The Brown Phoenix: An Erotic Dialogue from The Indies
I have recently edited what I believe to be some of the most beautiful and psychologically valuable erotic writing I’ve read in many years. If you are more reserved re your sexuality, this book is not for you. However, if you would like to partake of a very honest and explicit spiritual, psycho-sexual self analysis, this is a beautiful book written equally by a man and a woman.
This is my foreword and book cover below that.
This writing is cathartic and intensely erotic. It is excerpted from 10 years of a couple’s personal correspondence. During my sessions with the man, this ruthless self-expose was revealed to me and it was evident that the catharsis had ascended the realms of Art. He expressed an interest in publishing as will be seen during the discourse. When asked why, he said he believed it would help other people come to terms with their own psycho-sexual spiritual selves and, tongue in cheek, he claimed he has exhibitionist tendencies.
I was convinced to assist because I think he is right on all counts. It has been a privilege and challenge to edit, and still leave intact, the raw power of this naïve, erotic art. Great Art has many levels and no one person can say art is great, that determination is made by a ‘mass’ of perceivers, but I can say that this art is between good and great. I determined to help push it up the ladder and add an element common to all great Art, the ‘abstract’. I have not created the story between X and Y or a literal, chronological correspondence. Hopefully, the abstract envelope in which I have set this work allows access to tiers of readers – the purely sexual and the Erotic. People are born one or other and I’ve found my role seems to be that of easing erotic people through life because their journeys are often more challenging – they ‘think-feel’ more. I hope I have done this folio justice.
Men certainly feel intensely and deeply, but few I know have all four of the other prerequisites for producing stuff such as you are about to experience – the inspiration, the gift of expression, the ability to transcribe it and the will to manifest it. The partner has gifts of her own; she is the man’s love and together they have created art of more than one kind. I believe writing like this is committed by writers who have no option but to commit it. And Art inspires Art. The fourth piece, ‘After 50 Years’, was inspired by the woman’s re-telling of an excerpt from Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things”. Shades of Scheherazade…
In the ‘developed world’, the work also exposes a paradox for western popular culture because although the dominant voice is male, it is not the controlling entity. That role belongs to the female half of the partnership whose permission to publish was granted.
The Sexes appear as they do in nature, opposite and complementary with roles and attached social mores sometimes blurred. As with all such writing, expect to see/enjoy/ recoil at your own emotional life as you read this relentlessly honest mix of poetry and prose. Any evolutionary advantage of such emotions is still largely a mystery… and tell me you don’t recognise Kali in the epilogue.
S. Lowe
MBBS, BES(Hons), MASocSci/TRIP
Editor”
Original Cover Photography: “The Phoenix” by Vojko Kalan
Copyright © Vojko Kalan @PublicDomainPicture