Two Nine Nine: Tasks

 Tonight is a midsummer night where I feel a sense of foreboding and a sense of exhaustion and hopelessness. There are things in my daily life that are going very badly this summer--- even beyond this endless Red Death season of quarantines and limbo ---and there's also a sense of impending mortality. 

Last time I wrote here, I wrote about preludes, about wondering how affairs and encounters and adventures begin. Those things have always intrigued me--- how and when people make the decision to have sex, or to have a particular kind of sex, or to have sex with a particular person. I've lost any real sense of those things. I've no sense any longer of how these things happen, and it gets harder and harder to imagine being part of those decisions.

I can't recall tonight whether it was Sophocles or Aeschylus who gave thanks to the gods for freeing him from desire--- a cruel taskmaster ---in old age. Sophocles, I think. You're free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I do think it was Sophocles.  I'm not sure tonight what to make of the saying. Desire can be a cruel master, no question about that. And it's ever more cruel as one grows older and watches desire fade.

At some point, desire becomes a mockery. You know that you're no longer thought of as entitled to feel desire, let alone find any satisfaction. At some point, acting on desire, even feeling desire, makes you an object of derision. 

It's easy tonight to think that I've run out of time for desire, run out of time to have desires. 

A friend in Scotland wrote to tell me that she is appalled at the way The Discourse seems to be turning age-disparate affairs into signs of evil and exploitation. She's always preferred her lovers to be older and experienced--- "worldly", she says ---and has acted on that for half her life. She feels awkward and apologetic not for having the affairs she's had since she was sixteen, but for putting men who taught her so much and meant so much to her into the role of the villain. She tells me that she's called and written lovers from her past  from her quarantine house near Edinburgh to reassure them that she cared about them, learned from them, and will treasure them in her memories. Do not, she told them, ever be ashamed of being with her. I do admire her for that. I really do.

I keep thinking that my usual haunts have less and less appeal for me. There seems to be less and less reason to be out. Certainly flirting with lovely girls at small bistros seems to be something I have less and less social standing to do. And I can't really decide whether that's based on fear of being mocked or treated with derision or on fear of being seen to fail at desire. 

I do walk through downtown on summer evening--- properly masked, mind you, here in the time of the Red Death ---and think of myself as a ghost. I will not, now or ever after, look at myself in a mirror or allow myself to be photographed. I certainly won't look any photos of myself.  I walk along not looking into shop windows, not going in to any of the few places open, and knowing that I'm less and less likely to be speaking to anyone again. I've spent my life telling stories, flirting, trying to be an interesting figure there on the edge of things. Those parts of the story seem to have come to an end.

Desire drives, desire obsesses. We know that. But seeing desire fade away is a cruel set of moments.

One Five Nine: Staples

I'm told that Playboy is doing away with nudes in its print edition. I've no idea if it's just moving all the nudes to its website, but I have to assume it is. Still, I do have to feel a bit sad about the announcement.

I grew up with Playboy, after all. If I'd been a few years older, it could still have been a key source of lifestyle advice and aspirational longings for me as an undergraduate, but when I was young it was still a way to be at least marginally part of some better world.

I subscribed to Playboy when I was sixteen. I kept the subscription until just a few years ago--- 2010, I think. In the last decade of that, I was keeping it out of nostalgia and habit as much as anything else. I let the subscription lapse because they'd lost any edge they'd once had. They still had photos of lovely girls, but the Playmates had become a bit bland, and the actresses and models and singers who posed nude weren't cutting-edge.

Now I'll make no secret of the fact that I read Playboy in my youth primarily for the nudes. I'd never be the cliched person insisting he read it for the articles. Yes, fine, I read a lot of the interviews and articles and reviews; I read a fair number of good short stories over the years. I do recall articles about men's fashion and accessories and furnishings that I probably took notes on. But it was always the nudes that I cared about--- the vision of sex with lovely girls.

At some point, though, the Playmates weren't enough. I like my fantasies aspirational and stylish, and Playboy's commitment to the Girl Next Door idea wasn't what I was looking for. The nudes in high-fashion magazines were better. Taller, thinner, more posed in settings that were elegant and noir. I never minded airbrushing and artificiality--- remember, I always prefer the artificial to the natural ---but the poses I wanted weren't upper-middle California suburb, they were a lot more Euro-boutique hotel-decadence.

Playboy's original target market was the late-1950s/early 1960s young striver. Someone in his mid-twenties with a college degree and a white-collar job and a decent salary in a booming economy, but not from the old Eastern upper classes. Someone who'd need to learn about how to dress to impress and how to furnish a flat to seduce. Their target buyer was the same young man Ian Fleming had been writing for in late-'50s Britain: someone who read the Bond novels to know what suits to wear and what to order at the bar or at an upscale dinner. I might've enjoyed all that, if I'd been there. By the end, though, Playboy had come down in the world--- become a bit jockish, become more than a little tired. The finance bros had moved on to magazines and websites that didn't pretend to be retro-hip, that were brassier and more in-your-face. Playboy had been about jazz, and it managed to hang on through rock, but it couldn't deal with hip-hop  era attitudes about wealth and bling.

So here we are. No more Playboy nudes, at least in the print editions. What will undergraduate boys put up on the walls of their freshman dorms? What will mechanics put up in the office in garages and car-repair shops? Well, they can all look at porn on their phones and laptops, but I'll miss centerfolds. I'll miss Playmates-of-the-Month there on glossy pages.

Maybe I'll see if episodes of "Playboy After Dark" are available on YouTube and just watch the days of the Chicago Playboy Mansion in grainy black and white and see if I can still feel...hep. Not even hip, I think--- hep.  

One Two Five: Learning Curve

There's a blog called A Faded Romantic at Wordpress that I find myself reading on autumn nights. The author there introduces himself this way:

About and Explanation

A faded romantic Dominant from a time before Dominant became a cliché, with a love of all things beautiful and a taste for the darkly sensual and decadent.

A lover of music, food and wine, literature, theatre, film and art.

A writer. Though not a good one. Of novels, short stories, songs and poetry. The written word is my joy and my curse.

I am tall, silver-haired, slender, athletic, with piercing dark green/blue eyes and long, sensitive hands. I am neither handsome nor unattractive. I am a realistic dreamer, an idealistic pragmatist. I am a sexually dominant but patient and sensual lover.

I adore intelligent, elegant, independent-minded, beautiful, sexually submissive women.

I am not young. I am faded and fading.

But if the music is playing, and the wine is good, and the stars are shining bright in a soft velvet night sky, and the light falls on me just right, then you might see the man who could break hearts.

Well, if you have a very good imagination anyway …

There's  rather a lot there that I can identify with, though I'm not silver-haired and was never athletic. I've never thought of myself as a Dominant, of course. I'm never sure what to make of that word.  Of course I like having my own way; I'd never deny that.  My companions are inevitably younger, and I did spend years in front of classes, with whatever authority that brings with it. I've sometimes been the one holding the riding whip, but I've never been a Dominant in any BDSM sense. The metaphors I apply to sex are less about dominance and submission and much more about ritual, formality, and crafting stories. Asking a young companion to be a character in your stories is about control--- when is a story arc not about control? ---but it's not about submission to you. It's about losing oneself in the story, which is something separate from the two of you.

I'll have to come back one day to the idea of what control and submission are about. All I can say tonight is that I've never seen myself as a Dominant. Roué, certainly. Flaneur, of course. Auteur if I'm lucky, though there's a pretentiousness in that word that puts me off. 

Whoever is writing at A Faded Romantic calls himself "a romantic Dominant, from a time before Dominant became a cliche". I'd like to know more about that, about how he's seen the word change to a cliche. I'd also like to know how he became a Dominant.

One of the standard arcs in BDSM tales is how the girl learns to be a submissive, how she comes to accept herself as a submissive and learns the arts of yielding up control. Name a classic s/m tale, from "Story of O." to "Fifty Shades" and you'll almost inevitably focus on the heroine's learning curve, on her initiation. There's almost never a story of how the male lead grows into being a dominant, let alone a romantic one.  There's no Bildungsroman about becoming a male dominant that I've ever seen. (Is that true of the world of gay male literature as well? Does anyone know?) And it's a story that has so many questions about learning techniques, about recognizing and accepting oneself. Would a story about a young man becoming a dominant need an older heroine to be his guide, to offer herself up as a learning experience? Is there a romance out there about a romance where two new lovers of seventeen or eighteen teach one another BDSM--- with or without the internet?

I do wonder what it is for the author at the A Faded Romantic to look back on his life to something like twenty and ask how he became what he is now. I'm using him as a particular example, but there's a wider issue here, something beyond s/m. How do we learn to desire what we desire? How do we learn what we are as lovers? And when we do learn, when we've finally ridden out the learning curve, is it too late to use the things we've learned? 

If you're out there reading this, darlings, write and tell me about learning curves. If you are a lovely young submissive, tell me how you learned that about yourself. Tell me about whether you think desires are innate or something acquired. Tell me what you think about when you look over what you've learned about being a lover, what you've learned about desire.

Forty-Seven: Alexandria

Body, Remember

Body, remember not only how much you were loved
not only the beds you lay on.
but also those desires glowing openly
in eyes that looked at you,
trembling for you in voices---
only some chance obstacle frustrated them.
Now that it's all finally in the past,
it seems almost as if you gave yourself
to those desires too--- how they glowed,
remember, in eyes that looked at you,
remember, body, how they trembled for you in those voices. 

--- C.P. Cavafy

Twenty: Elegy

This is Theodore Roethke's poem "To Jane: My Student Thrown by a Horse”: something sad and lovely. A student of his had been killed in a riding accident, a student whom he loved--- from a distance, without touching, as someone with whom he shared a love of literature. The last lines of the poem are heartbreaking in an unexpected way. They're about the anguish of not having the standing to express grief, of not being in a role where one is allowed to express grief where someone the poet has loved has died. English has words for love in its varied forms, but we use them so awkwardly, so uncertainly. And here in the new century, we're so afraid and so suspicious of love. We place far too many limits on who can speak of love or loss, on who we're allowed to love. As open as we are about so many things, we use the words for love with less and less assurance and--- increasingly ---with a hint of shame and suspicion...

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

O, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.