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Noah -> RE: How important is fear? (7/21/2006 10:34:17 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: shigglyboom
CD and others,
Thank you for your responses. Please excuse my delayed reply to your question, as I have been away from the boards.
After reading the conversation here, I see my question originates from another question: how can you have a relationship based on trust and still have fear to play with? The two seem to me to be contradictory feelings. It's impossible for me to imagine having both at the same time.
Okay. Let me paraphrase the question. How can you have a relationship based on pleasure and still have pain to play with?
Answer: Easy.
Zillions of ways, each indiosyncratic to a particular pair of human beings at a particular time--although many of them are shared between one couple and another and a thousand others
It astounds me that people who "play" with physical pain from both top and bottom have such a hard time getting their heads around the directly analogous way this works with psychological or emotional pain.
I used to get all high and mighty when I had one of these episodes of astoundedness. I like to think that I'm somewhat less of an asshole now than I was then. Shigglyboom, for one, is a very intelligent and sensitive person. If her ignorance of a certain issue isn't arising from being dull or slow or dense then maybe that is also true of other people who don't get it. "It" in this case being fear as an important dynamic (NOT the basis, okay? can we stipulate that it isn't the basis and quit beating that horse?) in a vibrant, meaningful relationship.
The difference between shig and some of her respondents is that she is addressing soemthing she doesn't understand and asking careful questions with an open mind and considering input from a variety of sources. Some of her respondents who also clearly don't understand emotional/psychological S&M are bleating like Moses on a hilltop.
You go, shig.
Physical pain can be burny or thuddy or stingy or this or that or the other.
Emotional pain can be a matter of humiliation, fear, abandonment or any number of other flavors.
To those who say: "It isn't "REAL" (that fucking word again) fear if (blah blah blah)" I ask: can it be REAL pain there where a sewing needle is going into her cuticle bed if on some level she finds this meaningful and rewarding and one aspect of a whole relationship she values and very much wants to remain in? Obviously, yes, it is "real" pain. She is really pained and she is genuinely pleased to be pained.
If you're not sure whether that kind of pain is real, stop by my house some time.
I mean what the fuck is "unreal pain" or "unreal fear"?
Maybe some people actually are emotional instruments from which can be coaxed only one note at a time. It sounds sub-human to me.
I think that any well developed, mature, healthy person isn't some emotional whoopie cushion which only blows F sharp if squeezed softly or A flat if squeezed hard. I think that any well developed, healthy, mature person is an emotional orchestra which can play chords and notes and harmonics all at once, making melody and rhythm at the same time. He or she can play two songs at once, or three, and the counterpoint can be poignantly beautiful.
I stand before you as a humble--if not utterly ingenuous--conductor of such orchestras. Yes it can be done. Yes it is (fucking) REAL.
One of the songs can be a song of fear. You may have a theory about why that fear is not <sigh> REAL fear. Fair enough.
Maybe I'll shove you out of a plane and then yell down after you my theory about how your fear as you fall is really bogus, because without a parachute you have perfect knowledge of your own irrevocable destiny and someone in that condition cannot feel fear.
That would be an asinine theory of course, but then there are a lot of those going around.
"If you're happy you can't be sad."
Ever stand proudly by as your firstborn climbs onto the train headed for his first far-away, long term adventure?
"If you're calm you can't be excited."
Well maybe this is true for you but I can't think of a better way to describe the feeling of falling madly but sanely in love.
"If you trust someone you can't be afraid of them"
Well this is just preposterous. Here is an example of why:
Find a person with a very strong respect for heights of any kind, who gets stomach-tingly climbing a ladder to a second story roof. Have her go take a parachuting course. Take it with a world renowned expert whose record of keeping his students healthy has been perfect for ten years running.
Okay, now have her hold her teacher's hand and jump out of her first airplane.
Does she feel safe, because after all she's learned it right and the equipment is all checked and HE is right there beside her? Sure, in an important sense it makes sense to say she feels safe. That is true.
Is she practically crapping her jumpsuit with terror anyway? A lot of people would be.
Feeling safe. And feeling "gut-wrenching, heart-pounding terror, not just major adrenaline." At the same time.
And let's note that she is feeling simultaneously safe and scared in the hands and at the hands of a very capable person in whom she has developed a deep level of trust over a period of time.
Sound like a familiar scenario?
The difference between the parachuting and the enotional S&M is that in the emotional S&M the "teacher" directly provides the abyss down through which the "student" free-falls. He doesn't need an airplane and some silk and a great big sky.
A shiny little needle or even a well chosen word is all that is needed in addition to the willing mind and heart of the masochist.
There may well be people who so rationalize their emotions that they would feel no fear whatsoever. I don't pity them, any more than I pity someone who is blind or deprived of smell. But I do feel sympathy for them just because I know with immediacy and intimacy a whole range of human perception which is not available to them.
If you can't ride a bicycle and you feel the need to go post to some bicycle newsgroup that since YOU can't ride a bicycle, bicycle riding doesn't exist, I say go post your brains out. The bicyclists need a laugh as much as the next guy.
If you just can't figure out how non-pathological emotional S&M works in terms of fear and so you have the urge to reply here and tell me that some fear isn't fear or any similar nonsense ... hey, go for it. Why should the bicyclists have all the fun?
quote:
But I'm defining fear as real, gut-wrenching, heart-pounding terror, not just major adrenaline, and from what has been described here, it seems like "fear play" really shakes out as "adrenaline play" (sssh, I won't tell anybody). Is that right, or is there a side of this I'm missing?
Beyond that, if you do a search for the word "fear" on these boards, you find statements like "I like to see the fear in her eyes." So I guess my question boils down to: For those who can identify with this sentiment, if fear does not equal terror, what thing of beauty is it you are finding in her (his) eyes at this moment?
Yes. There is a side of this that you're missing.
But come on shig. You are asking us to name that which is beautiful in a thing of beauty? You go first. Which part of the flavor of chocolate is the tasty part? Which part of harmony sounds harmonious?
I once had an office which faced west onto a huge body of water. One evening the sunset was just stunning. I called to a colleague to come have a look. She looked and said--and I'm not making this up: "It's a sunset. So what? If we're gonna stay much later you wanna order a pizza?"
I can no more tell you about the beauty I see in my partner's eyes than I could tell my colleage that day what I saw outside my window. It is unspeakable. I don't mean it is so hard to say that I just can't manage to get it across with my limited skills. Some things are inherently unspeakable. They can experienced but they can't be said.
That a thing is unspeakable marks it for some people as unimportant or even non-existent. As for me I get fucking tired of speech sometimes. I get tired of hearing it and tired of doing it. I get tired of words (much like anyone who plows through these endless posts of mine I suppose.)
Sometimes I just want to slip into the unspeakable--whereas my readers probably just want to fucking SHOOT themselves to make it stop.
The unspeakable isn't some empty place in the world-of-sayable-things. The unspeakable is the context in which speech miraculously arises. Kind of like when someone on the phone asks you where you are right now you're more likely to say "the bathroom" than "The Milky Way galaxy, same as you, dude." Even though both would be true statements.
You don't have to not be in Kansas any more to find yourself among the stars (that ought to be carved on a hallmark card somewhere, huh?).
Similarly you don't have to exit the world of facts and theories to take a swim in the unspeakable.
Fear, like pain, can be a great vehicle for this trip, from the top or from the bottom.
Now whoever cast that golden calf while I was taking a whiz behind the burning bush had better be afraid, very afraid.
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