My emmie came up with a post that has set my mind working and this is not going to be a definitive statement on it. The relationship between love and Mastery is extremely complex and more than a little mysterious to me. I've been trying to understand the relationship in terms of various types of care to this point but although I'm fairly confident in relating love as a type of care, it is so qualitatively different from other concerns, "cares", troubles, responsibilities that it is difficult to pin down. Mastery is definitely akin to love in the responsibilities that it lays upon the Master, as love does to the lover. And I can't really imagine a full fledged Mastery of someone without love being requisite. But then there's the difference between love and "in love", and the infinitely varying degrees of "in love", and is passion the same as love in this instance or not? And of course I'm drawing out and pulling up more questions than answers myself.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
comments on mitda on Gloria Brame's blog
Mithras Invicti wrote a post today on Gloria Brame's blog quoting from a very self-revealing post by my mitda on her blog.
I don't know Mithras well, although he and mitda are good friends. But his post was very meaningful to me because he talked about her development in terms of self actualization. Although Mithras discusses self actualization in more psychological terms and I discuss it in more philosophical terms, it is the most important aspect of our relationship to me. The order I give my slaves that underlies all the little orders and directives is "become what you most are". Possibility is always higher than actuality for me.
People who have never and will never experience a TPE/IE relationship probably have a hard time understanding that we who are doing it do it, despite laws against it, despite societal censure, because it is who we most are. Not that I'm pleading for D/s rights in this post. I enjoy doing what I do in defiance of society, because I find society wanting in so many ways.
My previous post mentioned "unlimited responsibility". As a TPE/IE Master I am 100% responsible for everything in my slaves' lives. This responsibility goes beyond anything that has been expected by society in the institutions of marriage or even parenthood. And by this I mean that I am responsible for their possibilities, ensuring they have the opportunities to uncover them, develop them, and become them. This is how I express my own highest possibility. As a teacher I can show my slaves the beginnings of many of the paths they might travel on. But I can't go along them. I have my own path and whether it is in fact the right one I don't know, I won't know until I've gone all the way along it.
TPE/IE and Unlimited Responsibility
An idea current in continental philosophy, inspired by the confrontation of Heidegger with Hegel and Nietzsche, the subsequent confrontation of Adorno and Derrida with Heidegger, and reading the latter confrontations as reworkings of the first two, is a concept called 'Unlimited Responsibility".
As a scholar in this area I'm familiar with many of the ideas original put forward under other rubrics, but the title of this thematic investigation grabbed me as being particularly relevant within the study of TPE/IE. Because total power exchange, for me, implies unlimited responsibility, not as an abstract idea, but as a real, binding challenge to people involved in TPE/IE. Over the next while I am going to try to keep this thematic in view as I look at aspects of TPE/IE and its interactions.
I'll finish this introduction today with a little quote about Heidegger's difficulty for people willing to accept the challenge.
"Unlimited
responsibility is both a theme that pervades the space of intersection in which
Heidegger and his best readers meet, and also the challenge that Heidegger
offers us in reading him. Heidegger is one of 'the few and the rare' who set a standard
by which even those who disagree with him may be judged." - David Wood, Thinking After Heidegger.
mitda's wonderful post
For anyone who thinks we are destroying family values (sic) with our lifestyle, have a read of my mitda's post about her life and our family.
http://quietknowledge.wordpress.com/2007/07/31/then-and-now-really-its-like-this/
Long Train Till Dawn
I woke up a good deal early after taking some medicine and hitting the hay early last night. Still feeling rather manicky, going a million miles an hour. Bought a couple new laptops online, posted a bunch to collarchat and theslaveregister forums. Started a google group for Masters involved in TPE/IE. Now I'm waiting for E to get ready for work so I can shower and get ready in relative peace. emmie showering me is relaxing and I think it might help slow the pace a little this morning, so rather than rushing and doing it myself I'm going to try to take my time.
Hm, "Talk about the Passion" just came on. Would have made a good title for this blog overall. Perhaps sometime I'll change it, but my small readership knows the current name for now.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Convoluted Day
The last post completely upset mitda. We worked it out - I think she understands my viewpoint better now without my having had to be too heavy handed. emmie was another side to the story, but I'll get back to that in a future post, I hope (you can see emmie's own story on her blog listed on the blogroll to the left).
It was a weird day all round. It came to the point where I had to deal with my co-worker's sulkiness directly and get us back on track to test our development work and put it into production. At the same time I am discussing with a high profile firm a new position that could possibly involve some high level management work and systems architecture, rather than the grunt work I've mostly been stuck with since moving countries out of the blue last year. It would be very nice to be involved at a decision making level again.
I hope this humidity and damp quits soon. We've had the 3rd wettest summer on record here this year and the constant gray and humid air is dragging me out badly. Anyone have an extra sun lamp they want to donate? I really didn't expect to need one in Texas.
Taking Breaks?
mitda asked if I had taken a break from mastering them this weekend. I hadn't, in fact, done so. I simply had been in an easygoing mood and willing to indulge them a little. I also had been very tired and somewhat afraid of falling asleep and sleeping through for a long period, something problematic if I do things like padlocking their wrists together for bed.
The last few days I've also been in something of a revaluating mode, perhaps triggered by mitda's request for assistance at rating her mentorship needs, as to what both she and emmie each need from me. emmie is most in need of some direction and impetus to start looking at different topics that interest her and finding something that might hold her interest enough to make it a field of study. mitda needs to get back to her writing but I expect that will happen soon, especially given she goes to a sci-fi writing conference in 2 weeks. The GWNN bash was fun in its way, but right now I wonder if, especially for mitda, she's obsessing too much on the best way to be the best slave possible. Of course it's important to me, but an obsessing slave is not going to be the best slave possible.
Early Morning
Woke up with some nasty dream I no longer remember. emmie woke up at the same time, apparently some nastiness in her dreams as well, plus me moving woke her up. It feels like daylight outside, clear sky and full moon, bright enough to see for miles.
Our guests stayed last night until emmie was too tired to hostess any further. It felt odd to be entertaining as a quad. Something we shall have to get used to I suppose.
This morning it's back to work to try to have a more usual week than last. If for no other reason than to keep billing hours on an open P.O.. It's easier than having to find a new gig right away - keep billing here while I do the interview process elsewhere.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Slave Mentoring 2
The following topics are part of mitda and emmie's slave mentoring, and they have to rate the importance to them of each from 1-5. mitda has asked for help from me with this as what I think should be important to her is, obviously, a crucial input. It is an interesting exercise for me and I haven't honestly come up with a firm decision on what things mitda should focus on.
organizationetc;)
Long time between posts
Have had a busy and rather aggro-ful few days. Work was irritating last week and, well, best left at that. I brought the motorcycle home early Saturday morning and the ride (with emmie on back) helped relax me enough to get some sleep, finally. The weekend has been much better since.
I've done a little work on the bike. I find this relaxing - just cleaning carbs out and replacing plugs and the like. It runs a bit better, not fantastic but the engine smoothes out enough at 65mph to be an enjoyable ride. Really not bad for a 27 year old Honda. I pretty much have picked out what bike I want for myself and what I think E should purchase, probably late next year / early the year after, if money plans hold up. I'm going for the Triumph Thunderbird for myself and he's looking at a Honda Shadow 1100. He suits the low rider type more than I do, I prefer the straight up British street bike look. And the Triumph 900cc Triple is a sweet motor.
Emmie and I had some great sex yesterday, as did mitda and I. Later on they had some good fun with E as well, and it kinda culminated in a four way this morning. All in all a good return to healthy group sex. We have guests coming over this afternoon, our first real adult house guests since living together as a quad. These are friends of E and emmie's and they're aware that we're a quad, and aware of emmie's owned status, although it's my impression they try to hide the awareness from themselves whenever possible.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Slave Mentoring
Something that mitda and emelina have brought to my attention over the last couple of days, after discussing it with a slave in our acquaintance who is well versed in the etiquettes and protocols, as well as well known in the scene, is the existence of slave mentoring programs. While I have been aware of offhand Master mentoring programs this is the first time I have heard of organized slave mentoring programs offered by other slaves.
Essentially the new(er) slave chooses from a list of mentors that have different specialties to their service regimen, and spends time online or in person (depending on location) to enhance his/her skills in these areas. These areas might include household duties to sexual duties. Masters are definitely not welcome for the mentoring itself, but mitda had me review the mentors available in order to recommend one to her.
It's an interesting, and I think worthwhile idea. Since the slave who organizes this locally has a Master who is also well known in the scene, and known to me, I may pursue any Master mentoring they may have set up as well. Of course Masters tend to want to do things their own way - it's part of the dominance thing - but pointers can always be useful ; ).
Mitdasein
TPE, Poly and other Alt. Marriages, less coercive or more?
If the outcome of coercive power is the reduction of the human to human resources, and the reduction of the tradition to resource
allocations, we can begin to take a closer look at the various options open in the field of relationships. Quickly we can note the alignment of marriage with tax structures, religious power centres and family-values style politicking.
At first glance TPE, total power exchange, a.k.a. internal enslavement, is the most forceful of the marriage options open. Polyamory possibly the least forceful. Traditional marriage falls somewhere in between. But glances are dissembling here as in many areas. There are also the areas of gay and transgender marriages.
So how about polyamory? Poised as it is against the traditional marriage and the upholding of "family values", and convoluted as it makes marriage from an ownership and taxation point of view, polyamory is in many ways the most radical option for a newly relationshipped adult. The many flavours of polyamory, whether the poly group is in a V, W, quad or other, leads to a delay between expectations and realizations from the moment the group sets foot in society. There are no easy societal labels within the group - husband, lover, partner etc. all seem equally inappropriate. This facet poly shares with gay and transgender marriage. As a result polyamory as well as gay/transgender marriage finds a common element with the proponents of traditional marriage
But since the seat of coercive power in the home is usually occupied by the heterosexual male, doesn't all this argue the more that TPE is the most outrageously coercive form of relationship dreamt up in the west so far?
The missing element here, is mastery. Were TPE simply a matter of domination, and were the domination available in an exterior form, it would be nothing more than a 24/7 form of the imposed drudgery of Hegel's bondsman. A marxist BDSM'er might argue that since the relationship is at least explicit, there is the possibility of reclamation, which seems impossible for the wage slave in his battle with the amorphous and mostly unempowered bourgeois. More than this, however, is the internal form of the "slavery" envisioned, where the slave gladly enters the relationship and would not leave it for a moment. And the willing acceptance of that gift by the Master, returning a solid sense of responsibility that traditional marriage and traditional divorce simply leave to the courts. Mastery is not coercion, it in fact abhors coercion, and will only admit of its own existence if that mastery is provided to it by those it masters. Coercion looks for the weak and the subduable, Mastery only finds value in the mastery of equals.
Mitdasein
Domination, mastery and control
But domination and mastery, surely, are not exactly synonymous. I can dominate all I want and not gain mastery over a thing. By the same token I can have mastery over something I didn't dominate to begin with.
It's a truism in BDSM that the submissive makes the dominant, in that without the submissive behaviour dominating behaviour would look irrational and ridiculous. No doubt. What about that point where the "Dominant" asks the submissive to accept him/her as his/her "Master", for the submissive to become an all out, flat out, totalized slave?
The totalizing, that would seem to be related to the gigantic, to the massive in other spheres. If we live in an age of gigantic, totalizing machination how does this universalized fate fall down to the particulars, the individuals, to us?
To jump to it without any explanations, or justifications, we will make the assumption that the description of the wage-slave and the bourgeois, having not properly been superseded, are still applicable. That we fall into one or the other or both haphazardly without really seeing the distinction between them or the advantage one might contain. The wage-slave no longer sees the results of his labour in nature modified, he simply assists in producing a cultural product. The bourgeois doesn't see his ideas realized in material, he just contributes to the ideas that eventually end up commercialized and vulgarized to the most popular detail. Neither is really involved in struggle except that of struggle with the massive itself. A lifetime fight against being overwhelmed and dropped behind by the gigantic totalization of our society and the remnants of individuals that one finds in it.
Back to our modest little M/s trio. I have asked, and received the gift of absolute obedience, of total slavery to my person, my being, and not to anything I represent, hold, own or command. I have given the gift of total responsibility, not to ideals, or for some teleology in a future that only exists assuming history hasn't in fact stopped already, but to two people whom I have chosen to be responsible for, for the rest of my life on this planet.
This is the particular. Laws against M/s relationships can't, of course, take the particular into account. But perhaps if you know someone involved in a relationship that is set out, set apart from the massive, you might understand it.
Mitdasein
Does the universal always lead to the resourceful?
"In the course of my work as an ethnomusicologist specializing in music and copyright, however,
I have found, somewhat ironically, that perhaps the term ‘music’ may not be especially helpful as
a basic analytic category in my analyses. This is what I shall focus on briefly today, as a minor
point of discussion in the context of a much larger project.
The term ‘music’ is such a commonplace that it seems natural, and inevitable, that it be used as a
category for analysis in ethnomusicology. It seems to be understood that we know what it is that
we are referring to when we use the word. There are innumerable books, recordings, classes, and
conferences to support such a claim. Like those in the fields of musicology and ethnomusicology,
those who participate in the discourses of the law, economics, intellectual property, and copyright
also presume that there is such a thing as “music”. There is nothing in our experiences of the
music industry, technologies, music education, concert performance, and aesthetic appreciation
to suggest otherwise, it is assumed. Surely we can see ‘music’? Surely we can hear ‘music’?
I’m not so sure, and I’m not so sure we haven’t been flogging a dead horse for centuries. What if
there isn’t a ‘thing’ called music? What if our acceptance of the enclosed and enclosing
abstraction of a singular category of “music” is counterproductive to ethnomusicologists’
research concerns, at least those weighted towards the disciplines of anthropology and sociology?
What if we are able to analyze ‘music’ because we set out to analyze ‘music’, and classify,
separate, and differentiate in ways which justify our analysis and satisfy our curiosity - as
Foucault puts it, systematically forming the object of which we speak (1972:49). Many people
have a lot of power and status invested in and justified by the presumption of the existence of
‘music’ as a universal phenomenon. To paraphrase Foucault, however: “... it is precisely this idea
of [music] in itself that we cannot accept without examination” (1990:152).
McCann AAA 2002
3
Scopic Enclosure
Of late, I have been perusing a range of literature in art history. I have been particularly interested
in the work of scholars such as William Ivins, Erwin Panofsky, Martin Jay, Norman Bryson,
Jonathan Crary, Rosalind Krauss, and David Levin. I find this area of work interesting for its
focus on the discursive production of the processes and practices of sight, vision, and visuality.
Working within overarching themes such as “the rationalization of sight” (Ivins) or “scopic
regimes” (Jay), these scholars have highlighted the privileging of sight or vision as a dominant
trope in the lives we lead. Some of them argue that this “ocularcentrism”, as it has been termed,
draws upon and in turn reinforces a variety of philosophical positions from Cartesian
methodologies through Baconian empiricism and Heideggerian ontology to theories of the
Sublime. Sight, again and again, is privileged as the prime sense, the superior sense, understood
no less than our primary way to access being itself. This privileging of sight regularly comes,
however, with a series of discursive companions. Those who critique ocularcentrism draw
attention to, for example,
• the presumed autonomy of vision,
• the constitution of a monocular Subject centred around the presumption of a singular eye,
• the dominance of stasis, fixity, and binary oppositions in associated analysis of experience,
• the attitude of domination, mastery, and control that often accompanies ocularcentrism, and,
importantly,
• the depeopled and disempowering ways in which people drawn to ocularcentric analysis make
sense of our experience
To reinterpret this literature within my own frameworks of analysis, I would suggest that an
underlying theme of ocularcentric discourses and practices is a pervasive expectation of the
elimination of uncertainty. In my own work, this expectation can be understood as a principle
from which arises the process and practices of enclosure. Indeed, I have come to understand
ocularcentrism in terms of scopic enclosure.
Sonic Enclosure
I am concerned that there is not a wealth of similar critique of sonic enclosure, as found in the
discourses and practices of ‘music’ and ‘the musical’. In comparison to art history, the issue has
received hardly any attention at all. Notable exceptions can be found in the work of Max Weber,
McCann AAA 2002
4
John Zerzan, Michael Chanan, and Richard Leppert. In searching through the works of the most
influential philosophers in the development of discourses of ‘music’, readily available in Wayne
Bowman’s book Philosophical Perspectives on Music (1998), it seems to me that the elimination
of uncertainty is also a pervasive and highly-directive theme in the way in which these influential
philosophers make sense of their experience, and in the way they make sense of what they refer
to as ‘music’. The Pythagoreans, Augustine, and the majorly influential Boethius, for example,
wed conceptions of music to the harmonious immutability of number and mathematics. Plato’s
ambivalent conceptualizations of ‘music’ are intimately tied to his pursuit of perfection, utopia,
and ideal divine harmony. Kant’s aesthetic ideal is formalist in the extreme, where the intuition
of form and pattern is uncontaminated by the intrusions of sensation, purpose, or emotion.
Thinkers such as Hegel and Hanslick eliminate uncertainty in their conceptualization of music
through the opposition of ‘music’ to ‘language’ in the cause of essence and the certitude of
autonomy.
I could go on and on. My point is that the elimination of uncertainty is a pervasive theme in
dominant, orthodox discourses of ‘music’ and ‘the musical’, and in associated practices. The
discursive history of the concept of ‘music’, I would suggest, is a history of audio-centrism and
sonic enclosures. The consequences of audio-centrism are similar to those arising from the
disursive privileging of sight - ocularcentrism:
• the presumed autonomy of not just sound, but ‘music’ as a singularly abstracted quality of sound,
• the frequent understanding and conceptualization of ‘music’ as a reified entity or substance, often
anthropomorphized
• the constitution of a mono-audio Subject centered around the presumption of a singular ear,
• the dominance of stasis, fixity, and binary oppositions in associated analysis of experience and
meaning,
• the attitude of domination, mastery, and control that often accompanies audiocentrism, and,
importantly,
• the de-peopled and disempowering ways in which people drawn to audiocentric analysis make
sense of our experience
Audio-ocularcentrism
It is often forgotten, however, that dominant conceptions of ‘music’ privilege not only sound, but
also sight. Dominant discourses of ‘music’ and ‘the musical’, then, constitute and are constituted
by a powerful confluence of enclosures, being as they tend to be profoundly audio-ocularcentric.
McCann AAA 2002
5
This combinatory privileging of sound and sight concedes further privilege to processes of
abstraction and reification in the cause of high levels of order, structure, pattern, in short, to the
aspiration or expectation of the elimination of uncertainty. To privilege sight and sound is a
primary methodological aspect of the dehumanized cleanliness of formalisms. Philosophers such
as Augustine and Gurney, for example, influentially conceive of vision and hearing as the
“higher senses”, differing from the lower senses of taste, smell, and touch in their capacity for the
perception of form:
“Not only do higher senses make fine, complex discriminations of which lower senses are
incapable, they further engage in a kind of formal, combinatory play that makes pure sensual
activity an exceedingly rare occurrence for eye and ear. Thus, the higher senses have the power to
group and combine sensa, an apparently inherent need to do so, and are distinctive for the
pleasure they take in perceiving form" (Bowman 1998:151).
In passing, it should follow, then, that a dominant characteristic of social interactions dominated
by the expansionary strategies and practices of enclosure, that is, social interactions dominated by
the expectation of the elimination of uncertainty, would likely be audio-ocularcentrism, the
privileging of sight, sound, abstraction, and reification. And indeed, this is what I have found in
other work.
There have of course been critiques leveled against the fundamental formalisms and abstractions
that suffuse discourses of ‘music’ and ‘the musical’, most notably from feminism and
postmodernism. Among the most salient critiques:
• that formalist approaches to ‘music’ are often in terms of contextual or negative definition, that
is, formalist approaches tend to articulate what ‘music’ is not rather than what it is
• that as a result of the reifying focus of dominant, orthodox discourses of ‘music’ and ‘the
musical’ there tends to be a systematic exclusion of people, relationships, power, meaning,
emotions, and the dynamics of social interaction from all relevant discussion. Instead, what tends
to draw attention, for example, are debates over replication and reproduction, difference and
distinction with regard to sonic minutiae. Such discourses, then, tend to be de-peopled and
disempowering.
• That, subsequently, discourses of ‘music’ and ‘the musical’ tend not to allow for adequate
consideration of power relations, and, in particular, adequate consideration of power relations of
domination and oppression. Analysis, then, tends to remain primarily descriptive rather than
explanatory.
• And lastly, that dominant, orthodox conceptions of ‘music’ and ‘the musical’ frequently rely on
an essentializing, abstracting, and abstracted universalism.
McCann AAA 2002
6
Despite declaring open suspicion of the universalism implied by these discourses, scholars
drawing upon schools of thought within feminism and postmodernism still, however, adhere to
the central term “music”. Critical thinking in feminism, for example, tends to be profoundly
revisionist, advocating that we simply reinterpret the term, that we reinvest it with a wider range
of meanings than those which are normally present by association. It is declared that other
scholars drawn to formalism and idealist aesthetics have misconstrued ‘what music is’, normally
with blatant gender-bias, “drastically underestimating its significance and potency, and rendering
its sociopolitical and corporeal dimensions all but invisible” (Bowman 1998:387). The irony of
this, of course, is that feminist’s fundamental suspicion of universalist claims revolves around a
central universalist claim that remains untouched - that there is such a thing as ‘music’. Unified
or pluralist, objective or relativist, privileging sonic form or social experience, there is no
challenge taken to the basic assumptions of ‘music’ and ‘the musical’. Similarly in postmodern
critique, the underlying Grand Assumption remains untouched.
In some ways the discipline of ethnomusicology is also an attempt to back-pedal from the
privileging of sounds and sight that the concept of ‘music’ entails while still retaining ‘music’ at
the center of inquiry. Nevertheless, it seems to me that helpful theoretical engagements with
whatever people might mean by “music” may be those conducted in such a way as to leave
sound, vision, and reified material product as, at the very least, secondary concerns that can only
really be addressed successfully as part of comprehensive anthropological or sociological
analyses.
In many disciplines, ‘music’ is often analytically separated and abstracted from social context in
order to justify the validity of using the category as a universal label at all. This often leads us to
reduce our understanding of ‘music’ to those aspects which, as we participate in their reification
and autonomy, guide us to blind ourselves to the specificity of locally-negotiated meanings and
power relations. Seeking to understand ‘music’ as a universal or total phenomenon often draws
us to the safest common denominators of similarity in comparative analysis, which are music-assound,
music-as-vision (e.g., notation), or music-as-thing (e.g., recorded product), or music as an
entity. In my own work I have found that to embrace this safety is to replicate biases towards
visualization, auralization, segmentation, and fixation that are to be found within the discursive
assemblies of copyright. I would suggest, then, that a healthy skepticism in the face of the term
‘music’ is especially crucial in my own work on account of the perils of discursive complicity.
McCann AAA 2002
7
When used as a foundational category in the field of ‘music and copyright’, ‘music’ tends to
guide my analyses towards the consideration of reified sonic or visual entities, compounding the
implicit reification of orthodox legal, economic, and literary discourses, further leading me to
privilege considerations of access, control, and ownership, further guiding me to think in terms of
resource management, precisely the approaches I am trying to avoid."
-Beyond the Term 'Music'
American Anthropological Association 23rd November, 2002
Anthony McCann mccannat@si.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
Trying to avoid being resource-managed ...
Mitdasein
A Family that Blogs Together ...
Blogging together can be an odd sort of
family activity. In our case, with our little BDSM D/s TPE family it
can often be the easiest way of getting things that are difficult to
say face to face onto the record. Since all of our blogs are
blogrolled on each blog it also gives the outside reader a chance to
see the dynamic from all three angles. Unfortunately E isn't
represented. He doesn't blog. And he's not truly part of the TPE
trio, he prefers to just top in bed and be an equal during the day.
It struck me especially seeing each of
our reactions to the BDSM bash over the weekend. My rather slurry
response (blame the lack of adderall) was much different from mitda's
or emelina's reactions.
Today's blog by emelina, where she
talks about how much she appreciates her collar, was a nice suprise
and a push, if one were needed, for me to provide this family with the love
and appreciation that it provides me.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Exquisite Enslavement
One of the presenters over the weekend of the seminar on 24/7 D/s, also known as internal enslavemnt or total power exchange, managed to get some time to chat to mitda and emmie. They hit it off and have been IM'ing since, and went for coffee earlier today. I think it's great for both of them to have someone outside the relationship but involved in a similar one to talk to and discuss things. Of course it also makes me a bit nervous as I could easily have the finger pointed back at me for not doing things right ... This girl runs a board called Exquisite Enslavement, open to members only. It allows slaves to exchange ideas on everything from home necessities to the philosophy of enslavement. I think it will be very good for both mitda and emmie, with their very different views on enslavement to begin with.
So E's oldest moved in, temporarily occupying my office/refuge/saneplace. Oh I can go there during the day when he's up to work on the computers but when he's in bed, I can't sleep, and want to be anywhere but the bedroom, I have the choice of staying put in the bedroom or getting eaten alive by mosquitoes outside. We shall have the living room soon, it's just currently full of emergency plumber equipment trying to discover the root of a water leak. Hopefully that will help although for some reason I've never been able to sit in the living room. Not to mention my Sun workstation isn't there.
Mitdasein
Wow, did I type badly
Something more interesting later, it just blows my mind how much psychotropics affect us.
M.
So the dom learns the art of patience..
The girls went to pick up a script for me and filed it, so I have the med now and am starting to think clearer, Unfotrtunatley while not thinking clearlly this moring in the office I decided to take a whack of caffiene pills to make up for no adderall, believ4e m koids, it dosen't work. By now I'm antsy and tired and my body is full of nerve paihn. Not too good for the moods of a bipolar Master.
as far as patience goes I've been wiating since E left early this morning for the girls to run their errands and get back to being with me. Mitd and emmie claim they do this all time, waiting for E or I to gt home. Well now i'm on the other end for once, lol.
Mitdasein
Saturday, July 21, 2007
The BDSM Bssh
My background in BDSM, except for attending some fetish night parties in Toronto where I was a spectator only, has developed exclusively in private. None of our triad has every "played" pubicly at a play party, including those held at somebody else's private residence. Everything has taken place within our own home. So being at one of these events was all new to us. The dinner was a laid back enough affair, with the exception of the fact that about double the number of expected guests turned up at the restaurant, causing some torture to the restaurant staff. But othewiise nobody underwent any physical trauma that night.
So on to the seminars. The seminar we were most interested in was the first of the day, a seminar on Total Power Exchange, a.k.a. internal enslavement. This is essentially the 24/7 form of D/s practiced by a minority of participants, but dear to our hearts. Within TPE no limits are accepted on the situation, there are no safewords, negotiated limits or other things to fetter the Master, because the slaves are not viewed has having rights, period.
The Master/slave couple presenting was one known to us through the lovely vehicle of the internet, two people whose ideas and views we respected and as a result we were looking forward to hearing them expound on their favourite subject in a presentation format, rather than gleaning their ideas from scattered comments and writings on related, but not identical, subjects. They weren't disappointing, the Master displaying a quiet and humorous grasp of his ideas and the ideas present in TPE/IE, and the slave displaying a strong scholarly background in the subject and a good deal of self awareness as to the relationship dynamics it creates. Unfortunately this wasn't mirrored in those who came to hear the seminar, and answering irrelevant questions took up a lot of their time in the seminar. Many of those questions focussed on a hypothetic Master going beyoind the confines of normally practiced BDSM and in the process endangering his slave's life, with the question being when should another individual or the BDSM community step in on behalf of the slave. More on this another time, but I don't believe the community should ever involve itself within a particular relationship. The Master giving the seminar had been involved in the community for well over a decade and had not personally seen anything resembling a life & death situation such as was being proffered as likely in a TPE relationship. Suffice it for now to say that for me Care, from the smallest day to day concerns to the overwhelming love I feel between myself and my slaves, is the fundamentally human activity, in a TPE relationship no less than a traditional marriage, and someone who is outside that caring is both a) inhuman and b) involved in something as different from TPE as a sociopathic wife or child abuser is from the ideals of traditional marriage. The existence of such people doesn't invalidate a true, loving TPE relationship, any more than it invalidates the traditional marriage ideal.
The play party gave me mixed feelings really. A couple were playing with a single tail and the Master involved really was a master in the use of the instrument. While barely touching the woman with the whip, he created a tension and a situation that was increasingly erotic and sensual, The submissive was pushed into an overt and intense subspace that was very beautiful to watch, and there was a control of the instrument, and a self control in what was intended with it, that descried any notion one might have that it was an act of brutality or sadistic in intent.
We didn't play in public ourselves, for various reasons. Emmie is shy in most situations and this was certainly a situation that exemplified them. And with the exception of the above discussed single tail scene the beauty in most of the BDSM acts shown was contained and kept between the participants themslves. Administering a flogging can have the same erotic self control and beauty in power exchange that was demonstrated with the single tail, but it has it between the flogger and flogged, and is just not so much a public, sculptured dance that can be shared with non-participants. I have every intention of taking up the single tail myself, but it will be a long time, I suspect, before I gain sufficient mastery of the instrument to try using it on anything animate.
Mitdasein
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Oh Bondage, up yours!
Welp it's 4:40-something and I'm waiting for mitda to brew some coffee. We both woke at 1:30 originallly but managed to go back to sleep together for 3 hours. 3 hours of sleep that I desperately needed. I have an RSI in my neck from keyboarding / mousing and the pain has been particularly sharp all night tonight. The office is unbearably hot, thanks to the two space heaters (read a Sun Blade 2000 and an IBM RS/6000) that are in here at present. The RS is not so bad, but there's a reason Sun called its machines Suns. So I need coffee and excedrin and ibuprofen to get the head and neck into gear.
Thursday already and I have too much work to finish this week. And this weekend is booked off, there's no time to do much if any overtime to finish it up. A lot of what I'm doing at work are long-winded tests that take hours before they unearth issues, but they have to be done. Part of the reason they take so long has to do with populating our cache database - out of a current total of 37,000+ records the most I've actually been able to populate and test is 1700, because in development the database is blown away every night and recreated by scripts, and it takes hours to populate just those few records, coming as they do from a programming interface to a very slow database located in Ohio. So what does this have to do with BDSM? Nothing much, except it shows you the master's masochistic side ; ).
A new set of bondage cuffs and associated gear arrived yesterday and I took the opportunity to lock up emmie last night as well as mitda. mitda is pretty used to it now, but it was the first time emmie had been locked up all night without any way of releasing herself (the cuffs were padlocked and without the key - no way to unlock them). She seemed to do well, there were no issues when I unlocked her this morning. Being bound at night is something I prefer for my slaves but we are doing it progressively, both for practical reasons (purchase of bondage gear) and psychological reasons. I will be picking up a couple more padlocks today which will allow me to lock mitda's wrists to her thighs all night. Although I can't do this at present with emmie as well, as of tonight she will wear a different collar at night and her wrists will be locked together, then locked to the collar. mitda is ready to sleep in a somewhat uncomfortable position, emmie's position will be uncomfortable simply because it won't be released all night, but I feel she needs more time before she's ready to be both fully bound and strapped down to the bed all night.
You might wonder why I go to this trouble, especially when I'm generally a very lazy dom. But it is important in terms of the slave internalizing their place in the household. To be locked up and bound at night enforces their position as one of property. Unlike some D/s dynamics I do not like to denigrate or remove the slave's person from the equation by treating them as an object of property, other than in play or scening, I prefer to treat them fully as people. But they remain owned people. Having them as owned people and not things to me simply increases their worth. And the more fully I own their bodies, hearts and minds, the more worth they have to me as well.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Coercion and Mastery
I wrote a post a little while ago separating abuse and bdsm. This post is to attempt to tease out the difference(s) between coercion and mastery.
Coercion is an act of the will, frustrated by opposition, to turn another will by the force of guile. Ultimately it is dishonest in its actions and in its intent, bending the will of another to its own advantage for the sake of furthering its will alone.
Mastery does not turn the other's will, and certainly does not operate under any guise but its own open strength. It is functionally honest in both actions and intent, and its intent is to master the will of the other to the other's own advantage, for the sake of furthering both wills and conjoining them together. Mastery is quiet in its manner and mode of going about things, because the noisy "will to power" of the mainstream hides a singular lack of power, a fundamental helplessness when it comes to either their outcomes or the outcomes of those over whom they exercise coercion.
Mitdasein
Refactoring
Relationships, maybe, go through some refactoring every so often. We don't do it as formally, or even intentionally, but the overall structure of the relationship changes bit by bit until we suddenly find ourselves in a different configuration. And then maybe one should take the time to step back for a moment and survey the configuration and your place in it.
Our little quad has changed substantially over the last month or two. With emmie becoming a submissive and then a collared slave, and mitda pushing herself far further into IE / TPE than formerly, we've ended up with a very different power dynamic. Add to that emmie's unexpected medical retirement and the set of relationships each of us is in is quite new.
Not that this is a bad thing. Far from it. I personally am enjoying the new configuration quite a bit. But that's not to say it doesn't bring its own new stresses and new responsibilities. I have a good deal to learn about emmie, for instance, in order to meet my responsibilities as her mentor and teacher. At the same time I have to keep up with mitda's explorations to remain a good Master to her and to move as far along that vector as we can, especially since it was something I particularly wanted in the first place. But the configuration is still very new, and I hope I can settle into it as soon as possible.
Mitdasein
My Complaints
It doesn't happen quite that easily for the Master, in that he has the responsibility for caring for his slaves and ensuring they have what they need. Which in this case is enough of the right sort of attention and recognition. And sometimes I don't have sufficient energy, but more often I'm not entirely sure what kind of attention and recognition they're in need of. And they can't necessarily just tell me either, because they don't know. It's the job of the teacher to run ahead and find out what the student is in need of, procure it and provide it at the very time the student needs it. At this I've been falling down on the job a bit lately. I hope my wonderful girls will continue to understand the reasons and wait for me to get it together.
Mitdasein
Complaints etc.
This morning I sat working on my computer while mitda sighed a few times on the bed behind me at the extensive amount of time it was taking me to configure AIX. Sometimes I need to just do simple, mindless things on the systems I have, both to get them done and to relax myself, and it can be difficult for both mitda and emelina to understand that. Of course being with my girls relaxes me as well, but in a different way, and sometimes I need one or the other. Of course I was even more in for it later : ).
When emelina woke up I was treated to her complaints, which ranged from not being bound last night (there was no room if I held mitda, as mitda had requested, and I indulged her), and not having had a thrashing in too long, to sex being more intense between mitda and I than between her and I. Oddly mitda thinks sex is better between emelina and I, I suppose the sex must just look better than it is ; ).
So now they have gone to get emmie's labs done. I'm slowly getting ready to leave myself so that I can be in to work somewhat early. My co-worker pissed me off again yesterday by not talking to me until 3pm then handing me a bunch of work. So I left at 5pm on the dot. Give me the work early and it might be done the day you give it to me, simple.
Mitdasein
"Acceptance of the inevitable does not guarantee experience of the necessary."
Monday, July 16, 2007
Sulking doesn't become anyone
Yes, unbelievable as it may sound in a supposedly professional atmosphere, my co-worker is sulking and not speaking to me because I took two half days off and worked from home due to a migraine and fever.
I don't put up with such behaviour from my slaves. Very quickly they would find their sulky selves over my knee and their backsides welted and bruised. But of course if I did that here I would at least be fired if not charged with aggravated assault (would be true - I'm very aggravated, lol).
mitda had me take out some of this frustration on her on the weekend. It helped a lot but today I'm back to wondering what I'm supposed to do when the team lead on my project isn't speaking. Taking it out on her also pushed her deep into subspace, something she craves more than anything, more on that later.
"Acceptance of the inevitable does not guarantee experience of the necessary."
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Friday, July 13, 2007
And a longer evening
Leaving work I noticed the driver's side left front tire was flat as a pancake. I pumped it up and drove to the nearest tire repair shop but it turned out to be unrepairable. None of which is a huge deal, but try to find a specific brand tire in a size 225/40zr18 at shop closing time on a Friday night. Not to be done.
So I did find a place that could order me one for tomorrow, and they'll call me. *phew*, after phoning around for an hour it did come together. mitda got me a burger for dinner, though, which of course in my then current state didn't affect me well. And so I was rather miserable and stressed, and tired, since I had forgotten to take adderall to work and so didn't take my afternoon dose until I got home.
There is a point to all this. Tonight was supposed to be "date night" as E and emelina were going to see the latest Harry Potter flick and mitda and I would therefore have alone time. Alone time that I was hardly in the mood to make advantageous use of . And so mitda acted a little petulant and I simply got angry. My closest co-worker has been acting petulant and pouting at me for two days. I didn't need it from one of my slaves. Of course I could have whipped her for it. But really I was angry with said co-worker, and throwing him over my knee in the office would hardly have constituted work protocol.
Mitdasein
Long day to finish up a long week
emmie and E. are going to see the new Harry Potter movie, so mitda and I have date night at home tonight. I feel sleepy more than anything but I have coffee and adderall planned for my arrival home, which should put me back in decent waking form.
Going to hang in here for 20 odd more minutes then get in the old Saab and head home. I have everything I've been given done, tested, debugged and checked in and I'm bored and falling asleep.
Mitdasein
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Sexy Night
Tonight our quad just fell into a sexy feeling together and everything just flowed, so to speak ; ). mitda, bound and locked to the bed at her wrists, was being softly played with by E while I started to smack her a little. emmie started to kiss me a little and I flattened mitda on the bed and began to sodomize her. As we started to fuck E took emmie and put her on her knees, and slowly, gently slid himself into her ass. This has been an issue due to E's unusually large size but tonight she was relaxed, pliant and ready, and as he slid further into her she squeezed and fucked on his cock with her ass, as I'd taught her. Once he was fully penetrated and she was comfortable he started to fuck her in and out, slowly at first but building until he was fucking her into oblivion. I continued to fuck mitda on her stomach, then turned her over and took her with her legs pointed at the sky, so she could watch E and emelina.
After everyone had finished we slept, but for some reason I woke up shortly after midnight and, thinking it was early morning, woke mitda from her mat at the foot of our bed, unlocked her and told her to make coffee. Our activity woke up emelina and eventually even E, who usually sleeps like the dead. mitda began by going down on me while emmie and I made out. Then mitda asked if I would go down on her and I said yes, and told her to put her knees around my head and lower herself to my mouth. Emmie took the opportunity to continue what mitda had been doing for me, and seeing E awake, mitda started to suck his cock while I licked her, something she doesn't usually like as she likes to concentrate on sucking properly and being licked prevents that.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, still fully believing it was nearly dawn, I asked mitda for my adderall script, to take my morning dose and get ready for the day. After we finished and I finally noticed that it was 1:40a it hit me that I wasn't sleeping the rest of the night. I lay down for a while and drifted to neu! on the winamp. Then I woke up and mitda gave me a coffee, we went for cigs and then decided to go to the office to make her come a few times. Shortly after we started emmie knocked on the door and joined us, and emmie and I fisted mitda in both holes until she was in full on subspace and coming over and over. As a denouement to this section emmie got on her knees, mitda beside her lying on her back, and I fisted both of them together until they came together on command.
We have plans for an early morning threesome after mitda has a llittle nap. I will post if we do anything interesting. Sexual domination is incredibly fulfilling and often the place where D/s starts. It reinforces the slaves' position as owned and enhances the dom's sense of control and responsibility.
Mitdasein
Monday, July 09, 2007
Happy Monday
I talked to my D/s buddy at work about a coming up munch next week and he's planning to attend, which will allow him to meet mitda and emelina without requiring I invite him to our place. He's not poly with his slave, which is good in a way as I don't have any pressure to share my pair :). I enjoy seeing mitda with other people and probably would with emmie but it has to be the right person, and I'm not sure about him as yet. Some work hours and a couple of short lunches hasn't proven enough for me to gauge him.
mitda's last experience with another dom wasn't the best. He turned out to be more the dominant sadist than the sadistic dominant type (more on this differentiation later). Suffice it to say she cut the playtime to only a couple of hours, went for dinner and then left without staying the night as had been planned. emmie isn't ready to be shared as of yet, i don't think, other than sexually of course with her husband and mitda.
Now that emmie's two boys are home playtime is more precious and playspace harder to come by. The older one is definitely more autistic and less aspies-like and for that reason more of a challenge for me to deal with.
Mitdasein
Slaves on the Downward Spiral
I went to bed in a bad mood last night and woke up in a worse one. So I've spent from 2am till now pretty much working on my RS/6000 server and feeling pissy.
I'm not the only one. Both through conversations and reading their blogs I have been well apprised that both of my slaves are down, depressed, suicidal, etc. Not that this is the first time such things have happened, they both by chance are bipolar, as am I, and handling moodiness is a sine qua non of this relationship.
Unfortunately when it's all of us it becomes difficult to look to each other for the support we so desperately need. emelina feels like a third wheel, mitda feels "not good enough", and me, well, I feel like I'm neither doing my job as their master nor helping myself in any way.
Mitdasein
Sunday, July 08, 2007
Coming up with better plans
The need for one on one time, both from my slaves' and my own perspective, remains a real one. But slicing up my time just doesn't work, for a myriad of reasons. If I'm not "up for the cup", have other pressing matters, etc. during proscribed one on one time it is difficult for either mitda or emelina to accept that their time gets cut short, or doesn't happen at all. And in a poly household we remain a family of four adults plus miscellaneous offspring, and the interaction of all four of us on a regular basis has become very interfered with.
So I'm ending this particular little experiment. mitda and I were up early as usual today but I had things to do on our server, compiling some new software, doing a security audit to the new CIS 2 standard, etc. And I didn't feel all that well this morning, about as sexy as a turd. So mitda didn't get any real one on one time, and tonight I want to spend the evening with the whole family to relax prior to a week of work that is going to be at the minimum long, busy and stressful.
Speaking of miscellaneous offspring, emelina's two sons are here currently, both are mildly autistic, the older more than the younger. The younger child stays here semi-permanently, as he goes to school here and has his main life here. The older lives most of the time in North Carolina with his bio-dad and will be returning there in a couple of weeks. This is my first time meeting the older one, and he seems like a nice kid, albeit with a few quirks. The younger one is one of the best kids I've ever met, and despite the autism is in the average grade for his age and pulling in A's and B's.
mitda and I never procreated,either together or separately in previous relationships, so the miscellaneous offspring really consist of emelina's two sons from a previous marriage and E.'s two sons from a previous marriage. E.'s youngest was here for a little while during the time that both of emelina's were in North Carolina, and he has some issues. The older son is really an adult at this point, and is joining us in a few weeks for the indefinite future, having just graduated HS and preparing for a possible entrance into the military.
This new addition to the on-premesis family will also put difficulties on one on one time, mostly due to lack of space in the house for anyone to couple off to. It will be interesting to see how playtime gets accomplished, but at the very least we won't have to keep our situation secret from E.'s son as he is old enough and chill enough to deal with it in an adult manner.
Mitdasein
Saturday, July 07, 2007
Dicing up the Dom
In order to avoid any issues between them mitda and emelina have diced up my time. Evenings go to emelina, mornings to mitda. mitda and I wake around 4am anyway, so we have time in the mornings for coffee, playtime, fucking, whatever, and emelina takes care of me after work, showering me, putting my workthings away, etc. I usually sleep between them at night, while emelina's husband sleeps on the other side of her.
It's a rather odd feeling to have my time sliced and diced this way. As slaves mitda and emelina have no rights to my person, only the privileges I give them. But at the same time they only have the obligations to each other that I put on them, that and the fact that they do love each other quite a bit, and did prior to emelina joining the D/s side of our relationship.
We will see how this arrangement works out. It has only been a few days, so it is too soon to tell at the moment whether it will at all work out. The main issue I have is missing the two of them together, whether as slaves, lovers or friends they are a joy to me to watch together, and I will find ways to bring that about as much as possible. E., emelina's husband, has again been wonderful about the situation. He has the self confidence and self knowledge necessary to accept that both his wife and his girlfriend are owned by someone, even though the personal desire either to own or be owned is simply not something he possesses.
Mitdasein
Thursday, July 05, 2007
When the Dom has to dom.
I was wrong in my last post regarding emelina, she was as upset as mitda about my lapse in responsibility (http://mypoly-bilife.blogspot.com/2007/07/missing-master.html). Having an M/s relationship 24/7 has become a 24/7 responsibility. Which in general I love. And even when things aren't going perfectly and I doubt my abilities I can't renege on that responsibility, not even for a few hours. emelina posted in the comments on my blog that her day goes best when she is taken in hand. mitda wrote in her own blog something that should be a lesson to all Masters, or those considering that as a lifestyle (http://quietknowledge.wordpress.com/2007/07/04/6/). E. was equaniminous throughout all of this, as he usually is. He loves to dom in the bedroom but doesn't want my life outside of it, lol.
Thank you to both of my slaves for putting up with my error and coming home when asked to resume their duties.
Mitdasein
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
When the Dom doesn't want to dom.
This is a difficult thing for some slaves, not for others. emelina doesn't seem to particularly mind, while mitda is rather upset by the whole thing. In any event there's not a lot I can do about it at the moment. We will see how I feel tomorrow morning.
It is the 4th of July. Perhaps everyone needs a holiday.
Mitdasein
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Dominance and Abuse
Dominants get a lot of flack. We're accused of being "spousal abusers with an excuse", or "sadists with a philosophy". The thing is, anger is a huge part of abuse, and lack of control the other major factor. Sadists get off on pain, domination is a tool. Dominants get off on control and domination, bondage, discipline and sado-masochism are tools of that control. Submissives or slaves want, crave, need that control, discipline and domination from their Masters.
Not that this post will convince anyone who doesn't know and understand someone involved in internal enslavement or total domination.
When it doesn't go right ...
Even in the best BDSM relationships, dominants with the best slaves, submissives happy and adoring of their masters, sometimes things don't go right ...
Today we played and it didn't go right. Maybe mitda wasn't in the right frame of mind, after all she had her day put out of rhythm by emmie and I being home. She'll get used to emmie being home but the Master being home on a work day always upsets things. Anyway we played and neither of us could get properly prepped or into it. And it didn't work. She got nowhere near subspace and I got nowhere near domspace. Yes there is such a thing.
I'm still learning, and so are mitda and emmie. Perhaps I should have used my hands instead of toys, to gauge her response. But shoulds aren't the answer. We all have to continue to learn our places and each other.
A Blah Tuesday
Last week, after many years of avoiding psychiatry, emelina was diagnosed with a number of complaints (no, sexual deviancy wasn't among them). Aside from the shock of actually dealing with a diagnosis, she has been dealing with the side effects of the medication she was put on and hasn't managed a day of work since, although she has tried going into work twice now.
Family income isn't really a big issue at the moment. We can survive off my income and E's income quite nicely. It would be great if emelina can get disability but nobody's really getting their hopes up on that, we know too much about the SSA and their methods of avoiding awarding disability, especially to psych. patients.
So not the fun type of day we had on Sunday, although we started off the morning with some good group morning sex. I decided to work from home after realizing I needed to learn some things about my current project code base and didn't want to do that learning in front of my colleagues.
mitda and emelina should be back shortly from the misadventure at work. I suppose we'll discuss what can be done to either help her get back to functioning or deal with her being at home with mitda.
Sunday, July 01, 2007
Motorcycle and then some
Today I took emelina and mitda for a short run on the motorcycle. This after showing E how to basically ride. Of course he picked it up right away. emelina and mitda have taste in other doms. Afterwards we ate dinner, and then came the most intense non-disciplinary thrashing session with mitda in a long time. emelina was watching, and then E came in and joined the audience. mitda was in subspace heaven. i played with her sphincter with a toy while whipping her, then had her go down as the whipping continued. To cap it off we had anal with her legs in the air while E took emelina from behind. Very hot all round. Now E and emelina are online with their laptops and relaxing while mitda finishes the dishes. I love my poly M/s family.
