the mistress
I am a mistress, but the cuckold is not her husband. There’s no groom at home harbouring increasing paranoia. She is not cheating on a man. I am not bedding another man’s wife. I am sleeping with a woman who is cheating on the heterosexual idyll that is her façade.
Stolen moments, lunches, public bathrooms. The eroticism of enforced silent embracing of tongues and limbs. The excruciating tingle of delayed gratification. I am her lunch-time and after dinner whore. There’ll be no waking up with her in the morning, no expeditions to acquire groceries, no lazing about on Saturday afternoons reading the papers and watching TV.
You would think that a hundred years’ lapse between now and Oscar Wilde calling it the “love that dare not speak its name” would have been sufficient to allow our love more than just a discursive space, more than just a space in the pornographic images on TV and in men’s fantasies.
But things haven’t changed, not really. There are the children to think about. The children who when we walk past them on the beach cause us to stop holding hands. Easier not to provoke that anxiety and unease. Instead of just two lovers holding hands over lunch we become the topic of conversation for their dinner later that night. Glances that become stares which are never polite or surreptitious.
I am the mistress and the cuckold is convention, and hell hath no fury like convention scorned.
The public and the private, the outer and the inner lives. For years I believed that the public, outer realm was ruled by superficial whim and convention and that what was important was what occurred in the inner realm of the private. But the truth is is that as human beings we have to live in both realms. We love and are loved in the realm of the private, but our love only becomes real when it is made public.
Psychologists speak of the term ‘reality testing’: something can be confirmed as real only once it is shared. And although our love is real, what I feel is real, it blurs into schizophrenic paranoia and delusion when it is not shared by others that you know and love. And if our love is a delusion, unreal, then I do not exist. Unless others know about our love I do not exist. Love has made me a spectre roaming the fringes of her life, waiting for her to leave the real world to enter the minutes we share.
July 28th, 2006 at 9:15 pm
Ah yes. But there is more beauty in here than you allow - says a vulgar sex, a male -
This mad planet, this swooning environment, called passionate intimacy between two human beings, is purely ignorant of societal strains (that cold, vaster enviro..). those minutes are seasons; those moments epiphanies of space-as-time.. and, indeed,
if the intimacy exists, the social becomes glints and glance of in-jokes to this the ruling planet, the ruling stratum.
This vulgar, limping male is saying that if the intimacy is there, is secure and self-sustaining, the world become a landscape justifying this naked fermenting jungle of connection. and exciting it.
Just a merry glimpse from elsewhere
Mick
August 2nd, 2006 at 10:34 am
Point taken, dear vulgar male,
but are we as humans on this planet ever really self-sustaining? don’t the bank queues and petrol prices and need to pay the rent taint the sublime aspects?
August 2nd, 2006 at 8:43 pm
the special vulgar says:
there are few exacts in human scope, maths is a simple lie, but
exactly
there
where sincere and passionate reciprocation exists,
an energy, a swelling sustaiea, re-alphabets surrounding stimulli:
so that the oppression of arbitrary threat (basically,
the given social value-system) becomes mere wallpaper,
but wallpaper-as-canvass.
most [an excruciatingly relative term: very scarce persons are gifted to this harmony..] find this reciprocal other in the lover, some in an abstract muse, the lucky ones find it in a healthy pole of ego.
Fuck those self-sustainers!
So yes, when none-essential threat becomes wallpaper, and wallpaper canvass, you know you’ve got it. And it is here that you and ya’ll can birth what humankind much needs -
organic mathematics: the alphabets of blood.
vulgar man reaches for a beer.
out