DIMORA

the witnesses

They spoke this way before.

Song of Solomon

By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth:
I sought him, but I found him not.
I will rise now, and go about the city
in the streets, and in the broad ways
I will seek him whom my soul loveth.

She is the seeker. She rises, she goes out, she asks, she finds, she holds. The desire is entirely hers. And notice: the passage doesn't resolve. The holding is the point. The longing and the finding exist in the same breath, without one cancelling the other.

Sappho

When I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me

no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead — or almost
I seem to me.

This is desire registered entirely in the body, but not the body as object. The body as instrument of feeling. Tongue breaks. Fire under skin. No sight. Drumming in ears. She is not describing what she looks like. She is describing what desire does to her from the inside.

Mirabai

I am mad with love
and no one understands my condition.

Only the wounded
understand the anguish of the wounded,
when a fire rages in the heart.

Mira wanders without aim,
dyed in the colour of the Dark One.

"Mira wanders without aim." Aimlessness is usually a failure. Here it is the texture of devotion. She is not going somewhere. She is dyed, changed at the level of being, not behaviour. No consummation is described or even hoped for. She is mad. She wanders. That is all. That is enough.

Hadewijch

The abyss of love
swallows everything.

I am drowned in it,
I do not feel ground,
I do not touch bottom.

This is the love I wanted —
this drowning, this not arriving.

"I do not touch bottom." There is no ground. No stable place from which to assess or control the experience. Drowning is usually a catastrophe. Not arriving is usually failure. Here they are the desired state. She does not want to be rescued. The abyss is not a problem to be solved. It is the dwelling place she sought.

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what this is

The boundaries of the space.

This is not therapy.

Nothing here is broken. Nothing needs to be fixed.

This is not meditation.

The goal is not calm. Stillness may arise, but it is not the destination.

This is not erotica.

Desire does not build toward release. It dwells.

This is not empowerment.

You are not being improved. You are not being taught.

This is refuge.

A place where nothing is required of you.

What the witnesses share, across twenty-five centuries: desire that circulates rather than terminates. The body as a site of knowing, not display. Absence and incompleteness as dwelling places, not failures. No instruction, no moral, no "therefore."

Most representations of desire drive toward resolution. These do not. The longing is not prelude to satisfaction. It is a state complete in itself.

This is what has been subjugated. This is what Dimora makes space for.

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what happened

This mode has always existed. It has rarely been permitted.

Song of Solomon

Survived by becoming allegory. The church insisted it was about Christ and the soul, not lovers. The most explicitly erotic text in the Western canon was permitted only because its plain meaning was denied. The knowledge hid inside the explanation.

Sappho

Survives only in fragments. What remains was copied by grammarians who wanted to illustrate Greek verb forms. The rest was lost, or burned, or simply not copied when the old scrolls crumbled. We have scraps because a teacher needed examples of the aorist tense.

The Beguines

In the thirteenth century, communities of women across the Low Countries chose lives outside both marriage and the convent. They wrote, they prayed, they experienced. Hadewijch was one of them. Marguerite Porete was another. The church could not categorise them, so it silenced them. Porete was burned in Paris in 1310. Her book survived anyway.

Mirabai

A princess who refused her place. She sang to Krishna in the streets. Legend says her family tried to poison her. She wandered, she sang, she was called mad. Her poems survived because the people kept singing them, long after the courts wanted her forgotten.

The Pattern

Each time this mode surfaced, something tried to contain it. Allegory. Fragmentation. Execution. Diagnosis. The knowledge keeps trying to emerge. The dominant order keeps finding ways to manage it, translate it, suppress it.

You may not have encountered this before. That is not because it didn't exist. It is because every time it tried to speak, something needed it to be quiet.

Dimora is a space where it no longer needs to be quiet.

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