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.

Energy Independence

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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...)

Push Button Behavior Modification

What does a rope top do with a bottom who presents as a blood/collar/throat/electrical stim fetishist? Tell a story about this bad boy I know…

Ben presents as nothing out of the ordinary really, not in New England at least. One sees his kind all over, especially during hunting season, which begins soon. Ben happens to be a pretty fine specimen, however – strong, lean, blond, “nicely made” as any Yankee might observe. Not a bad recovery from his early life, during which he likely fell out of a pickup and wandered the landscape in search of food for a year and some.

Whether it was barbed wire, an unfortunate meeting with a farm implement, or perhaps with a coyote, Ben ended up under a surgeon's knife getting an 8 inch gash in his leg muscles fixed one day in his early teenage, having been found lame by the side of a farm road and ferried in yet another pickup to the only medico available at 2am in rural southern Vermont - a horse vet. Of course he spent that whole episode anesthetized, and just as he woke (in a cast hiding 40 sutures) to begin his convalescence, over him were hovering the solicitous faces of two elderly women. One of them was my mother. The other was the kennel owner.

The county doesn’t maintain a pound, so what few strays there are that survive the coyotes, the bears, now the gray wolves, and finally the Vermont winter are sent to the kennel on the north side of the Waloomsac Bridge. Ben had done alright, apparently. His coat was shiny, he was strong, his eyes bright despite his obvious pain, and he had offered his rescuers no resistance to their bundling him off to the vet. He was a little light in weight perhaps, and his movements even in the cast were clearly feral, but he was used to people, and he was beautiful and my mother fell in love with him immediately.

Ben immediately established himself as the alpha character among the others of the menagerie occupying mother’s farm. Once the cast was off he gleefully strutted his dominance and abilities in the fields, racing full out in any direction, flushing game, putting down challenges to his authority – even to mother.

Like boys will do, he wandered. Like feral animals do, he killed. It was unclear to mother what he was killing, but over 300-odd acres of range it’s easy to loose sight of a fast-moving yellow lab. Ben would frequently emerge over some rise with blood on his maul, looking quite pleased with himself. Mother didn’t mind the thought of her young man enjoying an occasional woodchuck, mole or vole tartar, but now and again there was more blood on Ben than could possible fit in the average vole.

The story got much more interesting one fine spring evening when out for a romp on Pointer’s Run. 50 yards across the new alfalfa planting three dear broke from the wood and foolishly gamboled along the margin. Ben broke into a streak, flattened out like a catamount and caught up with the smallest of the white tails in seconds. Mother stood rooted to the spot Ben had just vacated and watched in horror as he tackled this yearling and promptly tore open its gullet, laying his full fighting weight of 90 pounds across the poor deer’s forequarters as it spasmed and sprayed life out on the alfalfa. Ben was stripping the skin from his kill’s neck when mother, now shouting, attempted to pull him off, getting herself covered in gore and recoiling at Ben’s sharp and aggressive rebuke.

Mother retreated with her other dog and let Ben find his own way home. Over an hour later he came prancing up the drive, caked with blood, lymph and bits of the downy undercoat his prey had just begun to shed before going down to his blood lust. She banished him to the tool shed and went to see to the cadaver lying up on the edge of her top field. When she got to the bottom of the fields she could see the coyotes were already finishing the job, so she let the whole matter be, apart from washing Ben of his victory as he panted happily.

Clearly there was some training needed.

The solution was surprisingly elegant. Instead of the leather field collar Ben had discolored with his vampyrine mayhem, he was fitted with a new little box and nylon strap - a shock collar. The regime was simple: whenever Ben ignored a command he got an audible signal, triggered from a cell phone-sized sending unit; further recalcitrance would receive a fixed nine volts at various levels of amperage up to the full measure, which is more than enough power to take-down an obese Newfie, much less a 90 pound gazelle of a retriever.

Ben responded very well to the training and before long he was hanging much closer on walks. I learned how to use the system but had needed it much, other than to “chirp” my charge, for over a year. I was, admittedly, more inclined to indulge Ben’s blood lust than my mother, finding it altogether fitting to his general deportment and mien. He is, after all, a dog, an exemplar of his breed at that, and not so removed from his lupine brethren all over the woods. It had not escaped my notice, either, that since Ben’s arrival the coyotes no longer ventured anywhere near the house.

On a wet and windy evening we were at the entrance to the Mile-Around Wood when Ben stopped and pointed into the bramble off to one side. As I uttered “Ben…” he bolted into the cover and I fished the sender out to signal his return along with the full-voiced “Ben!” to go with it. Before I could organize myself a six-point buck broke no more than 5 feet in front of me, a huge deer, leaping the ten foot wide path in nearly a single bound, with Ben not more than a few feet behind it and gaining as they charged out into the open field on the other side.

I amped the sender up to 3 and hit the key. From 25 – 30 yards away Ben shook his head slightly, lost a little ground, and then pressed his pursuit, giving the buck time enough to turn and confront his assailant with his rack at ground level. Ben, mad with the chase, tore forward playing chicken with the lowered rack and without thinking I dialed all the way to the last stop and keyed. About five or so yards from the buck Ben’s head suddenly dropped and he went tumbling ass over tea kettle in a spectacular jumble. The deer immediately seized its good fortune and flew out of the field onto higher ground.

Just as I began to wonder if I’d seriously injured my mother’s feral founding his head popped dazedly up from the grass, he shook, and then made his way with his tail down toward me, shaking his head periodically. Finally he came up close at sat next to me somewhat stoop-shouldered, looking genuinely contrite. No small feat for such a proud creature.

For myself, I considered it a win-win. Ben was in one piece (as was the buck) and my pervy wheels were spinning.

Back in the present tense my fetishist friend had said nothing during the entire story, simply sat rapt and somewhat dreamy (especially during the throat-ripping bits). After a pause and a wondering stare, she turned to me and asked sotto voce “So, these collars… where do you find them?”

With thanks to Graydancer for the inspiration.

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.