The erotic burns images into our soul. Or does it simply mirror them? This happens at an unexpected moment when an image, word or sound ignites a deep feeling completely out of the blue. It takes us by utter surprise, the body reacts without the mind’s interference, and we just know it is a pure and ancient event. It is like falling in love with a stranger or recognising our life-partner or a relationship from another lifetime or dimension. It is a moment when real sincerity burgeons and we make contact with ourselves outside the restrictions of social structure and norm, beyond all the layers. This is our true nature. It is feminine, yielding, at peace naturally. It is transformative karma if we can allow the feelings to fly. 

It is sad and shocking that in a developed world dominated by masculinity and competition the erotic has become enmeshed with sex and pornography, the consumerization of human feelings. Eros is the god of true love, of the coming together of two souls. Strong feelings often lead to demonstrative behaviour – standing up and shouting, murder, betrayal, the giving of oneself totally, suicide – but so what. Why is the human body and its ability to merge with another so shocking? It is reduced to an object by the constant witness that polices the intellect arm in arm with the Law and Organised Religion.

Suddenly an apparition in a film brings tears to my eyes, my throat tightens and my heart beats rapidly. I cannot believe it is me shedding tears watching a screen in a comfortable seat. She is a middle-aged widow dressed in chic Chanel black, hair coiffured immaculately, stocking seams straight, sipping at champagne, and behind her is the heals of the Eiffel tower.

A man she doesn’t know walks towards her to look at the view and her. He gets closer and they strike up conversation briefly, he lighting her gold-filtered cigarette though he doesn’t smoke. Then she gives him her card with long coral-lacquered fingernails, and tells him to ring her any time after 5:00. He is mesmerised and so are we as we watch. We know nothing of either story except their suffering and isolation which has attracted them to each other.

His visitor status in Paris is nil – living in a filthy cheap hotel, all his possessions stolen from him while he slept on a bus, and forced to work for his keep for the owner as a night-watchman. His whole purpose is to see his young daughter again after his mother has brought a restraining order against him so he writes a perpetual letter to her and stalks her. But one day he takes up the woman’s invitation.

Roles are reversed and she makes all the moves in the hallway, dangling kisses which disintegrate him, undressing him, confronting his habitual domination and taking him. She holds him back with the force-field of her eyes while revealing his erect flesh to the brush of her lips, unconditionally releasing his pent-up seed and then bathing him lovingly. There are neither questions nor answers, no parameters based on time or space, and the social conditioning is a priceless vase dropped on marble from a great height.

Two foreign angels are released from their tight protein ropes in the City of Light. They allow each other to fully embody their divine essence in the dark apartment, and all the synthetic layers, the spots and spores of differentness planted by urbanisation, drop away.

They are Greek gods of love just like Eros and they can walk around among us. The visible and the invisible are one.