New Playmate: Fear

Shall we start with a blowjob story? Sex always gets everyone’s attention. Pleasure: a cardinal motivation. But let’s delay that gratification, and, fair warning, this post won’t end with the orgasmic gasp you’re longing for (don’t we all?). Let’s leverage the promise though; foreplay is fun, and entertainment is, after all, the goal here.  Well, that and writing my way to understanding my writing process—the steps I’m taking—to improve my writing…at least that’s why I’m here.  Why are you here?

[And, if your immediate reaction to that question is insolence (!) (moral indignity?), that’s not my intention—please see an earlier post regarding my tendency toward blunt written communications lacking the (necessary?) subtle tonalities of delivery—here’s the signpost (pink neon!): I ask this question with a spirit of curiosity, a shy and genuine curiosity, and heaps of gratitude that you’re here reading my words (heaps! really, your continued attention is pulling me through a bunch of turmoil, so, thank you). And yes, you can put shy and blowjob together in a sentence or a paragraph, it’s an alluring combination, but I digress.]  

Another pleasure of mine, and, I realize, essential to my writing process, is to read across multiple and diverse texts in one sitting, toying to find a connection or thread of meaning between them. For fun. It helps me relax. Weirdly. I do it at work and at home and can credit (some) creative breakthroughs to this fetish – this blog post, for instance. I had a vague desire to write about metaphor this month but needed more to, you know, fluff it up.

Recently, a friend texted “Don’t cull [your] state of mind; express it in all its confusion. Put the tornado in the typewriter…” So, my favourite peeps, this post is a flavour taster, leading you through my convoluted thinking that landed on sharing a very private short story publicly.

The other evening I read:

• an astonishing piece about the interstitium, a network of fluid-filled spaces unifying the body that we (Western scientists?) hadn’t quite appreciated (or acknowledged existed) until recently – shaped kind of like honeycomb – the hexagon, the same shape as the benzene ring structure, which, incidentally, came to German chemist August Kekulé in a dream of a snake eating its own tail
• a web site on “warm data”, broader contextual information as opposed to the simple numbers of (disconnected) statistical information
• Jung’s 1925 lecture #1 about developing his theory of the unconscious in which he inadvertently exposes himself as a real dick with his disparaging comments about the poor teen (his patient!) who fell in love with him. Calm down Jungian fans, I’m among you, I even practice his active imagination approach. But still, I feel for that poor girl, unrequited love, the scent of bitter almonds and all that…that lecture may have been the inspiration for David Cronenberg’s film A Dangerous Method
• the introduction in The Situation and the Story, a book by Vivian Gornick offering a stunning distillation of the necessity of crafting a persona to relay a story about a situation… reminds me about an earlier post and a poke in my ribs to revive a larger writing project I’ve been avoiding (why have I been avoiding it? resisting it? why?)
• my daily horoscope app: “Falling in love is good for the universe” and “Forgiving someone doesn’t make you a doormat” and “You are the most elaborate and sweet dessert” (can you tell I’m swinging by a thread here?)

Following this interstitial pathway (is this a bad habit? does this signal a lack of discipline? is this the chaotic consequence of consuming too many fickle fast-food-like-social media-servings? I’m not sure…) over the next few days, I read:

• an excerpt from Descartes’ Dream by Phillip J. Davis and Reuben Hirsh relaying how Descartes imagined being presented with a melon (!) – a metaphor which moved him closer to developing Cartesian (mind-body) dualism somehow…what a muck of things that has led us through…(see “warm data” above)
• A poem, Love After Love by Derek Walcott (tears, tears, tears…I need to get back to that larger writing project)
• A book review of ‘The Poetry of Derek Walcott’ by Adam Kirsch where he discusses Walcott’s associative freedom in his application of metaphor (I know, I know, I’m trying your patience now. Stay with me. We’ll circle back to my earlier promise, and I’ll throw in a ghost to boot! Keep reading)
• An epigraph credited to Michael Ventura in Randall Brown’s Pocket Guide to Flash Fiction that I’ll quote from shortly, but noted the reference was incorrectly cited as “The Talent in the Room” when it should be “The Talent of the Room”…perhaps a trifle, but in this context changing “of” to “in” twists the foundational communication of Ventura’s essay…
• The lyrics to the song You Gave Me The Key by Julia Doiron

And then, wrangling myself to the task of writing a monthly blog post, I reread some earlier notes and quotes I’d taken down about metaphor and can’t help but insert these beautiful descriptions from Alicia Ostriker’s A Meditation on Metaphor in By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry edited by Molly McQuade, “The sharp, honeyed burning point of course is that the pleasure we take in metaphor is a pleasure of consent, an agreement that the distance between two things is cancellable because of their likeness, whereby each illuminates some inner truth belonging to the other.” And “The implication of every metaphor is that the world is a multidimensional web of connections between animate and inanimate, larger and smaller, past and present, which await discovery.”

And I got to thinking, again, about my continued resistance to revisiting earlier drafts of writing. I’m pained to admit my fear here must be something deeper—far deeper—than simply failing to “write well”.  Instead, it has to do with facing what those drafts, written partly through stream of consciousness, partly through dream, partly through half sleep, exhaustion, desperation, and yes, sometimes elation, might reveal about myself, through metaphor, that I’m afraid to know or discover.

And that’s when Ventura’s essay really pierced me, articulating my anxieties with pinpoint accuracy:

“Crazy as a writer would define it: too unbalanced to work. If you can still write, then how crazy can you be?

Plenty crazy, is the answer. The room can become a hole. Your talent of the room, your ability to be there with all your soul, can overwhelm you…

The room, you see, is a dangerous place. Not in itself, but because you’re dangerous. The psyche is dangerous. Because working with words is not like working with color or sound or stone or movement. Color and sound and stone and movement are all around us, they are natural elements, they’ve always been [in] the universe, and those who work with them are servants of these timeless materials. But words are pure creations of the human psyche. Every single word is full of secrets, full of associations. Every word leads to another and another and another, down and down, through passages of dark and light. Every single word leads, in this way, to the same destination: your soul. Which is, in part, the soul of everyone. Every word has the capacity to start that journey. And once you’re on it, there is no knowing what will happen.

Locking yourself up with such things, letting them stir, using these pure psychic creations as raw material, and deciding, each time, how much or little you’re going to participate in your own act of creation, just what you’ll stake, what are the odds, just how far are you going to go – that’s called being a writer. And you do it alone in a room.”

Which rounds us (finally!) to the promised short story, a true one, lightly edited from its original 2020 draft created in a workshop with Leigh Hopkins responding to her prompt to write a 1000-word sexual scene that merges with a death scene. It’s my first, and, to date, only sex scene I’ve written (I think…will have to blow my hard drive searching for what’s beyond memory). No title.  A short commentary will follow (gawd this post is too long, with apologies).  

~

R had a reputation for the biggest cock in school.  That’s what the boys called it with a cocktail of admiration and jealousy. They teased him in locker rooms, school halls, the cafeteria.  He took it in stride, comfortable in his skin, his abilities.  He captained the football team, the soccer team and hockey.  He was good at track and math.  I’d noticed his smile three years earlier and vowed to capture and kiss his mouth. 

On a school night, the time of year when the dark descends velvet and cool and early, we lay in his bedroom in the dark with the door closed.  His parents were asleep down the hall. We were sixteen.

His penis was large. Very large. Though, at the time, I had nothing to compare it with.  His penis was my first penis.  I still dream of it today, occasionally, though, not as much as I’d like to. It wasn’t so much its length that was remarkable, but its girth, wide like the branch of a tree. That night I locked my lips around it and slid up and down its length slowly, the smooth hot hardness of it against my lips, brushing my molars.  I thought of how a snake might easily unclick the hinges of its jaw to accommodate.  My own jaw could do no such thing and the cramp of holding my mouth to receive started in.  His hips squirmed beneath me as I changed position, running my tongue up from the base to the tip, the spongey tip that squished so soft against my lips.  He moaned and caressed my hair.  He was always gentle, patient.  He worried about hurting me, but I craved the feeling of him entering me.  The insides of me ached and yearned.

I tore a little every time we made love.  It stung; a silver, piercing point of pain mixed with the pleasure of being filled. The sensation rippled from between my legs and a satisfaction, a feeling of being whole and complete, warmed my body, my soul. 

The doctor suggested, after handing me blister packs of freebie pills, he could cauterize my perineum with liquid nitrogen.  At sixteen, I asked whether scar tissue might not interfere with childbirth, you know, in the future.  The doctor looked confused. Confused enough for me to say, no thank you, not today. I love that girl at sixteen. Sometimes I wonder where she went.

In R’s bedroom my lips and tongue explored the length and width of his penis, my fingers caressed his scrotum. I pulled the moans out of him, every moment adding to my own desire, the slippery ache between my thighs. Every moment made me feel in control.  The feeling moved into me of just how powerful I could be.  How I calmed this athletic boy to complete submission beneath me.  How I’d done it with the flick of my tongue, my wet lips, my heat. The sensation of power made the hairs on the back of my neck rise. The power coursed through me, palpable.  I sat up.  We faced each other about a foot apart, and I smiled, the power shining out of me, luminous in the dark.

Suddenly, I knew I was scaring him.  And it felt good. I liked scaring him. His fear gave me power. He moved his hand to swat the air between our faces saying, Stop! Stop that! Loud and frightened.  Then, as if a switch flipped off, the power left me. I felt cold and a deep and sudden knowing moved electric through my body, a fear unlike any other quickened my heart and lifted goosebumps along my limbs. I knew with such certainty I needed to stop R from telling me what he had just felt—worse, what he had just seen. A knot of premonition hardened at the back of my throat: if he kept speaking, I’d see what he’d seen. I reached across the shadowed space between us and mashed my palm against his lips, but he said, Your smile. Your smile, stop smiling. 

And then it flipped and glared at me, hovering between us.  I’ll call it an apparition… a face comprised of light and dark. I never think of it as a ghost.  Only a face…no body attached…a face of shadows…radiating a terrifying expression. The depressions where its eyes should have been so dark they were hollow. It smiled horribly with a mouth full of teeth, so many pointed teeth, lips curled to convey what I can only describe as sinister.  

It played with us, whatever it was, having fun.  A fear I hadn’t known possible filled me and I squeezed my eyes tight against it.  I couldn’t speak. As I write this now, the air is light in my head and my ears feel blocked, pressured. I’m trembling over thirty years later.  

Since, I’ve believed humans exist with other planes or dimensions right round us.  That it’s possible evil exists and waits for the ready and willing.  That the dark side is there waiting, beguiling.  I’m not a religious person; this has nothing to do with all that. 

R scrambled to turn on the light. Then we woke his mother. The story pales in the retelling.  But I believe to this day if I ever see that face again, the fear will take me.  I’ll die.  I avoid shadowy twilight spaces.  I walk cautiously each day knowing the choice is there. 

For a long time, I felt terribly guilty and responsible for creating such a monster, whatever it was. For a long time, I believed I had made it with my power and blowjob proficiency.

I don’t believe that now.

Now, I think whatever that was, a spirit? An alien? It doesn’t matter. I believe it passed through me and played my emotions like a kitten with a tangle of string.

~

So, it’s not just my metaphors and it’s not just my words I’m frightened of; it’s stretching the skin of reality till I’m marooned or mad.  Did I create that demon? Does that dark capacity reside within me? Will my writing reveal—unleash—an unmanageable wickedness? I suppose some might find my fears and anxieties absurd and certainly questionable. For too long I’ve been afraid of the dark. These days I pad around this beautiful housesitting space in the gloaming, reveling the splash of waning and waxing moonlight glancing the St. Lawrence River. For the very first time since that experience at sixteen, I’m wondering whether I forejudged the apparition, and I question my fear of it all. And, for the sake of my writing, I’m ready to play.