I.
I’ve been looking into what it means to be ‘happy and harmless’ when the rubber meets the road.
It obviously means both absence of sorrow and malice as feelings, both the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings. Somehow it helps me to think of this in subtractive (rather than additive) terms. Knowing what is not there, makes evident what is there in its place (feeling good, a felicity and innocuity, all the way to an enjoyment & appreciation).
II.
Based on my learnings from the WomanFromNov, I made a pact with myself to be as honest as to my desires as possible with any subsequent woman. No games, just being frank from the get go. The idea being that if there’s a mismatch in our desires, we can part ways amicably instead of wasting weeks/months playing layered narratives.
Onfray’s Solar Erotics (link) perfectly captures this. So, I thought, if there’s no ‘mutual attraction’ (which is what I’d want, normally) from the get go, we can just go our ways.
III.
But Onfray’s Solar Erotics overlooks the ‘happy and harmless’ part. By playing the Solar Erotics game, I’m still be operating under the paradigm of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings, and in particular the ‘good’ feeling of (unilateral) attraction, which doesn’t feel good at all. This attraction (an instant hedonic pleasure) is one final aspect of the socialized desire I had been holding on to, and now – with the sincere intent to be happy and harmless (because duh) – I’m ready and willing to decline it once and for all. And open myself to intimacy aka. ‘closeness’ akin to the immediacy of my PCEs (link).
I quite like all of this. Contrary to what I had thought, it is radical … and I like being radical.