Dark eros, p.1
Dark Eros, page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Foreword
Introduction - DARK EROS AND THE EROTIC ESSENCE
Phase 1
Kitchen Tails - TINA SOUTH-X
Sunday & Ms. Fantasy - FRANK LAMONT PHILLIPS
I Want to Speak - JENNIFER HOLLEY
Valentine’s Day - TIM SEIBLES
No Turn on Red - REBECCA DELBRIDGE
Black Sugar - JEUL A. HARRIS
Midnight Call - CAROLE HILL FAULKNER
Binghampton Bad Boy Blues (excerpt) - KENNETH NORFLEET
… To the Head - LANA C. WILLIAMS
in the dreams of a former whore goddess - LURLYNN FRANKLIN
C:Back SlashMerge - OKTAVI
Gail & John - WINSTON BENONS, JR.
Black Love - SHANGE
Hunger (Translated from the German) - HERR REVEREND SCHMIDT
Untitled - JENNIFER GIBSON
The Encounter
The Search
Almost Daylight
Do Ya Got Some Blow? - DRUERVONN WASHINGTON
Electric Lover - EUNICE TOWNSEND
coffles: a suicide note - VICTOR E. BLUE
Marriage - CASSIE GRANBERRY
Dessert - ESTELLE E FARLEY
Phase 2
Orgasm Notes - JEUL A. HARRIS
Mr. Goodbar - JEUL A. HARRIS
Pain and Pleasure (Parts I-IV) - NINA LEONETTE SMALL
No Raincoats Allowed - IBU ABU
Head - BARON JAMES ASHANTI for Joan
Ed’s Gumbo #3 - VALINDA JOHNSON BROWN
Fear’s a Bitch - LIV WRIGHT
Hurt Me - HONOREE F. JEFFERS
My Best Fucking Friend - ENUF SED
Forbidden Fruit - JANICE W. HODGES
The Film Teacher - CECIL BROWN
Oral - LEAH JEWEL (REYNOLDS) ALEXANDER
Ode to My Sweet Sexy Brown - CHIKÉ CARTER
Serious - JERRY W. WARD, JR.
let’s be disreet - AMANDA TOWNSEND
soyons discrets (French translation) - AMANDA TOWNSEND
Phase 3
Woman on a Bus - MAWIYAH KAI EL-JAMAH BOMANI
The Thing - LEAH JEWEL (REYNOLDS) ALEXANDER
My … (a street-corner sighting) - FAITHFUL SENGHOR
Shrimp Étouffée - VALINDA JOHNSON BROWN
Caught - CHRISTOPHER STANARD
Tuesday Supper - OKTAVI
Do Right Women: Black Women, Eroticism, and Classic Blues - KALAMU YA SALAAM
Bibliography
A Bit More - TIM SEIBLES
a reenactment of a real love poem - NADIR LASANA BOMANI
Euphoria - SHANNON COOK
Haiku (untitled) - LENARD D. MOORE
Passion in Paris - GILDA N. SQUIRE
man - ESTELLE FARLEY
lotion - DANITA BECK
thinking ’bout you - BROTHER YAO
soon, again - KYSHA N . BROWN
answering machine - LESSLIE W. CLARK
Phase 4
Untitled - HELVETTIKA
will always - ELLE
Polish My Pearl (excerpt) - A screenplay - REECE AUGUISTE
Pussy Ann Trouble - PERRY HOLMES
Forty-five Is Not So Old - HUGHES JONES
All the Things You Are (excerpt) - From Tall Tales from the Life and Times of Sugarcane Hancock: The Phallocentic Memoirs of a Sweet Colored Man - PLAYTHELL BENJAMIN
Train Me - LOVECHILD
Merging - NIAMA LESLIE JOANN WILLIAMS
Wind in the Cane (Parts III and IV) - CHEZIA THOMPSON CAGER
Blaspheme! - JADE D. BANKS
Phase 5
Gentle Raindrops - ANDRE MOLLET
Dreamwork/Eros Sections - JERRY W . WARD, JR.
Red Lights - JANICE W. HODGES
Nzinga Astral Travels - AJUBA JOY
Marrow - TIM SEIBLES
Hands - RANDALL MOORE
sweetness - JADE D. BANKS
Winnefred’s Mother - GLENN JOSHUA
Profile This - ANTHONY BARBOZA
timed - KAZEDGE
His Side - SHARON A. LEWIS
Cherry Blessings - JZB
Teenager’s Bedroom - ESTELLE FARLEY
The Assistant - GILDA N. SQUIRE
Sugar - HONOREE F. JEFFERS
Cutting - NIAMA LESLIE JOANN WILLIAMS
So Close to Hell - AMANDA TOWNSEND
Tout Proche de L‘enfer - (French translation) - AMANDA TOWNSEND
Conversion: A Most Religious Experience - SADDI KHALI
Phase 6
Haiku #131 - KALAMU YA SALAAM
Dirty Diana (excerpt) - From I Wish Cotton Was a Monkey - RAE-REE RICHARDS
these nights are not important - STARRSTARR
The Wandering Lover - LIV WRIGHT
Monica - CHERI DAUGHTERY
Circle of One - JOY DOSS
Living in a Memory - ESTELLE FARLEY
Miss Rose - JERRY W. WARD, JR.
In the House - LANA C. WILLIAMS
Intimate Times - JANICE W. HODGES
These Bodies - TIM SEIBLES
SweatBurns - NIGHTINGALE
Acid Black - SCOTT JACKSON
Celibacy - XAVIER
Dear Lord, I Lift the Covers - WILLIE JAMES KING
Phase 7
Why I Play with My Cunt - LOVECHILD
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements - CALVIN BAKER
Communion - JZB
The Ballad of Sadie La Babe - TIM SEIBLES
MalKai’s Last Seduction - KIINI IBURA SALAAM
Untitled - WINSTON BENONS, JR.
Chastity - JANICE W. HODGES
Seduction - DE ANN DIAX
The Writer - ESTELLE FARLEY
Encountering Ecstasy - LINDA WHITE
Butterfly - LANA C. WILLIAMS
The Flower - LENARD D. MOORE
I Long - CAROLE HILL FAULKNER
surrogate lovers - EVANGELIST JANNIE JAMES
Cajunto Sabor - BARON JAMES ASHANTI
A Reminiscence - LEAH JEWEL (REYNOLDS) ALEXANDER
Afterword - NEW TALES, NEW BLACKNESS: CONSTRUCTING THE WHOLE SELF THROUGH EROTICISM
About the Authors
Copyright Page
Foreword
In the events of our upcoming past history … in the delicacy of the birth of a hummingbird feasting upon a pool of nectar … in the venues of the duskiest regions where legions of randy demons score feast upon feast of virgins … Eros is born. Not a blatant development of the virtuous-lustful natures of our people as predicted by present physic phenomena, but the underlying rivers through which we all swim—and on occasion drown. And that is the being, the marrow, blood of Dark Eros—that which causes the midnight oils to burn and blister in print.
An assortment of the unmentionable discourses, whispered about in the kitchen while your auntie would press your mother’s hair and “shush” you away. The lithe looks, pressed hungrily outward between men and women, and the like as we go about our daily routines exuding the glow of inhibitions. Missing curfew as your thighs broadcast the call letters for Station LUST on the airwaves. Phone calls leading to Tuesday supper leading to the dissertation of orgasmic notes as those in celibacy-cherubic in intentions and diabolic in mechanical attachments—ride the waves of pure-dee sex, that can or cannot be erotic, but usually is. No, wait … no sex, for the affirmation “pure-dee sex,” with its blunt strength, is too defenseless and shallow a term to encompass the heat that exudes from the damp pages of this exquisite documentation by Reginald Martin and the writers he has chosen to fulfill his vision.
The footing upon which we as a people stand slightly askew is Eros—the very entity which manifests her- or himself in our daily patterns and processes. Now, not to be misleading, this is not to say Eros in only the erogenous sense, but in the fullest development of its tensing possible. Eros as sensationalism, Eros as an ambience, Eros in fellowship with all of the indulgences of Providence’s earth … . Eros as receptacles of blissful gratification of the well-confined thoughts of a collective people. We are railed against daily for the libidinous joys natural to a people of the earth—our laughter boxed behind intertwined fingers in shame, our hips gilded like fine birds in Playtex cages, our bodies sheathed in constrictive curtains of conformity. Yet, every now and then as my grandmama from Tennessee would say, the cat is put out with the trash and the mice play. And Dark Eros definitely is a playground for the sacrificial armaments of Eros and his-or-her-baubles.
In his typical overwhelming fashion, Professor Reginald Martin illustrates the limitations of a system of conformity when it tries to confine the desires of a people tired of the endless destruction of cerebral passions. He will remain titled as R.M. for fear of unleashing the demons of Eros which seem to reside disturbingly near the surface of his waters. He is the helter-skelter frenzy of hurricane force within us all that is afraid to be confined lest it lose its truest self, unwilling to conform to the bullish dullness of average, everyday personage and predictability.
I tell everyone that I never understood my work as well as I do when I read what Reginald Martin writes about it. Now, in this subversive, beautiful book of his, you shall comprehend Eros in a way normally only reserved for the gods of individualism and genius.
Ishmael Reed
Summer 1996
Oakland, California
Introduction
DARK EROS AND THE EROTIC ESSENCE
And so, dear friends, it is again to this theme we come. Outside my riverfront condo, the barges’ high-intensity lights carve a clearing through the blackness, lase rs that only serve to illuminate the ever-unfolding dimensions of blackness all the way to the Gulf. As quickly as a part of its blackness is illumined, the obsidite folds reembrace the boats from the rear, changing shape and returning to eternal mystery and ceaseless multiplicity again.
I had told a good friend five years ago that the essence of African eroticism was not done with me, that it would force me to return to it at least once again … it was not done with me.
My erotic poetry, fiction, scholarly articles, and of course, Erotique Noire with Miriam Willis and Roseann Bell were positive authorial/editorial experiences from which I thought I would never recover, and certainly from which I would always carry a positive reverberation. I would get back to eroticism when I finished dissimilar writing projects. I would get back to eroticism when I had time. I would get back to eroticism when I good and well felt like it. I controlled eroticism by illuminating its essential nature to others, both hot and cold. I controlled eroticism. Eroticism did not control me. As Dark Eros is a self-realitied entity, I realize now how insignificant my formidable will is in the face of eroticism set-to-type. Permeated by black Eros, this volume presents itself to its readers via my editing and sequencing, which are asides compared to the volume’s other major catalyst: this volume presents itself because of and via the collective, symbiotic libido of people of African descent.
Another friend, who convinced me that there were only erotically hot and physically cold people in the world, was right, of course. Though this friend was never able to live with the fact that their essence was erotic, I still learned quite a bit of erotic ontology from the diachronic/synchronic conversations we would have, which only increased our erotic need and want of each other. (Rumor has it said friend is now using a vegetarian diet and The Book of Coming Forth by Day to lose the erotic self my friend was never able to control—alas, a losing battle, as that hot person should certainly know.) The substance of our exchanges on the essence of the erotic self informs this section of my introduction in ways that, I believe, both the erotic person and the nonerotic person can use to the benefit of each individual’s true path. The direct objects of my verbs here are those who were born “hot,” or erotic; my indirect objects are all those who must know themselves before they can be of any use to others, their world, and most of all, to themselves.
The ontology of the erotic essence is the urge toward more than sexual union; it is more than the drive and longing to be erotic: it is the urge toward Eros, itself. Here, I wish to define the erotic ontologically and to delimit to its subsets, namely,
a. How to know the erotic.
b. How to know if oneself is erotic.
c. What it means to the individual if he/she is erotic.
d. What to do if one is erotic in a world hostile toward the erotic.
1. The essence of the erotic
To understand the erotic is first to look at its ontology, both its being and its origins. Know that the erotic pre-exists and post-exists all those within the powers of its boundary. Thus, the erotic would exist without any humans under its sway to act out its impulses in a corporeal fashion. Thus, the erotic both waits to be accessed and accesses without permission. No writer included in this volume asked to have an erotic essence and teleology. They are what they were when they became conscious of being: erotic.
2. How to know if oneself is erotic
However, the consciousness of being was not always aware that it was erotic. The consciousness had a suspicion: you at twelve lingering at the kitchen door as your father oiled the legs of your mother or his own hairy chest and rippled stomach; the feeling you got—indeed the expectancy—when each evening after walking from the busline, your mother came to your room and asked you to undo the sixteen metal fasteners on her massive brassiere; the confusion and fear you felt both in your head and heart when you saw your junior-high friends behind the cafeteria, fondling feverishly, but not yet completely intimate; the curve of a leg or arm or butt, intermittently, throughout your entire life and your inability not to notice them; something about Pam Grier and Robert Hooks movies, but your inability to give words to exactly what it was about those cultural indexes that provoked you to think about turning sex into poetry.
All these episodes, and then, there, between career developments and various desires gone wrong beyond your control, the epiphanic moment when you were able to audibly utter or to write what you were:
• I am erotically attracted to these things;
• these things are right for my sexual self;
• my best sexual/erotic self is a part of these things;
• these things are synecdochical of my erotic self, which I do not yet fully know or understand;
• finally, for my life to be a circle, I must abide by these things which undergird an essential part of my entire self, both the erotic and the nonerotic parts.
It is then and only then that the consciousness of being knows what it is.
Still, the consciousness of being does not yet know how to act on its predisposition. It must experiment and find that groove meant only for it. This is the externalizing of the erotic essence so that one may follow its urgings. It is only during this phase that the human can begin to know the essence of the erotic.
When the externalizing phase has become a given—but not boring—constant in the life of the individual, the individual begins to know the erotic itself, face to face. It is more being than urge, more urge than predisposition, more predisposition that free choice. It is not the procreative impulse; it is not the libidinous reaction of an aroused individual; it is not the will and power to “do it” several times in one evening; Eros is itself and itself only, and can be known only to the bearers of its mark, for its ontology is endlessly multitudinous and polysemous. Consider, in a room of like-minded people, all shrouded under Eros’s dark wings, each person moves at a different flutter toward a different trail of pre-embedded lines of psychic silicon. Erotic individuals move toward the knowledge of Eros in only the ways they can and at only their own speeds. When the erotic nature comes to the heart of Eros, all is known; Eros is of God but not God; not God, but godlike in its sway over the individual within its circle. Eros is a blessing.
Upon accessing this knowledge, erotic individuals are immediately ejected from Eros’s heart and now know themselves for whom and what they are forever. Only then can erotic individuals live to the end of their allotted time without a constant disjunction in spirit. Only then does the horse know and accept its rider.
Remember, too, that the erotic self must be known to the bearer of its mark or all other aspects of the self’s psychic circle suffer from too much or too little attention; the psyche searches for its truest self, and only once the truest self is found can the psyche turn to developing the other parts of itself that remain not known.
3. The erotic in a hostile world
As can be determined by looking at those who have partial knowledge of themselves in any segment of their complete being, the ones with self-knowledge are the most frightening individuals in the physical sphere. All of their actions are authentic because they act out of the truest knowledge that what they are doing is right for what they are. Such authenticity may be used in negative or positive ways, but the authenticity itself is pure and positive, and authenticity is frightening to those who are unenlightened. The unenlightened fear the authentic actions of the authentic individual because unenlightened themselves, they cannot make authentic actions because they do not know themselves; they are merely rich or powerful or good-looking or lucky—all aspects even the unenlightened are bright enough to know are unearned and temporary. Self-knowledge is timeless and eternal. Secondly, the unenlightened fear the authentic individual because there are no actions they can make, no tapes they can watch, and no one powerful enough they can bribe to make them have self-knowledge. They fear they are irredeemable. They are correct.
Thus, with the knowledge of the erotic self, the bearers of its mark immediately expose themselves because they cannot be hidden; when they are seen, they must be attacked. They are, after all, not only to be feared because they are filled with self-knowledge and thus authentic, but they are even more to be hated because they possess an intimate knowledge of that part of themselves which cannot be aroused in others with alcohol or harder drugs, cannot be bought at a strip club no matter how skilled the dancer, cannot be fully felt even when power determines the sex. The erotically aware possess something which can only be gotten by divine fiat. And thus the hatred and envy the erotically aware evoke is understandable—and immense.
