1. How do you describe sensual pleasure ?
(That which you feel, that which you share in.)

Only by the recollection of concrete examples…

A solitary glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, suddenly empty and cold in the hand, swallowed at the foot of the Samaria Gorge, legs still trembling from the descent. My first chocolate crepe devoured in a café in Vinohrady, inhaling a friend’s cigarette smoke, while both of us attentively watched the waitress hover. The last stretch of the day, from outspread toes to fingertips. Mashed potato and onion gravy, eaten while wearing an old cardigan, with the curtains drawn on a midwinter afternoon, watching ’Jason and the Argonauts’. The hug of a guitar under the armpit, bass notes resonating somewhere deep in the ribcage. A slow exhalation of marijuana through both nostrils, spiralling like the tusks of narwhals, a hummingbird in the forehead. One wide stroke, from shoulder to thigh, the flex of nipples, warm and brown under the wool of a winter jumper, loosed breasts, taut with Goosebumps at the bus-stop, while Diana Ross sings, "When will I see you again ?" inside my head. A kiss in the cold, holding hands by an autumn bonfire, the air alive with the smell of fried onions and gunpowder. Always one chocolate less than satisfied. Moments of engulfment, entombment and submergence.

The stuff of poetry, the stuff of life.

2. Do you think that, beyond pleasure, orgasm and its enjoyment, there are particular conditions in which the sexual act brings sensual pleasure about ? What are they ?

The combination of touch, taste, smell, sight, sounds, with trust, vulnerability, abandon, care, risk, warmth, tenderness, selfishness and sharing. The very preconditions for the mutuality of giving pleasure. Free union, the oscillation of equals, skin on skin.

3. What does it tell us about our condition of being alive ?
4. What light does it shed for you upon the sense of life, of death and of their reproduction ?

That there are moments when one is absolutely alive, as alive as it is possible to be.

To know such luciferian moments, to know that everything afterwards is a fall from bliss, a perfect moment made precious by the certainty that it will not last and that death would be preferable to its absence. There blended in the immediacy of it, joy and sadness, perfection and decay, life and its slow diminishment into death.

5. Do you think it can be considered the absolute good ?

I stumble at the question. In the way that it is framed it presupposes a singular good which is absolute, when perhaps, not feeling corralled by the question, I might prevaricate around the words ’freedom’ or ’equality’ as absolutes ; that might include within themselves, the liberty to explore all those potential sensual pleasures contained within ourselves.

6. Does it - at the centre of a heightened consciousness and/or unconsciousness - constitute a part of the supreme point of the spirit, as André Breton expressed it ?

Emphatically, yes. If only a part.

7. Was it able to inspire, more or less directly, any civilisations, any traditions, any utopias ?

Of course. It is unimaginable that in the vast tapestry of human history that there have not been civilisations devoted to the pursuit of every imaginable pleasure, sheltered from the abyss of productivity, labour, conformity, suffering. It is no surprise to me that they might have left no record, or maybe only the merest wisp of smoke rising from the pages of certain histories.

8. Could it, without in so doing being made banal or exploited, be taken up by a society, and to what ends ?

Pleasure presupposes leisure, comfort, ease, time to indulge the senses, the absence of work and the aspiration towards utopia. Indistinguishable from liberty, the freedom to indulge and explore becomes one of the principles upon which any society should be founded. Only without becoming banal or subject to exploitation can this become possible ; pleasure as the basis for liberty. The diversity of pleasure, each subjective experience of the senses. The body is the centre of reality, the locus of change, action, perception of the marvellous, the remarkable, revelatory. Those most sensual pleasures, quiet or overwhelming, are windows into that other world of possibilities.

9. From the infinitely small to the infinitely large, does it relate to cosmic phenomena, of which we only understand the mechanics, but of whose actions give us recourse to analogy ?

By analogy, there are moments so overwhelming that only a tidal wave could have been responsible, eruptions of such magnitude that the fabric of ones previous life is torn apart, even if only for minutes, or forever.