Energy Independence

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Who Are You, Really?

The following may or may not have happened not too long ago. If it did, you know who you are.

Me, I didn't recognize myself.

It was not unlike how you often describe the shape of the room when I'm playing with your breath, how the world goes slightly plastic, soft. You flexed like you were being tumbled in the rogue wave I would later describe to you I had become. You levitated out of bed with, it seemed, the aid of but a couple of my fingers and suffered your exhausted body being bound yet again, not slowly, not erotically, but as though engraved by the single piece of still sweat-dampened jute. Your elbows veritably slapped together, your forearms jumped to their usual indigo hue, you gurgled a half-hearted protestation. You were soft, yielding... we both and everything wanted this moment, and gave way to it.

Once your wrists were unlovingly pinioned, you managed a "no..." as your soft world hardened to black. And then it began.

I wrote to you the following words a couple of days later:

"How often does one hear that on the heels of some momentous event or incredible behavior? 'Yes, it was me, but it's like I couldn't even recognize myself...' Unfortunately such words are likely as not to be uttered in a court of law during some sort of criminal proceeding, but the same words are also an acknowledgment of a tectonic shift in perception, for they imply that it's possible to see oneself from without, to see ourselves doing a self we don't recognize, which can only mean that we're having at that moment an experience of pure being."

You already know me a bit this way, this way better than nearly anyone else, really. You've felt that friction in your cheeks before, that heat. This was something else, this was shocking and hurtful and blinding in a way that no blindfold ever blinded. There was a learned force behind that first strike. You gasped four times, you seldom gasp at all unless I'm just giving you breath after a long withholding of it. I'm used to the cane coming down on you - your breath leaves in whimpers and cries, but it doesn't make noise going back in. You staggered under the blow before I grabbed your hair and rounded to the other cheek with concussive energy easily equal to the first. Was that what is called reeling? I wondered if it was the force or the surprise. Probably both.

After a sufficiency of mayhem committed on this face I adore you dropped to one knee, hard. I steadied you from the crown of your head and proceeded to rape your mouth, boring of that shortly and releasing you to fall. Your head missed the trunk by inches - your hair brushed over the corner. That's how quickly everything can go to pieces, but the room flexed for us, wanted this, just as we wanted it.

By one beautifully shod foot I dragged your limp form, squeaking across the parquet, back toward the bed, noting to you how good you were being about keeping your stilettos on. I would not call what I was enacting on you sadism, for I took no pleasure in it. I take no pleasure in beating you, on concentrating my upper body's weight on the business end of some tool or through the palms of my hands.

It's what we do; it's your apotheosis and my abasement.

As I noted to you years ago I am now, with you, a hitter, and uneasy rest the hands from which the gloves have been removed. Would that I were truly sadistic... that I could get off on hurting you.

Leashing you by your hair I lifted you and flipped you back on the bed, crushing your arms. You wormed backward weakly before I grabbed your throat and pressed it to the mattress. Your lips opened and closed silently, maybe you croaked something like a word, I don't know. I held you to the bed with one hand, choking off your resistance, while the other hand found you drenched with want. My still tumescent sex found you quickly and I caused myself some slight discomfort in the violence of my thrusting. When I let up on you you sucked breath and cried out, prompting the insertion of two fingers deep in your throat... and with it the retching. Out and back again, each spasm registering on my disinterested member. Once again to your throat, then in it, then once again a mighty swing and a resonant slap.

I was blind to myself, blind with sweat, berserk with power. I failed to check in, I failed to show up at all. I wondered where I'd gone. It was all so uncalled-for, this savagery. You're never anything but sweet as sugar. There was a long moment when it seemed you might sob, but no. You kept your composure, your dignity, your wits about you... you did not meet me where the ground was slick and unsure. One of us always has to stay present, rooted. You volunteered this time.

Then all the colors changed and it was past.

When I lifted the cloth from your eyes they were brimming with tears and wonder. Though I have beaten you bloody in the past, never have I done anything like this, been anyone like this. I have been on the offensive at times where I get what's going on - a rage propelling an attack properly comported to its object. The fighting me, a me I recognize. No rage this time, not even a mild pique. A calm and deliberate execution of raw blazing will, that's what it was. But whose? Who led this?

I'll be curious to learn if it really did happen, but I'll have to wait until I appear again. If I do you'll let me know and I'll make sure to get a good look next time.

Risk Everything All the Time, Part 2

Partners very reasonably expect that I have at least a modicum of skill in the dance I would lead, and while I have never dropped anyone in the (literally) hundreds of suspensions I’ve rigged (nor in dancing, come to think of it), I have crushed nerves, left unintentional marks, had to cut rope and generally made acquaintance with the many crises common to bondage play. Still, I’ve no interest in mitigating any of the risks to which I expose myself or my partner.

By risk I don’t mean of incompetence or negligence (I, after all, derive a significant measure of my satisfaction in tying by successfully getting and keeping my partner in the form or pose I fancy), but rather of surprise interludes or endings within the scene. Those sometimes include quick arrests of erotic energy and emotion (which, once they’re flowing, understandably want to remain so), but that they too are at risk of unforeseeable detours adds immeasurably to the charm and intimacy of BDSM.

I would risk saying that in BDSM the only risk worthy of the common conception of the word is that of incompetence, and even then two people may consent to venture into experiences with which neither is familiar - both are incompetent, ipso facto, until they’re not. Yes, we should be aware of the risks of tying and being tied, of wine enemas, of an involuntary twitch with a knife in hand, of the local laws, of hot, of cold, full, empty, up, down, open, closed, in, out, right, wrong, rough, soft, loud, silent, on, off, loaded, slack, tight, loose, happy, sad… we should be aware of all of it… and therefore none of it.

Stepping full into possibility is what, in the end, will have given life its sweetness. In this sense being a pervert is a gift par excellence. What gets me off is not binary possibility, but quantum possibility – vagueness, indeterminacy, gray areas, the interdigitation of one and zero. I’m more a student of Buddhism than a practitioner (because I believe the teaching has gotten the matter of suffering wrong), but I am totally on board with the idea of unknowing. Knowledge is static (a common starting point in any epistemology) – it does not flow. It’s on or off. Not knowing is flowing… and risky.

Embracing risk takes a certain amount of being out of one’s head, and by that I mean absenting oneself to thought and calculation and analysis (and knowing), and admitting full feeling and presence. I am continually delighted by what ensues from the simple fact of my having been fully present and aware. Were I feeling really bombastic I’d suggest that nothing ever goes wrong when I’m present, but what does go wrong turns quickly right when I’m aware and full in feeling. Going wrong is in the flow to right. When I’m in my head I miss things, mostly the flow.

I’ve taken thousands of trips on New York’s subways and never felt in danger of loosing my life, but obviously that does not mean that risk is not present. Doubtless many of you reading this will have driven somewhere today, which is a far riskier venture than gliding under rivers in giant aluminum sarcophagi. Still, risk is what gives living in New York its complex flavors and frisson, and we all share in it, on subways and elsewhere. It’s why the world tilts constantly in our direction. Shared risk is more prosperous and more fun. It’s why money and art are here in such profusion. It’s one of the more obvious yields of kink.

I don’t believe I’ve mentioned it, but my bread-and-butter is risk analysis and mitigation. People hire me to ride herd on their investments and they pay me only when I do better than the markets. Their risk is my risk. That said, I trade very aggressively and take only those clients who can stomach volatility (for which I am the poster child). My competence is in limiting the downside, a discipline for which I have to show up daily. I control what I can, which is a very small percentage of the whole. The making of the money, the main event, is something I just get out of the way of and let happen. I get out of my head. In effect, everything is at risk because it’s in play and working – if it’s not in the ring it’s safe, but no good comes of it.

With rope what I control is ultimately a very small part of a whole scene. My best gambit is to get out of the way and let the main event happen, what ever that might end up being. I’m a firm believer in non-zero sum outcomes - win-wins are possible and even probable if everyone is willing to put something on the table. There can be no winners when everyone is safe.

Risk Everything All the Time, Part 1

So, it's late on Monday evening and I’m shuffling through Jersey City to the Grove Street PATH station. Following a bit of work I’ve stopped for dinner and vigorous dialogue with a long-absent and dear friend with whom I can unself-consciously bring up kink and Kafka in the same breath. By this hour my constitution is propped up with a surfeit of bizarre boutique-y Malbec and rangy thoughts. It’s a clear night, a good one for surprise visits, which, despite my slight impairment, I still have in mind once I’m back across the river.

Descending into the station I note that the cops minding the station that night are all of the body type good for short bursts of activity on flat ground. One pauses coming up the stair to catch her breath, the other feigns impatience and shifts a plastic bag she has slung over her shoulder from one side to the other. I wonder if the perps they’d likely encounter in the subway are the kind who thoughtfully use elevators while fleeing. The crackle of the panting cop’s radio reminds me that they’re more like smart-cams with a reporting function – they don’t generally chase anyone down, they dial up an insertion team for that.

The hair of the very few Manhattan-bound passengers waiting on the platform begins to rustle as the inbound train pushes air out of the opposite tunnel. The train rumbles into the station shrouded in a thin fog which lifts and dissipates as the train slows, a phenomenon I happen to be facing and find strangely beautiful. The last several cars are dark, which is not that uncommon for NYC transit rolling stock, but this is a milky darkness. In the time it takes for the word “odd” to register in my thoughts, the doors open and people spill out onto the platform gasping and spitting, and gray smoke unfurls toward the vaulted ceiling.

New Yorkers (and their Jersey counterparts) don’t pay any attention to things that happen all the time; obvious attention-giving is how we tell tourists from locals. No one else on the platform was watching the inbound train arrive, and the station was well-filled with smoke and disgorged passengers stampeding toward the stairs by the time heads were turning. In either my Malbec-conditioned momentum or local-centric obliviousness I kept walking toward the evolving mayhem, which I thought later of myself exceptionally dull-witted. It wasn’t until the acrid smoke obscured my feet that it even occurred to me to change my direction and use my handkerchief to cover my mouth. There were a couple of passengers on their knees on the platform whom I gave a moment’s pause to consider helping before they were scooped up by one of their standing number to be merged into the panic that was heading my way. I stepped aside and made for the further (and less choked) exits. Coming my way were several New Jersey Transit workers carrying fire extinguishers, one yelling somewhat needlessly “Please evacuate the station!” I looked back to see their progress halted by dozens of bodies crowded at the bottom of the stairs. As I was not looking where I was going I bounced off a very soft chest; it was the stopped cop I’d seen on the stairs. As I turned I was met by kind eyes and a big bluesy voice asking me if I was all right - did I need help getting up the stairs? I nodded, and then shook my head and she somehow got my meaning, switching promptly to a more brusque “Then keep moving upstairs.” As I climbed the stairs now coughing a bit I thought I’d certainly caviled her.

On the concourse level the air was only slightly tainted by the fire. Passengers milled about looking progressively less traumatized, rallying to the point of laughing in many cases, beginning to shrug it all off. In the midst there were obvious signs of chaos – a couple of discarded coats on the floor, some vomit, a makeup compact, a pair of high heels left neatly on a utility box on the wall, everyone trying to get a cell signal. The transit workers who had made for the distressed end of the platform had wisely abandoned their mission and were bringing up the rear of the passenger herd coming up the staircase, calling out for everyone to evacuate the station, and largely ignored.

I waited at the exit stairs to see if anyone needed assistance or to await the inevitable stroller mom, but when a younger man asked me if I’d like help getting out I realized my presence was not only superfluous but maybe even a little fatuous.

When I came above ground the first bits of a glittering flotilla of fire equipment was assembling loudly on the square while others screamed in from every direction. Manhole covers were opened and plumes of smoke wafted up, fouling the air with the stink I’d just escaped. Hoses were extruded from trucks like fresh pasta. As colorful as it all was, I started back whence I’d come to see if my dear friend might not be completely exhausted of friendliness. There would be no going to Manhattan tonight.

One of the shibboleths of kinkdom is the idea that risk can be controlled. This is soft-peddled in the two maxims “Safe, sane and consensual,” and “Risk Aware Consensual Kink.” No thoughtful person who has practiced BDSM for anymore than a few minutes defends the notion that it’s safe – that one would even care to be safe en scene is itself counterintuitive, for it’s precisely where the certainty of outcomes departs that things get interesting. Safe is the precisely the opposite of exciting.

Ambiguity and Mental Health

The Chicken/egg question, eluded to in my last post: Does BDSM affect my (passive) psyche, or is it my psyche doing the heavy lifting? Also, the unimportance of "why?" redux.

• How has BDSM affected your emotional/psychological life?

BDSM administers to my life a primal tension and frisson that our technically sanitized and morally confused civil society actively mitigates against. It is a modern virtue to compact human emotional and physical experience into a narrow range; we sweep the natural exuberance of children, the catharsis of grief and even vague senses of ennui under the equalizing broom of serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, and carve our empathy and our bodies to fit a perfect composite image that is called “normal” or “beautiful.” In all our potentials we are aggressively herded toward the vast, gray and amorphous middle, surrendering what Gerard Manley Hopkins celebrated in his poem Pied Beauty as “all things spare, original and strange.”

Not long ago I read an AP wire report in the Bennington Banner (VT) of the phenomenon of teenagers playing very dangerous games, including mutual strangulation and surfing atop fast moving vehicles. Of course, the therapeutic classes are all atwitter about such goings-on, but I myself am unsurprised. The more adults take pains to smooth the bumps out of their childrens’ teen years, the clearer and bolder said teens will be in their expression of their new found erotic, emotional and intellectual vitality, which often emerges as pure Dionysian energy (i.e., chaotic, fecund, bloody, destructive, creative, etc.). Where our culture emphasizes safety and deadening of deep feeling, the first hormonal blush of adulthood demands immersion in life (and all that entails) immediately and at full throttle (so to speak).

BDSM reintroduces color to human relations in bold and sometimes grizzly defiance of puritanical mores and its culture of just saying “no.” It is resolutely politically incorrect. It is patently ridiculous and even comic with no obvious biological or social imperatives. It is utterly inscrutable. To the unambivalent it is harmless but hurts like birth. To the ambivalent it offers clarity. It can bring out the complete truth of who its practitioners really are. It has all of the right enemies.

• Do you feel BDSM relationships last longer or shorter than non-BDSM relationships? Why?

I think people endure or not in relationships as a function of their will to become known to their partners, irrespective of BDSM. BDSM offers all of the conveniences any other life pursuit for hiding from one’s self and from others, and as long as anyone in relation to another person keeps themselves secreted away, it’s fair to ask if there is any such thing as a relationship (in a serious sense of the word) going on. There are arbitrarily large numbers of ways in which people may loose themselves to passion, open and become vulnerable to getting exactly what their souls need (however that shows up), and thus truly be known by another. BDSM is about as efficacious in this respect as golf (but it may be faster acting).

Leading Question

Starting not from the beginning, but rather where I think my answers start to take on some interest, here is where my scholarly interlocutor's little bit of knowledge became a dangerous thing:

• How do you negotiate the consent and boundaries of 'safe, sane, and consensual' with your partner?

Like an increasing number of my fellow travelers, I do not believe in safe kink. I would go so far as to say that the mere idea of safety partially compromises the allure, efficacy and possibilities for discovery in kink. One of the fundamental notions that is therefore understood from the very beginning of any interaction is that what another person and I are proposing to participate in with one another is inherently unsafe; let us not labor under any delusions to the contrary. If we're having this type of conversation in the first place, plain-spoken acknowledgments of danger lurking among our intentions usually ups the excitement level that much more.

The word "sane" I consider a bromide and a palliative, and as an truthful assertion pertaining to anything to do with BDSM ascertainable only a posteriori. In fact, if someone feels compelled to assert to me their sanity, said sanity is thereby immediately suspect in my book.

Consent is perhaps the only term I consider meaningful of the three above. Consent emerges not from anything like a call-and-response-type exchange ("It is my intention to tie you up now." "That would be agreeable."), but from the feeling of trust, faith and mutual advantage discovered endogenously in the consideration of something possibly unsafe and, in a conventional sense, of questionable sanity. With time and the understanding that the person I am with will do me no harm, consent abides whatever it is that we determine we would like to do.

An example: a current partner and I are very fond of breath control play. We have never negotiated it, and it has evolved over many months to a fairly pitched and risky degree. It's beginnings were humble enough - I had gagged her very thoroughly and she had experienced trouble breathing. I rearranged things a little more to my liking (and comfort level), but none the less effectively, and we had a very nice scene. It was not until I mentioned the severity of the gag that she was prompted to tell me that she had found her gasping for breath very exciting, much to her surprise. We are now somewhat expert in a variety of ways of controlling her air supply, and she finds them all very much to her liking. Not safe, questionably sane, adventitiously consensual, and, as it turns out, one of our favorite things.