There Are Things That It’s Not Very Easy To Fold Neatly And Put Away.

it’s my hobby actually

I love to seduce

Black Passion International Hair Magazine. Volume 26. 2001.

poem on domination (good morning lol)

yeahh

taking pictures almost nude makes me feel so euphoric. like, i love living in my own skin. it’s sexy. the sheer physicality of it. I’m my own voyeur. My own visual director. Looking through my lens. Self-expression doesn’t have to be super defined

I hate Sundays. It’s like all my negative feelings are amplified on sundays. Almost as if my body has a clock for it. I start feeling shitty as soon as it hits 12am. nasty work.

love is kinda crazy

So I started reading this essay on Aeon, only 14 pages, I thought. Easy. I’ll breeze through it and read another one (trying to make it a habit to read more essays).

I’m on page 3 and completely spiraling (in the best way).

It’s about Plato, love, and beauty… specifically Diotima’s “ladder of love” from the Symposium. Basically, the idea is that what we think of as love (like being into someone’s looks or charm or whatever) is actually just the lowest rung of a bigger, higher journey. What we’re really in love with isn’t their body, it’s the beauty that their body reflects?

And at first I was like… I get it but I also don’t? But then it i understood. We’re not just drawn to a person’s hands or eyes or smile, we’re pulled toward something those things point to. Something more abstract. We love not just their kindness, for example, we start to love kindness Itself. And once you realize that, it’s like your love detaches from just one person and expands outward… you start seeing beauty everywhere, in everyone.

And then I started thinking, what if this whole “ladder of love” is also a metaphor for faith?

As someone that was brought up Christian, even when I have doubted the existence of God, I kinda never really stopped loving what “God” represents: compassion, forgiveness, honesty, gentleness. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s not about whether we can prove the source. It’s about the fact that we’re drawn to it. The beauty of that source?

That longing for the good, the beautiful, the meaningful maybe that’s what’s divine in us.

It’s like a person standing in sunlight and the sun is casting their shadow on the ground. We fall in love with the shadow, the body, the charm, the vibe but what we’re really responding to is the light behind it. The source. The thing we can’t touch, but feel. Does this make sense omg..

So yeah, this is only three pages into the essay. Gonna nap.

Arthur Adams