a vore kinkster, i see now
I donāt know if youāre new to this blog but on the off chance you are please bear in mind that my often v theatrical and ridiculous levels of excitement in the tags sometimes need to be takenā¦not literally.
Also while I have no interest in actually consuming another human being letās not ignore the fact that the endless links and parallels (literary, philosophical, religious) that can be drawn between desire / devotion and consumption are not incredibly varied and fascinating.
Food and love? Intimately linked, literally; from the moment weāre born, our very first meal is an inseparable union of food and love: it is warmth, security, connection, fullness and satiety, all in one gesture. It is our āwelcome to earthā. Itās a memory that, I think, carries over into everything. Anyone who has spent any time around babies or young children knows (with a great deal of panic) that their primary method of exploration, without fail, is to put literally everything in their mouth. It becomes a way to measure the world.
from Natalia Andrievskikhās āFood Symbolism, Sexuality, and Gender Identity in Fairy Tales and Modern Womenās Bestsellersā
It is also echoed by Levinas:
āThis sinking oneās teeth,ā he writes āinto the things which the act of eating involves above all measure the surplus of the realityā
Hunger is a yardstick. Food is unifying. We make peace by ābreaking breadā, by sharing a toast. Countless cultures the world over but every single one of them shares that. Eating together is communion. Ā Cooking together an even more intimate communion, taking forkfuls from your own plate to feed someone else? Itās what newlyweds do with the first slice of cake. In Amharic you commonly urge someone to take the food you offer them Ā with ābemoteāā Ā if you donāt take this Iāll die. It is, literally, a life-giving gesture. Itās one of the most generous forms of tenderness I know.
Little babies and animals are so cute and impossibly adorable we want to āeat them upā (thereās science behind it: itās called dimorphus expression, or Cute Aggression. Similar sentiments include: desire to pinch, squash, crush. Itās essential to keeping us balancedāalso alive.)
āOh, please donāt go ā weāll eat you up ā we love you so!ā say Maurice Sendakās Wild Things.āPlease donāt go, Iāll eat you wholeI love you so, I love you so, I love you soPlease donāt go, Iāll eat you wholeI love you so, I love you so, I love you so, I love you soā echo alt-j, over and over like an incantation in ābreezeblocksā
and while weāre on Sendak:
Meaning, in order to be made, must be devoured. We ādrink inā words, we ādigestāĀ and absorb and āsavourā them. Artists, I think, do it almost pathologically. There is hunger - hunger for what? That could be anything, but the point is: the hunger is there - Ā and when the art is true it is fueled by devotion, fueled by near maddening, impossible love.
āMy reading a kind of eating,ā says Li-Young Lee in āThe Cleavingā, āMy eating a kind of reading.ā
āWhat is it in me would / devour the world to utter it? Ā What is it in me will not let / the world be, would eat / not just this fish, / but the one who killed it, / the butcher who / cleaned it. [ā¦] would eat it all / to utter it.ā
And as for thee language used to describe sexual desire: the language of hunger, unequivocally: someoneās āthirstyā, you āeat them out,ā sexual appetite is voracious, insatiable, unquenchable. Anything less feels flat, lukewarm, insincere and, most notably, inaccurate. Love, says Sylvia Plath āgnaws [us] throughā.
The list is endless. I donāt want to go on and on; there are others far more talented who have put it far better than I could:
The entirety of Helene Cixousā āLove of the Wolfā for a start:
āFor us, eating and being eaten belong to the terrible secret of love. We love only the person we can eat. The person we hate we ācanāt swallow.ā That one makes us vomit. Even our friends are inedible. If we were asked to dig into our friendās flesh we would be disgusted. The person we love we dream only of eating. That is, we slide down that razorās edge of ambivalence. The story of torment itself is a very beautiful one. Because loving is wanting and being able to eat up and yet to stop at the boundary. And there, at the tiniest beat between springing and stopping, in rushes fear. The spring is already in mid-air. The heart stops. The heart takes off again. Everything in love is oriented towards this absorption. At the same time real love is a donāt-touch, yet still an almost-touching. Tact itself: a phantom touching. Eat me up, my love, or else Iām going to eat you up. Fear of eating, fear of the edible, fear on the part of the one of them who feels loved, desired, who wants to be loved, desired, who desires to be desired, who knows there is no greater proof of love than the otherās appetite, who is dying to be eaten up, who says or doesnāt say, but who signifies: I beg you, eat me up. Want me down to the marrow. And yet manage it so as to keep me alive. But I often turn about or compromise, because I know that you wonāt eat me up, in the end, and I urge you: bite me. Sign my death with your teeth.ā
and while weāre on that, Simone Weil:
āThe great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operationsā¦Children feel this trouble already, when they look at a cake for a long time almost regretting that it should have to be eaten and yet are unable to help eating it. It may be that vice, depravity and crime are nearly always, or even perhaps always in their essence attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at. Eve began it. If she caused humanity to be lost by eating the fruit, the opposite attitude looking at the fruit without eating it, should be what is required to save it.ā
There is Angela Carter (The Erl-King):
Han Kang, (The Vegetarian):
āHe held her at the waist and stroked the mark, wishing he could share it with her, that it could be seared into his skin like a brand. I want to swallow you, have you melt into me and flow into my veins.ā
Catherynne M. Valente (from Deathless):
ā I said: I could be a wolf for you. I could put my teeth on your throat. I could growl. I could eat you whole.ā (from The Bread We Eat in Dreams)
Robin Coste Lewis, (āPlantationā):
Kenneth Rexroth (āWhen We With Sapphoā):
Kim Addonizioās āFirst Kissā in which the topography of hunger and desire is quietly drawn full circle:
Maram al-Massri (Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor):
Maggie Nelson (Bluets, 206):
ā[ā¦] it became clear that I would lose you, or that I had already lost you, that you were āetched into my heartāā I may not have known then that āetchā derives from etzen or erzjanāto be eatenābut in the days since I have come to know the full meaning of the root.ā
Li-Young Lee (āThe City in Which I Love Youā):
Food and desire frequently overlap in Shakespeareās Othello: the language of sexual desire is, as always, the language of the feast ā Desdemona is āhoneyā, āpalate of my appetiteā, āfood [..] luscious as locustsā. According to Iago she willĀ ābegin to heave the gorge, disrelish and abhor the Moor.ā
thereās Jeanette Winterson (Written on the Body):
and Marguerite Duras (Hiroshima Mon Amour):
and this stunning excerpt by Julio CortƔzar (Hopscotch):
Andal and religious fervour (from Autobiography of a Goddess):
Simone Weil, again (Waiting for God):
and while weāre on that see also: Catholicism
see also: Hannibal ( @bluebeardsbride collection of posts and analysis on this is simply marvelous)
and keeping with horror, whatās more seductive in Western popular culture than the enduring, insidious excess of the vampireās hunger? The sheer breadth of the fears and anxieties they contain is endless, but that hunger ā transgressive, monstrous and shameless ā Ā both fascinates and repels us. You can read so much into the act of biting and draining your victim of blood, but there is an undeniably erotic element to it:
āShe seemed like a nightmare of Lucy as she lay there; the pointed teeth, the bloodstained, voluptuous mouthāwhich it made one shudder to seeāthe whole carnal and unspiritual appearance, seeming like a devilish mockery of Lucyās sweet purity.āĀ (Bram Stoker, Dracula)
and Nina Cassian (The Young Bat):
This, even with the inherent violence, reads like a sacrament. It is, for better or worse, communion. And so much of love and desire is about some sort of communion. āI donāt want you there, I want you here.ā And whatās the most intimate and lasting communion than:
āto be hungered after / to be taken inside anotherās warm mouth / to alter his atlas of desireā (Zakia Henderson-Brown)Ā
To me, that is the epitome of āI want you hereā. At itās peak the boundaries blur: inside and outside is one and the same. The circle closes. Literally. And once thatās done itās yours forever.
(Sarah Clear, āDinner For Two: Sexual Desire, Reciprocity, and Cannibalismā): The above is a literal take but for me it really isnāt about that; it is the motivation behind it ā the kind of blindingly intense, utterly consumptive (hello) desire that makes you want something that badly. Thatās what Iām completely floored by in Georges Batailleās āA kiss is the beginning of cannibalismā.
Hunger is the most primal need. Everything circles back to that, always, whether political or erotic. To be wanted beyond want, to be desired at a level of pure necessity ā that is intense asf. Who wouldnāt want that? As Erica Jong says:
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