opposite of fear, dormant, but either potent or impotent in relation to the fear. Inside you lays that which will approach the shadow, feel the fear and fight it, or ignore it entirely, and keep on stepping until: either death or the source is reached. Such is the leap that the shadow demands by its game of masquerade, the leap of the most ultimate risk, the leap of the loss of self. The leap of transformation.
I knew a writer who once sang something in the manner of, ‘All the ingenuity and stratagems in the world cannot deceive or harm the soul of an innocent girl when it’s set with a divine pride in a particular direction’. Bestow her road with starved wolves, lions, tigers and any other possible danger on Earth and watch her higher-nature charm her way through the shadows in the shinning and brimming source that is the transformation of a life into another.
This is the amorous blessing: the figure of eight game d’amour, de passion, de mouvement, d’action, de trasformation.
XX and XY
One arid evening while the Moon lay half-bitten and its background coated with little drizzles of light, XX proclaimed in conclusion to XY:
XX: Are you man enough to lead and respect your woman?!
Amidst the ugly silence that befell XY and the darkness that took his face, a smile arose from the depths like a star arises shinning from the darkness of the oblivion that is space:
XY: Are you woman enough to follow and trust your man?
Courting
The Philosopher courts the necessary. The Artist courts a canvas. The Scientist, their limited field of perception. The Religious, fear. The Spiritual, themselves. The Bussinessman, time. The poet, words. The Casanova, a young and ’seemingly’ innocent beauty. The Don Juan, women. The Mystic, Nature… What does the Lover court? What is there left?
Sin
The concept of sin signals loudly the ill-humoured political hierarchy of the religious doctrines. The hierarchy that the concept itself maintains so elegantly and so unbecknownst to the innocent soul that’s fallen prey to its poison: momentary release from the fear of death through cheap, second-rate reasoning. There is no sin that cannot be reinterpreted via a situation to a most profound blessing and act of piety. The abstract concept of sin bows to the concrete concept of life, like a Lord Steward bows humbly to the return of the King/Queen.
The Political Dialectic
One fine morning, with the Sun illuminating proudly in the sky, the Communist concluded to the Capitalist: “it just so happens that nature has made an artist and not a bussinessman out of me, can you fault or judge me for it?”
