supplicium post mortem

When you live like a hermit as I do, you occasionally fall into correspondences. Since I met M via just such a correspondence, I’m always hopeful that one of them might prove interesting long term.  Today while slogging through the woods in the snow, dogs in tow, I recalled an autobiographical essay I sent to a correspondent earlier this year. It struck me, particularly in light of Emma Jane’s Christmas present, as suitable subject for a post. So, slightly adapted, here it is. I don’t think the correspondent in question actually read the whole thing in the first place, and who can blame them, it being rather long. Note to self not to overwhelm skittish correspondents with lengthy self-revelation.

In previous exegeses I have written about the growth of my tgi imagination from its unlikely beginnings in the Waspy, industrial Midwest. Besides sharing photos of my dolls, I haven’t written much about the girl I was before adolescence, a girl who bears slight relation to casey, but is far more anxious and goodie-goodie. This is her story, my story:

Despite  feeling very peculiar when reading or watching stories about tgi, I was terrified of and squicked by the reality. Part of this was a negative response to having received it in the way that I did (more on which another time). Part of it, though, has to be the gargantuan dependence on the idea of myself as a Good Girl (read: compliant, accommodating, approval-worthy, Nice). I’ve met several people into tgi who have said they didn’t misbehave while growing up. Neither did I. My parents employed a bit of light hand spanking with my brother and me for what I think of as “getting out of hand” moments. Never were there rules understood in advance, broken deliberately, and punished. The idea of deliberate punishment (whether physical or not) was enough to send me into a meltdown–because being punished would have meant that I was Bad, not Good, not me, and not lovable. I was anxious enough with my parents’ un-articulated boundaries. I was addicted at a young age to the crack of their approval. I lived in fear of losing it.

When I was six, just after joining children’s theater, I went to try outs for The Three Little Pigs. The deal at children’s theater was that our director, Mrs. R, would try a bunch of people in a bunch of roles, and you could say what your preferences were, but you had to accept whatever role you were ultimately given, with good grace. Be a Trouper. She had me try out for all the pigs and even the wolf. I was burning with shame and anxiety because I was terrified of being cast as the wolf. That would mean I was Bad. I knew I wasn’t my character, but I was young enough that I felt that their…moral state?…connected itself to me, that people would judge me as they judged the character. If I was forced to play the Big Bad Wolf, then I might not only be Bad, but it would mean I was the kind of girl who deserved to be punished, maybe even spanked! Even the first or second pigs caused me anxiety; they, too, were Bad because they lazily built their houses of inferior material. They deserved their tragedies, and worse. The third pig was the only role that would allow me to sleep at night. By massive luck, or by type casting, I got the third pig. You really cannot imagine my relief.

A little later, I was cast as a village girl in a play called The Little Juggler. It was only my third or fourth show, and I had only a few lines. We village children were mean and bratty and teased the vegetable sellers and little juggler boy. Mrs. R came up with a bit where the vegetable seller gave me a swat with a carrot after a snarky comment my character made. I froze with embarrassment, shame, confusion, horror. I almost cried during rehearsal. I was sick to my stomach for days over it and eventually was forced, through sheer desperation, to assert myself enough to talk another girl into trading lines with me. I couldn’t explain why, just that I really really really wanted to trade lines. She agreed. Later Mrs. R asked what had happened with the lines. I think I blushed beet red and near-tears blurted that we had just wanted to swap lines. She let it go, though I’d no idea why. As an adult, I now suspect she recognized one of those awkward and inexplicable childhood embarrassments, and had mercy on me.

So, spanking as a real life topic was not the slightest bit funny for me. Everyone I knew got it growing up. It was a standard punishment along with grounding and having your allowance taken away. At school there were playground games that included the “rickets” or the “spanking machine”, i.e. having to crawl through the legs of your playmates and be swatted by them as you passed. Other kids found this raucous fun. When in 3rd grade [age 8] we had “moving up day” and visited the big 4th grade classes, they played a ball game called SPUD at recess. When you lost a round, you got an S, then a P, etc. If you got up to SPUD, you had to go through the spanking machine. I felt sick to my stomach and insisted on watching only. It made me so very frightened of 4th grade.

When you misbehaved at my school, you got Sent To The Bench (which Mark hijacked in the first story he wrote for me, The Benefit of the Doubt). The Bench was a pew-like bench outside the Assistant Headmaster’s office, just inside the main entryway. Everyone could see you there. Astoundingly (or depressingly) I was never sent to the bench in all my time there, surely one of the few if only students for whom this was true. In reality, you got told off, or in middle school got a detention with the telling off. Before middle school, I had the idea that you might get spanked. Some other kids wound me up (or fanned the flames of rumor) by telling me they heard that was true. (Reality: not!)

Perhaps you are beginning to understand the little nervous wreck I was underneath that perky, A-student, nice girl in the Lilly Pultizer dresses and school uniform? She’s still here a little bit, but M (and RP) effected a lot of rehabilitation over the years (for instance, RP’s institution of Casey’s four rules).

I wore underpants at all times except when in bath or swimming costume, another habit that was whacked out of me (Casey) by RP, who forbade it under nightwear as unhygienic and perversely over-modest.

Once when I was 8 or 9, I asked my dad if French kissing was dirty. I asked it rather boldly, expecting him to 1) be impressed that I’d talk about French kissing and 2) say Right you are, it sure is. He looked at me for a second, probably surprised, and said: Of course not. It’s wonderful. I didn’t really believe him, and on some semi-conscious level thought he was giving me a party line.

I felt enormously conflicted and peculiar when my mom would read me a book called The Lonely Doll [discussed by EJ and earlier by Adele] which featured a father teddy bear taking his son across his knee, as well as  his quasi-ward, the lonely doll. It’s a terrifically twisted book–I mean, teddy bears spanking dolls?–but then a good deal of my tgi play involved my dolls spanking each other. See, I never spanked them because that would be Mean, and I wasn’t Mean, I was Nice! However, they were not all nice, and some of them were quite strict school teachers or even orphanage matrons/masters, so I was able to identify with some of my poor Holly Hobbie dolls who suffered under such wonderfully mean grown-ups. The Lonely Doll might actually be a bit of a metaphor for meeting M (if you overlook the nauseating layers of twee). Whatever her name was, this doll lived alone. Then Mr. Bear and his son came along, and she had friends. But then she and bear jr. let their hair down and played a little wild and made a mess; and Mr. Bear spanked them! She was so upset because she was sure they would leave her (because she was Bad! Not lovable!), but actually they stayed. And she wasn’t lonely, and Mr. Bear presumably dealt matter-of-factly with her and bear jr. when they misbehaved as they should like little animals exploring a wide world.

I say there is not much of this girl left in me. I say she bears only slight resemblance to casey. Is it true, though? Casey might be more willing to be naughty. She might not shatter under the shame of being punished. But she is still a recovering good girl. She is, I am. There is still work, we think, for someone to do.

Today I received an email from Chris Baty, Daddy of NaNoWriMo. Maybe you received one, too. Here is how it began:

I ran into your 2009 NaNoWriMo novel yesterday, and it said that you two are currently “taking a break.” I offered my condolences and mentioned that I’d probably be seeing you today. It quickly scribbled out a note for me to give you. The note seemed kind of personal, so I didn’t read it. Here it is!

“Hi! Come back to me. I’ll be better this time, I promise!”

Maybe Chris sent this email to every one of the 166,700 participants, or perhaps he limited it to the 32,000 ish “winners”. Whatever. He’s trying to encourage people to finish what they began. My book and I are indeed currently “taking a break” for the holidays, but it’s like the kind of break M and I used to have to take in the first year, when he was still living in Englandland. Anyone who’s ever carried on a long distance love affair will know what this feels like. Time is always your enemy. It’s forever and ever before you see each other again, and then when you’re together, time evaporates. Even after he had moved here and moved in with me, I would still feel traumatized when he had to travel, even for a short time like a week. On some level, I think, I couldn’t accept that I really had him–and since that sounds as though I considered him a possession, let me rephrase: I couldn’t entirely accept that something this good, someone this good, far and away the best thing that had ever happened in my life–that it was for real, and wasn’t going to be taken away like other good things. That I could rely upon it.

As I’ve written before, we got married after being together six years, and we were married for seven years before he died. I think it was really only towards the end of that, in the last couple of years of marriage, that I began to treat him–us–as a real, permanent, true, reliable thing. The rooms inside me that reserved themselves, reluctant to surrender to the good thing lest it disappear, even they gave in. When he died, I found I didn’t have anything reserved anymore. All of me was with him. We had become us.

I am thankful that I haven’t become the kind of person who is afraid to give in like that again. I want to. I need to. I was more myself then, more truly me than I’ve been before or since.

long winter, long path

We are knee deep in winter. I thought last winter was the longest winter of my life, but now, here is another one, no less cold, no less long. The thought of my book sending me a little note saying, Please come back, I’ll be better this time–it makes me cry because I love that book, and I haven’t left it, I would never leave it, and it doesn’t need to try to be better for me, because I love it in all its messiness, and it’s up to me to clear the beds around it so it can come up and grow right.

But if there was someone to take a note to that other shore for me, I would write the same thing to him: Please come back to me. I’ll be better this time. I promise. I won’t fight for so long. I won’t fight at all. I won’t work so hard at stupid things. And did you know, yesterday when I had the Host in my mouth, all I could think and feel was you, your tongue on my tongue, you inside me, and it felt like you were there somehow in that melting, wine-tinged substance in my mouth. If you would come back I would kiss you all the time. I would make love to you all the time. I want to touch your eyelids, your cock, your hands, your bottom, every bit of you, even where your hair is thinning and where the skin is red from your wrist watch. I’ve learned a lot, since you’ve been gone. I’m smarter now. I can do more things. I take up more of the bed, but I’ll move over again. Your son has got so tall.

Please come back. I’ll be better this time. I promise. I promise.

As regular readers probably know, I have gone to a few tgi-oriented parties here in Gotham during the last six months. Those who have encountered me at those parties will know that I have not played at them. I haven’t really written about these non-play experiences. I love to read other people’s reports of play dates and parties, but I’m reluctant to write about my own experiences. I guess I don’t want to be the object of anyone’s blogging, so I shy away from talking about other people. I don’t mind people reporting that they had tea with me and that I am brilliant and charming, but I wouldn’t want an intimate play session shared with the internet. I’ve only written about some of my past scenes because my partner is dead. I don’t want to come off as censorious–to repeat, I love reading other people’s reports and do not disapprove in the slightest. Why, then, can’t I imagine writing about my own encounters? I can’t argue that I’m too shy to reveal myself. Heaven knows I’ve revealed the most essential parts of myself, repeatedly, right here. Maybe I’ll change my mind when I actually have an encounter to report.

Because here is how these parties go: I turn up, people are standing or sitting around in a central area, other people are off playing (behind screens or in playrooms). I get a glass of water. I eat a pretzel. I chat. I tend to be more relaxed talking with girls, probably because I don’t imagine any subtext to those conversations. Rightly or wrongly, on some level I trust women because I don’t think they’re trying to play with me. I don’t mistrust men per se, but there’s always the specter of possible play, no matter how respectful or even uninterested in me they are. So, I chat easily with girls (unless they’re acting frosty due to seeing me as some kind of competition–what a laugh), and easily enough with men. What do I chat about? Well, recently, I heard all about winter carnival arrangements in the midwest; I discussed scuba diving; I heard about motorcycle culture; I heard about the extent of the Scene in various other locales. All this serves, ultimately, to establish an ordinary human connection with my interlocutor, to remind us both that we are regular people who happen to have this hobby in common. Sometimes people show me their toys. I appreciate toys, as I would appreciate someone’s fountain pen collection. But do they turn me on and make me want to play? No.

I tell everyone that I am not playing. I explain I am bereaved and not ready to play. Everyone is respectful. I should take whatever time I need, they say; I will know when it’s right, and I must do only what I want to do, they say. We are all agreed on this point. I think I must confuse people, nevertheless, because here I am chipper and friendly (I hope), yet not playing. It isn’t as though I’ve gone with a partner or even with a group of friends. Given my solo status, why am I there, again, if I really really don’t want to play?

Sometimes people think I need reassurance, as if I’m a novice trying to take the plunge. They suggest that—when I am ready—I should think about finding a friendly person and just doing a little friendly scene to get my feet wet. Perhaps I do need to get my feet wet. Perhaps I don’t. But the more time I spend at parties, the more I begin to feel that it isn’t going to happen in that kind of environment. And, whatever you might say about my situation, I am about as far from an anxious novice as you can get.

Let me try to explain why—and before anyone feels hurt, it’s nothing to do with the parties themselves or the people at them. The parties and party goers are all welcoming, respectful, and just fine. The truth is that when I turn up at a party, I am actually about a million miles away from casey, even though I borrow her name. The person attending these parties is my ordinary, workaday self, under an alias. This person chatting away about spanking, scuba diving, history, whatever—this person could just as easily be on the telephone with some vogonic city department sorting out a business problem; or having a conference about some kid’s learning issues; or chatting with college or theater friends at their parties. This person is rational, confident, witty, empathic, together. This person is not casey.

As I was leaving a party recently, I was trying to imagine what would happen if I were to go off in one of the playrooms with some man I knew a little, a man I trusted to be moderate and not creepy. Off we would go, away from the party, and it would be just the two of us. And then, well, I’d have to dredge up casey. Why? Because casey is the channel through which I play (as a bottom). “Casey” is the label for that part of me, that vulnerable part of my personality, that young, gently cheeky, highly emotional side of me. The ordinary me has no interest in going across someone’s knee. The ordinary me is a completely together woman. So, here I would be with a man I knew only slightly, and suddenly casey would have to appear, or there would be no point to our encounter.

This, friends, is the sticking point. Because casey is something that was between me and M. And now casey is orphaned, scared, and bereaved, more bereaved than even I am. *

Is grief an activity or an emotion? Certainly, over the last year and a half I have allowed grief to work on me, as I try at church to let the liturgy and the music work on me. I don’t know how much it all penetrates to the part that is casey. Probably that is very protected and cloistered. It hurts a lot—a lot—even just now thinking of her and feeling her in my heart. I try to love her and take care of her and not bully her and do what I heard M say that awful day when we were interring his ashes.

God: casey wants to die. She doesn’t think there is any hope for life without Marky and RP. She hates people. She refuses to trust anyone, now or ever. She says I can quit going to these parties and quit blogging and quit tweeting and give all her clothes away to the poor.

So… of course I am not going to these parties to play. I am going simply to meet people and with luck make a few friends. And the thing with casey is that before she can be whacked or even spoken to in a toppy way, she needs simply to be seen. I mean that literally. No one has seen her face, no one has called her name—to her—in over 18 months. Just turning up in a room, wearing her clothes, and having someone speak to her, not a grown-up pre-match conversation, but as casey, as little casey. Someone would have to address her as a real person, not in some costume-shop top mode—young-lady-this-&-that, you’ve-been-very-naughty, etc. She might not even be able to speak the first time. She might sit there like some mute, traumatized orphan. So someone would have to talk to her, gently, not in a cotton-wool way, but like a strong adult with good boundaries and plenty of compassion. Like a real person would speak to someone in her circumstances. Just having someone speak to her like this might make her cry in about five seconds. It might be a long time, many such encounters, before it was anything like a good idea to introduce the idea of discipline into the relationship. Because—guess what?—whacking isn’t what it’s all about for casey, or for me. At least not now.

This, then, is why I am a dud at parties. I’m grateful to people for continuing to invite me. I guess no one ever claimed that the grief-stricken were any fun. I guess putting up with us is a kind of mitzvah. So…thanks.

* apparently a kind of theme/variation on this rant re. casey & play

Last month I had a dream concerning the above. If dreams bore you, move along. Ditto if scatological references squick you.

In this dream I was playing Harry Potter (looking like Dan Radcliffe in move #2). Ron, Hermione, and I were leaving a grocery store by way of a maze the staff had created for us. At the exit/checkout they told me/Harry that I needed a bag–they held up a plastic grocery bag and indicated that it needed to contain a pile of shit, like dog shit, but presumably my shit. Unable to exit, the three of us returned to the center of the maze to see Snape (calm down, girls). The idea was that I had ducked out on a caning from him, but if I took the caning, he would apply some magic purple goo to the cane marks afterwards and this would produce the shit I needed to exit the maze. Snape would Win the encounter because he would get to cane me, which he considered I richly deserved, but I would accept it because then I’d be able to get out of the maze.

We approached him in the dim place at the center of the maze. He was high above us on a dias. The darkness was  illuminated by a big, hot stage spotlight, which someone was adjusting to focus on me. I uttered a humble submission, but he couldn’t hear me (or pretended not to) up there. I mumbled something else. Same problem. Finally I said: Sir, I’m willing to accept the whack now. He came down and proceeded to deal with me, surprisingly not acting scornful or gloating or condescending or sneering, but formal and perhaps underneath it–through his ceremony and care–a bit respectful. He touched my robe and indicated that I should remove it. I handed it to Ron and Hermione. Now I was wearing a red tartan skirt, jumper, and knee-socks (and at this point the character sort of mixed with casey).

Snape gestured for me to bend over so that my friends and the spotlight were behind me. I bent over, nervous now, and suddenly shy of exposing myself. Sir, I said meekly, does Hermione have to…? He ignored my modesty and lifted up my skirt, embarrassing me further that Hermione would see my pants. I was bent over, hands on knees/toes, scared, very scared. I collected myself and practiced the detachment necessary, even recalling to myself advice some of my characters had given each other. I heard the swish and inhaled.

It hurt, and shocked me. I tried not to clench. The second one came shortly, and to my surprise didn’t hurt as much. The third, less still. What was he playing at? This was supposed to be an epic, revenge whacking and take me to my absolute limit or beyond. Strokes 4, 5, and 6 came all together, like light taps. But then the kicker: through Snape’s magic, they began to burn intensely.

Ah, this was where the suffering would begin! He had only been lulling me into a false sense of security. He might even begin to narrate the rest of the whacking with his loathing, ironic voice: You see, Potter, your confidence has been misplaced. It is false, in this and everything. You do not control the pain allocated to you, and your mental machinations are nothing but vanity–whack–vanity.

This didn’t happen, however. After the six, he let me up, not even especially sore. He treated me with that restrained, unspoken affection, that deep and powerful if unexpressed love that a teacher can have for a student, the gentleness beneath the severity, the paternal longing, the ultimate benevolence beneath the temporary sternness, the loving father beneath the stern God of Israel.

A few points of reflection: 1) the blending of me with Harry Potter; 2) the logic of the dream, that to be allowed out of the maze, you need a bag of your own shit, to be produced by the process of taking the cane; 3) Snape’s multifaceted personality, ranging from hostile authority to benevolent mentor; 4) the mildness of the whacking itself.

On an immediate level, this dream appeared to be about writing, though I suppose you could extrapolate beyond that. What is required to escape the maze? Shit. Your own shit. And entwined with this is the act of submitting to a hostile authority, one you had escaped previously by your own wits. Now, though, you must return to the dark center of the maze and voluntarily submit to that which you had evaded. Submit to an enemy. Submit, perhaps, to boredom, bad writing, meaningless, even death itself. You have to let Snape do what he will with you, even if your clever friends can see your underpants. All this in the service not of something beautiful, but in a bag of excrement, which is the only exit fee accepted here.

This dream also suggests that the hostile authority is only hostile because of my arrogance and evasion, and when I at last submit to him, confessing that I deserve his chastisement, he doesn’t hurt me so very much. In fact, he radiates a secret and unspoken love for me.

Finally, in this dream I am playing not myself or casey or even Hermione, with whom I generally identify, but Harry, the hero, the one who winds up doing great things even though he is very flawed and very human.

I guess we are all the main actors of our own stories. Excrement and suffering are certainly needed to exit the maze of a creative venture. And Snape, I know for a fact that I am not alone in saying I would submit to his hostile authority any day. Any day! If only writing were as simple as all that.

What has Casey Morgan been up to the last thirty days? Has Supplicium Post Mortem indeed died, or is it like the plant life all around us here in Gotham, dead-looking, but not in fact dead? As with the plant life, only time will tell.

The short answer to what Casey has been up to is NaNoWriMo. Don’t run away just yet. Rest assured this is not one of those posts that will go on at length about how Stressful, how Angst-ridden, how Amazing-Super-Awesome, how Challenging this Incredible-Amazing-Super-Awesome-Herculean-Insane-Really-Insane month was. No offense to any NaNo pals, but even when I feel that way myself, reading about it from other people makes me secretly want to slap them. So, I won’t whitter on with the breathless, flushed, nauseatingly healthy glow of the physically fit after a bracing run. Screw those people (again, no offense to the fit amongst you).

As you might have gathered from the NaNo widgets, I did in fact “win”. That’s right, kids, I am a Winner. Please remind me of that when I feel like a Loser, which is pretty much all the time. When M and I used to play, often we would have to time-slip a scene. For instance, maybe the board said Marky was to report to TL at 7.30 pm for a Report, but then when 7.30 came around, M wasn’t in the right headspace, and since I wasn’t willing to have TL take the rap for screwing around with kids’ Reports, we just time-slipped the scene, i.e. did it another time, but said it was the original time. When you’ve got a constant fluid narrative going on—some of it actually acted out, some of it just discussed with each other—the time slip is an indispensable tool for keeping play and life in balance.  So (this was not actually a non-sequitur) if the actual completion of the 50,000 words was every so slightly time-slipped by a few hours (but less than 12), because we found it shockingly difficult to pull the kind of late hours we used to pull, well, then, the Office of Letters and Light* neither knew nor minded. Anyway, since we were officially NaNo rebels, writing the 50K on a pre-existing project, the little time-slip fit right in. And the point is that we wrote that many words, new words, and more importantly, we finished the key plot arc in the book. Win. *rotates finger ironically*

Depression, anyone? I was talking to my spiritual director about the annoying neutrality that has ensued. I ought to feel at the very least grateful because I wrote more on my real writing in November than I wrote since M died. I wrote a piece of narrative I’ve been thinking and wondering about for more than ten years. I’ve been praying for help getting that writing started again, injecting some life there, if possible. And, look, it happened. So why does it feel like it’s nothing?

My spiritual director is wont to draw upon literature for illustration (whether he does this always or just with me, I don’t know), and his view was that a) feelings at the end of things were unpredictable, and b) not being able to value the valuable was, simply put, a maneuver of evil upon us when we are vulnerable. He recalled The Screwtape Letters, which I adore. In them Lewis so dramatically and comprehensibly helps us imagine the way evil works upon us. I love Lewis’s imagining of Satan as a kind of drab, far-removed civil servant jeffe, Screwtape. The hapless Wormwood is coached on his almost medical mission viz. his Patient (i.e. the person he is attempting to corrupt). Screwtape and Wormwood are not inspiring murder, rape, fornication, theft, genocide, destruction, or anything particularly dramatic, but instead they work upon the Patient by gently suggesting things to him that lead him by hairs away from what is true and ultimately good.

by Moro Rogers http://kambodiahotel.blogspot.com/

So here am I, 50K later, and do I feel satisfaction at good work? Do I even feel gratitude? No, I don’t, because the Wormwoods of this world are whispering in my brain: It’s not that big of a deal. You’ve done that before, so big whoop. 50,000 horrible words are nothing to be proud of. You may have written all that, but it’s not a book, and since you remain entirely confused, will probably never become one, especially as the one person you could rely upon for good advice is dead. And anyway, even if you did finish it, it will just go the way of the last one—nowhere.

Recognizing this as a form of evil helps, I think. Self-doubts, perhaps, ought to be analyzed, disputed, argued around. Evil, however, must simply be turned from. And so I turn. It hasn’t brought an onrushing of joy. I’m not sure I’m capable, yet, of such an emotion. But it has allowed me to start rereading the drek that was so unbelievably bad it felt that my fingers should fall off from typing it. And, you guessed it, the drek is not as bad as it seemed at the time. In fact, it’s good in places. I say this not to brag, but to encourage those of you who wrote some or all of the 50K, but are so embarrassed by your efforts that you can’t bear to go back and read it. Something happens to work written that fast. It may not be brilliant, and large swaths of it may call for laughter, but when you go back to it, the writing will contain things you have no memory of putting there. So, if you don’t reread, you can’t enjoy them. Message: man up and read the shit. If you are thinking to yourself, Well, it’s fine for Casey to say that, she’s a good writer, but I’m not, I have one word for you: Screwtape.

Those of you who aren’t into all this writing business, normal service will resume… at least I hope it will.

* The HQ of NaNoWriMo