eros, logos

Sunday, March 08, 2009

ancient history: sunday mass

It's sunday morning and that is where my lover is, at mass, with his wife and children.
He often texts me during the service, and sometimes demands that I masturbate and come for him during it, though he won't be able to check his voicemail until it is over.

Although I comply, I feel contempt for him over this. Although I am, now, the atheist, I was once a good Catholic, and his notions of sin and trangression and forgiveness are so very far removed from mine. I am the atheist yet I judge him harshly because he does not hold his faith dear enough--his principles. My former Catholicism is why I find boundaries and transgression so compelling, but I don't think one can truly understand transgression or sin, or guilt, without having such boundaries.
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He tells me he doesn't worry about discovery, that he believes his marriage would survive it. What is between them would be strong enough to endure that revelation.

I have my doubts about this. One can love and wish to forgive, and yet ultimately find it impossible to forgive such a betrayal. I do not think any of us can predict in advance how such a betrayal will take us, much less another. The theory has a way of coming apart from the practice.

What would not survive that discovery would be us, him and me. I have no doubt that it would be a condition for her that he sever all contact with me.

I also have no doubt that he would comply.

My wife, he calls her to me, sometimes. My wife. I know her name and we use it, and these words from him, my wife, they fall on me like a blow to my chest. In those words and tone I hear finality. I hear both possession and being owned. I hear the weight of the things that hold him together, these things he has freely assumed that give him identity, that help constitute his self, the public one and the one he holds most dear.

I am no part of that identity; I am inimical to it. There is no place for me in his public world. Men shouldn't leave their families, he has said to me, and I do not think he sees why this causes me pain. It's not for any trivial and obvious reason--I don't want him to leave them.

It's because what this means to me is that I am shameful to him; it is not love for others, but shame and the fear of shame that will ultimately keep him where he is. Like Peter, he would deny me three times and turn his face from me.

She is his other half, but I am his other self, the secret one. Yet I know and have always known–I am only transient to him, an obsession he secretly hopes will lift and fade with time.

What is between us merely adds to the sum of his happiness, although it is the whole of mine.

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
Philip Larkin, Church Going

Reminder: all posts starting with 'ancient history' are posts I wrote but didn't publish then about my old situation, not now.

Labels: ancient history, old news, X

posted by O @ 11:37 Social bookmark this 16 comments

Sunday, January 04, 2009

ancient history: conjure

Not now but then. Ancient history. Painful, and shameful, to write and to feel. But here it is.
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I'd like to be the malignant spirit, the bad witch over your house. I'd cast a spell that would murder your children.

Better yet, just take them from you, steal them away, give them happy homes with others somewhere and no memory of you.

I'd rip mandrake root out of the dark earth at midnight, mix it with my menstrual blood and cast a spell to dry up your wife's breasts. No more milk there, only bile and gall. Oh yes, I know about your lactation fetish, I've been inside your head for over a year now and whatever fantasies you have I know now without you telling me. How else do you think I've gotten in so deep? I know what you want before you tell me.

How appropriate that you'd choose me for your Other, the woman without children. I knew always that you'd have to go back to her, the source of fertility.

But in my wishes she isn't any longer. I'd steal away and poison not your happiness, but your fertility. I'd doom you to be together and childless forever. I'd wear a white chiton and make sacrifice to the Furies, the Erinyes in a dark grove. How clever the Greeks were, reserving the most bloody, the most dangerous and elemental powers, the chthonic always to the female deities. And how foolish the men were, calling them euphemistically The Kindly Ones, Eumenides, imagining that to do so could appease them and turn them away. They were so fearful of drawing their attention that they were afraid to speak their names.

I'd call them by their proper names, to do their proper work.

Don't imagine that because I have no children I am not fertile. No, I'm bloody and dark and endlessly fertile, and I've murdered two of my own children in the womb. Why would I have pity for you?
Medea killed her very own children for revenge, and Clytemnestra tells us of the sexual pleasure she felt when stabbing Agamemnon to death in his bath. Her womb rejoices: "As his blood spattered me I gave thanks to God, just as the soft earth in springtime gives thanks for the showers of rain, opens up joyfully and gladly puts forth buds."

Don't imagine that I can be easily appeased.

I'd steal away her milk, and then I'd drain you of your sperm. I'd call on the Erinyes to wither your balls, leave them empty and aching like her womb. I'd send rats to gnaw their way out.

And then I'd leave you alone together, forever, to conjure what you could.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.
Anne Sexton, Her Kind

Labels: ancient history, erinyes