culture diary, day 6

Beautiful late afternoon. The heat wave seems to have broken, so much so that I've shut the a/c and opened the screened windows again. Skies are blue and there's a fresh breeze, the air feels dry. I went for a swim earlier, all delightful and uneventful as what I had always experienced in years past. I have just woken from a nap and feel langorous and still wakeful. I've spent most of my time in this apartment nude. So comfortable. It's a rare pleasure to spend long stretches of time luxuriating in one's own skin. I sit at the computer typing, and when I get up to go to the next room there's a beautiful antique oak mirrored dresser in which I see my torso reflected back. I've seen this image so many times now it feels almost depersonalized - my head is cut off above the curved oak frame. It's me, or it could be any rounded French Venus from throughout time. I step past the bed and there's a full-length mirror, and it's me again, hair pinned up, looking back at me, no longer faceless, anonymous. And then I step past the image and it's just the sensation of me again, spirit within skin, moving about the apartment. I stand at the sink and rinse a few dishes, hard granite countertop cool against my skin, droplets of water dampening my breasts and I don't care (oh the liberation of no apron!). Back in the study I lean back in the office chair, stretching beneath the circulating fan and smiling up at the clear blue sky and treetops at the top half of the window. A helicopter hovers in the distance, tiny dragonfly over the East River. My back is slightly burned from my noontime swim, the sun having its way even through pearly haze. If I go to the pool tomorrow it'll be at the end of the day. I think of going to the Guggenheim in the morning for an exhibit whose theme is hauntings and repetitions and recursions, right up my alley, but then see that they've reproduced quite a lot of it online, so much so that I sit deliciously in my primordial, timeless nude and enjoy the most unrestrained tour, and my mind floats and I muse and dream as I gaze at the images and read the notes, grateful to be momentarily weightless, give myself to apprehending it all (albeit on reduced, flattened scale) without the clamorous distraction of painful feet. I wonder a bit about the tone of the curatorial notes, I sense a subtext that disdains as sentiment longings for the past, of memory, of the desire to preserve, record, remember. The overview notes that the exhibit "documents a widespread contemporary obsession with the past, both collective and personal." Whyever not? How is this a "contemporary" obsession, or an "obsession" at all? Isn't it one of the most essentially human existential quandaries that the past recedes, disappears, yet informs our present, we seek it and perhaps it seeks us? And that for time immemorial this quest to recapture lost time has been a very raison d'etre for art? Another curatorial note, on artistic recordings of landscape, reads, "artists... insisting on the importance of remembrance and memorialization." Insisting? Those sentimental artists! I just sense another agenda afoot, that while ostensibly celebrating poetic and artistic contemplations of the past, they are viewed as suspect, marginalized, unrealistically interfering with the steady march of progress, redevelopment, changes in landscape, loss of memories, rituals, traditional ways, etc.

I'm completely babbling, and if you were here enjoying delicious rose, ice melting the wine to pale pink, I don't know that we'd mire ourselves more than lightly in a theoretical critique of a subliminally coded virtual gallery tour. Or maybe we would. But with a cool breeze on our skin and soft sheets beckoning we wouldn't limit ourselves for long.

***

P.S. to KZE -- chasing your butterflies -- GG Train, Olivers Army, and all the delightful rest - LOL!

Sulphur to Sugarcane

The women in Poughkeepsie
Take their clothes off when they're tipsy
But I hear in Ypsilanti
They don't wear any panties
Once they gargle with champagne
They hitch up their skirts and exclaim
It's not very far, sugar
It's not very far, sugar
Pour some sugar on me, sugar
It's not very far from Sulphur to Sugarcane

***
Elvis Costello's lyrics sound so darn familiar. Where'd he get the idea about women in Ypsilanti?

***
Belle [a/k/a Iolanthe] to J, 7 July 2008

...You lay the groundwork well for the introduction of subtle, incremental furtherances of my erotic education. Eventually the studies had to move to more private, secluded spaces, your room, your attic, your car. Items of clothing came off by degrees, one evening my top, a week or two following, my skirt...

J to Belle, 7 July 2008

... I think you were wearing a medium blue skirt, but I'm not certain what sort of top you were wearing... One night we out to the place in that industrial park--I can't recall the name--near Springdale; it was a jazz place at the time. We spent most of the evening there listening to music and dancing, but in the middle of the evening, because we couldn't stand it any longer, we went out to the car in the very dark parking lot, and made love in the back seat. For practical reasons, you didn't take your skirt off, and we made love that way a number of times...

Belle to J, 8 July 2008

... You remember my various items of clothing so well! I'm amazed. I too remember making love while still wearing a skirt and nothing else. That was very erotic. I thought of that as I wrote to you yesterday, but just couldn't bring myself to write panties. So "skirt" it was...

***

Item from Blog of a Bookslut, 9 December 2009
... "panties" on my list of least favorite words...

***
Elvis Costello makes it okay - all of it - panties, skirt, hitched, Ypsilanti...

***
Belle to J, 18 July 2008

... More, more, and more. Panties peeled off and flung, skirt hitched...

***

... My fingers unbuttoning, then unzipping to get at you...

Belt buckle, belt buckle
Pour some water on me.

image: Ypsilanti historic water tower