single session erotic mentoring available here: This listing is for one 70-minute mentorship session with me, by phone, where we dive into what you’re living into and wanting to birth with specific attention paid to a question you have or a phase of life you need help navigating. I will take into consideration your natal chart but it doesn’t serve as the focal point of the call. Focus areas include but aren’t limited to eroticism as seen in your creativity, identity, desire, intimacy, transformation, magnetism and pleasure.
6-month one-on-one ‘Erotic Odyssey Mentorship’ info + application here
In the late 1500s, words were severed from their deeper meanings by an intellectualist named Marin Mersenne. Mersenne fought against an animistic view of nature that saw soul in everything. He was at the center of European thought, consistently dethroning the magical early Renaissance. Through his work, conceptual and paradoxical meanings were sent away into the occult and, over the course of the next 30 years, ‘logophobia’ developed and created our modern relationship to the English language. Hillman describes logophobia as, ‘a dread of words, especially of big words which might harbor irrealities.’
I learned Armenian alongside English but finding ways for each to understand the other, through metaphor and poetry, was the only way I could escape being a foreign land to myself. To speak in Armenian is to know that metaphor best reflects reality. To speak in English is to know that metaphor is devalued and seen as a gimmick in language. The popular response to metaphorical language in English is a momentary delight, at best, that fades into the aftertaste of a magic trick. The English language needs poetry to dramatize it enough to reflect the actual drama of life.
A lot of what is said in the Armenian language relies in an unyielding trust in the ineffable soul of what’s being said. We say ‘paree looys’ in the morning which translates to ‘good light.’ We sometimes say, ‘kulkhoos vurah’ when a guest leaves our home which is a way to extend the warmest welcome possible, but translates to English as, “on my head next time.” There is no intention to be metaphorical but, instead, a knowing that these words best reflect the depth of what’s actually meant.
For an Armenian to say the equivalent of, “I had a nice time, come back soon to visit!” is to do the very least and borders on disrespectful as these words don’t mean anything in particular. They’re usually said to have said the thing that means you have an interest in whether or not others think you’re polite.
In the Armenian language, words are animate—everything has a pulse. Whenever I need to know what’s really going on with me, I speak to myself in Armenian. In comparison to the English language, it’s a nude and intimate voice that sees the world in the same way.
You don’t need to be bilingual to feel that the English language doesn’t revere soul. Because language shapes worldview, neither does most of this country.
On a deeper level, nominalism is actually a psychic defense against what words trigger in us. When using or hearing words like love, trust, betrayal, truth, we can sense all the painful memories attached to them and relentlessly shrink ourselves and the words down to bare minimums to avoid engaging with the complexes, and memories, they awaken in us. Hillman says, “Nominalism is a psychological defense against the psychic component of the word… Of course there is a credibility gap, since we no longer trust words of any sort as the true carriers of meaning…our semantic anxiety has made use forget that words, too, burn and become flesh as we speak.”
In Armenian, there aren’t very many places to hide. I feel so much is lost in translation. I don’t think I could’ve survived in English if it weren’t for poetry and music.
Ensouling words in the English language is facing the state of them in our own psyche’s—our own souls.
If words have lost their link to their own souls, or god-sparks, they’ve been de-eroticized. They are flat and uninterested in their own deeper meaning and so is their capacity to make statements about who we really are and how we truly feel. Friendships and relationships often don’t feel as intimate, or erotic, as they did when we were younger for many reasons but not least of all is that we repeat what we think we ought to say to maintain our social acceptance as conversationalists who don’t make anyone uncomfortable or overwhelmed by the idea that we ought to choose each word—I’d rather be overwhelming than unalive. When we interact with others as strangers to ourselves long enough, we don’t remember what we intended to mean in the first place. Words are no longer ensouled.
Hillman says, “We need to recall the angel aspect of the word, recognizing words as independent carriers of soul between people…a new angelology of words is needed so that we may once again have faith in them. Without the inherence of the angel in the words—and angel means originally ‘message-bearer’—how can anything of worth and soul be conveyed from one psyche to another, as in a conversation, a letter, or a book, if archetypal significances are not carried in the depths of our words?” It cannot. Enter modern day alienation.
To live an erotic life is to take great interest in being present to our nuanced and specific inner realities as they change and evolve, and sometimes devolve. Choosing the right words to match the texture of our experiences and knowing what these words truly mean is the way intimacy between self and self, and self and other, is created. Language is one of the most profound world-view shaping tools we have. It creates what we see and how we see the world and ourselves. Language can reveal what we most desire if it can find its roots in the dark unconscious once again. To root soulless words in life, they must meet the dark unknown where birth originates, the birth of a language that feels like our souls in our mouths.
In devotion to erotic living, the definitions (and synonyms/antonyms) below get to the essence of what is meant by words like erotic, intimacy, magnetism, the void, etc. Each word was followed to its dark and given a chance to find the light again.
xx Nairy
Definitions
Shame: insult as inheritance
Regret: degraded desire waiting to be seeded