I read some interesting texts last night:

Roland Barthes on plastic toys that imitate known social entities as bourgeois training for children, assimilating them into roles as “an owner, a user, never as a creator.” (39)

At the end of the essay, Barthes writes of the material move from wood to plastic and other artificial media in toy-making as a significant symptom of overall “embourgeoisement” — “Henceforth toys will be chemical, in substance and in color; their very material introduces us to a coenesthia of use, not of pleasure.” (40, emphasis added)

In Alifa Rifaat’s short story “My World of the Unknown,” the narrator, a married woman, falls in love and has a passionate affair with a divine, magical snake. It’s a strange story, but the text’s vivid descriptions and the narrator’s candid recounting make the tale entirely plausible.

At one point, in response to the narrator’s request for worldly riches from the snake, who is a djinn monarch, she, the snake, replies “coquettishly,” ‘‘How greedy is mankind! Are not the pleasures of the body enough?” (74)

In Aphorism 10, Kabir writes,

“Listen, dear girl: Does my Belovèd live in my Self,

 or does my Self live in my Belovèd?

I don’t know: What’s my Self, what’s my Belovèd?

What’s inside my body? My Belovèd or my Self?” (177).

In the corresponding notes, Vinay Dharwadker states of this “sufi-style couplet,” in which the Belovèd is God, that “the question is: which contains which, and which is contained by the others…” (237)

Dr. Magdalena Łanuszka, in a 2018 post on her blog Posztukiwania, writes, “I am pretty convinced that the medieval viewer, looking at a hirsute Mary Magdalene, most likely saw her as a Wild Woman!”

Samantha Pinto, in a chapter on Saartjie Baartman, reflects: “...[Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí] argues that the West’s obsession with the body comes from its preoccupation with sight as the sense of knowing…” (127)

In a striking 40-second video, Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí argues that holding resources individually rather than collectively reflects what she calls “the pathology called the modern man.”

In contrast, in the notes on John Ruskin’s “Study of a velvet crab”: “Ruskin was as sensitive to the mixed colouring of shells as he was to that of marble.” (46)

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Last night, I read these texts, and today I try to piece them together.

“Last night” is a cheeky lie, a slippage: I read these over weeks. But in the gathering phase of research, in receiving, time is warpable, as you pick sticks for your nest and lay down the weft.

One obvious theme is the body, but why stop at that? Barthes, Rifaat’s magical snake, Oyěwùmí, and Ruskin all seem to discuss something deeper and more slippery: sense.

Barthes and the snake gesture towards pleasure. Oyěwùmí considers a hierarchy of senses, with the Western version prioritizing sight. Ruskin, I mention here to connect “sense” to “sensitive.”

What’s interesting to me is that sense becomes far more beautiful, and even fruitful, when we deconstruct the hierarchy that privileges sight. Or when we think more about sight and how the gaze, itself, is a tool of hierarchy.

The body is a container for the divine, and the divine contains the body— myth and nature. This I extrapolate from Kabir’s aphorism. I spend most of my time painting, some of that time in a place beyond being, fragile as a shell. When I drift in or out of the flow state, I can’t find the door through sight, only through sense.

I paint hairy Mary Magdalene as Wild Woman, as mystic. I paint swimmers, a dancer, and a goose. I receive feedback and critique, and some of it stings like eyelash serum: I know this will help me grow. I go back to the studio every day, just about, and practice, practice, like it’s an altar to something about me and the Belovèd.

Some paintings of mine I hate. Some I love for their easy births. Some mornings I despise myself for my technical shortcomings. Some afternoons I’m an inventor. Someday my intention will alight, magic!, with the fibers stretched bouncy across a wooden frame, and maybe by then it’ll be quitting time.

Much love,

Zora

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