supplicium post mortem

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

I’m reading Charles Williams for the first time, his Descent Into Hell. Williams (1886-1945) was editor of Oxford University Press and one of the Inklings. His prose is dense and hard-going, but frequently astonishing. He writes what Eliot called “supernatural thrillers” about characters in the modern world interacting with the divine.

I was slogging though it this week and gradually had my breath taken away by a most extraordinary scene in the chapter called “The Doctrine of Substituted Love.” The scene is a conversation between Stanhope (a great poet) and Pauline (a nearly agoraphobic young woman) on the sidelines of a play rehearsal. Stanhope is a quiet, self-effacing writer who knows about things like a goodness so powerful that it induces terror. This he has mentioned in passing to Pauline before. Here, he tries to get her to tell him what has been bothering her. Eventually, she spits it out: she sometimes sees her Doppelganger at a distance and is tormented by the fear that it will one day catch her up.

At the core of the scene, Stanhope offers to “carry her burden” for her, to be afraid for her, in her place. Pauline struggles to understand what he means. He explains:

“When you are alone,” he said, “remember that I am afraid instead of you, and that I have taken over every kind of worry.”

Pauline demurs, worrying that she will be pushing her burden on to other people.

“Not if you insist on making a universe for yourself,” he answered. “If you want to disobey and refuse the laws that are common to us all, if you want to live in pride and division and anger, you can. But if you will be part of the best of us, and live and laugh and be ashamed with us, then you must be content to be helped. You must give your burden up to someone else, and you must carry someone else’s burden.”

It is hard to write about this because Williams says it all so expertly, but I find this paragraph at once immensely satisfying, as if food, immensely relieving, and immensely hot. It gets at the deep communion I hear about in church. It gets at the notion that submitting to this communion is a natural order of the universe. Yes, we are free to refuse, to “live in pride and division and anger,” but this is to live unnaturally, in a state of sin.

Pauline wonders what will become of her self-respect if she leans on someone else in such a very great way.

He laughed at her with a tender mockery… “If you want to respect yourself, if to respect yourself you must go clean against the nature of things, if you must refuse the Omnipotence in order to respect yourself, though why you should want so extremely to respect yourself is more than I can guess, why, go on and respect.”

This, to me, encapsulates part of our modern dilemma, with our fixation on self-respect, self-determination, self-authorship, self-esteem, choice, independence, and so on—all excellent qualities, but when taken to excess, as I believe they often are, do they not lead us into the divided, un-natural condition which has made Pauline suffer? It sometimes seems counter-cultural to accept, indeed to submit to the idea that goodness involves sharing one another’s burdens, and further that this is no progressive modern concept, but in fact the ancient order of things which we have only temporarily forgotten in our contemporary egotism. And, to give over to it is not only to give over to each other, but to move into communion with something people have known for many centuries, many ages.

The mercy involved in this submission reveals itself as the scene continues:

She stood up. “I can’t imagine not being afraid,” she said.

“But you will not be,” he answered, also rising, certainty in his voice, “because you will leave all that to me. Will you please me by remembering that absolutely?”

“I am to remember,” she said, and almost broke into a little trembling laugh, “that you are being worried and terrified instead of me?”

“That I have taken it all over,” he said, “so there is nothing left for you.”

Oh, how I long to have someone again to carry my burden as I carry his; to take over my worrying for me; to bear my fear.

Stanhope tells Pauline:

“Ring me up to-night, say about nine, and tell me you are being obedient to the whole fixed nature of things.”

You can’t get any sexier or more spiritually authoritative than that, in my book. He is compelling her obedience, not by force, but through her free will. And her obedience to nature, to the great reality, will consist of relinquishing her fear into the care of another, who will faithfully feel it on her behalf.

I think that people who take part in tgi (in its several forms) understand this. TGI scenes are often dramatic enactments of this submission to one another, and to the truth of our human condition. This is why I don’t see any contradiction between my “kinky” practices and my quite orthodox religious practice. I see them in service of the same thing, the great reality, which has at its heart self-giving love.

Stanhope goes home and concentrates on Pauline’s fear:

“The body of his flesh received her alien terror, his mind carried the burden of her world. The burden was inevitably lighter for him than for her, for the rage of a personal resentment was lacking. He endured her sensitiveness but not her sin; the substitution there, if indeed there is a substitution, is hidden in the central mystery of Christendom which Christendom itself has never understood, nor can.”

Full text available on Google books.

The Mr. Hicks series, Hair, tells the story of a boy who rebels against haircut regulations by getting his head shaved. The Headmaster flips out and sentences him to severe, protracted punishment. Other boys demonstrate their support for the culprit. They are eventually punished, too. A central theme: is it right to rebel against authority, to hold it to a standard of “reasonableness”? The story basically says: No. You don’t get to pick and choose which rules you like, but you are bound to follow them all.

These stories are more severe than I really like, but they did make me long for the kind of post-whacking soreness that lasts for days. That’s by-the-by. What I like in the series is the firm and unapologetic assertion of authority. On the one hand, the Headmaster is choleric, loses control, and goes way overboard with punishment. On the other hand, the discipline master – himself calm – asserts that the boys’ disobedience is indeed wrong. When challenged: “But it’s just a haircut,” he replies, “Oh, but is it?” He understands and shines a light on the undercurrent: of course the kid had his hair cut to spite the Headmaster, whom he loathed. It isn’t about a haircut for any of them, but about the question of whether or not they should submit to the Headmaster’s rules, or only submit to the ones they judge satisfactory. The story says: Submit to all of them.

And suddenly, this rather extreme M/m story became for me a metaphor for submission to the love and the will of God, which has been a fairly unappealing theme in the book I’m reading about Lent. The attitude in this school is peculiarly English, I think. In America we have more tradition for challenging and rebelling against authority (despotism!) if authority proves unfit to govern (in the eyes of the governed). In fact, there’s a sense of duty to search for injustice and challenge it, especially today. There’s also an obligation for authority to be “reasonable,” i.e. democratically acceptable. But are private schools democracies (even in the USA)? They aren’t on mmsa anyway! Clearly they can be democratically inclined, and many (esp. secondary schools) try hard to involve students in governance. But, because schools are 1) in loco parentis; and 2) there to educate, they can never, I argue, be honestly democratic.

Contrast with the grotesque example of the Hampshire water authority that consulted the population (after supplying them with informational pamphlets) on whether to add fluoride to the water supply. There was a legal obligation to consult the population, but not to abide by its wishes. Result: 72% said no fluoride, but they got it anyway. So, it’s at best a pseudo-democracy, and at worst a cynical hypocrisy. Would it be better to say, We don’t consult the population because we are in charge and we know best, thank you. People would still be angry over the water, but at least it would be an honest representation of the relationship between people and water authority. They’d all be spared the hypocrisy and illusion. I think a lot of schools today, especially progressive ones, are confused about their own authority and what it means. As a result, they are more like the Hampshire water authority than they realize. All of which makes me yearn for the clarity Mr. Hicks’s adults provide, if not exactly for their level of tgi.

Riding, the English Public School novel I wrote about before, has turned up on Google Books (limited preview). Both volume one and volume two appear to be live now. In volume one, I quite like this scene. In volume two, you might as well go for the chapter called “Crime and Punishment“, though to be fair there’s a lot to choose from in both volumes. If your limited preview gets exhausted, you can always buy it.

I’ve been reading parts of Tell England by Ernest Raymond, which I suspect I read in college as part of my unofficial research of English Public Schools, but which I saw discussed on mmsa. It’s really quite something, and an edgy portrait of he pre-1914 world of school. Innocent and homoerotic, passionate, sensual. The boys are complicated and the hero-master, Radley, utterly charismatic. He loves the boys, has favorites, and makes hobbies of them, and is very hard with his favorites in the best possible way. He’s rewarded by their devotion. I love this early scene in which he canes Ray (the narrator) and his friend Doe for the first time.

I bent over, resting my hands on my knees. Radley was a cricketer with a big reputation for cutting and driving; and three drives, right in the middle of the cane, convinced me what a first-class hitter he was. At the fourth, an especially resounding one, Penny whistled a soft and prolonged whistle of amazement, and murmured: “Well, that’s a boundary, anyway.” …

When my performance was over, the second victim, Edgar Doe, with the steel calm of a French aristocrat, which he affected under punishment, walked to the spot where I had been operated on. He bent over (again without being told to do so), and only spoiled his proud submission by telegraphing to Radley one uncontrolled look of pathetic appeal like the glance of a faithful dog. Radley, not noticing these unnerving actions, or possibly a little annoyed by them, administered justice severely enough for Doe, proud as he was, to wince slightly at every cut. Then he put his cane away, and issued, as before, his little ration of gentleness.

“You’re two plucky boys,” he said (28).

Later in the dormitory, Doe confides to an astonished Ray:

“Do you know, I really think I like Radley better than anyone else in the world. I simply loved being whacked by him.”

I pulled the clothes off my head that I might see the extraordinary creature that was talking to me. A dim light always burned near our beds, and by it was I able to see that Doe was very red and clearly wishing he had not made his last remark.

Ray’s line of thought carries on:

Doe’s remark, I reflected, was like that of a school-girl who adored her mistress. Perhaps Doe was a girl. After all, I had no certain knowledge that he wasn’t a girl with his hair cut short. I pictured him, then, with his hair, paler than straw, reaching down beneath his shoulders, and with his brown eyes and parted lips wearing a feminine appearance. As I produced this strange figure, I began to feel, somewhere in the region of my waist [ha! ed.] motions of calf-love for the girl Doe that I had created (29).

Extraordinary!

Radley is known as one who “never lets anyone off, especially his pets.” He’s wry. At one point Ray overheards Radley and the school doctor (Chappy) discussing Doe. Chappy admits of Doe:

“I’ve a great liking for him.”

“So have I.”

“Good. Now, what first attracted you – his good looks or his virtues?”

“Neither. His vices” (38).

I love 1) that it’s perfectly acceptable for these men to admit their attraction to these boys without the onerous film of pedophilia over everything; and 2) that he’s attracted to a boy by his vices.

Radley goes famously for the swift alternation of severity and gentleness. He canes without apology, as in the scene where he rapidly changes from confidant to disciplinarian, commanding Ray to follow him to his study after Ray has complained to him about his housemaster unfairly giving him a thousand lines.

There was little change in my countenance when he placed himself opposite me with his cane in his hand.

“You have been very rude to me in speaking defiantly of your house-master. Do you understand?”

There was no alternative but for me to say “Yes, sir.” The answer came huskily. I was annoyed that my voice sounded hoarse.

“Put out your hand.”

I obeyed, stretching out my right hand as far as I could and displaying no perturbation, though I was wondering what it would be like to be caned on the hand. This was one of Radley’s surprises, and he followed it with one of his brutal remarks:

“Put that right hand down. You’ll need it to be in good condition for writing your lines. Put up your left.”

I held out my left hand. The cane sang in the air and whistled on to my open palm. A spasm of pain passed up my arm, my hand closed convulsively, my elbow drooped, and that vast array of tears made a tremendous effort to carry everything before them. But with all the strength at my command I got the better of them. Angry at having closed my hand, I extended the scorching palm again, and, very pale and trembling perceptibly, looked with set features straight at Radley.

He threw the cane away and, sitting on the edge of his table, took hold of the hand that he had struck and drew me towards him.

“Don’t you think, Ray, that you, who can take a licking so pluckily, ought to face bad luck in a less cowardly fashion than you have this afternoon? You’ll meet worse things than lines before you’re ten years older; and, Ray, I want you always to face your fate, whatever it may be, as you faced my cane – teeth set, no wincing.”

It was a stroke of master play. His gentleness, following immediately upon his severity, burst the dam. His words were an “Open Sesame” to the leaky floodgates I had held so tightly closed (45-46).

I also loved the moment when he yanks Ray into his study by the wrist, intending to show him his strength. He’s unflinching. He boldly tells Ray that unless he takes the wrath of his peers and leads them away from their rottenness, that he’ll lose his (Radley’s) esteem.

“Which would you rather have, their contempt or mine?”

“Theirs, sir” (102).

Awesome!

The book itself is an odd sort of hybrid. The first half is all about school, the second about Ray and his companions at Gallipoli (where they perish). So all of this character building in part one stands within the context of the slaughter and waste of the Great War. – Never mind, though. Bring on Radley, I say. *sigh!*

quotes from Tell England: a study in a generation by Ernest Raymondm (re)published by Echo Library 2006. (originally published 1922?). Also on Google books.

I’ve just finished an awesome novel, called Riding! It’s set in a fictional English Public School, 1931. There’s a fair bit of m-m whacking, particularly the cane. The narrative at times deals explicitly with the issue of punishment – different boys’ relationships to it, attitudes towards it, attractions and fears for it. It’s also well-written as a piece of fiction. Has anyone seen it? If not, the author’s website has links to sample pages. It’s a long novel, split into two volumes. Disclaimer – the author is an acquaintance of mine, but I don’t think that influenced my liking it. I’d put this in the category of mainstream novels that mention or treat tgi, but it’s not erotica or anything.

I liked this little essay on the cane, in chapter 4 “Something to Remember”:

What does it mean that Halton will get something to remember? The sentence belongs to a family of stock phrases referring to Public School rituals of corporal punishment. Its siblings include he’ll get six; six of the best; a quick sixer; so-and-so won’t let him down, et cetera. When a person gets something to remember, it means the punishment will make an im­pression, however recalcitrant he may normally be. It means he will sit up and take notice. It means this something will be more memorable than other somethings.

Halton will be told to bend over. He will remove his jacket and bend over the back of the prefects’ chair until his head touches the seat. Feeling a stretch in the back of his legs, he’ll grip the chair, lock his knees, tighten his jaw. One of the eighteen-year-old prefects will take up a rattan cane, a quarter of an inch in diameter, three feet in length, yellow, well-worn, whippy. He will flex it while he paces, building suspense, working on the nerves. When he sees a sufficient trembling, he’ll back away from his target, raise the cane, and, with one or two steps for momentum, cut through the air with a swish—punctuated by a gunshot crack. Halton will gasp at the impact. He’ll regain his balance, and as his breath returns he’ll feel the burning, stinging ache, the paralyzing flood across his latter end. All his cells will abandon their habitual swimming and dividing to attend this stunning event. Nothing for him in the world besides this physical happening, this bottled breath, and this skewed perspective of fireplace upside-down between chair rungs.

The prefect will strut back to the mantle, giving Halton time to think. Halton might think about what led him to this uncomfortable position; he might wonder whether or not he can make it through without yelping; he might ponder certain myths about the cane, such as the one that claims it takes a few seconds for the pain to register, and conclude that anyone who says such a thing has been reading about the cane, not experiencing it. The prefect at the mantle will have ample experience, both giving and receiving; therefore, he will know exactly what Halton is feeling when he delivers the second cut with a force and precision equal to the first. For this is what it means to have a good eye. Wielders of the cane actively cultivate the aim and timing needed to deliver a second stroke just beside a first just reaching its peak. Those who have mastered the gentle art are showered with respect for their good eye.

Mr. Grieves’s prefects had unswerving eyes.

Which means that just as Halton’s backside is howling in earnest, a second stroke will descend and heighten the pain to a pitch that is breath­taking. Halton will gasp again and brace himself for the third, already slicing through the air. With it comes the compression of universe into body, skin, nerve endings. There, dead center of a caning, all intellectual distance collapses. All mental chatter stops. Halton’s full attention is riveted to the dialogue between screaming backside and whizzing cane. The body has incarcerated the self; and three more, three more, three more to go.

So when it is said that Halton will get something to remember, it means that this ritual will be administered to his thirteen-year-old frame with especial force. It means that even if he chooses to erase other punish­ments from his memory, this one will be grafted to him, like the stripes that evolve from purple to yellow over the next three weeks. It means that even though he’ll stop wincing by tomorrow, even though the precise memory will be filed away in unnumbered warehouses, still something will remain. It means there are some punishments one never forgets.

– Riding, volume one, by H.S. Cross

Last month I printed out and re-read “In Wine” and “In Wrath”, both by Ripping Yarns. The former was Mark-centered (Mark Aken, not my Mark): Hold-in Mark, age 18, feels guilty for getting drunk and asks for the whack, which Dad gives until the Hold-in lets the guilt go and starts to cry, cf. Jack Radcliffe in “First Half at Keene’s”, cf. Gray Riding, cf. all the hold-ins we know. In the second story, “In Wrath”, Dan mouths off to a neighbor and over the course of the story is moved from temper to repentance. Both stories are classic in that the climax is the same: the switch from Dad in the bedroom; and both are narrated by Dad, which seems to be how that series gets started. Both I read slowly and closely, more so than usually happens when I read on the screen. In both stories I was 100% with the author at every word. It felt as if I had written them, or M had written them, certainly someone who knew us that well. In some ways this dad had an edge over RP (I can’t believe I’m being disloyal enough to write that) because he was less coercive and calmer, although just as firm. Still, he doesn’t have RP’s playfulness or his lucky-dippy demeanor. But look, it’s no good comparing them because they’re so different; plus one is fictional and the other’s dead.

But I’m attracted to this character of Rip’s, to his unswerving moral compass; to his compassion and firmness which co-exist without conflict, in fact in service of each other; to his persistence; to his even-tempered nature; to his honesty; to his huge dependability. Even as a p.o.v. character, he is focused on his sons and their needs (which makes him perhaps a bit unrealistic?).

I don’t remember if I ever discussed Rip’s “In…” stories with M. I remember discussing “Keene’s” briefly and him saying it wasn’t his thing exactly but that he could see it was mine. He liked a more severe, non-con quality in his stories and fantasies, veering into the sexual. Less of the emotional stuff that I like. I can’t see him being too interested in these two stories whose implement is a very unaesthetic nylon cane/switch. Marky would also find them very wet because there are all these tears, but no marks from the whacking – s-nore, he’d say. Yet, M. would have liked this family, I think, and approved of a lot of it. Would we have been that kind of parents if we’d had kids? I wonder if he ever did read those stories and what he thought. I can’t quite grasp the reality that I’m not ever going to know.

I read The Narnian, by Alan Jacobs, a C.S. Lewis biography I heard about on the malespank forums, which said the book contained references to Lewis’s supposed tgi interests. I considered these claims doubtful, but ordered the book from the library anyway. One reference is to Lewis’s discussion of “Eros” in the chapter by that name in The Four Loves. He alludes to a kind of role-play (first full paragraph on text page 145, or “149″ in the embedded media) :The Four Loves

Jacobs says that Lewis “insists strongly that such play must really be play, accepted as such on both sides, both fully voluntary and very temporary” (Jacobs 287). This revelation increased, exponentially, my feeling of connection with Lewis, a connection already powerful via his writings about his bereavement in A Grief Observed. I thought, He knows everything that’s true! How I wish I’d been alive when he was. I have the strangest crush on him. I think this is my first crush on a dead author, I mean a romantic crush. I want him to read my book. It wouldn’t be intellectual or rigorous enough for him, but I wish he’d read it. We have a lot in common, I feel.

The other reference was to some early letters with an Oxford friend in which he signed himself Philomastix (whip-lover) and opined about girls he’d like to spank (Jacobs 56). If only he’d met Casey Morgan (ho ho). The more I read about this man, the more I feel he was a fellow traveler in every possible way, separated by time. How nuts am I to be crushing out on a long-dead writer? Jacobs is a good writer, smart and sensitive, someone who understands and appreciates both literature and religion. He makes me want to try the other Narnia books, and he makes me cry at times. I often cry around C.S. Lewis. I often cry, period.

On a tip in the “Book chat” area of the MMSA forums, and after previewing it on Google books, I borrowed from the library Novel Gazing, Queer Readings in Fiction. This ridiculous waste of time considers itself a very serious academic tome, an anthology of “queer” readings of literature. [Politically incorrect opinion #1: Queer, Feminist, Marxist, whatever-ist readings of literature are bullshit, self-absorbed, and entirely miss the point.] The essay of interest, “Flogging is Fundamental: Applications of Birch in Swinburne’s Lesbia Brandon,” was very silly but had good subtitles and quotes and was grappling, I think with a worthy question, namely: if Swinburne’s flogging scenes aren’t dismissible (as many literary critics over the ages have dismissed them), and if they are compelling and somehow powerful, what is that power and how does it work? In other words, why is Swinburne so hot? Now that would be a worthy essay.

I did enjoy the quotes from Swinburne’s letters, particularly the one that “addressed” deSade and explained why Justine was so tediously over done – ha, ha, I agree! So, why is Lesbia Brandon so f-ing hot?

1. The massive pent-up emotion of it all; the heart; the transferred and frustrated love and lust.
2. The heightened tension of talking about it all. The dinner party, for instance, is hot because it is so excruciating for Bertie to have his flogging (and his heroism) discussed and alluded to in public. Reading it, I enjoy seeing the sensitive, pretty Bertie squirm; and, I also relish being him and experiencing that pleasing, burning shame.
3. The relationships are all so intimate and raw, unlike the endlessly-discussed, endlessly-analyzed relationships of today.
4. The birch itself is severe without being brutish. It cuts and draws blood (especially from sensitive Bertie), without wounding or injuring deeply. It’s rather surface. Anyone can recover from a domestic birching. In some contexts (sauna?), the birch can even be stimulating and therapeutic.
5. The bareness required is also hot. The birch nicely combines spanking with caning – sharp, uncounted strokes; necessariliy undressed application; area and point weapons, as Marky used to say.
6. There is also, in Swinburne, the powerful bonding relationship between the one who gives (here the tutor) and the one to whom it’s given (Bertie). It’s a big event between them. Not all big, intimate events involve sex.
7. The lushness of the language also makes it hot (as the queer essay author remarked, the use of flogging language for everything else, the sea, etc).

But the pent-up emotion is the nub of the matter. Imagine, for instance, that Bertie were merely flogged a la Charlie Collingwood (which is sillier and less hot; its only charge, imo, comes from saying forbidden things – bottom, birch, etc.) by someone who didn’t have feelings for him (even displaced feelings like Denham has). Imagine it was like deSade – hundreds of yelling strokes, blood all over, etc. SNORE.

And what if no one spoke of it? Or if they spoke endlessly and directly of it? Oh yes, sister, I was flogged today, on my bare bottom, oh hundreds of strokes well laid on. Did it hurt? dear me yes, how I howled the place down, the blood oh my did it run, and it still hurts most frightfully even now. — Ah, Mr. Denham, tell us all about it. — Certainly, sir. I began with ten firm strokes to the left flank, then I switched sides and gave ten to the right (the ambidextrousness, you know), Bertie howled thrice, “yelped” he would term it, but I gave him a stoke to draw blood at last, that raised the pitch but also likely signaled some release, if only of blood, ho ho. ETC…

Tedious, we say, esp. when you can have this:

The magnetism of the sea drew all fear out of [Bertie], and even had there been any discomfort or peril to face, it was rather desire than courage that attracted and attached him to the rough water. Once in among green and  white seas, Herbert forgot that affliction was possible on land, and in his rapture of perfect satisfaction was glad to make friends with the man [Denham] he feared and hated in school hours. The bright and vigorous delight that broke out at such times nothing could repress or resist; he appealed to his companion as to a school fellow and was answered accordingly. “He was a brick in the water,” Herbert told young Lunsford [a friend]; “like another fellow you know, and chaffs one about getting swished, and I tell him it’s a beastly chouse and he only grins.” This intimacy was broken by one tragic interlude; bathing had been forbidden on all hands one stormy day before the sea had gone down, and Herbert, drawn by the delicious intolerable sound of the waves, had stolen down to them and slipped in; having had about enough in three or four minutes, he came out well buffeted and salted, with sea-water in his throat and nostrils and eyes; and saw his tutor waiting just above watermark between him and his clothes. Finding him gone, Denham had quietly taken a tough and sufficient rod and followed without a superfluous word of alarm. He took well hold of Bertie, still dripping and blinded; grasped him round the waist and shoulders, wet and naked, with the left arm and laid on with the right as long and as hard as he could. Herbert said afterwords that a wet swishing hurt most awfully, a dry swishing was a comparative luxury. He did not care to face again the sharp superfluous torture of these stripes on the still moist flesh; and from that day he was shy of facetious talk in the water or out: thus the second stage of his apprenticeship began.

A. C. Swinburne, Lesbia Brandon, ch. II

*sigh* always wanted a whacking like that…

perfect dad, perfect lap

A dream I had before Christmas about the father in Ripping Yarns’s series of stories about the Aken family. The “In…” series…

It was like college, and I was living with roommates. Mr. Aken, the dad from Rip’s stories, turned up. He found some glass shards on the carpet, evidence of a broken light, and this was an expensive and important light in some way. He looked to me and I had to admit I’d known about it. It wasn’t clear if I’d actually been involved with breaking it, but I had known of it and done nothing, which was wrong. I was flooded with guilt when he looked at me.

He walked by me and touched my face with his finger (long, slender, feminine), under my right eye and then just below my eyebrow, as if tracing the contours of the black circles there. Then he was holding me on his lap and I was 7 or 8, like Dan in one of the stories. He was wearing a plaid flannel work shirt and so was I. Mine was over-sized and both were soft, and he was holding me in that hugely protective way, and I was weeping because it just felt so safe and so good on his lap, even though I was in trouble – especially because I was in trouble. He told me he’d be able to deal with this matter even though he couldn’t be everything to me that I needed and wanted. Still, I cried in his lap because at that moment it was perfect. Even though I wasn’t his son, and couldn’t be his son, he could treat me the same as his son for this brief time while I was on his lap and while he dealt with me for the broken light.

When I had this dream I had been tutoring Othello heavily, in particular Act V, Scene 2: “put out the light, and then put out the light,” (1) the first light being Othello’s candle, of course, and the second being Desdemona’s life. I may not have put out M’s light myself, but am I guilty, in my heart, in some way, for not catching it, for all the uncountable failures that preceded and maybe led to his death, for all the times I didn’t love him enough, for fighting about taxes, for all the forever left undone? How can I ever be truly forgiven all of that unless I can be allowed to have him back and redeem it, put it right with him, love him fully like I always really have? How can I truly and really redeem anything without him?

(1)

Put out the light, and then put out the light:
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me:–but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume.