Knowing what you want.

Mostly, if I set out to achieve something I do it. Usually this involves dogged one-eyedness, hard work, lots of stress, commitment to craft. I think the only problem then is knowing what you want to achieve. So many times I have sat down to write something with a list of what I want to do mapped out in my head. I get to the end and yes, I have done what I have set out to do. I had a goal and I stuck to it. It is only when it is done that I realise that there might have been other, better goals to try to achieve.

I think of my grandmother, all those hours slaving to create the things she has created. I will make a life sized triceratops out of paper mace she says and then after months of sleepless nights that is exactly what she has achieved. I will make a miniature Alpaca as small as the palm of my hand, and, weeks later that is what she has made. All these years completing projects that she wanted to do and yet at the end of it all it just adds up to a scattergun menagerie.

Be careful what you wish for.

I wish for a serious long and sustained career writing fiction, and yet I am distracted by journalism, non-fiction, an exegesis. The years are precious. I feel something awful happening to my body, the beginning of an inevitable decay. I sink back into the depression I was free of for all those years. I need to know that my plan is solid and achievable. I need to have my long term goals. I have set myself on the path of writing about sex and therefore I need to value this. Yes I want to write serious novels, but the whole miraculous world of human sexuality allows for much seriousness as well as much frivolity.

I need to be careful about the next projects, make sure that they count, they move me forward, they teach me new skills and help me develop as a writer. I am certain that one day I will end up like a second rate Philip Roth, writing the same novel every year which is published each Christmas, the novella about how I lost my youth and yet am still sexually obsessed with youth. The book of the aging writer. All I can hope is that I find new angles into the universal story of sex. All I hope is that I am open to new ideas, write the book and then move on to something else that develops my work further.

dread

I can't shake the dread. I suppose that sex would alleviate the feeling. It is impossible to warm my feet, my head feels like it is releasing all the energy in my body through the cold crown, my limbs are dough, swelling, ready to be punched down and cooked in a hot oven till they are hard. I have no love of self and yet I smile and converse and seem to do all the things a live human being does only inside I am all hollow and leaked-out.

Sex would help. I know this. Sex would give me a rush that might last an hour, two, an evening. I would have some small relief. But there is the night time to come and the waking in darkness and that heart pounding sense that it is already over, I am dead inside and it is only my body, clinging to the possibility of one last tumble that keeps a semblance of life.

Am I ready to take the plunge into darkness? Perhaps the writing will keep me upright if it is dark enough to dig a tunnel underneath my distress.

A list.

Today? A list.

Nicholson Baker "House of Holes" (not till next October) and "Vox"
Frank Moorhouse "Sonny" (not till next year)
Peter Blazey "Love Cries" (out of print but worth the search just for the Moorhouse alone which is a part of Sonny)
Rod Jones "Night Pictures" (Sorry, may be out of print too)
All Hail George Batailles for "The Story of the Eye"
And while you are reading that you might as well pick up Susan Sontag's "The Pornographic Imagination"
Anais Nin (of course) for "Little Birds" and "Delta of Venus"
Linda Jaivin "Eat Me"
Catherine Millet "The Secret Life of Catherine M"
Michel Houellebecq "Atomised"
Ian McEwan "First Love Last Rights" and "The Cement Garden"
Cameron Redfern (Sonya Hartnett) "Landscape with Animals"
Susanna Moore "In the Cut"
Catherine Breillat "Pornocracy"

All of this and more and while you are at it throw in films by Greenaway and Hanneke and Breillat and this is truly only the beginning. Sometimes I am overwhelmed.

Site specific teaser

“I am a little disappointed that you are wearing a bra. I hope you have no underpants on. Shall I check?”

She felt a hand resting on her bottom and her heart began to race in her chest. The thumping of it rattled her. The voice was low and husky, but it was, indeed the voice of a woman.

The hand explored the fabric of her dress, pressing against the cotton, flat-palmed, searching for seems.

“Good. Shame you decided to wear the bra though, you do have such nice full breasts. I bet the nipples are getting hard right now and that would have been nice to see.”

Her nipples were, indeed getting hard. She could feel them pulling tight against her bra, a pretty bra, thick, luxurious cups with a lace trim. She had chosen it specifically for Si with the idea that he might just find a moment to slip his hand inside her dress and feel the soft, intricate lace clinging to the significant swell of flesh, warmed by it, shaped by it. Now her plans for an unprecedented adventure had been thwarted. She thought back through their email exchange, wondering if Si had ever specifically mentioned his gender. She had pictured him naked when he said he was naked, touching himself, she had imagined a cock. But she supposed she had assumed so much based on very little. I am going to come soon, he told her on chat and she immediately pictured the spurt of semen from the eye of an engorged penis. The image of this was enough for her to join him. Did you come too? And she had been able to type honestly, so goddamned hard I hit my head on the bed head.

Experiment

They had to use themselves for experiments. Hooking up some unsuspecting citizen to measure the duration of an orgasm would not do. They took lovers, or made love with their wives, and even though this was all in the name of science they still got caught up in games of the heart that were not intended.

We touch the clitoris and it is directly connected to the heart it seems. Even I can not avoid this correlation. Sometimes emotions overtake us when we venture into sex. Sex can be easy and fun but it is not always so. The science proves this to us. Someone disbarred, someone divorced, all this and emotions running high despite the dependence on electronic equipment.

I feel my heart tearing itself up inside the safe containment of my chest. I find myself crying. I have nightmares. My self-esteem plummets yet again. I intellectualise it all as research. I make another abortive attempt at theory. I learn to speak sex as if it were a medical complaint.

And sometimes, like now, I imagine that I walk up to the top of a bridge and leap off it. I follow in the footsteps of the romantics and the poets. I wish I had some wasting disease or an addiction to drugs. It is annoying to be at the mercy of my heart and I am happier to say that I am at the mercy of my lust, although lust is clean and this ache is something else again.

reading it in strange places

The thrill comes from the juxtaposition of the erotic and the mundane. It is like this in fiction, bumping your head on the bed head whilst a lover spreads the lips of your vulva open and dips their tongue inside. The cramp in your leg mid thrust, all this these that humanise the act you are indulging in. It happens in pornography, the actor or actress seems confused or awkward for just a second and suddenly we are aware of the whole mechanism of the thing, the camera crew, the set, the fluffers. We know now that this is a man and a woman or a girl and girl or two men perhaps but that they will go home when the filming is over and somehow this makes the process more erotic. Just a human being like me or you being fucked and fucking.

If you are in the most boring of spaces and you are dripping with desire, or concealing a hard on then this is an extra charge. Pornographic literature should be read on the bus, or in the lobby of a government building, or in the library. It is the fact that these spaces are places you would not have sex in. It is the relative banality of the architecture, the austerity of the space. Sex and bureaucracy should not go together and yet here I am putting one thing inside the other and the juxtaposition charges the room with this added transgressive quality. It must be read in strange, sexless places.

This is all I ask of you.

Empty packages

Sometimes it is not the content, but the way you are initiated. The wait to be given the password, the size and weight of the key. Sometimes it is not the food that is served but the significance of the meal. Sometimes it is not the person you want but the reasons why you wanted them.

Sometimes it is the room you were in when you first- or the fact that someone was in the next room. Sometimes it is the longing that you wanted all along, and the actual gain seems so insignificant in comparison.

In that same room. In that same house, with the secret password and the vague element of surprise and it should all be there, the whole package deal.

So why is it that when you have it within your grasp it feels somehow empty?