Muses E-Book

Z.J. Galos

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: Memoirs
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 409

Beschreibung

Inspired by Andre Brink's book: "Before I forget," I have thought about my own Muses, who I met during my life, and who inspired me to write poetry - love poetry - short stories, and novels. I have been blessed by so many wonderful women, who have been great friends, besides partaking with me in various sessions at 'Writers Write' workshops, assisting me with forging my enthusiasm for writing into an emerging personal style under Amanda's caring guidance. Much later, I realized the quality of those writing workshops that brought out the best in us in search of self-expression in our literary efforts. I wish to honor them all, writing about their importance to me, their dedication and time, during our relationships. Experiencing friendship and love will be the motor for inspired writing and the greatest gift for the poet. Muses appear in person and their number might be three, six, and nine, depending on their tasks, as known from Classical Greek mythology. Picasso stated that an artist has his personal Muse, extending their numbers to ten. In this sense, I have a peek at my artistic endeavors by experiencing my own tenth Muse. who guided me along to my self-realization in the arts.

Leseprobe

the muse

“The Muse visits during the process of creation, not before.”

Roger Ebert

“Cheat your landlord if you can – and must – but do not try to short-change the Muse.”

William S. Burroughs

“my muse appeared one day demanding to meet in ‘flesh and blood’ and lives in my innermost since.”

zoltanzelan

Contents

Epigraph

PROLOGUE

BOOK I: THE MUSES EVOLVE

Eroticism in Beauty and Art

Poet’s Recluse

Marion

Heidi

LANA

LEE

Karin

KARIN

IRA

Ira – Portrait of a wondrous Muse

STIRRINGS IN STEALTHY LOVE

THE ELECTRIC RAINBOW SLIDE

THE THREE OF US

Last day of the poet to visit Mr. T

VAGINA

Vienna, 2021/09/09; Bratislava; Sered

Sered, 2021/09/09

WAKING EARLY FOR LOVE

Zen’s Dream

ANNA

Athina

ANNE

Julia and her spirits

BOOK II: MUSES IN MY EAR

the third time

tenth muse

WAKING MUSE

woolf moon

morning call

LESVOS

Dream Ritual

prelude to intimacy

TACTILE

muse

on my pet-rock/i bought in athens from maria/it’s written

pink moon

JENNIFER

nica two

Through the Purple Window

BOOK III: REFLECTIONS

Reflection One

Reflection Two

Reflection 3

Reflection Four

Reflection Five

Reflection Six

Reflection Seven

Reflection Eight

Reflection Nine

Reflection 10

Reflection Eleven

epilog

wake

PROLOGUE

The word Muse refers generally to anyone or anything which inspires an artist, musician, or a writer. What a Muse is has been defined through the centuries in the arts, poetry, and painting. Something, a human being, a certain object, an atmosphere, something touchable or imaginable, or an idol one looks up to. There must be many ideas that could inspire, be it esoteric or plain simple and on the other hand a specific ritual one has developed getting to know a person.

Besides, as every creative artist is in need of a Muse, many have been content to have one person as a fulfilment of this need, while others had multiple Muses. I can think of artists like Picasso, Modigliani, and Ernst Fuchs, often inspiring young artists. And on the other side also of female Muses, who inspired a whole range of talented artists with their personality: Kiki of the Montparnasse and Alma Mahler from Vienna. However, to describe the influence of personalities, mainly female, who inspired artists the world over, one could refer to a long list, probably accessible on the Internet.

I wish to describe the Muse who turns up to me, influencing my creative world. It’s a fascinating world, like a labyrinth, a spiralling road that opens up unexpectedly, just through an electronic spark the Muse had sent me. Unexpected indeed, day or night, evening or early morning. The Muse is everywhere, never tiring, transferring thoughts, prompts, stirring, and often being so delicate. Yet again, sophisticated in midst of being rude, hurtful, and also a Cassandra in her attitude. She is creating chemistry in you that will continue long after you have been in love with her, enjoyed a playful relationship or a passionate one.

In my case, I met her through the medium of a communication channel on the Internet: A poetry-café in Los Angeles, where poets met regularly online, to exchange their poems and read them with a specific writing tool they had advised for downloading, so poems could be fed into the comm’s system, written beforehand and avoid getting into stress of typing them out directly with speed, as many poets worldwide wished to contribute and time of presenting was of the essence. Was this a testing ground for art? Indeed, but also an opportunity to find one’s Muse.

I found Ann. She was inspired by my first quotation I coined about the Internet that resounded with the philosophy of the LA poetry café: love is the universe/ the web its pulsing vein/ that’s where we meet and touch/ where our juices flow.

Ann loved my quotation and she expressed herself with a happy laugh, finding me surprised that it could become sudden reality with her becoming my Muse. But Muses are unpredictable, appearing out of nowhere, possessing a magnetic personality, powers that draw the artist toward them immediately. Well, Ann was all positive, supportive, a constant contributor of prompts, a positive critical artist and herself a poet, having won second place in a National poetry competition in Greece.

But a Muse can also be negative, all negative, dark-blue negative. Yet, out of a negative behaviour and dissatisfaction with a Muses’ life – after all they could be also persons – they are vulnerable and have many issues with gender problems. When we study the history of Muses, we come across Classical mythology and learn about Muses who angered the gods. Gods were mostly depicted as personifications of something beyond the realm of any human being, the artists, and the philosophers. There then, Zeus, who fathered the Muses; they counted originally three, then advanced to six and finally to nine, had left behind a legacy that affected all human artists. The poet, the artist then added his or her own Muse, so they became ten Muses. Whatever, they have been enlarged in numbers, as a Muse has multiple personalities and how could one Muse carry all that weight of talent around with her?

Muses are foxy and erratic, wayward, uncertain, and imponderable. They steal somebody’s idea to hand it to their artist of favour. Yet, as fate plays another role of control in distribution of the application of talents, often a good idea appears and will fade out again by not being immediately adopted and it will be given to another artist. Back again runs the competitive edge of Muses, who run the lives of the artists they favour.

The Muse appears unannounced, mutates between her different attributes she chooses from, an explosive burst of colourful chain lights sparkle like a lit-up x-mas tree. It could be mild and gentle without lots of stirring and creating a great atmosphere for the creative process. Or it could be like a volcanic eruption with reflective lights of a discotheque’s global mosaic-mirror, spreading beams of colourful light effects on the stroboscopic appearing dancers.

Muses mutate, have enormous abilities to change from one material to another. In the evening she’ll animate you to read about something specific – a line of a poem or a short story by a literary great and perhaps it’ll influence your dreams. In the morning this mixing vessel of your innerness has ground down all your subconscious ingredients and a new mixture of ideas will emerge, a poem, a sketch design, a drawing, an intellectual physio-psychic composition you cannot explain at the outset, except while you work on it it’ll evolve without any rules, it’ll sit in the innermost of your being and slowly percolates thru’ your system bypassing the left side of your brain – the control freak inspector – and then dance in absolute happiness as a new creation assumes its own life, you wouldn’t have thought possible at the outset.

The word Muse relates to Music, the rhythm of the dance, the round dance. The cosmic spark creates man represented through the artist, in Classical antiquity thru’ Homer – seer of the Innerness, handed down from mythology. Salomon’s Songs comes to mind. In popular usage, myth refers to fanciful stories. In creation mythology, the world emerges from chaos to become an ordering cosmos – but a beginning has something beforehand, so there cannot be an absolute beginning. This mystery is dealt with by artists symbolically. Life was created by sound and words. Hieronymus Bosch ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ – order from disorder. The Book of Genesis. The artist depicts a homage to the cosmological myth, as he is in the midst of the creative act. See the palimpsest rock paintings in caves of South Africa and France. Delphi with practices in a cult. The Homeric Hymns laud Apollon Delphinos, god of poetry, song and dance, of prophecy, archery, healing, protection of the young, and with a lyre. Apollo and the nine Muses, who are depicted with a round dance they perform for the god. Beautiful young women, goddesses, embodiments of science, literature, and the arts. A chain of Poets and writers have been inspired by the creation of Apollo: Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Sappho, Callimachus, Strabo, Pausanias, Ovid, Virgil, Seneca, Nomus, and Aeschylos.

The Muses, (Musai in Greek), goddesses of literature, science, and the arts. Sources of knowledge had been embodied in poetry, lyric songs, and mythology. You better not challenge the Muses in a contest, as they could become viciously jealous and rob you of your voice or worse, and also could blind you, like Thamyris in classical mythology. They may turn you into chattering birds like Pierus’ daughters, who the king thought sang equally beautiful as the Muses. Apollo adopted Orpheus and taught him the skill of playing a lyre and Calliope trained him singing. Pindar said ‘to carry a mousa’ meant, ‘to excel in the arts’ Solon meant that the Muses would inspire people to do their best and were the key to a good life.

In classical antiquity up to Shakespeare, poets invoked Muses when writing poetry, to get help with inspiration, or sing directly through the author. Artistic inspiration: from inspirare – to breathe into, an unconscious burst of creativity. Inspiration or enthusiasm, came from the Muses. In religion the prophet is compelled to speak, overwhelmed by god’s voice.

In the 19th century: The poet is attuned to the ‘winds’, divine or mystical and the soul of the poet was able to receive such visions.

In the 20th century: Sigmund Freud believed to have located inspiration in the inner psyche of the artist.

In modern psychology: inspiration is generally seen as an entirely internal process.

Ancient models of inspiration: ecstasy or furor poeticus – the divine frenzy or poetic madness. It involves the whole mind and body of the artist, but is fundamentally a gift.

In the Renaissance – revival of the furor poeticus. /Ficino: Orphaic-Platonic Hymns with a Lyre performed.

Music that acts as a Muse, like Chick Corea. I listen to his Acoustic Band recordings quite often, especially when I’m in the process of creative writing. What a treasure house of inspiration the genius of this artist still is and will be.

Whether empiricist or mystical, inspiration is by its nature beyond control.

Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh – imitated the work of other artists. “Imitation is an effective driver of creativity, even for experts.”

Muses in modern literature:

Woody Allen’s ‘Alice’.

Robert Wallace: “All poets must learn from their own experiences, how to court their Muse, how to draw from the mysterious sources, whatever it is, it’s deep within themselves.”

Robert Graves’s idea on “true poets”, as devotees of the Muses in this century’s revival of a Greek idea.

Muses in Modern Art: A Muse – on one hand a fierce woman, who stood out of the constraints of society, on the other hand their role could be easily manipulated within a physical or psychological sense. Self-realized and emancipated women who used their role to distinguish themselves, often represented in sensual, often in eroticized poses.

Women who inspire –

Gustav Klimt – Emilie Flöge

Man Ray – Lee Miller

Pablo Picasso – Marie-Therese Walter

Salvatore Dali – Gala Diakonova

Francis Bacon – George Dyer

Andy Warhol – Edie Sedgwick

Rodin – Camille Claudel.

*

BOOK I

THE MUSES EVOLVE

Eroticism in Beauty and Art

Am I passionate about my work? I am as passionate about it as I am about my writings and my poetry. I am passionate about love, but to find the right partner with comparable attitudes is something I am still dreaming about. One day it will come true again, when the ravages of time have altered my viewpoint’s course. But by then I might see all from an unexpected angle, I never thought I would. Life after all is a journey, changing speed with direction; the landscape of space and time flying past the window of the mind’s express train.

Am I passionate about eroticism? Yes, indeed. I was told as a student of art that beauty is embodied in the eye of the beholder. So is eroticism, I read. I wish to discuss this with Sola, but I am restricted to write letters to her, she never answers.

I have mused that she is the choice of woman for me, suited to AyAy’s promise, who asked me before she left this planet, whom she might send me as a Muse. I answered: somebody intelligent. She chuckled with a sarcastic remark and I felt offended. I asked AyAy to find her for me and I thought she is serious in believing in the powers of the universe, where she intended to melt into. This is silly talk, I said, let’s rather make love. AyAy looked at me with her dark brown eyes that sparkled still with her alert mind, even if she felt the pain of separation hitting her and she took me to her bedroom. You are always aroused, she said, as if she felt sorry to leave good sex behind. She told me about her Persian girlfriend, an artist, she might have in mind for me. Then she cried-out in her climax, always coming first, before she encouraged me to reach my height. It was not the greatest sex we had that day, but at that time compassion had replaced the pure lustful emotions and combined them to a sounding out of a relationship, like the fading sounds of a Mahler symphony.

I had to meet Simone, who seemed to be a cultured woman, despite her taciturn behaviour. I did not know what AyAy meant with her girlfriend from Persia. However as I listened to Simone, falling in love with her and finding her sympathetic, I asked her to sleep with me. She did not refuse, but explained to me her involvement with another girlfriend. I had no qualms about gender love, being an open minded artist myself, but then AyAy’s words reverberated in my mind and I understood her. Shit! I said and Simone looked up at me. I would get involved with you, she said, but you are married.

I had to leave matters open, fled to the famous galleries to drown in art and long for my mate, I had lost to the ugly sisters of fate, I saw life like a video played before me.

The taciturn Simone has a mystical depth in her personality I wished to explore and experience, but I am afraid I cannot have that luxury of staying in London for such a long time tlo reach my goal. Besides I invited her to South Africa, but she never took me up on it.

When I met Sola, I thought that AyAy had changed her mind and sent me someone intelligent, who would communicate with me at eye level. My eyes had taken her in, clasped her in my soul, absorbed her like scented food and I wanted her immediately. No, I had entered a forbidden garden; I was caught and judged a lewd perpetrator. I will not fall onto my knees, I said aloud, just to beg her forgiveness that I desired her. Shit!

First Simone and now Sola turning taciturn. I called them ‘The taciturn Muses’.

Well now, beauty and eroticism rests in our minds. It is the way we perceive the woman, the man, the young adult and how we react to photographs, paintings and drawings and the act of lovemaking. The way we turn voyeuristic, or somebody who craves for sex, but is not aware of doing it.

I crave for certain faces, colours, ways of stimulation from the tight clad beauties in hip jeans; the way their pants slip down at their backs, when seated, or when they stretch, revealing the top of a throng that invades their pussies, as they are stimulated by someone looking at them: A wordless game of body language, showing butts and figures void of brassieres and underwear; soft and hardened nipples showing through soft tight tops. Half-clad and half denuded, it makes me ache in my chest, burn sensations into my nipples and my cock hardens. I am in love with the fetish of a body wrapped into voile or silk, being the sensual extension of a woman’s skin. I seek a favourite café, close by the fashion stores, trendy hair salons and beauty parlours, where nubile bodies parade for an exhibitionist show, stimulating their gender and the aesthetically trained eye of the artist, the poet or the budding writer. Others are left cold by the eroticist display of beauty and tuck into their generous portions of spaghetti, linguine and pesto; their stimulant for living. Mine remains beauty.

Have we suffered at present an overstimulation of our senses, through the colourful palette of an emerging Rainbow Nation?

Being suppressed since the middle Ages, at least four hundred years, the history of the Southern African continent unfolds, creating their own feasts of an erotic world within a clash of cultures. Where does it all lead? Have we arrived at the excitement of transgressing taboos? Do we as a result of denial create a new race of colourful people of all shades of the racial palette?

The hidden drawings of an ichthiophallic Min from Egyptian temples to the San artist’s depiction of excited men on cave paintings, two and a half-thousand years later, the human mind has always been fascinated with the sexual act. But before that with the magic power of the penis and vagina. One friend pointed out to me their symbolic designs, cut into stone at the western façade of St. Stephen’s cathedral in Vienna. Positioned left and right of the truncated Romanic entrance portal, are they depicting the root of all evil, or the beginning of mankind, the reason we are here and celebrate life? Indeed fascinating for any student of art history.

The early days of desire respond with sketches of sexual positions, the tradition with Indian, Chinese and Japanese drawings had been handed to the Western world. The literature of the Greek civilization and the ceramic art, with their depictions of group sex at a symposium, shows joyful faces and skilled hetaerae.

I am reading about eroticism and the cultures during the rebirth of Classical Art in the Renaissance. Giulio Romano, Madonna painter and Rafael’s chief assistant, drew sexual positions. Another artist transferred the sketches on to copperplate for reproduction. Poems of wit and free verse celebrating the new world, accompanied these rare treasures of erotic art.

I Modi comes to mind, written by Pietro Aretino, who lived in the early 1500’s. In the middle Ages, the Catholic Church through the Pope, rang bells of alarm and war erupted against the ‘satanic work’. The artists had to flee to avoid being placed on top of a stake and burned to death in a public show that stated the extermination of the evil.

The engraver Raimondi had been caught and thrown into the papal prison by Clement VII.

Aretino conducted a flourishing business from Venice, called: Literary Blackmail. Edward Lucie-Smith tells me these fascinating stories in his Ars Erotica. Can you hear Venice laughing and roaming with pleasure at a red-faced Pope? I can imagine his sated face, a harvest moon, incapable to suppress the free-thinking capital of the early Renaissance world. Aretino promises to suppress his own satires for the return of suitable amounts of cash.

The night interrupted by an alp of having to leave with the worst part: Stripped of all human rights, having to hand over all my books to the Barbarians, like a flock of sheep to the wolves. No! I protect my books with my life. At the last moment I am visited by my Muse. I am excited and aroused. I have not come for two years. I have climaxed in autoerotic love, but never ejaculated.

I read about Flaubert’s trip to Egypt, hundred years ago. He talks about Turkish baths and massage in the context of sexual pleasures, ejaculating into the back of young boy’s anuses, as they come to the point of satisfying their elder male customers for baksheesh.

I dream of Sola, calling upon her in my dream-like come. I wake to my first ejaculation. I place my arms back to enjoy the moment. It is now 30 months since AyAy’s death that I finally did not suppress the Million Dollar point any longer and let the juices of life spurt out freely onto my chest. I have no craving any longer, as I had for a long time, swallowing my own semen, tasting AyAy in the process. Her juices tasted complimentary. A bit of vanilla with asparagus overtones, as I recall it and from the obsession to taste her, kiss and devour her, being one.

Now I wake in the middle of the night, thinking about my favourite Muse: SOLA.

Sola, who is taciturn and clammed-up, never had a free sexual life. I suppose, judging from the way she moves and studying her body talk. In her mannerism she expresses sensuality, innate to her. She has not agreed to meet me once a month on a Saturday, but she has not rejected my offer either. Cerebral Sola, the Muse I cannot fuse with physically, but the one I want; the one I could treat well, giving her lots of love. I could free her from all inhibitions, but she knows that. She is afraid of such a journey and I do not blame her. I have been once afraid too, as I recited an old song, extending it to both genders: Only fools rush in, where wise men or women never go. But wise men or women never fall in love…

I am infatuated with her erotic beams and radiation of her personality that still hits me from time to time. I flee into my books on erotic literature and erotic paintings and photography. The messages are clear and stirring: Love is everything. And I return to my hero, Zen, and let him continue his monologue:

“As I have found my love in Greece, I will return there all my life, or what is left of it. The women are different, freed of all shackles of taboos. Their ruling religion is not prohibitive to sexual acts as in the Catholic religion. I enjoy the sensuality in women from Athens, who one can meet also on the islands, like on Crete. As I am attracted to them, seeking their nearness, my gutfeel tells me matching choices. Sola is sensitive, but she suppresses her sensuality. I can sense that whenever she is present. She always apologizes, to act with distance to me, as if she is unsure of herself. Or, she is sure of herself, having ulterior motives, acting that way. It is all again the ‘Gauteng Syndrome’: Lusting not for sex, but for power to have dominance in sex. It’s a fact, love it or hate it. I am sad that racy Sola fell prey to the pandemic syndrome and its placating society that rules over the behaviour of women and is screwed-up entirely.”

I wake to the shrieks of the Hadedas-Ibis and his mate, landing at an early morning’s hour on the tall fir tree, Bee calls the ‘Blood-Pine’, where the mate of the Hadedas had been killed by an opponent’s beak plunging repeatedly into his neck. After the kill, he fell onto the ground. Bee told me not to disturb his sleep, as I enquired about the huge bird, lying face down at the bole of the wild peach tree. I knew intuitively the score, went out the door and buried him below the sacred bamboo tree in the north-eastern corner of our front garden, his head facing west, as I found him lying. A week later another bird dropped dead from the same tree, further west, lying dead and facing the same way. Is this the new killer-opponent, I mused? Our front garden turning into a killing field for Hadedas-Ibis

I seek sexual relief, or is it my imagination that wishes Sola’s fingers to touch me soft and hard: In a masturbation that takes a long time, with the ebb and flow of pleasure, my imagination acting as the moon’s power of gravity, playing a huge role. Sola, the name sounding to be a sun, is rather a moon influenced child. She is like AyAy, a moon-lady and as such pulling me with subtle powers toward her. My senses are spinning. It is a concluded love. All it needs is one more meeting and I will seduce her. No. I have already seduced her within my mind. I have loved her deeply in my soul. All I need to do is to do just that. My Monday Muse used to reiterate Natalie Goldberg’s quotation: Writing is like ‘Sex, Drugs and Rock’n Roll’. Have plenty of love, feast on your favourite foods, and keep moving, let nature take over.”

Moving the hand, it’s a hand job, it’s physical. Writing is like sex, with or without a partner. It’s more fun with a partner. The favourite foods are titillating: The Muse’s lips, her face that blushes, her eyes that glow. Her lips open-up, sweet and juicy like her pussy.

If you keep moving and let nature take over, you’ll soon be in a groove, day and night. Writing is sex and thrill and Sola and I are lovers in writing. I had no opportunity yet to tell her to read Natalie’s books. Better, she would meet me and we could make love like mad, passionately and to exhaustion all day long, as we cannot yet be together all night long. How I love Sola. How I do crave for her skin to rub onto mine. AH! The scent of exotic spices, cinnamon, cardamom with peppery overtones of red chilies and a charcoal pearl tea that opens up to heat, rubbed into thundering licks of flames. A hot lava eruption. I’ll die.”

The rearranged, but familiar environment greets me, when I see Sheba’s face again. She seems less nervous than before. She must have found her soulmate, or a friend. She dresses less spiky, hiding her cobra tattoo on her back. She is all poised to turn into a civilized course director, taking me through to the study room. A black woman arrives, later two women pals, sitting opposite the dusky woman and me. We shake hands and our young literary facilitator takes us into the world of basic editing. I know some of the exercises I had before. I wanted to embrace grammar and love it as much as I love my creative writing. I succeed this time, I know it. The woman opposite me has gorgeous breasts and she flirts with her eyes. I have lewd thoughts I put off. The facilitator is a friendly chap, talking to me about his English major. We discuss Faulkner and French philosophers. I have started to read Light in August, but gave it up. I know about the banter between Hemingway and him, the two Nobel laureates.

Times look bleak, with winter setting-in and a lack of cash flow straps us in. New works in the offing have not materialized yet. I dislike the way corporate client’s operate, but that’s where the money is. What other job to pursue, but the house extensions of ‘Big Ry’? It is a real job and I am fucking around with a roof design in aluminium, nobody can execute here. Shit! It’s enough, make it steel and get the hell out of there. Colour? I dislike his black painted windows on his existing house. I will choose an aluminium look-alike finish, matching the roof sheets. Pow! I feel not on top of the world, but I have to show I do. There are many books I still want to write. It’s a disaster at present.

Finish The Spleen of Love, the voice says. Zen, you are a bit like Sharon or Sheila, dancing from one room to another, being on too many feats at the same time, exhausting yourself. Concentrate on one!

This engineer has a shaven head and a black woollen cap in winter. He looks like a sailor. Taciturn C, I call TC, is a fountain of references and connections. He knows many specialist contractors. I have to meet the tradesmen, trying to pull a fast one on me. Be careful, TC says, don’t get talked into anything. Easy for him to say, keeping at a safe distance.

I clean the table of the lounge, open the entrance door to let the warm midday sun in. Its rays beat upon the white tiled floor at the threshold, indicating time as a giant sundial.

I can feel the nippy air. Autumn has come fast as a thought. I carry shoeboxes with receipts to my library, but I never sit in any longer. It used to be the TV-room, but after the armed robbery, three black men took all the electronic equipment. The refurbished room with spaces designed for an entertainment centre and bookshelves stand on their own. I usually avoid it and in time the room became an archive for CD’s and books on Egyptology and art. I refused to replace the TV, the sound equipment and the fun of dealing with that has been cut off in me, like the TV aerial cable at the time of theft, thought to be the telephone line.

The room is the coldest in winter and although out telephone is located in there, the memories of the violent breakin have not left me entirely. Ara suffered the most, as she had been sleeping at that time. She turned into a bundle of nerves, fortunately they did no harm to her.

This morning Ara carries on mumbling in her histrionic way at day break. I am used to it by now, even if she wakes me too early. I usually sit-up in my bed and take one of the notebooks close to me and write. She strokes me like a woman stroking a horse, keen for some love. As she finished stroking me, she falls asleep. It is now years back that we made love. The attraction of our bodies faded with age. Ara has been worse off, as she has chronic medication to take that swills her body up, keeping her alive, but punishes her with access weight and obesity.

“It is hard work,” AyAy’s smile was pained, as I complimented her sexy figure of 55 years. Her strict diet made her appear in her fourties rather than fifties. Her aesthetic goals wanted a body she could accept and her good physical appearance balanced well with her mental alertness. With the mind of a crab-sun sign, she questioned everything. Despite being selective and highly critical, she loved me from an early start in our relationship. I had taken the bold step of seducing her, reading her mind correctly. I enjoyed her excuses, her timid personality, turning into a fiery one in time. Controlled by her academically trained mind, she embarked on a journey of fusing family and lover, asking me along.

She felt initially depressed, having reached a point of a sexual repression by a long marriage. She wished for a friend she could relate to in sexual freedom. The great pleasures of a freed love appealed to her, even if society labelled it depreciatingly through history as fornication.

“If we match,” she said, “then listen how the souls sing together in harmony.”

I had been lacking romance late in my life and forgetting the solitude and misery of closed societies in Africa, I thrived on falling in love with her.

“This is the first time in seventeen years,” I said and waited for her reaction.

“No,” she replied with surprise, “I have a phobia with numbers. I have been married for seventeen years. Is this a coincidence?” Her voice sounded serious as if it meant a foreboding. I shivered. She paused.

Did she place numbers together for the sake of own inner confirmation, rectifying her affairs, or is it that once in a million times two star crossed lovers merged?

Whatever, AyAy believed that we hit the jackpot, the lottery, she said, as on the streets of Athens the ticket sellers are everywhere, talking about the good fortunes being made, every seller having the winning ticket.

I finished cleaning the smoked glass table, wiping it off with a wet cloth. Morsels from our eating here, having accumulated with the shavings from my 2B pencil, I enter times of appointment into my diary. In front of the open lounge door, doves and pigeons sit like statues on branches of the wild peach tree.

“I want to feed the hungry lot,” she said, pouring boiling water over the instant coffee.

Since she developed tremors in her hands and feet, she prefers this easier method. Her nervous system had suffered badly, since the armed break-in by the gangsters, as they took her rings and valuable family jewellery from her fingers. I have written off the valuables they took from me, but I never forgive them threatening her with a gun, shocking her, causing this permanent harm. I have cursed them and I HOPE I never ever see them again. I still carry hate in me.

I muse about this unfair life, fate had in store for us. I have traced back the events to their source, where it all started and I placed the mosaic of events together, until my mind had been satisfied with the detective work.

Now I can write about it and soon with enough distance I can mould it into a story that expresses the fear of being hurt, the loss of family heirlooms and the disrespect of gangsters that grow up without a home and love. What will become of children just happening without family planning or the want for a proper upbringing?

I have quality time, if I write. The best time of the day, as I stir in a gentle awakening, nurturing erotic thoughts. I read Nedjma’s book of a sexual awakening of a Berber woman. I think of Sola, who seems not yet awakened sexually. I sense she could have a passionate sexual life, after her marriage, when her children have grown-up. I pity her to be wasted as an attractive woman and I know she’ll turn into a woman like AyAy, once she has stepped across the threshold of her repressions. I want her, I told her. She preferred silence, quoting me Karl Marx. I know it, AyAy quoted me the same chapter about causality.

I have good vibes being around her, feeling them rise in me and her image dives into my being, deeper and deeper. I am aroused by adoring her racy looks and the amber glow in her eyes, the velvet skin that changes colour in the sunlight. Her mind sparks bounce about, darting into me like passionate bites of her teeth on my skin. My nipples grow tight and burn against the moving cotton of my shirt. I am on fire for Sola and I cannot extinguish the licking flames. I do want them to burn on. It always happens, whenever she is around me. It hit me for the first time, laying eyes on her; since I reached out on impulse and took her hand, clasping her sinewy fingers in greeting her. I had fallen for her that instant. Is this love lopsided? Do I fall from the moon, hitting the ocean of fierce impossibility, as Icarus did in his tumble from the heavens?

Sola inspires me. As she looks at me, I see AyAy’s eyes in her eyes. I see AyAy’s lips pursing in her lips and I think of them clasping around my cock. No, it’s Sola I desire now, time to lay AyAy at rest, even if AyAy promised to send me a bluestocking. I transfer AyAy’s lovemaking to Sola, who indicated to me an interest. But she turned all sensual innuendos into acts of writing for me. That is what she expects from me. All my sexual longing for her I weave into my poems, my short stories and my novels.

“What do you wish to write about?” AyAy asked me, after we had made love, taking the bus to town and visit our favourite bookshops.

“I want to write about love,” I said. On impulse, she cried out to me to be daring, running across the main street, ahead of oncoming traffic. Breathless we reached the other side, the onrushing cars wouldn’t reduce their speed, and our hearts were racing by an increasing adrenaline-rush. I couldn’t yet understand AyAy, until much later. I just let my feelings thrive and my awakened instincts had taken over, when I met her. I wanted her to be happy with my efforts to love her. It became a pleasure and no effort at all. Learning to satisfy her, became the world for me and I could for the first time enjoy my own climax again that became even greater when she had reached her own sexual height before I did, the first time. For the second time she insisted we climaxed together. It took twenty-one days, called in my poems, to find the paradisiacal groove, being in love completely as one unit. For the first time since my student years I had found a union with her in mind, soul and body: The triad of sexual love, the triangulation of the senses, resembling the pyramid’s apex of human happiness.

AyAy thought of us becoming gods, as depicted in mythology, I loved. The more I loved her, the more I understood Classical mythology and the more I desired to gaze at sculptures of Classical and Hellenistic Greece.

Nedjma! The sudden appearance of an Arab woman mesmerized my senses, as I stood in front of the statue of a Nymph, taking a photograph of Ara in front of it. A stocky dark-haired woman attendant ran towards me, shouting: “No photograph.” I protested. “It’s nowhere written, and I have asked for permission at the ticket office.” The woman with hair above her lips continued: “No photograph!” I lowered my camera. The dark skinned woman came to my aide. “You are not allowed to have a person posing in front of the exhibits, taking her picture.” It made no sense to me.

“I cannot understand that,” I said, looking into her darkbrown eyes, holding mysteries and hidden promises. She smiled at my gaze, starting to talk about Greece and the Orient, which she had recently visited. I forgot about the shouting woman and the surroundings, over my sudden fascination with this racy woman, in whose eyes I stared at my denuded reflection. “I am Canadian,” she said, “traveling is one of my passions.” I smiled, following her around as all three of us admired the statue of a shepherd.

“And the other passions?” I lowered my voice as she looked into my eyes. “I think I know,” I said and Ara stepped ahead of us. She noticed my notebook, with drawings I had doodled on its cover. “You are an artist?” she gasped, touching my fingers as she took my book to look at.

“Yes,” I replied, “I draw and poetry is one of my passions.” She smiled and studied my drawing. “I know about your other passion,” she said. “I am at the Divani Palace hotel, just down Parthenonos street.” I tried to remember all the Greek names hurdled at me with such speed, I mixed up the names immediately. “I am at Vyronos…Plaka…” but she had turned and started for the exit of the Acropolis Museum. “My boyfriend is waiting for me,” she waved her hand as she raced up the marble steps. I looked at her shapely derriere, moving in a rhythmic sway. Ara returned from the ladies’ rooms. I busied myself, writing down her name. Nadjma, no Nedjma. “We can go now, Ara said and I gave up recalling the name of the woman that appeared as if AyAy would have supernatural connections, sending me dusky Muses.

“Nedjma, is an unusual name,” Ara broke the silence. I stared at her. She had remembered her name. “Indeed,” I said, “she came like a warm breeze from the desert and vanished between the ruins,” I mused. Ara looked at me, used to my mental musings.

“She reminded me of an Arab princess,” Ara said, “one I was reading about in Washington Irving’s book Tales from the Alhambra, within the magnificent gardens of the Moorish castle.

“I think, she forgot her camera,” I said, holding the tiny digital wonder on a strap around my wrist. Nedjma had asked me to take her picture and I did, ignoring the feisty woman attendant, sneaking behind a statue. Then we talked and gazed into each other’s eyes and emotions flared-up, clouding our minds: Sex in the mind stops thinking, as well as an actual happening in sex. Not for me, it makes me flourish in writing. Nedjma must have sensed that and she threw me a link to her. It must be the ancient taboo of sex across a cultural threshold that adds to the excitement. “I phone her hotel later,” I said, “which one is it?”

“I can’t remember its name,” Ara said.

“It will come to me just now,” I said, stroking the slick silvery surface of her digital gem, she had bought in Riyadh, as she had told me. The slow movements of my fingers led me think of her figure, rushing up the marble steps. The memory of her swaying hips aroused me. The intensity of the moment, diving into each other’s eyes had been like undressing to make love. It has been left uncompleted, like AyAy’s demise into the fold of the Ugly Sisters of Fate and once recognized and registered accepted into the travel through eternity.

I still felt stirred and distracted by Ara’s question if I was all right. I stammered some excuses, referring to the stale air and headed out the museum into the rectangular courtyard. I took deep breathes of fresh air.

Brooding over my story, I finished at the course, I met Sola. Her eyes met mine. I shuddered inside, a cold breeze made me tight and then as my nipples burned against the cotton of my blue Lacoste shirt, I felt as if my clothes would fall off me. I stood naked in front of her for those seconds that flashed into my mind the picture of dark eyes in whose depths I searched for her soul: Acropolis Museum, beautiful statues coming alive, mingling with us. The shouting woman clothed in a black robe, separating us and being rude, followed by the soft alto voice of an young Arab woman.

I looked confused with the first warmth of a smile from Sola. I was in love. Nonsense, I concentrated on my writing on demand, but turned my head slightly towards her, stealing glances of her eyes. I smiled inside. Those dusky eyes. I have searched for them all my life. I had never possessed them. I have never come close to love them; never as close as with AyAy, whose eyes I loved with fingertips, caressing them with my cock. I stroked across her eyelids with my crown, feeling her eyeballs vibrate onto my penis, sliding to her cheeks; she opened her eyes, as I slid down her nose and they shone as in a glassy trance. Her upper lip trembled, as she gasped; her warm breath like a soft breeze along my shaft. She touched my red crown with the tip of her lips, kissing it and her tongue slid over it for the first time. The moment she took my cock into her mouth, the warmth spread through my abdomen in a rush of pleasure. She took her time to enjoy me as much as I hungered for her fellating movements to intensify. She took my penis into the womb-like cavity and it stirred me to such an extent that I held her head, moving into it, fucking her mouth.

I felt my tension turning into an intensified pleasure. She moaned with me as I pushed into her deep cavern, feeling the tip of her throat. “AH,” she gasped, disengaging after having swallowed my spurts of semen, “you came in my mouth!” She felt excited and climbed up onto the bed, mounting me. I’ll die, I thought, but received her with lewd words of encouragement. I did not know then that I could carry-on being hard for her, until she arched her body, tensed like a bow, her head thrown back, before she climaxed again. This time, her orgasm had been greater, her juices running over me. “I am so wet, thanks to you,” she whispered in between her laboured breathing. She had been wet with desire already, before she threw her head back in her peaking. She remained there until she made me concentrate to come with her together. She rubbed my nipples and I closed my eyes, as she had taught me. It hurt me a bit at first but then the pain dissolved into pure ecstasy. Our souls flew together on wings. I saw them like a hieroglyph on the fresco painted wall of a tomb. She cried out with me together again, returning to another height. I wriggled with a want to dig deeper into her womb and she pressed down on me, pinned below her pussy and her body that fell on me, finally. Only the breathing sounded in the room. Our heartbeats matched in their rhythm. I recalled a French movie, the heartbeats linked to giant speakers, drumming out the ecstasy.

Our first orgasm reached together. That had been the prize for love for love’s sake and it could not be sweeter than this affair du Coeur, AyAy talked of as love, even if we masturbated, connected through a telephone link for love sounds.

The first time we had telephone sex, she excused herself, but added that it is now in fashion. The overwhelming chemistry of our physical matching, spread over the mental part, like hot chocolate sauce over ice cream.

We agreed on many issues about art and literature, but kept our individual opinions on our favourite heroes. While AyAy represented an impressionistic painting, she emulated in her writing, she insisted on my position as an expressionist. “Perhaps you are right,” I said to her. “You are a poet and a beautiful woman, following the lines of tradition of a hetaerae. I have an open mind and I fell in love with you to be disappointed?” She gave me a curious look and I laughed, enjoying teasing her all I could. She touched me.

“You are easy to arouse,” she said smiling. The moment AyAy touched me, my body started to boil and I became hard for her. ‘That’s because you and I are cut from the same marble,” I said and she laughed. She enjoyed teasing me, growing to be infatuated with our sexual love, as much as I did. “Hero and Leander? Star crossed lovers!” I whispered, my mind compared us with lovers from mythology.

“Which marble,” she picked up my first metaphor.

“The one used for building the Parthenon,” I said and saw the temple in front of me, with AyAy’s embodiment in one of the columns.

“Mount Pentelikon,” she whispered, “sacred, venerated by sculptors and artists. “Hero and Leander?” she whispered, as if someone would listen into our conversation. She lowered her eyes and sadness spread across her face. She leaned against my chest.

It turned out to happen in reverse to the tragic story from mythology, but I did not know about that yet. AyAy had a foreboding she did not explain to me. Twenty-one days in sexual love’s bliss, the epitome of love for love’s sake, in the immediate vicinity of the Acropolis, the Plaka and the pleasure walks through the Botanical Gardens, pushed all reality into the shadows of its lush-leafed surroundings: My daily walk through the heart of Athens, with the Acropolis rising in a lustre of sunlit pink marble, like her body that rose from her disrobing in my anticipating erotic depictions. Twenty-one days seems a long time, but when one is in love, time is flying fast like Cupid’s arrows.

Twenty Days and One, as I would call it later, as a title chosen for a book, I have written many times in my head and in some poetry. Every time I think about it, another variation springs from my forehead, as she sprung from the marbled column of the Parthenon. The descriptions are still incomplete, as the story is: I am on an odyssey, in search of a Muse with dusky eyes.

I found her! It shouted as if it would be her voice in my inside; AyAy’s voice, except that these eyes kept deep secrets in their shaded corners and her lips gleamed like dark coral, changing into purple red, like her vulva, I wished to uncover and taste.

My nose slid down her forehead, my lips tasting her olive skin for the first time. Folding my lips onto her lips of sticky sweet, spicy cinnamon and red pepper, sends me into an erotic overdrive. Sliding down on her, I push her soft top to her nape, kissing her shoulders, grooves and neck, as she throws her head back with the first waves of pleasure. My fingers touch her breasts slightly, cupping them, followed by my tongue tip upon her nipples that tighten. My lips purse upon them and I suck them like a baby sucks. She enjoys my venerating them with gasps. My fingers slide to her belly that shudders to my touches and I stroke her pubis through her panties. I feel its moisture and I lift her leg, pulling them off her, then the other, relieving her of the last barrier. I touch her vulva with my finger tip and she recoils. I slide to her toes, eating them. She lies in front of me like a Modigliani nude, stretching as more I kiss her. I touch her inner thighs and stroke her. She moans. I slide my finger onto her pussy and it slips into her lubricated vulva. I follow with my head, my fingers spread her legs. I lick her scent on my index finger that massages her until she relaxes. I am into her moving my finger deeper, then retrieve it and play her pussy with my tongue. Sweet cinnamon and cardamom tastes with the juices of asparagus and a shot of vanilla, I feast upon, she writhes and pulls my hair. I