Eroticism Reveals Another World

“We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal,” says author and activist Audre Lorde. “I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force that moves us toward living in a fundamental way.”

Eros moves us toward radical aliveness, and eroticism extends that aliveness into every facet of our lives. Eroticism is more than sexuality. It concerns the aesthetics of sexual desire, sensuality, and romantic love. Chilean poet Octavio Paz says it’s the poetry of the body. It is to sex what poetry is to language, imbuing our touch with beauty, meaning, and immediacy.

“Eroticism reveals to us another world, inside the world,” Paz says. “The senses become servants of the imagination, and let us see the invisible and hear the inaudible.”

Start by noticing intricacies. Select details to foreground, like the yellow-green leaf flapping at the end of a branch in the fall wind. Background the trunk of the oak tree and the nearby road noise to make the leaf’s color and shape prominent. Ignore the smell of rain for now.

In this way you composed the moment. Although the setting didn’t change, your version of it did, according to what you focused on and what you filtered out. You shaped your experience based on how you looked, and there are countless ways to see yourself and others in space and time.

Consciousness influences perception, and eroticism is a kind of awareness practice, a playful yet devotional way of sensing the environment to affirm the elements that enliven us. By training attention to prioritize that which elicits eros, we construct an intimate, alluring world—first in our minds and then with our hands—an alternative to the alienated humdrum of existence.

So wander through your house. Pull the baked cookies out of the oven. Open a window to let in fresh air. Tip toe up the plush carpeted stairs, stopping to adjust the framed art on the wall. Enter your bedroom from the landing and close the door behind you. Undress. Step onto the cold bathroom tile and turn on the faucet to run a bath. After dipping your fingers into the hot water, slide your body into the tub. Now glance in the mirror as the image of yourself evaporates into steam.

Invite eros to flow into every room of your being. Make a home, inside a house.