The phantasia sexualis

Sex takes us into a world of intense passions, sensual delights, subtle emotions, layers of meaning, and realises our wildest fantasies. Sex requires art, attention to details, and a vivid imagination. It requires a the humility of the artist or devotee to receive rather than force an outcome. For beyond sexuality is a whole world of sexual meaning and to invoke fantasies with vibrant detail like any narrative that carries the feel of life and the verbal experience more visceral. Within them we will find the roots of our desires and sources of our satisfactions.

The sexual fantasy is infinitely elastic compelling us with new characters, images, and often, contradictory ideas. Like dreams, they expand, enhance, exaggerate, or distort reality, shedding inhibitions the unashamed unconscious swiftly moves in unaccustomed ways and means. Entertain the impossible. It is an art that requires imagination. And living with a degree of artfulness, as the ancients believed, we attract the various spirits that we need to live a full human life, including the sexual spirit.

Sex reveals the nature of our deepest desires and yearnings. What pleasures us — gentle sex, aggressive sex, acrobatic or inventive sex, fondling and fixating on body parts, all kinds of kissing, private or public acts — reveals who we are, our unconscious nature, our complexes, beliefs, and inhibitions. For like everything that is human, the sensations so deeply linked to sex cannot be separated from imagination. We are always living the narrative and perceiving with imagination. Although sensation is fully grounded in physical perception, it is nevertheless determined by fantasy. Our sexual fantasies help us explore our beliefs, direction, and individuality. Fantasies lead to physical relationships, marriage, and parenthood. Conversely, they may even draw us away from bad relationships and marriages when the fantasy becomes unfulfilled. Our challenge in life is to look past the narrative to perceive the world that lies within and beyond the obvious. We need to take our desires seriously but not literally; to fantasise vividly while taking apart the fantasy and examining it closely. The point of diaries, drawings, poetry, and other forms of artistic endeavour is to confront our desires on our own terms and reduce our own confusion between reality and fantasy. The artistic expression of fantasy can be so vivid and engaging that they effectively become the raw material that transmutes imagination to reality. The paper or page thus becomes the crucial medium for this alchemy in which the very self is as stake.