Writing: Welcome to my Erotic Nightmare
sex, madness and creation
It’s all wet and rainy out. I sit at my desk and I feel that I have been absent from this and from myself. To take myself seriously as a writer. Man, I used to write all the time. Granted, I was usually high when I did. Reclaiming one’s voice is not a simple task. Chalk it up to laziness, but there is insecurity at the root of it. The sense that, well, what have I to say that is of any matter to anyone? It has all been said, it has all been done. Much like Alice in Wonderland, I emphatically advise others to write or at least journal, because it is therapeutic, because it awakens one to all sorts of marvelous gifts of insight and revelation. I sincerely believe these things. And yet I allow myself to stagnate, Writing is a tricky thing. When you think about the activity itself, it seems easy enough say, compared to competing in the Olympics, or going to war. Writing is a deceptive endeavor; somewhere between lucid dreaming and and stripping. Writing stories, for me, has been a bit of a Sleeping Beauty erotic nightmare: unconscious and vulnerable, dreaming up my fantasies while lying prone and nakedly visible to anyone who looks upon me. My true face exposed. My words betraying my truths through the characters and metaphors and imagery I unconsciously select. It’s utterly terrifying as well as exhilarating. Every time I finish something I feel like I have cheated death somehow. Like maybe I have one more round left in me yet, maybe I am not a total and utter coward after all.
I never set out to write things of an erotic or violent nature. The reason I end up doing things of that nature is very simple: I am easily bored. It takes a lot to make me stay on topic. In order to fully engage my brain I need to have my senses fully engaged. Apparently it is sex and violence that most command my attention. I don’t think I am alone in this. Adrenaline and Dopamine make one sit up and pay attention; all senses engaged. When aroused or at death’s door you suddenly realize: goodness! I am alive! I could be dead in a minute. Wow! All systems go!
I think that my first story Star Power, was as much about my own relationship to my writing as it was about the themes I thought it was about. To write is to be naked in a way that is about a million times more naked than if I was being seen in a porno. Ironically, or rather, fittingly, my first story was a nightmare of the self: muted yet overexposed. A sentient sex doll at a porn shoot. I’ve never felt naked in my skin. I have always felt it was just my skin. Quite ordinary. I note the eyes that survey it, and I see what it is they are seeing, but from the inside of my fleshbody, I am inside my own brain, and my skin, my body, are simply the temporary flesh receptacles of my consciousness. I am not being naïve. I know what men see when they see me, and I do not pretend to not take advantage of it when I am feeling lonely and in need of validation. But I am able to differentiate myself as object and subject.
It is an odd talent I developed quite early on. It developed alongside my sexuality, which sprung like a sweaty lipstick garden out of my Madonna worship. I shaped my own sexuality out of my sexual attraction to her and other women whom I found to be glamorous. I did not know back then that I was Bi, but in any case, I began objectifying myself from the start. I saw myself in the mirror, mimicking what I imagined a desirable female to be. If I pleased my own eye I felt satisfied that I had accomplished my goal. To say I turned myself on, might perhaps be a stretch, it might not. Honestly, its been ages since I was 8 years old, so I can’t be quite sure.
I did begin to be a bit offended when I did not get the male attention I wanted in middle school. I seemed to be invisible. I did not try too hard, to be fair, though I think the main cause was my late development. So while other girls were parading their impressive mammaries about, with boys drooling after them, I remained pathetically flat chested until like 13ish. I did not understand that, despite the fact that in my head I had been a movie star for years, all the boys saw was a strange big eyed big eared girl with a questionable fashion flair who talked either too much or not enough.
By the time boys began to take note I had already been rearin to go for eight years. This made me exceptionally starry eyed and desperate. I read Lolita when I was 16, when I felt myself at the top of my deadly temptingness. When I got the attention of older men, it was the hugest validation. Finally they saw what I saw! It is fortunate I was not exposed to a bunch of perverts at a younger age. I was jailbait waiting to happen, especially since adults always marveled at how much older I seemed for my age. Little did they know the naughty things I would have surely been down for at a very not legal age, if prompted by the sufficient amount of encouragement and warmth. Little did I know how easy it is to seduce older men. Perhaps I was looking for daddy validation. In any case, after many sad scrapes and tangles, I wised up.
Sylvia Plath was and is probably my main literary influence, because I admire her talent for laying herself bare, while still remaining such a confounding riddle, to herself as well as the reader. It is really her style I admire. The way she uses words like bullets, like knives. Reading her poetry is like watching a pornographic performance art piece of self-flagellation. A dark striptease. You are tantalized and horrified at the same time. Sex and death. That’s what its all about. Just ask Freud, ask your central nervous system.
In truth, I am writing this just so that I can procrastinate on the larger task at hand. I always cheat on myself like that. Maybe that is why I have developed a bad habit of cheating on my lovers. My loyalties are contrary. In fact, sometimes, when bedding another man, my affection for the other is only increased. Cheating means something different to me than it means to others, I guess. I know it is not right, in principle, but neither is selling myself short and constantly falling into relationships in which I am unhappy and sexually or intellectually unfulfilled, and yet I do it constantly, since, apparently, I hate myself, or am simply terrible at reading people, despite imagining myself some master sleuth of the male mind.
I began writing poetry due to my first plunge into deep depression, at age 12. It was my first Midwestern winter. It was a starkness and a desolation I had never imagined possible. I had been uprooted from my home and all my friends and was in a strange and alien land that was unsettlingly sterile, culturally as well as scenically. My life was utterly uprooted, my hormones were kicking in and working their dark voodoo upon my system and brain, I was going a bit mad, I realized I had no idea who I really was anymore. Feeling horribly trapped and desolate, my only escape was the pen. I wrote as if I was prisoner shut out from the world, never to enter it again, from my existential exile.
When I finally began my foray into love, that became my primary fuel and favorite drug. Nothing blends acute misery and utter dizzy bliss like love. I was a shameless addict and I tapped my fresh vein over and over again, relishing the pain, confusion, terror, madness, erotic heat, and intense bondings of early love. Due to my romantic excesses (in intensity not multiplicity) I was pretty much tapped out by college. My last high school boyfriend was pretty much Heathcliff, the typical Byronic hero (in my head). I probably suffered most with him, he was probably the most unstable, and he was the one I loved the most fiercely. After od’ing on his love I was a shell of my former self. But a new addiction was already in place. Weed, and lots of it. In that high I found what I could never find in another: a return to my deepest self, a magic carpet that swooshed and twirled all over my crazy brain. I marveled at the sights I saw. I had no idea my mind was so full of stuff. I was pretty much stoned the entire time I was in college. That I got any work done is a sheer miracle and testament to my high functioning haze.
The cause for my extreme escapism was depression. The cause for my extreme dive into love was the same. I thought, oh, magic, I’m in love, my depression seems to be cured! So I traded the torments and sacrifices of love, which seemed quite minor, in comparison to engulfing debilitating endless gray sky expanses of suicidal depression.
So, love was my drug, then drugs were my drug, then, sensing the tapping out of my escapist options, I began to wonder about finding a more lasting fix for my existential malaise. I realized I had to turn inward, find the Goddess consciousness inside. In doing so, I rediscovered myself, sexually as well as spiritually. In fact, the discovery was one and the same.
The odd paradox of female sexuality: containment and penetrability. It is all inside, hidden, enclosed, and yet so easy to enter. Women are containment vessels. We have the power of creation between our legs, we show the evidence of monthly blood sacrifice to the ever thirsting gods of life and death. It is a terrifying and amazing thing that is also quite ordinary and seems really quite banal: a wet hole, much like a mouth, but the apparatus of life giving and destruction lie tucked away beyond view.
Writing, for me, is never truly divorced from my sex. Orgasm and conception, creation is the creative and biological goal, the reason for my body to self lubricate when penetrated, the reason for my mind to lubricate when inspired by an image or abstract concept that haunts me till I let it out.
There is no difference, in fact, according to Noami Wolf, the connection between the mind and the female vagina is much closer linked than people assume. Sexual trauma can dull the mind. Arousal can stimulate profound artistic inspiration. In her book Vagina: A New Biography she explores the many facets of this awesome link between the female brain and the cervical nerve center. Emotional security is crucial to sexual fulfillment. And the female orgasm is a mysterious and multifaceted thing. It is sacred, it is complicated and it is limitless. When aroused and fully satisfied, the nerves from cervix to brain, light up, stimulated and on fire. Ideas come easier, thoughts are clearer, and inspiration flows freely. When a woman is sexually satisfied she flourishes and becomes stronger and more capable in every way. The vagina is truly the nerve core of the female mind.
Female subjugation takes on a whole new meaning in this light. By controlling a woman sexually, you control her mind. It’s no wonder Charlie Manson’s main recruitment process involved three days of senseless fucking while tripping and demanded they call him “daddy”. He called it the ‘daddy game’. Indeed. Maybe he was gangbusters in bed. At any rate, his stamina would impress any girl. But more importantly, he knew that by satisfying his women sexually they would then be more likely to buy any of the ideological and behavioral modification kool aid he wished to sell them. He was mindfucking them into submission. When you are fucking a woman you are fucking her mind. Brutal, heartless sex or rape can be mentally damaging. And there is evidence of it in studies Noami Wolf conducted for her research in Vagina. Tender and considerate lovemaking that allows the feelings to flow and the orgasms to bloom and flourish make amazing things happen in her mind. This is why sex transports. It can be the most sublime of mystical experiences or the most banal and cursory, depending on the attention, time and care given to actually create the magic of true communion.
Now I feel that familiar restlessness again. My fixes are not quite working anymore. I have been delving into what moves other artists. In reading about Mary Shelley and the inner turmoil that created her famous monster, I ask myself if, despite the conclusion that I have had enough trauma to last me a lifetime, if I have truly had enough. Perhaps this is an utterly backward approach to creativity, but I know enough of myself that I do not explode unless prompted by either pleasure or pain. My crucible of love and torment no longer seems to do the trick. Perhaps the time of treating myself like a test animal hooked up to various electric wires needs to stop. Hooked up to 2000 volt batteries from head to toe, shocked awake, my inner murk no longer dissipates. This is the rant of an addict. Love, sex, drugs, pain, pleasure, madness, relief from reality. “I can’t get no satisfaction”, the Rolling Stone’s chorus suddenly pops into my head as I say this. Living like rock star in my mind, have I hit my fat Elvis years already, before I have truly blown my creative load? My conceptual sequined jumpsuit is old and soiled. The polyester smells and constricts instead of glamourizing my inner fire.
Bald wires shiver with surges. I am not protected. I am gonna blow. My head will go flying off in one direction, my legs, finally split apart by vibrating and gyrating currents will flail madly like reanimated dead frogs, electrified, in opposite directions. Where does that leave me now? My insides spilling out. Of the new electrified soup a new body will rise. A body already electrified and self-fueling. Not needing a man to pleasure me either mentally or physically. What a dream. I would be invincible. I do want babies one day, so I will need a man for that. The basic human need, beyond procreation, of a marriage of minds, or at least, spiritual communion is undeniable and cannot be denied. So, I’m fucked. I desire those who hurt me. It’s a sad fact. I see other chicks with the nice guys and I wonder why they can’t be mine. I am drawn to men who are emotionally neglectful and disconnected from themselves, and thus able to hurt me. I know I am a raw nerve, so why do I go towards men who clearly are insensitive? I salivate at the battle. Being hurt is a feeling I recognize. I live for the threat of danger and the many little deaths along the way. Ego obliteration. I use men like battering rams. I hope they will pound my self away so that I will no longer be trapped inside my old self. Its war. Its always war. No matter how much I say I want peace and communion, what really gets me off is the battle, the subterfuge, the espionage. Maybe it is just because that is all I know.
In my mind it is always a war, it always has been. Pitting one adversary against another, just as I would do with my parents. When my mother was cold or mean I would go to my father, and on the rare occasion he pissed me off, I’d turn on him and sic my mom on him. I always won, or so I thought. I always lost, actually, I lost my sense of loyalty and my ability to ever truly trust anyone I loved. I made love into a war because love was war. It would have probably benefited me if they had been a united front, even if it would have resulted in more hurt at the moment. I was learning about love from them, and to see them so easily turned against each other was not terribly reassuring. I learned about the power of manipulation, I learned that if I play it right I can always come out the victim and I became a master at playing the martyr. I learned to always justify my bad behavior somehow. There was always a justification. I became fascinated with the outlaws of society, the criminals, the madmen. I assumed this was because I admired their freedom of spirit and delighted in analyzing the aberrant mind. But I wonder now, if part of that was not actually because I was searching for insight into my own antisocial and sociopathic tendencies.
Madness has always been a point of focus for me. As I began my spiritual explorations I learned that the poet/mystic was a type of person that I identified with the most. I realized that all my quests were leading to that sort of deep inner and outer exploration. That, despite my sense of alienation and separation I felt with most mortals, I shared a link with the weirdos on the fringe who can see things and comprehend things most people can’t or will not, for fear of losing their foothold on the life and way of being that they are familiar with. I have found kinship with other artists, for the most part, for they also speak in the language of metaphors and they make the kinds of mental connections that seem like utter nonsense to the ordinary ground dwellers. I am a seeker of the far reaches of my mind and the cosmic landscape beyond. I am haunted by my personal demons, like everyone else, but my calling is that of the mystic. My fate is cast with those who see visions of the future and who learn, through mental training to perceive the reality beyond the assumed social reality others assume is all there is. I have seen and read enough to know that what lies beyond and the modes of seeing it are accessible through self exploration, meditation and trust of inner voices and the heightened observations of the signs that appear all around.
I am returning to my mystical roots. Sex is a spiritual act. It is not a tug of war. It is a very vital link to the divine. My insides are tender, sensitive and fragile, my mind, an exposed mass of nerves with feelers prodding the ether. When you enter my vagina, you enter my mind. I am vulnerable and filled with raw potentiality. I refuse to accept the parameters of ordinary existence. I know I have a choice and I chose to fly. This is my only goal. It is my destiny. I do not care about fitting anyone’s mold, because my potential is only as great as the limits of experience and exploration that I dare myself to expand. Sexually, creatively, intellectually, my self expands and requires anyone with whom I share myself in any of those ways to fully comprehend the magnitude of this endeavor.
I fear and love sex because with my body I cannot lie. I fear and love the act of creative writing because with my language I cannot lie. I enter into both acts with the fearfulness and anticipation of Mickey Mouse in Fantasia as the Sorcerers Apprentice, my heart in my throat and a dark fire in my loins. The power of words, the power of love, mystical and magical juices flowing in the act of love and creation are nothing short of Alchemical potions. The stuff of life, DNA, the stuff of emotion, the thirst of the soul, the power of a mind awhirl and a soul on fire; all making marvelous magic for anyone who dares to be transported and transformed by the eternal process of surrender to Eros, in the bedroom or upon the page. The white sheets beg to be soiled with the ink and the blood from my quivering pen. The vein is ready to be pierced.
LezaBlackSun 