Amer-al Qaeda

With apologies for my absence, I offer this forthright observation by Paul Krugman from this morning's NYTimes on the culture wars. As is abundantly clear to anyone in our United States, when cultural conservatives are out of power, the culture war becomes a shooting war. This has, quite naturally, got me thinking about my own little sub-corner of the larger culture.

At its most expressive, SM is a peak experience of self-responsibility, something grievance-minded individuals abhor, notwithstanding their contradictory rhetorical posturing. The having of grievances or the blaming of others for unhappiness is definitionally a repudiation of responsibility. The taking of action, the assumption of risks that attend such actions, and the constitutional strength to abide the outcomes of having taken the risk, without deflecting any part of it, is the operant principle of SM, morally and practically. It is also the definition of responsibility. SM is a context within which grievance does not function, for causality is unmediated and apparent to its participants. Thus the top who does not check and test the reliability of a club's suspension points cannot blame the club if they fail. Anyone for whom a scene fails is implicate in its failure for having freely consented to it; both top and bottom share responsibility.

When we feel upset and assign blame outside ourselves this I call personal irresponsibility. That right-wing fanatics should emerge now to terrorize their fellow citizens is indicative of not only their lack of common cause with the basic tenets of democracy which brought progressive voices to the executive and legislative branches of government and legitimized them, but it also betrays an understanding of the nature of action that begins and ends somewhere other than within. The "terrorist" is not a self-responsible actor; he or she nominates some conveniently external factor (political view, lifestyle, race, God-name, etc.) to inform their grievance, and then appeals to external authorities to legitimize prejudicial action, with the actions thereafter generally focused against an objectified form of the grievance, i.e., the target to be terrorized and/or purged. The pointedly amoral version of such terrorism calculatedly appropriates the mantle of free speech (or "common sense" or "spin-free") as the Trojan Horse by which it breeches the wall of personal responsibility.

The traditional fulminate to such action is religion, which advances its claims and power on the supposition of exteriority, individuation and otherness. Its value system is essentially negative in that some seminal lapse is its ontological starting point, and often the capricious enmity of non-immanent forces require appeasement (if it's God) or defeat (if it's the heathen infidel). Lapsarianism is a principle of resistance and victimization; cowardice articulated as salvation to a fevered, often homicidal, degree. In this regard, the supposition of exteriority in the context of religious belief may be viewed as a conventionalized form of insanity.

What little harm the principle of SM may be said to visit upon the world is mostly self-contained, meaning practitioners and believers hurt themselves (but take responsibility for doing it). As extreme as their proclivities might be they do not show up in public places and indiscriminately seek to harm others. Anyone who does is something other than a sado-masochist, and is doing something other than SM. Sado-masochists are, in other words, functional members of society, making their lives, enjoying their liberty, providing for their happiness.

People who do show up at churches to kill doctors, invade museums to slaughter Jews, erase hundreds by detonating truck bombs near government installations, or who use torture to gain an advantage over their presumed enemies, are not unlike an infection for which our body politic has yet to evolve antibodies, a social pathogen, with about as much regard for their fellow man as swine flu.

Religion pimps righteousness, while taking life, trampling liberty, and indulging grievance. Faith believes in one's fellow as one believes in oneself, and responsibly abides the entailments of so doing.

Obsessed

Or maybe just loyal.

I light of the many and disturbing revelations being made these days under the general rubric of "torture," I feel increasingly compelled to point where I can to clear-headed accounts of what has been the neo-American position and tradition on torture in recent years, and its high distinction as a mode of interaction between people.

Consider this digest of the ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody in last week's New York Review of Books (with thanks to John Wirenius for pointing it out). Also

One of the most obvious distinguishing characteristics of American-style torture is the ambivalence of its enablers. Seldom has so edifying and concrete a term been so cavalierly double-spoken by its practitioners. "Enhanced interrogation techniques", indeed. Nothing so sullies any act as shame, and nothing is quite so neo-American as absolving ourselves of our bad behavior by professing our self-loathing. In principle, however, this is less neo-American than a first-world updating of the old passive-aggressive Puritan two-step, known better to historically liberal sensibilities as moral cowardice.

What makes it moral is that it is an act of will; the will to purity. What makes it cowardice is that, while Puritans of all stripes love purity, Puritans generally dare not speak the name by which such love would be reified, namely the destruction of the impure ("Death to the infidel!" notwithstanding). Nietzsche ennobled the will to power ("Machtgelüst") in several of his works, and noted that it was as characteristic of enfeebled ascetic types as it was of robust, pro-creative types. Only one of the two could, however, be said to be an honest broker of their intentions.

In the present case our elected leaders have been too ashamed to call what they were directing what everyone already knew it was; as though it's not torture when we do it (and heaven forfend it should be looked upon as simple sadism). To give a moment's benefit of a teeny, tiny doubt, perhaps torture is such a definitionally gray area among those at the levers of power that other world leaders and international bodies were understandably cautious in their observations and condemnations of neo-American behavior. Is the nature of leadership power a contingent property of the threat of torture (the so-called "deterent effect" so beloved of penal-industrialists, gun nuts, drug warriors and sabbath gasbags)? Maybe, and maybe if you're a leader you have to deal with the possibility you'll have to use that threat someday. Maybe we've all been reminded lately that it's not just a threat, and that we should be careful about what we sign up for when pulling our own little levers, like on voting machines.

It's certainly no mistake nor should it be a surprise that clear reportage on torture is just now emerging - directly on the heels of the departed regime (the ICRC Report is dated early 2007, but was just released within the last month). Although it clearly advantages them to discredit the previous regime, I have been impressed by the new Obama administration's forthright use of the word "torture" to describe what has been going on, to permit open and transparent debate on the matter within its ranks, and to allow that it's going to take some time to clear it up. It's the antithesis of the earlier view, free of moral absolutism and capable of working the ground between the polarities of purity on both sides; the pro-"enhanced interrogationists" and the Human Rights Watch-ers. It's smart and utterly impure stuff, the first we've seen of its kind in a long while.

In the BDSM world view, what we do and our experience of it we call sadism, plainly. It's focused, directed energy between two people for an instant or an hour, it's intended to register as an unconventional sensation (conventionally called "pain") and to shift the recipient's frame of reference - psychic, emotional, corporeal. The rope bondage I love so much I consider to be especially capable in levering all of the above, through the surfeit of time required to do it, through the symbolic and actual connections, and through the symbolic and actual suffering of physical restraint. What happens in that space is unconditioned, and it's not always good, but the disposition toward its potentials has to be non-normative or what you've got is failure before the fact. In positive terms, one has to have a bit of a liberal world view to get what BDSM has to offer; to be honest of intent and to gladly suffer uncertainty of outcomes.

For all of a top's activity inside a scene, the benefits of the frame shift accrue equally (if not in greater measure) to the receiving party, and this, apropos my last post on the subject, is another characteristic marker of BDSM. It ain't BDSM if the lever you're using extracts power from the exchange.

That would be torture.

The American Menegele

In a chilling amplification of my previous post comes this article in today's New York Times.

It strikes me in the first place as pretty disturbing that American culture can foster the begetting of soulless functionaries capable of administering torture under the sponsorship of the state. But then we also have such a punitive cultural calibration that to suggest there's anything amiss in having the "free" world's largest prison population (5% of the world's population, 25% of the world's prisoners) is political suicide. As an aid to job creation for its security-industrial complex the same culture endorses inexpensive and unencumbered access to high-powered weaponry, paid for in part by rationing the medical necessities that often ensue from the proper and intended uses of this same weaponry.

Now we learn that there is a branch of our illustrious medical profession capable of repurposing the Hippocratic oath to finesse the maximum of suffering obtainable short of death (usually) in the name of... security. Now, I'm the first to point out the salutary uses of a little well-intended, soulful suffering - it's a tonic and the grist in the mill that gives creative impulses traction. But what kind of world view brooks the commodification of suffering? What kind of society rallies its wealth and genius to expand pain gratuitously, along with the anxiety that attends its anticipation? What kind of cultural spirit seeks to abjure the most basic of human virtues, such as robust health, educated senses and refinement of feeling, learning, the miracle of sex and its importance to the race?

Ours, it would appear. Punish, punish, punish... that's our big idea, our big contribution, pretty much since Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather.

We're good at it in the worst possible ways, and we're only getting better.

Is It Torture Yet?

Consider the ethical dilemma of meat-eating on page 310 of Michael Pollen's brilliant Omnivore's Dilemma :

"To (Benjamin Franklin's ) argument 'other animals eat meat', the animal rightist has a simple, devastating reply; Do you really want your moral code based on the natural order? Murder and rape are natural, too. Besides, we can choose: Humans don't need to kill other creatures in order to survive; carnivorous animals do."

To this I reply that a moral code based on the natural order is apt if for no other reason than our ability to conceive of rights is also natural. If we endorse the natural ability to choose as being in the order of things, but exclude choices based on selective observation of the natural order, then we have only deepened our dilemma.

Coming obliquely yet again to my point, I wish to observe that empathy is the determining ground of torture.

Think about it. Other animals kill outright, and if they don't kill outright they linger a bit over their prey's demise, perhaps to sustain the rush of the hunt, perhaps naively. As agonizing as that may make the death of the poor creature in a predator's clutches, ethically it does little more than make sport of the act, but not torture. I think it's safe to say that in as much as a motive may be imputed to any predator (other than humans) it has to do with getting the kill.

Humans do stalk, hunt and kill for sport, but we also do these things for utterly bureaucratic purposes as well, and then often with no intent to kill. Torture, the blandly procedural visiting of engineered suffering upon another person, serves an end but is seldom the end itself, various religious and political manias notwithstanding. Even in the case of an event such as the famous Inquisition during which the infliction of lethal suffering putatively served some ennobling end (say, salvation), it's fulfillment was contingent on the recipient's confession, renunciation, or what have you - the externalized criterion. I have to doubt that it's ever been recorded that any prelate who committed or suffered to be committed the laying of a lash on the hapless back of an innocent owned up to a simple will to be an agent of suffering; the mission of the priestly class (always a dangerous and uniquely religious confection) was, and still is, the legitimizing pretext.

When the visiting of pain is the end itself then what is happening is sadism, and the distinguishing mark of its humanity is empathy. Want of empathy mixed with externalized criteria (e.g., renouncing Satan / al Qaeda / le diable du jour) to which the engineered suffering is suborned is torture. While in the popular consciousness the space between sadist and torturer is ethically gray, and doubtless there is plenty of room for crossover, the unfriendly, oafish, often pathological, and as often statist, mode of hurting others favors the term "torture".

Sadism is an intimate act. To be sadistic is to stay close to the authentic feelings of one's partner in the act, and in an sado-masochistic context a sadist's partner would nominally be a masochist, but not always. Many are the partners with whom I've shared an intense experience who would never identify as masochistic. They have no fondness for the pain they experience as a product of my depredations, but they take it in and work out their ultimate triumph over it, often by absenting themselves from it, but, again, not always. Sometimes it ends up just being a long effort of endurance. It is often more difficult for me to be cruel to someone I know derives nothing of value from pain qua pain. Their psychic, emotional and physical machinations within our exchange are more complex, less scrutable to me, and thereby in a sense more demanding of my empathy, with which I often feel myself responding profligately, if not always evenly.

Throughout, the ends served are uniquely contained within the exchange between partners, whether pain is intended, or at all the object of the proceedings. As often as not, a partner will tell me that their objective was to witness how much I pack into my love, and how unconventional I can make its expression. To quote a recent email from a lover of many years past, speaking to her perceptions of my approach:

"One thing it's definitely not is ordinary - you're like an anti-Valentine. Your affection was always tailor-made to me, however fucked-up it looked to anyone else (and it did and still does), and it sucked sometimes, it hurt so much, but it was pure and I always thought it was my own. It's unforgettable because it's unimaginable."

That was long enough ago for me to blush at what she was referring to and my own ineptitude at that time. Then I was not clear that what I was doing was not torture in the most venal meaning of the word, and this lover would not turn out to be masochistic in the end, although she was working on figuring that out through our play, much as I was figuring my way through my conflicts about being mean with someone I love. What I like to believe she is pointing out above is less so the depravity of our erotic interest in each other and more the closeness and intimacy borne of the difficulty of what we were doing - me naively throwing (nylon!) rope, her asking for it, both of us aroused by our respective uncertainties. I hurt her not quite knowing what I was doing (incompetence plus nylon equals rope burns every time). She got off not on the pain, but on the intensity of my approach and that I would risk any of it on her.

What I understand with the passing of time and the patient teaching of my partners is that what I do with rope, my hands, my cock or any other part of me is far less important than what and how much I'm willing to offer to the space we would fill between us, which in the natural order of things may be the essential import of human eroticism. It's a choice as to how we do who we are, and the choices are pretty much unlimited in the erotic realm, but what they all have in common in order to preserve them as erotic is empathy, no matter the mode of their expression. My expression happens to induce an eruption in the range of human feeling usually given a wide path under most circumstances. Absent empathy what I chronicle in these pages would be torture. With empathy, the adhesive media of human expression that can transform a victim into a participant, there is the possibility of transcendence.

With thanks to Spain, for doing the right thing, and to A. for keeping her old emails.

Ars non Quanta

With the small exception of the host's denasal sine-wave of a voice, This American Life is among my favorite Public Radio (the last remaining radio) programs. If you're a regular listener you may recently have heard tales from people who attempt to quantify non-rational experiences, expressions and events. Among the many fascinating segments was one, "Paint by Numbers" about a group of artists who sought over the course of many years to determine by polling what it is that people are looking for in their experience of art. The authors chose to limit their inquiry to painting and music.

Immediately I noticed that, with respect to art and art-making, the premise was possibly faulty. Do people precondition their desires for aesthetic experiences? Is it possible to desire a specific aesthetic experience? The artists, with the help of confederates the world over, apparently polled thousands of ordinary individuals in dozens of countries. Regarding paintings, nearly every person polled had an opinion, and within a very early sample certain constants of preference began to emerge. For example, across the board blue is a favored color, landscapes a favored subject (hills on the left, trees on the right), a body of water, and perhaps a political figure (?) somewhere in the mix. With their data the working group then set out to produce a few variations on statistically determinate art.

Every one of the pieces was not only a disappointment to the artists, but when presented in public drew uniform approbation from viewers. The variations were specific to place of presentation (e.g., the political figure in the piece produced for American audiences was George Washington, as uncontroversial a figure to the average American as could be imagined). Upon reading further into the backstory I learned that people in the US were marginally more gratified by other, less familiar, variants - say, Dutch themes - than they were by idioms and places they recognized.

The musical experiment I found even more intriguing (being married, as I am, to a musician). Following the same sampling method the artists polled thousands of people worldwide and came up with instrumentation, styles, voicings, themes and other elements of composition that were then compiled into a series of musical pieces. Most popular was the standard rock / blues combo of guitar, bass, drums, synth and low, slightly gravelly voice (male or female), regular dynamic variation, natural keys, and dramatic climaxes in themes of love and longing. Predictably, least favored among all the possibilities were opera voicings, cowboy music, children's choirs, bagpipe, accordion, death themes, augmented chord structures, flat keys, and so forth.

Of the songs composed according to the success formulation every single one sounded like it had been extruded from a plaque of corn syrup. As with mortgage derivatives and credit swaps, the initial raw goods had been so sliced and diced that the resulting product, designed as it had been to mitigate "risk" and presumably afford a pleasing return ended up having no value whatsoever.

The pleasant surprise came when the composer and his musicians began tinkering with instruments, voicings and themes that respondents had labeled as least favored. You'll have to listen for yourself to hear what they came up with.

Their one effort to assemble all the despised elements (e.g., a lyric soprano singing about life on the range backed by bagpipes and a chorus of urchins) resulted in something that at least the artists found interesting and a significant cross-section of random listeners actually liked.

If you've read this journal for any length of time, you likely already know how I'm going to read this phenomenon: Mostly unsurprising, maybe unimportant, but nonetheless affirming. I was glad to hear it reported in a popular format in any case, for the media outlets that do not follow the numerically predetermined path to capture for themselves and their advertisers the largest quantifiable audience slice possible are few.

The artists being interviewed rightly observe that numbers are entirely ecumenical - they not only do not lie, they cannot. Given a large enough sample, what people say they like in the way of aesthetic experience should, therefore, hold up to testing. After all, if Coca Cola can boost sales of a soft drink by fiddling with its sugar content based on sampling and testing, why should they same method not hold true in application to the several senses?

Numbers can, however, be misapplied. While it's obviously possible to quantify what people have liked aesthetically, what they will like in the next instance is the interesting question underlying our artists' inquiry, and where I think they got their premise wrong. However faulty the premises, in this case I still think the question was the right one, for in a somewhat oblique manner they addressed what may be close to the core of a modern aesthetic malaise, the one every sentient being understands in their bones. In attempting to quantify aesthetic pleasure, to dragoon that most ineffable of human experiences into a business model, we have produced the environmental equivalent of the focus group-derived art above. The proposition is both neatly and grossly endorsed by a visit to your nearest strip mall or government building, or by a listen to any Top 40 playlist (syndicated for decades to local transmitters by centralized industrial operations, such as Clear Channel Communications - a representative of the "music industry". Now there's an oxymoron).

Paradoxically, we yearn most for what we can never know we want. Ask people what they want and they're all too happy to tell you. Net result: HumVees and Zima, McNuggets and boy bands. Ask people what they yearn for and they're likely to describe something they resolutely do not expect. What people seem to find most gratifying is likely to arrive utterly unexpected and in a form they could not have anticipated, laid at right angles to what they thought they knew, such that it prompts a reassessing of assumptions, however slight. Of profound aesthetic experience people allow that they were displaced by it, and that maybe it even included bagpipes and cowboys.

If I may be said to have any religion at all my default is science. Science is, at bottom, an expression of faith in certain codes, however granular and reduced. At the core of the method is mystery, as honest prelates in the assorted -ologies readily confess. I do not have any faith in art, for no faith is required. Unlike conventional notions of spiritual revelation, the revelations of art are practically a commonplace, available 24/7 to the feeling person. The barren calculus of capitalism and production, with its maximizing of yields and scientific reproducibility of results, despises real art and, as we see above, is incapable of producing it.

Help, Help! I'm Being Oppressed!

The engendering of humiliation characterizes the practice of hojojutsu and other inchoate forms of what would become shibari, and is implicit in what was the seed of shibari's own transformation from a martial into an erotic practice, and perhaps into something even more profoundly useful.

On the face of it, being bound is humbling since the unbound party is assigned the manifest power in the equation. The way in which we perverts temper the politically awkward fact of a power gradient obtaining between two parties is to call it a "power exchange", but there's no getting around it: one person humbles, and hence humiliates, another. What I would like to counterintuitively assert here is that a humbled state is about as close to the possession of pure power as any person can hope to achieve in life.

It has always been possible to subvert the will of a presumptive controlling party by creatively appropriating the presumed (sometimes ceded) mechanism of control. Thus, for example, has the word "queer" lost all of it's force as invective. Consciously surrendering to humiliation and degradation, to being apparently reduced and controlled by another, is the difference between being empowered and being oppressed. This idea is both the fulcrum and the lever of consent, and like those two basic machines there is practically nothing that consent cannot move.

All mystical traditions recognize that oppression is an optional state. Christ did nothing to resist the cross; in fact he actively sought the harshest of judgments from Pontius Pilate and the Pharisees. He was not oppressed in the slightest - rather, he was impassioned, humble and went down willingly to the grossest of abasements. He loved his enemies (and I have to doubt he thought of them as enemies). Had Christ indeed permitted himself to be oppressed by his oppressors he would then have likely have been forgotten along with every other Jewish carpenter named Jesus from the Galilee of his era. That he (as the tale is told) gave himself, that Christ surrendered, is what is remarkable about the man. A few hundred years before Jesus became the Christ, Siddhartha Gautama was born a prince, surrendered to humility and became the Buddha. Among the liberated community of our own era, the stories of Nelson Mandela, Václav Havel, Aung San Suu Kyi and countless others bear out the maxim that oppression is optional.

It's a bit more difficult for me to come up with an argument for oppressive practices other than bondage (say, whipping) being transformative in the direction of liberation (maybe I'll have a go at that sometime - the flogging scene in the movie Glory springs to mind), but I don't doubt that the same principle applies. Tying someone up looks to a tyrant like a ready means of reducing what it means to be a fully realized human, so the tyrannical community reliably adopts physical restraint as one of its tools. The liberated community knows in its bones that such behaviors are gestural, impotent and ultimately futile.

Given, however, that consciousness first blinks on in a monadic cosmos where all data points to our being all and one with Everything, that is, in a flawless state of union with the principle of creation, the perversion of physical restraint into eroticism is a small leap. Between the bottom of our hearts and the backs of our minds we already know what our deepest nature is and that it is continuous with the whole of existence. We come to consciousness both enlightened and tightly constrained, our fledgling senses accommodating only the toroidal nature of the womb. It is a comfort, a state of knowing without thinking, from which Freud observes we part only reluctantly. An atavistic impulse to return to the perfect state of satiety and unity is associated in earliest consciousness with being in a tight spot, understood as such only a posteriori, and certainly distinguishable from the open and vulnerable physical and psychic space we come to view as our world.

A commonplace about enlightenment is that separation and individuation are finally understood to be falsehoods, and so the inevitability of death is cast in a wholly different light, one unpacked of fearsome meaning (or any meaning at all, actually). To really live then becomes what Kant, in his consideration of the Sublime, liked to call Zweckmaßigkeit ohne Zweck, (purposeiveness without purpose). Alfred North Whitehead noted in his Function of Reason that the precise purpose of authentic inquiry is to be purposeless. At the edge of experience purpose is understood by scientist and mystic alike to be a mental, egoic construct, one which I suggest endows the entire notion of oppression with its noxious cast.

Indeed, to be enlightened is to fear no evil.

All ecstatic experience (or, again, passion) points to ultimate principles, and orgasm is the one form of ecstasy with which most people will have at least some experience in their lives. We partner-up intending to bridge the divide between at least two individuals, and fucking is largely (and merrily) how we prosecute that intention. So, as a species on at least one thing we're all in agreement: deep relations with at least one other person = good. Extrapolating only slightly from there it's easy enough to infer that deep relations with the whole of creation = even better. Getting sexed-up leads to ecstasy leads to reconnecting for a moment with the Godhead we know from earliest consciousness. Communion with ultimate principles is bred in our bones. Christ, Ghandi, Lao Tzu and nearly everyone else with their eye on the ball tell us more or less the same thing: We are God, we are All, what we think separates us from our true selves is an illusion. Gestation and birth are just metaphor for the state of grace and the fall from it.

(If we already have grace and know the ultimate truth, why bother with getting born and having duality, individuated self-hood, identity and all the other head-fakes of waking life in the first place? What's the advantage? Is the Universe in the business of squandering perfectly good creative energy?

The appearances of life have their own grade of cosmic import and are yet another topic to be considered another time.)

The physical constriction of bondage is a ready return to the antecedent state of grace. In getting tied up under a consensual, surrendered framework it's relatively easy to transform the intention of someone interested in controlling your freedom into a free ride to satori. Doing that allows the power gradient to shift immediately in the direction opposite to what is normally assumed, and tyrants need not apply.

Advantage: Bottom.

More Restrained Feelings

My sense of shame about sex generally has pretty much abated entirely. As I believe I've noted elsewhere, our household is abundantly revelatory of our interests (editing note - not yet on this blog... maybe someday), and all who visit are welcome to inquire after what they find there. My mother has considered at length artwork hanging in our bedroom that tells a fairly unmistakable story, but she keeps to herself her understandings (thus furthering the example she and my father set early on). With respect to anyone else, my enthusiasm to engage fully both the matter at hand and my interlocutor's interest diffuses much negative judgment. In the main, I've more reason to be pleased than not with the reception of my sexuality, and am ever more delighted to be blessed with a diversified portfolio of erotic interests and capacities.

When speaking of BDSM I am always referring exclusively to consensual activity. As in any economic activity, if two parties understand and agree to the terms of a transaction, the transaction is legitimate and its tenor is positive. If one party does not agree or breaks with the terms of the transaction, consent no longer obtains and the tenor is negative. Non-consensual activities are not properly to be referred to as BDSM in my book.

Since I consider BDSM definitionally positive, (somewhat boring, I realize, as a response to your question), I'll tell you something about what I think BDSM offers its practitioners. I believe the extensional world (i.e., the one available to our senses) to be but a small portion of what ultimately is. Proceeding from Heisenberg and Bohm in physics, Plato, Santayana and Nietzsche in philosophy, and Eliade and Campbell in the study of mystical traditions, there is always much around me to recommend the view that the varieties of human experience are practically unlimited, and that inquiry into the contemplative splendors of what lies beyond this realm is not merely edifying, but perhaps even ennobling regardless of outcomes - actually, the outcome of life is death, so in the end we all come to wisdom, don't we?

I enclose an excerpt from a presentation I gave to a lifestyle group not too long ago on shibari (Japanese-style bondage) and the link through BDSM to ultimate principles:

The idea of the monad, or the unbroken continuity between apparently discrete phenomena is axiomatic to Buddhist thought since at least the time of Bodhidharma (about 500AD), and is well developed in other eastern traditions. Consider the Hindu idea of the veil of Maya, before which we labor with the problem of duality. Behind the veil, there is no separation and what we think is duality is revealed to be an illusion. Whereas the separation from ultimate principles is believed to be a fact in western ontologies, eastern disciplines stress only the illusion of separation overlaying the fact of unity. To the eastern mind, the same energy flows through all apparently individuated things, as, for example, revealed in the meridian systems of oriental medicine or the patterns of Shinto Kagura dance. Open, boxy, and irregular shibari architecture plays with this assumed inter-penetration of energies across dimensions, crossing and rearranging conventional human postures and affording the possibility of a look into ultimate principles. That it becomes in the making highly erotic only compounds its force and potentials while syncretizing it with the mandates of biology. The classic M-jo character in Japan thus goes relatively willingly into her restraint and, while not necessarily embracing her suffering, accepts it as consistent with the pain of illusion such as we know on this side of the veil. Although Zen does not allow much about the antecedent Hindu concept of Maya, it does (through the Chinese Buddist Wu) specify Satori as the endpoint of suffering wherein the truth of unity is made manifest to the spirit.

Of course, all of this is available to the western bondage practitioner too, and it could easily be said that the rope top is performing a kind of priestly function in either case. The overwhelming emphasis on resistance to being restrained in the popular conception of bondage in the west, as opposed to ready yielding characterizing the eastern conception, is, I think, consistent with much larger mytho-poetic, and hence social constructs inhering in both. It may be difficult to describe what the salient differences are between eastern and western traditions in bondage (I mean, hands get tied behind the back in both cases), but it becomes easier when we couch our interest more broadly in the two worldviews.

Relating Through (Not Despite) BDSM

One hears ad nauseum that kink deranges the finding and building of solid relationships and abiding love. I disagree. Certainly there are many interests vested in the maintenance of that idea, not least of which would be the common culture and its perpetually reinvigorated puritanism. Love and a satisfying relationship are the peanut butter and jelly of erotic maturity - pretty easy for me to piece together (even with the handicap of a learned palate) if I just own up to my fondness for the simplest of tastes. My need for love (and expressing love) is as basic and atavistic as anyone's; my need for peanut butter nearly as much so.

It may yet take generations but these United States will eventually exhaust the world's importable supply of sexually backward mores (our foundational religious tolerance being since the dawn of the Republic a magnet for intolerance) and have to make peace with biology and its uncalibrated expressions. In the meantime curiosity about erotically flamboyant behavior will invariably come subtly freighted with pietistic (and peanut butter-less) scruple. Consider the suppositions below:

• How do you find others with similar BDSM interests?

I traffic in artistic circles, model for artists, rig for hire, write on aesthetics, mysticism and altered states, and consort with other writers. I’m open about my inspirations, and much of that flows from my pervy experience. I make a point of studying the work of those by whom I’m inspired, and endeavor to meet with these people and join their projects. That has led me to participation on various bondage websites and as model/rigger for various photographers who have an eye for the spirit of BDSM. Since I either show up in the work or contribute to it, I am introduced to others in the community as effective and participating in my capacity, and inevitably the right people find their way to me (and I to them).

• Do you feel your BDSM interests make it difficult to find a partner?

Quite the contrary; I feel that my BDSM interests enhance and deepen my social profile, even among those who have no interest in bondage as such. A counterintuitive example: I myself find petroleum chemists who are deeply passionate about subtle variations in carbon chain branching very interesting indeed, and will spend an entire party listening in rapt fascination to the latest advances in refinery by-product reclamation processes if the speaker accepts my ignorance and believes in my interest. I met one such person recently, had a most enjoyable evening owing to that person’s candor, and enhanced in the process my understanding of our fossil fuel-based economy.

Most people do not believe that who they are and what they spend their lives on could ever be interesting outside their domain. Whatever it is that someone does, however arcane, can read from them as an object of others’ fascination if they are willing to speak their truth with passion and alacrity. Preachiness may be a fault, but it works because consciousness seeks expansion more often than not.

• What type of impact has your BDSM interests had on your relationships?

My BDSM interests have given me more and better relationships, and also given me a modality and even a narrative structure in which to render the happy accident of my existence comprehensible to myself. Furthermore, BDSM transforms what might be considered in a conventional view to be a character quirk (some would say a flaw) into an elegant and erotic competency that distills my rangy sympathies for the benefit of another person while accelerating insight into my partner’s humanity.

• How has BDSM affected your sexual life?

The question appears to presuppose a distinction between BDSM as affective, and my sexual life as affected. There is no such distinction, much the same way that a top is not a top without a bottom in the picture (and vice versa). While I have and enjoy conventional, gentle intercourse as an extension of my affections, it is precisely that; affectionate in the way that walking hand in hand or a delicate peck on the cheek speaks my feelings for another person. The fugue of my high sexual arousal is inseparable from BDSM.