is not a Sin
Guiltless and shameless, it is an act of imagination, accept it
It used to be just lust. It used to be the only linguistic instance I could imagine where the adjective ‘ just’ signified excess, not restraint. Just lust. Guiltless, shameless, astonishing lust.
I fed the word into my computer’s internal search engine. A mail dating to 2007 emerged; a letter to a poet. Its subject: Lustory. “I wonder how many times I must tell you that I want very little from you. I want your body to long for my black nothingness, to quiver at the mere touch of my gaze, to live off every word that comes from the mouth of my c***,” my very audacious 22- year- old self had written. “Let’s be outrageous. Ridiculous. Irrational,” I ordered, signing off with the name he had evolved for me— Honeysuckle. A few years later, a potential lover would recognise and admire my penchant for verbal striptease. “If there’s a sliver of truth, a sense of you, it’s in your effortless spontaneity, an ability to seize the moment and glide with it.” I told him I wondered each time I wrote to him how much I could get away with, how much further I could venture before he turned back and walked away for fear of the consequences of my words.” Then one evening, over the phone, he delivered the fatal, final blow. “I’m just not as into you as I thought I was.” I was devastated. Not because I loved him or had fallen for him or was even about to, but because he had permitted, even encouraged me to expose my lust to him and then, when I wasn’t paying attention, stole my dignity.
Lust is not the absence of pride
I know this now. But back then I smarted for weeks, months, like a wounded, fragile bird, afraid to trust, too intimidated by the consequences of my lust. I paused at these lines in Anais Nin’s short erotic story Linda.
“She was afraid of the day when Andre would cease to be sufficient for her. Her sensuality was, she knew, vigorous; his was the last burst of a man who had spent himself on a life of excess and now gave her the flower of it.” Lust is appetite, I thought, the kind that is aroused once again as soon as it has been satiated. It is
an eternal yearning for the marriage of Eros and Thanatos, the life and death force; the feeling of simultaneously consuming and being consumed.
When did I become so apprehensive about announcing such spiralling of desire? The last letter was almost apologetic and sought recourse in restructured fragments of a dream. It remains unsent. Its intended receiver is oblivious about its existence. “You held out your hand. Your long, slender fingers that I’d held inconspicuously once, months ago, no, more than a year ago, were reacquainted with mine— can this really be considered illicit, this heaving of pulse, that Morse code, this still ongoing litany of uncertain, unconsummated desire—( let me not call it lust). You guided me through a stretch of storm, through a strait of sea, and when we got to the other side, kissed the back of my palm and told me it was time for you to leave me. When I stepped outside this morning, still reeling from dreams of you, it was clear that the storm had passed. You rescued the sun from colluding clouds. It would seem you also salvaged me. From what, I am yet to know.” I was in a small town in Germany when I wrote this. Ten days later, I would find myself in Athens, subsumed by an uncontainable appetite. “What’s your name?” I ask the woman who was checking me into my room. “Aphrodite,” she replies.
The desire to speak desire
One night later, I woke up with a symphony playing inside my head and I had to wonder where it came from, how it happened to pass through my consciousness. I’d been reading Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, where, in an essay, she speaks about how we experience desire differently depending upon whether we come from an oral or written culture, and elsewhere, she recounts what the Greek Lesbian poet Sappho had written once, that a city without desire is like a city with no imagination. It is the same with desire- less people. “I know the heat of my desires can seem repulsive, because of their adamant constancy, but I also believe that the act of desiring transforms the desired, not only through a process of imagination, but through the desired object’s consciousness of its desirability”. I wrote in my letter to the subject of my lust, a letter I’d titled thus: The space between two independent entities is not blank, not un- composed, is void ( when void is the opposite of emptiness).
Sometimes I wonder if I am unconsciously composing a compendium on lust comprising different women’s articulations of it. I peer through my many notebooks and find phrases and lines excerpted from everywhere. “Lust for emotion,” for instance, a term Virginia Woolf used in one of her diary entries. I no longer know which one. “Lustful trunk,” I wrote elsewhere, possibly extracting from Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva, right below this— I know that you are not scandalised by the fullness I achieve and that is without perceptible borders.” Then there is Katherine Angel, whose Unmastered: A Book On Desire, Most Difficult To Tell is what it claims to be, except, she inscribes her desire within a legacy of hypostasized feminist ancestors. “My desire to speak desire, as I struggle against their weight, is revisionist— of myself, and of what I understood to have made that self. Of the feminism that made me, and that forbade my desire; or the feminism I made make me— for what makes us choose the canon we choose?” What comes first, the feelings or the words, Angel asks in a note in part III. I do not know either. Sometimes I am certain I am because I lust. Because my hunger is so great and my appetite so unfailing. For what is lust if not an act of imagination.
“My desire to speak desire, as I struggle against their weight, is revisionist, of myself, and of what I understood to have made that self”