J is for Juxtaposition

It's not unrelated to syncretism, actually, the setting of things against each other to form a contrast, the way contrasts and shifts produce enlightenment.

But it matters, really.

It matters to see that the crown is placed - the plants of south and north bound together - by both Heru and Set, that order and chaos combine to produce this whole.  It is not something achieved by one overwhelming the other, but a tandem function, strength as an individual and the collective heart of the community.

When a symbolism works with contrasts - the bird and the snake, red and black, male and female, whatever other things are framed as dynamic balance with each other - there are always those stark places where one meets the other face to face.  And those places matter, fundamentally.

One of the things that bothers me about my surrounding culture is the mutually annihilatory contrasts.  Good and evil, say, that whole Manichaean god-and-devil dance in which each is attempting to destroy the other, or whatever the fuck that's on about, and the world doesn't actually work that way at all so it all comes across as trying to turn reality into a big game of chess to me.  There Are Two Sides, They Are White And Black, And There Is Nothing But War.  Doesn't look a whit like the real world to me, so whenever I run into this kind of cosmology I'm at a loss.  It's like talking to people who are seriously waiting for their Hogwarts admission letter, really.

The real world is predator and prey, and there is no mutual annihilation there.  If the prey 'loses', vanishes away, obviously the predators die off.  If the predators vanish, the prey die too - starving in the winter because there are too many of them to survive on the forage, if nothing happens because their weaker members are no longer culled.  You put those together and you don't get Good Vs. Evil World-Annihilating Cagematch, you get a self-balancing ecosystem.  You get synergies and transformations and all kinds of interesting and flashy stuff.

That's what real juxapositions produce, this flash of something larger, more complex, in the give and take available.  These create edges, liminal spaces, in which one can find transformational magic.  This and that has its realm of thisandthat, even when it is an interplay of opposites.

Dreamlife

When I was a child and trying to get to sleep, I would tell myself little fantasy stories all about the boy I fancied and how in a fantasy world he needed to be rescued and afterwards we would live happily ever after.

When I got a little older, I got uncomfortable with that because what if he didn't want me, so I would tell myself little fantasy stories that were only mostly about the boy I fancied and how ... etc.

When I got a little older, I built raw fantasy out of my kinks to soothe myself to sleep, with intricate gearwork constructions of bondage, domination, and service.

Once I had a sexual partner, I would assemble bits and pieces of fantasies out of things we'd done and extrapolations thereof.

Often, these would be kinked, playing with ideas, coming up with scenarios and notions.


... now, when I am trying to get to sleep, my mind is full of baby smiles. And holding her close, cradling her in my arms, and actually having the strength to not have to let go, back away, get a little space, and breathe so that I do not lose my mind. Actually having the infinite patience that is back behind the archetype, being able to pour all the love into her that she can hold.


I honestly find it more than a bit confusing.

And I would miss the sex dreams, if I had space left in my mind to have them.

Scenes from a Life, Kink Edition

"This would probably make an even better photograph."

"Why's that?"

I have to think about it, my head pillowed on one of his thighs, my hand resting next to it. The other hand, with the dark rich red rope still wrapped around the wrist, curls around my waist.

He strokes my hair and shoulder while I think, and I arch my back a little against the length of his other thigh, shifting my legs a little to stop the knot from grinding into my ankle, an endeavour made more difficult by the thick band of hemp coiled around my knees.

It's an oddly domestic little picture, in my mind, viewed from the outside. One of his hands on top of my head, the other petting me, expanse of skin and several colours of rope, lounged in the great heap of pillows, this comfortable lazy-dreamy snuggle.

I finally say, "With my hands free, the choice of it all is much more obvious."

I close my eyes. It feels so good.

Meant for Someone Else

Do you believe?

The voice spoke, murmuring theology in the tones of trance, with cadences of sensuous eroticism; the voice spoke, talking about souls and connections and the flow of the universe, self and other, serpent and avian, union, transformation.

Do you believe?

I have never believed.

I just do. That which works, that which is, the flow and shape of things, the symbols that are used to frame it. This experience: what is it? I have no belief. I take it as it is.

The voice speaks, teasing, drawing out response; even in the heat of the day, it raises goosebumps. I can feel the knot of responsiveness, letting the shape of the visualisation flow in my mind, knowing my reactions, a thin thread of pining for company to share these effects with.

Do you believe?

Is it real?

The slick of sweat is real. The fluid tension knotted up beneath my belly is real. These are sensations, tangible, physical.

Another time, two voices, his and hers, calling to each other across the throng, over the chant, over the sound of drums and the singing bowl an armspan across, teasing, pleading, taunting, loving, as they circle.

Do you believe?

Is it real?

Is it all in your mind?

I have never believed. Belief is a foreign country to me, perhaps too much science, perhaps too much mysticism, perhaps simply the acceptance of the scope and span of the unknowable, the limitation acknowledged of the intrinsic subjectivity of my own senses.

Do you believe?

I feel sometimes, a little, around the edges, that I almost might be able to imagine what belief is.

Gnosis, I can do. Trust, I can do.

Belief?

No.

And yet, when the gods touched, the heavens opened.

No Idea

It was kinda supposed to be a mellow and easygoing thing. I was a little into service state, not terribly into headspace but full of concern and the need to unwind some of the tension that was so intense that it was making him spasm at irregular intervals.

I'm good at reducing his tension.

(And a damn good thing, too, because he's such a stressbucket.)

And it was working out well, very soothing, the gentle treatment letting the tension run out, very satisfying sex if not the sort of thing that goes to the mindblowing orgasm direction.

And then he stretched.

His arms went up over his head, reaching towards the corners of the bed, the muscles of his upper arms showing definition with the effort of the motion, sloping up from the breadth of his shoulders. He had twisted his head to one side to loosen his neck, exposing the curve of shoulder to a loose halo of curls. It was a perfect pose, made the more so by its artlessness, by the simplicity of the stretch.

I stared.

I did more than stare, just watching with hungry intensity, the perfect angle of the limbs, the flow of muscle, the expanse of chest, the exposed throat, the loose hair, the blissfully accepting face in profile with its faint half-smile.

My actual first thought was, "You... are a rope short of bondage porn."

He turned back to me, looking up, looking at the way I was responding, and said, "My, that's a predatory look."

"... you ... have no idea."

He teased me with an "Are you going to take advantage of me when I'm vulnerable?" and I bit back response after response, the urge to try to pin down those arms even though I know he's strong enough to throw me off, to not let the need to take care of the fragility be overwhelmed by that utterly captivating moment.

"You have no idea."

It was work after that, work to keep being gentle, knowing that I had an intent and that I would follow through on it no matter how much that image of a stretched-out body opened up under me in perfect beauty kept coming back to mind.

Still keeps coming back to mind, days later.

I told him that that was a visual that I would be keeping, and he looked amused, but perhaps not understanding, not knowing what it was that I saw.



They say women don't look.

They have even less idea than he does.

He can see me seeing.

More Desire Week: Kink Ruminations

This is sort of half-assedly in reponse to SnowdropExplodes's comment on this post at Figleaf's. Which was too incoherent to post as a comment. And probably more explicit than my run of the mill post, but hey, it happens.

SnowdropExplodes wrote:

This keys heavily into a theme that I've heard mentioned by submissives, especially women submissives, about the key source of pleasure (I've been told several times by subs that their preferred form of sex is fellatio, because "there's no direct pleasure for me; it's all about him").

I only like oral sex -- giving or receiving -- in a d/s context. I have occasionally poked at this a bit to try to figure out why this is, and I got nothing; the only clear notion I have is something about service sexuality, but that doesn't really explain why I don't fancy being the recipient either.

The thing I find most interesting, personally, about service sexuality stuff is the way it functions for me as very intense foreplay. The intense awareness focused on my partner's reactions ramps me up in a way that only active teasing can do otherwise; it frequently parses as a form of teasing.

"You're teasing me."
"Yes."
...
"You're still teasing me..."
"We both know what you want. You don't really want me to take the edge off, do you?"

I have a penetration fetish, in that sort of semi-technical sense; I am as a general rule not satisfied by sexual activity that does not include (typically PIV) penetration at some point, no matter how many orgasms I have (though I have done some experimentation to discover other potential means of achieving satisfaction). I find orgasms that come about from other activities notably more satisfying when they come immediately following penetration than when they come before, even if the same actions are taken. And so on.

In a d/s context as a submissive, I frequently wind up framing penetrative sex as a reward for service, sexual and otherwise. I certainly do non-sexual service stuff (and had a running joke for a long time that the anti-BDSM ideologues probably would be confused by the amount of carpentry involved in my kink), but if one removes the completeness-of-relationship-arc stuff that I talked about my linked post there, there's this core thread of sexualisation. Not in a transactional "If I do this, I will get kinky sex out of it", but a link forged between the task and the satisfaction-reward. And sometimes this is straightforward -- the "my assistance with this carpentry task cuts down the time required to complete it from three hours to an hour fifteen" sorts of things make for a lot more time to contemplate kinky sex -- and other times it's a lot more abstract. But still present.

And I can get into some interesting headspaces with sequences of service tasks, especially if some of them are sexual, that don't wind up including my personal reset button. Because that thread of sexualisation is there, and because some of our favorite things to set me to doing are sexual, it's a constant, complicated flow of foreplay. Sometimes the feelings are quiescent for a bit, and that tends to dull them out over time, but they can be let go for a while and then re-invoked with a new task, a reminder, a bit more active teasing, extending this foreplay over the course of days.

(Tangentially: When I frame it like this, I can understand orgasm control kink as potentially doing something similar when dealing with someone who's orgasm-oriented in the way that I'm penetration-oriented.)

It's something to do when there isn't time to fuck ....

(Sigh.)

Desire

So apparently some folks have declared it female desire week, for women to express their lustiness or what have you. I'm ... a little bit at a loss, honestly.

Sometimes I feel this tremendous gap between myself and the surrounding culture, in which it's expected that one will feel desire for celebrities, passers-by of appropriate aesthetic qualities, or what have you.

I mean, if I were going to pick The Universe's Most Aesthetically Appealing Celebrity, my current vote would be Keith Hamilton Cobb, and not just because his voice is even more beautiful than he is. But, y'know, I don't want one. I wouldn't know what to do with one. Wall hanging, perhaps, but that isn't what people are talking about when they talk about desire, attraction, whatever.

Desire, for me, isn't something that comes that easily. There are things that hit my sense of aesthetics -- one of Figleaf's recent posts includes a bit of the curve of the hip that I'm quite fond of -- but it's all terribly abstract to me. There's no bite to it, no desire, it's all very intellectual-awareness, very unconnected to anything that goes anywhere. Yes, that's pretty. "Pretty" doesn't connect all that much to "desire".

When I think desire, I think ... I'm going to quote something Trinity wrote a year or so ago now:

It made it very difficult for me to enjoy sexual fantasy and sexual play with other people. Because for me, a huge part of the appeal of SM is the excess. The idea that too much sensation may be painful, but that only feeds an intense loop of pleasure that increases and increases, until I feel capable of devouring the world. And the person beneath me becomes a great consuming wild creature, able to take anything, transmute anything, beg for more, opening and opening, endlessly devouring in a different way.

And that sort of energy is a kind of destruction and consumption. It's a sacred kind, the consuming fire of the Destroyer . that fire runs through me when I'm high from topping. Frightening, sacred fire that seeks to devour to bring rebirth and joy.

I'm thinking in that kind of direction. Not in those terms precisely, because of not doing significant SM, but definitely in the consuming fire kind of feeling. And to get to desire, to get that raw intense redness, I need more than pretty. Pretty is nice to look at; pretty is not worth enveloping, devouring, wrapping up in myself, swallowing. (Look at me still being switchy!) I'm not interested in assimilating mere pretty, but I'll hang it up somewhere I can look at it.

I do watch pretty at times. This week at my tai chi class I spent a while when I was sidelined to rub down my knee watching one of my classmates do the advanced form, partly to see what the movements might look like should I study far enough to learn that, partly in appreciation of the motion, partly because he has some of the prettiest hands I've ever seen (hands are one of the things that I like). But later, I was watching the female student in the following karate class because of the feel and flavor of her movements, and I'm straight enough to not have any potential of the frisson that might somewhere derive from pretty maleness. And more often than not, when I'm taking a few minutes to rub down one of my bum joints, I'm watching my liege in that class, and I damn well know when I'm watching with desire involved. (This week I'd have far rather been watching him, honestly, given my overall state of lustiness, but he was on the far side of the room and obscured by other people, and I prefer to keep my ogling at least vaguely subtle.)

(Hah. And what does my music start playing right now but "Tall Dark Handsome Stranger", by Heart:

I had a tall dark handsome stranger
I've had the devil in disguise
I've been attracted to the danger
But I was never satisfied
And I know what I like and I like what I see in your eyes
You're so beautiful

I'm amused by the appropriateness.)

And I can think about things I like to look at, body-bits I particularly appreciate; I've written about that now and again. The curve of the hip. Beautiful hands. The area around the throat and collarbone, and the shoulder. Longer hair than is 'normal' for mainstream masculinity. Eyes, gods, I love beautiful eyes. Distinctive noses. The ruffleable soft fur on forearms. I like the build that gets called 'athletic'; I like stocky and broad-shouldered too. I don't care for a heavily muscled look. I'm so well-known for my fondness for engineers that a friend of mine, upon meeting one of my exes at a party, sent me an email that concluded by asking me if he was one. (I told her you were a thwarted weatherman, m'dear.) My taste seems to run sufficiently to sarcastic, arrogant, if-I-ran-things types that an acquaintance who's fond of astrology reacted to anything I quoted from one of my partners with, "Was that the Leo?" I like creative, and it's not coincidental that most of my partners have been met in a gaming situation of some sort (the major exception I met in a writing discussion forum, and has since taken up RPGs); I like musicians so much that I've decided it's probably a bad idea for me to actually get involved with them. I can fuck someone who doesn't smell good, as in go through the physical motions, but I'm not going to make that sort of mistake again; one of my standard "I'm finding you particularly appealing at the moment" mumblings is "you smell good". I appreciate skill on display, especially smooth and graceful motion. I appreciate a clever mind, someone who can understand my jokes and pick up on my somewhat tangential idiom, someone I can talk to about the stuff in my head, which is wide-ranging, frequently esoteric, and needs the support to flesh out.

All of that stuff goes into desire. And so much of it is so personal and individual that it's weird to imagine writing about in a useful or interesting way. I can't share the narratives of desire for celebrities; I can get aesthetics and occasionally to the point of "I wonder what he's actually like", but I can't smell them, let alone know if they're actually interesting enough to want. I can't frame desire in purely aesthetic terms; when I talk desire, I'm talking hunger, that passionate, frightening, swallowing-up kind of feeling.

And I've always been a picky eater.

Triggering the Kiss

He told me once what it was like, in sketches, from his side, filling in my memory with reflection; a few weeks of increasingly focused flirting finally winding up nestled facing each other under a blanket, staring, me full of fright, him seeing that and trying a soft, tentative kiss, a light stroking of my neck, not understanding then why his hand on my neck produced such an intensity of not-responding because we were so far away from talking about kink and reactions and still building the shapes of the trust that would come of that. He told me about wondering at my restraint, my anxious awkwardness, perhaps because I had pursued him until that point and had come all over shy, unwilling to kiss deeply, full of tension.

Knowing he can read the fear and be gentle with it helps, even on nights like this when I want to duck and hide and bury my face and be not kissed, not kissed at all, certainly not deeply; the bites along my shoulder are fine, the holding, the knot of rope grinding into the small of my back, but no kisses, none. And he kisses me anyway, and I recognise that and choose trust with the conscious work of will and ride the surge of things holding tightly to that trust and nonetheless breathe much easier when the kissing is done, when I don't have to fight with myself to have it, when I can let go.

I am not always so fearful. So rarely so, now, with him; hard to trigger, working at healing, save for the rough and fragile days when all the covering on old wounds is thin and no padding at all, when I turn away from being kissed.

Let me spin you a memory: an awkward woman-child, shy and hungry for learning how to be human, settled into her high school's auditorium seats to watch the county's selection of teenaged bands perform. The friend she came with is dancing; the boy she pines after is off with his girlfriend; that boy's friend, from a different school, is sitting with her, one arm around her shoulders.

She is terrified. Frozen up, uncertain, able to respond in an anxious laughter at times, mind racing. She watches the bands, perhaps this one a friend's performance, others from people she never will see again.

His fingers shift a little, tracing a circle on her still-developing left breast. This is a pleasant sensation; she considers relaxing a little, but still does not know him, know whether she wants to be with him at all, or how to reject him gracefully if she does not, and oh, that feels good, and it's so nice to have someone offering something other than scorn, and at the same time what should a Good girl be doing to be Safe, and shouldn't someone talk, not that she knows what the words would be, and ...

... he leans in to kiss her. And this is too much, too much to think about, obliterating thought already quite tangled trying to make sense of sensation. His tongue probes, hitting teeth. Eventually encouraging something more, deeper, with greater intensity, leaving her only able to think of the unpleasant slickness of it, trying to parse this against the knowledge that This Is What Lovers Do, trying to figure out if it will become okay with practice, if the shape of it will be different ...

... and it never changes, not in all the long months ...

... and eventually that relationship dies in the burning of coercion and pain and terror and loss and shattering shattering shattering ...

... leaving revenants haunting so many things, most especially the kiss.

And eventually she learns, as she grows into woman from child, that it can mean Hunger instead of slime, and there are times when she can hear Hunger without remembering those first forced kisses, those kisses and the entire cascade of everything that came after; even sometimes she can say it, though those are rarer, harder, edged with other fears.

But Hunger is terrifying, and it comes with ghosts.

Tremulous and Tender

When I was in college, one of my friends had a thing for tormented, mysterious dramatic fellows with cloaks and masks. Epic Phantom of the Opera fanfic sort of 'thing'.

I never loved the Phantom.

But I had a massive thing for the music of the night.

I can't remember when I first heard the musical; I have memories of listening to it going back and forth to the shrink in junior high school, but that's the closest I have to something that dated it. Call me twelve, that's probably close enough.

It caught me, caught my attention. The rest of the plotline of ALW's Phantom fell completely by the wayside in its incoherent jumble of spectacle; I was captivated by the music of the night, this first portrait of compelling, beautiful dominance. It spoke of "cold, unfeeling light", which was one of those deep secret associations in my child mind that I would not speak of, because I was supposed to find the light warm and welcoming, and I never had; that touch of familiarity made the siren song of the Phantom's music grasping for control, for compulsion, for beauty that much the more real and personal to me.

Perhaps like Christine in the storyline, I was too caught in the music to be aware of the savagery that fed the Phantom, but it was the music I always wanted more than the man, the music that was the perfect master. The music that needed that one point of perfect inspiration, the idealised Christine, the one who was willing and able to open to the music, fill herself up, and pour it out again. The music was always my master, I its dedicated worshipper, filled with it, shaped to it, spilling it out again with my own voice.

The music of the night, in concept -- not in the form given in the musical, but as its own angel -- was my first Master. The one that trained me most in service, in being owned, in being the cherished slave of power, alive as never before with a resonance that shook my ribs and drove my breath deeper, richer, more powerful.


There is a story here about why I no longer partner with musicians which I will leave implicit.

Hiding the Cow

The name I post under to these blogs, Dw3t-Hthr, is one of the standard transliterations of an ancient Egyptian temple position, which means "Adorer of Hathor". (I will note that I tend to use Egyptian names for Her rather than the better-known Greek, but since we don't know what vowels they used, I use a variety of transliterations at more or less random.)

It struck me as an interesting thing that I picked that handle to post under, a while back, because the parts of me that resonate with Hetharu are not things that I much bring out in public spaces. I have had people tell me that they saw no influence of Her in me, and it has occasionally taken me a bit aback, until I thought a bit about how little of the parts of me that are Hers I reveal to the world at large. My public persona, especially online (apparently), is brusque, short-tempered, occasionally argumentative, somewhat withdrawn, puts up with no nonsense, and is not femme.

Hethert ... Hethert is the daughter of Ra, sometimes seen as the personification of the hand He wanked Himself off with to create existence. She bears the title Eye of Ra, a title of some several goddesses of manifest solar power, protectors of the sun. Her name means "House of Horus", house of Her husband, Heru-Wer, Whose eyes are the sun and moon, the vault of the sky; she is called Mistress of Heaven. Gold, she is called, the shining golden one, governing beauty, femininity, motherhood, joy. Lady of Intoxication, dancing the ecstasy of drunkenness. Healer, shade tree, Lady of the Sycamore. Hers is the rejuvenating power of sexuality, capable even of turning back old age. Lover of precious stones, especially blue and green ones: Her titles give her specific dominion over lapis lazuli, turquoise, and malachite; as She Who Reigns in Punt She looks over imported wealth, incense, luxury. The Mistress of Music's son is the musician, and the sistrum is frequently shaped in part in Her cow-eared likeness. As the Mistress of the West She receives the dead and brings them to rebirth just as much as She brought them to birth.

And people look at me and wonder how I might claim to love Her so, because aside from a manic fondness for blue things and perhaps a little mythological mockery in reference to The Distant Goddess, Her title from when She had to be coaxed back to Egypt with flattery and trickery rather than remain brooding outside the borders and depriving the sun of its protector and the land of its manifestation.

But seeing the cow is an intimacy, truly, not something that I put forward so often -- reference, perhaps, occasionally, but Her reflection in me is not something I am always entirely comfortable sharing. So I laugh at my choice of names, adorer of Hathor that I am, and reflect on things.

Like the vast amount of wrestling I am doing with my mommy issues, and the secret thread of that which is making myself capable of motherhood, of reflecting Her image. Not just cleansing myself of the traumas of my past, but this trial of worship, of preparing, of making myself more capable of manifesting Her nature in this manner, making more space to embody this goddess in this fashion. And this is a madness, a religious fanaticism, but it is nonetheless there, in all my striving towards adulthood, responsibility, mastering myself so that I can endeavour to avoid failing at this calling. And twined in with all that the curled up in my husband's arms, shaking with the force of it, knowing where I need to go, fear to go, ....

Like the deeprooted urge towards healing, towards support, that touch and mending of the wounded, which has to be held close, not loosed too freely or too readily, or I will spend all my life mending the unmendable. But I remember talking a friend out of suicide, once. Or getting someone in horrible personal pain to call me at three in the morning (my time), because she so clearly needed someone to talk to and there was nobody else. Or one of my classmates, shaking with pain, rocking and sobbing, and Her hand in mine, knowing that there was something that I could give her when she could speak, and the wonder of the giving and the receiving. And one could, if one wanted, chase threads of this into kink, into service, into the offering of support and dedication; I do not think that would be incorrect.

Like being reminded -- as Cube mentioned when I was venting about toonspace -- every so often that I brighten people's worlds, reveal joys to them that might otherwise go missed. That I show the world as a wondrous place, full of wondrous things, at least when I am well and balanced and kept properly maintained. (I lose this too easily.)

Like the constant play of music in my life, played or sung or performed or just rattling along in my head. Like years of training on piano and voice, a few with the flute, dabbling with teaching myself drum and bagpipe. My liege has commented on how charming he finds it that I sing along to things, sometimes under my breath, sometimes without seeming to notice that I am doing it; and he was not surprised that I remembered the music that was playing the first time we had sex, either.

Like long hours spent watching the infinite vault of deep heaven, and finding it warm and present and loving.

And wile they weren't singing about Her, the Who put it well:

Listening to you I get the music.
Gazing at you I get the heat.
Following you I climb the mountain.
I get excitement at your feet!
Right behind you I see the millions.
On you I see the glory.
From you I get opinions.
From you I get the story.

Dua Hetharu.



(There will at some point be a followup to this, titled 'Hiding the Lion'.)

Love and "Lies"

My favorite love song in all the world is called "Lies".

"Lies" is by the late, great Canadian folksinger, Stan Rogers, from Home in Halifax. (Link goes to the MP3 download page; the CD is throwing errors at me.) It's a sweet and soulful tune, very real and present in the world, with the magic of love in it. It's there in the words, which I've linked above, but the music, the revelation of it, is this most amazing thing.

We have here this woman, taking her moment of peace for her coffee after seeing her children off to school, caught up in self-doubt and her perceptions of her age, girlishness lost:

Is this the face that won for her the man
Whose amazed and clumsy fingers put that ring upon her hand?
No need to search that mirror for the years.
The menace in their message shouts across the blur of tears.

Time, childbirth, and labor have taken their toll on her, the way they inevitably will. Her husband was, once, amazed to have her pledging to him, but she cannot escape the fear that she has lost what he wanted of her then. She wishes that the mirror which reveals the marks of her age to her would lie to her. She is inutterably human, familiar in her frailty.

And then she gets up, shakes off the mood, sets the mirror aside:

And thinks ahead to Friday, 'cause Friday will be fine!
She'll look up in that weathered face that loves hers, line for line,
To see that maiden shining in his eyes
And laugh at how her mirror tells her lies.

To see that maiden shining in his eyes and laugh at how her mirror tells her lies.

To have that partnership of years, through all the aches of time and age, and to still have the true mirror be the eyes of the beloved, which will still dance no matter the marks on the face: that is the love I have always wanted. Work and children and years and all, and still to dance with it.

I amused a friend recently by commenting that I'm an old-fashioned gal, not willing to marry a person who isn't willing to be a parent to my children -- amused because of the wild nontraditionality of my family life in so many ways. But I want this, the amazed and clumsy fingers, the moment of quiet when the kids are off to school, the too many lines to erase or disguise, and the laughing joy of each other.

Friday will be fine. And all the Fridays after it, and all the rest of my breathing days, Friday and otherwise. That, there, is what I breathe in moments of "I love you".

This month marks thirteen years with my husband, and two years with my liege.

May we be mirrors for each other for years to come.

Mortification of the Flesh

Daisy and I were talking last month about ecstasy and pain and sacredness and a variety of other things. And I'm working my way through the pain and blood that is my own calling to the divine, the things that it demands; the flogger I picked up at the Fetish Flea is still sitting by my bedside table. At some point it will be more than merely a pretty object.

The power of pain has always been something that I have known, down in my bones, something that spoke its own language. There was debilitating pain -- the headsplitting agony of the migraine with its warped vision effects, the sick wet pop of my hip missocketed, the way I could only do pushups with one hand on the knuckles so it wouldn't fail under me. And then there was the other pain.

There was the pain when I was so far gone into my own head, into the demons of the darkness lurking somewhere south of sanity, that I could grab, rake down my arms with my nails, dragging myself back into the world rather than fall into the abyss of going mad. There was the pain that took that stuff from inside and pulled it out, inverted it, made it something under my control, taming the beast. There was bringing myself back into reality, the sharpness and clear sparkling realness of it. There was tracing patterns in the back of my hand with the point of a knife, because I could see that doing something, and it hurt less than anything else I put my focus on. (That time my husband took the knife away from me.) There's the sharp immediacy of pain grabbed and put through alchemical transformations, my standard first step of the little energy work trick I learned in my teens: how to block pain.

(I don't know if any of my readers know the game Egyptian Rat Screw, but the relevant point is that if two cards of the same value are played in sequence, the first player to slap them wins the stack. I once slapped in on a pair of queens and won the game. My roommate one summer at camp was very good at it, and played some kid with a cast on his arm. At midnight, she was up plaintively complaining how much her hand hurt, so I got up, and I made it stop. Then, bloody rationalist, she whined that I had stopped it, until about two, when she exclaimed, "Yes! It hurts!" and went promptly to sleep. Occultists get no respect.)

I had scars, thin brown discolorations, down the outside of my left forearm for about eight years, from high school.

When I need, absolutely need, to keep control of my temper, my nails go into my palms, leaving little crescent arcs that last long after I let go. Or sometimes somewhere into my arms. Sometimes I've left bruises.

And I have this rigid wall between pain and sex, pain and ecstasy, and I'm suspecting it's going to come down.

The rigidity of that wall may be surprising to some, with the way I bite and sometimes scratch -- I've had a reasonably nippy evening, just that kind of mood, even without any sex being involved -- but none of that parses to me as working with pain. Physicality, sensation, a feral streak that has a large thread of sexual energy to it, sure, but not pain. That spot where the shoulder flows into the neck? Biting that doesn't hurt. Biting that is something else altogether.

Taking the wall down scares me.

(And yet, He said, fear is how we measure ourselves.)

It scares me because so much of the work with pain goes so deep, so intense, and so closely tied to madness and managing madness. And I refer to "Have you ever gone mad?" a few posts down because there's a seductiveness to madness, this sense of release, of freedom, and choosing to turn my face towards the abyss, to go to where that huge, deep wellspring of power is, that tremendous, transformational power, and beyond it the hungry Void ... scares me.

I know that siren song, the seductiveness of going completely unmoored.

So for a long time, I maintained this rigid, rigid wall. This is not me. I don't understand it. I don't go there.

It scares me, and it scares me deep and hard and hitting right around Swadhisthana.

There's an edge there, a sharp one, a delicate balance between madness and reality, that sharp erotic curve of the transformational line.

I have always met the gods at the edges of things.

Resuming Normal Broadcast

Thanks to folks for their supportive comments on my little meltdown.

In an attempt to get back into the swing of things, I'm going to write about my hair.

I have joked in the past that my hair is a more critical identity trait for me than my sex. Which is an interesting thing; it's certainly far more consciously chosen.

I have very dim memories of one of the first times I had my hair trimmed, in my grandparents' bedroom in Stoughton. I screamed the entire time. I have gotten a little better about having my splits removed since then. A little.

I've kept it cut the way I do it now since I was fourteen, when I came to the conclusion that I was done looking like Wednesday Addams. This was partially influenced by the abuse I took in junior high school, which was partially centered on my hair (and one of the cases of unwelcome touch was hair-related). I have permed it twice, maybe three times, at about the age of seventeen, and came to the conclusion that I appear to be allergic to the chemicals, don't like smelling of plastic, and don't have particular interest in the effect. (Besides, as my dear college roommate says, if I want it curly I can braid it and wash it.)

I have a lot of hair. In its natural state it is fine, prone to splits, on the oily side, straight, and dark brown with a tendency to brassy highlights when I get a whole lot more sun than I have in years, and these days reaches my ass. And there is, well, a lot of it.

I'm thinking about my hair today because I just finished dyeing it, which I do every three months (though I was about a month late on this one due to life being crazy and disrupted, and me being a lazy bastard).

Dyeing my hair is a two-day process; I wash it the night before so it's clean and dry come the day of, and then mix up and apply the stuff, let it sit for a few hours, and wash it some more. It's a fair amount of effort to go to, and this time when I was washing it out I wound up thinking about cultural beauty rituals and assumptions.

The assumption I often see is that the stuff one does that's appearance-based is effortful, done to please others, requires extensive maintenance, and so on. The whole sparkle-pony shit that gets sneered at around elsewhere.

I have a hell of a lot of hair. I have a hell of a lot of oily, fine, split-prone hair. I have spent probably cumulative months of my life arguing with my hair, with its tangles and tendency to snarl, extracting tennis-ball sized accumulations of frayed mess that did not noticeably affect its density, several times giving up on tangles and cutting them off with a knife. (I have a blade, rather duller now than when I got it, that I refer to as 'my hair-cutting knife'.) I have a hell of a lot of ornery hair, and I won't cut it short.

Now that it's freshly hennaed, I can't stop running my fingers through it; the smoothness of it, the way it feels, the way it flows. It doesn't tangle; I will probably need to worry about combing it again sometime in October. That two-day process (mostly planning and scheduling, and then sitting for a few hours with mud on my head) wins me wash-and-wear hair, hair that behaves, hair that is willing to grow a hand longer now that it doesn't get so fragile and so caught up in snarls. The hair that I always thought I should have had.

I was washing the cocoa butter out of my hair this afternoon and just running my hands through it, feeling the sleekness of the length of it, the way the water flows through and around it rather than fighting with it constantly. Like it's not there, in the way it flows and swirls (and now I laugh at the person at the Flea this weekend who asked me if I was a mermaid, for a completely different reason than my bafflement at the time; my liege's fiancee did suggest that I have mermaid hair, floaty on the water...).

It turns my hair from dark brown with those bronze highlights to dark red-brown, nearly invisible in artificial light, striking in the sun. And yeah, I've gotten a compliment or two on that from relevant folks.

But what it wins for me is the hair that's my self-image, my identity, and reduces its maintenance to the occasional need to deoil it. It gives me hair I can run my fingers through without catching them on a sudden snarl that wasn't there a moment ago, induced by the disruption of a breath or a touch. It gives me my hair.

It gives me hair that I maintain this way in significant part as religious devotional. And it gives me hair that has been known to get my liege to bury his face in the back of my neck and rumble, "Mmm, henna", as well. But mostly ... it gives me my hair.

Sex and God

Your hope in my heart is the rarest treasure
Your Name on my tongue is the sweetest word
My choicest hours
Are the hours I spend with You --

O God, I can't live in this world
Without remembering You--
How can I endure the next world
Without seeing Your face?

I am a stranger in Your country
And lonely among Your worshippers:
This is the substance of my complaint.

-- Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya, trans. Charles Upton

Sure, there's loving God. And then there's, y'know, loving God, wink wink, nudge nudge, saynomore, saynomore.

Which falls in a weird sideways place somewhere rubbing up against madness. There are all kinds of frameworks for divine ecstasy, but along with ecstasy being sort of marginalised and out of fashion, expressing it in that whole sexual/romantic/kinked vague direction is a good way to get weird looks. At best.

This kind of direct sexuality does not seem to mix well with a lot of people's image of religion. (And I think about Tantric practice, which seems to me in the West to have first been limited to its sexual aspects and then separated from the whole embodying-the-Divine bits.) When people refer to a nun as a "Bride of Christ", they're probably not thinking in terms of Jesus's cosmic polygynous harem (except if they're easily amused warped literalists like me). (But somehow I bet there are a few nuns out there somewhere who have some level of mystical consummation of their marriages.)

WordK wrote "Since YHWH's interaction with humans is often of an erotic character (and I dare anyone who has read the prophets or Song of Songs to try and tell me it isn't)..." Hmmm:

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth--for thy love is better than wine.

Thine ointments have a goodly fragrance; thy name is as ointment poured forth; therefore do the maidens love thee.

Draw me, we will run after thee; the king hath brought me into his chambers; we will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will find thy love more fragrant than wine! sincerely do they love thee.

-- Song of Songs, Chapter 1

Well, I'm not going there.

There's this whole section of the clawing towards the experience of oneness with the divine that just doesn't get talked about, doesn't get seen. And that doesn't make it go away -- there are still the quiet voices of the people whose dreams are filled with their gods, who aspire to some sort of partnership with something in the Unseen world. As well as the noisier voices of the ones who are less circumspect.

And it scares some people. I know of people who simply cannot deal with the concept of a god as a lover -- perhaps because it's hubristic, perhaps because the material and mortal is thought of as something immiscible with the transcendent and divine, perhaps because 'god as parent' is so strong in that mind that 'god as lover' becomes abuse, creepiness, some sort of warped perversion of family. (I've seen all of these.) And this doesn't stop there being stories of the heroes who came from crossbreedings between lines (though their mortal parents often had a really bad time of it), or mortals raised to godhood, or that so-political office in ancient Egypt, God's Wife, intended to keep the daughters of a rival line chaste and without mortal offspring -- but did the God appreciate His Wife? In a culture with seductions between the god and the mother of the king painted on its walls?

And it's the edge of madness, this concept of reaching for the divine in this way, and it's hard to talk about without being mad. Impossible to respond to a sneering, "Why would anyone worship such a god?" when the answer has at least two tendrils rooted in this emotion. And there's the whole question of whether the madness is the madness of ecstasy, or just being in need of a straitjacket.

And none of that means that I'm not hoping to find a ritual scourge at the Fetish Flea. Not because my liege asked it of me; because Neb.y asked it of me.

I want to fuck you like an animal
My whole existence is flawed
You get me closer to god

- "Closer", Nine Inch Nails

Shadow Drums

This is something I wrote a while ago, a little bit tidied up; I figured I'd re-audience it or something.

Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number--Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysos, every now and then.

--Ursula K. Le Guin

I tend to be of the opinion most days that the culture I grew up in believes that the Apollonian pleasures are the only true pleasures, and the Dionysian pleasures are wicked indulgences that one might sneak into but which are really flaws in character.

The results I see of this are twofold. First, that very few people are taught a healthy way of interacting with Dionysos, such that they either fear him and his servants, or are swept away by him and claim they were not themselves, not in control, not at fault, and such that they do not know how to make _use_ of the secrets of sex, of drugs, of music, of any of the other dark drumbeats of the soul. Second, that those people whose souls balance more naturally as servants of Dionysos than servants of Apollo are lost, unable to find a place where they can stand and feel that the axioms of the universe fit the way they see it.

Where are the places for the ecstatics, for the potion-makers, the dancers, the drummers, the temple harlots, the prophets, the shamans, the makers of poetry, the makers of sculpture, the painters, the singers, all of the people who try to speak to the gut rather than the head, in a culture where what is rational and _productive_ is what matters? On the edges, if anywhere at all, when the Vice Squad and the War on Some Drugs leave them alone long enough.

It's all, "Don't do that, that's bad," "You should wait until you can deal with that as an adult," "You need to be rational about this," and those things don't work so well when the sirens sing and the drums start beating. Is it any wonder that so many people can't deal with sex and drugs when they're never taught how to dance with Dionysos without getting torn to pieces by the Maenads?


And now, after reading some stuff Belledame linked to, including some commentary on Little Light's brilliant monsterdom piece, I'm puttering about reading the Bacchae....

Juxtapositions

A hemp rope is an interesting thing.

It still remembers being a plant, does a hemp rope, in the feel of its fibers; it doesn't have the harsh impersonality of one of those plasticky bits of cord. Its harshness is the rough remembrance of personality, the twining knottiness of life. Its abrasiveness is just like people.

And there's a softness to it, too, hiding in beneath the rough like a secret that it doesn't want to admit to until it knows you better. It will hold on, twining against itself like an embrace, the gentle snugging of rope against rope, rope against skin, coiled and winding in this trail of holding on.

The rough affection of the rope dances against skin as the memory of a touch; here wound around a side, there twisted around a breast, running along the neck like fingers tracing the vein. It shifts with each breath and teases the flesh into awareness, and then another touch can author blue fire in the nerves with the gingery lightness of fingertips.

The rope is a danger, wound as it is, restraining as it is, and it holds so gently, with its light caresses and promises of security. There is flight wrapped in its coils, the loosing of emotion, of trust, of the energy that burns in eyes that answer questions with nothing but the raw emotion that will not be bound.

Still and trapped and held close and loved and free.