452. Sensual

BROWDERBOOKS

LAST  CHANCE!  The ebook of my new nonfiction title, New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You, is temporarily available from Amazon's Kindle store at a bargain price of .99 cents (or for a few lucky buyers, free, courtesy of Amazon), but only for three more days.  The price then goes up to $9.99, the highest that Amazon's Kindle allows.  If you want the e-book at a bargain price, buy now by clicking here.  And after reading a chapter or two, if so minded, give me a short review --  a sentence or a few words at most.

If, like me, you prefer a print copy for reading, the paperback will soon be available ($19.95 plus shipping). A media release will announce it.

My books are available here.  Now on to "Sensual," preceded by "Hate."  Not that I hate the sensual --  far from it.

SMALL TALK:  HATE

It's good to have a few hates, preferably things, not people, since things can't hate you back.  A blast of hate can cleanse the mind and soothe the spirit.  It's all a matter of what you hate.  Here are six things things I hate:

• Wienies  (I know what goes into them.)

Dontworry

• Jackhammers  (We can put a man on the moon, but we have never bothered to muffle a jackhammer.)

• Mail marked URGENT or OPEN IMMEDIATELY or YOUR FREE GIFT IS INSIDE.  (Into the trash, unopened.). 
• Pop-up ads.  (An arrant invasion of privacy; I delete them at once.)
• The military's euphemisms: enhanced interrogation (torture), extraordinary rendition (sending suspects to another country where they can be tortured), collateral damage (dead and wounded civilians, and anything else not the target).
• February, when winter is longest, the holidays are over, and spring seems depressingly remote.  Between Christmas (Hanukkah, etc.) and Easter there is only Valentine's Day, encouraging sales of gooey greeting cards, smelly flowers, and health-damaging sugary goodies.

So what do you hate?  Name six things.

                           SENSUAL

Sensual, it’s in all of us, like it or not, but what is it?  First, some definitions.

·      Sensual:  “Relating to or consisting in the gratification of the senses or the indulgence of appetite : fleshly.” (Merriam-Webster online)

·      Sensuous:  1. a. “of or relating to the senses or sensible objects.  b. producing or characterized by gratification of the senses : having strong sensory appeal.”  (same source)

I think of “sensual” as derogatory, implying overindulgence deserving of censure: "The prince abandoned himself to sensual pleasures."  On the other hand,  “sensuous” strikes me as innocent, aesthetic: the sensuous delights of great music.  But since Merriam-Webster’s online synonyms for “sensuous” include “carnal, fleshly, luscious, lush, sensual, voluptuous,” perhaps the distinction is arbitrary.  It’s not always easy to tell the difference between “sensual” and “sensuous,” between naughty and innocent, but since when is life easy?

         A sculpture in the South Asian Hall at the Met of a bejeweled Hindu dancer, a celestial attendant to the gods, is wonderfully sensual even without arms.  Here is Venus, here is Eve, the Eternal Feminine, at her most enticingly seductive: males, watch out!  

         For a more modern take, how about John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X, showing a woman in a low-cut black dress, her face in profile, one strap of her gown slipping from her shoulder.  Presented at the Paris Salon of 1884, the painting caused a sensation and constituted a setback in the career of the American painter, who had hoped to advance his career in France.  The subject was Madame Pierre Gautreau, a Louisiana-born beauty who, though married to a French banker, was notorious for her rumored infidelities.  Sargent later repainted the fallen shoulder strap, raising it to make it look less suggestive, more secure, but Mme Gautreau was humiliated by the portrait’s critical reception, and Sargent soon left the City of Light for murkier but more receptive London.  But the lady’s exposed pale skin, combined with her assertive face in profile, is, in a controlled but defiant way, sensual in the extreme.

         Another example: Looking out a window in my living room, I once saw a woman in a building just across the street combing her hair in front of a mirror.  She stood there in profile, completely unaware that I, quite by chance, was watching.  The rhythmic strokes of her comb were magically sensual, all the more so since this was not intended, she was just combing her hair.  (Some would then say sensuous, but I say sensual.)

         And how about this passage from the Song of Songs in the Bible:

   Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon.

    A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse: a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.

    Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard,

    Spikenard and saphron; calamus with cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrh and aloes, with all the chief spices:

    A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon.

    Awake, O north wind; and come forth, south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out.  Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.

         “The graces of the church,” says the marginal commentary at the top of the page, followed by “The church professeth her faith in Christ.”  Some church!  Some faith!  But after all, the Christians adding commentary long after the Song had been written were hard put to render Christianly these superbly erotic, magnificently sensual lines of poetry, inviting the beloved to enter the speaker's spice-filled garden, his Eden and Eve of fulfillment.  And I’ve quoted only a snippet, and that in translation --- the King James Version.  What must it be in the Hebrew original!

         As for music, the pop scene offers Elvis Presley singing “Love me tender, love me true / Never let me go,” while Elvis the Pelvis moved his hips suggestively – so much so that they had to be censored on TV.  As for classical music, the sensuality of Carmen in the music of Bizet’s opera is supple and lithe, like the heroine, until death intrudes.  By way of contrast, the sensuality of Wagner’s lovers in many operas is dark and brooding almost from the start, with death as the alternative, or the inevitable outcome, of passion.  “There is no sensuality without spirituality,” a Sister of Mercy friend of mine has written, and “no spirituality without sensuality.”  In Wagner’s lovers, the one does seem to shade into the other.

The mezzo soprano Galli-Marlé who created the
role of Carmen in 1884.  Not much spiritual here.

         Fragrances can be sensual, and many a perfume is named accordingly: Bombshell Seduction, Sexual Sugar, Agent Provocateur, Lush Lust, Ange ou Demon, Obsession, Putain des Palaces, Dirty Sexy Wilde.  Subtle they ain’t, which is why they leave me cold.  But no need for these concoctions with silly (or brilliant?) names; nature can do it all by herself (nature is always a she), and better.  If you crush eucalyptus leaves, you will be immersed in a deeply sensual and deliciously penetrating aroma.  I discovered eucalyptus and its fragrance while in college in southern California, where it had been transplanted from Australia.

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Eucalyptus leaves.
Geekstreet

         And speaking of nature, snakes are sensual.  Hiking in the outdoors, I have often seen them – harmless little things – slithering away through the grass.  For me, their supple, nimble movements are distinctly sensual.  

Brian Ralphs

        And how about their bigger, more menacing cousins, the pit vipers, a subfamily that includes rattlesnakes?  Are these creatures, so deft and unerring in pursuit of their warm-blooded prey, sensual?  Yes, vastly and deeply so.  Their darting forked tongues, their ability to detect prey at a distance, their speed in coiling, their lunging,  venomous fangs – sublimely and mysteriously sensual.  Here again, danger and death are intimately involved in the sensual.  Nature is fascinating and mysterious; I don’t try to understand it, only to observe in awe its intertwining of beauty, danger, and death.

A rattler.  Beautiful?  Yes.  Dangerous?  Only if he doesn't hear you coming.  If he does, he'll scoot out of the way.
LA Dawson

         If I asked you where in the city can you find the most gripping display of sensuality, what would you say?  The Museum of Modern Art?  Nope.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art?  No way.  Where then?  The Aquarium at Coney Island.  There you can see aquatic creatures splashing on the surface, and then, if you enter the buildings, you can see, through huge, thick panes of glass, the same creatures swimming about underwater.  I have seen seals and walruses disporting, eerie wide-finned manta rays gliding, and squid and octopi creeping, but for sheer sensual beauty, nothing can match sharks. 

Manta ray.
jon hanson

         Yes, sharks are beautiful.  Seen underwater, these torpedo-like killers, sleek and supple, glide noiselessly, their sense of smell detecting blood in the water miles away that guides them to their prey.  Their teeth curve back so that, if their prey struggles, the shark’s teeth dig deeper, rendering escape impossible.  Shark attacks, though often blazoned in the press, are in fact very rare.  Yet sharks are feared the world over, and their sleek sensual beauty, their boneless bodies’ maneuverability, gives them an appearance -- but only an appearance -- of evil.  (Nature is natural, not evil.)  But their teeth, which they shed frequently and readily replace, are collected the world over, the rare ones fetching high prices.  So to the mysterious linking of sensual beauty, danger, and death, we can add the passion of collecting, and plain old-fashioned greed.

Scary?  Yes.  Evil?  No.
Victor Grigas

Shark's teeth; nothing escapes.  But they too are beautiful.
Joxerra Aihartza

         I have one more candidate for sheer sensual beauty: flowers.  The Victorians were right in putting pressed petals in their parlors, rather than fresh flowers in full bloom, for what are blooming flowers if not sexual enticements to pollinators, thrust vaginas of flagrant and enchanting beauty?  Unless, of course, they come off as brazenly phallic.  Admiring flowers, especially those exuding a heady and voluptuous aroma, one can almost be sucked into them and swallowed down into a consummating and smothering extinction.   

A tiger lily.  She can eat you up.
Thomas Good

A black-eyed Susan.  More phallic than vaginal.
Connor Kurtz

Magnolia grandiflora.  Frankly, this one is almost obscene.
Anna Anichkova 

So there it is: the sensual.  In many forms, some enticing, some insidious, some menacing.  Take your choice.  Or maybe the sensual takes us.  If so, takes us where?
       
Coming soon: Maybe Deutsche Bank, which keeps getting put off.  Meanwhile, don't give it your money.

©   2020   Clifford Browder