Forget about Fifty Shades of Gray. This book, the notorious Psychopathia Sexualis, a medical tome on perversions and fetishes, came out in paperback when I was an adolescent. My friends and I had many laughs imagining the plight of shoe fetishists and masochists from reading its pages, although the really lurid bits were in the Latin footnotes (not translated in that edition). For many decades this book, in hardcover, could only be bought if you knew someone who knew someone. A classics professor at Brown University told me that a textbook salesman had offered him a copy, warning him that some men had gone mad from reading it. So here it is, for free. Download and read at your peril.
Download Kraft-Ebbing Book
Thursday, March 9, 2017
The Watcher
The love
that does not touch, that makes
no penetration,
requires no
mirror back to verify
that what is
real is real.
This love
excels all lovers.
The unmailed
letter superior
to the letter returned unread,
the passion
that leaves the eye
as a gift to beauty.
Love thus,
in secret, and love again.
Enlarge the
heart
(O it has many chambers!)
If the loved
one be as oblivious
as a fieldstone,
so be it!
Moss clings, sun warms,
water wears
down — there are many ways
to make love
to granite.
You say the
love you give
is not
returned to you?
Leave to the
bankers
the keeping
of balances,
the
squeezing out
of interest.
Love is
returned, somehow,
in the ease
of future loving,
the
cavalcade of youth
pressing on
by
as you watch
from the café window,
marveling
there is so much in you
beaming back
at them,
so many
qualities and curves,
neck napes
and striding legs,
sungold,
raven black and pumpkin hair,
and the
gemstone eyes
of onyx,
turquoise, emerald and hazel —
what would
they be
if you were
not there to love them?
what
coal-mine darkness
would they walk in,
if we did
not spark them
with our
admiration.
Be not
jealous of touching.
Does not the
air,
thick with the ghosts
of the world’s love cries
press down
upon you?
Do not the
star lamps
warm you?
Does not the tide
crash out
your name
upon the
lonely cliffs?
Without
desire, the universe
would cool
to neutrons;
the
whirligig of being
would slow
to a stop.
So storm
out! radiate
your
unsought affections,
the passing
poet, taking nothing,
giving all.
(2001 -- Providence, RI)
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