The Philogynist's Shadow (Pt 1): The Subject Who Unmakes Objects
Conscious Of Intrusion
“The moment I focus on you, am I making you an object of my focus? Or can my declared attention become an earnest form of relational recognition (whether or not you have anything to do with me)?”
– Philonova
He wants to live a life of beauty. Not acquisition. Not conquest.
But that, too, is a kind of wanting. He knows this.
He tells himself he is not here to consume. He does not take. He perceives. But even perception changes the thing.
And some mornings, he wonders (and wanders (and wonders while wandering)) if reverence is just desire in silk gloves.
He listens to women’s voices the way one listens to prayer – but they have not asked to be sacred. They are ordering coffee. They are asking for space. They are laughing to themselves without needing to be heard.
He tries to witness without needing. To notice without naming.
But something in him still feeds. Still stirs. Still writes it all down.
He is not untouched by what he perceives. He is altered. And that alteration feels like a gift he did not ask permission to receive.
He used to say he surrounds himself with women who are becoming – but now he questions the curation of that.
Do they know?
Have they agreed to be part of his slow devotion, his private conversation of ache and attention?
He does not wish to sexualise with benevolence and colonise with kindness. He does not want to make a temple out of women just trying to get through the day.
But beauty keeps arriving. And he keeps noticing.
He does not touch. He does not speak. He regards.
But what is regard if the one regarded has no say in it?
Some days, he envies those who do not feel so much. Who do not turn every encounter into an invitation into deeper soul initiation.
He tells himself this is a form of love. But he suspects it is also a form of loneliness.
He does not want to possess. But he wants to be changed.
And that is a kind of possession, too.
So he walks carefully. He tries to unlearn the hunger that cloaks itself as grace.
He prays to look without harm. He fails. He tries again. Not a life of clarity. But of contending.
Not a man made pure by restraint.
But one pierced by contradiction.
This is his offering:
Not perfection
But the tension he refuses to escape
Yet sometimes, he wonders – for all his restraint and ritual, all his ache and reverence:
Is he merely submitting to the superficial?