Blog has Moved

My blog can now be found at Wordpress at http://dominationandmastery.wordpress.com . See you there. Mitdasein.

A Tale of Chantix and Psychosis

I've been AWOL on the blogging recently, mainly because I tried to quit smoking using Chantix ® . Suffice it to say this is not the drug for those with mood stabilization issues. I spent four days that I barely remember in and out of psychosis. Not that I'm saying this drug doesn't work to help others quit, but for a bipolar with psychosis it's a recipe for disaster. By Friday I apparently threw up all over the bed, leaving emmie to clean up, which she had terrific difficulty with as she is not fond of bodily fluids. I have no memory of it. I have little memory really of the whole episode – nothing I took helped (and I have a cornucopia of antipsychotic drugs at my disposal) – but finally I slept so much on the last day that I never got around to taking the anti-smoking drug. Lo and behold, I got better, immediately better. Apparently the FDA wants to put a stronger warning on the drug, I say definitely do, and put something in the warning about bipolars, hey, we're people too!

Munch and Play Time

This weekend is the big play party (for us, at any rate - there is a bigger one but it's not really our scene). I'd like to play with both mitda and emmie but it is sometimes exhausting to play with more than one slave, especially in a (relatively) public space.

Apparently mitda does want to play with other people so I could let her do that and play with emmie. At the same time emmie might not mind the reprieve as she is does not so much enjoy pain but instead likes to please.

I will think on it some more between now and the party. There is a munch the night before which will be enjoyable as the group usually has a good conversational atmosphere.

Nurturing

At times the Master's role is to protect, to nurture, rather than opening up a World to the slave. It is in the hidden roots in the earth that things grow and mature, and come to fruition. Pushing the slave into doing things to boost his/her confidence, and promote his/her abilities by giving room for trial and error, failure and eventual success, is a major part of this nurturing process. Stepping out from what we already know into those areas that have remained opaque and mysterious grows the slave into a fuller human being and more valuable property.

Presence, Presencing, Presentation and Being

In terms of Being and Place, Topoi, it seems necessary to work out the differences at play between Presence, Presencing, and Presentation. Beings have presence, that is to say they are present in the present and abide by for a while. Presencing is the event of presence, therefore the event of the Being of any particular being, it's uncovering, its truth. Presentation is the situation within which the being may presence, and different beings may presence in different situations. Being itself is the hidden core of presentation, the point of excess that always threatens the situation with its overabundance. As punctual Being is the limit of the limit-situation itself.

The Situation, State of the Situation, and Training

To every Situation there exists a metastructure, the State of the Situation. This reduplication of the count-as-one of the multiplicitous Situation serves to protect the Situation's unity from the danger of the point-of-excess, the Void, or Being. In a nation the State's laws and regulations decide what is permissible and possible in the Situation - “Sitere” originally meant ot let, or permit. But the State is not merely an image of the situation. There are elements of the situation not contained in the State, and elements in the State's image that are extraneous to the situation. These elements, respectively, are the Singular and the Excrescent.

In the M/s Situation the State is represented by the authority of the Master. When I claim a shared Situation with my slaves it is my reduplication of the Situation that is shared along with it, with my interpretations, as-structure, and meaning. However my slaves always have things “of their own” that are not part of the State, but still belong to the Situation. Incorporating these things into the State of the Situation when they are singular, and driving them out of the Situation when they are excrescent, is at the heart of slave training. By careful repetition the purview on the World that the Master possesses is imprinted on the slave, until he/she cannot experience that which the Master does not permit to be experienced. Governance, then, becomes a tightening of the grip on the slave's very World-experience, performed in the safe, protecting, nurturing cover of the Master's secure hand.

Topology and M/s

“Place”, Topos, is always the proper place of some “thing” or some “one”. To bring into the proper place is the full meaning of appropriate used as a verb, rather than the common usage of to “take”. While I certainly do “take” mitda and emmie as slaves, it is truer to say that I appropriate them and in so doing bring them to their appropriate places. This “event of appropriation” is one way of translating Heidegger's Ereignis, the other way is “Enowning”, and the event of appropriation is in fact how one comes to enown another. That this requires enacting on the part of the slave as well as the Master should be obvious in the enowning/enslaving dialectic that takes place. Topologically a map is drawn of our combined being such that mitda and emme “belong” to the multiple Mitdasein. They of course are multiples themselves, so the set is always a set of multiples. I don't call the set by my real name, but by Mitdasein, because Mitdasein intimates the shared being we have together. As Master, I am of course Mitdasein, but they are integral to my Mitdasein as those with whom I share the Da, the “there”, the World.

Mastery vom Ereignis

To situate means to place, to put in it's (own) place. M/s situates both the Master and slave by placing them in their appropriate places relative to one another. My slaves are slaves in relation to me, not to anyone else. There is no expectation, other than general politeness, for them to act slavely to anyone else. By the same token I have no expectation of being a Master to anyone else. By enslaving them they have enowned me (enabled to own) and in a strong sense we are enowned over to each other. Via Mastery of philosophy Heidegger was able to write “vom Ereignis” or “from Enowning”, I can also write “vom Ereignis” through the deference shown me by mitda and emmie, but my Mastery is limited to their persons.

Feeling Blah thought Things Are GOOD

I've been really fighting a bad mood today. No really, I have been trying to be reasonably cheerful when every little thing is a monstrouis irritation. I've taken Ativan to no avail, put on relaxing music, even had a bath; nothing seems to be helping. The kidlet is a huge and near constant source of annoyance for me. I think because he watches so much TV or plays video games he thinks he needs a soundtrack of his life to go with whatever he's doing. So he babbles, sings off pitch and asks annoying questions constantly. Of course he's only 9 and has his issues. But I find myself wishing sometimes he has the autistic trait of being non-verbal, rather than overwhelmingly verbal as he currently is :).

Things aren't going so badly though really. House Daedalus has dealt with what seemed an insurmountable debt crisis by simply working out better terms with creditors (thank Luc and emmie for that), and we managed to scrounge enough cash from family to be solvent until I get a paycheque. With all that relief there maybe came a let down of adrenaline leading to this miserable mood.

Earth and World of the Master

Every site has its share of covering/protecting/hiding (Earth) and uncovering/revealing/showing (World). The M/s situation takes its part of both the nurturing and protecting and the uncovering and revealing that is the shared World of Master and slave. The Master's gesture in covering and protecting simultaneously leaves the slave safe to uncover his/her self and show his/her truth to the Master.

Narcissism, BPD, Bipolar, Mastery and Slavery

"and the DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder came up. These include "has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations"".

This quote is from a well thought out post by Tanos on Entitlement, posted in his weblog and linked from the ownership wiki on The Slave Register

I lived with someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Looking back on it he had a somewhat D/s relationship with his lover, who had obvious Borderline traits. However there was no sense of mastery in his actions, attitudes, etc., merely entitlement without responsibility. Looking at my own behaviour I do, of course, act entitled, while at the same time discouraging such acting in my slaves. But I have a sense of responsibility and a dedication to them and their lives that is simply lacking from the purview of someone with NPD. I will and do take risks, including the risk of simply being an overt Master in a country where human ownership, consensual or not, is simply illegal. And that is a minor one given all the things in our lives.

A couple in our local scene are an obvious NPD/BPD couple, and the two tend to go together. While he seems to take reasonable care of his charge I feel a sense of creeping unease in their presence. Although emmie and mitda (and I myself) have all been diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder 1 it doesn't seem to have any direct bearing on our M/s relationship. Obviously my moods and theirs impact the day to day functioning of that relationship but I can't say I see an overall tendency that runs from BP symptomology to M/s dealings.

Migraine

This afternoon I came down with a severe migraine. I've had to get up as laying down sent the blood to my head and made the pain all that much more intense. I feel like I've taken a bullet to the head although that might hurt less.

The girls have gone to fetch some Amerge from the drug store, fortunately enough one of them has a prescription for it. So I'm waiting while they make the 15 mile trek to the drug store and back. Damn I hate migraines, I don't know how I survived my 20's and early 30's when I had a near-constant migraine for about 11 years.

Being and Time; and Place?

I am currently reading a book by the name of “Heidegger's Topology: Being, Place, World”. Why topology when Heidegger's most famous book is “Being and Time”? Heidegger's notion of Being and his notions on philosophy imply a certain situatedness and site, and he was certainly aware of Jasper's work on the limit-situation, having been the first reviewer of “The Psychology of Worldviews”. I will post more on this topic and how it relates to the M/s situation as I assimilate the ideas therein with the work on the mathematical topology of Being by Alain Badiou.

Master as Proxy to the Void

What does the Master, as the State of the M/s Situation, accomplish for the slave? In essence the Master keeps the Void at bay and serves as the point of Being for the slave by proxy. For the slave this results in lessened anxiety that more than makes up for the anxiety generated by the loss of freedoms (see the Reactance essay on Tanos' Ownership WIKI).

Moving to Wordpress

I am in process of moving my blog over to Wordpress.com. The new URL will be http://dominationandmastery.wordpress.com. I will continue to update this blog as well for the next couple of weeks as I move over.