leyla

1. What are the words you do not have yet? [Or, “for what do you not have words, yet?”]

2. What do you need to say? [List as many things as necessary]

3. What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?  [List as many as necessary today. Then write a new list tomorrow. And the day after. ]

Mário Macilau (Mozambican, b. 1984)

It is immensely appealing to fantasize oneself to be inviolable, utterly autonomous, and in possession of firm boundaries – and therefore able to ward off invasion. When you feel vulnerable, it’s tempting to brace yourself against vulnerability – the fantasy of hardening yourself so that nothing can hurt you. The collateral, however, is that nothing can reach you, either. How to protect oneself without denying vulnerability, with all its fruitfulness? ‘How’, asks Lorde, ‘to feel love, how to neither discount fear nor be overwhelmed by it, how to enjoy feeling deeply?’

When it comes to sex, there is pleasure to be had in vulnerability. It can be what makes sex joyful – the giddy rewards of stepping haltingly into the water, the gasp on contact, the relief in the finding of ecstasy. We need to be vulnerable – to take risks, to be open to the unknown – if we are to experience joy and transformation. That’s the bind: pleasure involves risk, and that can never be foreclosed or avoided. It is not by hardening ourselves against vulnerability that we – any of us – will find sexual fulfillment. It is in acknowledging, and opening ourselves to, our universal vulnerability.

Receptivity may also be a crucial part of pleasure. It is an exquisitely ambiguous trait; it’s welcoming, it’s open, and inviting – and, by that token, it’s also a risk. Letting things in, being porous – being susceptible to the other’s needs and desires – is what makes one tender to the feelings of others, and what puts one at their mercy.

When I invite someone in – when I want them to enter – I can never be sure that they will enter in the way that I want them to. Nor do I always know in advance how I want them to enter. That’s why the invitation to sex is daunting, and why it can be so moving. To be met in one’s desire, and to be surprised in one’s desire, is an exercise in mutual trust and negotiation of fear. When it works, it can feel miraculous; a magical collision, safe and risky in just the right degrees, comfortable and challenging in just the right proportions. It’s rare, the strange alchemy of bodies and minds that can effect this melding of familiarity and unfamiliarity, of ease and surprise. Because it’s rare, it should be treasured.”]