My Heart, the Whore

Recently I feel like I increased my Understanding a little bit more, because it seemed clearer to me how you could get hurt by someone and enjoy it. This is not necessarily related to BDSM, but maybe it is.

I'm not explaining this very well. But I had met someone who had enacted a change in my heart that was unprecedented, which happens with all people who change my heart, because all people are different.

Anyway, the particulars of this person were that they made my heart feel like a prostitute. That's the simplest way I can put it, because it was a feeling and feelings don't really translate. But yes, I felt like my proud heart had been overthrown and reduced to the purest junkie beggary. What organ had once been the model of modest decorum became, as far as this person was concerned, the most outrageous slut imaginable.

So, from that sort of abject thrall, I could suddenly understand how you could flaunt being owned by someone, or be treated roughly by them. That person was my liege, my flag and my flower, if she wanted. (She didn't-- c'est la vie). So even if she cut off all my hair, stabbed me or bit me or deprived me, I would feel like running up to other people and, with the greatest, most genuine pride, show them my marks.

Anyway, like I say, this was all emotional, psychic information. None of it actually happened. But now I feel like I Understand a little bit more than I did before.

Summertime Detox

After a conversation with a friend yesterday, and watching some Red Hot Chili Peppers videos this morning (and some other psychological factors I won't go into here), I think it's a good time to try being really strict with myself. In other words, I'm going to try taking no psychoactive drugs whatsoever-- no caffeine, no nicotine, no THC, no alcohol, no nothin'. Also, I'll be a vegetarian while this is going on.

I haven't imposed any pressure on myself to do this for any specific length of time, but I feel like it's an important thing to try and do right now. Also I'll be trying to get as much exercise as possible.

It probably has to do with the fact that the sun has finally come out around here.

Also, I'd really love to finally try Kundalini yoga-- I found a studio that teaches it, right here in town. The only thing stopping me is cost, but maybe I can find a way to swing it. If this all works out, I think I'll be in a good place to make some psychic progress.

The Absent One

"2. Historically, the discourse of absence is carried on by the Woman: Woman is sedentary, Man hunts, journeys; Woman is faithful (she waits), man is fickle (he sails away, he cruises). It is Woman who gives shape to absence, elaborates its fiction, for she has time to do so; she weaves and she sings; the Spinning Songs express both immobility (by the hum of the Wheel) and absence (far away, rhythms of travel, sea surges, cavalcades). It follows that in any man who utters the other's absence something feminine is declared: this man who waits and who suffers from his waiting is miraculously feminized. A man is not feminized because he is inverted but because he is in love. (Myth and utopia: the origins have belonged, the future will belong to the subjects in whom there is something feminine.)

3. Sometimes I have no difficulty enduring absence. Then I am "normal": I fall in with the way "everyone" endures the departure of a "beloved person"; I diligently obey the training by which I was very early accustomed to be separated from my mother-- which nonetheless remained, at its source, a matter of suffering (not to say hysteria). I behave as a well-weaned subject; I can feel myself, meanwhile, on other things besides the maternal breast.

This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival; for if I did not forget, I should die. The lover who doesn't forget sometimes dies of excess, exhaustion, and tension of memory (like Werther)."

--Roland Barthes, "A Lover's Discourse"