Christine Gabrièlle

This post is quote-heavy.

There were so many great sequences of thought that I couldn’t split up. I was screaming “Yes! YES!!” every few lines. Even sent a voice note to a friend.

I tried really hard not to read the entire piece to my friend in that voice note, and I tried really hard to limit my quotes here, but these were just too powerful not to be plucked off the page and placed onto this screen.

Ladies and gents… Audre Lorde.

“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.” (pp. 28-29, author’s italics) 

adrienne notes that the above quote is one of the essential concepts that will guide and shape the book.

“Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision—a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered. Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. And the lack of concern for the erotic root and satisfactions of our work is felt in our disaffection from so much of what we do. For instance, how often do we truly love our work even at its most difficult?” (p.29)

I really like the perspective of pursuing pleasure in all aspects, especially when it comes to our work. A lot of times, we get jobs because we have a need for money (to pay bills or whatnot), because our families have pressured us into specific fields, because it looked good on TV. But what work would fulfill us, what work would we—even when it’s difficult—truly love that we do?

I think that’s a good place to pursue a career change from. What work would truly be a conscious decision—a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered—like, I go into work grateful that I get to do this work and I leave empowered by the work that I did?

“The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need—the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.” (p.30)

“As women, we need to examine the ways in which our world can be truly different. I am speaking here of the necessity for reassessing the quality of all aspects of our lives and of our work, and of how we move toward and through them.

The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.” (p.30)

“There are frequent attempts to equate pornography and eroticism, two diametrically opposed uses of the sexual. Because of these attempts, it has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical… In the same way, we have attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to feel nothing.” (p.30) 

[Ascetic: practicing strict self-denial as a measure of personal and especially spiritual discipline]

When discussing “Who taught you to feel good?” I mentioned how growing up religiously leaned heavily into self-denial when talking about how I learned, through coaching, that I had permission to pursue pleasure despite what I was brought up in church to believe.

“This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.” (p.32)

My God! Audre Lorde, right now, is speaking to me! [direct quote from my audio recording as I was reading this piece for the first time]

“To refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience, and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd.” (p.34)

I’ll just leave this right here for you to ponder.

🖤