Remittance Girl

Every so often, you run across something quite beautiful. I was lucky enough to meet Karl James as @2plus2makes5 on twitter and take the time to look at his site. Karl is director of something called the Dialogue Project – a pretty amazing organisation. I won’t attempt to describe it. Better you go to the site and read for yourself. However, what I’d like to point your attention to is a number of recorded interviews he has made available from his blog, Understanding Difference.

It might seem obvious that talking and listening would be beneficial to the human race – that we might know each other better, find more in common, feel each others’ humanity more deeply – if we did more of it. However, listening to a number of these recordings, I was struck by how often standard ‘interviews’ don’t really produce the satisfying sense of knowing we hoped they would. You might think that recordings of non-celebrities, people just like you or me, talking about themselves might be boring, but it’s quite the opposite. The interviews are very deftly guided. The subjects are given a lot of space – there are some very long silences in which the subject is allowed to construct their narratives eloquently. This is markedly different from the usual type of interview that is done for broadcast where there is an overarching fear of dead air – silence.

What I’d like to invite you to explore are the series that have been recorded on sex.  Well, the subject is ostensibly sex, but in fact, the narratives become inextricably joined to understanding of self, of how one is seen by the world, how memory plays an enormous part in constructing our understanding of who we are and where we are.

The Dear Listeners post summarizes each of the interviews and links to MP3 files. They are all amazing, haunting, startling and in parts disturbing. Each, in their own way, told me not only about the person being interviewed, but also something about myself. More interesting, I thought, was that in listening to some of the narratives, I got a glimpse of a way of seeing that was utterly alien to me. It made me wonder what it must be like to go through the world seeing things in that very different way.

My favourite interview by far is Adrian’s. Prepared to Love is achingly emotional. I grinned, I laughed, I cringed, I cried through Adrian’s telling of how, at the age of 42, he decided it was time to experience penetrative sex, and hired an escort to achieve his goal. Of course, it turns out the ‘goal’ didn’t matter nearly as much as the journey. Also what I appreciated most – although to some extent this is true for all the interviews – is that it would be so easy to make Adrian a caricature. In fact, at times, you can almost hear him trying to resort to that himself.

What the project teaches us is that it’s so much easier and lazier to generalize, to superficialize, to turn people into cliches. But underneath, no one is a cliche or a caricature. You just have to do the work and dig deep enough, listen hard enough, allow yourself to let their stories seep under your skin to overcome the habit of chunking information, classifying, labeling. No one is simple. No one is uncomplicated.

As a writer, I found all the interviews powerfully inspirational. It was as if, after each recording, I thought…wow, I could so write this person. There is a kind of magic to the way Karl and, in one of the interviews, Julie, his partner, get their subjects to be so intensely self-reflective. I’m not sure if it’s the interview technique or that the subjects they’ve chosen were particularly self-analytical.

I’d be interested to hear your reaction to the interviews. Which one spoke to you the most and why?

It seems the more I post discussion blogs on writing, feelings, relationships or sex, the more emails I get from people who think I’m some kind of expert in any of those areas. I can’t say it’s not flattering to get those sorts of emails, but they also come with a lot of responsibility and, quite frankly, I’m not very knowledgeable  at anything other than writing angst-ridden erotica.

Firstly, I’m SO NOT an expert when it comes to sex. Admittedly, I’ve had quite a bit of it in my life, I’ve seen a lot of it, and I’ve talked with a lot of people, but I’m not a sex therapist. I’m sure I’ve got as many hang-ups as the next woman and probably a few more because I over-think stuff.

So, instead of writing me an email asking me about some aspect of sex, why don’t you take yourself over to Tuesdays with Nina, at Eden Fantasys. Nina Hartley was, I gather, a porn actress. Please don’t let this put you off. She’s a very intelligent, responsible source of good, frank advice. And she doesn’t approach everything from a medical or psychiatric angle. She just knows a shitload about all sorts of sex stuff, and she’s good at expressing herself about it. She answers questions via video blog and…well, I highly recommend her.

Secondly, although I write a lot of stories that contain some essence of power play, or D/s, I’ve never been a part of a BDSM community, have never played in public, etc. I can’t give you advice on how to conduct a D/s relationship or what’s safe and not safe.  Again, although it interests me a great deal, and I’ve had some passionate relationships that included power dynamics, bondage, pain, etc. I don’t feel that my experiences are general enough, or extensive enough to give anyone else advice.

Two books that have been recommended to me are SM 101, by Jay Wiseman. For D/s, the book everyone seems to recommend is The Loving Dominant by by John and Libby Warren. Gloria Braeme, a notable writer on the subject has also written books and also offers a long list of links and essays here. Finally, quite a few people have recommended Fetlife.com. This is an online D/s and BDSM community. It’s a pretty safe environment to go exploring your curiosity on the subject.

Finally, you might think I would be more than willing to give people advice on writing. However, I need to point out that I’m not a very successful writer. There are a lot of people out there offering a lot of good advice on how to get published, where to find an agent, etc. I just don’t know any of that stuff. The resources are so plentiful that it would be pointless for me to list them here. The only advice I’m willing to give is…to be a good writer you have to write a lot.

This was something of a housekeeping post, I know. But I thought I’d make it so I had something to point people to. If anyone has suggestions for other good information resources, please, please feel free to share them in the comments area.

Well, I got halfway through writing a short story and realized, with the help of a friend, that it was mostly shit. This always depresses me. Especially 4,000 words in. However…it was crap. So I’m going to have to suck it up.

photo: vidalia_11

In the meantime, I’ve noticed recently that I’ve been running into a lot of twitter friends suffering ennui. Well, actually, not from ennui, but I thought that sounded good.

Really, what we’re talking about here is desiring what cannot be had. This can, of course, take the form of unrequited love, and often does. But there are more twisted and complicated versions of the ‘desiring the unobtainable’ syndrome, too. The desire may be mutual, but any possible consummation of it may be either socially or physically impossible. More complicated still, you can be absolutely sick with desire for someone or something you know is just going to be very bad for you. Consequently, you decide not to attempt consummation. That doesn’t lessen the desire any. It doesn’t quench the fire or make the yearning any easier to bear. In fact, I’d have to say it’s worse, because it’s entirely self-inflicted.

Some nifty strategies for purging the yearning

1. First and foremost, when it comes to unrequited love, it’s pretty easy. I call this the ‘well, then, fuck you’ strategy. You need to have a relatively healthy ego to do this one. It involves convincing yourself that the person who doesn’t return your affection must be more of an idiot than you thought because, if they weren’t, they’d love you back.

2. Another strategy, for those of us with slightly more eroded egos is the ‘he/she/it is better off without me‘ method. This is not as satisfying as #1 and involves a few months of feeling nauseatingly emo. But basically, you reason that since you really do love them, and you acknowledge that you’re a fucked up loser anyway, the person is really far better off loving someone else.

3. The third strategy is more Buddhist, but does follow closely on #2. All pain, as the Buddha said, is desire. If you can free yourself of desire, you can free yourself of pain. Personally, I can’t manage this one and I find it fucks with my motivation to eat meals.

4. Observe and critique. This method is akin to #1, but a little more artful, less adolescent and, I find, really works a treat. The trick is to observe the object of your desire without interacting with them and force yourself to critically evaluate everything they do or say. If they’re human, they are inevitably going to say or do something really stupid. Now, if you are too busy interacting with them, you won’t notice this, and if you do, you may easily forgive it. But if you can obtain some distance, you can build up a list of pretty unacceptable character flaws that will, once you survey it for a couple of weeks, cause you to stop yearning for them completely. The key, at this point, is to not go overboard and start to actively hate them. This takes up almost as much energy as loving them and it’s way worse for your karma.

All of the above methods are useful for cases of classic, unrequited love. But what about the other types?

He’s married / she’s married / one of  you is incarcerated.

This needs to be stated right up front. There’s no action that can result in a happy ending to this story; it always ends in tears for someone. Firstly, there is no guarantee that consummation of this love is going to work out. And what’s worse, there is really no way of knowing if the fact that the object of your desire is unobtainable is actually feeding your desire – which, believe me, is a very great possibility. The forbidden always seems a lot juicier. Basically, you either have to agree to consummate it and see what happens, or find the wherewithal to cut it off and walk away. At least if you follow the first path, you won’t spend the rest of your life haunted by ‘what ifs’. However, you do have to realize that you’re probably going to hurt some innocent bystanders in the process of finding out. All I can recommend is that, if you’re going to be a selfish cunt, the least you can do is be discreet – at least until you find out whether you weren’t just hankering for some forbidden fruit.

Sublimating Desire

No matter what anyone says about the Catholic church, you can’t run a large organization for long and be a total idiot.  Sublimating or redirecting the energy that feeds your desire is a classic strategy with a long history. Some people take up sports. Some people take up self-flagellation. None of those have ever worked for me. If they work for you, you’re lucky. However, beware that some sublimation methods are not very nice. The Spanish Inquisition comes to mind. Just because you can’t have what you want, doesn’t mean no one else should have it. Any kind of fundamentalist religious practice should, in my opinion, be avoided. There’s a fine line between lust and zealotry.

Redefine your understanding of consummation

This is a good working model for both unrequited and forbidden love. We’re brought up to believe that there is a model for what people do once they’re in love. The most traditional version of this involves getting together with your beloved, marrying, breeding and undertaking a mortgage. But, if you can free yourself from that paradigm, there are really a lot of ways to love someone. In fact, you are absolutely free to create wholly new paradigms. For instance, who says that taking the image of someone to bed with you and masturbating isn’t just as legitimate an act of love as actually fucking them? The only reason we consider this a poor substitute is because we’re brainwashed into it. Well, that and the hardwired urge to perpetuate the species. But hey, that’s not why you wanted to fuck them anyway, was it?

The Greeks had interesting ideas about love in its different forms: agápe, éros, philía, and storgē. (for more on this, see Wikipedia) Now, obviously, I’ve been discussing éros or erotic love here. But it is quite possible to morph it into agápe or virtuous love. If one could just let go of the fixation with fucking someone, the possibilities for how one might then continue a relationship really open up. Personally, I have managed to move from wanting desperately to fuck someone, to wanting to simply smell them. But that’s as far as I’ve managed to shift it.

Fermentation

This is really the hardest strategy to explain. It’s the one I practice and, I should state up front, not always successfully. However, it’s been workable for long stretches at a time, and has also had some nice fringe benefits.

1. Firstly, just admit it. You desire: you want, you lust, you yearn, you burn. It hurts.

2. The object of your affection may or may not reciprocate. This doesn’t matter – in fact, although reciprocation may be nice, but it’s totally immaterial. You’re going to love this person whether they love you back or not. Let that sit with you for a while. It does take a while, but actually, it becomes easier to accept than you think.

3. Find some form of creative practice that will allow you to tell the story of this love. It can be abstract, like painting or photography, or very concrete like writing. The point is, you take this story and re-write, re-paint it, re-compose it over and over again. Use it like a theme. Create a whole bunch of endings – some good, some bad, some happy, some sad. It will help you start seeing the desire as a process instead of a road with an end.

4. Of course, the natural course of desire is release, but what if it’s just not possible to release it? The other option is to sort of learn to feel it coursing through your system, invading all your cells, being contained within your body. Think of it as an intoxicant. You’ll start to notice that, after a while, you stop thinking of it as something that seeks release and realize it’s something that feeds you and lives in you. And the feeling of it actually does change over time. It starts to grow some really odd and interesting things. At first you walk around feeling like you can’t contain it, but after a while, it sort of makes you glow from the inside.

Best of all, by some mechanism I’m not sure I understand, the desire starts to separate off from the object of your desire. They become somewhat separate. Certainly, you still feel all yearny and wistful about the object of your love, but it doesn’t have quite the same knifey, desperate quality it had before.

Was all that too abstract and hippy trippy? My apologies. And, I don’t want to be a hypocrite. Fermentation does have some interesting outcomes, but I sometimes find it fails me. However, during the times it has worked for me, it’s made me a very productive writer.

Any opinions, advice, strategies? I’d love to hear yours.

The shoulders were about right, she thought. The height – perhaps he was an inch or two shorter – but that didn’t matter for much. Weight is something she’d never been good at estimating but perhaps this man was carrying just a little more muscle than was ideal.

Giving her drink a clockwise quarter turn, its thick base rumbled as it slid over the slightly uneven surface of the wood.

At least he was dark haired and eyed. Had he been blond, he wouldn’t have served her purpose at all. And there was no question he was unattached, at least for the evening. No woman at his side, no ring on his finger and, were that not enough, there was the vaguely predatory look in his eyes. Not that it would have mattered in the least had he been married. She was not shopping for commitment. But, even so, his eyes more than anything else, told her that, on being approached, she would not be rejected.

Almost with the lassitude of someone who has a necessary but unpleasant job to do, she stood up, wove her way between the busy tables, and took the stool next to his at the bar.

Up close, her determination wavered. Small details jarred with her requirements and she considered the wisdom, the ethics, the coldness of her plan. His hands weren’t right. They were too delicate and their slightly ragged cuticles spoke of a nervousness that put her off.

But then he smiled. White, white teeth set off against a tanned face. The curve of his muscular back where the neat pale blue shirt tucked into his belted chinos. Maybe it would be enough, she thought. Maybe she could find a way to like him for who he was? That would go such a very long way to assuaging her sense of self-loathing at what she was about to do.

And then the dance began. The way it always does and always will. The politeness that leads to the warm hint of innuendo. The light laughter about a light subject. The signs and symbols, the glance and the word that pairs any prospective couple to one another and separates them from the crowd.

Someone had trained him well, she thought. He listened far more than he spoke. And because of this – because she was waiting so intently to hear that indefinable thing that would either set her on her course or cause her to politely take her leave and bolt – there were some uncomfortable silences.

Without being obvious, she leaned in to the conversation, estimating the angle of his vision and its relation to the swell of her cleavage. Her head tilted artfully with the express purpose of exposing the length of her bare neck, so her hair brushed with demure invitation over her collarbone.

With the next sentence, his too delicate fingers reached across the expanse of wood and brushed over the back of her hand. His knee nudged her stockinged lower thigh. And in a moment of self-consciousness, he drained the liquid in his glass, fixed his gaze to hers and said, “Wow. You’re very beautiful, you know that?”

It would have been so much better if she could have felt that natural swell of pride, followed almost predictably in women, by a need to make an attempt at modesty. But she didn’t feel it. She didn’t care if she was beautiful, or if he thought she was. But all at once she knew that she could not sustain much more of this pretense.

She would either have to be honest about what she was after, or admit that she could not follow through and leave. Draining her own drink, she gave him a kittenish smile – the kind calculated to assure a man that she was as far from being a threat as anything possibly could be.

“Come here,” she murmured. “I want to make you a proposition.”

His eyebrows – which really were far, far too sparse – arched flirtatiously. “A proposition? Now that sounds interesting.” He bent forward, their faces almost touching and let her bring her lips up to his ear.

“Do you want to fuck me?”

For a moment, he said nothing. A noise that was uncomfortably too close to a giggle broke from his throat as he pulled back and looked, not into her face, but at some unspecified row of bottles at the back of the bar. “Um… well, yes. I guess I do.”

“You guess you do? Or you do?” She forged seriousness into her tone. And beneath the words lurked the subtextual warning that she wasn’t tolerant of adolescent behavior in a man.

“I…I do.” He locked his eyes to hers, sensing that perhaps the offer would evaporate. “I definitely do.”

“Good. Now here’s the deal: I want to fuck you and pretend your someone else. I don’t want you to say another word, because you don’t sound like him. Can you do that?”

He furrowed his brow and laughed again. This time it wasn’t a giggle. He was trying to figure out if he should be offended. “You’re joking, right?”

“No. I’m dead serious. Can you do it?”

“Do I look like this other guy?”

“Yes, superficially.” This wasn’t going the way she planned. She shook off the implications of the question. “Look, do you want to fuck or not?”

Yet another laugh. If he kept this up, she was going to have to leave.

“Sure. I…guess….Yes. You’re hot.”

“Fine. Then just don’t say anything else.” She forced a friendliness into her voice that she was sure sounded false. “We go up to your room. I give you the best blowjob you have ever had. We fuck. Everyone’s happy. Okay?”

His eyes narrowed “Are you a…pro? Because I don’t pay for it. I’ve never paid for it.” The words came out in a rushed mixture of offense and embarrassment.

“No…look. I’m not a hooker. It’s absolutely free. No strings at all. I just get to pretend you’re someone else. In order to do that, you have to shut up.” Her patience and her courage were both wearing thin. “Can you do that?”

* * *

He kissed her in the elevator. Perhaps because he had begun to find the idea liberating. She closed her eyes and tried to shut out all the sensations that didn’t seem right. He was tentative and gentle.

In the sterile hotel room behind the closed door, she could feel his desire growing, for stuttered moments she forced the idea of him, of his scent, of his touch into the thing she wanted it to be.

With her blouse off, on her knees, she undid his pants and unzipped him, pulling out a nicely proportioned and usefully erect cock, and set to work doing what she knew she did very well.

It throbbed against her tongue; it lurched as she drew the length of it into her mouth. She closed her eyes and began to suck him expertly. And she was there…. where she wanted to be, pleasuring the only man in the world she cared for.

Blindly, she reached for his hand and pulled it to her head, urging him to get a grip of her hair.

His hand was gentle. His hips didn’t thrust. He would not take from her what she was offering. The cruelty of the real crept up her chest and closed her throat. His scent wasn’t right. The taste was different. Where was the urgent quiver of coiled pleasure in his hips?  Where was the dark, deep growl that should slide down her spine as he breached her throat?

This wasn’t right. This was flaccid, sluggish convenience. Good natured, casual consumation. It was not him. It would never be him. Nothing in the world would make it him. No trick, no silence, no amount of alcohol, no suspension of disbelief. And, to her utter horror, the poor bastard she was using with such spectacular lack of success realized that something was amiss.

“Hey, baby,” he said, sounding as gentle as a man with his cock down a woman’s throat can ever sound. “What’s wrong?”

She gripped the base of his cock and finished him off as fast as she knew how. It took her less than three minutes to pull on her shirt, button it and get out of the room.

As she stood at the banks of elevators, fighting down her tears and jabbing uselessly at the call button, he stepped out of the room.

“What the fuck did I do wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Then why the hell are you leaving?”

The doors to the elevator whispered open with a demure chime that sounded at once polite and impatient. She stepped in and closed her eyes until the doors slid closed.

“You’re not him.”

Probing the idea of you
the tongue tip of my mind traces
your borders, elevations
the salinity of your essence

the rough gravel of the voice I’ll never hear
the magnetic north I’ll never reach
the bitter aftertaste of absence

the cavity in my brain
huge and hurtful, ever present
the land I cannot traverse
the tooth I cannot pull.

#nightpoetry