context: The text reflects on intimacy—through the silent language of loving waking bodies, in between which desires and lights pass without words. The parallel with the landscape signifies the listening of natural instincts.

The photographs retrace a journey through Morocco—from the foreigner’s point of view, whose presence amongst a riot of striking colours, dusty air, and humming, vibrant skies translates another intimate language.

, another day.

In the morning upon waking, I ran from my burning bed to the balcony, out of the dreams that had tormented me. I gave myself over to the pale rays still streaming from the moon, to the white dawn of the Moroccan orchards, as the tranquil immensity of the sky dissolved in pleasure into that morning mist. I lifted a drowsy nose toward the garden pricked with trees. Those groves always seemed inhabited to me—couches upon which to find delight, thickets bleached by those who ventured into them. Shadows there extend protective arms. The wary wanderer loses himself in the too-quick exhaustion of having succumbed to their charms. I followed with my eyes the long red clusters of clouds reigning peacefully, like a mountain, over the meadow so beloved in my dreams. Their benevolent, suspended fruits kept watch over that waning night.

Turning my gaze, I discerned the outline of his body behind the glass door, the haze of his face still under the yoke of sleep. I watched the shape his skin took—eaten by the nocturnal sheet barely lifted—tinged with the admirable glow of a voluptuousness that trickles. Eyes half closed, I examined the openness of his flesh, flesh porous to the light, whose radiance seeps around like milk. Shelter of my sensuality, he was the landscape into which my desire sank. Eyes of blushing modesty, small halos like the wings of a lepidopteran spread across your face. The balcony swayed softly. If I did not know the colouring of his thoughts upon waking, I nevertheless stole from the sun the desire to land upon his cheek, as it sliced through that face of shadows and light. It was the wish to be a creator, to be the first glow to enter his gaze, the first pattern of the first smile. Under the aegis of a little right to think, I beckoned the landscape to join us, so that together we might brush against the shore of the day. A gap of reeds bent over the river trembled, like a fragment of time bursting open. I would have wished to sleep endlessly in the dampness of that grace. For it is the springs—most delicate in the morning—that diminish at noon and evaporate by evening. The dew lasts scarcely a second; it is altered by the first ray that slips between our eyelids. Thick, wide drops slide along the stumps; they sink into the voluptuous softness of the wet earth, carrying that morning toward a vast plain all flooded with light.

on intimacy.

To live, we must read the unsayable of intimate feelings. Precisely, we must learn from what is not spoken. We can understand a feeling by reading words, gestures, intentions that are neither expressed nor carefully concealed. When something means something to a thinker, they first keep it for themselves, within themselves; it remains secret if they truly wish to keep it so. Then they analyse it, before perhaps bringing it to light— or never. For this intimate thing can produce in the heart of the one who thinks it the greatest good or the greatest harm. It bites, twists, smooths, clings to them, it screams to exist. All inside, in waves. It is a red, sanguine body, pitted with warm veins, that shelters this thing like a princess in an enchanted palace. The mystery of the unspoken feeling is organic, since it remains inside. It is a matter of intimacy. Must one penetrate another’s intimacy to read them? We read appearances easily through words, through the various established languages of our civilisations. Words are surface signs. They are black on white, characters sprinkled across emptiness; they are hardness within tenderness.
Words do not need to leave; their meaning is almost already conceived. We can arrange them, turn the skin of their own meaning inside-out, but they remain stuck to the letters, barely mobile on the shores of our lips. Inside, however, words adorn—haphazardly—the inner walls of our bodies, which hold them without speaking them. Not yet expressed, they are shapeless and purple; inaccessible.

To read another’s interior, it is therefore necessary to come closer, to join it. To enter into him or her. The red palaces of intimacy open through the act of love. Man is entrails. He penetrates and he feels. Woman is his refuge; she swells. She enters him as much as he enters her. They could be two women or two men, equal in a suction of doors unbuttoning themselves. Together, they cross the purple of their veins, cling to ornamented mucous membranes in an attempt to glimpse the moist language that seeps from them. The Woman delights. One day her thighs crack open like ripe fruit, and she becomes a refuge. In the presence of her sacred other, the veins of her dwelling swell, for she wants to welcome him and understand him. She wonders which things he does not say, which letters are glued within his elementary inner self. Often, she feels his eyes pouring toward her, slowly, in a mist of gaze. He penetrates her. Swiftly, gently, violently. Together they go faster; they must catch things in midair, pin them to the ground. The rhythm shifts with this other whom we have chosen and with the surrounding world that has appointed us. We decide what to scrape, what to polish, what to cherish and what to keep. He turns his head, his torso twists, she wraps her legs around his hips. He flips her over and lets her hair rain onto his waist. They speak now only without words.

A body that enters another touches its buried sentences and expels them. More than a consented grasp, it is an offering. For two beings, in mingling, make their meanings spring forth— each from the other— irreversibly, as none else could. Words draw souls out of their bodies. Words of love, words of hate. The feeling of organic mystery is unique. It turns blue. Everything unspoken spreads from the two pairs of eyes whose colours blend. A pale ochre ocean surfaces. The waves advance, clear and long. They undulate to the rhythm of skins carving a path through one another. Life begins on a shore.

***

The Woman said “This desire that inhabited me, I could not prevent it. With all the gratitude of my heart, with the love with which I so diffusely enveloped his being; through my thirst for his vivid caresses; the path opened, inevitable. I needed to surrender to the forgetting of the waves, my flesh drunk on love. I nourished him with that strange thirst, until his full throat spilled over with joy and came to bathe my earth. I am woman, and full. I am refuge and stranger. I welcome and I hide.”

Our dreams of tomorrow will be ecstasies— but tomorrow’s ecstasy will be different, for nothing resembles the reveries we create.