Today, I discovered myself unexpectedly aroused by the first paragraph of the second chapter of a book. Neither the chapter, nor the book as a whole, is intentionally erotic—the paragraph in question describes only a young composer’s dream that smashing up a fine china shop produces musical notes for a perfect new movement—and I can offer no accounting of my surprising physical reaction other than the rapturous qualities of the prose. One might suppose that, enthralled with the text, my unconscious mind paid no notice to the source of a few powerful feelings stirred up within me and simply became... confused. Exuberant and confused.
No matter. It amuses me to think that I might "delight" in anything. Polymorphously perverse is what Woody Allen called it; but let's not get carried away.
I take some relief that there is no stigma attached yet to arousal towards a non-sexual passage of a book, just as there is no stigma for arousal at anything for which such arousal has no common name. Had it been arousal at the character, a young and talented man, easy on the eyes if his story is to be believed, why that might have implied Homosexuality, a thing with a name and a legacy. Had it been the pages themselves which set me off, reminding me in texture of the undoubtedly handsome tree which once fell to produce them, one might consider that Dendrophilia, another thing with a name, has played its shameful part. Now that would be something awful.
But no, it was the words, the delicate phrasing and that familiar spirit of creative destruction they detail.
I had the option, of course, to ignore the issue into atrophy. Instead, I decided that the time was right to break up my day with a shower. I satisfied my urges, but did not overindulge, barely calling to mind a rapid slideshow of erotic memories to speed physiology along: a face I had seen, a pair of breasts I once held in one hand to see that I could, a whisper, a secret I'd almost forgotten, a red-lipped smile, a song strummed for me at sunrise, a kiss. These fantasies flew by one after another and back again, fleeting, shimmering and thousand fold, great flung handfuls of glitter.
And now, God willing, a pleasant afternoon.
