Jeffrey Winke, Coquette (a collection of sensual Haiku)
The erotic is the arousal of our sexual sense through the slowing of attention. The erotic is sexuality, not sex. The erotic refuses to rush past. It rebels against compartmentalizing sexuality to sex, or the bedroom, or erections and orgasms. It slows us down, takes notice, can happen beneath the covers, in a crowded restaurant, cooking a meal, or over a game of chess.
The erotic pays attention. It notices a fold, a texture, a scent, a nuanced gesture with a wink of delight. The erotic is neither the whip nor the whisper, but the lingering of attention to how either, or both, strikes the senses.
Stop the rush of time to notice that peach’s texture as you take your first bite…
…and the feel of a pair of fresh nylons slipping up over your legs…
…and how her hands work the knife when slicing a fresh vegetable.
Lean in and whisper to your spouse, lover, or friend when it would be just as easy to speak in your normal voice. Lay in bed before your morning shower, attuning yourself to the sparrow, neighbor’s voice, and that passing car. And when you finally step into that shower, notice where skin-pleasure inclines you to let the water fall.
The erotic requires no end other than drawing a moment out with a sensory detail. The erotic can see the universe in a grain of sand and satisfy a craving for love through the subtle touch of the hand. “We are obsessed with an insatiable appetite for ever more vivid sensations,” Isabel Allende writes in her book Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses. “…a subtle caress, the pleasure of skin against skin, or of sharing a peach is not enough anymore.”
The erotic is our body electric carefully listening, touching, tasting, smelling – stopping time and refusing to not take notice.
As of late, through our cold winter nights, I’ve taken to staring into the glow of a fire. Lights off, computer asleep, TV quieted, cell phone hidden away in another room – I let myself fall under the spell of her skirt-like flames licking, screaming, bending and percolating behind the glass of my wood burning stove. She rages. She stretches. When spent, she quietly recedes into the wood’s luminescent orange glow, until once again fed, or poked back to life. I poke her often. Sometimes, I keep the glass door opened to hear her crackle and hiss.
Fire hypnotizes. It soothes. It amazes. It frightens. It coaxes us into contemplation. As gazing into a star-clustered night fills our thoughts with wonderment about the vastness of space and time, fire hearkens us back to tribal memories: fire-dancing; ritual trances; fire-circles and storytelling; fire sticks and torches; stone lamps; shadows flickering ghost-like upon cave walls; shadowy figures huddled in its warmth against icy winds; howling, stalking predators kept at a distance – their instincts keeping them wary of a sting that never lets go.
By rough estimates, the controlled use of fire dates back half a million years. That’s 500,000 thousand years of coaxing itself into our genetic consciousness. (Some scant evidence suggests that our pre-human ancestors tamed it over a million years ago.) It protected us, calmed us, purified us, warmed us, lit our darkness, sanitized our food, lead us through the most hostile of environments. We danced with and around it. We sacrificed to it. We catch the sight of fire at the edge of our conscious awareness, we not only turn to look – we stare. Fire calls to something deep within our consciousness. We’re compelled to watch, and watch we will until its danger is right upon us.
Some nights I watch in spite of myself. Time ticks away outside of awareness. An hour passes. Maybe two. My thoughts both deepen and calm. Events from the day slip behind a veil I don’t even know exists. My list of “to do’s” recedes from anxious calling. All the mindless yapping and chatter of memory, want, request, duty and need fall away. I’m entranced and at peace – protected…warmed…inspired. Sometimes I dance before her – sensing ancestral ghosts circling with me. Sometimes the flames weave barely conscious images that send me cozily into sleep.
When we look at the chaotic dribblings of paint on a work of modern art, we become restless. We don’t know how to engage it.We call it ridiculous.Not worth our time.Childish.We shrug it off with simple judgments, and hurry on to more self-evident, prettier, less ambiguous pictures.
Grant Wood, American Gothic
We love certainty.Certainty keeps our world tidy.Predictable.The world and our actions shine in the glow of self-evidence.Certainty allows us to think and act quickly. The problem with human consciousness is that it takes effort and time.Better to remain unconscious and certain.It’s simpler that way.
When we say “I know”, we’ve given ourselves over to judgment.We’ve decided.There’s no more light to let in.We’ve pruned away enough complexity and ambiguity to fit all there is for us to know on a bumper sticker, or a 10 second news spot, or twitter feed.What we don’t know, or are too lazy to find out?To hell with it.Complexity is a nuisance.We must prove to the world our convictions by wrapping them in the mantel of certainty. “I think, therefore I know.”
Certainty is an illusion, a trick we play on ourselves. Certainty is an emotion that prunes away all the hundreds of millions of informational bytes taken into our senses. It’s a feeling hardwired into our emotional brains to allow us to act without having to face a mess.We can pick what we need, or what we believe we need. Certainty is not born of a series of self-evident truths.It’s a chimera whose purpose it is to make it easier to blame, to run, to fight, to scream, to love, to stay, to go.There is no courage in certainty. No heroism.There is no hard choice to make.
At times, the problems we face in our own lives feel as daunting as those chaotic scribbles on a piece of modern art. There’s too much information, too much we don’t, can’t, or refuse to try and understand.We can’t possibly take it all in.Moreover, there’s the element of chance to dash all those odds we calculated to come our way.There’s timing.There’s our incapacity to foretell the future. There are other people’s intentions, about which we can only tell ourselves stories to bolster the certainty of what we choose to believe.We become self-justifying informational processing machines.
“I know, and am too knowing, too strong, too courageous, to doubt.”
Doubt is not a problem of strength or conviction. Doubt is the light that humbles us in face of our perceptual biases and limitations.The real heroism shows when we stand squarely in front of doubt. It shows when we face our times of chaos and inner turmoil with the humility afforded by doubt’s light. When we courageously proclaim, “Yes, I doubt; and, still I choose.”
Our thoughts, spin, twist, twirl and agitate around the cage of our brains. With all of the billions of neurons in our brains firing on/off - on/off, there’s bound to be a bit of noise. Buddhists call it our monkey-mind.
In any given hour we’re besieged by hundreds of thoughts. Most of these thoughts are the same thoughts we had the hour before. And, the hour before that. The same thoughts over and over — for hours, days, weeks, and even years. Sometimes they just come on their own. Sometimes, we coax the more compelling of the bunch so we can poke and prod them over and over.
The more we think something, the more likely we’ll think it again. That’s a neurological fact. To the brain, thought is an action. To think a thought, then to think it over and over, we strengthen that circuitry. Fire it up, baby! Soon, it’ll glow at the slightest provocation. And if fear attaches and catches hold, instinctively we’ll fix to it. Feed it. Nourish it. Hold onto it and watch it grow.
Fear is one of those feelings that’s in love with itself. It will take the slightest sign of trouble to justify and amplify it’s own existence. And, if that sign isn’t there? It will make it up. It scans the world, our imagination, our memories for it’s reason to be, because…well…that’s what it’s supposed to do. It’s a feature, not a bug. Why? When it comes to survival, it’s better to be wary, wrong, and live, than to take your time to be accurate and end up as somebody else’s meal.
Genetically speaking, physical survival is king. Yet, our psychological lives are tied to this very same survival system. These days, most of us can go a lifetime without ever having to run for our lives. Instead, we have deadlines. Mortgages. Car breakdowns. Hundreds of unanswered e-mails marked “urgent”. Our freedom from physical danger allows us the privilege to exercise our threat response on bosses, co-workers, lovers, kids, husbands, and wives.
We’re free now to imagine all kinds of threatening possibilities to stir up that monkey cage. Even better, let’s put that threat sometime in the future when there’s nothing we can do about it. Watch our monkey-mind agitate. Imagine that fear coming to get you sometime next week — the body will react as if it’s right in front of your face!
And if we forget that we were afraid? Oh right! Let me get back to that! We’ll conjure it back. We’ll encourage our own obsessiveness over our envies, our grievances, our jealousies, our losses. We’ll do it in future time where they haven’t yet happened. It will happen. It will…it will…it will. Now, we can sit bracing ourselves while tied to our helplessness. We’ll sit. Wait. Stew within the electro-chemical buzz. We’ll find meaning in all that brain noise.
Shhh…listen…there are messages in that static.
How we love to rattle our own cage only so we can watch our monkey-thoughts scream, hop about, and agitate.
There’s an ache within us — a sense that something essentially human is slipping from our grasp. We live surrounded by concrete, steel, plastic, and bright unnatural light. Closed in spaces – whether office cubicles, bedrooms, elevators, our automobiles – are the rule rather than our cozy exception. Daily, we navigate walkways, gates and fences, crosswalks, locked doors, marked and unmarked property lines. “No trespassing” signs can bring a contemplative beach stroll to a halt.
We might feel it most in big cities. No doubt that urban living brings excitement, innovation, and raises incomes and possibilities. At the same time, the bigger the city, the more crowded our spaces and the more rapid our pace. In fact, researchers have found that the more populated the city the faster its people walk. And to move it all along with order and efficiency, time and space has to be structured. Our lives have become governed by wristwatches, timed traffic lights, scheduling technologies, automatic door locks, and crosswalks.
We’ve learned to live, and even love, our walled-in ordered lives. The natural world is a wild encroachment, a threat if not bound, ordered, and managed. Ooooh, baby baby it’s a wild world. “Keep out!” the signs warn. “Stay within the lines.” And our ache whispers on.
Signs, by Five Man Electric Band
It shows itself in our chronic anxieties and depressions. At times, it’s a dull sensation of not being at home in our own skins. Our blessing and curse is that we’re highly adaptable creatures. We can learn better than any other creature how to make the most horrid environments home. In our modern age, we’ve learned to love the comfort and safety of staying inside.
If we’re lucky, once or twice a year we make our escape. Like hounds dashing through a slit in the screen door, we rush toward our two weeks in the mountains, or by the ocean, or that lakefront cabin. Hunters hunt. Rock climbers climb. Hikers hike. Campers camp. Sunners sun. Then, we rush back to back into the confines of that familiar ache.
Researchers have found that our senses are wired to find certain landscapes appealing. Our reward circuitry lights up at the sight of hillsides, meandering streams, paths bending around partially blocked views, verdant green foliage capped with color. To the senses of our evolutionary ancestors these landscapes may have signaled abundance and safety. Some have argued that our sense of natural beauty is the mechanism that drove our ancestors into suitable habitats.
We are meant to move, not sit around for hours on end watching our tiny little backlit TV and computer screens while eating potato chips. Our visual system loves dashes of color and wide opened spaces with a touch of surrounding mystery. We are meant to engage our environment, not be confined by it. We are happiest expressing ourselves. Listening to the rustling of leaves and babbling of cool water streams. Using our hands. Running. Jumping. Meandering. Swimming. Climbing. Touching.
To ease that ache need we see past those barriers of concrete and steel? Need we every now and then throw out our well-ordered schedules for at least one day every week? It seems we come back into ourselves, if only for a moment, whenever we step off the marked path and into nature’s disordered and wild ways.
“A querencia is a place the bull naturally wants to go to in the ring… It is a place which develops in the course of the fight where the bull makes his home. It does not show at once, but develops in his brain as the fight goes on.” Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway
We all have a beast within, a bull to kill…whether it be a habit, a troublesome attachment, a pattern of thought, a sorrow, an addiction, a mood, a fixation, a fear, or something that brings us to rage.
Know that bull. Study where it’s taken its place of refuge. That place in your life where it burrows in. It could be in a bottle of scotch. It could be a room in the house, a chair, your garage, or even in front of your TV or computer screen.
“…in his querencia he is inestimably more dangerous and almost impossible to kill.“
It could be a state of mind, or that way in which you address your lover, kids, husband, or wife. It could be a place in your imagination where you return again and again to relive a conversation, an encounter, or a past or future dread. It could be a thought, or a cherished belief.
“The bull may take up his querencia in a place where a horse has been killed in a previous fight, where he smells the blood; a place where he has tossed a bullfighter, or any part of the ring for no apparent reason at all; simply because he feels at home there.”
In that place, your bull will be confident, brave, and secure. When you, or anyone else, attempts to challenge it there, you may feel its stubborn refusal in your brooding, or snapping, or numbing, or anger, depression, anxiety, or irritation. The bull has lifted its horns for the goring. Pity the poor loved one who tries to step toward it there.
Like a great matador, we need bring the beast out from it’s place of safety. After a long day’s work, refuse to let it establish its place in your ring. Risk making it uncomfortable.
“The bull must be brought out; but he is gone completely on the defensive and will not respond to the cape and will cut at them with his horns, refusing altogether to charge.”
Step away from that computer. Change your tone of voice. Refuse to spend the night brooding in that chair. Reach for that novel you’ve wanted to read, instead of the TV remote. Pull out that bike, camera or drawing pad, instead of cracking open that beer, marijuana, or bottle of Xanax. Kiss your partner, instead of barking out that complaint. (Or stamp your feet and yell, instead of that half-hearted kiss, if that’s where the bull chooses to live.) Go to that movie by yourself, instead of waiting by the phone. Cook that delicious meal, instead of another night of pizza or take-out chinese.
That pint of ice cream you seem ever destined to eat? Look it square in the eyes, then show it your cape. Weekends get you down? Drink too much? Take a canoe trip, instead of burrowing in and letting that bull raise its surly horns through your boredom, or list of domestic chores.
“…a bull who knows how to use his horns and who cannot be made to leave his querencia is as dangerous for the man to come within range of as a rattlesnake….”
Be brave. Be clever. Change it up. Break routine. Coax it out. If just for an afternoon, flash your cape, and by surprise, slay the fear that owns you. Olé!
A letter makes it personal. It reaches us like a whisper. We may steal off to some private corner to unseal the envelope, if only to better reflect on the words without distraction. We go off to that corner because we can. A letter can be carried anywhere. We can secret it between the pages of a book, or in a pocket, or in your bosom beneath your blouse.
To sit down and compose a letter means taking your time, distilling your intent. There’s paper to choose. The right pen. The envelope. The stamp. In days of old we’d seal our letters closed with wax.
La Lecture de la Lettre, Picasso
When writing the letter, the words must fall carefully to avoid starting over again. Of course, we can leave in the scratch-out, the fingerprint, the smudge, the spill of coffee. To the spouse, lover, or dear friend the misfortune is not a stain, but your actual presence on the page. Leave it, you create a deeper intimacy.
Letters can be heart-filled, or poisoned. A letter can be sensual, tearful, raging, philosophical, mundane. A letter has a weight and texture that we can know through our hands. It can carry a lock of hair, or the trace of perfume.
Napolean scolded his Josephene, “You never write to me at all, you do not love your husband; you know the pleasure that your letters give him yet you cannot even manage to write him half a dozen lines, dashed off in a moment! What then do you do all day, Madame? What business is so vital that it robs you of the time to write to your faithful lover?”
One way or another, a letter begs the writer’s attention and time.
A letter is handled. Held. Touched. Read. Reread. Folded. The envelope is licked and addressed. The stamp is carefully, or carelessly, secured in its corner. One way or another, you are worth the time and the 42 or some odd cents.
Ask the soldier on the front what it is to receive a letter. If it’s from a wife or lover, he might hold it to his nose hoping to catch her scent. He might kiss it. Lick the envelope’s glue as if seizing the taste of her lips from afar.
Captain Joseph Bush wrote to his wife from Vietnam, “If my mail means as much to you as yours does to me then I know how you feel when the mailbox is empty. Whether or not I get a letter determines if it’s a good day or not.” (1)
A letter holds the other’s presence. It demands thought. Reflection. A sense that the distance between us matters.
“ooooh, my baby she wrote me a letter…”, that soulful Joe Cocker
I am torn in two
but I will conquer myself.
I will dig up the pride.
I will take scissors
and cut out the beggar.
I will take a crowbar
and pry out the broken
pieces of God in me.
Just like a jigsaw puzzle,
I will put him together again
with the patience of a chess player.
On October 3, 1974 Anne Sexton was unable to pry out the broken pieces. She closed up the garage, turned the ignition key, and waited for the waft of carbon monoxide exhaust to carry her off toward that “pint-sized journey” into death.
Anne Sexton
Was Anne Sexton’s suicide an inevitable result of parental hostility, or a child’s life gone astray? Was it alcoholism, bipolar disorder, her genes, or caused by some chemical imbalance that might have been corrected if Prozac, or Wellbutrin, or the right combination of Lamictal and Abilify were available then?
We like certainty. We like tidy explanations. We prefer our answers to “why” wrapped in simple, easy-to-organize, packages. “It’s in your brain” makes as much sense as finding causation in child-rearing, toilet training, or that kid who bullied you in 5th grade. A chemical imbalance? It’s enough to make us feel comfortable taking the pill because at least, now, we have a digestible explanation for “why.” We’ll call it a useful little lie.
When it comes to “whys” of human emotional sufferings, the truth is as elusive as it is messy. In the world of psychiatry, causation is a chimera. (1)
psychotic chimera
If there’s anything that modern neuroscience says for certain about the human brain, it’s to keep our humility. One human brain has over 100 billion neurons, 109 trillion synapses, and hundreds of thousands of interconnecting circuits. There are no biochemical, anatomical, or functional signs to distinguish Anne Sexton’s brain, from that of the Dalai Lama, or your neighbor next door who washes his car every weekend and obsesses over his front lawn. Yes, we’ve learned much in the last 10 or so years. But even then, we’ve not scratched the surface of understanding the workings of this magnificent, and at times troubling, organ.
“In a dot of brain no larger than a single grain of sand, 100,000 neurons go about their work at a billion synapses.” Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind
Drug companies have marketed the idea that depression represents a chemical imbalance — a decreased availability in the brain of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Before you jump on the wagon and proclaim your own chemical imbalance, however, consider that there are no tests to date that assess the chemical status of a living person’s brain. There are at least fifteen different serotonin receptors. We have little idea what these receptors actually do, or how they may relate to any psychological state. In fact, it is now estimated that there may be over 100 neurotransmitters, and most psychotherapeutic drugs affect many more neurotransmitters than were initially suspected.
As for genes? Every day we read some article about scientists uncovering a gene that causes shyness, or depression, or fearfulness, or talkativeness, or sexual promiscuity. One gene, one behavior. But, genes do not produce either behaviors or mental states. Genes carry instructions for producing amino acids and proteins, and then assembling these proteins into enzymes and anatomical structures.
Yes, somewhere down the line these structures, whether they be neurons, brain circuits, or the number, kinds, and functioning of synapses, are faintly related to what we do and how we feel. It’s never just one gene acting alone, however, but in concert with other genes. Even our genes have to be switched on or off by a chemical reaction caused by a specific environmental influences — like being spanked, or falling in love, or getting divorced, or reading the Brothers Karamazov, or taking LSD. How this all works to cause anxiety, depression or schizophrenia, we have only the faintest of clues.
Elliot Valenstein, in his book Blaming the Brain, reminds that there is no way that a mere one hundred thousand genes can determine the precise configuration of 10 trillion synapses in the human brain. Genes may build the structure of the house, but it’s our collection of experiences that furnish it, decorate the walls, landscape the yard, create the mood, whether chaotic, calm, or melancholic – in essence, make a life our home. (2)
Does it mean we should shun the help offered, whether it be talk therapy, pharmaceuticals, or some combination thereof? Of course not. Ask the tens of thousands who have been be mercifully spared the fate of the worlds’ Anne Sextons. Poet Jane Kenyon wrote:
We try a new drug, a new combination
of drugs, and suddenly
I fall into my life again
like a vole picked up by a storm
then dropped three valleys
and two mountains away from home.
I can find my way back. I know
I will recognize the store
were I used to buy milk and gas.
I remember the house and barn,
the rake, the blue cups and plates,
the Russian novels I loved so much,
and the black silk nightgown
that he once thrust
into the toe of my Christmas stocking (3)
Neither does it mean, however, we accept tidy, spoon fed explanations. The paradox is that psychiatry has been slightly better at solutions than causes – though the solutions are often hard fought, partial, and not without sometimes troubling trade-offs.
All Anne Sexton poems are from: Sexton, L. G. (Ed.). The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton. 1999: Mariner Books.
(1) Michael McGuire and Alfonso Troisi, in their book Darwinian Psychiatry, remind: “….some persons with depression grow up and live in adverse social environments while others do not; some come from families in which depression is common while others do not; and significant individual differences in depression-causing physiological systems have been reported. What is more, some respond to one type of anti-depressant medication but not to another; some do not respond to any type of medication but do respond to electroconvulsive treatment; and some do not respond to any known intervention.” (Quoted by Andrew Solomon in Noonday Demon, p. 401
(2) Valenstein, E. S. (2000). Blaming the Brain. New York: The Free Press.
Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be as good as fingers.
They can be as trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises.
Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.
Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren’t good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.
But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair.
Peter Gabriel & Anne Sexton: Mercy Street - All My Pretty Ones
Our thoughts, spin, twist, twirl and agitate around the cage of our brains. With all of the billions of neurons in our brains firing on/off - on/off, there’s bound to be a bit of noise. Buddhists call it our 
