Visit with bruises?

Marie was just here for two nights -- way too short, except that she doesn't have any more vacation than that from work right now and I had tickets to a concert for Tuesday night. Oh, ... and also I'd visited her for four nights last week, en route to another business trip. And then, too, we'd gone out to a concert.

I haven't kept a running tally of our visits, the way I did nearly ten years ago when I started dating D. Nor really of our conversations, though there's still the chance that I might post all our e-mails on-line here. Some day. When I get around to it. Mañana.

Meanwhile we continue to talk about everything. This time I heard about one of her aunts who spent the thirty years in between her first and second husbands firmly decrying the institution of monogamy. This is a different aunt from the one who broke one of the beds at the family's vacation retreat because of some very energetic fucking. And of course her mother spent years addicted to both booze and sex. I suggested to Marie that maybe, just maybe, it would be possible to detect a certain thread of ... high energy in the women of her family. True, it has only been recently that Marie herself has had much of a sex life (courtesy of yours truly), but I added that she wouldn't have suffered so much from fighting against her own sexual nature if that nature hadn't been very strong to begin with.

I've also continued to send her some of my old poetry. She has been astonishingly good about reading love poems I wrote for D, though as often as not she has followed up with questions: Wait, you said this and that about your relationship with D -- how does this fit in at all? Anyway, just before her flight down I had sent her "Call me".

The discussion here was interesting. Did I really think D was two-timing me? Hard to say. We talked about it a lot as a joke, but D was in her late 50's and women that age don't get a lot of offers. (On the other hand if anybody that age would get an offer, it would have been D!) And I added that (as I note in the post itself) the poem doesn't describe exactly what happened ... although honestly I no longer remember what really happened, only what I wrote. And finally I remarked, as a stylistic point, that I wished I had found a way to put the word true in the first line of the third stanza, because having true or truth repeated in every single line would have been a nice touch.

That she could help me with. This morning, while she was waiting for her plane back home, Marie e-mailed me this update:
 

"Tomorrow call my phone just after six.
I'm on the road – alone an hour or two.
They say that phones and driving shouldn't mix,
But I am famished for a chance to talk with you."

And so I called, a bit past six o'clock.
I heard a rustle, voices, then a hush.
"My darling, are you free now? Can you talk?"
"I'm not," she said, and hung up in a rush.

It's true she'll send me e-mail with the dawn,
Assuring me how true I'll find her heart.
She'll tell me, "Truly this is what went on."
If only Truth for her weren't such an art!

And yet I'll love her every bit as well,
No matter where she was, or what she'll tell.


The one other thing that caught my attention this trip was ... well, a turn in our ongoing discussion of sex. Marie had remarked that for years her intensest sexual fantasies had to do with a man drugging a woman to make her lose all her inhibitions, and then forcing her to feel outrageous ecstasy. And I had remarked that, oddly enough, this is how our own fucking usually goes. I don't have to drug her, it's true. But since I almost never get hard any more, or not for long, I spend most of our fucking in the coordinated use of my hands and mouth. This means that I can keep going more or less as long as I want to ... and what I usually want is to push her into coming over and over and over again. Sometimes I'll pause and let her catch her breath, but only as a momentary interlude before starting again ... and again and again. So am I actually acting out her darkest fantasies? And how far am I coercing her? (In fairness she is always joyful, both during and after. So it's hardly against her will! Still, the timing is all mine and not hers.)

Then this afternoon, after she got home, she sent me a text that made me think of the same topic all over again.

rough draft

Marie was here to visit a little while ago, and during the whole visit I had this nagging cough that would not go away and sometimes got frighteningly severe. Today she sent me this.

the coughing fit shakes you
then you sit, doubled over
breathing painfully,
shallowly.
trying to stop the next spasm

the coughing fit shakes you
then you crouch, doubled over
breathing carefully,
shallowly,
braced for more pain

the coughing fit shakes you
then you lie, curling double
mouth open
silent
frightened to breathe

As if a summons

[This post originated as a letter to Marie on February 10, 2017, the date I have posted it. But in fact I didn't get around to posting it here until April 25, 2020, some three years later. I'm indolent like that, as you've all long known.]

My love, my heart,

 

I saw an article today that sounds like it’s calling me, except of course that I have a job and a life and am generally busy with all kinds of other stuff. But I didn’t expect to read what I was reading.

 

A little background. You remember that when I was in graduate school (some 30+ years ago), I was studying political philosophy. In that time, the two most interesting writers that I ran across (other than the Big Names that everybody knew, that they offered classes in) were Carl Schmitt and Bertrand de Jouvenel. I read three short books by Schmitt (of which I lost two when we moved back home), and never actually read any Jouvenel until I was working at a slow job a few years later and had a lot of time on my hands. I’ve read one of Jouvenel’s books (Du pouvoir), and own a couple others that I mean to get to some day. (smile)

 

Check these two out in Wikipedia. (One place where I’m inclined to disagree with the article on Schmitt is that, according to my understanding, Schmitt’s Nazism during the 1930s-40s was pure opportunism and not based on any real commitment.)

 

But all these studies had something of the antique or historical about them. While Francis Fukuyama may have exaggerated in saying that the whole world was going to end up as neoliberal democracies, certainly there has been nobody literate and intelligent out there arguing at a philosophical level for any other set of political principles since … when? The 1930s? (I leave out the war period itself. Inter arma silent philosophi.) Of course there were self-proclaimed Marxists in the 1960s, but it’s hard to think of Marxism as a living body of thought by then. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but even so … the 1960s were a while ago. Of course there has been quite a lot written by political Islamists, but not much of that is likely to be directly applicable to Europe and the United States.

 

And then today I read this:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/behind-the-internets-dark-anti-democracy-movement/516243/

 

Followed (as a P.S.) by this:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/steve-bannon-books-reading-list-214745

 

And here I sit, out of practice and out of shape and libraries behind the curve. (sigh)

 

In that parallel universe where I had made a career out of Schmitt and Jouvenel, I would have languished in total obscurity at some small, liberal arts college, until today … by which time I would have tenure (therefore liberty) and the background to fight against this stuff in my sleep. (sigh)

 

Oh well.

 

Back to work.   

  

Seven deadly sins, for the New Year

By now you know the drill. Every few years I take the same silly quiz again and update my results here. Past entries are here, here, and here. Lust is back up again, possibly because I am involved with Marie. Gluttony and Sloth are doing pretty well for themselves. Pretty accurate, I suppose.

Here's the chart.

Greed:	Low
Gluttony:	Medium
Wrath:	Low
Sloth:	Medium
Envy:	Very Low
Lust:	High
Pride:	Very Low

Take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz

Sic et non

In an email a couple weeks ago, Marie talked about how since September she has been tying herself in knots – because she wants to marry me, and that's not possible (at least today) and from this she generated a huge amount of anxiety. Some day I'll get around to posting her message and my reply. But meanwhile, here's a sonnet I wrote this afternoon on the same subject.

__________
   

You find yourself by Yes and No entrapped,

Like Abelard inspecting rival creeds,

Or maybe loves me, loves me not's more apt,

Tugging at daisy blooms like worry beads.
   

Shall we be wed? I did not answer Yes.

And if not Yes, why then it must be No.

And if it's No, the question's foolishness.

Are you a fool, to trade in folly so?
   

Or maybe Yes and No don't rule the heart.

Perhaps there's color out past black and white.

We might need dialectic less than art,

Or harsh fluorescents less than candlelight.
   

Hold close, my love, and let me stroke your hair,

While blocks of questions sublime into air.

Intention of kindness

I went to our town's Theravadin Sangha this evening. It's been a few months since I was there last, but I thought it might be useful in light of the. ... umm ... distractibility (or whatever you call it) that I wrote about last night. Anyway, the woman who gave the dharma talk (after we sat for 40 minutes) started by asking if anyone had made New Year's resolutions. No-one had, but she used this entry point to talk about intentions and intentionality. She even invited us to consider setting intentions for the rest of our lives ... or, you know, if that seemed too intimidating then maybe for the next year, or the next two weeks, or whatever we felt we could handle. 

When the discussion started, one young man whom I hadn't seen before said his intention was to be kinder to his wife, because they were fighting a lot and he claimed it was all (or mostly) because of his own spite and jealousy. And I thought, "Oh wow, there's actually someone I might have something useful to say to." So when we were all done I talked briefly to him:

"Your story is none of my business, but I spent a lot of years where you are right now and one thing that helped me was just to slow down. It's so easy to respond to a trigger in ways that you later regret, when you jump at them automatically. And what I finally learned after decades of jumping at triggers was just to pause – for 30 seconds, or a minute, or 5 minutes – and then ask myself What do I really want to say? What's going to help? Anyway, it helped me."

He thanked me and said he'd try it. So hey – maybe I did something useful today ....

Sent from my iPhone

Not anxiety

Worked late. Went to the store. Got home. Ate dinner. Had a couple glasses of wine. Watched a couple episodes of a TV show from five years ago that I just got from Son 2. Went to bed. Masturbated. Drank two shots hard liquor. Ate snacks. Back to bed.

And you know, I didn't need to do any of it. I wasn't even hungry for dinner.

So all of it -- the whole evening -- was just distraction. To keep my mind busy. Why? To avoid feeling ... ummm, whatever-it-is. In the past  in this blog I've called it "anxiety" but that's not really right. "Anxiety" sounds like I'm worried about what's going to happen, or about my to-do list, or something, and none of that's true. It's not loneliness -- the boys were staying with me through yesterday and I would have felt the same thing, only it would have been masked by talking to them. And I might not have drunk as much, nor had the late night snacks. Nor masturbated. (It's a small apartment without much privacy.)

What's the point of all the activity, then? Beats the shit out of me.