Two Weeks of Abstinance

I could have filmed the whole thing, the slow disintegration. It would have made a fascinating study into the human mind.

I was contained, imprisoned in a tiny shack, shivering with the icy breeze off the ocean. Somewhere out there there would be the slow ponderous passage of whales, a world of underwater silence and fish-eat--fish. There is comfort in knowing that the life cycle is continuing under the deafening tidal rasp. Eat and eaten, and therefore everything is in it's right place.

I am at the top of the food chain. I steam a small parcel of shark meat and I force myself to return to the chair. It is a marathon and I am delirious with the writing. I have pushed through the boundary between this world and the next. I am a fictionalised version of myself. I emerge from the pages of the novel and I feed and water and steel myself before plunging in once more.

The world I have created is dark and sensual. I dive in and it is as if I were in my own soul, dank water, dizzy with the claustrophobic airlessness of the ocean. I am on a writing retreat and I have set myself a target, 40 000 words in two weeks. No excuses. And because I know myself too well, I have banned the use of masturbation. I have become a monk, a cold turkey monk. There is a folder for pornography but I have refrained from opening it. I wake too early in the cold dark and the ocean calls but I will not go to it until I have written at least 2000 words. If I haven't' reached my target for the day, I will remove my privileges. No alcohol, no coffee, no food. I will be hungry for each word. Hungry mostly for sex. My self denial is complete.

I wash quickly, barely touching my skin. I sleep with my fingers prickling with cold above the covers. Like a recovering alcoholic, I steer myself away from any thought of sex.

At night I have no control over myself. I slip into the kind of dream state that I remember from childhood, dark pits of dream stuff foetid with the ferment of archetypal detritus. I am plagued by images of people I know, tongues and mouths, chaste friendships re-created by Hieronymus Bosch. I dream of him, in his suit, always in his suit, but I am naked.

He tells me to sit and I sit. He tells me to spread my knees, my labia, and I am all open places. I am the gut of a fish. He looks, standing in his pristine suit, but he will not touch me.

He denies me my pleasure and I can only watch his hand pushed down his suit pants, the shape of it stroking his penis that is denied me.

I wake to my alarm, early, dark, cold, and I would run down to the ocean and gulp sea-water. I am mad enough and desperate enough to do this, but there is my discipline, my 2000 words. I climb into the hug of my doona, banishing the last echoes of the pleasure that my sleeping body has taken without me, and then I sit down, chastely, and I write.