Nicole Daedone
Storyteller
Erotic Artist
Activist
Sicilian
The Eros Sutras provide a framework for exploring the practice of OM and an Erotic way of life. They offer a different perspective on the world, highlighting the interconnectedness of all things and guiding practitioners towards a life of human flourishing. The practice is OM, the path is the Sutras, and love is the carrier signal.
-William Stafford
The Story Thus Far
I specialize in following the thread where not many dare to tread. I want to know life biblically, the way a man knows a woman (or other configuration of such). I want to know the water by getting wet. Theory, commandments, concepts leave me empty, and not a good kind of emptiness.
My driving question is, “Is that true?” Is it true wholly? Where and how is it true? For whom is it true and why? Can it withstand the test of time? Is it true for me as a woman? The last one has taken me into some very off-beaten paths. Givens are often no longer givens when I ask this question. The world turns upside down.
My two guiding principles are the ideas that firstly, “I’ve come only for this”—whatever is presented before me is mine to puzzle, play, to explore, and finally, to love. This leads me to, secondly, the how I explore, which is to ask, “Can I love this?” “Can I love even this?” “Who is the I who is loving in this moment?” “What does love look like here?” “Does it require a peaceful approach, approval, power, or some good old-fashioned wrath?
And then, “What is this?” I must leave who I believe myself to be to answer that question. What is this on “its” terms and not on mine. As a free woman I want all things to be free, liberated from any ideas I would impose on them.
I create genres from existing worlds by extracting the essence and growing philosophies from there.
I ask, “What is the highest form of this?” “What does this need to become that?” “What does it need cut away to become its own unique beauty?” “How will we know when it is realized?”
My absolute specialty is doing this with shadow material, with what we discard or disregard, what we see as trash, people we see as monsters, and groups we have seen as outsiders. The mark of my work is that something that has been denigrated is now exalted and not by assimilation, but by becoming wholly and uniquely itself and then fitting into the culture in such a way that it is viewed as invaluable.
I do this by turning every process into a spiritual journey. Or, as one reporter described it, I do everything I do “religiously.” I do it agnostically as well, meaning that the edicts of my known world do not constrain me. I will enter any domain, apprehend it, taste, touch, smell, feel, and most of all listen to it until it reveals its secrets, and then I will offer my gifts to it on its terms.
That part is vital; it is not me imposing my will, my idea of what it wants to be but me using my powers to access the resources for it to become itself.
I believe that everything, and I mean everything, when properly tended to, reveals an untold beauty.
We are constructed of the divine. But my work is not as an activist, reformer, saint, teacher, guru, or shaman—it is as an artist: an Erotic artist. My art might be considered akin to found-object art, made from what has been thrown away.
But it is an art that turns something back into itself. I vision how to turn the unconscious realm of sex into the spiritual plane of Eros; the degradation of addiction into the art of addiction that isolates the addiction drive for purposes of realization; the life sentence of trauma into human flourishing; the feminism of subjugated women into the feminine collective of inestimable power; those who have been canceled, exiled, and banished into the leaders of the next era; desertified soil into not only carbon-absorbing but nutrient-producing; prisons into monasteries; hunger and food deserts into farm-to-table free pop-up restaurants; black culture into the black box for society that holds the secrets.
I know, though, that these domains historically viewed as inferior and/or invisible must first recognize their unique value, and then draw it forward and learn to wield it well. From there they can see their unique place in the order of things, and finally get some good old-fashioned PR. This means they need “cultural authorities” to speak for them—science is a non-partisan authority in this culture. So I get the science to back the truth so that people who have doubts will have proof; and, as a result, have access to medicine.
My work remains what it once and always was – to turn poison into medicine and make it available to those who would want it.
Harriet Tubman said, “I would have freed more slaves if they had known they were slaves.” I think we’d have more people healing if the real medicine were not feared and misunderstood.
Nicole Daedone