Holed - Sweet Sophia - Anal Restraint -13.12.2024- -

begins the descent. The word is passive and active at once. To be holed up is to retreat into a burrow, a den of fearful safety. To be holed is to be punctured, to have integrity violated by a void. In nautical terms, a holed ship sinks. In geology, a holed stone is one worn smooth by water and time. The ambiguity is everything. The subject of this essay — whether a person named Sophia or a vessel of wisdom (for Sophia, from Greek sophia , means wisdom) — is entering a state of enclosure and breach simultaneously. The hole is both refuge and wound.

Then comes The adjective is an anachronism, a lullaby sung over a crib in a burning house. “Sweet” evokes innocence, honey, childhood, the sentimental. Sophia is not just any name; in Gnostic tradition, Sophia is the fallen divine feminine, the emanation of wisdom who desired to know the unknowable Father and, in her error, created the flawed material world. To call her “sweet” is to condescend to tragedy. It is the voice of the captor, the lover, the priest — all three maybe the same person — who domesticates her suffering. “Sweet Sophia, you know this is for your own good.” The sweetness is the sugar coating on the restraint. Holed - Sweet Sophia - Anal Restraint -13.12.2024-

The whole title reads as a case file from a detective who has given up on justice and turned to poetry. Or a Sadean inventory written by a monk. The dashes between the words are the bars of a cage. We, the readers, are voyeurs at a keyhole — another kind of hole — peering into a room where sweetness and restraint have become synonyms. begins the descent