it's UP! 269 = two hundred & 69!  so it has to be sex, which we haven't touched for some time but which, along with love, is indisputably at the heart of everything :)  as tim leary pointed out years ago, for example, 2 hydrogen atoms DON'T fancy making water with just ANY old oxygen atom; they're attracted or they're not.  just like everything alive.

so this is SEX 1,  the personal.  UP! 269// SEX 2, the political, follows shortly.



khenifra sits so high in the mountains [and i do mean high], that it suffers from sporadic electricity. 

no "news" has reached me for 6 days.  why, unlike everyone else here, should i assume there IS news every day?  news breaks out from time to time, having built up during the preceding, no?

anyway, after 9 days in morocco i am so so so glad i made the move!  my body has averaged 2 hours of sunshine per day, and feels now like it's shining.  i begin to re-possess my own inner heat - somewhere at the base of the spine i fancy.  solar power?  look, the closest Mega Entity in this part of the universe radiates continually what we humants interpret as "light" and "heat" (cos that's all we're capable of perceiving!)  so it's almost a sacred blessing to have this Being pour His/Her/Its beneficence over your body's skin.  call it vitamin D if u insist as long as you accept you're making chimp talk :)

my health is returning; i've become much more sociable and tolerant (than i was when i finally left london).  still retreat to my room often, however, and feel tired, yet can't sleep.

did i mention the berber musicians going for it outside the hotel as i write this?  well, as i wrote the last few lines, i was thinking of going out to catch some of the live music (which might not recur after all) but it's stopped.  now what?  if they kick off again into one of those extended flights i'll go down... i hear a snatch of marley on the system.  it stops.

just got back.  the music kicked off again so i went.  turned out to be one of those hand-round-the-cymbals things where you're invited to bang in.  i declined as i usually do these days.  my big breakthrough, though, was a new refusal line that nobody believed but hugely everyone enjoyed for a number of reasons:

"i promised my father i would only play the bagpipes. do you have any?"

these guys respect tribal and family loyalties.  though they know am joking they admire whence my excuse is coming :)



when our mint tea arrived, my current student/guide, rafik, invited her to join our table.  it was quite un-moroccan the way she moved over from where she'd been sitting alone.

her name was Leila while mine was johnny [did i mention how i use this name when traveling in non-english speaking countries?  it's easy on the tongue, it's recognised worldwide, but very few people have ever met a Johnny!  it turns out that everyone loves johnny!  i think it's a name from early american movies, and johnny was always this handsome, easygoing, democratic kinda 'californian' guy who you couldn't help loving and the senoritas couldn't resist.]

i'd spotted her twice before around town, chatting with groups of local lads.  a relatively free moroccan lady?!  watching her close-up now talking with rafik, she was clearly older, almost a young aunt?  (not that these sex-starved mountain youths would bother about that!).  our eyes kept meeting.  everything seemed suddenly very clear.  i swear a cloud dissolved over the snow peaks.

her small, shapely body was in jeans, a black waistcoat, glittery purple blouse, t-shirt and wrapped arabic scarf.   lovely rather that beautiful, but that could be the european talking; her face was pale, striking; her deep black eyes looking almost haunted, full of eastern prom- [oh for goddess' sake, johnny!]

naturally we spoke french, and, in her deeply caressing voice, she seemed very french, even too french.  she looked like a '60s existentialiste, and sounded like some old french movie diva - she'd probably practised her french in the cinema! - well, johnny was an old american movie hero himself! 

rafik later told me she'd immediately started talking about "Love" - Leila reported that he'd proposed marriage in the first minute!  her first serious line to me was when i finally got the chance to ask, in english, where she was from: "i remember noseeng.  i forget more evree day.  i am noseeng."  she went back into french and stayed there.  too french, you see?  i rejoiced, though, that it wasn't going to be tourist chatter.  when she went too far and said, "quand j'ai oubliee tout, je serai disparu en tout"  (when i've forgotten everything i shall finally disappear) i replied, or johnny did, in french from now on: "no, you ARE more when you KNOW less."

i quoted the zen saying that the Student knows more every day but the Seeker knows less.  i felt her whole inner body lean towards mine.   i had something to give this being.  "et enfin, quand tu sais rien, tu verras tout comme il est!" (and finally, when you KNOW nothing, you will SEE everything as it is.) 

"what is Love?" Leila, her eyes no longer looking IN, asked Johnny.  "it's a word humans use to try to capture a tiny bit of some of the things and levels that exist."  it's much easier to say these kinds of things in french.  i'd tell a french girl her eyes are "like the sky" (it's poetry in french); i'd NEVER say that to an english girl.

she's very touch-feely, often touching rafik's sleeve in pleasant surprise or mock shock.  does she realise what her language means to these young (frustrated) moroccan guys?  but maybe, if you won't be intimidated from going out in the evenings, a certain physical intimacy with the males is safer than a withdrawn preciousness?

sensing a deep loss in her, despite the existential angst style, i speak at some length of my Eternity idea.  i want to try it out on others anyway.  i tell her that nothing ever disappears, that nothing CAN ever disappear, that we get to repeat every aspect of every experience thousands and thousands of times.  i rant a bit.  something tells me strong and clear that she wants to hear this, or at least she wants to hear SOMETHING.  something NEW!  that the only and best gift i can give is to help her move out of wherever she is.
[back in my room afterwards, i want to make notes, like these.  but mostly i want to curl up on my bed and recall and re-live.]


under another cloudless blue moroccan sky we're sitting looking a half mile down on the redbrown and green valley below.  part of me wishes i was alone to contemplate the scene.  instead i opt to talk to her more about Eternity.  i rant again (too strong; i 'declaim confidently').  she will re-experience EVERY detail of what she thinks she has lost.  she'll even experience them hundreds of thousands of times.  it's going in deep, i KNOW it.  and want it - for her; to shine potential into the dark corners she felt would never see the light of day again... new growths that can continue after i've exited her mountain top.

i say: rafik told me about your marriage?  not marriage, she tells me.  she only married once, when she was 19.  feeling my way forward, watching one hawk chase another in long beautiful sweeping glides below us, i feel Leila and i are paralleling them.

she jumps to her feet.  she's always suddenly jumping up and doing something else, like she's jumping away from something to which she was getting too close.  it's mostly nerves, but something else too, and what does that mean anyway?  she says, with her ex, she also used to giggle and jump.  her eyes are very bright today; as is her life attitude; i sense it's the positive effect am having on her and feel even more confident and ... expansive.

and sometimes her body will suddenly shake, she tells me, and wants to know why.  i work it out, but don't manage to complete it till the next day, that it's her Whole Body breaking through...  our culture helps to break down our bodies into separate self-functioning sections (writing, football, ironing) and we lose contact with our Whole Body, which always works with the whole body involved.  when her body jumps it's her Whole Body kicking in.

what a lovely creature she is!  and how her Love has been closed down!  i begin to appreciate more her refusal to be browbeaten into submission.  she's a brave foxy lady!  but i fear for her too, she seems almost too alive to survive.  and all that time without a man!  without a man to appreciate her.  to worship her.

back at the hotel cafe i leave her with rafik.  i feel the need to make some notes, and also to have a shower.  i'm also making a point of being sexually non-aggressive - which isn't really hard for me these days tho i track the ghosts of my Desires while simply enjoying where we are; goddess knows i'm familiar enough with Disappointment not to be bothered if it comes again. 

free?  free at last?!

up in my room, sensing things over, i intuit she's beginning to accept me as her husband, only not.  a preordained sense of erotic destiny has captured my loins and my mind.  i decide to say to her, in my prophet voice (because she needs some answers, a way forward, at the very least the renewed possibility that there COULD be a way forward) that, for a woman, solitude is worse than for a man because she is so much about Beauty which needs must be worshipped to exist (can't find the french word for worship and settle on appreciate).  and, more or less, i would be happy to perform that service :)

but there's no sign of Leila when i go down.  later i worked out that by then it was too late for her to be seen hanging out around town.  it's outrageous enough that she does it till an hour after dark when practically no other woman is seen, except of course the western girls.



next day Leila tells me she'd been building up to inviting me to her house the day before; she'd decided; and now she was inviting me.  having agreed our plan, with a sensuous rush in my ears, the rest of the day is shaped by this.   gradually, but very gradually, i become more sexual until the early evening walk to her house.
the three of us head towards the little lake below the town.  half way up again, while rafik was talking to someone, i put my hand down the back of her pants and squeezed and told her: "you have a nice, tight ass," and she draws away giggling as i draw away too (to give her her space), and then she's leaning and squirming against me, like that.

"johnny!"

i don't know at this point that there's a whole Moroccan Romance thing going on as well as what i'm experiencing.
[i'm writing these notes 48 hours later, half hoping this tale is a Short Story; cos it's wonderful as that; magical, and penetrating.]

through the town, where my behaviour quickly changes, with me being more restrained than she who's always touchyfeely when she talks to a guy.

suddenly there's a blackout.  there have been 2 since i arrived in khenifra.  both lasted an hour or so.  this one is to go on so long that i several times wonder [and still do] if our energies had blown some historical fuse.  lamps and candles start winking on, and then bonfires; it's really very romantic, and there's that word again.  the mores of seduction - the hidden moves and signs.  Leila says: "i shall go ahead and you will follow me."  i grok immediately and say "i'll be 10 minutes behind you".  i think she threw back over her shoulder: "it doesn't have to be TEN minutes!"

with darkness and now with the blackout, of course, we seem pretty safe from prying moroccan eyes - but it was to be a theme that developed and reverberated all night.  and i still don't know how real it all was.  i guess she didn't really know either.  which is half the problem.  maybe nobody knows!  maybe you just have to accept that what happened is what happened.  but i know if there had been a law against what we were about to do then we could have taken absolute precautions.  as it was, our little operation was a bit of a mess from a security point of view.  several people, for example, passed us on the road, and "the widow of khenifra" and "the long haired hippy crusader poet" were pretty hard to miss and even harder to forget.

her breasts are tucked behind corset-like armour.  she has, as i said, the tightest little ass.  at some point in the walk to her house her hand is fluttering between my waist and the top of my legs like some lost but wondering bird and i place it on the package.  "johnny!"  did i mention we were both wearing jeans?

it's a bit of a blur now, and indeed then; it felt like (and was intended by Nature to be) a long, slow-motion fall into bed, but this wasn't Smith Street, Oldtown, England.  i do remember her saying at one point (i was walking behind her with my hand half stuck down the front of her very tight jeans) "you've had many women, johnny," which i decided was best left unanswered.

finally at the house, with the whole star-studded firmament conspiring in our affair.  i remind her of her dead man, she says, more than once.  but she doesn't mean anything so banal as looks.  perhaps they met at university but i've long since decided not to proceed on that level.  what's between her and me is that she gets new hope and sparkle and juice and i get a lovely erotic glimpse behind the veil :)

"johnny!"


[now am remembering Bushra from last year's caravanserai club trip to morocco.  now i understand her!  now i'm ready for her!  now i know about today's moroccan womanhood!  she said in an email that she might join me up here.  now my fantasy life is taking me over.  am thinking of Leila, Bushra and me in the next valley!  the three of us!  exploring the alleys, highways and byways of Free Love!

i stopped writing there for a few moments.

one thing i know now that i did not know yesterday is that moroccan women definitely perceive the relative freedom of the West, and those who know a little are attracted by the european man.  his gentleness, his laid-backness, his lack of that truly terrible possessiveness of the arab male.  to give you an idea:  Leila told me last night at her house that her marriage, at 19, was to a guy she met when they were both studying at university.  he said of course she could go on with her studies and other things when they were married but, the very morning after the wedding, (and particularly after possessing her) his attitude completely changed, Jekyll & Hyde stylee, and this male monster "ordered" her that "you are now my wife, and all his will end!"  she was locked in, beaten to make her submit to her new "Master", and finally escaped after 3 months. 

though she, it seems, bothered to go through the whole muslim divorce procedure over several years, i imagine this sort of thing is happening to a great many shocked young muslim brides, and what are they to do afterwards?  even if they want to marry again it will be very difficult, for they are now tainted.  and if they DON'T want to EVER marry again what are they to do?!  they probably have to move to a different city to feel safe from their "lord, master and husband" who might feel the right or even duty to justify his "rights".  and the terrible truth is that they really CAN'T find some Loving with any arab males because they can be so violently possessive and jealous.  so now i understand the whole Bushra thing!  why she hung out with us guys, what she actually wanted when we were wondering if she was going to steal our money, or get us to marry her, or so we'd pay her.  young widows, probably thousands of them, are really just seeking a Way Out!  some Love!  it's all absolutely Normal - the word Leila most used when referring to how she or we might be seen by muslim society - in her house, during a blackout.

i'd guess Leila would have strung along with our party just as Bushra did, on any level  up for anything so long as it was an aspect of love.  all over morocco, in the larger cities, there must be tens of thousands of poor female creatures desperate to be loved, gently, adoringly, respectfully and passionately!  is their young beauty to be unseen forever?!   is what i consider the loveliest of all Goddess' creations to be NEVER appreciated or worshipped?!  goddess, i keep noticing in everyone's face these days what a tiny part of their potential they actually experience.  we live in the last hundred years of the stultifying Middle Ages and it's a Human Tragedy!  for most humans alive today, catching even a fleeting glimpse of our true possibilities would certainly drive them mad.]


i'm sitting on a chair in the kitchen with Leila crouched between my legs, perched somewhat uneasily in her kitchen IN CASE SOMETHING HAPPENS.  one of her bras is gone, and both our shirts are untucked from our waists, when there's a knock on the door!  she's already lifted the candle and headed off, tucking her shirt in.  there had been several noises previously which she'd jumped up to check, actually opening the door each time to look out and even call! 

"halo! quelqun est la?"

wow, i think, but i'm not really THINKING much at all.  the hands in my mind are still caressing the tight warm buttocks that are now outside the house.  but i did find it a bit odd.  one of her most frequent comments was "i want to live openly"  - like it would be EASY but DEAD to play the Game.  which may explain SOME of what happened last night.

anyway, it's "only" named, the friend who "most comes to visit me", and who works for a german company in the valley below.  i'm still adjusting to the FACT of him sitting at the other end of the table, while she's telling me how he's always cared for her.  he's a blacker, handsome young dude with a nice smile which she draws out of him constantly as they talk.  and she saying how, if she finally decides to give up her freedom, he's prepared to marry her - like, the implication is clear, that's very honourable and decent of him.  to overlook her hanging out with europeans and being divorced and so on i suppose.

though she's actually sitting close to him, handcontacting him and babbling away in fast, excited french/arabic, i do catch that she's explaining how she's always been very honest with him about what she WANTS, she's been open, and he's grinning his beautiful white smile like he agrees, and his face goes from darkly serious to smiling and back.  and later, after he's gone, she tells me she doesn't know how he'll react, or what he might do (about my visit). 

he's quite liberated through working alongside the germans, she says, but she's clearly very worried. 

"what are you afraid he might do?"

"he ees a good man, a kind man,"  she says, settling down on my knees again.  "but i don't know WHAT HIS RELIGION WILL MAKE HIM DO!"

all at once it's all very real.  the blond christian is 2 miles from town, in the middle of a moonless night, during a blackout, stranded and disshevilled at the widow's house, and the fiancee might be rounding up a possee of fundamentalist believers from the village at this very minute.  or an angry mullah? 
it takes an age (an era?) for things to settle again.  but slowly our natural slow-mo fall into bed picks up pace again, all "absolutely normal"  (as i continually point out to her while her Nature gets back on its feet).  we're down to one veil now; i've had her breasts out, large-small with quite enormous purple-brown nipples that jump about like she does.  and i tell her so, and i want her to know because her beauty has (presumably) been so unseen for so long.  they're firm but tricky, and i've kissed and licked each perky tip, and done it like a junior priest to a middling goddess, with 100% attention, respect and erotic gratitude, and she's accepted it as this, and is starting to reach deeper levels of relaxation and sensuousness.

"johnny!"

though somehow our conversation continued along the way, my brain was too warm and wet to remember much now.  really it was reassuring sounds that spiritual animals make to each other, contented purrs and soft growls.  mine is mainly saying:  Everything is absolutely fine.  and totally normal and natural.  live out whatever was lacking.  do those things you dreamed of doing.  go for those thing you'll wish tomorrow you'd done.  do WHATEVER you want.  we both KNOW what is right and natural and absolutely "NORMAL".  we KNOW.  the moment is ours, let's make memories and visions that will turn us on in years to come.

then i realise she's explaining or confessing to me that she'd TOLD named i might be coming to visit!  she might even have said she'd invited him to drop by and meet me; i was pretending to understand more than i did to keep our flow.  part of her brave (but foolhardy?) desire to live openly & honestly i suppose.  is there an added french thing?  liberte´ & egalite´?  but she's up and off again would i like some coffee?

i guess i made a move at this point, though i didn't see it at the time.  but it suggests i came to a decision when it felt more like a Resolution simply emerged.  after being ultra ultra patient, easygoing and liberal, and giving her all the time she needs or wants,
and after i've kept saying this very thing to her, to "take your time,"  that "you don't have to go any further," but "if u want to then DO it, let's DO what we want NOW, take this opportunity dans les deux mains in both hands,"  stuff like that in rusty french
i finally declare, in English first and then in French: "we got to move things more horizontal, babe, where's the bedroom?  we can't spend the whole evening sitting here in case someone comes to the door."
she's already on her feet, picking up a candle and heading into the dark doorway out of the kitchen.  "why do you want to find the bed?" she trills, "are you sleepy?"  a joke?  a throwaway line, like many this evening?

"au contraire" i respond, remembering the phrase from some childhood classroom.  she giggles, and disappears; but this time with me carrying the little oil lamp following after as she disappears again (to change costume?  like removing her final bra because it appears to be locked?) (only joking) (i think).   i check out each room, i have a needed pee; my erection's been standing to attention all night but with no sense of urgency, my mind, my soul have been savouring each erotic moment, finely etching in each detail.

i've found the bedroom; a lonely bed, not made up, a bed that wasn't expecting visitors.  i've sorted a red sleeping bag and two heavy wool blankets, and she fluffs around and finally comes in and lies down.  "johnny!"   just as things are beginning to get much more interesting than was possible at table, she's suddenly on her feet again, pulling up and half closing her jeans, and starts complaining in a loud voice, mostly arabic, how they won't leave her alone, how all she wants is to live her life as SHE wants to, openly and honestly, how if they came and found us in her bed would they think?!

now it's all coming out.  the culture.  the religion.  the arab male.  all the men in the town want her but they say different things behind her back.  how she only wants to live openly and freely.  the Insult of it all!

and 'who cares what prisoners of history think?' enquires the european, and they care answers she, and they may come, and we should not be in the bedroom.  there's another bedroom, a small one, which would be safer.  why?  because it's not, though i don't think she actually said it, the marital bedroom.  and it's just off the kitchen! 

(easier to retreat from).
gradually i begin to tell her that things ARE changing.  at first she protests "on the surface, yes," but i persevere, perhaps i wear her down, and she starts to just listen; i tell her there is no doubt about it, that i am coming from the Future where everyone is heading, how she is in the avant garde of her people, how she is actually leading the way back to the Natural.  by the next day i'm talking of her writing her thoughts on all these things, how she could be leading the next generation of moroccan feminist writers.  and she's agreeing, she sees how this is a frontier.

[am having insights into the problem the Megatripolitans have when they timedance back to our point in their history.  THEY know how things turned out, but we DON'T.  we can still see the edifices of the Old Power but cannot know how bereft and empty they are, and that they will NEVER return to destroy and punish us again, that those days are truly over.  you see, every previous time of relaxation the Old Dino force has always come back harder than ever.]

oh, the Fear!

Leila's back between my legs in the kitchen now.  but, though i've pulled out John Thomas a couple of times for her to stroke, admire and even worship , i confess to still being distracted by what the outside world MIGHT be getting up to , especially as she starts at any sound.  i re-run the terrible fate of the widow in Zorba the Greek.  i remembered how, earlier, the first few times i'd seen her, she'd seemed just on the beginning of the very edge of extremity, of madness, her face pale, pale, open yet drawn at the same time.

"johnny!"

[back in london a good jewish friend asked if i saw the Muslim Problem for real now and i replied that i'd really seen it like the British middle ages, a question of being stuck in History.]

talk about reality tv, this feeling that the Moral Majority could come crashing in at any moment, that every millimetre my fingers crept into her increased the likelihood.  was it mostly in her mind?  but then how had it gotten there? 

yet time is passing, and dust eventually settles - doesn't it?  we're discreetly diddling and doodling like we're being Overseen by cctv cameras.  i've suggested she change to a long, loose skirt so she's equally ready for the Natural OR the Demonic, and that's proving quite effective.  but the hour is getting late; we can't recline when every cell in our bodies is ordering it, and she keeps jumping up at the most erotic moments.  like she's too highly sprung along the puritan/passion cusp, but she's not to blame!

i ask at some point if we're moving too fast and would be content with any answer she might give; even this is enough, and i'm grooving every nanosecond.

"non, johnny!"
all the time now i'm telling her to feast her eyes and her senses, to do ANYTHING she wants to do, or has dreamed of doing, to do it NOW, to fill her soul with memories and visions.  i say more than once that women have been taught they shouldn't be sexually active and curious and experimental but it's not TRUE!  to deny these sides of ourselves is ABnormal!  and encouraging her on, and letting her see my body (we're finally in/on the bed in the small bedroom, we're both stripped to the waist and her long skirt is around her waist IN CASE.



so now we have our time.  we are both naked (Leila was never quite naked, always a scarf, or a piece of material around her middle, or her long dress, now like a belt, something to hold on to?) and looking, drinking in each other's body.  i've been telling her all evening that absolutely not a centimetre further shall we travel than she wishes and she has nodded seriously, gratefully (Manna from Heaven to a Muslim lady:).  while i know not what chasms we surfed, she and i, without looking down, i Trust, above all, that she has found another Good Man, like her ex.  to her, i pray, it came as a ray of sunlight after a long, grey mist (missed?). 

she led the way, or i allowed myself to be drawn more and further into her until, at some point, i asked again "are we moving too fast?" (this is the stage, after all, when the male most reveals his acquisitive side) and this time she said "oui, un peu," and i was more than happy to lay back.  actually i was beginning to get sleepy, it had been an emotional roller coaster of a night.  and, besides, the actual physical activity is starting to seem more like a way of ENDING a Perfectly Timeless Moment.

but comes a point when she announces these exact words:  "johnny!  now i weesh you penetrate me.  i weesh for you to be inside of moi"

i kiss those arab lips once more as i move my body across her; i separate her legs; i'm gazing once again into her dark maw where the deeply purply lèvres (french for lips as she's informed me) post their kiss at me.  she's half sitting up, touching Prince Charles with a finger tip and stretching its single crowning drop of love juice into a silver thread, and she says: "qu'est-ce que c'est ca?" (what's that, meaning the drop).

i go to answer but she's moved away again and it's not till the next day, on the little pink volcanic cliff above the village, that i get to explain to her what it was (i'm assuming she'd never had the luxury of studying it before), and how it PROVED that Allah intended us to do our normal natural things together. 

but, as she's pulling her long skirt back up her legs, JUST IN CASE, i'm getting weary, besides being more than blissed and blessed with all that HAS happened.   i could have made a point of explaining that drop, The Drop That Broke The Camel's Back, but i guessed her query came from some half-assed scientific pamphlet about sexual diseases - ills which would certainly pose more of a danger to her, a moroccan woman, than to western welfare-state moi.  but it was waaay too late in the night for 'scientific explanations'; besides which, would she have believed me at that point?!  she'd already said "and if i have a baby?" to which i'd had no answer, certainly no condom.  in an arab country?!!  well, next time for sure :)

that, it turns out (if this is a Short Story), plumbed the depth of our intimacy together.  the Fundamentalist Threat virtually dissolved as soon as she was in the other bed, and i felt absolutely wonderful and fulfilled, and slept the sleep of the experientially sated.

i guess the result or lack of it could be claimed as a triumph for Either Side :)  technically, and perhaps much more than that (especially here?) we did not Make Love together.  perhaps Hamed's mullah can accept the technicality.  for me, we most certainly Made Love! :) 
[end]