Praying Mantis

“Praying Mantis,” he said then and his voice was rich and sticky like something you would have to chew for a long time before it melted on your tongue.

She looked to where he was pointing. A tiny brown stick swayed back and forth on a branch. It had seemed like just another stick in a nest of them, but she could now make out it’s outline, and further along the branch another, slightly larger mantis.

“I thought it was just the stick insects in here, but it seems they got a couple of these guys trapped along with all the others.”

“What others.”

“You don’t see them? There are hundreds of them.”

He pointed randomly at different branches. She felt her brow furrow. Relaxed her forehead. She didn’t want him to notice that she needed glasses but refused to wear them. She wanted him to see her without her flaws, dressed in her finest cotton frock, stockings, the exciting tug of her suspenders humming like a harpstring under the breezy skirt.

“You just need to see the leaves in a different way. They are not leaves at all. They are wings. Can you see them?”

Then suddenly she could. It was so obvious in fact that she couldn’t believe that she hadn’t seen it before. So many of the leaves were not leaves. So many of the sticks were not sticks. She noticed the tiny eyes, the hairlike feelers, the stiff legs stretched out at odd angles. She took in a breath of air and the new information coursed through her like oxygen. Nothing was what it seemed to be. She looked up at the man through a tangle of insects and wondered what secrets the calm mask of his chiselled face might be hiding.

“I think the mantis is about to mate.” He said, nodding slightly, staring intently at the drama which was about to unfold before them.

“Don’t the girls eat the boys after mating? I think I heard that somewhere.”

“Yes, sure. But it is more sinister than that. Sometimes the girl will bite off his head at the beginning of the mating. The body of the boy will continue to mate as if it is alive. A zombie Mantis you could call it, and even more surprising, if the amorous couple are disturbed, the headless male will sometimes play dead, falling to the ground and lying perfectly still until the threatening creature has wandered safely away, only to leap up and continue to fuck as if it were alive and well when really it is a dead thing, playing dead, then playing life again, and making new life in the process.”

“That’s awful. How do you know stuff like that?”

“I’m an entymologist.” He stepped around the glass tube, held out his hand.

“Dr Ellsworth. I work at the university.”

The research

When we talk about sex it becomes meaningless. Even here on the blog it is only the fiction or creative non fiction that sings. We cannot describe that which must be felt in the body. We can talk about the body and the meaning that is contained within it. We can talk about the language of sex and I can tear my writing apart, but honestly you can only feel it and as soon as you think about it it stops being sex at all.

When I am sitting in a cafe writing about sex I only know it is working when I surface, breathless, trying to maintain composure. It is like a wave of words takes me and plunges me into the heart of the sexual experience. I recapture the build towards orgasm. Occasionally, rarely but once or twice I have let my body continue to its secret climax. This is the sex research, the real thing, this riding the wave and letting it tumble me into the sea bed.

If you ask me what my research is like I would have to tell you it is so removed from sex that I might be talking about laying carpet. I feel the buzz of it in my temple and I find it difficult to equate it with what I do in the work. So what do I get from all this surface chatter. Some way to contextualise what my body knows without thinking. My words on the page are just a conduit for my body to speak its language. This sex research is like a fig-leaf, something that obscures the true wonderful physical nature of the act.

I sit in a state of anxiety, knowing that this whole new framework of study may be swept out from beneath me. I wonder if I will still read those articles I printed, the book by Angela Carter, the encyclopedia erotica. Maybe not. I will plunge into the words instead, let the authors take me with their words, the real erotic experience, the books that make me come. I will learn b reading fiction. This is what I do best. I tell myself therefore that it is alright if they take it all away from me, but I find I am curled up on the floor anyway, beside my bed, as I used to curl up as a child. I cannot enjoy the good things that are happening because the fear of failure is equally as overwhelming as my love of sex.

Feeling sexy

Just because it involves your genitals does not mean it is sexual. The examination, your breast squeezed between the glass plates like a hunk of meat. Your labia spread and held open with a metal device. Your sexual history pored over in minute detail. The cold and clinical non-sexual going over is not conducive to sexiness.

And yet there is the examination of your breast, the piece of meat squeezed relentlessly between glass plates while that person, that significant other watches, detatched but vigilant. Your labia spread and held open, an examination, the cold chill of metal in that hot part of you, the spreading of the metal fingers and that other, looking, poking, exploring inside. Your sexual history held open to be devoured by hungry eyes, one hand on their clit or cock, one finger turning the page, licking turning.

So sexy? It is all in the way you look at it, I suppose.

Dream houses

I had a dream last night and I just can't shake it. I owned a house. It was something I had just purchased, I think. When my friends came for dinner it seemed like a warming. There were spiral staircases everywhere, nothing was finished. The walls were missing in places. When I tried to find a large saucepan to cook pasta there were only tiny things. I had to break the pasta into smaller and smaller pieces, putting it strand by strand into a miniature pot of boiled water. There were a lot of friends to feed. We would have had to eat in shifts. I still felt proud of the grand decay of the house but I realised then that it had been an impractical purchase.

Then the dream changed, perhaps time had passed or maybe I woke and then settled back again to sleep. In this new part of the dream it was a Saturday. I was on the beach which seemed to stretch out to an exquisite ocean. The house overlooked the sand. The weather was perfect. There were dozens of people on the shore. Some of them climbed up onto my veranda. There were too many of them. I tried to convince them to leave my house alone but there were too many missing walls and the revelers continued to pour inside.

I know what the dream means but I don't know what to do about it. I recognise the feeling of invasion, people streaming in before the walls are shored up. I know that what I own is grand yet incomplete, not yet ready to share, even with my friends.

It is indeed grand, this sex project I have begun and yet I feel incapable of defending it. My impulse is to walk back to the beach where the weather is perfect. My longing is for the shallows, and then beyond that for a place of drowning.

exposure

The one thing this kind of daily exposure does is force you to be less critical. I wonder what the blogging does. Is it just self-indulgence? Even as I write this a chorus of faceless readers yell out 'yes' and I cringe. So what it does therefore is force me to write with little self-judgement, to face my doubts, to put myself in the firing line and learn to duck effectively. It doesn't matter if anyone reads it, this is an exercise in playing chicken. I am standing on the track and holding my arms out. I am naked and there is a train hurtling towards me. If I don't destroy myself with self-doubt I will survive this process. All the criticism that the world can throw at me has already been stared down. I go to face yet another committee tomorrow. I am supposed to defend my project, my process, myself. I stand naked and defenseless but at least I am familiar with that pose. I do it here on the blog every day and no one has killed me yet so I suppose I will survive whatever tomorrow will throw at me.

Back to it

I have printed out a heap of things that might help me sort out my relationship to the language of sex. A pile of stuff and yet I haven't had a chance to read even one essay. I have had my hands in the guts of it up to the elbows, words staining my skin like beetroot. Beside me The Sadeian Woman by Angela Carter remains unopened. It has been all breasts and arse and cunt for so many days that perhaps a bit of theory will feel like some small relief. Certainly I might have something better to talk about here than the day-in day-out of my turbulent moods. Tomorrow I face the committee and after that I might cry a bit before finding something new to think about.

committment

This commitment to writing a post about sex every day did not take into count how unsexy university can be. At this point in it all - emotional crossroads - there is nothing happening in my body at all. No sleep, no creative work to speak of, just an endless self-protective argument, and you know what? None of it matters. If you stand far enough away, I am just a slab of meat with genitals attached. Soon enough I will die and the genitals will stand for nothing. I have not and probably will not procreate. I am the last of a genetic line. The genetics of my line are flawed and should not be replicated. But that is okay because from this distance I am no more than a flash at the end of a replication of cells. What I think and what I say and what I create means nothing and never will mean anything. If an asteroid were to plummet into the earth right now you would not miss any of it. Crazy even wasting time thinking of it. Meaningless and then you die so what is the big problem?

The books. See the books mean something. They mean something to me. Salinger and Fitzgerald and Nabokov. But when I am dead that meaning is negated and I will die soon enough. I am dieing a little everyday. He talks about Kipling. I know nothing about Kipling and I feel a rush of wonder. More things to discover. A tiny flutter of sense in senselessness. But then I open my eyes in the morning and I stare up at the ceiling and I wonder why I am dragging myself out of bed anyway.