The Sensual Life

Sensuality as a prayer.

By Guy Rose (American; 1867 – 1925)

“Sensuality does not wear a watch but she always gets to the essential places on time. She is adventurous and not particularly quiet. She was reprimanded in grade school because she couldn’t sit still all day long. She needs to move. She thinks with her body. Even when she goes to the library to read Emily Dickinson or Emily Bronte, she starts reading out loud and swaying with the words, and before she can figure out what is happening, she is asked to leave. As you might expect, she is a disaster at office jobs.

Sensuality has exquisite skin and she appreciates it in others as well. There are other people whose skin is soft and clear and healthy but something about Sensuality’s skin announces that she is alive. When the sun bursts forth in May, Sensuality likes to take off her shirt and feel the sweet warmth of the sun’s rays brush across her shoulder. This is not intended as a provocative gesture but other people are, as usual, upset. Sensuality does not understand why everyone else is so disturbed by her. As a young girl, she was often scolded for going barefoot.

Sensuality likes to make love at the border where time and space change places. When she is considering a potential lover, she takes him to the ocean and watches. Does he dance with the waves? Does he tell her about the time he slept on the beach when he was seventeen and woke up in the middle of the night to look at the moon? Does he laugh and cry and notice how big the sky is?

It is spring now, and Sensuality is very much in love these days. Her new friend is very sweet. Climbing into bed the first time, he confessed he was a little intimidated about making love with her. Sensuality just laughed and said, ‘But we’ve been making love for days’.”
— “The Book of Qualities”, J. Ruth Gendler

Lately, I have been listening to one of my favourite opera pieces — Puccini’s “Tosca” (YouTube // Spotify). In the opera’s famous aria “Vissi d’Arte” Tosca sings: “I lived for my art, I lived for love, I never did harm to a living soul! With a secret hand, I relieved as many misfortunes as I knew of. Always with true faith my prayer rose to the holy shrines. Always with true faith I gave flowers to the altar. In the hour of grief why, why, o Lord, why do you reward me thus? I gave jewels for the Madonna’s mantle, and I gave my song to the stars, to heaven, which smiled with more beauty. In the hour of grief why, why, o Lord, ah, why do you reward me thus?”, her story, filled with devotion and gaze turned upwards towards the Divine, was still not one of austerities or denial of life and passion. It was actually her passion and her intense feelings that made it easier for her to plunge into life and passion with the courage of a divine fool. Passion is religious in nature after all, and its original meaning is “to suffer” - to suffer and enjoy the purging fires that arise within and burn that which cannot survive the grave.

Impulse towards corporality and feeling and impulse towards spiritual are often deemed separate, but in the stories of feminine heroes, there is no separation - it is exactly their strong identification with their sensual impulses and feelings that arise in their bodies that make it possible for them to pursue with fearlessness that which average woman would reject for life of convenient comfort. For Tosca, just like for the “heroic" feminine across the cultures, the spiritual and sensual are not separate — it is the body that suffers & that is impassioned, that is pierced on the cross & that rises from the grave. Her lover, in the duet piece (YouTube // Spotify), tells of her "pulsing love and storming anger”:

What eyes in the world can compare
with your black and glowing eyes?
It is in them that my whole being fastens,
Eyes soft with love and rich with anger. […]
You are my idol Tosca,
All things in you delight me;
Your storming anger
And your pulsing love!

[Quale occhio al mondo
può star di paro
all'ardente occhio tuo nero?
È qui che l'esser mio s'affisa intero.
Occhio all'amor soave, all'ira fiero! […]
Mia Tosca idolatrata,
ogni cosa in te mi piace;
l'ira audace
e lo spasimo d'amor!]

Often what we encounter and read—be it traditional or modern spirituality, or philosophies, or therapy, or simply the general cultural climate—encourages (directly or subtly) against the sensual. The current culture’s superficial hedonism is mere consumption. This is opposed to sensuality as such because sensuality, at its core, is ability to receive the world as it is without feeling an impulse to change it or alter it or even make a commentary about it. It is to avoid the temptation of judgement or even opinion. For many women who feel inclination towards sensuality, immersing herself in such philosophies can bring her to be in rebellion against herself, to on a certain level, see her femaleness and her female body as something to be moved away from.

The impulse towards mere consumption is born from an inability to receive. It is an impulse towards numbness and flattening yourself, towards avoidance and not presence. When you indulge in such way, it doesn’t nourish you or make you feel satiated, it actually only makes your hunger grater — somewhere, deep inside yourself, you feel deceived. This consumption doesn’t have to be simply of material aspects of reality — it can relate to consuming philosophies, worldviews, religions, books, social media, politics, popular wisdom or anything else. You consume yet cannot “birth” anything original; since you are separate from your sensuality, you cannot receive into yourself — what you do immediately upon consuming is vomit. When you “rot” in your room, it is because you are swimming in the toxic vomit of your own making.

Sensuality is to exist from the body and to identify with it more than you do with your thoughts, even what you consider to be your “intellect” — to not eternally think about concepts, archetypes, God, but to actively embody them, which makes it also possible for others to experience that aspect of reality directly through you. When so, sensuality, far from being simply “dirt and blood” as many may disdainfully label it, becomes a prayer, an active invitation for the Divine to move from within you.