The Fascia of Love

Body, love and communion

By Pierre Bonnard (French; 1867 - 1947)

Happy Valetines’s to Volupta’s readers. This Friday, to honour the celebration of Love, rather than it being the usual style of post, this one is imagined as an interactive contemplation and so available to everyone to read. A contemplation on love and communion — as you read (or listen to my voice — those of you who are paid subscribers), feel free to contemplate and imagine yourself, painting the imagery as you explore the anatomy and the fascia of love and communion. If you wonder how does it connect to the arts and mysteries of the Feminine we are exploring here — take it as a Sophianic meditation, a call upon the embodiment of Love, of the miracle through which the White Light comes to be a myriad of colours and shades. It is the woman who is the embodiment of anything and through who the Divine comes down to us on Earth and through who we travel when we are to return to our Divine dwellings.

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Dry, ancient stone witnesses the weather and the time. Zephyr plays with his consort, transforming the soil into their flower-decked bedchamber. In the openings and hollows of the dry and ancient stone, the winds create sounds—at times, they sound like music; then they sound like human screams and the howls of the beasts. A queer shepherd hides in one of her crevices, hiding from the oppression of the afternoon Sun. The people knew the crevice as the grotto of the nymphs — for fresh water comes out of the walls, creating pools amid the arid surroundings. The shepherd yells and sings, amused by the echo that the crevices create. His own voice sounds foreign, like something coming from outside of him.

He smiles and giggles at this play. When a sweat trickles down from his forehead and onto his brow, he kneels and bends down towards the water to refresh. She who whispers to him from the waters and echoes his own voice lures him into the wilds of immanence and into the fertile thickets of sensation. Hungry for the whisper and the echo, he yields to the allurement, hoping every time he does, to allure her too and to have her whisper and echo one of her secrets to him.

To this goal he has come to many devices and inventions — from wood and animal skin, he made musical instruments, to mimic her sounds as if to say: “I am like you. Talk to me.” Often, she was unimpressed and would ignore him. Other times, one of her creatures would appear. A parakeet with his green and red inspired him to invent speech in order to chant hymns. A gazelle he had never seen before and was certain was a mirage. Once, there was a leopard and he gasped gazing at the beast. And another time, a serpent with a rhythm attached to its tail, coiled itself around his feet. In his pursuit, not expecting it, he has become the Lord of Animals, the Translator of Music and the Poet.

Outside, in the Sun, the ripening fruits and weathered walls pulse with the heartbeat of Music, home amidst the abundant gifts of field and vine.

As time passed, the space in which he dwelled became less of a mere empty vessel that only echoed his voice — the crevice revealed itself to be the holy chalice in which the wine of life is consecrated. This wine moved through his blood vessels and into his throat and into his heart and into his loins and into his feet. He would feel this wine even when he would have to depart from the meeting at the cave. His daily labours became a liturgy of sweat to her who he met.

At sunset, when the day’s labour is done and the rhythms of the day are replaced by those of the night, he sits under the dark skies and finds the stars upon them. One night, she began to speak. She had become bold, he thought—meeting him outside their meeting spot, reaching out uninvited, invading his space, demanding his attention. At night, she spoke to him through the stars—and he began drawing them together, tracing the constellations, the zodiacs. He mapped Pleiades and Aldebaran, and Orion and Dolphin, and Regulus and Antares, and Fomalhaut and Sirius. The Lord of Animals, the Translator of Music, the Poet, the Cartographer of Stars—like the four royal stars of the zodiac* he found himself crowned with four crowns.

And yet he was but a simple shepherd, drawn by the echo and whisper. When she came at night, he knew—he was sure—that he had succeeded in alluring her too.

The Poet and his Poem, that night, slept in the same bed.

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*Four royal stars of zodiac Aldebaran, Antares, Regulus and Fomalhaut are found in the four fixed signs of the zodiac — Taurus, Scorpio, Leo and Aquarius.

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With Love,

Volupta