In BDSM We Trust

Silly me.

I have always thought in my anthropologically Pollyannaish way that the possibility of such a cunning and competitive creature as homo sapiens making it this far without exterminating itself speaks to some deeply rooted cooperative impulse. Imagine my surprise in finding out that the received wisdom among evolutionary anthropologists is that social skills and cooperative behaviors developed to better compete with other humans.

Huh? So, the ability to wage war and ultimately to obliterate all life on our home planet is an adaptive improvement on the behaviors of Paleolithic hominidae? Who knew? And how about a species that can completely encode such a trait in but a few thousand years (i.e., a blink of the evolutionary eye)? Despite the credit due our species under this view for collectively mutating faster than A-Rod, the grimness of the entailments I can scarcely imagine (how about this one - North Korea wins).

Who can blame AIG for trying to reverse-hedge the insurance business?

While I would not question the position that competitive pressures within the BDSM social milieu exist and are indeed intense, the success of BDSM as practice once a partner relationship has been established is predicated on something rather less zero-sum, a trait that is apparently being looked upon as theoretically radical, possibly even heretical, among anthropologists.

In a recent New York Times article there is reported a recent shift toward a new direction among careful thinkers in such matters. In a recent monograph, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy observes that human babies are uniquely expert in eliciting from their adults deeply suborned evolutionary adaptations, the net effect of which evince to us our own capacity to trust.

The great apes get their progeny up and running on their own much faster than humans; among mammals human infants are unusually helpless for an unusually long period of time. This extended span of rearing is, understandably, rather a lot for any human mother to bear. Thus among the many ways humans cooperate in rearing children is, according to Hrdy, chief among beneficial adaptations. By their wily ways of keeping adults not merely entertained, but largely empathetic to their helplessness, infants provoke and reinforce the expression of the trust trait. This is true for apes, but apes will not generally ask for or offer assistance in the rearing of their young. Humans do, and we generally get a positive (read: non-infanticidal) response from our fellow adults because, well, we all find the little blobs of gristle pretty adorable.

Perhaps we are able on a sub-conscious level to recall our own helplessness as infants, and thereby file our responses to little ones under "empathetic", but according to Hdry we were "nice before we were smart." Even so, we were smarter than other cooperative animals (such as certain birds, wolves, etc. - it's how we managed not to become dinner) before we became fully homo sapiens spaiens some 12,000 years ago. But that's what makes the problem interesting. We had brains that were already cunning, territorial and selfish, and there is much about our behavior even today that augers against evolutionary success, but we seem to have evolved more profitably in the area of trust. Babies express it reflexively, parents recognize the trust their babies show toward (certain, not all necessarily) other adults, and trust the other adults to aid in the rearing of the children.

Of course, as soon as we entered the neolithic era, developed agriculture and settlements, we came up with the idea of territory and, concomitantly, war to enforce its boundaries. The selfish genes entered their ascendancy, but the extant traits for trusting were able to keep pace, and the time spent rearing our offspring has not gotten any briefer in the intervening millennia. As an adaptive trait trust and the sharing of pooled resources is still pretty novel.

In light of all this it's a bit startling to learn that the assumption of anthropologists, sociologists and political theorists has been for generations that humans are primarily competitive, and social adaptations are largely in service of that dominant impulse. Perhaps my rosey colored views can be attributed to my long experience at play in the fields of trust. Loving just one person takes a great deal of trust, and also faith that their love is genuine. The pains of loving fully and well are profound, and faith is required because the pain can so easily be taken personally. Loving many takes an expansion of faith, and the vectors of trust become much more densely interwoven. My wife trusts and loves my partners proceeding purely on the love and trust she sees in me for them (much as I believe Professor Hdry suggests obtains in other loving contexts), and I do likewise with her partners. Trust does much to ameliorate competitive impulses (which have their place in the evolutionary scheme of things once trust has been violated, I suspect).

I think most would agree that it's difficult to trust in just one relationship, much less many. With more than one or in several relationships conscious trust becomes something to which one has to surrender since there is no such thing as stage-managing it. What exactly is it were asking to trust anyway? That we not get hurt? If we're unwilling to hurt then we're unwilling to love. If we submit to trust (to quote the great Peter Gabriel line) we get love, and we get the inevitable pain of love too, but we take it, gladly.

I don't need to spell out the value in metaphor of BDSM play to the case supporting Professor Hdry's theory - I think many readers of this column understand the virtues of trust, of cooperation, of loving profligately and wastefully, and of electing to suffer in love. The demands on, and challenges to, trust in BDSM play are always formidable, and within that sphere I've elaborated on an infantile impulse my conscious mind surrendered over 40 years ago, but which may also be a key trait in shoring-up mankind's evolutionary prospects against its own prodigious inclination for self-immolation.

Marriage Failure a Natural Success

In a hilarious example of editorial resistance to the way things actually are, the Washington Post published this feature on the findings of researchers at the esteemed Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on the genetic basis for marital dysfunction.

The writer and editors of the Post article blandly accept the social idealism of the study's authors, not bothering to trouble themselves with a critical (i.e., journalistic) perspective on the biological ramifications of what, essentially, now seems to be a demonstrable biological truth (albeit as yet scientifically uncorroborated); that some 40% of men are genetically outfitted to "cheat".

The use of the word cheat in the article is very telling, as are words such as "risk", "dysfunction" and "threat":

"Men with two copies of (a particular) allele had twice the risk of experiencing marital dysfunction, with a threat of divorce during the last year, compared to men carrying one or no copies," said Hasse Walum, a behavioral geneticist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm who led the study. "Women married to men with one or two copies of the allele scored lower on average on how satisfied they were with the relationship compared to women married to men with no copies."

If we consider more than one copy of the allele in question (an allele is a member of a pair or series of genes that occupy a specific chromosomal position) predictive of a man's success or failure in marriage and long-term relationships in light of the much more rigorously predictive models of Gregor Mendel and later Charles Darwin, then a fair alternate conclusion could be that men possessed of more than one of these rover alleles are more likely to wander and therefore reproduce - precisely nature's intent for all its creation - and that failure, if any is to be assigned here, accrues entirely to the institution of marriage as it is conceived in the popular consciousness.

Do we blame fish for dying off when we dam a river?

The report is all very nuanced, and not made any less so by the inclusion of weasel words such as "satisfied", with the concomitant couching of the entire study's relevance in terms of that vague and variable criterion - stacked, let it not go unobserved, on but one side of the matrimonial partnership (which, I suppose, if one considers the Latin root mater in matrimony is placing the emphasis where it wants to go anyway). It's quite likely that nearly 100% of men with this naturally-occurring genetic variant would have equally valid (i.e., weak) complaints about their matrimonial "satisfaction", thus is the criterion spurious and the point of the study moot.

But, since we're on the subject, let me apply Occam's Razor and offer a simpler thesis: Naturally-occurring human genetic encoding trumps socially-engineered monogamy.

Big surprise.

Despite its laughable faults, this study does support an explanation for women-kind's reliable attraction to renegades and outcasts, the proverbial "bad boys", the "alphas", of whom it is always known at the outset never stick around. The basis of the attraction to the James Dean type is by now well-understood: women sense good-quality genetic information much as men do - the kind that begets more of the species most efficiently (and therefore gets passed on), the kind they want expressed in their offspring. If 40% of males pack the tomcat allele, then there's no denying that variant's success in getting itself passed on.

If a woman thinks about it (i.e., does the risk-analysis math) she may indeed go directly for the beta male, or upon hooking up with an alpha seek to modulate his risk profile down the scale to beta levels (thus possibly jeopardizing her marital satisfaction in an entirely different way). On the level of woman's feeling, however, the recently popular beta types, e.g., the "emo-boy" and homo-manque, have apparently had their moment in the sun and have been largely discarded (as they characteristically fretted they would be) by sexually astute and self-aware (read: trend-leading) women.

From the perspective of a long-time married man who, given my history, likely has two or more of the offending allele, marital survival is in no way predicated on the luck of the double-helix draw. Fin and my marriage is completely legit in all the conventional senses of the word (licensed, blessed, taxed, etc.), but it is also something else utterly outside conventional legitimacy: we can't "cheat" because we tell the truth.

Or, pulling in Occam again, cheating ≠ truth telling. Fin knows all about my partners, they know all about her, I know about hers and they about me. Everyone is clued in and gets complete disclosure upon request from me, and I from them. I think the marriage succeeds not because it's open but because we are open with each other, fully exposed and vulnerable... and therefore, paradoxically safe.

Think about it - the "cheating" is just the lying (cheating = lying); we fear what we don't know, and if our partner lies to us about his or her desire for other partners, about the nature and extent of their lust, about their kinks, about whatever, we don't get to know them, who they really are, who we're spending our lives with, who sleeps next to us (when we're really most vulnerable), who's helping to raise our kids. Now, that's fearsome, not knowing who you're married to. That could be reason enough to get out of the relationship.

Make no mistake, I'm not arguing here for having a lock on everything your partner is or will ever be in order to stay in your relationship. Quite the contrary - mystery promotes attraction (see "bad boys" above). I'm talking about proceeding from truthful premises and being content with the unvarnished truth of what you find out about your partner, which is often what they're finding out about themselves in the same moment. Their own picture of themselves is likely incomplete, so the truth is we don't get to know anything our partners don't know - although we pretend it's possible and often demand answers along these lines. In effect, we ask to be lied to.

A big part of success in anything has to do with allowing yourself to be surprised, indeed, being grateful for the leavening and spice of life's surprises, big and small. This is never more true than in relationships, but in principle yielding to surprise solves (in the sense of Wendell Berry's concept of "solving for pattern") for what appears to be a host of life's more intractable problems while creating few new problems of its own. Often events are just surprising and nothing else - not really problems at all if one can accommodate having not expected them.

Blaming unhappiness on hardwired (and therefore unsurprising) biology is lazy, even shabby, thinking. Lying is a social act, related in this case to a social institution, marriage. Given that over 50% of marriages end in divorce, and that cheating plays a big part in a sizable percentage of those divorces, it may be fair to say that lying (by cheating) is a property of conventional marriage; i.e., dishonesty comes with the package, if not in the bridal registry.

That after 25 years Fin and I are still married is already statistically unconventional, but in the conventional sense our marriage is a failure in that it utterly fails to force biology to heel, and has failed, thereby, to fail. With respect to this failure to fail we have also been told occasionally through the years that our marriage is basically a sham, that our relationship is nothing more than that of roommates with privileges (ironically, this often comes from folks whose marriages are somewhat brittle, if not in outright distress).

And you know what? Those folks get to be right. That's all 25 years of cohabiting companionship, mutual support, commitment, pooled resources, sexual experimentation (within and without), crisis management and the gathering to our relationship of a cherished and loyal coterie of friends, lovers and fellow travelers comes to: a sham marriage. Nothing like a real marriage, with the lying and the cheating and the stacked odds on ending and the counselors and the lawyers... the real institutional trappings of the institution of marriage.

So, there you go: lots of alleles = marital failure. QED.

What bearing, then, does the bit of embossed paper with the endorsement of several potentates with powers granted them by The State of New York have on my relationship with my wife? Nothing with any real meaning, really.

Other than perhaps economic. The last lines of the article cited above confirm as much:

"Fisher (quoted previously in the article), who described herself as a romantic, said she would not reject a potential mate who has two copies of the risky allele (Surprise!). She paused, (no doubt doing the risk analysis) then added: 'But I might not start a joint bank account with them for the first few years,'" (italics mine).

What's left? Well, Fin and I don't lie, cheat or resist our genetic makeup, and we stay together despite the odds. Clearly it's something other than the kind of failed marriage that gets looked at in studies.

I wonder if anyone still believes in the idea of a sacrament.

Non-Zero Sum

Every now and again I can't resist giving props here to the flashes of genius that are erupting all the time all over the web, only a very small percentage I get to see, and an even smaller percentage of which apply to the focus of RSE. This post is, I think, a laudable read on the first of Sarah Palin's campaign vexations, but more importantly on the sex/culture wars. That such a sophisticated, articulate and accessible analysis should emerge from the domain of art doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

Is it possible that the last salvo has been fired, the last petard hoisted, the tsk tsk'd and we can all go about our business?

You Want to Make It Yourself, or Have It Delivered?

“Can you imagine old age? Of course you can’t. I didn’t. I couldn’t. I had no idea what it was like. Not even a false image. No image. Nobody wants anything else. Nobody wants to face any of this before he has to. How is it all going to turn out? Obtuseness is de rigueur.”

Philip Roth writing as David Kepesh in The Dying Animal

A few months ago I wrote an essay about stalking game fish and wild fungi. Although my conscious focus at the time was on patience and to some degree the election to suffering in order that the very best of things can learn of the sincerity of our interest in them, at the same time I less consciously eluded to the possibility of a relationship between myself and my delicately elusive quarry.

Much of that relationship and the messy excellence of it was predicated of the time devoted to it, specifically when the goal of my elaborate efforts (to eat fish and mushrooms) was deferred, when my ultimate reward still lay before me, when the going was the toughest. Merely eating fish and mushrooms could have much more easily been satisfied by a stop at Fred Meyer (sprouting all over the West these days like a mushroom itself, usually in the shittiest of circumstances), or easier still by occupying a booth in a Bennigan's or TGI Friday's until a Brobdingnagian combo platter of beer battered "fish nuggets" and 'shrooms heaved into view.

After all, some things are available just for the asking (and $9.99), so it's perhaps interesting to ask what the non-obvious qualitative differences are between my time-consuming and labor-intensive approach to a quantitatively small (but intense) payoff, and the passive, leisurely route to rafts of fishrooms. In terms of the biological necessity of getting calories into my body the latter would seem to have much to recommend it. What is it about foraging that should be so persuasive when the biological essentialist in me can simply open my wallet and fill my hole?

Perhaps it has something to do with adding a little more time and effort to my pleasures to make them not merely meaningful, but more obviously substantial. Eating food used to be a central tenant of life, and the quality of one's life varied dramatically depending on what, if anything, was to be found in the fields, wood or crosshairs. Our senses used to be acutely geared toward determining ripeness or rot - hard to do when your lettuce is barricaded in a blister pack, or your peaches have been dipped in a chemical agent to stall their ripening.

There is a relationship one has with food, or can have with food, that is fundamentally life-giving and life affirming. Anyone who has traveled in France or Italy invariably takes strong note of the cuisine and the culture surrounding it, and of the (concomitant) sexiness of the people, their joie de vivre, as it were. Ever notice how one does not jump to such conclusions so readily in Germany or England?

Relating to the foodstuffs marketed by industrial outfits is kind of the equivalent of having a relationship with Internet porn. One can have a relationship to porn, and we all by necessity have a relationship to food, but it's impossible to have a relationship with porn because it's not the real thing. Permit the suggestion that a relationship with industrial foodstuffs is an equally dubious proposition - one does not have a relationship with food through the intellectual exercise of reading the nutrient labeling. One eats. One, however, is not obliged to eat the real thing.

There are certainly pleasures to be found in paid procurement, as I'm sure Eliot Spitzer would agree. I myself tremble in lust before Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey. But prostituted goods are not what our better natures crave, they are not what we get to the end of our lives wishing we had not missed.

At the center of what will have been a life well-lived is how much of it we gave to surrendering ourselves to forces we thought were not us - other people, nature, eroticism, etc. In this sense a relationship is only the entry point to the really important stuff - the surrendering. The ultimate surrender is given ("Most things may never happen: this one will." - Philip Larkin). In the end it will pay to have gotten good at surrendering while you were able, that is, unless one finds a dreadful exit somehow attractive. Death won't care one way or the other. Good examples of surrender come to you daily by way of what you put into your body, and claiming the life of the plant, or better still, the animal that is headed for your dinner table is to understand the nature of having a relationship with something. I can relate to killing - lots of fish have met their ends at my hands, and if I were a better shot I might also have had relationships with a few deer.

I should think that if something is inevitable and there's a option to have it at least tolerable, maybe even enlightening, that'd be the choice I'd like to make. That's possible when relating, which in order to be worthy of the word requires vulnerability, access, risk - in a word, surrender.

But, that means: Relating! - not the sort of thing that happens when what sustains you shows up for a few bucks on demand, like so much fried fish. Such cheapness casts the erotic (and food, for that matter) as entertainment - no risk, no edification, no surrender possible... a pastime and detour many pervert into a way of life. Food, sex and life itself become art when we have discovered ourselves opened in a kind of voluptuous, abandoned and carefree way, fearless of the entailments, final and otherwise, loving the moment and knowing that we're in it... in a relationship with it.

You'll know you're in it, of course. It'll be very close, too close for comfort, really, it'll be very difficult...

...and, unless it's death, it will not be delivered.

Ring Around the Collar

The cards and letters keep coming...

I am having trouble figuring out BDSM culture... I'm very interested in collaring and wonder if you've ever collared a partner or participated in the ceremony, or can tell me more about the symbolism and so forth. I don't even know what I would wear with a collar! How for example did collaring become special in BDSM? Also, do you have anything you can say about wearing a collar in mainstream society? Obviously I know you don't wear one, but maybe you know people who do.

This from someone who stumbled into kink through association with an artist friend we have in common. I've not heard of what progress she's made in her experiments, but elaborating on my reply to her for posting here has been interesting.

I understand that as a novice the norms and mores of the "culture" should be of exceptional interest, but what I think I know on this front is likely of very small value to someone for whom the interest is keen. Many years of exposure to and participation in (to varying degrees) the club, porn, house, Internet, fine art and political BDSM scene has lead me to surmise the following with respect to norms in BDSM and that which, within the framework of an interpretive apparatus, would identify it as a distinct culture: they are the very norms that identify the larger culture from which they emerge, merely amplified.

Let's consider the example of collaring. When two people avow to one another that between them a commitment to one another obtains, it is customary in the West for this oath to be materially symbolized somehow. In my business I use contracts - legally defensible though they may be, they are in fact merely betokenings of a common understanding. In trade, value is expressed via money, which, like a spoken word, has no intrinsic value other than that ascribed to it by the receiving party; even gold fluctuates daily with respect to the perception of its worth.

In marriage, we use rings, a convention which, as I understand it, emerged from Egypt and is symbolically derivative of the Uroboros, the serpent consuming its own tail and symbolizing the pelastrational nature of integration and assimilation (see Mysterium Coniunctionis by C.G. Jung). Moving forward a couple of millennia, the Romans had culturally calibrated the ring symbol as representative of value, and employed expensively tooled rings of precious metals as trade goods in marriage - the wedding band was regarded as a legal agreement expressing ownership of its wearer, i.e., the woman. Arguably, we preserve more of our current cultural, civic, intellectual and social cues from the Greco-Roman tradition than have persisted from the high era of the Pharaohs.

Even in our modern age we speak of "taking" a mate, and wedding bands are looked to as symbols of "goods" that are "spoken for". I never remove my band, and it is frequently a topic of conversation with partners who are eager to plumb the meaning of the ring as I've perverted it. Even among long-time kinky people there is often the residuum of cultural conditioning regarding possession and its symbols. One learns about one's kink on the tricky terrain of intimacy - through vulnerability, openness and the making of mistakes, false assumptions, or sometimes going 'round in circles (or, if you're lucky, in the making of circles, such as dear A. below - ed.).

In that accelerated world, the lessons come more quickly, more clearly and often more extensibly. This is how it is, I think, that kinky folk tend toward the somewhat more polite and decorous end of the spectrum in the broader cross-section of society. Again, not different so much as simply amplified.


A collar is, to my thinking, merely a variation on the same theme, albeit amplified to an unambiguous degree, whereas the ancient meaning of the wedding band has been diluted by years and the general principle of democratization. Collaring is something we do with our pets, a factor in our lives our laws tell us we "own" and for which we are responsible. I expect the pervy world to keep pace with whatever most clearly and most subversively represents unambiguous commitments (which, of course, are every bit as fragile over the long haul as any commitment expressed elsewhere in society), be it collars or something else. That it be openly defiant or contrary to convention is definitionally its perversity.

Personally, I find collaring symbolically facile. In far more recent times metal collars and chains were expressive of ownership and were also punitive instruments, as they are still. Yet, today, the wearing of metal chains about the neck is not merely fashionable, it's practically uniform. The more bombastic and aware of the Gangsta community here in Brooklyn openly declare the wearing of heavy metal chains about their necks as the subversion and appropriation of a potent symbol from the habit of their historic white oppressors. It is apt, therefore, that proper white society should look upon black "bling" with distaste and discomfort, for it is emblematic of pain white visited upon the body of black on these shores. In much the same spirit the word "nigga" is now exclusively the dominion of black-on-black communication. There is no white person still standing who does not appear a knuckle-dragging cracker should the word escape his lips with any sense of conviction.

Given that most kinky folk come from solidly middle class circumstances and would not be thought "oppressed" in any conventional sense of the term, one wonders about the subversive value of the collar, or what exactly is being defused through reappropriation. This is true for all symbolic expression in kink. The psycho-historical aspect to kinky expression may not be as labyrinthine as Gangsta culture, but then again, perhaps it is. Another way of looking at the issue may be to follow the path backward to what the dominant culture identifies and endorses as normal, and see how behaviors someone such as myself (a scion of middle class comfort if ever there was one) practice (and even call sacred) emerge from that so-called normalcy. In the end, all subcultures end up being commentaries on that of which they are derivative.

Shutting Up and Shutting Down

Not so long ago, when I thought I knew something, I was wont to suggest that, once I’d relieved her of use of her extremities, the one remaining way a woman could get to me was with her voice.

I’m a big guy, 6’4” or so, and I still press my high school weights. I don’t concern myself overly much with physical threats, which may sound like my ego speaking but I don’t think it is. I’ve not been in a lot of fights in my adult life simply because I don’t look like a good bet to lose. As I was growing to manhood, however, there was always one thing that could reduce me to a quivering blob of spineless gristle, and that was feminine verbal rejection. No matter what subtle erotic machinations I would deploy, a careless word could be the final word in confidence subversion.

I’ve already noted that I was a bit slow on the uptake of bondage porn, so I was equally slow to learn that there could be such a thing as an effective gag. Even when I made the move to rope I thought gags were kind of ornamental, something to enhance a bottom’s feeling of helplessness rather than actually keep her from impugning my swagger and technique. When finally I became competent in the area I realized that enforcing silence was a consummation of the power granted me, and my poor ego was safe from the kind of withering indictment only woman’s lips could utter (just for the record, the disciplinarian in my family was my father – my mother was rather a cipher in the behavior modification department, and not the chatty sort. Thus do I part company with Dr. Freud).

What I thought I’d figured out was not merely my attraction to a well-constructed and applied gag, but what must account for its popularity as bondage bijou. If she’s gagged I am fully protected.

(It’s interesting to think of bondage as a means and a metaphor for protecting one’s self, and in that light it’s curious (and paradoxical), really, that among tops there appear to be comparatively few women attracted to doing bondage. One of them, my dear friend Suze, has written an authoritative compendium on gagging (and blindfolding) from the perspective of one who loves applying them and having them applied.)

There is, of course, more than one way of conveying disapproval, and after verbal condescension the eyes are the most verbose organ of communication. The principle above applies to the eyes and their quieter furies in the form of a blindfold. Thus did I for years make a case to myself for completely obscuring the faces of women I loved and in whose eyes and voices I’d otherwise be blissfully content to lose time and any thought of visiting upon them the sorts of privations lurking in the more lawless precincts of my consciousness.

That’s what I thought I knew.

In recent years, through more concerted and intense play, I’ve come to a different view of things having more to do with the way in which I’m relating when I am fully in control. And relating is a weak word – merging is what I’m talking about here.

There is a line of reasoning regarding erotic objectification which I towed for a while in my right-on and callow youth which stridently opposed the transformation of woman from an individual and distinct personality into an object of gratification (of any sort). I did labor under this doctrine and others with respect to my kink, but have thankfully attained some equanimity with the advance of my years and consigned such cant to the wasteful pleasures of immaturity. The truth was and is that I do make out of my loving partners objects for my enjoyment, and in no way is this more clear than when I remove from my own view the betokenings of their character and personality as revealed in their physiognomy.

I might take up the matter of conceptually individuated self at some point in the future, but suffice it here to say that I don't set much stock by it as a point of physics or philosophy. Philosophy especially has spent a disproportionate share of its creative energy attempting accounts of self-hood with generally unsatisfactory results. A concept of self may indeed be required to elaborate an intelligible meaning to our lives, but intelligibility is not (to me at least) the end all and be all of existential legitimacy, nor would I argue for the necessity of my own existence because I've figured out how to be intelligible to myself (I haven't - with all due respect to Descartes, I am, therefore I think, not the other way around). Intuitively, I feel more aligned with the possibility that distinction and individuation are useful intellectual canards, that all is one solid block of reality, and that the world view of humble neutrino has much to recommend it.

When I look into a lover's eyes I see capital H Her. When I hear her voice, I hear Her. I sense the person to whom I have an attachment, whom I love, upon whom I visit my depredations and deep musings. When I remove from my senses who she is as separate from me I loose track readily of Her as individuated from me (or Me) and the boundaries between us soften that much more. In the most perfect of instantiations I fall fully into her and she for her part takes full receipt of me. There ceases, however momently, to be a her and me and I see that essential facet to intimacy wherein self is absent and the two of us cease to exist.

I glimpse something powerful and normally remote in this. Fully compromising all of who she appears to be is not necessary, but it is close to sufficient to engender the shift out of my own ego (what my dear Besu calls the "racket") and into a higher order of experience. In sacrificing individuation and becoming a gateway she absorbs me more completely than is possible when I cling to notions of my self and her self.

If the point of love is something other than to merge, to shuffle off the constructed facade of Me and be completely vulnerable, I cannot imagine what that might be. The trappings of SM, bondage, gagging, blindfolding, and such, just accelerate this. When I am most in love I am precisely that, in love, lost, really, to who I am, to where I begin and end.

(Cartoon courtesy of Dave Annis at rope-bondage.com)

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Il a commencé par la Fin

On this date 25 years ago, I fell in love with a German woman in Venice at the end of a blind alley. 20 years ago on this date Fin and I were wed, and today we celebrate. In that couple of decades and some we’ve toiled and rejoiced in the way that people who grow truly intimate inevitably do, and instead of children (not entirely out of the picture quite yet) we’ve birthed art, hers and mine (she knew from age five what she was put on earth to do - it took me years to own up to bondage being art, and I still don’t know why I resisted). A quarter century of common and diverging-in-common aspirations has been no less colorful than that crystalline moment when everything changed, and there is nothing today that each of us does not endorse in the other. Nothing. The world only opens wider with each yes.

It has been a quiet epiphany to learn that all revelation pales before expansive love - recklessly admitted, honestly expressed and gratefully received. Run to it with glad abandon and give yourself to its tender ravages, for in the loss of your self there is the universe to be gained.

With thanks to Barbara Nitke

A Parable of Taste and Patience

Are the very rarest and most precious things really so hard to obtain, or do they merely seem so?

For the last week and some I have been visiting relations in the Pacific Northwest. A key point of the trip was to spend time with my young nephews, my youngest brother and his wife, and to give myself a mental picture of their still relatively new circumstances, having moved from the northern reaches of Vermont a little over a year ago to a charming 100 year old bungalow in Portland. My sister-in-law is a native of the city and in part their relocation was prompted by a desire to be near her clan at least while the boys are little. There is much to be said of the culinary culture in the region triangulated by Portland, Hood River and Bend, and my brother, a chef, was more easily persuaded by this fact than proximity to in-law sitting services.

The soils and waters of the Columbia, Willamette, Deschutes and Sandy valleys are veritable Xanadus for foragers such as my brother and myself. At this time of year the salmon are running, the sturgeon are gearing up and the fungus is coming in. It is the latter that occupied my time and thoughts disproportionately over the course of several wet days.

But first, a bit on stalking the former.

A sturgeon is caught using a drop line outfitted with bait or a lure. One waits sipping Full Sail Ale for the gentle creak of the gunwale telling of activity below. The sturgeon have to be induced to make one’s acquaintance, and once having done so they are anything but acquiescent to my playing my proper role in our sudden relationship. There is an adversarial feel about fishing of any sort, and I inevitably respect the ones that get away – it’s a sobering experience to be bested in a contest of wits and patience by one’s dinner. That sobering is mitigated by ever more generous administration of Full Sail, so a day on the Columbia is never wasted - though by the end of it I may be.

My guess would be that a sturgeon has better things to do than accept my invitation to dinner, as evinced by their forceful resistance to my entreaties. I have to take some pains to convince my intended guest to come to the table, an act of persuasion that crosses over very readily into coercion. Still, once having gotten the upper hand I’m grateful to the fish for finally giving itself over to me, but triumphalism of any sort is usually just code for having worked, or having idled while others did.

The mystique surrounding the wild morel is rather more developed than that of most fish (maybe excepting sturgeon of the Caspian sort). If one has a well developed fancy for edible fungus, then gustatory congress with the morel would the sine qua non of your condition. Certainly adding to their mystique (and their expense in markets) is the shortness of their season and the difficulty of finding them. That they are acknowledged as so elusive I’m sure adds to their saveur.

One must be prepared to suffer a bit to come to the morel, for they grow in messy circumstances – windfall, bramble, nettle, muskeg – not a natural place for a featherless biped such as myself. Regardless of the success of any morel expedition, the seeker will come away with bootloads of muck and myriad small violations of integument (mercifully it’s too early for mosquitoes right now). Attention to this aspect of the quest merely confounds recognition of the mushroom’s greeting, which is what it does when you let it see you.

A morel is a charming and unlikely denizen of the forest bottom it inhabits – one would not expect the best of anything to emerge from so unlikely and inhospitable a biome. Yet, as soon as one gives up the search and simply lets all creation as it has arranged itself be what and how it actually is, without wishing it, the mushroom, or oneself (sulfurous goo, thistle burns, battered shins and all) were any different, the morel reveals itself, and it is like a revelation, often in profusion, indeed tilting toward you in deference. Its combed ribbing, brinded gray confirmations and conical cap practically conspire in salutation, as though you were the one they had come topside to meet and offer themselves to. They know that their lot is to be treasured, to be used reverently and with respect and skill. Less perspicacious creatures avoid them. They’re waiting for the one who trusts and who is willing to be displaced, persistent, patient and perhaps a bit discomforted. The morel appreciates your suffering and rewards you with the full, happy and unresisting offering of everything it is, and will be in the violence you have yet to visit upon it.

Gently courted from its redoubt it maintains its beauty, dignity and composure as you suffocate, cut, compress and burn it, emerging on the far side of your depredations ever more desirable, seeping and fulsome, and now completely vulnerable. Every morel, like every mushroom, wants to be your last, wants to give itself ahead of others, wants to taste like nothing ever has nor will again.

It is a blessing worth thinking about that the little delicacy and I are enzymatically compatible, that for a tiny quirk of chemistry my precious and I can meet and have a loving relationship whereas it might so easily have been lethal otherwise. She wants me to find her, and as much as says so when we appear to each other, but she has no intention of making it either easy or hard on me. All she asks is that I stray a bit from where I know I can get around easily, stay awake to where I am, be willing to suffer a bit and, most importantly, not to bother looking for her.

That’s when your heart’s desire shows up, and it sure beats shopping.