Prometheus Rising exercise and reading group, Week 34

Venus of Willendorf

Chapter Three: All I Want Is Love

By Apuleius Charlton
Special guest blogger 

There is a closing of the lips and a sustenance from the suck. We draw desperately from life, hoping for nourishment, accepting whatever flavor comes into ourselves. Meditate deeply upon the nipple, the phallus, the sun and the stars and you will still not understand but your mouth will make the motions. How blessed we are to drink of the milk of the stars above, who we, in English, name the Milky Way. 

Two is the first number most of us know. Two eyes, infinite and dark, looking down upon us like a Zeta Reticulan’s or two fiery pink nipples flooding our vision and the taste of life sustaining fluid. Flared before our eyes life a moth’s wings, life unfolds in its static glory.

I’d like to think the Grand Old Man was someone who was greeted in the afterlife with Simon Moon’s “ultimate perversion” of diving into a literal barrel of tits.  Something like my paradise with feelings like milk-white flesh and rubies, ink-and-paper whispers and infinite pinpricks. Many and more things are stored in our oldest memories. 

Chapter Three made dreadful, diagnostic sense to me from the initial reading so many years ago. Like a whip across the face, I understood. I had wandered around as an automaton. Ridiculously, I had thought I operated independently while being played like an ill-tuned piano. As someone who has always had what, in retrospect, is a story-worthy oral-fixation, all the neuroses, macro- and microcosmic, made sudden sense. There is nothing, then there is two- if one is lucky, then there is nothing once again. Or there are multiples- I haven't passed the gate truly and do not know what lies beyond. 

I love talking and drinking. I often try to drink water while reading to my students and end up choking. I don’t want to take a bite of life but I want to imbibe and spew it. One of the best parts of swimming is not caring if you are wet. The trick of baptism is immersion, to cloak yourself entirely in the liquidity of a new reality. The breast, by being so invitingly soft and malleable, is a fleshy representation of the fabric of whatever-it-may-be. 

Suffice it to say, I appreciate my wife and what she has written, unread by the author, at my request. Paradise is located betwixt two hills: 

lustrous and white, with their own gravitational pull. he speaks about them often, saying things like this is why men create art, or this is why men seek god. he turns toward them whenever there is strong emotion, anxiety or happiness or fear, and in the absence of stimulus, when he is bored. i joke sometimes that they’re his favorite fidget toy. at times he enters an almost trance-like state, free of base lechery, worshipping an emanation of a goddess. other times the tide-pull happens idly, when he is watching television or reading, and he is simply a being existing in orbit.

We all have to stare into an abyss, just some of us are sipping on the stars.