James (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} synesis) wrote,@ 2006-06-05 21:00:00 |
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| Current location: | SW19 |
| Current mood: |  Babalond |
| Current music: | Lover, you should've come over - Jeff Buckley (Grace) |
| Entry tags: | devotion, gay, magic, men, personal, queer nation, thelema |
Venus
This is a piece that grew out of a discussion about sex, taboo and magic, where someone mentioned Phil Hine’s essay about being fucked for the first time. I’d never read it, but I was intrigued by the concept. Before I allowed myself to read the piece referred to, I sat down and wrote my own. Anyway, since it came up recently, here it is. It might make some of you uncomfortable, but, well, that happens. Unadulterated comfort is bad for your health.
It was originally intended for publication, but (as with many such things) the magazine sprang stillborn from the presses, and I decided not to get involved with it. Responses of any sort, but especially considered ones from those who, er, know the field, are always appreciated.
I – Ablutions.
Absurd, really, what we put ourselves through. Soaking in hot water to open the pores, facemasks, potions and unguents, each acting more on the mind than the flesh. Each application a step towards the plastic and desexed. Be perfect to gaze upon, be alabaster perfection, to the point where it repels touch.
Let each piece of clothing be chosen for its significance. Red for passion; these trousers that they may slip down easily, to reveal the sway of hip; these shoes, perfectly formed, this coat perfectly cut. So too the reverse: this collar that it can hide the mark on my shoulder, this powder to conceal that blemish, this belt to cinch in my still-too-fat waist.
Like ritual. Lie in water, slowly anoint the hair, take the cloth down the arms and over the thighs. Do not miss a spot. Pay attention to each part, and will yourself into perfection with each stroke of the cloth. Sink into the water again. Let us not fool ourselves: we are baptised daily in order to make our sin more perfect.
Bring out the wax and the sharp metal tweezers. A ritual shedding of hair – hair in places where hair is unsightly. Let it be removed, so we present to the world a single surface, a unified image of perfection that neither grows nor changes. Let us be a walking idea. Like Samson we have shorn ourselves, but have entered into our weakness through choice. We intend to submit ourselves entirely, lay ourselves bare.
We present an image that he may crack it; we whitewash ourselves, but not with the intent to conceal, only to hint at the possibilities that lie beneath.
Each of these is an armoury constructed to preserve the self; he will shatter it.
II – Union
He wasn’t anonymous. This is important to understand. It is similarly important to understand that anonymity draws a veil of innocence over things: what matter that I should do this, since I won’t see him again? And until then, it had all been anonymous, almost studied – anonymity gives us the chance to assume masks, and failure to connect allows a distancing of the self from the body. Remember to arch my back, run this hand along his thigh, to move my tongue in this acted, studied way. There is even a secret script, with variations on the actors and their names or characters, but which proceeds forever the same. There is no vulnerability; the truly private part remains closed.
He wasn’t special, either. This is important: just one of those brief flings, too aware of its own transience, sustained only by physical passion. There was no future – he perhaps understood maybe a tenth of the world that I did, with no desire to explore further – and yet, briefly, until it unravelled, I held him close to me.
This is power, then. To know he wants to fuck me, to hear him say it, feel him press against me, breathe out hard against my neck. This is power. To know that I have what he wants, and that I can, and will, give it to him. To know that I can give him what he wants carries a charge all of its own. He does not want what I have written, he does not want me to make children with, he wants me. Let him breathe some more, a little harder, draw him nearer. Let him want me.
Let him in. Let him in. Take the position slowly, and nervously. Every muscle along the line of the stomach tense, nervous and waiting. Relax and breathe. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. Lean back into the pillow, let a chill run down the spine. Sudden leap in the stomach as I feel him pressing against me.
A whole new experience, one I wasn’t prepared for. I feel contracted, tiny, suddenly – and how far can he go? There is no awareness, no distance, no wall. And ‘I’ am floundering suddenly, not in control of my body, suddenly overwhelmed by revolt in my limbs. My arms fling up, uncontrolled, against the wall and around his neck, the breath comes sudden and rapid, the spine twitches, I push myself closer.
Closer. Closer. Pain, of course, but hunger for more. I am paradox: suddenly so tiny in this sea of immensity, floating like something empty and suddenly filled. And suddenly so vast, blown to pieces, mute and insensible sensation rippling along every part of me. Stop, stop, can I take any more? (Don’t stop, don’t ever stop.) Simply flowing, contracting, expanding, shuddering around this unknown, unsensed core of not-me.
You have to give yourself up, you have to give yourself up, and become a sea of sensation. Sweat taste, see only the sheets twisted, the flex of the torso and the slow bobbing of his neck, the veins in his arm, and the room curving in around me, moving distantly and to infinity and suddenly close. And his face, his face, rising up out of the sea of sensation where he is every man and no man, each man I danced with, or pressed against a wall – and devouring, devouring. Kiss with teeth; kiss with claws. Given up, given up, gone out entirely, ah! There’s no innerness, I’m exploding out in every direction, a wave of sensation and possibility, shattered, twisted.
Look up. Look up.
His eyes, his eyes fixed on mine a single point of constancy, a world around which the world revolves; take in, give up, hold within. Cry out, from somewhere, some long-untouched part of the self now touched, cry out and cry out and cry out with nature’s cry of abandonment and treason against the world. Let him dip in closer and closer until he is flesh and breath and all innerness. Ah, because I change under his glance, seas and ebbs of tensions and mute voices through each muscle, possibilities flowing on my surface like a sea & him & him & him & all men & his body like a Light – a light – a light, a great light with burning eyes – over and within, we are pierced inwardly, we suffer with ecstasy and more. Let him flow out through my veins - & ah! & ah - & ah!
III – Exhalation
We do not even know of what a body is capable.
---- And afterwards like a sleeping child, sprawled over me, and a great wave of contentment, each part of the body resting, lying like open apses. Waiting to see. The cracks in the plaster, the kicked off sheets, the discarded clothing. The blue light of the city through the curtains. In this same place, where an indefinite barrier grows up between us again, where he has retreated in sleep and I lie awake, seeing anew, even the grains in the carpet. Peace. Tension. Possibility. ----
Because there is no depth. Because body is always deep but deepest at its surface. Interiority remains my illusion. Because I have become a great sea. I am a surface on which things are to be inscribed, like virgin soft wax. I am the possibility of a hundred thousand new things, which flow over my surface. The body does not ask for meaning, because meaning is pressed into it, inscribed on its surface, displayed. It is cut onto it by the outside.
But I insist on withdrawing – somewhere – where? But I draw back, my arm lying under his head, breathing over his hair, slowly to put together the pieces of the shattered mirror of the self. Piece together the mask, in a new way. The shattered mirror reveals a thousand possibilities, a thousand new lines along which light is reflected. At its sharp edges it is brightest.
We do not even know of what a body is capable. There is more, there is always more.
Panta plere Theon estin
All things are full of gods
Panta plere Theon estin
All things are full of gods
