supplicium post mortem

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.

I had poster’s remorse as soon as I clicked Publish last night. A murder of worries descended: in clearing up my nationality, have I become less appealing? Less mysterious? Less interesting? Or, more to the point, less authentic?

My father, a son of the industrial mid-west, has always been scathing about posers. You should hear him excoriate his cousin (my “aunt”), who raised her children in the UK and whom he accuses of being “a big phony” and “more British than the British.” By confessing my American upbringing, have I made it impossible for people to read my UK-set pieces without thinking, faker?

The subject for today’s exegesis (Quick! Click away!): How to regard being drawn to an alien thing that on some level you feel you are? In this case, let us speak of the English schoolboy. To persist with writing them would appear to be monstrously inauthentic. How dare an American girl pretend to know them? Yet, they have been with me more than half my life.

Cue timeline of my tgi imagination: Little House on the Prairie (which debuted when I was 5), followed by the Orphanage (after seeing Annie at age 9), eventually succeeded by the English boys’ school (zapped whilst watching Stalky & Co. at age 16). There were of course other influences, then and now, but the imagination has moved on little since eleventh grade.

David Parfitt & Robert Addie as Beetle & Stalky

Cue, perhaps, digression into the idle coveting of my brother’s willy, on the grounds that it would be so much less effort to wank with it. This was before Judy Blume or whoever informed me of erections. Before I blundered onto English schoolboys (perhaps not incidentally after achieving my driver’s license – “You’re becoming a tiger!” my driver’s ed teacher exclaimed with relief after weeks of me driving like an agoraphobic mouse), before that moment of gazing, slack-jawed at Robert Addie on A&E, I disliked boys as a category. Boys were bad, noisy, dirty, perverted, insensitive, got into big trouble deservedly, and made life a lot less nice when they were around. (Note: crushes, and boys with whom I was momentarily “going”, though not kissing, were excluded from this estimation.) Boys, in short, scared me, especially their sexuality, though I couldn’t have put my finger on that. I did know, in high school, that boys only wanted one thing, and on some level I thought that if I kissed a boy, that meant I was agreeing to sex. My junior year in college, on the eve of my first kiss, I asked my wild roommate if that was true. She said, Of course not! but I didn’t quite believe her. Later, having discovered a.s.s. but not yet M, I assumed that letting a man spank me was tantamount to saying, You may fuck me, or at least grope me. What a relief to learn that this need not be so. Of course, back then my mind labored to Discover the Rules, rather than to articulate my own boundaries. Sigh.

FYI for you, the first days I spent with M on his first visit to Gotham did involve kissing and a few other activities that would have shocked my teenage self (though not fucking); however, this did not mix with tgi. M and I may have made out on the futon, but Marky and Mr. Prior were scrupulously chaste. I got all those bruises with only 12 strokes of the cane through Calvin Klein boxer briefs and school trousers. RP only touched Casey to pull the tail of her shirt out of her trousers (a purely dramatic gesture, as it makes zero difference re. padding), and to shake her hand afterwards. I don’t think they were even on hugging terms then.

M did later introduce me to the workings of the male anatomy, and to a delight in dirty English schoolboys. His was an unrepressed, joyful sexuality. Sex was Fun and Nice, a Nice Thing. He loved his willy, and if other people wanted to look at it, it was no surprise to him. This, you might imagine, was alluring and foreign to my mind.

This mind – to insert yet more exegesis – had by age 26 become so thoroughly warped by the toxic combination of WASP prudery and Ivy League feminism that it had imprisoned me in a complacent academic aloofness guarded by sheer unconscious terror. (See Equity Day Off, the dialogue with Judy, ha ha). My party line was that I was All For Sex, any sex (so long as it was Safe); in all likelihood, I thought, I was even bisexual. Sex was No Big Deal; it was a choice, a creative expression of my most actualized personhood. I liked wanking, therefore I must want wild sex, like my friends and fellow peer-counselors in college. This particular peer counseling group was for sexual concerns. We did all-night shifts manning a phone line where people would call to ask about condoms, or to chat through the dilemma of having a crush on their roommate. We led them through being Straight, Gay, Bi, or Questioning. If I had gone to school a little later, the whole universe of Queer would have necessitated a longer training course, ha ha.

McTurk, Stalky, & Beetle

The point is I talked a good talk, but – gosh – I just couldn’t manage to get any guys to like me as anything other than a friend. Maybe you’re starting to get the picture. The narrator in Equity Day Off is a pretty accurate portrait, except that I never in college got anywhere near to admitting my real interests. My obsession with England was, at best, picturesque and Anglophile. My obsession with English schoolboys (being them, loving them) was too puzzling and unnerving to contemplate with my full mind. Hence Gender Politics, Feminist Theater, Cultural Discourse, blah fucking blah.

After spending a lot of time in England (biking, hiking, writing for a travel book), some of the attraction became clearer. There was a way that English people’s neuroses were like my own. I understood them instinctively in a way I didn’t understand Americans back home. It was like discovering a whole life I’d forgotten about through amnesia.

It would take a book, or more, to trace my love and hate affair with England (+ Scotland, Wales, Ireland). And the thing with being married is that to a certain extent you become merged with your spouse. Not just in sexual intercourse, or in name (actually I kept my surname), but in vocabulary, habit, and so many, many things. So, in ways intrinsic and extrinsic to that marriage, I have absorbed many things English, words being only part of it. Certain pronunciations, for instance, send shudders down my spine: our pronounced are rather than hour; wrath with a flat, twangy a vs. a deeper sound rhyming with Roth. Also, arse pronounced properly (soft r) turns me on like no tomorrow, whereas ass leaves me ice-cold. FYI for anyone attempting to talk dirty to me, ha ha.

All this exegesis and still, perhaps, I come off as an Anglophile fraud. Know that I am no Anglophile. I  detest the English on many grounds. I possess no twee, cultish fascination with tea and scones and things that are “so British.” Ugh.

What, then? Is it an attachment to the home of the English Vice? And overdose of strong literature at an impressionable age? The lingering effects of marriage? Or is it in some fashion the English schoolboy stowaway in me, recognizing scents of home when the sea winds blow that way?

w4m – 22 – Widener 4 East

You surprised me in the stacks last night. I was the freshman wearing a yellow blouse, navy blue jumper, and knee-socks – you know, the girl with glasses sitting cross-legged in Victorian literature, the one so absorbed she didn’t hear you approach, the one who screamed and then blushed furiously when you asked what she was reading?

You wore khakis, white shirt under gray v-neck sweater, and a tie loose at the neck. A leather satchel weighed across your chest. You looked old, maybe even a grad student. Who wears a tie to the stacks on a Thursday night?

I know I was unfriendly, but you should know I was embarrassed. I wish I hadn’t acted like such a glacier. You may remember my vocabulary: fuck off, pervert, asshole, weirdo. I can only say, Sorry.

Did you know the shelf I’d emptied and the volume over which I pored? Swinburne, A.C. and an astonishing piece of prose called Love’s Cross Currents? I think, from the glint in your eye, that you did. Then you probably knew my heart was beating somewhere other than my chest, and my thighs were tingling against the marble floor.

Meet me there again, any night this week before closing. I’ve heard people spend the night in the stacks. I’ve heard there are ghosts. We could take some volumes down to D-level. Or maybe you’ve got a carol somewhere? Perhaps you could tutor me in Swinburne’s oeuvre, or thereabouts.

Check out other missed connections this week:

• Frenchies
• PapaTomLA

What is it about a day at the seaside that sets the scene for tgi? Is it the baldly Swinburnian experience of being knocked about in the surf, flogged by the wild sea, half-drowned and scraped to bleeding by breakers? Is it the sensuousness of full-body exercise in the water coupled with languid sunbathing, the salt baking into your skin, your hair drying as it will, in twisty, windblown curls? Is it sunburn, the dog’s bite of sunbathing? Or is it simply the lack of clothing?

I can’t remember the last day I spent at the beach. Today – 80 degrees, low humidity, steady breeze, cloudless sky – was the Arcadia of summer sea days. You might not think we have beaches here in Gotham, but they can be found. The beach today reminded me of my seventeenth summer. We had just moved to Gotham, and I was enraptured with Stalky & Co, in particular the descriptions of (nude) bathing off the Pebble Ridge. I longed to swim to exhaustion like those boys, to feel my skin salt-encrusted, to succumb to torpor during afternoon-school, and to suffer the consequences of falling asleep on the wrong master. I had not yet discovered Swinburne, but once I did, my ocean fantasies broadened to include the flagellating sea, and the desperate bravery of one captivated by the wild, living water.

Being fair-skinned, the risk of sunburn pervaded my childhood. My mother was always slathering me in sunscreen and berating me when I got burned. She never did more than scold, but managed to make it sound as though I’d recklessly contracted cancer. I prefer in my mind a more detached approach; as in, little girls who get sunburned can be put across someone’s knee until their bottoms match the offending shade, ha ha.

Today I swam a long time in huge surf, and in struggling to exit found myself knocked upside down and dragged along the shell-studded sand, leaving me with bloody scrapes on my shins and bottom. I felt butch. I felt like Bertie in Lesbia Brandon, the salt water stinging the scrapes in a way that felt salutary. Later, at home, my body ached from the unfamiliar exercise, and I felt dopey in a sun-drunk or post-massage way.

Stretching across my towel after the first swim, rashly allowing the mid-day sun to dry my back and limbs, made me yearn rather for the birch. Not to have just then, but later, perhaps, after returning home, to atone for skiving off to the sea, or getting sunburned, or swimming out too far. Something of that order.

And in the surf I remembered the first time M and I went summer camping in the Virgin Islands. We arrived at Cinnamon Bay (St. John) late one night after a day of travel. The campground was dark. A note had been left directing us to our site. Sweaty and fatigued, we pitched the tent and went down to the beach. The moon hid behind some clouds. We stripped and went into the water. It was mouth warm, clear, calm, and full of phosphorescence. We’d never swum naked together before. We kissed in the water and held each other. The surprise of this beautiful, empty, sparkling water and the primal, sensual pleasure of floating in it together – I’ll never forget it.

I miss him in so many ways. Today, his touch, his mouth, his cock, and the company of his imagination on a made-to-order seaside day.

In the side chapel when I was consumed in prayer/tears – or was it in the car park at terminal 7 when I was ditto? – it occurred to me, or was communicated to me, that if I want to find the real deal again, I have to be deeply honest about who I am and what my deepest longings are. I need to live the real me, not a fake me. I need to strive to be more and more honest, deeper and deeper every day. So maybe this blog can be part of that. It was through Casey that I found the last 13 years, and even though things don’t happen twice the same way (says Aslan to Lucy), Casey might be my channel of deepest truth, or one way into it.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” said Lucy. “And I was so pleased at finding you again. And I thought you’d let me stay. And I thought you’d come roaring in and frighten all the enemies away – like the last time. And now everything is going to be horrid.”

“It’s hard for you, little one,” said Aslan. “But things never happen the same way twice. It has been hard for us all in Narnia before now.”

Lucy buried her head in his mane to hide from his face. But there must have been magic in his mane. She could feel lion-strength going into her.

Prince Caspian, “The Return of the Lion”

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.

Tell England, continued…

One thing that enthralls me (and also depresses me) about the relationship in Tell England between Radley and his students, and that’s how acceptable it is for him to be alone with the boys. He can take Ray’s hand and hold it while he talks intimately with him; he can work his psychology and let Ray know that he has strong opinions of his conduct and character. Today that’s all been perverted – and that’s the part that depresses me.

First, a teacher (especially a man) would never be allowed to be alone behind closed doors with a boy (or girl). In all schools where I’ve taught, there are windows in the classroom doors specifically to prevent this kind of intimacy, to “protect” both adult and child from such an intimacy, or the suggestion of one.

Second, it is generally frowned upon to express a strong, direct opinion of a student’s conduct or character. That’s considered judgmental (a negative thing now); we are expected to take a more morally neutral approach in which we hope to reveal to the student that such-and-such an action isn’t really in their best interests. Children are rather left to work out right and wrong for themselves, except in matters of political correctness in which they are subtly manipulated into self-censorship under the guise of tolerance. All this I find ultimately cruel.

Third, Radley’s love of boys – as un-sexual and unexploitative as it is – would be branded pedophilia today, and how much poorer they all would be! Without the intimacy, those personal lessons cannot be taught, or learnt. Viz:

I know now that the feeling for all the boys, as he gazed down upon them from his splendid height, was love – a strong, active love. We were young, human things of soft features gradually becoming firmer as of shallow characters gradually deepening. And he longed to be in it all – at work in the deepening. We were his hobby. I have met many such lovers of youth. Indeed, I think this is a book about them (105 in Google books).

Fourth, Radley’s show of strength in the corridor scene would be subject of a suit. Today, everyone’s minds (adult minds, at least) are turned ever outwards, away from the crucial task of teaching, and occupied with the possibility of criticism –  from parents, administration, law, the EU/government, students themselves. All that self-censorship drains men and women of the energy required to give fully of themselves towards the formation of decent human beings. Today, the essential task this novel presents, that of forging a young man to just behavior, would be impossible. Today we have less, so much less, passionately, energetically less – a brutal indifference in the name of progress.

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

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.