I wrote a bunch of stuff on desire yesterday and then did something before saving it properly and it all disappeared. Duh! Thought I would rant about something else, but the desire question won’t go away today. I thought desire was something I could orchestrate better. It turns out that my desires have taken me by surprise this past week. Websters defines desire as:
- To wish or long for; want.
- To express a wish for; request.
- A wish or longing.
- A request or petition.
- The object of longing: My greatest desire is to go back home.
- Sexual appetite; passion.
I’ve been thinking about the sexuality of desire, and how that comes about. My sexual needs are kind of like this symbiotic parasite ready to appear with provocation – or or with no provocation with absolute regularity. I mean, like most women, I am the most sexually approachable during ovulation, and just before my period. That doesn’t mean to say that I am unapproachable the rest of the time, it just means, at those times of the month I’ll tie you up and have my way with you before you knew what hit you. A mess of organic chemistry, is it really pheromones, or scent that triggers lust, or is it the other way around? I’m pondering this as I wonder about the continual fantasy pictures in my head. No, I’m not hearing voices, but most men tell me that they have a running porno in their head – pictures of women they know and imagine. For me, although not an unfamiliar thing, is getting more frequent as I get older. Who knows, maybe I’ll be the randy old lady with holsters of vibrators, always at the ready to jump the object of my desire….
Deep thoughts from this lightweight blonde on a summer afternoon, but I’ll leave you with this quote from Anita Shreve on the first page of her book, Fortune’s Rock.
“In the time it takes for her to walk to the bathhouse to the waterline, she learns about desire. Desire that slows the breath, that causes a preoccupied pause in the midst of uttering a sentence, that focuses the gaze absolutely on the progress of naked feet walking toward the water. This first brief awareness of desire – and being the object of desire, a state of which she has no previous hint _ comes to her as a kind of slow seizure, as of the air compressing itself all around her, and causes what seems to be the first faint shudder of her adult life. (page 3)”