This one scares me. This one is dangerous, volatile and unnerving. I don’t know how to be honest in this chapter. I want to root out the pathology. I want to dig deep, look at disturbing strata, describe the findings in detail without being either timid or pornographic. I want to sift through the remains of past encounters, past flames, desires, ecstasies and pain but I want my wife to read this chapter and not be burned. If I can stay with God and write what he wants me to write then these concerns are insignificant. But how do I walk with God through this hall of shame and madness? I don’t know.
There is a necessary and healthy madness at the core of male sexuality. It’s difficult for me to isolate that which is pathological in my sexuality from that which is natural. The pathology harnesses the energy of that core madness then shames me. As a trade-off, guilt sometimes increases the heat of desire.
Here’s another difficulty, Marc seems to take these pokings and proddings of my sexuality less seriously than I do. It appears his take is quite simple, I’m incested to the dark mother and so vulnerable to the wiles of the seductress and then open to the dark mother’s shaming. He has told me that masturbating is bad, not for moral reasons but because I’m in my forties and my appetite is naturally in decline and jerking off is a waste of the sexual energy I should be bringing to Ellen. He calls it throwing my passion down the toilet. I agree with him on that point but I see my sexuality as yet another unexpressed layer of my life and I want to uncover that layer, open new air passages and drive out the pathology. I hope for rebirth in this layer of myself just as I feel renewal and transformation taking place in my mind and heart.
As I mentioned earlier Marc acknowledges that most men who are married to the same woman for a number of years either become unfaithful, sacrifice their passion on the alter of faithfulness, or go on Viagra. The only way out, he says, is for men to learn to transform our passion from penis centered sexuality to heart centered sexuality. That is a sexuality fed by intimacy instead of one fired by images of shapely female anatomy. There’s a powerful and direct sexual circuit that runs from my eyes through my mind, lungs and belly to my dick. I imagine that circuit is hard wired and will be with me for the rest of my life, but I’m hoping for a new circuitry - one that largely bypasses the old - running perhaps from my ears and mouth, the gates of intimate conversation, through my heart and then to my penis and body at large. My hope is that by digging into this subject as I am here I will add heat to whatever slow sexual alchemy is taking place in me.
Where to begin?
This chapter was born by splintering off from the previous chapter. There I wrote that I was confused and lonely, prime material for a cult. In the first draft of that chapter I went on to say:
"but I had my own unconscious, unhealthy, private religion that in it’s strange way shielded me from others. I placed my faith in Sindri, my girlfriend."
Really that sums up my problem. Sindri, my first lover, wasn’t simply my girlfriend she was my religion, the cult I was drawn into. I’m not saying anything about her as a person here, I don’t think I ever knew her very well, I was too deeply enmeshed in my projections onto her. I think men do this quite often, especially when we’re young. Women do it with men, too. But few do it as deeply, blindly and completely as I did with that girl. She was the central figure in my dreams for fifteen years after she left me. I think if she had asked me back at any point during that time I would have dropped whatever life I was living and joined her anywhere. I had it bad.
In that earlier draft I then went on to tell something of the story of our fiery relationship but I can see now that that is not the way to go. That is not the way to go because my job here is not to take us back into that romance, my job is to unearth the pathology that lived there, my job is to kill that romance.
I was twenty years old, a virgin and I really wanted to get laid. I was embarrassed and ashamed to be a virgin but mostly I just wanted it. There was nothing in my life, nobody in my life suggesting that I shouldn’t get laid, suggesting for example that I should wait until I was married. I’m quite certain that all my close male friends and most of my women friends had been fucking for years. That was painful. The more I felt that pain the harder it was to do whatever it was other men did to get laid. I need to say here that I didn’t think of it at the time in such crass terms. Crass talk among men made me uncomfortable. I thought of sex as the natural extension, the crowning reward and expression of my desire to love and be loved. This sounds pretty normal and healthy but it went deeper. For one thing the healthy counterbalance to youthful, over exuberant, hormonal goddess worship is a solid relationship with God. I wasn’t only lacking this relationship I was rejecting it as unhealthy, misogynistic, imperialistic, exploitative, based on lies and no fun. This rejection as I’ve said before was rooted in my rejection of my unloving father. But there is more still to the peculiar personal pathologies in my goddess worship and that’s what I want to here reveal and offer up for destruction.
In many ways I had created Sindri in my imagination before I had even met her, already created our sex life before we slept together, already imagined her leaving me before we began. There’s pride in action for you. Pride and fear of living life directly instead of from a predetermined place.
The first time I saw her she was standing in silhouette on stage. I fell in love, whatever that meant at the time, with her shadow. She looked great. I wanted her. Everything else flowed from there. Nothing about her seemed to interfere with the projection I had long been building. She was a powerful sexual animal, I was repressed. She was quick to ask and work for what she wanted, I didn’t even know what I wanted most of the time and when I did I was afraid to acknowledge it to myself let alone ask for it. She was verbal, dynamic and present, I was ashamed and quiet though I did have a peculiarly aggressive and paranoid sociability that was based on drawing others out while I remained hidden. I was so good at this that most people didn’t realize it or to put it in a more useful way I was attracted to and attracted people who wanted an audience. I probably felt to her like the best audience she had ever had. I’ve often since wondered what she saw in me and I think that was it. And the reason she left was that I was in fact only an audience. An audience member doesn’t talk back, doesn’t reveal them self, in fact they don’t even boo anymore, all they do is listen, project their own stories and desires onto the actors and clap and cheer and laugh and that’s exactly what I did with her. You can’t have a relationship with an audience member. In fact this is still a problem for me, not with Ellen but with my supervisor Bruce, I’m so afraid of him that I usually hop to, feel guilty and support him even though he often treats me like shit. I may bite back sometimes but that response is simply the flip side of the same pathological coin. Sindri treated me pretty shitty too. She slept with other men, seldom seemed interested in drawing me out, and made large and small plans only consulting me afterwards. But what a projection I had going on to that girl. I figured I had a better girl than anyone, she looked great, she was sexy and loved to fuck, she was smarter than me, she was outgoing, a better actor than I was, knew what she wanted and got it and she loved me, whatever that meant at the time. I thought I was in heaven and I was in so much pain. But my desire for her trumped everything. When she left it felt like my guts and bowels had simply vanished. Nothing but emptiness and hunger that knows it will go unmet.
I knew at the time that I was out of kilter, even before she left I knew that I was somehow incomplete but I accepted my status for the most part and simply looked toward the next moment when I could expect coital completion with her. We completed everywhere, in cars, on rooftops, midday on the edge of sports fields, in a professor’s office while waiting for an appointment. I did feel fulfilled during and for a while afterwards, a fulfillment that was part "up yours" to the establishment, a fulfillment based in part on pride. But most of the time I was in pain and the sex relieved the pain, every bit of it, but sex doesn’t deal with the roots of pain. In that way it was like a drug, another pain killer. I killed a great deal of pain in those college days or more appropriately, put it to sleep. Marijuana, hashish, Thai stick, cocaine, amphetamines, acid, angel dust, alcohol, fucking. High, high, high, or more accurately high, in pain, high, in pain, high, in pain...
I want to look now at a couple dreams that seem to recur in various forms and that seem to roughly stake out the territory we’re looking at. One is soft and chocolaty, the other harsh and ugly.
In the first, which I had maybe a year or so ago, I’m at a party, a high school party. I walk by Kendra Kamp and a couple other girls, they don’t seem to notice me. Kendra Kamp was a very cute cheerleader who I just assumed was unapproachable. In the dream I see a bunch of younger boys, junior high age I guess, goofing around, being silly but I ignore them and follow Kendra. She’s sitting on top of a cabinet, I climb up to join her then she suggests we go down into the large cabinet and cuddle. We do and she tells me she always liked me. I feel great.
There are a couple problems here. First off I need to be with the goofy boys not with the cute girls. I need to be with them because they are wild and unpredictable. I need to be with them because they are the wild and passionate side of myself that I rejected to please my mother and to please other women. I had hoped that Kendra might be the anima, the divine female but she wasn’t. Who was Kendra? I don’t know and that’s the point. She was just a cute cheerleader who received my projections. She may have been an awful, selfish, vacuous person, I have no idea. The point is my attraction to her in the dream isn’t based in depth, it’s superficial. How could that be divine? Yet I felt so enriched and validated by her attention. That’s the seduction, keeping me from myself, keeping me from the divine boys. The next dream is more recent but I’ve had this very same one again and again. It’s ugly. I use ugly language because it best conveys the feel of the dream, where I’m at in the dream.
I’m fucking a woman who is continually shape shifting. I don’t know her. I will her tits to get bigger, they do for a bit. I grab them and squeeze as hard as I can, squeeze with desire, anger and frustration, they shrink and I will them large again, squeeze again. There is absolutely nothing personal here, I just want to get off. I fuck her in the cunt, in the ass, I pull her mouth over my huge dick shove it halfway down her throat and hold her head there, I don’t care if she can’t breathe I just want to get off. In a weird way I’m not even horny, or I’m horny in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with me with who I am, it’s like I’m possessed by an unfeeling horny machine that just wants to get off. I never get off, not in the hundreds of times I’ve had this dream, never once.
I said earlier that with these two dreams I’m staking out the territory to be explored. The class could be called A Survey of Sexual Pathology: Soft and Cuddly Seductions to Violent Rape. I think that might attract a few college students. Marc suggested another way of holding up these two dreams. He said incested men are always angry at women. So the second dream is the flip side or the dark underbelly of the first. Let’s call that class Chivalrous Knight and Jack the Ripper: The Two Masks of the Incested Male. It doesn’t matter what we call it, the curriculum is the same.
I recently popped an old CD in a player, a collection of jazz tunes and was arrested by a version of Steven Soundheim’s "Pretty Women" from Sweeny Todd. I’ve since been listening to it all week, trying, unsuccessfully to catch all the lyrics. The song is moving through me in several ways now. It seems to be the ideal theme song for the chocolate rabbit, a true echo of the inner Siren’s song that drew me in childhood out of the current of men’s ways and dashed me onto the rocks of incest and unfullfillable desire. The song has a beautiful melody but the lyrics bespeak a quiet obsession that once seemed quite natural to me. I believe it’s the music though which most draws me. I feel when listening to or singing the song drawn back to a moment in my childhood where my sense of love and wholeness was fractured and a great piece attached itself to a pathological longing for the love of beautiful women. When singing the song now I feel not a desire for pretty women but a return to that greater source of love. A return to God’s love in the days before the Siren’s song drew me off course over forty years ago. In other words Once Upon a Time I was whole. I felt God’s love and moment to moment I trusted that life was good. Then I suppose my essence was either worn away by my father’s steady anger or perhaps at some point he became quite suddenly more violently angry at me specifically or at my mother or at the world in general and I withdrew in a hurry. I don’t know. But at that point, this I’ve learned from the shaft sunk into me by the song "Pretty Women", at that point or over that period my wholeness was destroyed, I ceased trusting life and the Divine, I ceased feeling known and loved and the piece of me that needed more than anything to feel known and loved attached itself to an incested relationship with my mother and to the need to be loved by beautiful women. An iron triangle of me (no longer genuine, now the chocolate rabbit), the dark mother and the seductress.
I want to lay out the words I was able to catch from the song:
Pretty women, fascinating, sipping coffee, dancing
Pretty women, ? , pretty women
Sitting in a window or standing on a stair
Something in them chills, chills the air.
Pretty Women, silhouetted, Stay within you, glancing
Stay forever, breathing lightly, pretty women
Blowing out their candles or combing out their hair
Even when they leave they still are there
Pretty Women, letter writing, how they make a man feel
Proof of heaven as they’re moving, pretty women
My apologies to Steven Soundheim but that’s the best I could extract from the recording I possess. Do you see how this is the anthem for the chocolate rabbit? What is remarkable to me is that listening to and singing this song doesn’t draw me into my pathological obsession but returns me to the moment when that obsession was born and beyond to the sense of love and support I knew before I was shattered and began looking for love in only the wrong places.
I remember clearly aching for the love of pretty women from the time I was five years old and it may well have begun before then. That can’t be good.
Another biographical flake just floated past me. I had a half sister, she may still be alive though it’s been about twenty years since I’ve heard from her. Her name was Kathy and she was my father’s daughter from a previous marriage. But I didn’t know that. I knew her as cousin Kathy though I knew the relationship was somehow different from that which I had with my other cousins. She lived with her mother and her mother’s mother I believe. But she spent quite a bit of time at my father’s mother’s house and she called my grandmother, the one I’ve written about, Grandmother. I didn’t know what it all meant but I was head over heels in love with her. She must have been about three years older than me. She was gorgeous. Years ago she came in a dream as the Anima. I can’t now remember that dream but that’s one of the few times the anima has come as anyone other than Ellen. As I’ve said women in my dreams are usually pathology.
I remember sitting on my grandmother’s back porch and watching Kathy rock my little brother. She was just beginning to bud into adolescence. I was sitting to her side facing her and as she rocked forward the armhole on her sleeveless dress would bow forward and I could see the small rising of her breast. How old was I? Seven? Eight? But I longed for her. I figured since she wasn’t really my cousin that we could probably get married. It was right around this time that she and my grandmother, the three of us spent quite a bit of time together, revealed to me our true relationship. I ran from the room crying. I was hurt and upset that my father had been married before and had another family but I was wracked with grief at the realization that I could never marry her. I guess Kathy was my first pretty woman. I guess also that I somehow sensed unconsciously that we were more closely related than cousins so my attraction to her as imagined lover fit right in to my paradigm of incest. Around and around I go and when I get off, I mean really get off this tragic smiling merry go round it will be with God’s help and only with God’s help and only because I’m willing to die to the only sexuality I’ve ever known.
In the midst of preadolescence a friend and I found some pornography hidden in a tree trunk in our back yard, loose pages with black and white pictures, pretty innocent by today's standards but heady stuff for a nine or ten year old who apart from his mother had probably never seen a naked woman. We took the pictures inside and somehow my mother found them but she didn’t get upset or take them away. This surprised me, she said she thought it was healthy for boys to enjoy pictures of beautiful women. Where did that response come from I wonder? Some bit of sixties pop psychology she’d read in a magazine. Maybe she’d been afraid that I was gay. I have no idea but I began to show them to quite a few of my friends and cousins and I think another mother must have contacted my mother for she changed her mind and confiscated them. What did I see with those nine year old eyes? Something forbidden, I knew that even before they were taken away. I’m sure there was some horniness involved but I think the most exciting thing was sharing the pictures with other intensely curious boys and telling them that my mom didn’t care. I felt empowered, unusual, cool. Sounds like more incest doesn’t it? And I do believe those pictures were food for my pathology.
Pornography is a big part of this complex. For centuries I imagine kids have been figuring out ways to find and experiment with alcohol, tobacco, explosives and firearms and adults have been countering with ways to protect those kids from the harmful effects of such things, but until my generation or perhaps the one just before mine there just wasn’t much available pornography. So we’re still pretty early in the curve of understanding how the stuff affects us and how to protect ourselves from it‘s harmful effects.
I’m twenty one years old, living in San Francisco, missing Sindri and working as a carpenter helping remodel an old once elegant apartment on Nob Hill overlooking the city. Someone pinned up a centerfold on the worksite. Oddly I’ve never spent much time since that boyhood episode looking at such stuff. Since that time I’ve felt embarrassed around porn and figured it was very politically incorrect and not something women would want me looking at. Odder still I’ve never masturbated. I’ve had wet dreams galore, in fact by the time I was in college they occurred every other night like clockwork, I was embarrassed, hoped I didn’t writhe or make any sounds my roommate could detect and learned to keep a towel by my bed on those date nights. But I just couldn’t imagine getting excited by my right hand, I couldn’t see how it could work. Also I have a lot of pride around quite possibly being the only man I’ve ever known to make it all the way through adolescence without jerking off. So here I am at twenty one back home now in my bedroom after work and I can’t get that centerfold out of my mind and it suddenly strikes me, hey I can do it I can masturbate and it was this great liberation, or seemed so at the time, I write about it in my journal. I title the entry First Flight or something like that. As I said earlier I’m aware that I’m overly needful of and dependant on Sindri in many ways and she’s half the country away and wiping up afterwards I feel a bit freed from that dependence. But of course the instrument of my liberation becomes the next chain to ensnare me. The next day I stay late on the job site so I’m the last to leave then take the centerfold home. I’m cookin now. Now I’m being roasted.
The vast majority of the criticism I remember hearing throughout my lifetime about pornography has focused on how harmful it is to women. Pornography exploits women, it demeans women, along with advertising it makes them feel unattractive and hyper conscious of their appearance. Pornography increases the likelihood that men will treat women like objects. Some pornography seems to encourage violence toward women. All this is true but the popular condemnation of pornography I’ve heard through the years all but ignores the damage done to men. I want to make it clear here that I’m talking now only about pictures of women viewed by men, of course there are other pornographic permutations but they’re a pretty small part of the industry and not a part of my life. I may have been late in coming to pornography and masturbation but I’ve more than made up for lost time. Most men hide their collections, though I remember being startled along with my brothers to discover our father’s collection out in the open when we visited him in Las Vegas, but in my experience that’s an exception. As a rule most of my young adult male friends hid their stashes and when I visited I became very good at ferreting them out. I didn’t buy the magazines, again I felt embarrassed and it seemed politically incorrect also I never had much money and they seemed pricey. But I did once haul home a large collection abandoned by some college chums when they moved out of their student digs. I felt as jazzed as Solomon must have felt walking amongst his harem.
Anyway back to the damage done to men. I feel that the part of my soul that is meant to respond with purpose and enthusiasm to a woman’s nakedness has been scoured away by these images over the years. When I first started looking at Playboys in my twenties nearly every picture affected me powerfully, the last one I perused with intent, maybe a year ago, only one in ten were good enough. It’s like heroin, the more you do the more you need and of higher quality to get off.
Here’s another downside for men, for me. Pornography and near pornographic images helped me to focus so single-mindedly on the way a woman looked that I was less likely to notice for example that a given romantic interest was, for example, absurdly demanding and unloving until I was involved and regretting it.
When I first started having sex, before much exposure to pornography, the act itself was arousing, a wonder and mystery. But the more crammed my inner chamber of visual erotica became the more I became fixated during lovemaking with pieces of my partner’s anatomy that measured up. It could be the usual suspects like tits and ass but more likely it was something more obscure like knees or pelvis or lower back or upper chest or neck or arms but it was visual and it was impersonal and I needed to focus on it to get off. Eventually it became worse and I had to go away completely and imagine those airbrushed pictures to get off. My soul has been scraped away to the extent that, once the projections have worn off, the women I’ve made love with over the past fifteen or twenty years have not excited me. Now I wouldn’t expect any woman, not even my wife, to desire me based on my appearance, I’m getting older and softer and growing a middle aged belly. But I do hope that something in me and of me attracts Ellen and in fairness there are many things in Ellen which attract me but they do not, because of what I now am, much water the fields of my sexuality. I pray that someday they do.
As I mentioned before there were no voices in my life in my early twenties suggesting that I shouldn’t have sex. My mother didn’t want me doing it in her house, I think because it smelled funny, but she didn’t say anything about my doing it elsewhere. Sindri’s mother was fine with it as long as her father didn’t hear us. Professors, the minister at our church, other adults I knew, no one seemed to thing it was a bad idea. I now think it was a bad idea, not necessarily for everyone but for me, here’s why: I wasn’t rooted deeply enough in the world of men; sports, outdoorsmanship, hard work and a relationship with my father or any father substitute to stand in myself in the midst of the extraordinary currents of sex and so I was swept away. My early experiences were based on an unhealthy projection of spiritual meaning onto a woman‘s body, those early experiences were not an expression of my deeper self, they were instead a seeking for that self. Now in my later life I find it very difficult to reclaim my sexuality as my own, all my sexual juice seems to flow from that well of "Who am I?" Now that I know that I am a child of God I need a new conduit of sexual energy, but I’m between worlds, still haunted by the receding images and hard-ons of the old ways and only slightly hooked up to the new ways based in self expression and genuine intimacy.
(more to come)