It’s probably going to make some cringe, but the best way of explaining the beginnings of eroticdove’s life is to cite Pico Iyer – one of the best of modern essayists, a truly great travel writer; nay, a truly great writer, period.

I do not know how Iyer will take to being the inspiration for an erotic website. I suspect he will chuckle, this man who writes to affirm joy and travels for the prospect “of stepping of the daylight of everything I know, into the shadows of what I don’t know, and may never know.” (”The Place Across the Mountains,” from the book Sun After Dark)

I like Iyer because aside from his lyrical power, he epitomizes good and takes back nice from the realm of faint, damning praise. His is the wisdom that carries no mocking laughter, except maybe the gentle kind we all have for our younger days.

Iyer brings you to strange lands and stranger people, to comedies of manner, with vignettes — harrowing and ennobling — carrying the germs of answers to great existentialist questions.

Iyer, of course, did not cause my foray into erotic writing. It is just that this equally footloose soul sees analogies between his meditations on travel and the thrilling – and often just as wondrously messy – journeys into sexuality and sensuality. You fly high, you circle; you swoop and plunge, often with barely a prayer to light your way, anticipating but never really knowing where you’ll land.

“Dove” comes from a childhood spent daydreaming when not playing war games with ten other siblings; from summer days, perched on the roof deck of a grandmother’s rural pharmacy, chafing at rules that barred me from river docks I yearned to roam. I don’t remember which neighbor kept doves but hold dear the flights of fancy that had me stowing away on some ramshackle boat to land in the Amazon or some kung fu monastery in the Chinese highlands.

And so reading Iyer, days after friends and I decided to take this Internet journey, felt like the dove swirling into an upwind.

He likes the word “flights;” likes that “it can refer as much to a piano concerto as to the movements of a bird, and it reminds us that ‘flights of fancy’ take us as far from what we know as any flights in fact.” He writes that some of us travel “to slip through the curtain of the ordinary, and into the presence of whatever lies just outside our apprehension.”

I can’t say it better.

Inday
March 19, 2008