Fish In the Afternoon

“There is no small pleasure in sweet water.”

Ovid, Letters from the Black Sea

I went to the ocean recently.

Ocean currents are an emergent phenomenon. From the interaction of wind, heat, salt, and a complex system of internal flows and breaks, the whole of the sea moves and rocks – back-and-forth, back-and-forth. This movement is perceived whenever we enter the ocean, whenever we feel its rolling and dancing, whenever the waves push us down or propel us forward, whenever we are lifted upwards or feel the water crash above us. But it is not just the ocean that is moving – it is everything. The sand on the beach is formed from the slow movement of matter in touch and tension with the ocean. Our bodies are communities of microorganisms, perpetually flowing through us like an organic architecture, forming tiny ecosystems populated with animated, living creatures going about their own lifeways. All of the world is motion and flow, the stimming of the cosmos in perpetual becoming. Nature itself is a stim. 

Sex is also a stim. Or, more accurately, a collection or choreography of stims, an art of stimming. In sex, our bodyminds act as the subject and object of a dance of intensities, of attention, intention, and sensation. By intensity, I mean that these modes of action and perception are not measured quantitatively, through differences in magnitude, but qualitatively, through differences in kind. Each sensation, directed and focused through the interplay of attention and intention, is incommensurate, forming an experience that is particular to the bodies of lovers. Sex inheres in the imagination, the play between these modes forming a world which lovers inhabit, each becoming a landscape, a geography, a place of dwelling, fingertips brushing over mountains and lips tasting rivers, salinity dripping from the tongue.

I have auditory-tactile synesthesia. This means that the sense modalities of sound and touch intertwine in my experience, noise as tactile awareness, sonic atmosphere as patterns on and beneath the skin. My sense-world is only minimally visual, instead being oriented towards this interrelation between the auditory and tactile, objects coming into and out of awareness based on their sonic qualities and the way that these qualities vibrate across my body. I therefore also experience sex differently, as sex is intimately tied to the senses and the way these senses interrelate. Sex is composed of stims that echo through our perception. Moans and sighs are an echolalic call and response, an improvisational melodic riff atop the polyrhythms of enfleshed movement, tactility echoing into auditory bliss. The spiraling of fingertips and rhythm of hips are waves of rolling and rocking motion, skin against skin as hand against drum, tongue against tongue as wind against the earth. For me, sex always moves in and around and within the echolalic, the transformative interplay of breath and sound in attentive pleasure. Thigh against thigh as vibrations against matter. Tap tk-tk tap-tap. 

Our vision of Eros is too constrained by the Platonic image. For Plato, erotic desire invites us to contemplate the forms, the yearning for the body being sublimated into recognition of the abstract essence of beauty as a reflection of the good. However, this is the opposite direction to Eros. Though for Plato sensual desire moves us from the concrete particular to the abstract universal, revealing the transcendent value of the latter, Eros moves us from the abstract universal to the concrete particular, revealing the latter’s immanent worth. The power of the erotic is in forgetting the forms and instead making a world – a real, breathing, sighing, and sweating world – with another, an embodied, concrete other, an other of flesh and being whose pleasure is not a shadow of another world but the good’s presence in ours.

Eros is always dependent on the particularities of our bodymind. Sex is grounded in the fleshiness of being, the multi-sensate world of bodies-in-motion. Each person is an ocean, a collection of internal and external dynamics that form an ever-flowing melody, a system of harmonic changes that transform one’s relationship to oneself, to others, and the world. To taste another is to enter an infinite space delicately folded into finitude, teeth brushing up against universes, fractals of possibility quivering through orgasm. To form a world with another through sexual play is to step foot into the unfathomable and feel the warm salt of their life intermixing with yours. Heat with heat, wind with wind, flow with flow, sound with sound, sense with sense, world with world. 

The waves in you meeting the waves in me.

“Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”

Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Sand

Image: Feminine Wave, Katsuhika Hokusai (1845)