Temptation is the work of the flesh represented as at once desirable and dangerous possibility.

What the body desires, that the mind re-presents in the grammar of language…  Are not words a form of touching, certainly a most oft used manner of touch?

Desire and danger at the same time!  Temptation is excitement simultaneously positive and negative.  You’d need to experience it for yourself.  That shouldn’t be a problem since “temptation” comes our way often, invited and uninvited.

The temptation of the flesh is only a common imagining of misery: it even reveals the misery of all moral life. In temptation, in anguish, in solitude encloses and is ponderous.
What desire denounces
   as being the enemy
      is the limited circle of the single being.
The being without air—without “communication”—riveted in solitude to itself alone experiences a feeling of overwhelming sadness. Friendly conversation is lacking or disappointing. Chatter nourishes more than it sets apart a feeling of emptiness.

-excerpt On Nietzsche, Notes by Georges Bataille, p. 250

Breakout! Is a breakout from my solitude possible?

Valentine’s Day is tomorrow, a formal reminder that a solitary existence, life-without-love is no life at all. Love comes in many forms does it not? I think friendship is the apex of love.

Bataille’s use of “the flesh” to indicate the rooted, biological ground of desire could not be more on target. The quaint rendering is apt.  What the body wants is involuntary. We patronize ourselves by our fixation on freedom-of-choice. There is little if any of that… The body simply desires, what it desires — then the mind, our reason re-presents the Janus-faced possibility to us.

And why temptation? The circle of our solitude is limiting, and too limited for you and I to thrive. We absolutely need others.  We suffocate by solitude.  Temptation is a clue that I am always on the lookout to breakout, a connection with others, to risk becoming more!

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I read this poem this morning and liked it very much.

Love Poem Attempt 3/?

BY Taylor Byas

I’ll say it—the most remarkable way a man 
has touched me is when he didn’t intend to, found
the heat of me on accident. I’m saying his hand
punctured the gap between our backs, rooted around
for the blanket we shared and swept my rib-ridged side.
In movies, that touch is the domino
that starts the chain, but his bed did not abide
by rules of fantasy. He touched me and, oh,
I held my breath. Waited for the regret
he never felt. My God, he touched me then slid
closer beneath the duvet, our spines close-set
arches that joined in the dark, kissing. I did
not know it then, but his fingers flexed with want
into the night. His heart at my back. Desire out front.

POET’S STATEMENT

“The loneliness of the pandemic has forced me to think about intimacy and touch in ways that have never been required of me before. I find myself redefining my previous definitions of closeness, of desire. I wrote this poem weeks after laying next to someone I love very deeply. I realized that the proximity to him, along with his accidental (and non-sexual) touch, was such a special vulnerability. We were comfortable enough to just be close, to touch backs, to be felt even as we drifted off to sleep. Is that not love?”
—Taylor Byas

Taylor Byas is a Black woman poet and the author of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, forthcoming this year from Soft Skull Press. Originally from Chicago, Byas lives in Cincinnati

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