the habit of being

I am afraid of this being the year that disappeared. 2006 will be the first of many vanishing years, perhaps. Old people are always saying that time speeds by faster and faster. I am only 23, and already things that seem like yesterday are turning out to be last year, or even the year before that. It doesn’t help that I haven’t kept up my journal.

Why is that? I’m not entirely sure. In my early years of online-journalling (this was in the pre-blog days), this was something that sometimes happened: Suddenly, I was possessed to take down my site, leaving nothing but a splash page saying something about a “hiatus” and a link to email me (back then, people actually did). The typical length of such a hiatus was about six months, and I’d emerge on the other end of it with a new domain name (or at least a new design - Version 2.0 or somesuch) and what I thought to be a completely different persona.

Maybe I stopped writing here because I needed to grow a new ego. Or maybe it’s a combination of more mundane factors, like that I’ve been crazy-insane-busy. Back in February I was taking classes on frontal lobe functions and modern Indian history, editing the first story I’ve published in a national magazine (it came out in May, under a pseudonym), “finishing” my first scientific article (since then it’s been submitted, rejected, rewritten, resubmitted, lather, rinse, repeat), and sleeping with my best friend, among other things. The City was beginning to open up for me in big ways, and I was seeing a lot of dance and theatre for the first time. I also tend to get kindof SAD-ish in February, though this year it hit hardest in March.

I stopped sleeping with my friend and fell for a tall man with a Russian accent. I wrote manic emails like this:

I spent most of yesterday leading a gallery tour in Chelsea for the prospective graduate students, and then I went shopping in Soho and found this soft white dress that is so amazing and pretty that I spent $140 on it without even blinking, and this whole time it was freezing out and windy and I wasn’t dressed well enough. Buying the dress made me late for meeting the Russian boy at the bar in the IFC, so I called and was all apologizing and still wound up taking the wrong subway and having to walk a long way in the freezing cold and being even later, but I got there and he was all smiling at me and wanting to see the dress and hugging me and getting me some vodka to warm me up. And then we saw Manderlay which is incredibly intense and terrible and beautiful and we held hands the whole time and when it was over we were both just completely blown away and loved it and felt like the only people in the world who could see a completely disturbing film like that and come out of it excited and talking about how we’re going to make things like that someday. We went to the Belgian beer bar on West 4th and I impressed him with my knowing which beers were the best and we sat in a corner and had this whole conversation about world politics, and, still beaming about the movie, he kept touching my hair and we’d kiss and my hair would get in our mouths but it wasn’t even weird and he’s this amazing kisser. We wanted to go somewhere not so loud but we both live far away from there and it was so cold so I said, “We could go to my lab. It’s a few blocks away” and he said “Really? Okay. Let’s go.” So we stopped and got more beer to smuggle in and I took him to the Psychology building and up to the lab and he was asking all about my job and I swear to God I did not think we were going to have sex… Then we got dressed and were drinking beer and eating my Valentine’s Godiva my mom had sent which was still in the lab and a grad student I knew walked in but I just gave her some chocolate and it was fine. We talked and talked about my work and his work and I asked him why he’s not married and he told me about being engaged when he was about my age but it didn’t work out and they don’t talk anymore and if he’d married her he’d never be doing the things he is now…

And then he never called me again and I started reading The Rules and reciting them to all my friends on a regular basis. I made a proclamation — “No more telling them my whole traumatic life history. No more letting them read my writing. No more sex on the second date. Fuck being honest. I want to get married.” — and I then proceeded to stop dating altogether. I fought a war against bedbugs. My lab got a big grant from the NIH and I got a MacBook Pro. In March, I went to visit my parents, who had just moved to Louisville, Kentucky, and my mother and I had our first mint juleps and derby pie at The Brown. In April, I got my wisdom teeth pulled and discovered that The Double Life of Véronique is probably the best movie ever made. In May, I presented a poster at the Vision Sciences Society conference in Sarasota, saw my writing in Barnes and Noble, and had a birthday. At some point, I re-decided not to get a Ph.D. in neural science or psychology. In June, I landed a room in a West Village apartment owned by a 50-something Buddhist ex-dental hygeinist, but I didn’t move out of my old apartment in Astoria until July. I watched my ex-lover and his wife haul pieces of my antique bed down four flights of stairs and into a sudden rain-storm. I took a summer fiction workshop, and, reluctantly, wrote short stories. I decided I really want to get an MFA in writing. I dreamt that I took out my own heart and lungs and zipped them up in a transplant bag, but did not die. In August, my goldfish with no name died, almost exactly a year after I got it. I got a visa to Russia, where I will be giving a talk on my research in St. Petersburg next week. One Sunday, I wrote for 18 hours straight, and was incredibly happy. The next Saturday, I walked for miles and took hundreds of photographs. And then, I started to miss my website.

He loves me, and writes “she sees the value both in sadness and in happiness, and revels in intensity and loss of control.”

At this time I am unable to make a statement in full, I cannot offer a definition. I realize, however, that the way I view control is a very central, if not falsely basic, element in what makes me round and unstatic. I gain all power, all pleasure, from my ability to give myself over to things. A measure of trust, I said, and that is not all. Yet it is somehow so very simple, and below intellectual description, how I feel that be giving up the surface control I am gaining something so much more valuable. This is neither physical nor emotional control, but both and neither at the same time, on different levels, contradiction, and at some central point it all makes perfect sense. Simply said, I am a receiver, yet in receiving whatever action or confession or glossy little pearl is thrown at me, I seem to add as much to the meaning of the gift as the giver. In a way, I am giving a gift as well, and therefore do indeed have control, only the control I gain is not the most obvious, it hides under blankets and behind opaque screens. I am an extreme, I am yin.

The issue is not so much that I find being held down, trapped, enfolded, devoured, to be among the most blaring of my sexual wants. I become only more aware that I have always been aware that power dynamics get me off. My earliest memories of masturbation center on rape fantasies, and I’ve had those dreams as long as I can remember. I can still see even early ones vividly: myself stripped in an empty parking lot, tied to a lamp post, and they came up to me in sequence and touched me (I touched myself), and then they fucked me, one by one, and I feel the concrete, it is cool, and the lighting is such that the ones not having their turn could stand outside a certain circle and barely be seen. (I will, of course, note that I am well aware of the many, many differences between what I would call rape fantasy and actual rape. I’m immensely glad that I have never really been forced into intercourse against my will.) All the same, I have a long-standing fetish, and I will always prefer the term “fuck” to “make love,” if simply because, like in French, the term is much closer to “rape.” I do not like the idea of consent, it seems false.

I discovered S&M in my early teens. I read everything I could find. I went to chatrooms. I visited pornographic websites. I don’t recall feeling guilty about it. At 15, I wanted a job as a model for bondage photography. (Seriously.) I was silly, very young, but I saw clearly I had a strong interest, was ever so intrigued. Still, it didn’t really click with me that my interest could be “real.” Honestly, at 15, I thought most everything about me was part of some false-personality I had created for myself, I thought my life was nothing but a continuum of fabricated stages, based on ideas of who I wished I could be, rather than who I was. For example, throughout the saddest periods of my life, I believed that I was not depressed, but rather that I was somehow playing the role of a depressed person, because I bought into the idea that sadness somehow created beauty.

It took me a long time to realize and admit that my fascination with domination and submission wasn’t just part of one of my goofy teenage personas, and to separate what it was that appealed to me from the blaring image of overly made-up women in black leather bodysuits posing provocatively under captions reading “Spank Me!” in bright pink letters. I never wanted the show. I never wanted the affectedness or the game. I’m really not after some token kink to make me feel like a radical.

Rather, I’d like to be fully comfortable with the reality that my natural inclination is to want to be dominated, that it’s perfectly alright if I find the idea of being tied up as part of sex play exciting (Extremely exciting), that D/s can be a beautiful thing, not necessarily plastic or pornographic or overly done, but simple, very real, unaffected, and satisfying.

{ Insert rant, with apology: It seems like almost anyone who’s anyone in feminism would be inclined to think I’m seriously fucked up. That I’m buying into some damaging stereotype of what a woman’s role is, that I’ve been somehow suckered into an outdated way of thinking that everyone’s been trying so hard to eradicate. My god, since when does the Revolution or whatever the hell it’s called these days cite as one of its goals to dictate how each and every member of the female sex must behave herself in bed in order to qualify as liberated? It’s completely ridiculous, and quite contradictory to everything -I- believe about feminism. But I’m no theorist, and I haven’t read much of anything on feminist theory, or queer theory, or any theory in general, so forgive me if I have no idea what I’m talking about. But I think it’s extremely strange that a movement which supposedly works to end persecution of women (sexual, economic, or otherwise) would do something so blatantly idiotic as to support the idea that women who CHOOSE to lead sexual lives contrary to a very strict set of I-won’t-blow-you-unless-you-eat-me-first standards somehow -deserve- to be persecuted. So I don’t understand the anti-porn movement, and I certainly don’t see why prostitution should be illegal, or why girls who like to be fucked are any less capable of standing up for women’s rights. }

I guess, getting back to what I’ve been TRYING to say…

A plain white sheet of paper with words typed across it (filling the page, plain black letters, small) is truly the loveliest, most inspiring thing. Before the first sentences are read and comprehended, the page contains all the most insightful, logically poetic, time shattering thought imaginable. The potential for all manner of beauty is packed into those black letters, spaces between, words yet unread, so neatly blocked off between one-inch margins on all sides. A page full of grammatical errors and trite redundancies, with no intellectual or emotional merit whatsoever even, is still indescribably engaging -before- it is read, sitting on a marble coffee table somewhere or tucked safely into a labeled manilla folder. Is it that a body of writing not yet titled is at once Anna Karenina, the Bible, and The Cat in the Hat? A body of text has life, it speaks to those around, calling them to read it, like magnetic poetry, words shout to be touched. Judgment comes about not until they are massaged, digested. Prior to that, the text may as well be sacred script. I must wonder if all people might simply assume that a hefty stack of typed pages must contain ideas, thought, truisms.

If anything in these years I’ve made things online I’ve learned that the web is entirely unlike print, and that one is silly who makes websites based on magazine spreads or such things. Still there is so much technical knowledge involved in actually using the web as the medium it was meant to be, I wonder if it is not better to simply put my black bits of text on a white page and hope that somewhere there is someone who might want to print it out. Online, plain black (#000000) text on a white (#ffffff) background is boring and plain. People want TV.

. . .

“You missed a nail.”

“Nah, the paint chipped off.”

“Now all the other girls will talk about you behind your back.”

. . .

Red-silver are my fingernails and pink are my hands tonight. It is now, this microscopic instant on my private sphere, as if my heart itself (my very center, more likely my brain than my heart, but I am sentimental and feel the beat strongly) were letting out a much-needed sigh and singing an aria all at once. I don’t often take notice of my sides, they are only products of engineering, precisely holding the rest of my body together, relatively straight, yet now I see my sides are quite exhausted. A slight tremor is still about, a trill on low F# (sharp), and it is in my sides that the echo seems to remain, bouncing back and forth like a neon vending machine rubber ball. In this after-feeling are all words and none, this is the paradigm of calm, much like what I once called floating. A breath means infinitely more (it truly does reach the entire body), a touch could send a crack down my spine, expanding somehow along all my capillaries until my body were as crazed as a dismantled clock.

To be truly aware, so far on the edge, one must be still, so still. (The slightest twitch might alter the trajectory of millions of tiny waves jumping about in my space. How many tangent lines does a human body create and break every second, with each pulse? Could one conceivably calculate the mean derivative of an orgasm?)

It strikes me that this flavor of reality is so close to that which follows and dreadful argument, or an eruption of tears, all is in turmoil, out of balance, and suddenly it is over, and for once one can really, clearly, think. It is this identical calm, only more dull, slower in coming, legato. I could never write even the simplest essay for school unless I got horribly upset about it first. Not until I’d had my mental entropy explosion time could I get myself composed enough to write, because afterward this detachment would step in and organize my thoughts in front of me, where I could see them for what they were, logically and in light.

Yes, this was true for years, until this term when I had to let it go due to the insane number of essays I’m expected to write (my body, my sanity, just couldn’t take it, the buildup to the calm).

Perhaps there is only a very limited number of ways a person can feel. In my case, there may be only two