Tag: nature

4 minute read

Introduction to the Ageless Sexuality Series and its Origin

This month I urbanize myself in the philosophic sense with the sense of impending change. The season is changing. The government is in limbo and I live underneath my aging skin with a sense of defiance, not toward others necessarily, but toward the looming sense of fear that permeates the public spaces around me. Intimacy is shaped by the subterfuge.

Once I set foot outside the security of my car I flaneur the park, the street that leads to the ocean and then the dock around my local library. I listen to the one inside as Sam Shepard puts it in his novel of that name.

The philosopher Walter Benjamin gave voice to the state that takes over when I roam my city, intimately connecting yet maintaining distance. I check into the computer station at the library and open a piece I wrote while the pandemic was raging in Peru. I think of the last great, bone nourishing embrace with a friend there on the cobblestone street by the mercado.

Surrounded by the Andes from the north and my indigenous Quechua neighbors to the East, I watch as a new phenomenon intermittently occurs in the dark of my bedroom at night. I chafe uneasily under the alpaca blankets warming my skin against the Andean chill. Episodic memories hover after midnight. They wait, transparent to waking life on the walkway outside my cottage door. Their presence informs my dreams, and even my breathing changes when they hover at the Sacsayhuaman ruins near up the hill from my Peruvian home. The horse trainer visits me one night and we sit, me in his lap, on my patio under the Calca sky.

He saddles a Pinto. I put my boot into his laced fingers as he raises me to the level of the ride. The horse and I gallop across the pastures to the edge of the mountain behind our houses. We take a rocky path, dogs from villagers napping at our heels part of the way. We crest to a plateau, lay in the grass overlooking the valley while the horses meander chewing juicy Bermuda cud.

I return to Los Angeles with a sense of curiosity about the state of the post quarantine metropolis. I walked the beaches along the surf on a rare rainy day. In my twenties as an actor this was my city in every sense; I avoided the blase attitude that the sociologist Georg Simmel thought the defining patterns of constancy with which being a city dweller confined you. It was a survival mechanism, he thought, that kept you from being overwhelmed. I didn’t need that in my twenties and now in the last third of my life it doesn’t seem to be available. And then, a stranger at a Tango lesson tales my hand and leads me toward a place my body drinks in the dance. Unspoken, ageless, a form of primal movement requiring trust. What does the flux we’re in mean for us 21st century inhabitants of cities around the globe? Where is our psychic suit of protection? Is it in the small gesture? Does it transcend time?

I find solace in my roots. I learned as a child the fluidity of nature because I was surrounded by pastures and wet weather creeks and cows and forests that yawned fluid and flexible as an umbrella over my budding sense of self. I call forward the dexterity of my rural youth today as I drive along ribbons of traffic, sit amidst the well and the struggling, allowing the one inside to shift the gears, turn the wheel and apply the brakes when necessary. The perceptions of the urban flaneur penetrate the Now with shades of gray, leaving the extremes of black and white as night seeps in gradations across the sky to day.

As I prepare each week’s new work for Limit Experience Magazine’s Ageless Sexuality series, I feel the work turn from dark to light and back again, sometimes with humor and ever punctuated with moments of quiet, stillness, and rage. No judgement, just lived experience opened to the digital page. The work, new and old brings me joy, contemplation and sometimes rubs against me. evening out rough spots it elucidates change, the only guarantee in life.

After all, perspective is everything; when on the way to meet a friend, Uruguay refused my American passport. Shortly after a long ride into dawn, I stood in the border station watching the bus drive away. Several motorcyclists offered me a ride. We stopped and bought I ought a helmet, slung a leg over a tall stranger’s Harley and the took me to the nearest airport. I took a plane to my friend’s mountain town where we spent several days together. We ate nectarines in the shaft of sunlight over the sheets and communicated through out translation devices about our lives as parents, as visual artists and as new friends we bridged vast gaps on time. I never met his daughter but since I had seen her the year before in my vision in the desert of Joshua Tree I felt I knew her. I never told the man about this earlier meeting. The clock didn’t exist in that space but our connection somehow expanded even as I left post breakfast a week later. The liminal world can do this just as literature can. Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote a book about the kidnappings that took place in Argentina and I read it after I left the man. I went South to the end of the continent and in that city felt his presence and then eventually he again appeared. He’d been handed a Paris assignment and his plane stopped in Buenos Aires where I was lodged at their Congreso. I walked endlessly tracing paths I knew he had taken when he lived there when his daughter was a baby. I got messages he was nearby but I had immersed myself in Marquez; I missed his visit and have not seen him since. Perhaps I write submission calls for Limit Experience Magazine about the dynamics of this time curious about others’ rendezvous with timelessness and love.

The Strange Hotel, Buenos Aires, Photo Credit: Nicolas Guerrero

A little about the writers you’ll meet; In the next few weeks you’ll have poetry and fiction and nonfiction through which to flaneur with men and women of many different perspectives:

Bio: ANDREIA RODRIGUES

Andreia Rodrigues, author of Sin & Other Stories, is a Brazilian writer based in Europe. Alongside her work in erotica, she has written a memoir, a romance novel, and a collection of autobiographical essays. Her work has appeared in literary collectives such as Bare Back Magazine and Feminine Collective. Through fiction and autobiographical narratives her writing is dedicated to helping women heal and transcend.

Bio: DIANE FUNSTON

Diane Funston lives in Marysville, CA and is originally from Rochester, NY. She began writing in adolescent angst which ultimately led her to a degree in English from CSU San Marcos. Diane has been published in numerous poetry journals. Her first chapbook was published by Foothills Publishing in 2022

BIO: LINDA MALM

Linda Malm was published as a teen and only returned to poetry after she retired as a college dean. She won a competition to write with the Robert Redford/NM Film Board enterprise and now is publishing poetry. In 2023 Kelsay Books published her first chapbook, “Winded from the Chase.”

BIO: JOHN DAVIS

John Davis is the author of Gigs, Guard the Dead and The Reservist. His work has appeared in DMQ Review, Iron Horse Literary Review and Terrain.org. He lives on an island in the Salish Sea and performs in several bands.

BIO: ANDREW PARKINSON

Andrew Parkinson lives and writes fiction in Vancouver, Canada. His recent work has appeared in DarkWinter Literary Magazine, Porch Literary Magazine, and a ‘long short story’ in The Write Launch. Forthcoming writing will appear in Queen’s Quarterly and Gaslamp Pulp.