supplicium post mortem

Earlier this week I had a vivid dream in which I was a schoolboy being caned across the shoulders, á la Stalky & Co. It stung quite intensely in the dream, and over the next morning, I fancied I could almost feel it.

Reality, I’ve never been caned anywhere except the bottom, and I consider this a hard limit. But Stalky was such a formative influence for me (detailed exegesis here); it obsessed me from the age of sixteen into my mid-twenties. It is responsible in large part for transporting my childhood tgi (orphanage & prairie focused) into my young adult tgi (English Public School focused). All the other English school literature that I read–and I have read pretty much all of it–I discovered after or through Stalky. For instance, when I was seventeen, I spent hours at the 42nd Street Library reading ancient copies of Dean Farrar (Eric, or Little by Little and St. Winifred’s, or the World of School) because the characters in Stalky mocked him so scathingly. Despite the eccentric (and to me entirely perplexing) fact that the Head in Stalky “licks across the shoulders,” I responded strongly to those scenes of punishment because of the relationship between the Head and the boys. The whackings, like all the stories, are under-written and vibrate with human tension and understanding. Because of Kipling’s obliqueness and the nearly incomprehensible world of the English Public School (to a teenage American girl pre Harry Potter), I found myself trapped in a kind of tractor beam with Stalky, utterly fascinated and attracted, yet grasping at meaning. I couldn’t, for example, understand how a person could be caned across the shoulders (or that this arose from the school’s military background) — wouldn’t you break a collarbone or something? I wondered. I had not yet encountered the species of light, whippy cane that could accomplish this task and yet leave Kipling’s heroes in once scene “within an inch of blubbing.” Generally, I pretended to myself that the Head was dispensing normal canings and left it at that. He wasn’t, though. And in my dream recently, I (my schoolboy avatar) was receiving just such a USC licking across the shoulders. It was all hot sting, no thud, rather like an intense and stripey sunburn. I’m sure that must be exactly what it feels like, lol.

And if this dream were not enough, last night I dreamed I was playing a school-like scene with John Cleese in academic gown. I was wearing blue-jean overalls, the kind I gave to Marky that first December we spent together fifteen years ago. (It was such a good December, and even though we had to spend Christmas apart, life carried so much goodness and hope then. Emotions ran high, low, and every complexity in between, but it was like eating and breathing for the first time, not having realized before that I was missing anything… turn back, o time…)

So there I was, and John Cleese was telling me to bend over. I gasped at the first stroke, more from surprise than pain. He carried on briskly, and while I felt them, they weren’t unbearable. I kept still and quiet, which I sensed was frustrating him. But seriously, I thought, does he expect me to howl the place down when he’s whacking at perhaps medium strength, over jeans and pants, and I’m not exactly a fainting beginner?

You can tell I was dreaming because in reality it’s been so many years since I’ve felt the cane that I might as well never have had it. Why caning dreams, though? I never dream of these things any more.

Yesterday while getting physical therapy on my elbow, I lay on a cot gazing out the darkened windows, thinking. Here I was in this dark, wintry, modern world, going about my affairs, while my characters waited for me in their English summer of 1926. My schoolboy protagonist, in particular, waited for me  to take him through whatever this fire was that he faced, to make him into the person he yearned to be. I thought of him in my dark, Gotham evening, but did he also sense me somehow from within that world where I long to be?

It isn’t just my characters that I carry around inside myself this way. There is M, and Marky, RP and all the others. I can feel them, too. Where are they? Where are they all?

self-pitying rant #677A-1610

in which I despair of my situation by rubbishing friends, acquaintances, and men I’ve never met

I’ve been feeling on some level that I am growing away from tgi, perhaps forever. This isn’t exactly an iteration of Lost Kink. I’ve been thinking that maybe I will one day look back on tgi, and on my marriage, as an immature phase, an ultra-elaborate construct, a fad. A thirteen year fad. I’ve even felt–and this may be the worst part–that tgi is starting to sound like an old term, some disused, past-life word, a word which is outdated and babyish—yes, with all the beautiful, naive genuineness we both had then—but which is nevertheless embarrassing and lost to me.

Today everyone I know is a grown-up and they speak of kink or spanking or TTWD. (There’s something cute about Graham‘s the activity, but to me that sounds limited to play transactions, transactions being the key word.) These grown-ups inhabit The Scene, a world of parties, of fetish categories, of cant role-play traditions and phrases, of play-dates, of poly couplings, of atheisms, and while many of these grown-ups are extremely lovely people, and have been extremely lovely to me, they are acquainted with other grown-ups who scare me, or who at least make me want to run home, hug the dogs, and then hide under the bedclothes and talk to God.

I never want to go to another spanking party. I never want to write another blog entry. I never want to get another Fetlife message. I never want to meet another top. I never want to read the word kink again. I never want to have to watch a spanking video or to read or write another spanking story. I never want to have to go on another coffee date, platonic or otherwise. I want to burn up all of Casey’s clothes and all the implements and toys and everything in M’s closet, including his newspaper from the day he died, and his unwashed laundry, and Mr. Prior’s tweed jacket [...no, not that, never that...] and his Church’s shoes and his kilt wot he wore at our wedding and all the rest of it [...except maybe a couple of Casey's clothes, ones we can wear out...] and never again hear the words kink, spanking, TTWD, and take the word tgi and put it in a little box, and dig a hole really really deep in the backyard, down where the tomatoes put their roots, down below the Gotham rocks, and put the box there and cover it up and let it get eaten by the worms and the roots and the little black ants that the exterminator sprayed for yesterday.

There isn’t going to be another person to look after Casey. Any person who gets beyond a coffee date, he would quite rightly say: Casey was who you had with M. Let it stay that way. Let’s have something else, a new character. I won’t be able to explain how Casey isn’t a character because I will be busy processing the psychological virtue of his suggestion. Mr. Beyond-a-Coffee-Date won’t be capable of, or interested in, loving me for who I am, in finding that out, or of letting me into who he really is. He will be busy listing his needs and deciding if I’m a girl who can meet them. Or maybe he will be trying to convince me that my needs are the same as his. Or perhaps, that an activity that he’d very much enjoy would be just the thing for me. He will be trying to convince me, directly or indirectly, to Let Go of the past, to Move On, to Accept the Death of that part of me. He may have read that this is necessary, maybe in a paperback book, and it will correspond very nicely with what he wants, which is to get my eyes off M and on to him, so I can start giving him what he wants. He will want to play. He will expect to use safewords, to negotiate. He will hope my Needs can be met without much effort from him while he gets his own Needs met by me. Isn’t that what relationships are, anyhow, mutual use?

The word tgi will never be mentioned. It is buried, and anyhow I will have learned not to say it. Oh, he’ll want to know All About me, but only to find out how much I am a suitable needs-match for him. He will never have experienced the world cracking open and God breaking into it, launching that blinding rescue operation, taking two people, each somehow lost, and steering them together, two rescues in one, a divine efficiency; steering them together not so that they can use each other as objects in their own fantasies, not so they can use each other at all, but so they can long to know each other, so much and so deeply that they sometimes forget themselves, that they become for each other human channels for that love that passes understanding, that love that longs for them too, that longs for them to grow closer and closer to their real selves, and turn more and more from the lies, the fears, the illusions, the distractions, the selfishness, the wounds inflicted by this broken world and its people.

Mr. Beyond-a-Coffee-Date might find such ideas religious and repellent, or perhaps lovely and poetic, but he will not understand the kind of sanctuary that can be made in a home like this. He may think he understands, because he may think he’s had it himself, but it will shortly become clear to me that he hasn’t. What he has had will have been a sympathetic fit with a woman willing to serve as a movie screen for his kinks and psychodramas, and vice versa.

So, yes, Casey is something I was with M, because–as I will suicidally explain to Mr. BCD–I am not actually kinky. I once fell in love with a man, and he loved me as I have never been loved, and Casey and Mark and the Others were ways we sometimes expressed ourselves, exercised ourselves, when we were loving one another. Mr. BCD will think he knows what I mean. This lifestyle is who I am, he will tell me. Kink is who I am. I won’t know how to explain that I am incapable of loving a kink. I’m only capable of loving a man.

And pretty soon it will become clear to me that I am guilty of the worst kind of leading on. I have entered into coffee dates and beyond on the pretence of looking for a friend, a playmate, or possibly “more”. Mr. BCD will think we are meeting in the hopes of a sexual relationship, or a play relationship, or at least a sympathetic ear for his concerns; perhaps he will be there for a simple diversion from the humdrum life between parties. I have, I’ll realize, led him on. The one at fault is me for being dishonest, not him for being self-serving. The truth is I want the old kind of love, but it isn’t something I can procure on my own. It needs that cracking open of the world, another wave in the rescue operation—for me, for him, and for the bits of the world we touch.

Come, you thunderclaps.
Come lightning, come quake.
Move, plates, atoms, seas.
Tear, curtain.
Blow aside, veil, an instant
All it takes.
Fall, arrows; roll chariots; pierce spears.
Come parachutes, come knights, come infants.
Burn, fire.
Pour, rain.

Last week I was fortunate to visit the Morgan Library and Museum, which has recently reopened after an impressive renovation.

A complex of buildings in the heart of New York City, The Morgan Library & Museum began as the private library of financier Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913), one of the preeminent collectors and cultural benefactors in the United States…Mr. Morgan’s library, as it was known in his lifetime, was built between 1902 and 1906 adjacent to his New York residence at Madison Avenue and 36th Street.¹

To my knowledge Mr. Morgan is no relation of mine, but I can’t claim to have researched the genealogy. Any anyway, the point is the dyed-in-the-wool sexiness of this museum! The main part of the museum is clean, well-lit, and modern, but you can also walk through a devastatingly sexy trio of rooms in the 36th street building.

Let us begin with Mr. Morgan’s library. When I entered this room, I felt the opening of pores, the hunger, the sigh of breath that come upon me when I enter beautiful, old buildings of an academic and/or ecclesiastical character. The British Museum Library, for instance. The Bodleian, the 42nd street reading room, not to mention any number of churches (recently, for instance, St. Vincent Ferrer, where I went to hear a lecture on the “vices and virtues” of the New Atheism). Readers who share my penchant for libraries will want to acquire this bit of crack: The Most Beautiful Libraries in the World. The guard inside Mr. Morgan’s library was delighted to answer my questions about how one moved between the levels. He pointed out the shelves which were actually secret-compartment doors concealing staircases. Among many other things, the Morgan has quite a collection of Bibles, including a Coverdale Bible. This room so impressed me that I let slip to my companion, an older lady from church, that the room was like porn to me. I’m not sure if the silent look she gave me was sympathy or distress.

Moving around the Rotunda, we enter a scrumptious little room called the Librarian’s Office (click for bigger). It was impossible not to imagine being sent there, a misbehaving young visitor, and made to sit still in that red armchair while the Librarian completed his or her paperwork. Then, I am afraid the red sofa would come into use one way or another. There was more than enough room here to swing a cane, a strap, or any implement the Librarian might keep for such occasions.

Finally, we enter Mr. Morgan’s study (further tour here, which you really must visit if only to see the desk). This room so overcame me that I was forced to sit down and try to regain my equilibrium. Forget photos of scantily clad men. Forget tgi drawings, videos, stories, etc. Nothing–and I mean nothing–could have been sexier to me at that moment than this high-ceilinged, red-wallpapered, book-lined, stain-glass-window-decorated, wooden-furniture filled study. My friend and I rested on an upholstered bench which had been set before the fireplace. I have absolutely no idea what she was thinking about, or could possibly have been thinking about besides what I was thinking about, viz. being summoned to this study and dealt with by Mr. Morgan (uncle? father? grandfather?) in the most traditional manner. Later, I distracted myself by perusing the shelves, which appeared to focus on fiction, including many early (first?) editions of Dickens. The only thought I felt able to share with my friend was a celebration of the 19th century novel. They were long! Very long! As novels ought to be. So there.

Afterwards, my friend and I had a bite to eat and got a little drunk in the cafe. We wound up talking until closing time. She told me that although our church is brilliant in every way, she did not think I was going to find a suitable man there. I agreed heartily, though probably not for the reasons she had in mind. Conversation eventually degenerated into talking about M. It reminded me how very much he is missed, still, by people besides me.

But! The Morgan Library=kinky destination! If I ever have the pleasure of entertaining like-minded kinksters in town, I know where I will take you.

p.s. I realize I forgot to say that Jessica’s post Library Tales got me thinking about this outing and thus inspired the post. Thanks, Jessica!

My childhood tgi fantasies tended to revolve around hostile authorities, which is why I liked The Orphanage so much. The orphanage in my mind evolved out of my infatuations with Annie (as experienced in the Broadway musical), Noel Streatfeild’s Thursday’s Child, Oliver Twist, Daddy Long Legs, A Little Princess, plus any other orphanage I could find in the pages of literature.

A notable exception was Mandy, by Julie Edwards (Julie Andrews). Mandy imprisoned my imagination and my heart, but on some level made me uneasy, perhaps because it was in fact closer to me than the hostile authority orphanage. Mandy is about an orphan (named Mandy!) who has lived her whole life in a small, kind, homey orphanage. She’s allowed freedoms, has friends, and is beloved by the orphanage matron. But, she longs irrationally for something else. She climbs over the orphanage wall, finds a cottage in the woods, and secretly begins fixing it up. Long story short, in a moment of crisis, she is rescued by the landowner on whose property the cottage stands (a man on a horse, no less) and taken to recover at his big house. The man and his wife (?) fall for her. Then she gets better and goes back to the orphanage. Except now, even though she’s back with her friends and people who love her, she misses the man and his wife. It’s enormously conflicted and sad. Eventually, they adopt her. Mandy pressed somehow on a loneliness I felt as a child, even though I was growing up within a loving, caring family. In many ways, I was unable to deal with this feeling. The hostile orphanage was easier.

My orphanage (which I imagined most nights while falling asleep, which I attempted to draw in my notebooks) was called St. Peter’s. It was a special admissions type place. I (my character, whose name varied) was brought there one dark, rainy night by a priest of slight acquaintance. My mother had been an actress (the real kind, not an “actress”) but had died and left me alone, à la Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon. This priest had presided over the funeral and out of pity brought me to St. Peter’s, knowing of its sterling reputation. I was about nine.

This orphanage was run by a grossly exaggerated and fictionalized version of Mrs. R, my children’s theater director, with the other children as avatars of my children’s theater friends. And in fact the children at this orphanage were chosen for their talents, and Matron made money taking us around and having us perform for people. So, even though we lived a horrible, hard life and had to scrub floors and do every kind of difficult chore and were subject to the meanest discipline, after dinner every night we were sent to the dining room and told to get on with our rehearsals. We kids organized our own shows and practiced them together. Sure, there might be rivalries amongst us, but we were absolutely united against the orphanage authorities: Matron; her scary (and retarded) brother, Jack; and the other people in her employ, who could also punish us as they chose.

There was of course a Bench at the orphanage, but you could be whacked at any time for any reason. We comforted each other in our misery and always—always—had our minds on the future when we would Run Away. Of course we would fail many times, and be severely punished for our efforts, but one day, my cadre and I would make it. We would escape, and after a period of thrilling, Faginesque adventures in The City (which would naturally include theatricals), I would happen upon the Perfect People, who would adopt me.

The promise of the Perfect People was essential, but my fantasies rarely left the orphanage. Something about the harshness and despair, coupled with the camaraderie and resistance comforted me. The dynamic with authority was important. You couldn’t win against Matron, not openly, so your only option was to resist her internally, to obey her, but not in your heart, to pretend compliance while secretly plotting your escape. The hostile authority was intoxicating for a Good Girl like me, naturally. As a Good Girl, I depended slavishly on the good opinion of the authority, unless of course the authority was a Bad Authority. Then, I could resist it, disobey it, undermine it, hate it. No wonder the orphanage was like crack to me. There I could transgress, break bounds, get into trouble and still be heroic and good. There, punishment was a badge of nobility. The heroine always suffered punishment, and yet she was always good. Win, win and win!

Perhaps you are feeling like you might be sick now. I am, too. But the interesting point is what happened once I actually began to play at age 26.

When I first started to play, APD, I wanted to be in the English school world. It was a nice blend of hostile, but not fully hostile authority. I would call it detached authority. Ideally, they were fair and not abusive, but stoicism was certainly called for. I enjoyed exploring the extent of my stoicism, and I felt a particular buzz because I had, for so much of my life, been so very fearful, particularly of physical challenges.

But—but. M’s instinct with Casey tended towards the domestic, and towards the firm and compassionate end of semi-con play. We imagined the orphanage together, but we never played it, at least not with me as the bottom. Actually, we played Casey at the Perfect People once or twice, and that “Casey” turned out not to be much fun; she was so traumatized, she scarcely spoke. She wasn’t very robust. So, whether through observation or instinct, M realized, I think, that although I had come out of the orphanage, it would not be a good place for me to visit, now.

We did one scene early in our relationship with him as a hostile top. It taught us a lot, not least because it was such a disaster. But that is another story…

Don’t you wish you could do that more often? I can think of several conversations, subsequently requiring mind-bleach, which wouldn’t have got to that stage if I’d been able to safeword, lol.

As previously discussed, I’ve never really played with safewords. This isn’t out of any philosophical stance, but simply because they proved extraneous in my play relationship and in the few scenes I did outside that relationship. Another common practice that has never quite entered my play is the warm-up. This probably has to do with the fact that when I play, it is always–through role–real, in which case a warm-up would seem at cross-purposes, and thus on some level probably pervy. I think, perhaps, I have been missing something.

I’ve no idea why, but this morning popped into my head a memory of a trip to the doctor for planters warts. This would have been just after I met M, probably just after my first trip to Englandland to visit him (three weeks of a dark December in Surrey). Planters warts are a painful and difficult-to-eradicate infection usually in the sole of your foot, in my case in the flesh of my heel. You have to soak your foot twice a day, scrape with a razor blade down to the roots of the thing, and then staunch the blood with a salicylic acid preparation. (Sorry, graphic part over.) Let us simply say that in addition to the expected kinds of pain, I was experiencing considerable discomfort during that trip.

Eventually I broke down and visited the doctor. Doc confirmed that it had gone beyond the soak&scrape stage and that the only solution now would be to freeze them off with liquid nitrogen. He warned me: this could get quite painful, and I should let him know if I needed him to stop. I, overflowing with confidence borne of newly discovered tgi play, told him it was fine. I gave him my stoic face. He put my bare foot up on the table and took out something that looked like a blowtorch. I blanched.

Ok, he said, I’m just going to keep on with this until you tell me to stop. It’s not going to hurt at first, but then it’s going to start hurting and keep getting worse.

Me: Sure.

Doc: Oh, and you should know that the pain is going to keep increasing for a while even after I stop, so you should tell me to stop before it’s at the absolute limit. K?

Me: (gulp, nod)

This was an interesting exercise: to safeword, but to have to safeword before you’d reached your limit. You didn’t want to do it too soon, because then the treatment wouldn’t be as effective, but if you left it too late, you might find yourself in an agony you didn’t want at all. It was, intellectually, quite hot.

Not that way, perverts. This is about the other kind of playing you do with yourself when you find you have lost your playmate.

Playing with yourself is hard, as previously discussed here and here (among other places), and it is most unsatisfactory for exercising anything but your imagination (and even then only a fraction of it); but, playing with myself is what I have been doing for the last twenty months.

Mostly this takes the form of conversations between TL and Casey, or me and Casey. Sometimes Casey turns up around other people, though she is pretty careful only to show her face around people who won’t recognize her. Once, for instance, we were going around a part of a wildlife park where you could pet the smaller animals. We were with a younger relative, and Casey was “in” 100%. There was one part where there were mice and squirrels nesting inside socks. Casey started literally to jump up and down: Socks! They sleep in socks!! Younger Relative was also experiencing cute-overload, though he was a bit more stiff upper lip about it. At one point he said, Oh, it’s your inner child. I said, That is exactly who it is! Unfortunately, I couldn’t introduce him to Casey just then, lol.

As a child (APD) I played with my dolls a lot, when I wasn’t at rehearsal for children’s theater. My brother and I were close in age and played together, but he was in many ways an unsatisfactory playmate. He was terrifically stubborn (a necessary defense, probably, against my bossiness) and although he could be made to go along with my schemes, he rarely seemed to make anything up himself. Also, he was a musical prodigy so from a young age spent hours in solitary practice of his instrument. So, I played with my dolls. Sometimes, now, it feels like the same thing. The only difference (besides the lack of dolls) is that I know now what real playing is, with a real playmate who will invent with you and move the play along and surprise you and blow your mind. I know enough to miss it.

M used to play all the time, in every way, not simply roleplay or tgi. It’s hard to convey, or even to think of an example. The plastic seedling trays were labeled by him. The onions say, for instance, unyons. Maybe you had to be there.

Last summer I went back to Englandland for the first time, and I met a couple of people whom I described to my mother as “blogging acquaintances.” Friend 1 took me out to lunch and then wandered with me through the streets of Eton. I had not wandered around Eton since I was eighteen, but it hadn’t changed much. We walked and talked, and then it started, inconspicuously. Watching a begowned teacher walking down the street carrying books, we caught our breath. “Except,” she said, “he should be carrying something else.”

Imagine a giant permission slip.

And so it continued, casually, as asides to the regular conversation: “Oh, I’d like to report to his study after games.” or, apropos of some boys in sports kit bending over to pick up gear, “Oh, you can stay just as you are, thank you.” You have probably done this kind of thing  yourself.

I think I might have burbled a bit to dear Friend 1. Simply talking this way was like being awakened from a kind of winter’s sleep. I hadn’t realized until just then how very much I missed it.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago when I found myself g-chatting with Friend 2. We both type as fast as we talk, so the conversations tend to be dizzying, but at one point she said something about us going back to Switzerland. It was some kind of typo, as we had never been to Switzerland, at least not together, so I joked, “We had so much fun, didn’t we?”

She didn’t hesitate: “I know!”

Me: I liked that youth hostel where we went hiking.

Her: I preferred the chalet.

Me: It was very pretty, but you know that guy broke my heart.

Her: He had the most awful sweater!

Me: So true! I was blind…I miss that rather authoritarian rest cure place.

Her: Oh, man, no kidding.

Later, I realized: she was playing with me. I had a playmate! You may think I am grasping at straws, and in fact I am, but the point is how it felt to play, even with faraway Friend 2 via text chat, or faraway Friend 1 last summer. It felt like moving after being locked up for longer than you can remember.

This week, Casey has been pressing hard, against whatever it is she presses. (viz. the experience that gave rise to Double Teamed). One way it expressed itself was a powerful desire to buy her a dress I’d tried on at H&M. This dress was so cute (gray flannel pinafore, buttons up the back, tie at waist, knee length) and I thought Casey would look so cute in it. Unfortunately, it didn’t fit very well (I have a large cup size and it was fitted in the chest). I was bemoaning this to Friend 2, saying it might fit if I lost some more weight. Friend 2 suggested I get it and put it in the back of the closet, knowing that from H&M it couldn’t cost that much. So, yesterday, we went back to the store and I got the dress for Casey, in gray and in navy. And, now it even fit.

Home we get from the store, but she couldn’t try it on yet because TL had a student. Turned out the student needed help with a Latin translation, and it turned out one of the words was verberare, which, we discovered, means to flog. It was very difficult to keep Casey in check at this news. She tore open her own dictionary and scoured the page: verberabilissumus, altogether deserving of flogging! At one point TL’s student forgot what the word had meant.

Casey: To flog!

Kid: Oh, wait, I thought it was to beat.

Casey: Right, flog, beat, whip.

Kid: What’s flog mean?

TL at this point asked Casey to fetch something from the other room while she defined flog for the kid. When Kid worked out that the criminal in his translation was being threatened with verbereris, his response was, “Wow, harsh!” Casey had to be sent on another errand at this point.

Finally, TL’s lesson ended and Casey was allowed to put on her frock. Navy blue, white blouse, navy gym knickers, white ankle socks, black school shoes. And let me tell you, Casey has never been more In for the last twenty months. My body was taken over by her, walking like her, skipping around, even – wait for it – smiling. I felt quite literally possessed by someone else. Except I knew her. I had known her. It had been a  long time.

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

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?

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.