This article accompanies the fable
Kama Sutra


Sir Richard Burton at Miramare, Trieste

Sitting on the sea wall at Miramare, Sir Richard Burton is churning the ocean and dreaming of Lakshmi above the waves.  Drinking the halahala poison and caressing his bright blue throat.  When the sunlight streams across the hills, Maximilian is on fire in Mexico and Carlota leans out her upstairs window. 

Who remembers their past lives really?  Have we forgotten ours as we remember theirs, or are we creating ours from theirs?

The Age of Iron and Chaos is upon us, Kalki riding a white horse to Banbury Cross.  The tortoise is falling into the void and the wheel will return to 1.

Sex was more intense when he was young.  Now desire comes only in the mornings, an old friend pushed aside by food, alcohol, drugs, the other pleasures…  Absurd, though, to equate sex with death as others have donne.  Why?  Orgasm does not, cannot, shorten one’s life…  In Sanskrit, nirvana means annihilation.  The candle stops flickering or is blown out.  But the waves sweeping over this sea wall are exhilarating, a reminder that sexuality and spirituality are the same.  One could just as well equate sex and orgasm with birth.  The moment when something atomic is generated in the heat of a fusion reaction.  Never had children though.  A question of fertility and grace and the long slow slide back into the sea.

Alexandre Cabanel's Birth of Venus (1863)