January 2016
THE PROBLEM, it seems, is with death.
When we first become self-aware, and have incorporated language so that communication and meaning can go beyond facial expressions and gestures, the possibilities of death begin to present themselves to us in ways that have definable expressions. It terrifies us, when the observation is made that someone we loved, we cared about, we liked, dies, and how that can also happen to us. No one around us has any good answers, not that satisfy the loss, the doom, the utter realization that we aren’t going to see our friend, our loved one any more, that we aren’t going to continue to enjoy their presence. Being selfish creatures, the connection is made that what happened to them, could happen to us.
Our parents, in their pities and concerns over how their beloved happy child is devastated by something we could not possibly be prepared for, tell us a story.
The motivation for the story is pure and simple and an honest attempt to offer comfort to someone who cannot possibly understand what has just happened. The story goes something like this: “They’ve gone on to a better place.”
This is the fundamental story we are told that has any real meaning for us. Whoever it is that left us, and won’t be back, have somehow had something survive from themselves that we will meet again someday, and that everything will be alright. The cleverness of this story is that it leads to the inevitable questions as to whether or not what happened to them can happen to us. The big shocker comes down from on high that yes, yes it can, and in fact will someday, but that it is alright. That whatever it was that survived from our loved one will survive in us, and we will meet them again, and we can then again be happy. The end.
The story fulfills its purpose, and it calms a despondent child. The story, though, does not end there. The child who accepts the story—which is difficult not to, considering the source—changes heaven and earth to make it fit in with everything the child sees and hears for the rest of his or her life. At least, until a better story comes along.
This is the story that is the basis of all religion, of all philosophy, of all moral code, and it leads to the corollaries that are so useful in maintaining discipline growing up, that there is another place we could go to after we die, that isn’t so happy, so pleasant. To make us less of an inconvenience to others. Eventually, there comes into play beings bigger and more powerful than everyone known or met, beings mightier than even death itself, who are in a constant fight over us and the parts of us that survive our deaths, and gods and demons end up being at war over our souls that somehow spills into our everyday lives. And so it is that the clumsy attempts of a parent to comfort a grieving child leads to immutable concepts of heaven, and hell, and judgment, and “knowing” right from wrong to the depths of our souls, where the spirits of gods and demons shout at us constantly as to what to do, what to think, what to believe, what to feel, and how our self-righteousnesses are better than someone else’s self-righteousnesses, and just who is of value and worth, with all the endless variations as to what any of those things specifically mean, with enormous heaven-and-hell complications and upshots attached to every possible answer and action.
Which is where we, as erotic writers, come in. For we, too, offer up stories, that are shamed and ridiculed as being bad or evil or worthless by various layer-upon-layer to the whole good/bad right/wrong heaven/hell schema that is a conclusion arrived at by the simplistic formula of “if this is bad, then that is bad” that builds through ridiculous ramifications, until it gets to us and what we write, and finds us wanting, as we do not fit in with the structures of worth and edifications of value.
Because we tell a story that predates the death story. We were sexual beings before we were self-aware, death-afraid creatures. We were sexualizing ourselves and those around us before we even understood there was a difference between ourselves and each other. At a time that all we could do was eat, sleep, shit, cry, and try to fuck, the first rules put down on us were not about how and when to shit, and when and where not to, even though that is much-touted as being so fundamental toward our developments. The truth is that in all societies, that pretty much takes care of itself, sooner or later, and it is only some groups that force it onto the young, earlier than they are ready for it. With consequence, of course, that is explained by various fixations and fetishes we end up having when we get older. But before then, before any of that could happen, when we would cry because we were hungry, we would get comforted and fed until we fell asleep in our parents’ happy arms on a daily basis. But when we made moves that could be construed as sexual, in trying to touch and feel genitals, to play with them, to achieve happy erections in boys over kissing and handling of ourselves and each other, and what passes for happy wetnesses in girls for the same sorts of activities, that was the first time we heard “no” that we understood as something coming about due to something we were doing from Mom and Dad, who were the biggest powers in existence, to us, until we heard the death story. They would scold us and put our hands away from ourselves or whoever got our attentions, maybe even spank us. Or maybe, we watched it happen to someone we were connecting with, with a strange mix of sadness and horror over what we were witnessing, and what it meant to us and our feelings, to see someone else punished for our affections. There is where we learned to not trust people with our emotions, where we learned not only that we were not accepted for how we felt playing with our friends, but that we should not accept others, either; this is where we learned to be embarrassed and to embarrass each other, in an effort to win the approval once again of the mighty, and, where we learned to deny and ridicule the only true weapon we have against death, where we can be involved with creating something that is part of ourselves, that will survive us.
And so our erotic stories are filled with acceptances of the sexual act, overcoming ourselves and each other, in defiance to our parents and everything they ever stood for and taught us. Which is why the truly erotic aspects of our writings come about in associating sex with pain and humiliation that we first learned was the result of such feelings, all eventually leading to an orgasm we do not understand and cannot control. Erotica is a form of time-travel. Back to the beginning.
All of which is why erotica in all its forms and the creators of such things are so reviled by the death-story-tellers, as they cannot answer the questions of death beyond what a child could understand, and how our stories fuck with their sense of happy endings in the sky in the future, and how these judges and condemners of all that disagree with them and their version of the death story cannot possibly accept the lessons we have to tell that tell us our parents were wrong about how we should play with each other, and about what we have to go through to get back to the cribs and cradles with our friends and those we love, to enjoy each other, and be happy. Hard and wet and fed and fucking and well-shit upon and pissed upon by each other, accepting everything even if it hurts, even if we hurt each other in the process, held in mighty arms until we fall asleep at last.
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