Tie Me to the Ends of Love, Part 4

We spend out lives forgetting perhaps because the apparent truth that the self that gets pumped out into this dimension is somehow inauthentic bumps up almost immediately against biological nature. Nature’s uncaring and fascistic intent for us is to make copies – authenticity be damned. Nature gives us the little incentive called sexual pleasure to make those copies, but, the deeper truth being what it is, just as nature would confound our reaching in the direction of authenticity it also gives us one of the best avenues back to unity that we have, sex, which religion fears because sex trumps orthodoxy (and, hence, power) as a means of ecstatic, transformative experience. Not that devotion doesn’t work at all – millions of mystics have renounced the world to commit their lives to attaining a view of the godhead. But that’s a slow, laborious process. Similar, if not identical, results can be achieved with sex in a fraction of the time. Mysticism is to sex as the abacus is to a Quad-core processor.

So, there you go, nature itself offers up to humanity the sine qua non of spiritual actualization, sexual ecstasy, by marking it specifically as difficult, by making it appear inauthentic, by prompting a forgetting of unity. Thus does the fast track of sex become boggy with cultural and religious ideas of separation and thought-based self-identity, crystallized in the emotion of… shame. In shame sex looses its efficacy, and we can all think of some manner in which we’re thoughtfully disabling our sex with some blockage or other – an entire industry and billions of dollars in chemicals have rallied to meet our shameful thoughts about our sex. We become useful idiots in nature’s plan for our chromosomal proliferation.

That is, unless we don’t.

In a grander sense nature provides the friction we need to get traction, to make our way back to what lies in front of all of us and use that truth now and, instead of hovering just above life, falling fully and intimately into it.

She’s still there, by the way. Still just as tightly tied, somehow managing all this while to have avoided being gagged. And look at that – she is a good girl after all! In all this time I’ve been talking nothing has changed about our Besu and her predicament, except maybe her thoughts. With time and patience, hers and mine, she begins to let thought go and allows her body to be – in pain, dislocated, displaced. She has allowed herself to become unknown to herself, her self has mysteriously abated and left in its stead an opening, a widening which will meet all possibility now, especially that of divine immediacy, of the immanence of love and the enfolding of time and space, the time and the space in which we firmly believed until we shook ourselves loose from it.

For my part, as the top, I stay on the path I started down with her, the one on which she consented to volunteer her freedom, her voice and her self to my designs, my intentions, which, as anyone knows, were always in some sense her own. Among those intentions would be to for me to remove from her senses the veil of familiarity and the known, and challenging bondage is the manner in which I apply myself to my intention, a manner in which she can at every moment of our engagement feel that intention and the collapse of space/time that, if we are able to press forward into true intimacy where things are fuzzy, scary and strange, reveals the authentic nature of self in its obliteration and merging into the other, and by extension, into all things, into unity. With bondage it is to this strong possibility I continually pledge myself and then my self’s subjugation, that I might feel her in and about me and in so doing forget about either one of us.

It’s very similar to exactly what is going on right this very moment between all of you and me. Right now you, this audience, is not an assembly of individuals to me – to me you’re all fused, you’re an audience. With any luck you’ve been having an experience roughly in common of me, the element at the front of the room, the one holding forth hopefully with more authority than pedantry, but hopefully… full of hope and, therefore, vulnerable, open and exposed, with many of my deeply felt and personal truths revealed to others, the audience, my partners, as it were, in this little talk, without whom nothing here would have taken place.

Well, perhaps Besu and I would found our way into a lovely little scene, but you get my meaning.

And that’s how it happens – you show up, you present yourself and you stay present and before you know it you’re in the throes of an intimate experience. Surprise!

In my experience of it, it’s in this way that BDSM can deliver the goods sought after for millennia by adepts, mystics, alchemists… aspirationalists of all kinds and colorations; that being to surrender self, and to gain power and strength in the surrender. Regardless of what two people may actually be doing, when energy is fearlessly offered and intense both top and bottom surrender to the present moment and die to their respective pasts. To relate is to be fully conscious without necessarily being happy. Let the first happen and the latter will follow, get the inside right and the outside falls into place. The B of BDSM, bondage, as fact and as agent, may be no more efficacious than any other sadomasochistic mode, but if it may be said to do nothing else it does stress interiority - the daunting pleasures of going within, for, after all, and perhaps paradoxically, bondage is all about containment. I don’t want to overstate my position here on bondage, for I have a great many other kinks, but I believe that to be in it and to look at it is to have ready and unique access to the primal and essential impulse of being human, to step lightly back into the deeper currents of being, and through the gateway of intimacy as partners welcome a pure intimacy with all things, in every dimension, and in no time.

Tie Me to the Ends of Love, Part 3

But what has an ontology of duality brought to human relations? I see an ever deepening, almost therapeutic search for self as distinct from all else that is believed to exist as the final measure of earthly attainment, the ultimate good.

And I’m referring now to the quest itself, for as you’ve noticed the notion of concretely individuated self is (kind of) slippery, and that’s good. What would it mean to actually “tie down” who I really am? Well, if I tie anything down so it stops moving, stops becoming, is, in other words, static, then I can tell myself I know something for knowledge can only be of the immutable and unchanging.

But I would not appear to be those things. I’m always changing. I am, for example, aging. I’m compressing the gap between this very moment and my ultimate non-existence even as I simultaneously open up time and space between having become conscious and this very moment. I understand that I live constantly in relation to my end, my death, what Martin Heidegger called his “proximity theory” of being. Eckhardt Tolle would have me understand my relationship to my end as a brand of intimacy which most people are conditioned to avoid, as it is unmanifested and cannot, therefore, be weighed in thought.

Being, to Heidegger, is a misapprehension of authentic self (as opposed to individuated self); as I noted before we tend to settle for a concept of who we are relative to what we think we know about the world around us. Heidegger, while saying that the ultimate knowable truth is death, elaborates by observing that we do this prejudicially, meaning we construct a self from what we think we know best, what is most familiar, even comfortable, and this leads to a misbegotten notion of self. Our most authentic selves come not from what we know best, but from what is
most mysterious to us, what is darkest, strangest and most inscrutable. We know our authentic selves when we’re on the trickiest ground. Our highest and best selves are unlikely to show up in a Barca Lounger; we do, however, recall proudly the last time we pulled through when the chips were really down.

I would like to extend Heidegger and propose that in life we are processing toward unity, which is the truest course of being, and unimpeachable because we all face the same end, which, despite the most thoughtful efforts of organized religion, is a vast, aching mystery. Thus do we come into the world with an inborn ability to process back to a unified state, for all that is born dies. Being born itself gives us a strong impetus to aim for unity, for the world of the womb is expressive to earliest consciousness of a principle of unity and birth is all about separation, so in a sense the Abrahamic or Judeo-Christian problem of struggling for reunification with God is apt, but only as metaphor. As a way of understanding one’s humanity and of actually getting to God it’s historically of somewhat dubious utility.

So, how to go from unity to separation and back to unity? Well, we all get to unify in the ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust episode, the curtain call, as it were, and maybe even then we get to understand the nature of God and being without time, but what about before then, in life? Is it possible?

Through intimacy. Through breaking down what we think we know about self and its separation from other, from our partner. Through abrogation of self and merging, fusing and even joyously confusing the frontier where you end and your partner begins. It is what the Buddhists call compassion... compassion – feeling with. In Heidegger’s native language, mitgefühl. It is in the realization of authentic self, the self that is the other and acknowledges no distinction, no separation. It is being as one, unmediated, undifferentiated, which is available to us in this life, before it ends. No where is it written that we have to wait to know, in fact we’re born knowing and we spend our lives forgetting. That, to me, is what intimacy is all about, forgetting to forget.

Tie Me to the Ends of Love: Part 2

Say I have somewhat ruthlessly tied my partner in a position for which she was unprepared. Unprepared? Some might say that’s bad form for a top, and I would beg their momentary indulgence. So, my partner is working hard with this position and is possibly breaking down a little before long... sooner than she’d like... and in recognition of this I add a bit more challenge to the picture, something subtle that shifts the focus of discomfort just enough to take her out of the mind that’s saying “I… can’t… do this…” and put her back into the body that’s feeling more and more with each passing moment.

While I can afford to appear aloof about all this shifty energy, she’s anything but: it’s really uncomfortable now and ere long she might want out, might even get a little irate, but she’s not using her safe signal. In a little while she might get vocally angry, which is easily frustrated with a gag, about which she’d be humiliated on top of her aching for release. But in the meantime we’ll all keep aware for a safe signal, or panic, or, hopefully, fuller and fuller consciousness and presence as her options fall by the wayside.

I may give her a moment’s respite in the form of a glancing, gentle touch, brokering the continuation with a moment’s kindness, as it were, but I'm in close to her suffering, which is now acute and which she's resisting - I sense that she wants to be still in her bondage but it’s hard... she wants to be good but she’s unprepared to be good, to perform as she thinks I want her to perform, as she thinks I want her to be. Thinking about doing something “right” or “well”, or how she can manage the pain or the humiliation. Thinking… thinking… and thereby making the Cartesian blunder of being – cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. But what? What am I? What’s assumed here? Well, first of all a self, a substantial, individuated entity apart from other selves and things. “I” is not only assumed, it's separate, and separate is, of course, anything but intimate. Separate is alienated.

So, now the suffering is more than physical; it’s existential. She’s in her head, figuring how to do what she’s being challenged by to avoid being with the challenge and thereby risking who she thinks she is. She’s the solidly proverbial human doing as opposed to the shifty, ephemeral and maybe chaotic human being. The primary question is now before her, brought by her dangerous lover, someone with whom she would be intimate if she could figure out how. If she could figure her way out of alienation. Always figuring. How to answer? Figuring out what the original question was in the first place… perhaps finally figuring not to figure.

The head, the mind, the brain, the center of ratiocination is the back office of intimacy, it’s where your claims get processed by unfeeling functionaries who insist on procedure and logic ahead of inconvenient and disorderly emotions. As any process-driven bureaucratic organization would do, thinking insists on not only its primacy but on the expansion of its control. Not surprisingly, many of the people I’ve met in the BDSM community are very bright, one might even say brainy. Good with their heads, and, maybe, in the community specifically looking to get out of those same heads a little more often.

So, perhaps rather than militate against intimacy, we simply fall back on familiar and culturally endorsed patterns of dealing with new information – we sort, we categorize, we try to figure it out, we think about things. Think about that; when’s the last time you had an ecstatic experience by thinking about anything?

Maybe some of you are familiar with Eckhardt Tolle’s Power of Now and his concept of the “unmanifested”. The manifested is the reality we think we know and the one we rely on to explain our existence. It’s a relative existence, one in which context is all important. It’s the heir to a long tradition of what I call separationist belief structures, starting with Plato’s ontological division of the world into extensional and ideal realms in the “Cave Analogy” to an interpretation of grace that includes a fall from it - Lucifer’s fall from heaven, man’s fall in the book of Genesis, and with the fall the eternal struggle to return to God’s good side.

Coming into the Enlightenment, this basic principles of separation and alienation are present and operant in Descartes and the worldview he organized so neatly and imparted to, for example, Issac Newton, which in turn gave us Newtonian physics and the calculus and their divvying up of reality into smaller and smaller quanta, ad infinitum.

Already pickled in a guiding existential principle of separation and duality, these leaps forward in human thought to this day look to most folks like unvarnished benefits. Notwithstanding important confirmations in high-energy physics (e.g., Heisenberg and the "Uncertainty Principle") of long-standing theories enunciated in metaphysics (e.g., Liebniz and his "Monadology"), both of which concern themselves with primary substance, and which together are beginning to point to resolution in a non-granular universe, the doctrine of duality continues to advance a world view where parsing thought, method and calculation is practically a religion, one where quality is least of all judged on refinement of feeling and mostly based on reproducibility of results. Not altogether a bad thing, I would say, for it made writing this essay using a word processor a great deal more fluid a project than it might otherwise have been.

Tie Me to the Ends of Love: Part 1

This is the text of a lecture I delivered for TES in NYC recently. It is only slightly modified to suit this forum. First the teaser:

Join Mac for a riff on Leonard Cohen of which the poet himself would approve. The ends of love have known many means: chocolate, diamonds, war... bondage? Well, maybe not so much. Until now. From ancient myth to modern neuroses Mac explores what love might have in store for us and how rope helps pin it down. Carve into your desire to bind or be bound and what it means to your ideas of yourself, your partner, your intimacy and the ends of your being. Go straight to the top to get to the bottom of some pretty big issues, expect the usual big words, a little Q&A, maybe a few gratuitous visual aids, and maybe to leave with some new ideas.

***

Thank you all for having me again, and especially to Lolita for her raw determination in getting a date together. I can well imagine that she often gets her partners to stretch and do the sorts of things they might not otherwise, and about which, afterward, they’re grateful.

I’d like to open tonight with a quote from the blog of someone who appreciates many of the same things I do about art, culture, daring, polemic and especially Japanese aesthetics. His name is Tatsuya Ishida, and he’s the author of Sinfest. Here you go:

“Whenever I peel an orange, I save the stem end for last. There's something about pulling out the spine that is very satisfying. Texture-wise, visually, the little plucky squirty sensation, it's a fun little operation to cap the peeling process. That's sort of my modus operandi when it comes to food. I try to leave the best for last. When I have a chicken pot pie, for example, I eat all the carrots and peas first, and leave a stash of chicken for the big finish. When I have a sandwich I work my way around the crust to the middle. I have this shit down to a science. Sometimes, though, it's not so smooth. Things can get complicated. Like, when I'm eating a pancake breakfast with hash browns, bacon, and eggs, I can't decide what my favorite thing is. I panic a little in my heart because I don't know how it's going to end. But that's what life is all about. Thrills, man. Thrills. I start out all confident that I'll end with a bite of bacon but then, the sweet syrupy pancakes start to win me over. Then the hash browns, that unassuming dark horse, make a comeback. And then the eggs are like, "Hey, we're the pure unblemished souls of chickens! Recognize!" At that point, all bets are off. It's anybody's game. I might go with bacon. I might not. Nothing's set in stone. Anything can happen. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, ‘Tat, you crazy fool! You HAVE to have the last bite planned out AT ALL TIMES!’ But I like to live on the edge, Jack. I take chances. I flirt with danger. That's how I roll.”

Flirting with danger, that’s certainly one way to roll, and, I’m going to submit here that it’s not only a great way to roll but a great way to come to the timeless moment when danger, uncertainty, and the strangeness they engender roll into fusion between oneself and what, until that timeless moment, was another person. This is what I call intimacy.

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 for what appears to be a host of life's more intractable problems while creating very 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.

I’ve been chatting about this idea with friends for a while to see what views I could glean that are different from my own. Rather than definite answers to the question of “what is intimacy?” or “how do you arrive at intimacy?” I have, for the obvious reasons, been interested in the question of whether suffering and displacement are legitimate access points to the realm of intimacy, and, concomitantly, what is that militates against immediate immersion into intimacy if suffering and displacement are indeed effective?

In the BDSM community we’re all familiar with the terms “intimacy averse” or “intimacy challenged”, and if I may presume to narrow these concepts down to something we can work with in the short time we have, let me suggest that they mean something like the inclination to run away, to withhold, or to give the impression of withholding, and, perhaps most importantly, to react with trepidation to a partner’s fullness of feeling in love, be it ecstatic or despairing.

To go into what I mean by “love” is a subject for another day – I’ll allow, however, that love in any universalizable sense of the word, must include an opening of self to the other, a revelation, if you will, where at least in some measure we expose the better, and the worse, angels of our natures to another person. I know that I will develop an intense and poignantly suasive feeling when I am coming unfurled before a companion, and never more so than when I am freely, profligately and perhaps even recklessly reducing their physical representation to me – who they look like, feel like, who they like to think they are. Rope is pretty good for this.

But, coming unfurled in this instance refers to the way in which I become completely honest about who I am in the moment, which is often neither pleasant nor attractive. But it’s authentic and it’s there, and it is fully expressive, and it fronts for me if it is welcome. If it’s unwelcome, it’s still there but there are other aspects of my character that may step to the fore at such times, no less honest, and which may be called upon to broker a continuation of the opening and the revelation.

Let me give you an example... (Besu and I teamed here to provide a visual aid similar to what we did a while back for photographer Jack Montgomery, a riff on Nobuyoshi Araki, right...)

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.

Of Rôles and Other Chimaeras

• What role do you identify as having?
  
  

I find the entire question of rôles and identity somewhat notional, to be honest, for everyone I've ever known in BDSM culture has very permeable containment of whatever they claim as their identity or rôle, and few hesitate to say so.

For example, several professional dominants (prodommes) with whom I've played are quite happy submissives and/or bottoms off the clock, and more than a few hardened masochists of whom I'm aware turn out to have well-formed sadistic streaks. I myself have tested everything I've ever contemplated doing on another person on myself first, and found all of it gratifying to various degrees. None the less, our categorizing instincts being what they are, most people in the "scene" (even those most polymorphously perverse) adopt one designation to supervene over others.

In my case, I'm what would be understood as a straight rope top, that being the active party in a hetero exchange featuring bondage. I do not expect or require submission, in fact I rather like when a bottom works passionately at escape. I am, however, hugely gratified by the final yielding borne of either exhaustion or the capitulation of resistance, and I do what it occurs to me to do to attain that yielding. I envisage the net effect as analogous to the performance of a priestly function of sorts: I am excited by the aspirant's quest and the deft administration of a small part of their journey is my principal gratification. I have not heard many tops allow this, but I find topping in BDSM to be effectively a service rôle (further subverting the congruity of the labels with the truths of BDSM).

• How did you come to your role identity?

My sexually controlling nature emerges from an especially awkward and powerless youth. At age 12 I reached 6 feet in height, and I weighed at the time only 125 pounds. For the next several years, I could not organize one foot in front of the other, much less participate profitably in athletics or appeal to the opposite sex. I was also an easy mark for the more alpha/successful boys my age, as it did not take much to knock me over.

The first feeling I recall that this ungainliness might not last forever was when I subdued an assailant by ensnaring him in my long arms and just pressing him to my body. He could not break out of my grasp to hit me and became suddenly very quiet, even docile. A teacher broke up the altercation (wherein I was implicated as the instigator, which, owing to my opponents becalmed state, must have been easy enough to assume), and I was quite pleased with myself to be marched to the principal's office and treated to detention.

Thus did physically controlling another person take on the coloration of personal overcoming. With otherwise a perfectly average young man's view of the world, girls were of course intimidating to me in my teens. When I hit upon simply holding them tightly or pinning their arms while otherwise engaged, I not only got more enjoyment from the act (however chaste or innocent), but my partner would often enough become noticeably more enthusiastic. Strong physical control of my partners (even absent bondage) has been a hallmark of my sex style since.

Spinning Yarns

14 to 1? Can that be right?

A dear dominant friend of mine who inscribes his perspective in a fine web log told me a while back that in all the vastness of the blogosphere entries originating from the dominant pole of BDSM are comparatively rare. Intrigued, I undertook a methodically unscientific survey of submissive-to-dominant blog ratios and can affirm my friend's assertion to the surprising tune of about 14 blogs authored by submissives for every one put out by a dominant.

Are we, the supposed active half of a power exchange, really that taciturn? Or even torpid?

Should someone care to look into this glaring imbalance in a more considered and rigorous manner I would be pleased to be found in error. In the meantime I offer this recording of my monomania as a small corrective, for while I have been taciturn with respect to my public participation in BDSM I have been writing about it - in essays, correspondence, photographic commentary, aesthetic analysis and many another way - for decades.

Several years ago a faculty member at a large mid-western American university scarfed my email from a list and spammed me a request for insight on the perv nation for a paper she was preparing. I fell for her solicitation and we corresponded for months, with her gently stewarding the exchange and me staying up nights Babbitting like I knew something. In consequence an academic monograph elaborating some of my inchoate kinky antics is lodged somewhere in a prairie library, mostly for the delectation and delight of corn-fed students of social deviance, but where no one else is likely to ever lay eyes on it. I'll start RSE with some slightly retooled excerpts from that lengthy exchange.

May you be edified, if not corn-fed.