April's Artistic Challenge Day 28: Art As Love-Making

(warning: somewhat erotic content follows)

As I reflect on the artistic process this morning, there is a degree of eroticism and sexuality that leap to the fore. Just as the most erotic moments of our own lives have involved various rhythms and tempos, so, too, does the artistic process--in its ultimate manifestation--also involve various rhythms and tempos. Good art, like good sex, is not meant to be a mechanical repetition of one type of movement or expression repeated ad nauseaum.

For instance, have you ever heard a new album by an artist that you have enjoyed over the years, and you cna literally hear them 'going through the motions?' To me, that is like sex that is mechanical. Someone hell-bent on trying to repeat their former glory is trying to recreate a moment than can never be. Good art, like good sex, demands that we be involved in the present to a degree that time does not enter the equation: we are not going somewhere (trying to get off, trying to create some 'thing;' nor are we trying to re-create a moment or 'thing' we have already been and done--no matter how fond we may hold it all in our memory).

Presence. This is what is required. And when Presence is in its fullness and immediacy, there is no time. Art becomes timeless. Love-making becomes timeless. Traces of Eternity enter into our art and our sex, our creating and our erosicizing. No past. No future. No history to overcome. No goal to achieve. Just this. This fullness that ebbs and flows, that rocks and rolls, that rises and falls, that undulates and oscillates. Just this Timeless Dance of Many Faces relishing their Eternal Nature; re-membring their own Timelessness in, as, and through one other.

And if we are fully present so that Presence outshines any and all reflections in time, then who we are and what we are doing--whether making love or making art--become these processes imbued with Timelessness to a degree that others are left feeling some unmistakable something. The audience tastes the Timeless. Our lover transcends the vagaries of time and the ticking-tocking of a world running out of time. Meaning, that to the degree we are embodied Presence as we flow in the fluid mediums of sex and/or art we embed a Realization of THAT in the ecstasy of its transmission.

It's why good sex and good art are both widely known as capable of inducing 'mind-blowing' experiences. Time falls away. Every 'thing' falls away and there is just this openness.... just this clearing... just this... horizonless vista of unfettered awareness resting in its own eternality.