TOP DOG PRESS

Pain Itself

by Skian McGuire

       “What's the difference,” she asked, “between the pain you want and the pain you don’t?” 

We were sitting at her dining table, the clatter and bustle of the Manhattan morning rising from the street below. I couldn’t say. It wasn’t that the pain I wanted hurt any less than the pain I didn’t. Usually, it hurt more. And it wasn’t that the unwanted pain was always inflicted on me without my choice: think dentist. So what was the difference, anyway? I had to think about it, I told her. Then I had a lovely caning, and a taste of her singletail that left us both hungry for more, and having run out of time, I picked myself up and headed for the train home.  I’ve been trying to come up with an answer ever since.

     Pain, I’ve found, is an odd thing to remember; like smell. I know something when I smell it, but remembering it isn't like remembering a color and seeing it in my mind's eye, or hearing sounds. I smell things in dreams, then wake up with an annoying feeling of not being able to remember something that was right there a moment ago. I think we humans might not be wired to really remember the actual feeling of pain – think childbirth. I try to remember the most painful things I've ever experienced, and I know these are dreadfully, terribly painful things, but exactly how did they feel? All I can do is make metaphors – something that was like those things. I remember one top whose bites were something like having blood drawn from the artery in one’s hand, a deep, slowly blossoming, very intense and very site-specific pain – though not as severe. And that's the best I can do – compare the two things, without actually being able to mentally re-experience either one.

     I have been asking myself, what do I know about pain? I know that if it's a big enough pain, nothing else can really occupy the space, and I have to focus completely on it. I've read that people who cut themselves use pain as a focus, as a way of safely feeling something when all other feelings are too difficult. I can't say, honestly, if allowing myself to be beaten isn't a kind of self-mutilation by proxy. I don't really think so. I've never been inclined toward self-mutilation. I also can't say that I'm not acting out some occluded memory, trying to defuse it by re-enacting it time and time again. There are a lot of blank spots in my childhood memories, and I have a number of physical scars I have never arrived at an explanation for. Maybe by enduring intense pain again and again, I am proving that I am indestructible. My tormentor could not destroy me when I was a child; see, I even choose the destruction, and am not destroyed. I have won. My tormentor has no power over me, and never has, and never will. The powerlessness of the child I was is somehow cancelled out.  A femme top is not the abuser; she may be, in part, standing in for her, but she is also supplying things I never got from my mother. I had no fear of the woman who was my Mistress, herself (although my animal self was always afraid of the pain); I trusted her in ways I have never trusted another human being. The restricted context of the scene, and my love for her, opened a way that had not existed since I was a child too small to have learned to fear a woman who has power over me. In some ways, I think I was allowed to return to that starting place, however briefly.

    Like many people, I ignore most of what my senses experience. Pain forces me into pure experience, away from all the things that get filtered through words. Sometimes I think that pain re-unites me with my animal nature in a way I can’t when I top, which seems ironic, since bottoming seems to me something utterly and exclusively human. Furthermore, not only does pain carry me into the realm of pure experience, pain is a blowtorch that blasts away everything I think of as myself, the self-that's-made-of-words. Is it as they say that, like the Tao, the self that can be described in words is not the true self? Years ago, when I had pneumonia that nearly killed me, I came to a sense of calm acceptance of death along with a realization that the person I always thought of as myself was really just so much window dressing. The part of me that would die was the least true, least important part – or so I grasped at the time. Sometimes I wonder if experiencing pain to the limit that I can endure, in a way that is safe and controlled and by my choice, returns me momentarily to a sense of that true and undying self, without the effort of disciplined meditation. Am I a masochist because I’m lazy?

     Or, then again, am I a masochist because I’m an addictive personality? For all the endorphin high, I can’t really compare bottoming to any drug I ever tried (and I tried just about everything but heroin). What it calls to mind instead (as I explained once in an e-mail) is this:  

when I was a teenager on the east end of Long Island, and every sunny summer afternoon was spent at the beach. The thing I loved best was when the surf was high, and I could stand at the place where the waves broke and wait until one was just about to crash on top of me, then dive at its base. Tons of water would rush over and around and on top of me as I sliced through it, blind and deaf from the roar in my ears, then I'd come up on the other side, dizzy and triumphant. That's what bottoming is like. When it's all over, I feel such an incredible sense of calm and being strong and whole, and a sense of mastery. No matter what the deep, inner motivations, of which I could probably spin out endless possibilities, no matter what the story might be that I make up to give meaning to it, the feeling that I get out of getting the bejesus beaten out of me – that's what I do it for. And I do it because, at some level, it arouses me, even if there's no room for arousal when the big pain is going on. And – not to be forgotten – I do it because it turns someone else on.

    It’s arousal that brings me home to the subject of the pain itself,  the only way to think about the experience of pain that is unencumbered by meaning. It’s simple: hit me with your hand, a flogger, a paddle, a belt, and I get wet. The degree of arousal varies by the type of pain; being punched is arousing mainly for the shock value and the burst of adrenaline. Being caned is so intensely arousing that just thinking about it gets me wet, and even though it hurts like a son-of-a-bitch, even when I am caned to the point of screaming and crying and involuntary writhing away, I still want to get fucked right now. The thought of being caned bloody takes my breath away. I also like singletails. A lot.

     But my own arousal is not enough to explain why I want pain, because even when the pain stops being sexually exciting, I don’t stop wanting it, or wanting more of it. The excitement of the sadist inflicting the pain also excites me. It’s a feedback loop. Even if the pain itself is too intense to be arousing, as long as the top has a hard-on for what he is doing, that’s enough to turn me on, too. I want him to go on hitting me. I want to take as much as I can physically endure for the sake of that loop and the hot sweaty sex that I hope will follow. And even if there won’t be any sex afterward, as long as it turns the top on, or if the pain that top inflicts on me is something she finds nourishing, or healing, or fulfilling in some way, I want to take as much as I can, for her sake.

     Which is another way of explaining why I want pain: when the pain I take from a top is a gift I give her, because I can. I have a high tolerance for pain. Being switchable, I know from the inside how it feels to inflict pain. Even before I allowed myself to experience very much of it, I knew how necessary it could be to let that part of myself loose for a little bit, how nourishing and healing and fulfilling it could be. I had deep moral reservations about being as much of a sadist as my desire demanded, which I wrote about and shared with several friends, one of whom was the woman who became my Mistress. My conflict resonated with her, and I offered her my capacity as a masochist. I didn’t know her well, but I had an intuitive sense of her trustworthiness as a conscientious and compassionate person. I offered myself because I could, and also because I need to bottom. Bottoming for her became something I never expected it to be: something that felt like riding the roof of a freight train with her, being carried off at high speed into the unknown. It terrified me; she had to be brave for both of us. Still, I wouldn’t have refused it for the world – not just for what we each gained from play that wasn’t play but something deep and transformational, but also because we somehow served the Goddess in it. It was my desire for pain, and my Mistress’ to inflict it, that opened the way for Her to pick us up by the scruff of the neck and show us a thing or two.

     And then there’s catharsis. By taking so much pain that I am driven beyond anything that can be put into words, I am driven beyond thinking, beyond worrying, beyond guilt, beyond shame. I can get emotional pain outside myself, out into my body where it’s easier to bear. When the pain is so great that I can’t help but cry, I can cry without shame – something I have found difficult until recently, another blessing of the Goddess’ mystical freight train. When a top takes care of me afterward, and lets me know that it’s okay to cry, it’s okay to be needy and weak, and as disgusting as I see myself then, I’m not disgusting to her, something in me that was nearly destroyed in childhood begins to heal. The emotional slate is wiped clean, and it feels, at the same time, like spiritual absolution. In some way, I feel that I achieve a state of grace by doing penance in the form of physical pain; I return to the communion of humankind from which I often feel alien.

     But still, even for all these reasons why the pain is a desirable and worthwhile thing, still – pain hurts. The pain itself is really pain, even if it is arousing, even if it results in an endorphin high. I can get turned on by other things. I don’t need to get beaten to release endorphins; don’t I have a fully equipped weight room, a handy mountain, and dogs who love to run? What is it that makes the pain I want different from the pain I don’t want?

     It doesn’t have anything to do with consent, either. I have sat down willingly in enough dentists’ chairs to know that some pain has to be scheduled whether you want it or not, and paid for in dollars, too. I’ve had infections lanced and gotten horrible big Novocain needles for the sake of getting wounds stitched up. As an asthmatic hospitalized for pneumonia, I have had arterial blood drawn from my hands for blood gas readings, a procedure so painful that it was once used to gauge the depth of a coma – only a victim in the deepest level of coma did not react to it. I’ve consented to pain I didn’t enjoy in the least for the sake of my own well-being, and it could be said that the pain was something I chose and therefore wanted, by a very broad definition of the word.

     So what kind of pain do I mean by, “the pain I don’t want” –  pain of the mundane, non-BDSM variety? It is a matter of honor to me, to endure such mundane pain with grace, because it’s a waste of time and attention to dwell on things that are so transitory and meaningless. Judging by the ever-present bruises and dings, every day has its little share of pain that I didn’t even notice. As for the larger kinds of pain, I have no conscious memories of broken bones or wounds bad enough to require stitches except from the accidental bites of my own dogs. I’ve never sprained anything. I’m not prone to stomach aches, cramps, sinus pain, earaches, tooth aches, or any other internally generated unpleasantness, except for the cluster headaches I used to get every summer. I haven’t had a cycle of them in years, which leads me to hope that they may be gone forever – they’re as nasty as anything I can imagine not requiring medieval torture implements. Unlike their vascular cousin, the migraine, typical cluster headaches last only an hour or two but happen in cycles called clusters. They’re so excruciatingly painful that sufferers have been known to blow their brains out, and God knows I might have, if I’d had a gun. The experience might qualify as cathartic, if only it could be conveniently timed. Alas, not. I do feel a kind of giddy rush when a headache is over, but I don’t feel swept clean. I just feel tired. There’s no getting around the fact that life is chock full of such miscellaneous pain. Not just physical, but emotional pain, too, and not just small stuff of the variety we are adjured not to sweat – but huge boatloads of suffering we simply do not deserve. Child abuse. Rape. Cancer. Genocide. And – unless one believes in karma, or in the salutary effects of character-building – most of it doesn’t mean squat.  At least, suffering in BDSM is never for nothing. The equation always balances, giving us something we want in exchange for what we endure, like the pain we endure for medical reasons, only more direct.  It could be that our intrinsic craving for fairness is one of the things that makes BDSM satisfying, but I don’t think it’s the main reason why we do it.

     Some pain does have intrinsic value, of course. It could be said that emotional pain is usually related to personal growth; if not the result of growth, then an opportunity for growth. Even so, I most definitely don’t buy into that “it’s good for your character” crap.  It is just as likely that we humans crave fairness so much that we assign value after the fact to things that hurt us, just so we don’t have to feel like suckers. How do we tell? The only thing I know for certain about emotional pain is that it does me no good to avoid it, because by doing so, I also keep myself from all the joy of emotional fulfillment. On the other hand, pain that results from injuries does have value on a physiological level, keeping us from worsening the damage and insisting that we hold still and heal.  Of course, the problem with physical injuries, like emotional ones, is that we are sometimes so afraid of pain that we keep protecting our wounded places long after we should be out getting them some exercise. Sore muscles from physical activity demand rest, and so such pain is also valuable. For me, that’s another kind of pain entirely, since it usually results from things like weightlifting and running and climbing small mountains. The pain itself, even if it is mundane, even if it is a side effect of something else, is something I actively enjoy. I like having sore muscles. Yes. Really.

     Huh? Am I a masochist, or what? No, really. I like being sore the day after a good run or a good workout. I feel strong. I feel alive. I feel...sexy.  

     And that, I think, is the key. 

     Before I began doing BDSM with the woman who became my Mistress, we had a long discussion by e-mail from which certain earlier parts of this essay are adapted. She wanted to know what it was that I got for myself out of intense pain,  because it was important to her sense of honor that we both received something of value – she would not be in my debt by accepting something from me that she did not in some way return. What matters in such things isn’t just a reckoning of tit-for-tat, or even the balance sheet of karma, it seems to me, but that adult humans need to complete the circle of giving and receiving in order to remain whole. As humans who still have needy children within us, we can’t give and give and get nothing back without dishonoring our own needs; as humans who have grown into our adult mastery, we can’t take and take and never give back without dishonoring our gifts. In order to reassure her that the exchange would be an equal one, I wrote about what bottoming meant to me, discovering in the process (because I often don’t know what I think or feel until I try to put it into words) that BDSM play is composed of several different elements. I made a musical analogy, explaining to her:

     During the early Renaissance, there was a musical form known as a cantus firmus mass (also called a tenor mass), in which the composer would take the melody from some completely unrelated piece of music – usually a popular song of the time, a chanson  – and use it as the tenor line of all the parts of the Mass (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei). Before that absolutely revolutionary innovation, the various parts rarely had any musical relation to each other. With a unifying theme in the tenor voice, the music of the Mass became one work of art, not five separate ones. It was important that the theme be in the tenor voice, not the bass, because putting it in the bass line would severely limit the composer's harmonic possibilities. And the fact that [the theme] was often a piece of popular music made the composition something that (in my opinion) resonated with the listeners more deeply, who were in fact participating in the sacred ritual by listening. The popular tunes were often very well known. One, called L'Homme Armé, became the cantus firmus of several masses by different composers, among them Josquin des Prez and Guillaume Dufay.

     It seemed to me that, for me, the whole structure of play might be like this.  I told her that for me,

 sex is the cantus firmus.  It has to be there; it unifies everything that I do BDSM for, even if the scenes themselves are for different purposes, acted out by different means. Sex isn't the bass line, the foundation, ... (I think the bass must relate to the story that's being acted out at some level deep below consciousness.) The upper two voices [might] be ... fear and pain.

     Even if a scene doesn’t include actual sex, there must be some desire on my part for the top, or the top for me. Without that, there would be no reason to do the scene. It would be more pointless than food without salt, it would be food without calories or vitamins or even flavor.

     And that, folks, is why they call it a fetish. The dictionary even has a word for it –“algolagnia ... pleasure in inflicting or suffering pain,”  from the Greek lagneia, or lust. The pain I want is different from the pain I don’t want because it’s about sex. Pain gets me wet. Simple, right? Back to square one.

     Well...

     Except that sex is still just a shadow on the wall of Plato’s cave.  Sex isn’t just the interaction of bodies in order to achieve orgasm, it’s a metaphor itself. Sex is the  power of life, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” as Dylan Thomas said. It’s also an ineffable act of communion with other human beings and every other living thing and every inanimate thing, too, and through them, with Life and Death themselves: “And I am dumb to tell the hanging  man/ How of my clay is made the hangman’s line.” Sex is one way to connect with others and complete each other’s humanness, without which we can’t be whole, any more than a solitary dog or horse is whole, because, like them, we are designed to live in community. Pain that is inflicted in the context of sex completes a circuit of desire and need. It is conjugative. The other kind of pain – the pain I don’t want – is by its very nature alienating.

     When the pain I don’t want happens to me, I am alone in it, even if it’s being administered as part of a medical procedure for the purpose of making me well and whole. The doctor or dentist or physical therapist who causes pain in a therapeutic setting may or may not secretly enjoy it, but their purpose is to bring healing, of which pain is merely the regrettable side effect. We are not sharing the same experience. When the pain I don’t want is inflicted non-consensually, in the form of abuse, it is not only alienating but annihilating – I am nothing but an object for the abuser’s pleasure or release, ceasing to exist as a person.

     But pain that is inflicted on purpose by someone who cares about me in order to fulfill my desire for pain as well as her desire to inflict it – that’s more than simply consensual, it’s congruent. We are sharing the experience as completely as it is possible for people to share any experience, imprisoned in our own skulls as we are most of the time, with nothing but language to liberate us. I am as intensely aware of her feelings as she is of mine, but it is not merely the experience of perceiving each other that we share. We are perceiving a third, abstract thing: the pain itself as it is given and received. As Antoine de Saint Exupéry said in Wind, Sand and Stars, “Love does not consist of gazing at each other; but in looking outward in the same direction.” So we look paradoxically inward and outward, at and into each other and ourselves, and the experience is the experience of love.

     I never realized until I began topping someone in a serious way, how very much is shared by the top in an intense scene.  I had been aware of the deep connection between myself and my top when she fisted me; with my Mistress’ hand in my cunt, squeezing her and holding her so tightly that she could not easily withdraw, I understood that the link was not purely physical. I felt that my vulnerability opened her to me in a way that I could not ordinarily sense. When she opened my ass the same way, I felt that the walls between us had thinned to transparency. At moments during the scene, it was nearly as if we didn’t exist as separate people. I was penetrating her – her consciousness – just as deeply as she penetrated me. Now I’ve begun to find that inflicting pain and fear can beget a similar experience.

     In the past, I had played mostly at SM Lite – inflicting only so much pain as was erotic. I had rarely gotten a taste of the kind of sadism that sent a rush of excitement and gratification through me, something like a volcano of light infusing me, focusing every thought and feeling and every iota of my being on that moment of the bottom’s pain. One strike of the cane. Another. Then uncertainty came flooding back, mostly borne of self-doubt. How could I possibly deserve this gift? What if I couldn’t stop? I thought about those questions a lot. When a friend allowed me to give her the kind of cathartic experience I’d had myself as a bottom, I found a way to answer them.

     That was what I wrote about in “The Problem of Pain (with apologies to C. S. Lewis),” the essay that so resonated with the woman who became my Mistress. I discovered that inflicting pain on someone in order to bring them catharsis while I also fed the Beast in myself – the Beast that enjoys inflicting pain – forges a connection with that person that enlarges both of us. In the shared experience of pain, being open to another person in a way that is beyond language, we are both discarding our definitions of ourselves that say, “I am this. I am not that. I am me. I am not you.” The walls come down between us; for a moment, in perhaps only a very small and limited way, I am you. You are me. My Mistress with her hand inside me was not just penetrating me, I was penetrating her, too, penetrating her very being. It is not possible to venture into such deep places, such interpenetration of selves, without a solid sense of one’s own integrity – and so, I become myself, reaffirmed.

    In realizing this, I am brought back to the time when my childhood memories started returning, so powerful sometimes that it seemed that the boundary between the past and the present had become so thin, I might at any moment fall through. One sudden move, one shock, one loud noise, and I might break that boundary as if it had no more substance than the membrane of an egg, and I would find myself reliving the horror as a child again. That’s what it felt like. It wasn’t, of course, that I could travel in time, or be returned to the child’s body I once inhabited. It was that the self I knew that might dissolve – wasn’t I feeling the same feelings of fear and loss and confusion, every bit as strong as I had when I was an abused child? What was keeping me from becoming the same broken child self? I still don’t know – the anchors of my adult life, perhaps. My dogs, who needed me. My partner who loved me. The woods I found sanctuary in. The job I had to go to. In the end, I was lucky to trust those anchors and my own strength enough not to be paralyzed by fear. It came to me, remembering this, that the interpenetration of intense BDSM, even as a top, might be simply impossible for someone whose sense of self has been so deeply compromised, when the boundary between the adult who is and the child who was is as fragile as the membrane of an egg.

     I don’t know when I came back from that place of fragility. I can only see the journey now that I’ve completed it, with the perspective of distance. I don’t know that I won’t go back there, returned to my body’s memory by the past that still hasn’t emerged from the shadows. I don’t know what lessons this life still has to teach me. But there is one thing I know now as surely as I know my own strength which rose from the suffering child like, as William Least Heat Moon relates the Lakota saying, the buffalo arises from the grass: when I as a top share with a bottom that moment when the walls between us disappear, I become more myself, more whole. When I beat my good strong bottomman until he is not sure he can take any more pain, when there is nothing in his mind but the pain (except perhaps his fear of failure, and the shame that rides that fear like a bloodsucking demon) – in that moment, the things he is feeling are part of me. I can’t do what I’m doing to this friend I love unless I perceive his pain and fear as if it were my own. I have wrapped my fist around his heart and discovered that it was my own I held, my hand cradled in his big paw. A hall of mirrors.

     Human beings, as I have said before, as I say with everything I write, as every writer says with everything he writes, human beings are not solitary creatures. We are not whole, alone. Saying this is not just a statement of fact – why would I have to say such a simple truth, so often? Why would we all? Why? Because we are praying for it to be true. We are praying that we aren’t all alone, here, trapped in our own skulls that echo with our own solitary footsteps as we pace back and forth, waiting to die. Even if all I can do is tap-tap-tap a code into the wall of the next cell by way of the computer keyboard before me, it’s better than being alone, because alone is only half a human life. Alone may not even be human at all. All the horribly malformed creatures, all the demons in human form that have ever dismembered women or raped toddlers or turned on the spigots of the Zyklon-B, could they do what they did, if they were whole human beings, connected to the ones they destroyed?

     Luckily, something drives us toward completion, like children who long for the fulfillment of adulthood and can’t be denied it no matter what the cost. The Friends (Quakers) with whom I worship believe there is that of God in everyone; maybe it’s God Herself urging us all toward Her own reunion. Whatever the cause, we recognize that connection enlarges us, and so we find every way we can to connect. We tell each other stories. We hold hands in the dark. We open ourselves to love and let ourselves be hurt, rather than spending our lives alone. We have babies, and not just in a safe dark den – we bring doulas and video cameras. We not only have funerals, we have big messy wakes where we sing the songs the dead one loved to send him off, and we sing the songs he hated just to make sure he’s dead.. We sit on the floor grieving and forget what we look like. We get incredibly drunk at weddings. We buy magazines full of photos of the weddings of famous people we don’t even know, because we feel like they’re members of our own families. We (some of us) turn on the television the moment we wake up, just to hear the sound of another voice and never be alone. We scrapbook. We shmooze. We take mambo lessons. We  find ways and more ways to fling wide the doors of consciousness and  share the deepest feelings we can, every way that we can. We have sex. We pick lice from each other’s monkey heads. We tell each other stories, the same ones, over and over again, never tiring of them.

     And if words aren’t enough,  and the only doorway to each other’s souls is this fragile body and all its feelings, all its love and terror and need and shame, what then?

     Pleasure and warmth and fullness and comfort are not all the expressions one body may receive from another and know it is not alone, like words in a vocabulary of the flesh; sometimes my body can barely hear those words and almost never can believe them, at least not until I have been opened to them by the ones I was taught to expect. Pain, I can hear. Grief and shame and the great gaping emptiness of solitude, where what I need and what I feel never matters and crying only brings more pain. Those things, my body can understand, and when these unspoken words have blasted down the walls of self like the trumpets sundered Jericho, my aloneness can be conquered with pleasure and warmth and fullness and comfort, and I can be wholly human.  It doesn’t matter if I’m the bottom or the top. With BDSM as its vehicle, the pain I want is like every other thing I want that ends my aloneness, only deeper, more intense, more clear and undeniable. Maybe because my aloneness as an unwanted and abused child was so deep, that I need the searing intensity of BDSM to overcome it. Maybe it’s just the blessing I was given in exchange.

     No matter. I know what the answer is, at last. What’s the difference between the pain I want and the pain I don’t? The difference, my friend, is that you want it, too.

	

 

This essay is a sequel to The Problem of Pain

My deepest thanks to Holly H., who inspired both works.

Ó Skian McGuire 2005