Category: Essays

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Love and Let Die

 

credit: corvalisadvocate.com

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.  Mary Oliver

In the morning after a rain when the ocean settles into the sky, the horizon looks true,
not divided but a continuum–grey on grey–indecipherably terra-firmament.

My life appears so linear, me moving my mother and father along their journey, as they once held my hand and led my toddling feet, cajoling them forward and dragging them back, the push and pull of a daughter’s love full of fear and longing as they travel into the night even as my daughters, soft and loosely tethered to my heels, unwittingly come along for that treacherous trek of mortality. But the line is an illusion. Time is recursively experienced and what else is there but subjective moments of breath?

Heidegger notes: Temporalizing does not signify that ecstases come in a ‘succession’. The future is not later than having been, and having-been is not earlier than the Present. Temporality temporalizes itself as a future which makes present in a process of having been. (Being and Time 68: 401).

The past, present and future are always with us in lived experience. I am one (of many others) with an awareness and constitution of my past, my history, born to certain parents in a particular calendar time, history, and place, aware that I exist–live, breathe, do–in the moment known as now until the someday I cease to exist and so experience time not as an arrow shooting from birth to death but as a walking simultaneity of past, future and present I carry and am.

Like time, bodies are continuous, only unmindful minds make it not so–the mime of generations. We are and are not the infant or/nor the corpse but live suspended between the two, seemingly marching forward from birth and facing death, but really carrying our birth and death with us at all times.  Living with another human being is living with her patterns and hang ups developed from childhood, her fears of her own mortality and the actions and inabilities to love or trust or celebrate life due to her genetics, home life, experiences or attitude toward her own mortality.  She is reckless because she can be in her twenties with so much life ahead or she is cautious and more discerning with the people with whom she spends time given she may only have a good ten or twenty years of life left on Earth.  Death shapes her.

To clearly “see” ourselves poised for death sharpens our vision of what is real and true, who we are. Since I will die, I schedule my days full of stuff to do. Since I will die, I plan from the time I become aware of my impending death to go to school, get a career, a family–live a life in finite time. If I were immortal, would I choose to get up and go to work each day?

The realization that I am not, wearing my own death as a blanket across my face in order to make me see what I do in the unknown time allotted to me, who I am, is the experience of time that allows me to be my authentic self, roughly paraphrasing from Heidegger. We all know what it feels like to have a close call. The aftermath of that potentially fatal collision–near miss–shows us who we are, what we are made of, what we hope for, and what is important to us–truly, not lost in the doing-ness of the day. So how to keep death in front of our eyes?

Read a lot. Observe. Listen. Think. Feel. Try on faces, clothes, philosophies, scenarios, and lovers; test your instincts and learn. “Love who can love you the way you need and want to be loved,” I tell my daughters. The formula is simple. It only takes knowing who you are, letting the “soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Time as aggregation, an amassment of experience and burning, is the fullness of space opening up as the big bang deity of the universes spreads the creation of all we are and imagine unending.

The deep field experiment (http://youtu.be/LENqnjZGX0A) of the Hubble telescope reveals that the infinite is even more than we circumscribed previously. David Eagleman, in his informative and entertaining Youtube video on Possibilianism, remarks that the Hubble telescope identified over ten thousand galaxies in a pencil eraser sized spot in seemingly starless space viewed from Earth. Upon learning this, I was struck with how humans are unfathomably minuscule and particulate and endless as moving dust of eons innumerable.

Perspective. There is no time or reason to suffer needlessly at the hands of others in the finite or infinite. Each human is an ever burgeoning expanding and shrinking self in a moment. We are not either-or’s, especially not labels that predict behaviors merely for the sake of another’s comfort. I don’t have to identify as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual in order for someone to understand how to act with me, determine what interests or potential lies in me.

Gender is not merely anatomy. Sexuality is not merely the act. In the words of Robyn Ochs, bisexual activist, writer, professor:
“Sex is between your legs; gender is between your ears.” In real people, sex and gender do not always correspond…sex and gender each exist on a continuum; thus there are more than two sexes, and more than two genders.

This resonates with my lived experience thus far. We cannot know another by assuming we know, only intuit and strive and thrive, be brave and curious. Love is all we get in finite time. Judge not so unthinkingly.

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Guest Post: “The Mother as Mistress” by Jim Caron

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There is something between a son and his mother that I cannot explain. Some sort of bond that relates to all women, the way men thrive on acceptance from that special female, whether it’s mother or mate. That is the essence of a man, acceptance whether through love or status, it is his most valuable currency in life, rich or poor.
However, there are those men who never leave the scope of the womb, the childhood home, their mother’s sphere. Some men to the point you sense something bizarre, perhaps a bit twisted and fodder for the likes of a Psycho movie or an incest fest.
I see it in that long time schoolmate, Jeff. Through the years, Jeff never moved beyond his mother’s house. You may know the type, never married, still at Mom’s and past 40, never in the company of a woman or significant other male partner. This particular schoolmate lived across the street from my parent’s house. Same age as myself, we attended the same Junior High and High School. I suspect it was his way of acquiring property by simply out living his parents, as opposed to the careers we were steered towards in every class we took together.
He lives there still, alone as far as I can see after driving through the neighborhood recently. Watering the lawn, he stood in the front yard as I went by, smiled and waved as I am wondering what his secret life might be like, what weird twisted kind of sex life he may have. Perhaps one of those guys has sex with pool toys, or maybe cold liver from the meat counter, these choices running through my mind as I’m rounding the corner, I won’t be stopping for a chat.
Howard. His mother dies and he becomes obsessed with psychics in an attempt to relieve something within himself he never vested in, and instead, relied on his mother to provide. He never married, kept to himself, women found him creepy, he was. I still can’t figure the man out. He was the anal sort that would paint outlines of his tools on a peg board in the garage. You would go into the kitchen and open the “junk” drawer and everything in it was carefully arranged. There were also a lot of guns, he liked guns. His mother’s inheritance bought a number of weapons and a truck load of ammo which he and I indulged at the Huntington Beach shooting range on a daily basis.
I became an excellent shot, could hit my mark with most types of pistols shooting with either hand. As with any mistress, first or second string, the newness of Howard’s guns wore off and he realized this new mistress did not provide the warmth and acceptance he received from his mother. Howard was always a geek, the boy all the others teased and made fun of, his mother was able to fix that for him. Despite being the ultimate nerd, Howard constantly proved himself as a talented musician when we were in drum corps, but never gained social acceptance in any circles. Whether in the corps or later on, when he left the army and became that lone hippie geek with the bell on his pants that would wander into my night club, staying all night, barely saying a word. During none of this time did Howard bond with a woman, he was the weird loner who never had a girlfriend, always close to mother, an only child.
A man obsessed with his dead mother, what sort of twisted mistress she must be. His father, was still alive, a cranky old coot that his mother divorced after a public scandal at the Garden Grove City Hall. The head of the recreation department and his secretary caught in a love nest, in the 1960’s it was a death knell, Howard was only 9. The father had a more traditional approach to the mistress concept, Howard bonding with his mother rather than venturing out to seek acceptance from a mate. Howard held his mother in saintly regard, she never remarried or bonded again as far I knew of, so Howard saw her as some sort of “Virgin Mother” and never forgave his father whom he neglected for the rest of the man’s life.
Howard became more sullen and reclusive as he got older, going to the psychic more often and becoming more depressed over the loss of his mother. He did not seek to re-invent himself or look for a new horizon, he chose to whither and so he did. He also began to get pervie, following around girls from my band trying to look up dresses, leering and such that we had to exclude him from events with the band. He began bragging about buying crack whores on Harbor Boulevard. We cringed with disgust, it seemed to empower him as he spoke, watching for our reactions.
Howard then began collecting and keeping high powered weapons, assault rifles, lots of ammo. I remember taking one look at his newest acquisition and deciding to never return to his house again. Why take any chances?
I could look at my own mother and say with assurance she had a power over me I still cannot explain. Not in a sense of love, but of commitment to family, ideals, rules. When it came to these things, for her it was business. I realized only after she died, how much she controlled my young life, her mental power and influence over me. She was more of a specter in life than death, constantly watching and evaluating, wielding nothing other than the wrath of her disapproval. That alone was enough to shake me to the core, far beyond any physical threat or beating my father ever offered. I cannot explain why or recall when she programmed me that way, it was some kind of voodoo, black magic or witchcraft that could subdue me in an instant and far beyond the sting of any corporal consequences.
However, I knew no matter how much trouble I might find myself in, she would come get me, put me back together after accident or idiocy. It seemed to me the essence of the mother son relationship, a relationship I really did not understand until after she died: she owned me, but I needed her too. It was the perspective of death and distance that allowed me to see the relationship for what it was. She was the lawyer that stood between me and the court of life. I could not stay out of trouble, she was the only one could or would fix things and always was. You can’t have that with a wife and keep her respect, maybe her love and sympathy, but not her respect.
That is a vital point for me. I believe this is what men find as the wedge that eventually divides them from their commitment to a wife. Her instincts will see you as weak and your instincts tell you she will, she can say what she wants, but her female senses will change her opinion of you. Let her deny it, but believe it. I think men can be weak with a mistress, cry on their shoulder and get their little boy stuff over, that stuff most guys will cycle through from time to time if they have a cry baby relationship with a woman. If you want respect as a man and a strong image around the house, you have to have good publicity, no scandals or losses that bring you home tawdry and in tears. No matter how she may coddle and cuddle, say she loves and supports you, deep down you are no longer the man she was originally attracted to. Admit it girls, admit it guys, I think we’ve all had an episode here and there to demonstrate the truth of Motherly or Mistress acceptance as opposed to a wife’s long term, true respect. It’s just how a man has to play it, if he is too weak to cultivate his mate, their situation, the currency of their relationship, he will face the same losses or success any man might find in business. You get what you pay for and invest in.
I would conclude by asking again, what power is it in a son that a mother holds? It is certain to be a testament to those things that bond us beyond what we can see. I know it’s true. Men dying on the battlefield call for their mother, it is a universal thing at those moments. What home is it in a mother that men find? Acceptance beyond your weakest moments, forgiveness for failures, those things you can’t take back or fix. Being given another chance, a place to hide, regroup to fight again. Seems these are the same things a man might seek in a mistress, but never in a wife. She would judge him as a weak partner and it will eventually manifest in her feelings towards him. Women can get very cynical about a mate over the years and I believe this is where most husband complaints find their origination, moments of failure and weakness. It’s Darwinian in some strange way, I prefer to believe and follow these concepts rather than depend on the superficial words of those trying to be polite or are unaware of the forces that drive their thoughts and words.

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Shadow Dancing with the Mistress Masochist

credit; http://www.zavesmith.com

I cannot face the blank page. I close my eyes, fingers frozen above the keyboard in readiness to strike the letters that form the words that fall into sentences, sentences to paragraphs, filling the blank with black. Writer’s block again. A surprise text from my beloved interrupts my agony as does the barging into my room from a disgruntled teenager who loudly complains she waited hours to no avail only to be denied the very coveted object of her desire, a new phone.

The phone rings and the voice to my ear asks me if I’m working. No, how can I? I ask where s/he is, s/he who must sneak love in a shoebox and an envelope of emailed bathroom love notes so the wife and children will not know. I love my love in so many ways: the sharp wit, keen pragmatic wisdom and common sense beyond most and all the while sentimentally apt to fall for a romantic tune and a sway dance, singing and sighing, even as s/he urges to bite and confine me with the unparalleled force of painful passion, the one s/he loves, destroy and own me. S/he is almost home, so s/he whispers a quick “I love you” and s/he is gone. The silent space fills the room. The laughter in the next room disrupts the delightful pain of longing. My life as me is a rocket ride of amazing torment and painful contentment.

The life of a mistress is one of denial, of empty space to be filled with fantasy of future memory. Her profile reveals a deep desire for punishment and deferred pleasure. She is judged and typecast as the scorpion fly, the Lilith of Eve’s prize, ever in human consciousness, but in reality, she is as fluid as the stories she floats in and out of, the ever flux of human flesh yearning for more in the quest for meaning. She provides links, fills hollow caves with patches of light, just enough to see the illusion of shadows. To judge is to play the fool.

Joyce Carol Oates in her essay, “They All Just Went Away” ponders the tendency of women to hurt themselves, to give up their space in deference to others. Each time I read this essay in preparation for class, I sink into her words.

Above all, the real is arbitrary. For to be a realist (in art or in life) is to acknowledge that all things might be other than they are. That there is no design, no intention, no aesthetic or moral or teleological imprimatur but, rather, the equivalent of Darwin’s great vision of a blind, purposeless, ceaseless evolutionary process that yields no ‘products’–only temporary strategies against extinction.

I think of humans coupling for love, marriage and children as survivalist needs for safety, security and self-perpetuation. Passion, however, is relegated to the realm of possibility and unpredictability. Sacrificing security is painful but paramount for passion, sometimes a worthwhile tradeoff. The mistress seeks and provides pleasure where safety breeds contemptuous boredom and the cancerous kill of the fire of desire, but there is a cost.

As a woman and as a writer, I have long wondered at the well-springs of female masochism. Or what, in despair of a more subtle, less reductive phrase we can call the congeries of predilections toward self-hurt, self-erasure, self-repudiation in women.

While the empowered mistress writes her role as protagonist and antagonist, hero and villain, and sadist and masochist as she loves with abandon and shadows love, aches in abandon, the nature of the mistress is often one of self abnegation and longing desire; threadbare hope and the coat of imagery warm the space, but the intangible is the self-inflicted torture, passion without presence, longing. She waits alone. This masochism is also the source of creativity of the writer. She, an other in self abnegating aloneness, borrows mystical moments of self-evisceration–the awe and radiance of others’ pain and joy–to disappear in their destruction and reappear in their resurrection Phoenix-like from the fire since passion burns born in torment. She is both agency and objectification, the meta-narrative of reading the reader reading the writer.

The writer is a mistress, with her drive toward self-punishment, in writing absolution and taking on the sins of others; she creates in hardship and pain, in triumph and longing desire, her shadowy figures tasked with completing the possibilities of the what if and should not. She is judged and critiqued. Her life drawings show us who we are. Sometimes she shows us what we don’t care to see or even dream. S/he tails the taboo.

Yet what could possibly be the evolutionary advantage of self-hurt in the female? Abnegation in the face of another’s cruelty? Acquiescence to another’s will? This loathsome secret that women do not care to speak of, or even acknowledge.

I don’t know. I won’t be judged. The mistress and the writer are independent and free to choose their stories, write them with the beginning unknown, the ending imagined and the middle lived suspended in the shadow of the snip of the scissors’ ever-so-slowly closing blades.

Shadow Dancing

Your silhouette twirls me in a pony skirt umbrella.
I falter and still to take my bow to your dark smile.
My fingers fondle high cheek bones of ionic spin.
They poke through to the wall behind you in jest.
I stroke you yet thumbing the thin strands of hair.
You hover in my chest and feet dancing me witty.
Though silence spaces the crackled sonic voice.
It fills dark deep dread of distant lost connection.
So electrifyingly fill my ear in warm static breath.
Sigh trigger heat-pour down from my neck to toe.
Body-sense wisps of thin caress a sweet timbre.
A hand in tones transmitted in aural wood chime.
Shade palms settle upon the dip of my shoulders.
They soft sweep across the bones tracing burden.
Feather touched windless air drifts across my face.
I fall back into the deep curtsy of a shadow dance.
The song circulates my bloodless fill of time spent.
Memory kissed moth flutters of your lullaby sweet.
Twenty moons shine liquid ether ossify you to me.

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Guest Post – On Orientalism

Anne Thériault's avatarThe Belle Jar

By Israa Nasir

It was around 10pm on a summer night, a few years ago. I was waiting on Queen West for a friend. We were going to head out to a party like any other twenty-something on a weekend. A man approached me and asked if I worked in the ‘entertainment industry’. When I said no, he told me that I had a “really good look for this stuff”. He introduced himself as a film-producer and continued to tell me that his next project was looking for exotic, middle-eastern-looking women and that the pay would be really good (side note: I’m not middle-eastern). As I began to walk away while refusing his offer, he shoved a card into my hand and told me to think about it. I turned the card in my hands and saw that he was indeed a film-producer; he produced pornography, specializing in ‘oriental and…

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Guest Post by L.C. Miller: “Mistress to the Show”

The concept of “Mistress” is interesting to me because even though I’m a faithfully married woman, I am one. It’s not that my relationship with my husband is unsatisfying. It’s not that we’ve lost interest in each other or that the intimacy between us has tarnished over the last 16 years. I haven’t even fallen into the arms of another as a means of escape to a place where I feel desirable, sexy… wanted.

Nevertheless, when I chose to be with my husband, I don’t think I fully realized that I wouldn’t just be taking on the role of partner, wife, mother, or caretaker, but the primary role I would play when I said ‘I do’ was that of mistress.

Everybody knows the famous expression, ‘the show must go on’. No matter what happens, the show will take priority. The people need their entertainment. You will find even movie theaters are open 365 days a year. I am mistress to the show.

Before I met Mike, I too worked in entertainment. I played keyboards in a band but I was no musician. I sang backup but I was no singer. I pushed paper at various record labels and management companies, which is how I met my husband when he was carrying on his love affair with the show. A road guy for the likes of Metallica and Queensryche, he was a metal head now in charge of the latest and greatest grunge band my company discovered during the high surf of the Seattle sound. And even though they couldn’t survive the first tour of the show, Mike and I bonded by speaking over the telephone every day while he was on the road. We laughed and joked and I enjoyed flirting with him during innocent business conversations; and he was drawn to me the same way a man who’s spoken for is lured by the mere dulcet tones of a woman’s voice. He enjoyed escaping into something new but he was obviously in a committed relationship with the show.

Years later, after wanting more from my personal connection with her, I thought perhaps if I moved from Los Angeles to New York, we could take it to the next level and get closer than we ever had. My friend Andrea was relating a funny story how our friend Mike had gotten off the rock tour and was now the sound designer for this show all about tango now on Broadway. I couldn’t help but laugh, imagining him being in such a long committed relationship with a long haired, head banging wife to something much more seductive, classic, lusty. Boy, did his relationship with the show change! I decided to call him and ask if it was okay to stay with him while I tried to relocate, setting up interviews to continue pushing paper for ‘my girl’. Unfortunately, I was just pursuing the same bitch on a different coast.

Mike was all alone in New York, only having to deal with his wife three hours a day, with matinees Wednesday afternoons and weekends. I was attracted to him, but I tried to tell myself he was already committed. He invited me to meet his wife, and something totally unexpected happened. I fell in love with her too.

I no longer cared about my own wife. All she ever did was cross T’s and dot I’s in the name of pop music. She wasn’t very interesting. But this lady my husband was with; she was a knock out. I could see during the show that Mike acted just like a complacent husband with her. I gasped at her every touch, her dress and her shoes as she ran them up and down the back of that handsome dancer’s leg, beckoning me to watch, to follow. I was mesmerized by the show and so was every other ticket holder. But Mike was already more than comfortable with her because when two ladies came up after the curtain dropped and commented how one dancer whipped her hair around so much, his response was, “That’s so you won’t notice how fat she is.”

I didn’t care. It was love at first sight.

I started sleeping with Mike and going to the show every night. Just to watch. He would ask me, “Don’t you ever get tired of seeing this over and over again?” And my answer was always, “Hell no!”

I think this is when Mike fell in love with me; because I loved the show… maybe more than he did… and it seemed my passion for her renewed his interest in their marriage. He took it as a sign that I could handle his commitment and be okay waiting in the side wings until their time together was over. Clearly I was very happy being the voyeur to their romance and I did love every minute of it.

We were married right after the show left Broadway and started a world tour. We spent more than a year in this blissful triangle, experiencing the world, life and love together. And like any mistress, I relished our private time and began to resent the demands of his wife more and more. Here he seemed interested in me and bored with her, but he’d never leave her. He looked at me with love and desire and her with disinterest. Sometimes I thought, “She could do better. She should be with someone who’s really in love with her.” But she doesn’t want anyone else either.

While we were on tour, my mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer and needed me to come back to Southern California to take care of her. I wanted my husband to come with me, but I had to accept he was already married and no matter what happened, the curtain would always rise and fall on his first wife first.

I buried my mother alone, without either love by my side. I was able to share my grief with my husband over the telephone during a layover at Heathrow Airport on his way from Portugal to South Korea. He was very sorry but he and his wife couldn’t chat. After all, she must go on, right?

Two years later, my husband’s marriage would change and for a while they would stay together at the House of Blues in Anaheim so I could be near family to have Mike’s baby. I still wore a ring on my finger, but while I went back to work in a law office, my husband split his time trading child care responsibilities with me and then would run off to be with her all night, having fun, dancing to Etta James and bringing me home bootleg recordings of their torrid evening together.

For years we still went wherever Mike’s first wife took us, but we finally settled down in Seattle to raise our child all together; Mike, me, our son and the show. Again, Mike and I became lovers who passed in the night. I would fall asleep and he would wake me. He would do and say all the right things, sending me back to a blissful sleep, only to wake again to an empty bed. Was it all a dream? Whatever it was, I knew what he was doing. He was dressing her up in something new. My husband was off creating his love into something special for all to see, leaving me to raise our boy on my own.

She beckoned. She demanded. She must go on.

I would start to hate her and tell Mike I’ve had enough. I wanted to threaten him by demanding he choose between us, but I was too afraid of his choice. And at my breaking point, he would bring me to see her in her new outfit, dressed up in Hairspray, Young Frankenstein, Shrek, Memphis, Aladdin… the list goes on. Every time I’d show up resentful, the show would seductively lift her curtain, share her magic and leave me swooning. Can you deny a relationship that has thousands of people moved to a standing ovation night after night? How can I not stand and clap too? I love her every time and it makes me look at Mike and admire his commitment. Sure he looks tired and maybe he might look bored, but the love he has for what he does shows in every performance. I can’t break them up.

I surrender.

I know my husband loves me and our son, but he is still fully committed to his first wife. She puts a roof over our heads. She makes our son and I laugh, cry and experience wonder while Mike merely looks like a dutiful husband, holding his wife’s purse and twisting her knobs in the back of the room, so everyone can hear how beautiful or funny or sad she is. Whether she’s Beauty and the Beast, Miss Saigon or the Phantom of the Opera, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter what she puts on, there I am, fully in love with her from the twenty second row.

As long as I’m married, I’m mistress to the show.

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Comet Love

CNN

What’s it like to land on a comet with its flaming tail at the speed of night? The fantastical imaginary of the ordinary citizen can only know a breath of it. If only such a landed probe could take pictures of all of the people looking up in awe and wonderment at its passing. That would be the ideal outcome, to capture the best of the human spirit as it is not in the human capacity to reach beyond our galaxy as we sit on the earth now, but it is in our capacity to dream and imagine and reach with our minds.

Perhaps that is what space travel will be eventually, a cosmic astral projection of minds to other minds in distant galaxies and that the stuff of television shows and NASA or other space agency attempts are mere clumsy limitations of the mind. The physical transport is an outdated mis-read of where humans should be directing their efforts–not at transporting the body to other galaxies with improved technology for craft life but transporting the mind through developed improvements in using more of the human brain, much more than the ten percent we do. If scientists can figure out the workings of the brain and how to use more of it, we would go farther in all of our feeble attempts, due to lack of imagination and physical ability, to space travel the verses–uni or multi. That’s my dark matter hope. As grand as our meager steps are in proportion to who we are, I can only speculate that more brain is better for bigger steps toward human survival–if that is even worth it. My limited brain cannot imagine what could be more important.

Philae successfully landed on Comet 67P. The scientists in news-flash photos, mostly men, and I seem to be the only ones excited about that. Though the landing did not go entirely to plan, that didn’t dent the jubilation of the paunchy breath-holding middle aged scientists who hopped, jumped and hugged in high-five glee and release at its touchdown. The love and pride for their cyber child was bounded only by the liquid vision of the for-once unshielded tears of these utilitarian fathers of the brave foundling. One of her thrusters did not thrust, but she is safe and is useful nevertheless. If she does what she is programmed to do, take pictures and collect other data, she will bless her human makers with information unknown about the travels of a lone comet that circles the sun of its destruction, succumbing to the irresistible force of suicide, desire and heat.

So long as there is an infinite unknown, I anthropomorphically will it to be so: that she brings back an ancient love story beyond comprehension for its pre-dating and surpassing human imagination. That way we can continue to wonder and strive, which is the best humans have to offer.

She will give us imagery to parse and dream about, analyze the pre-solar system traces so that we may sniff the scent of our own origins–even just a hint. The human mind will take it from there. And if those paunchy old and young science-saddled men and women get nothing more than a glimpse into the relationship of a comet with a blustery sun that blasts and winds like the litany of a curmudgeon whose cranky rant on a rainy arthritic day thunders and grates, then humans will be that much more edified. They only need new clues to edge ever nearer to the ever elusive answers to the age old questions that echo in the ignorant blackness of the deep-of-darkness matter: How did we come to be? Are we alone? Why does that even matter?

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Guest Post by MPM

The Child As Mistress

This blog focuses on the mistress (and ‘mister’) we have, we are, or we become, whether the mistress is a person, an activity, a modality of thought, a cultural norm, or any of a million other possibilities. Today’s quote by Dumas and accompanying picture imply the traditional concept of the mistress – that of a woman on the outside of the marriage that the husband is involved with clandestinely. But I am an example of a mistress withIN a marriage. And I am not alone. My brother is as well, as are millions of us without ever imagining ourselves so. In fact we are mistresses that have the full, ahem, ‘blessing’ of no less than the Catholic Church.
Perhaps a little background is in order. My parents were married in the middle of the Baby Boomer decade of the 1950’s. My father was in his mid-30s and had never been married before. From stories my mother told me about him after their divorce 20+ years later he did not have the best reputation around town. He wasn’t a criminal, he was just someone that was difficult to like closer than an arms-length friendship. He was blue collar WW II veteran with a ‘C-‘reputation and the social graces of a venomous desert insect. He was also cheap, opinionated, and a Republican in a sea of Democrats.
My mother was one of five sisters who were all well liked, well mannered, and, ahem, well endowed. She had been married before to ‘the love of her life’, as she would later tell me along with the stories of my father. Tragically, he was a gunner in the last American bomber shot down over Japan before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing all aboard. Rather ironically, as this would not be possible here in the US due to the circumstances, there is a memorial in the city where the plane crashed commemorating the event. For the next decade mom was lost in grief, certain she would never ever find a man that matched up to the standards established by Charles. Their togetherness had been established in high school before the war and was intended to continue long after till death did them part. And of course this relationship was going to produce an abundance of children as did all Irish relationships in those days. With the sadly abrupt passing of Charles this plan, this dream, passed with him.
Enter my father some ten years later. He began pursuing mom with all aplomb of a drunken dancer. Mom, mindful of his ‘C-‘reputation, held him somewhat at bay. However his continuous pursuit finally wore her down enough to allow for a benign and tepid relationship. She had no intention of marrying this man. But being in her late 30s, and since it had been a decade since her last enduring relationship, she eventually allowed herself to get close enough to him to enable the relationship to continue its natural upward course. My father was in his mid-30s and determined to take their pairing to the logical conclusion of the day – marriage. Their opposing stances eventually caused a standoff. Mom began to pull further away from him to distance herself from ‘C-‘to seek a ‘C+’ or better partner.
In those days a woman in her late 30s could not conceive of having children. Mom’s dream and desire of lining the nest with rug rats had crashed with Charles’ plane. The medical arts of the time were not prepared for the complications that could arise from a pregnancy so late in a woman’s life. It was accepted by society and culture that mom was ‘too old’ to be a safe and reliable contributor to the boom of babies that generation provided to the nation. And so, seeing mom begin to slip away and certain she was his last chance at the legitimacy and rise in stature a marriage would bestow upon him, dad made a bold and strategic move. With the precision of a championship archer he aimed Cupid’s arrow directly at mom’s heart. He said to her, ‘We can always adopt kids.’ The arrow had found its mark. Mom set aside the reservations she had over dad’s ‘C-‘ character. She immediately raised his grade, albeit on a curve and due to his extra-credit essay on adoption, to the lofty status of ‘C’. They married soon after and began a life together that would provide each with what they wanted. She was going to receive children and he was going to receive marital legitimacy.
Until it didn’t. Soon after the consummation of their alliance, dad, living up to his ‘C-‘reputation, reneged on his promise to adopt. Naturally this caused a breach of contract dispute. Their union began to develop cracks and seemed about to crumble. Somehow they agreed to a mediation. They jointly decided to seek the counsel of the precursor to modern psychiatry, the Catholic Church.
The Father they selected as their confessor and whose penance they agreed to abide by was a kind and genial man each of them respected and admired. They each knew his wise and wonderful wisdom would apply the mortar to repair the cracks that had developed between them. After several sessions of listening and head nodding by the good Father he pronounced himself ready to rule. His decision was simple and direct. He admonished my father for breaking his contractual agreement with my mother and ordered him to fulfill its original terms. They were to adopt a baby. The role of this child would be to repair the damage caused by the breach. My father reluctantly and resentfully accepted his penance and set about the task of choosing a child off the rack that would be able to assume the required role. Indeed, what else could an Irish Catholic do when a pronouncement was delivered by the sagest of the sage, the wisest of the wise, a representative of the respectable and all-knowing (insert booming and echoing voice from above) CATHOLIC CHURCH?
Enter me. They decided to baby shop at the orphanage where I had been on display since I had been born a mere three months prior. This made me the latest and greatest model. I still possessed that new baby smell so desired by adopting couples seeking their first human purchase together. I was featured in my crib in which I had been placed and had not budged from except for the occasional diaper change and attendant hosing down. After a series of paper signing (more contracts) and counseling by the (holy shit!) representative of the Catholic Church present at the orphanage, a stern nun, I was whisked away to begin my new life and new duties as the bastard marriage savior.
For a few years into toddler-hood I fulfilled my role dutifully. My father surprised himself by actually enjoying having a little bastard around. He genuinely took to the situation he had once avoided. But my mother was ecstatic. I was the first born son (ok, first adopted son) she had always wanted. Over time, I later learned, I received all the love and attention she was supposed to divide between me and my father. I had become her little bastard mistress son. I was now the third person in the marriage Dumas spoke of. (Well, he didn’t actually mean a child but work with me here.)
My father soon tired of his relegated role and began to resent the little bastard. This, of course, renewed the cracking and crumbling that the advice of the CATHOLIC CHURCH had repaired a few short years ago. Duty bound by their allegiance to the earthly representative of the guy in the sky they returned to the counsel chambers of the good Father. After a suitably perfunctory and long enough listening period the good Father prescribed the same mood altering substance he had last time: adopt another child. And so another little bastard entered the fray of our ménage a matrimony and began sharing the role I had originally been enlisted to perform as a solo act.
I’ll spare the reader and refrain from detailing the years of acrimony, repression, resentment, frustration, anger, bitterness, abuse, and bad days that ensued. Instead I’ll wind this missive down by stating that the open inclusion of little bastard mistresses into the marriage failed. In my teenage years (and my brother’s) mother and father divorced and he moved out, never to be seen or heard from again. The remaining trio of mom and her two little bastard mistresses were relieved immeasurably. But life from then on was no picnic and the requisite emotional scars and attempted surgical removal of them by an unending stream of psychiatrists, psychologists, drugs (legal and sometimes accessible only via cavity search), alcohol, shamans, and voodoo practitioners some 40+ years later and continuing is testament to that. This example of mistress insertion may not prove Dumas right or wrong. But hopefully it is a cautionary tale that forewarns the reader to choose a mistress wisely and not off the rack.

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Fifty Observations About Married Cheaters

I came across the Dumas quote posted today while perusing yet another pro-con work over of the role of the mistress, this one conceding, as always a wee bit sheepishly for fear of being accused of less than stellar morals or lawfulness, mistresses are not always destructive but can actually spark renewed love and interest in a marriage. That they do have such a productive effect sometimes seems logical to me and has been my own experience.

In researching under the wide umbrella topic of the mistress, I have come across so many articles dissecting the causes for, effects of, and history of cheating spouses or partners. So much of what has been written, regardless of the insertion of a psychologist, sex therapist, counselor, attorney or theologian, are largely opinion pieces based on specific testimonials and experiences. People come to the subject with their own predispositions toward cheating experientially, religiously and intellectually. Generalizations in these writings and the overall attempt to be one size fits all denigrate what morsels of truth and advice there may be in them. The painfully obvious truth is, all situations are unique in so far as they involve individuals, who, though human and so patterned with some universal behaviors, are different from other individuals in their components and combinations, and so add the complexity to a very complex subject.

Reducing cheating to a ten ways, ten reasons or ten anything seems implausible to me. Most of those articles contain mere observations from specific experiences of specific people. I too have observed the behavior and words of cheating spouses–nearly my entire life. I have been cheated on and I have cheated, though not on my husband of 35 years. When he and I separated for six or more years in the late 80s to mid-90s and then again when we agreed to an open marriage in 2010, I engaged in long and short-term affairs/relationships including married partners. I did not seek married people; the relationships arose organically from circumstances I and the other party were in at the time. Like any relationship, they were based on mutual need, admiration, friendship, respect and often, love.

In addition, I was a divorce and bankruptcy attorney for 24 years. I heard so many stories of the whys, wherefores and whereabouts of the innumerable reasons for and circumstances of divorce, including cheating spouses, mid-life crisis dumps, long-term mistresses or misters, open marriages, and just a host of marital and non-marital arrangements.

The following list of 50 items is one I have compiled over the years by merely listening and observing (and yes, at times, judging). It is not a list I prepared with any intent. I am not sure I even prepared it at all. Living my life is all it has taken to come up with this list and remembering what I have done, what has been done to me, what I have thought and what I have heard. With respect to marrieds, I put this list together not to recommend, advise, admonish, judge or astonish. Nothing on the list is revelatory. These items do not purport to be causes, reasons, solutions or symptoms. They are merely observations about being human. I have no other intention but to share my observations, in no particular order, for whatever interest they may lend to the reader.

Married people I have had affairs/relationships with:

1. Are attracted to me because I am not their spouse.
2. Want more or different sex than what they get at home.
3. Want to be listened to and feel they are not.
4. Want to be prioritized over the kids, sacrificed for.
5. Love and are beholden to spouses who sacrifice themselves for the kids.
6. Want to be thought of as sexy, naughty, romantic and/or irresistible.
7. Want to be thought of as creative, intelligent and/or funny.
8. Want passion again or for the first time.
9. Want to live out their fantasies, some, all or any of them.
10. Want to be young again.
11. Want to have control and feel they don’t.
12. Want to be shown love and tenderness more, different or any.
13. Want to be the center of someone’s world, for the first time or again.
14. Want to experience vitality and power again.
15. Want a person with traits lacking in their spouses.
16. Want to conquer or be a savior.
17. Want to possess.
18. Want the excitement of risk.
19. Want their egos flattered.
20. Want to want their spouses.
21. Don’t want their spouses but don’t want to leave them.
22. Are very good at compartmentalizing.
23. Are very good at justification and rationalization–moral equivalencies.
24. Don’t want to disrupt their families: kids, parents, spouses, colleagues, friends.
25. Are afraid of divorce/loss of life they have known.
26. Are trapped in a marriage whether self-induced or otherwise.
27. Are guilty for perceived hurt of their spouse, for their own failures.
28. Are repressed sexually or otherwise.
29. Feel overburdened by the lives they themselves created.
30. Have overactive sex drives.
31. Express love through sex.
32. Escape into sex.
33. Need touch.
34. Are afraid.
35. Are angry.
36. Want to feel something.
37. Want to be understood.
38. Want to be validated.
39. Want to hurt their spouses.
40. Want revenge.
41. Are commitment-phobes.
42. Fear success.
43. Self-sabotage.
44. Have low self-esteem.
45. Are narcissistic.
46. Are sociopathic.
47. Are immoral.
48. Are amoral.
49. Are competitive, wanting to beat the system or someone else.
50. Feel comforted even as they are disconcerted by carrying a secret.

I could write at least 50 more, but they would be as banal as these 50.

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Writers Are Spider Mistresses

A time for telling truth has come upon us now.
We needn’t lie to get us through these times
You see it in my eyes and writ upon my brow.
No need to say you understand these rhymes.

When writing is the mistress:

“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.” – Winston Churchill

credit: a3.files.biography.com

First a mistress then a master, does Churchill mean that at first writing a book is alluring, a release into a world of pleasure, and then it becomes dominating, controlling, and confining like an addiction or a duty? In other words, it starts with the idea of writing a book, the germ of a subject that could spread into thousands of words, which inflames the contagion that impels the fingers to tap in order to scratch the itch and twitch of adrenaline desire-thought. The impassioned writer proclaims, “There is a book in me.”

But after the initial caffeinated burst of bluster-strained strands of webbed words–clever and comely–the chore of the work settles in, each day pouring water into the well to keep the once deemed fertile land irrigated and quell the fires of doubt and douse the flames of drudgery in the daily threat of stage five alert word draught. When the ideas stop flowing, the writing is a task of terrible resistance and fear sets in. The writer frets, “I don’t have enough, not good enough, not enough heart, authenticity, interest. But I have invested so much time and ink, I can’t stop now.”

Or was Churchill a switch hitter and he just means that writing a book is like loving a woman–not your wife–being in her control or under her spell, and then like loving a man?

No, he means that writing enslaves. It is an enormous envelope of time and thought, and the promise of her–writing–what she potentially makes of her lover–writer–is a sculptor of marble ideas smoothed into delightful statues of truthful experience and penetrating insight whose vision inscribes beauty into the minds of those envisioning the word figures and rests there completing that mind, that reader, who is forever changed or confirmed or comforted by some moral missive, sublime image, or worldly flavor.

In reality, the writer is a whittler of wood who shapes a block into a toy sailboat by toiling away at the carving craft hour by hour to make animation from the inanimate. The writer makes sound from ink. Perhaps it is this need to be heard and to connect with another human being that is the real potential that arouses the desire–the ultimate desire–that causes the penner to heed the call of the word, arise each day, wipe away the sticky, silken threads of the dreamscape, to hack away at the mental chains of complacency and write. That same desire thereafter ensnares her in the matrix of predator and prey, reader and read, writer and book, the book she violently tosses at her readers.

The itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout
Down came the rain and washed the spider out
Up came the sun and dried up all the rain
And the itsy bitsy spider went up the spout again.

Writers are spider mistresses.

credit: wondersinthedark.files.wordpress.com
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Guest Post: Revisiting Shame and the Mistress

A regular contributor of comments to this blog, MPM, shared with me the rumination below in context of an ongoing discussion about the historical and modern day role and conceptualization of the mistress. It bears reproduction here in its entirety for another perspective and invitation for response.

Ruminations on “King Charles II of England and His Mistresses”
Everyone – and I mean everyone, including me – should have a mistress or be one. You can tell a mistress things that you can’t tell your so called life partner and vice-versa. For some it provides emotional stability. For others perhaps an emotional release. It’s obvious that the need for mistresses (and ‘misters’) has endured throughout human time, perhaps as long as the oldest profession. That is not to equate the two, but to state that the need for one or the other seems to be intrinsic. Perhaps even those who do not participate in such activity at least have the thought of taking on one or the other, if only in passing sometimes. The human mind is probably too complicated for some to burden a single person with all that it contains. Perhaps engaging with one or the other relieves a partner of a burden too heavy to endure.
But then again, perhaps I am wrong.
Earlier I posted this comment to the blogger’s article, “King Charles II of England and His Mistresses”. That the comment is full of “perhaps-es” is a clear indication of my own self-doubt regarding the certainty – no, the validity – of what I was stating. After rereading my reply I felt compelled to expand upon it in an attempt to answer, for myself, the questions I openly asked.
So that the reader may better understand the questions I raised in my initial reply I will share with you my current situation.
I am currently a “mister” to a married woman who is herself a mistress to a married woman. I have met her husband and we appear to get along fine. I only use the word ‘appear’ because I am ‘fine’ with it, but obviously I cannot vouch for nor ascertain his true hidden feelings. Indeed, no one else can be aware of the feelings all of us have decided to keep secret. The circumstances of their marriage allow each to have this type of open relationship. I will not divulge why this is so to protect their privacy, although admittedly this certainly opens the door for one to peer into. Why I chose this particular woman knowing about the circumstances she was in shall also remain private except to say that we genuinely are compatible. Interestingly, each of us has been involved in non-monogamous relationships in our pasts and are so now. When I asked her how she felt about the wife in those circumstances she provided different answers for each situation. Some were because the wife no longer desired to have sexual relations with her spouse. Others were for more personal reasons. However, the answer to one of those situations surprised me a bit. Although the initial intent of involving herself in this relationship was not to do so, she stated that she was certain that doing so saved his marriage. He is in fact still married to his wife yet maintains a fond and friendly bond with his one-time tryst mate. I have not been as fortunate. Each of my circumstances has ended with a bang or a whimper and I have “lost” all – partners and mistresses – I have been involved with except one. I’ll conclude this backstory by stating (admitting?) that, going back some 40 odd years to junior high school days, I have never had a completely monogamous relationship. In some it took me longer to stray than others. But the constant has been that I always have strayed.
In my original comment in reply to the article I declared that, “everyone … should have a mistress or be one”, and I gave my reasons why I believe this. But upon reflection I decided to take a step back to observe the issue with more focus from a distance. I realized I was only speaking for my narcissistic self. My grandparents had been married for over 67 years and neither of them ever strayed. Ironically, I always set my sights on finding someone with whom I could strive to match their record of monogamous longevity. Why then have I never been able to commit to a single partner? Why does anyone allow themselves to play this way or even stray but once? Is it really an intrinsic need as I suggested in my reply or is it more than that? Perhaps (there’s that word again) the “intrinsic need” idea is a vain and selfish rationalization proffered to attempt to assuage feelings of guilt and shame (see this blogger’s article “Shame, Shame on You–and Me” for more on this topic) for branching outside of society’s accepted standards. After all, if the hidden relationship is discovered there are always feelings of hurt, anguish, and betrayal felt by the one who has been deceived, and we are the reason, and suffer the burden of destroying or altering the course of another’s life, as well as our own.
But then I took a further step back and was faced with examining the reality that some of the world’s best known and most followed religions now have, or once had, traditions of allowing plural marriages. Although it was never an original part of Western culture, Islam is the most obvious example as polygamy is still practiced today. And even though it has been outlawed (and to be fair discredited by), the Mormon Church also preached and encouraged polygamy. And is it more than simply interesting to note that both Islam and Mormon allowed the male to have wives younger than what (our) society has deemed to be a legal age for such unions? Doesn’t our society and culture view these versions of polygamy to be child abuse and rape? I’ll save the reader the tedium of reviewing every instance of child sexual abuse perpetrated by priests and simply go straight to the top – the Pope – and cite but a few that have been historically documented to not only have had mistresses but children they fathered with these concubines: Pope John X; Pope John XII; Pope Benedict IX; Pope Paul II. And Pope Leo X had a homosexual mistress relationship.
There is also the circumstances of hut dwelling tribal cultures still extant throughout remote areas of the world today. Their communities of miniscule populations probably, in some cases we can at least speculate, allow for not only polygamy but also a fair degree of incest simply to keep the tribe alive.
With these examples in mind it seems logical to question why our culture decries the mistress. It appears it could be argued that our culture is actually an aberration for doing so.
Then I began walking backwards to take a closer look at and examination of “our culture”. In keeping with the blogger’s theme of political figures with mistresses, most historians now accept that Thomas Jefferson, our third president, had as his mistress a slave he owned named Sally Hemings. This fact was established in 1998 with DNA evidence. It immediately discredited all the historians who had denied it for the previous 200 years. In modern times we now know that JFK had Marilyn Monroe as his mistress. We know that William Jefferson Clinton had Monica Lewinsky as his, and before that Jennifer Flowers. We also know that presidential aspirant John Edwards fathered a child out of wedlock.
Turning now to sports figures, no one can provide an accurate account of the number of athletes who have had or still have a mistress in every town their team visits, and let’s not even try to imagine the number of children born of these couplings.
At this point I felt I no longer had to seek or cite examples of the mistress in culture, politics, religion, or in any aspect of man’s contrivance. It is indisputably obvious that mistresses have been around “forever” and will continue to be a part of being human. Although my own grandparents demonstrate that there may not be an intrinsic need for everyone to have or be a mistress, history demonstrates that the opposite is equally true; which, I feel, at least partially validates my declaration that everyone should have or be a mistress.
What to do, then, with the guilt and shame?

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