My Hitchcock Impression

Planet Of Burning Souls

Maybe I’ve been eating too much strong cheese, but I have had some really weird dreams over the past few nights. The weirdest has to be the one I had last night.

I have no idea where the inspiration for it came from. Perhaps it’s the fact I’m currently reading The Da Vinci Code (and all the conspiracy theory inherent in the story) and the recent memory of the Space Shuttle journey? Anyway, the dream wasn’t so much a dream as a revelation. Not in any Biblical sense of the word, although I guess it could be said there were hints of religious overtones if only in the form of my occasional solipsist view of the world.

In my dream, it wasn’t a burning bush that enlightened me. I simply had some kind of mental flash and then suddenly woke with the knowledge that this planet we all live on, Earth, is in fact (for wont of a better description) a giant flying saucer that is hurtling through the cosmos. It has been for eons, and perhaps it’s not just Planet Earth but the entire solar system that is the vehicle. It’s being driven by some higher being (to borrow from Alcoholics Anonymous vernacular) and its engine is powered by burning souls – mankind. Where it’s going is anybody’s guess. Strange?

That’s it, basically. I have no idea who is driving the celestial bus and frankly, I’m not especially interested in finding out. I don’t believe in Heaven or Hell although I’m inclined to think if either exists at all, we’re all already living in Hell and any kind of Heaven is merely an escape for those who are sick of living in Hell. Incidentally, I’m not one of those escapists .

I’m reluctant to turn my blog into any kind of opinion forum and so I won’t say much more about this, but I may as well expand a little on the solipsism I mentioned. It’s not a religion but rather a philosophical viewpoint on existence that I think is fascinating. What if absolutely everything around me was a construct of my imagination? I suppose I should be afraid if that is the case however, I’m not. It would mean that I not only invented the story of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse but in fact, I am those harbingers of death. I am Yahweh and Jesus and Mohamed just as I was Hitler, Pope Pius XII, Mussolini, Pol Pot and a whole gallery of evil dictators. More than this, it must have been me who unleashed the atrocities of 9/11 and created the tsunami last year that killed scores of people. It’s a thought that gives me pause not least because I realize it was me who was also busy at the time creating parlor trick miracles such as burning images of the Virgin Mary (me) onto grilled cheese sandwiches and making scented oils weep from statues I had created in my own image.

It’s sometimes said there’s a little bit of good in everybody however, I’ve also heard (and think it’s true that) if you believe this, you haven’t met everybody. Now I am scaring myself. Pleasant dreams for tonight!

Patience Is Not A Virtue

People often say 'patience is a virtue' but strictly speaking, it's not one of The Seven Heavenly Virtues. Interestingly, justice is one of the seven and I believe this fact and popular misconception of patience are at the heart of a lot of the Marquis de Sade's writing. This theme is central to his story Justine in which it could be said bad things happen to good people. For the reader there's a sense of schadenfreude about the trials and tribulations of Justine.

Schadenfreude is an old German word with no direct translation into English. By definition it's when a person finds delight and pleasure in the misfortunes of others. It was a common thread in much of Sade's writings and it remains a core element of dominance and submission to this day. I can't recall offhand when it was (many hundreds of years ago) but the Roman Catholic Church actually released a Papal Decree defining schadenfreude as 'sinful'. This is an interesting perspective since many people would consider schadenfreude as being a form of justice. For example, how often do we see the CEOs of vast corporations swindle money from the people who trust them and get away with it? Occasionally we see them trip up in some way and be brought crashing back to earth. Rare would be the person who wouldn't find at least a modicum of delight in this, and that is what schadenfreude is all about.

In a play sense, I experience much delight to see women lured into and caught in embarrassing situations. The knowledge that she might also find pleasure in this is what makes it work for me. It's a kind of a consensual schadenfreude, if you will. Sade even went so far as to write about it as a kind of justice in action. For him, there was no "Good things come to those who wait" axiom we have today. Instead, he held the firm view that patience isn't a virtue and those who believe it is, often are punished for thinking so. I tend to agree with the Marquis on this. Then again, if you're somebody like me who thinks punishment is a good fun thing, then everything is right with the world and the earth can continue spinning happily on its axis throughout the universe.

Is There A Place For Fantasy Storytelling In BDSM Play?

I'm a chronic daydreamer so yes, fantasy is integral to the way I think. The very best fantasies are the ones that are so vivid and intense, they actually feel real. There's nothing I love more than to tell stories that blend fantasy and reality, where the reader or listener can be so enthralled they can't distinguish where one world ends and the other begins. I realize not everybody is wired to experience fantasy on a physical level (left brain/right brain stuff) just as people aren't able to transubstantiate the physical back into fantasies. But it's well worth the effort to develop the skills to do both, if you're so inclined.

I suppose there's dozens of different techniques people who have the ability use to exercise their imaginations. For me, fantasies are generally first formed visually in the mind. Actually, it's not just fantasies I guess, but anything I think about. For example, I don't need to physically play a piano these days in order to practice anything I'm learning. I will spend some time early on at the piano, but much of it is done in my head. I tend not to visualize all the small details (the dots) but rather, the whole shape of the overall form of the piece, whatever it is. I can hear that in my head as well and I've been playing the instrument long enough that I have a physical sensory perception of how those sounds feel under my fingers.

I approach writing fantasy/fiction the same way. The visualization is of the larger picture. This includes many things such as the physical appearances of the characters [*], nuances of their speech and so on; the physical world in which I see them living, and a sense of the non-physical but very real element of time. To this end, I quite often write large slabs of a story in real time. Spoken fantasies tend to be brief scenarios usually centered around one central theme and as few characters as possible to bring it to life. Above all, I generally don't just tell stories but rather, I get myself into whatever headspace I've created for the character and let them tell the story through me.

[*] Though I might develop a complete mental picture of my characters, I usually avoid trying to impress my visualization onto the reader/listener. The idea is more to plant enough of a seed in the mind of the reader/listener that their own imagination can take over and allow them to be absorbed into the story rather than leave them on the outer as a passive observer.

Mr P (Mind-Fuck Expert)

Putting The Head Back In Hedonism

“Give me the good stuff and give me lots of it now!”

I’m the kind of person who has always preferred to eat his dessert first so yeah, I can relate to that quote.

The quote is taken from an online journal I recently started reading and her most recent comment suggests she’s been reading my blog here. A comment like “I read your journal (you know who you are)” is surely directed at me or, at least, that’s what the Voice of Vanity within would tell me. It may not be the case at all, but let’s suspend disbelief for a moment and carry on regardless. She goes on to say she wants to see herself mentioned more often by me, so here goes.

The idea that two people can correspond through abstract prose, such as you find in a blog, is one that has appealed to me for many years. I once read the book Quiver by Justine Ettler – an Australian author in the grunge-lit genre that was popular in the early 90s. The book was bought on impulse, primarily because of the picture on its cover that featured a stylish black and white image of a woman who bore all the hallmarks of a dominatrix: busty, tight-fitting leotard and with riding crop in hand. There was only her torso shown and it reminded me a lot of the cover of Germaine Greer’s book, The Female Eunuch.

Ettler’s novel turned out to be one very, large yawn. It opens with the description of some Sydney flat the morning after a wild party. Now, I’m no critical expert on fiction, but after reading several pages, I still hadn’t gotten to the end of what essentially was a shopping-list description of everything in that flat. Boring doesn’t even begin to describe it. The rest of the book only went downhill after this, and I can’t even remember most of it; such was the stupefying nature of the prose. Apparently (according to the synopsis on the back cover) it was supposed to be a romp through the seedy underside of Sydney, with measured doses of BDSM themes thrown in to titillate the reader. The fact it was written in the first person perspective led me to believe Ettler’s inner girl was all too clear for the reader to see. I have no idea whether or not Justine is her real name, but I’m guessing it’s an alias drawn from the title of the dear ol’ Marquis de Sade’s most famous novel of the same name.

Whatever the case, Ettler’s book inspired me to write a novel of my own. I wrote several hundred pages that essentially attacked her book as nonsense and her as a charlatan. It was filled with every taboo I could imagine, much like the Marquis himself might have written – not out of any literary sensibility but rather simply to make Justine look even more stupid than nature intended. Cruel? Perhaps. A waste of time? Undoubtedly, because I lost interest in it before it ever got half way finished. But there was still an underlying experiment at play – a what if type of scenario as in what if my novel became the beginning of a correspondence between Ettler and me – a correspondence that wasn’t done in the usual brief form of letters but rather as a series of novels by two people?

Anyway, I’m straying from the point. That type of tag-team writing is now common place, especially in the Blogosphere and in particular, within the genre of BDSM fiction.

There’s certainly a lot of crap out there in this genre, and I make no apologies for my own contributions to the mire. When I first started writing for online publication (mostly in the old Usenet hierarchy of alt.sex.stories.*) I wrote what most beginners write: stroke stories in the third person perspective, past tense. Occasionally these would have some small redeeming quality but mostly, they were written for my own amusement and that of one or two readers I picked up along the way. After a while, I did try and craft stories that were a bit more intellectual than this, but it quickly became apparent there wasn’t any audience for these. Not online, anyway.

A few years ago I read a great novel (by William Goldsworthy) called Honk If You’re Jesus in which he wrote from the perspective of a female scientist. It was a perspective I’d never considered for my own fiction but it sparked an idea that grew almost into a complete, Frankenstein type of character – a submissive woman and her journey into the world of kink. I was never completely weird about it – her – in that I didn’t need to dress as a woman or be submissive in my own real-life kinky play. The character was largely drawn from a mix of fantasies shared between Mrs P and me, our own real life experiences in the kink world, and a healthy dose of my own perverse nature to blur the lines between fantasy and reality. It was also a fascinating experiment on a number of levels.

For starters, as a man (and a one who identifies as a dominant one at that), it gave me a clear insight into just how dimwitted many of my peers are. Their letters, often which began with illiterate gibberish and demands to serve them and praise the inane pictures of their penises, were a stark peek into what I now believe submissive women undoubtedly have to put up with online. Girls, as a token sister, my heart goes out to you.

But more interesting than this was the way writing from this perspective forced me to really make an effort in understanding what might go on in the head of a submissive woman. Obviously, men aren’t necessarily equipped with the right emotional wiring to ever fully understand this, but it was interesting nonetheless. If nothing else, it allowed me to get more intimately involved with Mr P, not just on a purely physical level, but at depths I might never have plumbed had it not been for my kooky little experiment. In retrospect, I guess I got so deep I missed all the superficial warning signs of what ultimately has become our separation, but there ya go.

I forget the point I originally wanted to make in this entry. Oh wait! Hedonism.

Yeah. I live for pleasure. Everything else one has to live with and endure all seems a bit pointless if there isn’t any underlying pursuit of pleasure involved. I’m not entirely without a sense of morals when seeking it and will joke my hedonistic motto reads a bit like a motel sign: No children; No pets. I tend to leave the old people alone too, but I’m open to most other things. More on this next time…