A Nerve Ending on God's Clitoris

What is the sex of food?

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Linked with the very foundation of survival, let us consider the sensation of hunger (of desire) a primary impetus for action.  Our fleshy, vulnerable bodies, built so perfectly for the experience of pain and pleasure, hold within them the great burden and brilliant gift of the brain.  This benevolent organ wants only for us to survive, so to simplify things, it talks about hunger like it is an assassin.  

This reaction is archaic gossip. 

While it may remind us of our mortality, hunger will not kill us. 

Often I believe the rumors.  I stuff my face unconsciously, get drunk, and go on masturbation binges in desperate attempts to turn off the hunger alarm.  Super survivor!  Put it in me!  I'll take cheese and cock and wine and vibrators and anything else that will put to rest the blinking red light that says I am not safe without them.  But what happens when I stop trying to turn hunger off and let it turn me on?

I'm a bit of an extremist, a pleasure seeker.  Not everyone is as bent on filling up as I am, but perhaps some of you can relate.

In moments of real strength, I take a deep breath and disregard the brain's outdated advice.  I explore hunger.  I invite desire to the table, to the bedroom, to this little plaza in a small French town where I write to you at sunset.  Rather than attempting to assuage the sensation, I let it stretch my physical experience.  I turn into a taste bud on God's tongue, a nerve ending on her clitoris.  

Hunger, then, becomes a source of creativity.  I pay attention to it.  I acknowledge the mortality of my body and I come alive. 

I take each bite with a grateful whisper to the hunger that makes the food taste so good.  I make love with an earnest "thank you" to the desire that charges my experience of the present.  Such sensation is not easy.  I must acknowledge the ephemeral nature of this moment and let go of trying to keep it.  

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We can do this.  Come, do this with me.  Bring your hunger with you.  It's been falsely accused as a dangerous hit man.  Let's forget the brain's panicked warnings and navigate uncharted territory.  Together, we'll brave whatever sensation arises.  

This is the sex of food.  This is the sex of death.  Let's practice it.

Food and Sex

The room has been forbidden.  You have been told only bad people, strange people, naughty people go there.  You don't want to be like that.  You want to be good.  You crave righteousness and the approval of your elders.  You sit down every night and eat your porridge.  It is good, comforting.  The heat warms you and the oaty gelatinous consistency fills your belly gently.  The meal comforts you the way an old man is comforted by the predictable rock of his afternoon chair.  But you are not an old man in your heart.  Your favorite part of the meal is not the substance, but the sprinkle of cinnamon that dusts the lumpy dish.  A hint of the exotic.  Warming and aromatic, adding that splash of color atop the richness of cloud-sky grey.  And you long for more.

Your curiosity grows.  The banquet awaits.  You hear people laughing, crying, the sound of delicate glass repeatedly kissing itself.  You press your cheek against that prohibited door.  The sound is interesting, but it is the smell that calls to you.  Having just finished your meal, you are not physically hungry, but the pull of decadence is strong and the aromas are so attractive.  You know not how to distinguish among them, nor which heady scent belongs to what, but the bouquet seduces you anyway.  It has a depth like the color of blood - or the rich brown of fertile soil.  The perfume moves up your body, evoking images of the evening ocean spreading itself across the beach.  You smell animals - the heady funk of a feral goat and the sweet musk of the hare.  Whiffs reminiscent of spring flowers and cedarwood and the green moss that celebrates after autumn rain arise and fall in the complicated mixture.  You can bear the mystery no more.  You defy the moral code and the piety of tradition.  With a thunderous kick, impelled by carnal desire, you break down the door.  

Your eyes adjust to the candlelight.  Wrapped in that delightful odor, you drink of the spectacle.  A runner of silk, cream in color, spreads across the great, mahogany table.  Festooned and besprinkled with flecks of gold, the beautiful fabric underlies hundreds of ornate platters, each offering a different arrangement of sultry meats, fresh fish, harlequin vegetables, and steaming grains of various colors and shapes.  You see voluptuous fruits with arcs like the crescent moon, sliced and bleeding their juices in playful droplets.  A motly collection of polychromatic sauces, some still bubbling, begs the dip of a rebellious finger.  There is an array of candies, pristine and sparkling in sugary patinas.  Frosted cakes sit plump and inviting - like grandmother's breast, waiting to comfort the weary child with a sweet story.

You do not know what to do.  The spread is overwhelming.  The longer you gaze at it, the more beautiful and seemingly untouchable it becomes.  You want it more now and understand why it is forbidden.  There is a part of you that pulls away.  That urges to turn and run through the heavy door back to the safety of principles and porridge.  Faced with this freedom, you realize you may not want so much choice.  Perhaps it is better to remain with the simplicity of grey.  Yet you know the cinnamon will always taunt you.  But now, here, what to choose?  How should you know what you want?  And if you do not like what you choose?  Where to begin?

It is one thing to break down the door into the secret room.  It requires another kind of courage to taste the food.  With food, however, this is not always such an existential crisis.  With sex, for many, it can be.  With life, for most, it is.  There is so much out there and if we let ourselves see it all at once, recognizing that it is available to us, who wouldn't feel momentarily burdened with the weight of that freedom?  I had a professor who referred to this as ontological insecurity.  When faced with the reality that we can have anything we want, we would rather not take responsibility for our choices and have the institutions (and their respective dogmas), articulate life for us.  

There are parallels between the ways in which we experience food and sex.  Both exist across cultures, both are often riddled with guilt, and both offer powerful experiences of sensuality in our bodies.  

Love Letter #2

New York,

    I love the friend you have become.  Awkward and sweet in moments that betray your facade of cement.  I love realizing you're late too, all the time.  Seeing through the stability into the many cracks of your humanity.  Yes, I know you have streets lined with false fruit blossoms and big movies and Broadway shows and showy museums.   But you also have that magical garden, New York.  The one on 6th and Clinton with overgrown lily patches and tumbled pebbles hidden in the turtle pond.  You have Hope Deli and the orchid exhibition inside the glass castle.  You have bridges with people laughing and yelling at each other to get out of the way.  The gas station with the man who never sleeps, but always smiles and helps me put oil in my car (even though - of course - I don't need help).

    You have my heart New York.  I came to you because of a fantasy - opportunity, high-rise buildings, big names, epic bridges, opportunity, work, inspiration, sweat, opportunity yes yes yes!  What I fell in love with was your circus, your storytellers, your variety in coconut waters.  The gorgeous Polish neighbor who cooks only Korean food.  The endless stream of parking tickets, forever presenting me with opportunities to forgive us both.  The show-stopping summer rainstorms.  Public lightening!  Pokey umbrellas and wet expensive suits.  Foul subway smells that inspire raucous stories among strangers about giraffe pussy.  It's the poker clubs, clicking with the sound of anxious chips.  The restaurant fuck ups, the amazing coffee, the sometimes amazing sweet potato fries, the shitty coffee.  That pub with all the cowboy boots nailed to the ceiling, Roosevelt island, the tiny beach underneath the Brooklyn bridge at low tide that is happy spawning ground for colorful tampon applicators. Omnipotent pigeon feathers.  The giant slug man waiting next to me for an F train at 3am, trying desperately to connect with someone by grumbling loudly about Bloomberg nazism.  You...you know who you are, human avatar of the city...the unrealized romance I know would be almost as beautiful as this pining.  The self sacrifice, learning to speak up.  The psychedelic spiritual ceremony when someone yelled, "I'll fuck your mother!" and it was so uncomfortable, I forgot about the profound and giggled with the fairy next to me.  The ocean!!!!  Tattoos.  Cheese. 

    Oh I could go on.  But you have a healthy collection of songs and poems written for you.  Who knows, if your head grows too big, you might give birth to another freedom tower (and the chance to make fun of you for that would be as delightful as the bar maid who, after a long, quiet night, watched me suck on the end of a brandied cherry and leaned in to my sweetened mouth, a lock of hair stuck to her lips so that it felt perfectly unperfect and I knew it must be really happening...but did it really happen?)

    Anything is possible here.  My favorite anythings are the unplanned in-betweeners.  The events that become stories because they emerge from such a perceivably rock solid background.  Good job New York.  Way to build a set.  Thank you.  I will come back.  I will make more in the shadow of that egalitarian moon, in the light of your paralyzing sunsets.