Why do I write texts about people in agony? Why do you read them?
I could say I don’t know why. I feel driven to do it and it feels right when I do. Lacan would surely say that it’s my symptom.
The characters in my stories suffer, but not by accident. They are not stupid, stumbling onto disaster by mistake. They seek it out. They go in search of their agonies, sometimes knowing why and sometimes knowing only that there is something unknown to be had there.
Sometimes my characters go to justice. Sometimes they go to truth. Sometimes to free themselves from the heavy burden they have become, the accretion of self they have acquired. Sometimes they go to the silence of pain, and sometimes to be enveloped in its great roar.
When I write, a void sits before me, opening up its black mouth, waiting for me to enter and to write it into the order that is a story. But I never order it completely; I leave the edges in chaos so I don’t betray the nature of the material I’ve used to build it with. This is a truth I cannot disavow. This is between me and story. You are not here yet. We have a sin to commit, I and the text. We have a master to serve. We have an agony to bring forth into the world out of a jumble of words and notions. We have a cave of pain to build.
Once you get it, the relationship you have with it is up to you.
I adore erotic agony, therein lies truth. Romance leaves me flat because no matter how sweet the words I see the lie within.
If truth be told, I think I see erotic agony as a romance, but not with a person. I see it as a very long, slow and complex romantic entanglement with death. We are destined for each other. And, in the end, death will have me.
*hug*
Also, when you meet that great Leveller, like Renata Flitworth, make him take you to dance all night, unbind your grey hair like a young girl running in the humid streets of Saigon, and laugh.
And maybe we’ll finally meet beyond that curtain, too. I’d like that. =)
I love that about your work. It’s one of the thing that keeps drawing me back.
Again, part of the beauty of your writing. It is not merely “open to interpretation,” the fact that its edges are left, and that I am reading it, mean that your stories of agony and eroticism become what I read them as.
I have also very much enjoyed your “writing on writing” and the roles and possibilities of author and reader, and the discussions you have facilitated about a number of other topics.
Your fiction stirs me, your nonfiction leaves me thinking and questioning. These are good things. 🙂
Just like the 19th century Romantic Artists (eg Friedrich) confronting and exposing humanity’s vulnerabilities, whereas a little darkness emphasises the light, for me too much overwhelms, their paintings still have a powerful overwhelming effect, It seems to me that the creative confront the deepest darkest fears of the human condition, not the scientist. I would wish death could never contain your talent.
Spencer
Unknowingly seeking it out, this agony, the final stages of a difficult or painful death. He enjoys reading her work, and he’s not alone…
RG,
I started reading your work my last year of high school, sometime in 2008/2009. I’d already developed or acknowledged my interest in kink and your stories always pushed just a little beyond other scenarios I’d seen. They were a little more thoughtful, a little more realistic, a little more dark. I read everything you had online at that point, and periodically over the years I’ve come back as stories appeared and disappeared like annuals in a garden I didn’t have to tend. Sometimes I’d be disappointed at not finding a story I wanted to reread, or finding one still unfinished, indefinitely. But there were always new ones that pushed me differently, made me question something I hadn’t question, or explore a possibility I didn’t know was possible. Despite the disclaimer I’ve read hundreds of times I’ve never reviewed or written anything. I think I was, and probably still am, uncomfortable with the idea that someone real has written what I’m reading.
I used to read these stories as masturbation fodder, but today I went back to use them that way and I wasn’t turned on. The agony is addictive but not arousing. It’s frustrating. It’s teasing. I want the happy ending, I want the escapism but instead I’m forced to wonder why I am the way I am. What control and comfort and pain and humiliation do to me and why. I have thought a lot about a story you wrote -and it’s still uncomfortable that there is an author who is real and reading this, or perhaps another reader, even though this feels like something very personal to me, this comment or letter, as well as the stories I’ve read here- but the story started with a girl playing chess with her father, and she gives up when she knows she can’t win and he destroys the board. There’s an explicit connection between this scene and her later life sexual kinks and I wonder about that all the time. Does everyone have a reason, do we have to have a reason? Do they make taboos more acceptable? Is it a weird parallel to kink shaming- something fucked up happened to us (a nanny stepped on our testicles as punishment) as children and now we have sexual desires that we need to be defensive about? Or are we simply drawing a deterministic line about our development? Certain experiences dictate our favorite meal, our favorite color, why not our favorite sex act?
Anyway, RG, thanks for making me wonder, thanks for agonizing me for almost a decade. I’ve grown up a lot sexual during the period in which I off and on read your erotic fiction, and it served a different roll at each point.
Katy, you don’t need a reason other than “this works for me”. The deep roots of our sexuality stem from our specific biology, if you ask me.
The rest is a thin slice of intellect and socialisation on top of a dark grey wolf that sits next to us, reminding us “I remember when this was all plains, and we ran and hunted and ate and slept and mated and it was good. We had no anxiety about this stuff, we weren’t trying to fit into a mass-media society where we became telepaths, and everyone judged everybody else. We just breathed, and *were* and nobody questioned it”.
I read your work because brings relief .. in more ways than just erotica.