Memory Rising

Mark Sinnett attentive to sensuality brings on layers memories. The child is never very far away from the appetites of the adult. Together they form a continuity that consumes the world with an avidity that results in acute observations. There is, for instance, an extended description of a partner making bread which culminates in the promise of an embrace imbued with aroma and attractiveness.

And when you do come up to me,
in the end, swinging your arms
in the room's air
with a rough semaphore
that says you want me
to be proud of you,
pushing around the smells
of yeast, of baking, stirring them
about you until they are over me
like a blanket

There follows a fine observation about a trace of flour in the hair at the top of the spine and the next segment brings the memory which carries the conceit further and interestingly balances plural (marmalades) and singular savours (the butter).

and I lie there in the gusts
of memory brought on by your sent —
[...]
before I loose myself
from your body, untie
the knots we made

and turn instead to the bright
bitter marmalades I grew up with;
the soft, warm butter.

"Late Riser" in The Landing.

And so for day 1104
21.12.2009

Fertility

Brillat-Savarin's first Meditation from The Physiology of Taste provides an outline of six senses. There are the five of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. The six is physical desire and is in the service of procreation. An impish me wants to invoke a translation of this seductive six sense. I want to drop the procreative imperative. I want to recuperate the six senses in the name of the sensus communis and make the erotic impulse flow heroically as the quotidian social glue that is not genitally affixed.

Read with a nice glass of wine in hand, M.F.K. Fisher's translation invites the reader to use a wee bit of imagination to universalize the satiation offered by a good digestive act which magically results in the will to share one's life with someone.

This active, troubling, imperious sentiment is common to both sexes; it brings them together and unites them, and when the germ of a new life has been fertilized, the two people can sleep again in peace; they have fulfilled the most sacred of their duties in thus making sure that mankind will continue.

There is no glossing over "the germ of a new life". Pregnancy is the aimed for condition. Those of either sex coming together with those of either sex do also participate in the continuance of "mankind" read in the wide sense of humanity. They may or may not sleep again in peace. The fertile can sleep so. It doesn't mean they will.

Fertile or not, rutting does engage the full five and a lively imagination to boot.


And so for day 74
26.02.2007