Courtly love is an unconsummated desire prompting the infinite pilgrimage of worshipping the beloved Lady, which induces the lover’s mystical journey. Modeled after Petrarch’s failed pursuit of his beloved Laura, courtly love inspires eroticism sublimated into sanctifying sallies and daring attempts to deserve the beloved. However, the idealization of the woman in Petrarchism will never compare to the self-aggrandizement of the poet-lover; she will always be the object, and the poet-lover remains, grammatically and thematically, the subject. My work aims to invert Genesis and Petrarch’s amatory trajectory, making the woman the origin and the man the destination and repository, rendering him vulnerable, nude, and extraordinary. The penis becomes the object of wonder and contemplation. My work makes me the eye, the bizarre and demented knight, who ferociously dawdles in love, inspiring my crusades and simultaneously uplifting man by his beautiful sensitivity and not by his might.

- Josephine Hirsh