Open Spaces

Catherine Millet The Sexual Life of Catherine M. translated by Adriana Hunter

The second conclusion is that natural spaces do not feed the same fantasies as urban spaces. Because the latter is by definition a social space, it is a territory in which we express a desire to transgress codes with our exhibitionist/voyeuristic impulses; it presupposes the presence of others, of fortuitous looks to penetrate the aura of intimacy that emanates from a partially naked body or from two bodies soldered together. Those same bodies out under the clouds, with only God as their witness, are looking for the opposite sensation: not to make others come into the pocket of air in which their rapid breathing mingles but, thanks to their Edenic isolation, to let their pleasure spread as far as the eye can see. The illusion there is that their ecstasy is on the same scale as this expanse, that the body housing them is dilating to infinity. Perhaps the tipping into unconsciousness known as the petite mort is felt more keenly when the bodies are in contact with the earth, teeming with invisible life and in which everything is buried.

And so for day 477
03.04.2008