Kink & Alchemy (H)

A dear friend wrote to me about feeling that vanilla sex was inadequate and though he’s not particularly oriented towards BDSM, he’s decided to start exploring it to expand his sexual repetoire. He writes:

I’m under the impression (perhaps misguided) that BDSM has a lot to do with power imbalances, anger, humiliation.  I appreciate that it’s probably more complicated than that, but those drives aren’t really my deal… I’m also recently aware (via facebook) that some psychologists are considing recognizing five human experiences (interest, gratitude, confusion, elevation, pride) as emotional responses on par with the regular ones. So it seems that I could start looking into some kind of “topping” practice with a focus on aesthetic / emotional responses that are different from the ones I think of as being specific to BDSM.

I replied:

From my limited experience:

Pain is different from harm. Whether the two coincide often has to do with intention or context–the pain felt during childbirth is processed and experienced differently (and usually not as psychic or emotional harm, even if the body is injured) whereas an equal amount of physical pain felt when being tortured in someone’s basement or in a POW camp I would guess is much more likely to be harmful.

In less dramatic senses, I think there is more risk of harm when we are acting out of any sort of malice, retributive anger, hatred, resentment, defensiveness, aggression–anything that Yoda would put on the dark side of the force.

This purtains to kink in that, when it is done in a “safe, sane, consensual” manner, one of the intentions may be to cause pain–physical or emotional–but not to harm. Anyone who wants to do you lasting damage isn’t someone that it would be healthy for most people to get kinky with. A good top, when you are not “playing” with power or other kink stuff but doing something more serious, is more like a spiritual guide, knowing when to push and when to slow down, open to feedback, offering support and encouragement when necessary, with steady love beneath whatever else is going on or whatever the expression of it is (you know I don’t necessarily mean romantic love). And in this context, the sub has the opportunity to experience and confront some of the things we struggle most with as humans– perhaps, physical pain, which she will learn is easiest when one surrendors to it or accepts it wholely; mentally, humiliation–which can be an joyful release from selfhood, an entry into intense trance states, a way of taking the ego and breaking it against a rock, failure or guilt–which, in going into fully in the safety of the setting she will learn to fear less in daily life, and to meet fully when it arises, her psychic and physical limitiations–which may help release her from some of the perfectionism conditioned into us by our culture, fear–which she will become intimate with and learn to and enjoy, create for herself the tool of imbuing the terrible with the erotic thus helping her to face it, to make it bearable.

It is a grounds, perhaps most of all, for giving and recieving unconditional love. There is incredible risk on both sides to exposing “shadow” sides, in asking for obedience or giving it, in giving a command or following it. The scene can exist only when both parties conspire together, are in it together. And it is amazing, to humiliate oneself completely in front of someone, to for a period of time exist in a state of utter trust and let someone cause you pain without trying to escape, and instead of leaving, the person stays, appreciates, loves you all the more. And the top, I would guess, has a reciprocal experience–to demand, inflict, command, humiliate, and still be loved. It’s breath-taking, isn’t it?

The difference between this and actual abuse has much to do with explicit consent and intention. Abuse often comes from intentions to harm, defend, protect, intimidate. Kink, in good situations, comes from intentions to expand and open emotionally and experientially, to achieve intimacy, to give and recieve love, and often includes inflicting pain in the service of these things.

Of course some people use kink to channel hatred of various sorts, or to put themselves in harm’s (rather than pain’s) way, and in those scenarios, there is great potential to damage all involved. But in the best cases, sex can become a pretext, a means, a background, or simply a component of a deeply intimate, alchemical process.

Depravity (I)

In our puritanical America (and we were colonized by puritans, after all), we seem to be afraid that everything is a gateway to sin. Graphed on a chart, this thinking would probably increase as religious fervor increases, but it seems to be a pretty prevalent mechanism in the US. Overall, our attitudes about sex are much more ascetic than, say, France’s, our attitudes about drugs more prohibitive than The Netherlands (obviously). Our age of consent laws and our legal drinking ages are higher than most of Europe. There are probably a lot of reasons for this, and I don’t know if what I’m going to talk about is a reason or just a symptom, but Americans, I think, fear depravity.

We seem to think much of the world is sinful, or if we don’t buy the notion of sin, at least unethical or dangerous or just overly-complicated. It’s not a matter of qualitative difference sometimes: monogamy is simpler than polyamory, abstinence is simpler than promiscuity, asceticism is simpler than finding a dealer and getting high. But not even just simpler; safer.

But safe from what?

I remember from my D.A.R.E. training in elementary school this notion that smoking pot for the first time is the gateway to becoming a heroin addict (and I think my parents figured swearing of any kind would turn me into a Tarantino movie). Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not; certainly many heroin users started with marijuana, so is it not safer to just avoid the whole thing? This is the thinking they teach us to keep us clean.

I suppose I can re-quote Martin Amis:

If you harbour a perversity, then sooner or later porno will identify it. You’d better hope that this doesn’t happen while you’re watching a film about a coprophagic pigfarmer – or an undertaker.

-”A Rough Trade”

I’m behind the idea of harboring a perversity, but I don’t think that’s what’s being taught, or rather, it’s more common to put the cart before the horse. People are more afraid that watching pornography will make you want sex, that taking drugs will make you want drugs, that getting kinky will make you violent, that reading Marx will make you a Communist.

With my recent first forays into kinky behavior, the only thing I’ve come away knowing is that I am not a violent person. There is a thrill I get from the permission to bite, choke, scratch, spank, and paddle a person, and that thrill comes entirely from knowing that I am not aggressive in any other part of my life. From what I know from other kinksters (and it is rather fun now to say “other kinksters” instead of just “kinksters”), kink can be very psychological, with all kinds of darkness and degradation, fear and intimidation. It can be a place where very real and possibly dangerous desires get exposed. But for a person who is dark and possibly violent, the darkness always preceeds the sex and exists beyond it. Kink will not make you violent.

And I think it holds: drugs will not make you want drugs; gagging someone and stringing them upside-down is not going to get you into bondage (odds are: you’re already into it). When it comes to harboring perversity, I come down on the side of nature over nurture. It’s true that exploring a wide variety of experiences might increase your tolerance for many things: you may smoke socially because others are, you may be willing to tie up your partner, but doing it is not going to affect your preferences. I know from a long relationship with a mostly asexual partner that all the sex we could have was not going to make her want it more.

The funny thing is this: as our culture espouses this idea that trying it will make you want it, I think we push more people towards real depravity. When someone is told all their lives “smoking weed will make you a pothead,” they feel almost obligated to become a pothead after trying it once. We don’t leave it up to our society to ask “do you want this?” We say only “if you try it, you want it, and are depraved.”

Myself, I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t use drugs of any kind, and I completely avoid caffeine. For a long time I lived that way out of judgment of the lifestyle; but at some point I asked myself the question, “do any of these things interest me?” At which point I never bothered with the idea again.

Re: Deepest Darkest Secrets (I)

To re-posit a quote Hope shared a while ago:

“If we each told each other our deepest, darkest secrets, we would laugh uproarously at our lack of originality.” – Stephen Levine

The tubes are already buzzing about it, but Letterman just put this idea to the test.

What’s fascinating and, yes, funny, is that the big revelation is the climax, but it’s not the revelation itself that is climactic. In fact, he can’t help but make it funny, and after a good 8 1/2 minutes of buildup it’s so simple, such poor theatre. What’s makes it a big emotional release is the fact that he’s telling it at all.

Telling the truth can be very deep. I’ve been revisiting this feeling of having one’s ego destroyed. Sometimes I feel my pride annihilated, after playing an open mic or after a crit in college. It’s terrifying but it feels very cleansing once the adrenaline releases, and I get really friendly with other people. I got the same feeling the first time I showed a group of people my last film; I wonder if the openness is just a rush of endorphines or if pride and fear are what keep me sheltering myself. Facing a fear and wrecking the pride makes everyone my buddy.

I discovered that telling the truth can do the same thing when it’s a big truth. When I called my best friend one day just to say “look, I want you to know all the reasons why I love you,” suddenly I loved everyone in the world. It was easy to get drunk on it, and I started telling everyone how I really felt about them. Seems most often my deepest darkest secrets are affections I have for people, that I’m usually afraid they don’t want to hear. Strange how sometimes paying someone a large and sincere compliment can be the most selfish thing you can do.

But it’s okay; it’s nonzero.

Pornology (I)

Here’s how female porn stars are paid, by the deed:

solo: $500
girl-girl: $700 (extra $100 for anal toy)
boy-girl: $900
anal: $1100
double penetration: $1500

Chip talks about the first porno theaters that opened in the 70′s in Times Square. He says that the films, which he saw dozens of times each as he spent entire afternoons, day after day, having casual sex in the balcony seats, always followed a standard pattern of sex: fellatio, cunnilingus, woman-on-top, and a male-on-top finish. And it always ended with a “gentle, lingering kiss.” He goes on:

Generally, I suspect, pornography improved our vision of sex all over the country, making it friendlier, more relaxed, and more playful – qualities of sex that, till then, had been often reserved to a distressingly limited section of the better-read and more imaginative members of the mercantile middle class.

For the first year or two the theaters operated, the entire working-class audience would break out laughing at everything save male-superior fucking. (I mean, that’s what sex is, isn’t it?) At the fellatio, at the cunnilingus even more, and at the final kiss, among the groans and chuckles you’d always hear a couple of “Yuccchs” and “Uhggggs.” By the seventies’ end, though, only a few chuckles sounded out now – at the cunnilingus passages. And in the first year or two of the eighties, even those had stopped. (No, that’s what sex is: a four-part act, oral and genital, where everybody gets a chance to be on top. Anything else was what was weird.) Indeed, I think, under pressure of those films, many guys simply found themselves changing what turned them on. And if one part or another didn’t happen to be your thing, you still saw it enough times to realize that maybe you were the strange one, and it behooved you to sit it out politely and put up with it, unless you wanted people to think you were strange.

-Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, p.78

Porn is the reason video killed film, the reason VHS killed Betamax, the reason Blue Ray killed HD; it’s commonly argued that the Darwinism that decides what technology will succeed is a pornographic Darwinism, buoying the success of the internet, previously the film industry, previously the camera, and previously the printing press. I think it’s fair to assume it does much to shape our understandings of sex in the way Chip describes, especially today with the porn-abundance the internet provides. All but the most fortunate Casanovas and the biggest prudes have watched more sex than they’ve experienced.

But if it’s true that porn normalizes certain acts and attitudes (which is pretty indisputable to me), there are a lot of things modern porn normalizes as well. Most young people start learning about sex from porn before they learn about it firsthand, and here’s what I’d assume they are learning:

Sex is not playful, not anymore. Sex is never slow. Sex is humorless. Sex does not involve kissing with lips, only tongues. Sex is not about eye contact. Women don’t come (they either don’t need to or don’t want to or can’t); unless we’re to believe a woman spends the entire hour or so in constant climax, there is never a climactic moment for the woman except (dubiously) in lesbian scenes.

Sex is almost always mildly degrading for both sexes, though more for the women (see the preponderance of spitting in clitorides [yes that's the proper plural, isn't it hideous?], the long strings of spit on penises, and holy shit, the facials). Women are usually the seducers, which is curious to me since the scene always ends when the man comes (what, only once?). Sex is gutteral; Martin Amis (in “A Rough Trade” quotes a porn director who’s answer to “why so much anal?” is “pussies are bullshit”, referring to the more animalistic noises a woman makes during anal sex). Sex is aggressive. Sex is intense. Sex is about more: more toys, more people, more orifaces, more at once, more positions than we’ve tried.

I don’t want to sound like a person who thinks pornography is bad for society; I think you can judge a lot about a society’s health by the health of it’s porn. And I think our porn is getting sickly. I think we need to admit that young people are going to watch porn, and it’s important to ask “what are we teaching them?”

And I want to come out and say that a scene with a lot of kissing, a slow build up, a little bit of laughter and whispering, and a convincing female orgasm, that doesn’t end at the moment the man comes, would do more to get me off than most porn I’ve seen. But pornographers are too lazy for that, and I think they try to make up for it by giving us more taboos to cross. I figure anyone who is turned on by aggression and degradation is going to find most of this shit laughably tame.

Amis says:

Gore Vidal once said that the only danger in watching pornography is that it might make you want to watch more pornography; it might make you want to do nothing else but watch pornography. There is, I contend, another danger. As I sampled some extreme productions on the VCR in my hotel room, I kept worrying about something. I kept worrying that I’d like it. Porno services the “polymorphous perverse”: the near-infinite chaos of human desire. If you harbour a perversity, then sooner or later porno will identify it. You’d better hope that this doesn’t happen while you’re watching a film about a coprophagic pigfarmer – or an undertaker.

Porn is inherently desensitizing; that’s kind of a good thing, as it can loosen our anxieties about sex. But I can already see what’s it’s done for me: when a PG-13 scene in a movie was the most I had access to, it was enough. Then access to the internet meant longer nude scenes, artful photographs. When that wasn’t enough, softcore films, then solo hardcore, and up and up. I think this is a common trajectory. I have trouble now with just using my imagination. It seems like much of the industry is concerned about what the next rung on the ladder is, what thing can people are still sensitive to. It’s a lot easier to arouse by shock than to arouse by sincerity.

But I think of the movie 9 Songs, which made a stir a few years before Shortbus for being a narrative with explicit sex scenes. It was a movie of flashbacks as a man muses on his former lover. In their relationship they went to concerts, had a lot of sex and conversations, and broke up easily when the girl moved back to America. Director Michael Winterbottom insisted it be viewed as a serious film and not pornography. As a film, the acting was lukewarm, the improvised dialogue was weak, the editing was choppy, the drama (and BDSM) was laughably tame, and the cinematography was indifferent.

As pornography, though, it was immensely satisfying.

I, etcetera (H)

(A little experiment in stream of consciousness. I found a copy of I, etcetera and got inspired.)

Intimacy is (like spiritual practice) a series of continuous humiliations. (Suzuki Roshi says, “Meditation is a constant insult”.)

Maybe this is part of the appeal of (sexual) masochism and humiliation–to take this frightening part of it all and delve into it, take it to its limit, explode it, and, thus, be done with it? Or perhaps it’s a way to alchemize that fear, too: wrap it up in eroticism and thus gain the ability to turn towards it. Use desire to render aversion impotent (forgive the pun, please, this is an experiment in indulgence and the luxury of things so obnoxious as parentheses).

Humiliations of: body, history, (and most of all) psyche. In the West, there is something fundamentally humiliating about being in pain. Pain implies failure and/or defect. Maybe this is what the Buddhists mean about not taking pain so personally: instead of seeing pain as (a) personal (failure), it is simply a natural consequence of the human condition. The universality is recognized, and pain loses it’s accusatory tone, becoming simply part of what is. It’s no more personal than old age, or death.

A system outside of shame and pride does not mean lack of joy. Pride is not, in fact, the ultimate joy though we bow to it as if it were love, or some other kind of mercy.

The Bootstrap Theory (H)

Another from Seeing the Crab:

“I am in remission now, so there are days when I pass for healthy… To my horror, I find the self-assured and determined ideas healthy people have, ideas about what it means to be sick–about the right way to be sick–returning to me… I commit all the insensitive sins I railed against one short year ago…

I give a lecture to a thoroughly disabled colleague. ‘Call Social Security,’ I tell her… ‘Right. Do it. Call them.’

‘All these things they expect you to be able to do when you can’t think.’ she says. And then I remember. I remember that I could not balance a checkbook. I remember that I could not recall my mother’s address. I remember Jonathon calling Social Security to provide the forms for me…

But I give advice like this anyway. Stable now, and treatment-free, I regress into the bootstrap theory of serious illness. I give pep talks. I think of illness as something you get over, something to stop complaining about. I think to myself, ‘Oh, well, she doesn’t have it so bad,’ which is really a way to establish that no one has had it as bad as I. My disease, no matter what someone else’s is, is the standard from which I make all my pronouncements. I strut… I have an arrogant twitch in my ass as I walk down the hall. I am waiting for the applause. I, and only I, will be the polio victim who learned to walk and become the homecoming queen, the thalidomide child elected class president.”

This links back to a post I wrote earlier, in part about how easy it is to forget our own pain, and other people’s. How easy it is to resubscribe to the bootstrap theory of mental or physical pain, but especially mental, since it’s even harder to adequately communicate.

Maybe this is cause to be grateful that my pain is never too far: when I start to slip towards the bootstrap theory, that slippage barely lasts at all; my pain is always so quick to come back and remind me what bullshit that is.

Much The Same (I)

Outside of my family, the following people have seen me cry: my best friend from high school, my three relationships, my friend Jordan, my friend Lisa (only once), and Hope. This discounts middle school stuff where someone makes you cry in public, and incidents where I have cried to an intimate and someone else happened to be present. I suppose it discounts psychotherapy as well.

I’ve been re-reading Craig Thompson’s travel journal, Carnet de Voyage, written while he was on a book-signing tour of Europe. The loose, spontaneous brushwork is gorgeous, very different from his very meticulous linework in his graphic novels. He spends most of the book lonely, missing his ex-girlfriend, wishing for a companion, drawing a lot of pictures of girls. In the last few pages he connects with a Swedish girl in Barcelona named Hillevi, and they spend his last days in Spain romancing.

The day before he leaves she says to him:

You and I are so much the same… You have so many layers that you can peel away a few, and everyone’s so shocked or impressed that you’re baring your soul, while  you know it’s nothing, because you know you’ve twenty more layers to go… But we’re the ones that are most scared, and need the most love. (p. 216-217)

I’ve had conversations with people I’ve just met where I can talk about the most painful things that have ever happened to me, and I can even say “it still hurts today.” But they don’t get to see it. I look so goddamn mature and removed, talking about pain as if I’ve left it all behind, and in that moment it’s sincere; I have grown and left much of it behind. But they don’t know about the other times when it rushes back on me. Very few people get to the inside of the onion.

And it’s not a matter of trust. Maybe some mixture of tact and insecurity and a small dollop of self-loathing; I feel like that onion core is simply more of myself than most people would want to see. And like many artists, it becomes the most important thing to express, because it’s the thing most inexpressible. “Needing the most love.” I made a film recently, about my vow of silence, where I cry on camera. Because I know I’m too afraid to cry in front of most people, so it becomes important to share a document of. “This happens.”

Yesterday at a dinner with Hope’s family and friends of family, I watched the way Hope interacts with all these different people and counted the layers she peels. Impressed with the way she’s willing to take casual conversations to the subjects that really interest her, where my instinct assumes my deepest interests are probably more than polite company is interested in. It’s something I’ve been working on, and it’s pleasant to see someone do it with more ease than I have.

It’s common to notice most the traits you admire in someone else, but I don’t think it’s really envious. There are areas where she peels more layers than I do, and I’m sure there are some areas where I peel more layers. From our first conversation, what drew me to Hope was the ease with which she peeled, and comfort with which I peeled, us two potatoes in a restaurant kitchen. I felt a similar drive to delve and reach equal depths. The skills she has that I admire stand out from a lot of commonality. I get so used to the similarities I don’t see them anymore.

And I think that’s been the case with most everyone on the list. The people who get to the middle of the onion, the only place where I cry. What’s better than to cherish your commonalities and admire your differences?

On Writing (I)

Purpose:

Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

I. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen—in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all—and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

II. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

III. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

IV. Political purpose.—Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

-George Orwell, Why I Write.

Form:

A “perfect” sentence, if there is such a thing, ought to be both vivid and mysterious, lucid and unpredictable. Whether it shakes out like a bedsheet or rumbles like a locomotive, its cadence ought to reverberate in the mind’s ear with an unavoidable rhythm. Whether its images are designed to kiss the reader or spit in the reader’s face, they must be as fresh as new violets down by the hog creek, and they should be psychically charged. The sentence’s philosophical and psychological meaning ought to spread in ever-widening ripples like an echo circle. And, ideally, when the subject meets the verb, the verb ought to yell out, “Surprise!” I don’t know if I’ve ever written a perfect sentence. It doesn’t matter. It’s the pursuit of the perfect sentence that is the reward.

-Tom Robbins

Content:

A simple question: How can we recognize the truth? It is, of course, difficult. But there are a few simple rules. The truth ought to be logically consistent. It should not contradict itself; that is, there are some logical criteria. It ought to be consistent with what else we know. That is an additional way in which miracles run into trouble. We know a great many things – a tiny fraction, to be sure, of the universe, a pitifully tiny fraction. But nevertheless some things we know with quite high readability. So where we are asking about the truth, we ought to be sure that it’s not inconsistent with what else we know. We should also pay attention to how badly we want to believe a given contention. The more badly we want to believe it, the more skeptical we have to be. It involves a kind of courageous self-discipline. Nobody says it’s easy. I think those three principles at least will winnow out a fair amount of chaff. It doesn’t guarantee that what remains will be true, but at least it will significantly diminish the field of discourse.

-Carl Sagan

For my own part, sometimes I write because I don’t have a choice.

Favored Greeks: Diogenes (I)

(history bleeds into myth amongst the Golden Greeks; I’ve chosen my favorite versions of these stories)

Diogenes lived in Athens, having been expelled from Sinope for defacing currency (or because his father defaced the currency, or they defaced currency together…?). He may have visited the Oracle of Delphi before his exile, just after, or after moving to Athens; what the Oracle told him is uncertain, and may have been confused with stories about Socrates.

In Athens, Diogenes took an interest in the philosophy of Cynicism, and pursued its founder, Antisthenes (who may have actually been dead at the time) to be his teacher. Antisthenes did not take on pupils, and grew so fatigued with Diogenes’ insistence that he struck his head with a cane. Diogenes then lowered his head to Antisthenes and said “you’re going to need a much bigger stick.”

Antisthenes took him on.

The Cynics believed that the path to happiness was virtue, and were therefore skeptical of all other avenues. This included the usual dubious paths of money, fame, power, what have you, but also religion, love, comfort, and friendship. They believed in supreme non-attachment. The word “Cynic” comes from the Greek word for dog, because the Cynics were doglike, eschewing society and often hygiene.

Diogenes became known as Diogenes The Dog.

Taking non-attachment to fascinating extremes, Diogenes decided that owning a house simply meant you had to expend great effort maintaining it, not to mention work jobs to pay for it, and that the payoff was not worth the upkeep. Such luxuries were “dainties” and he realized by watching a mouse that he could live without. The mouse, he said, was free because it could adapt itself to any circumstance. He moved into a tub. Likewise, clothes and utensils limited one’s freedom, so he took to drinking water from the fountain, eating with his hands, and wearing the same black cloak every day. For food, he would teach philosophy to passersby in exchange for bread.

He hung out in the Athens courtyard. He’d take to wandering around with a lamp and shining it in peoples’ faces, claiming he was looking for one honest man and only finding rascals. A self-positioned beggar, he took on the role of society’s debunker. He had nothing to lose by offending anyone, and used this freedom to teach very strange lessons; he once masturbated in the Agora, and used it to make the point, “if only I could soothe my hunger by rubbing my belly.” He would gatecrash the dinner parties of famous philosphers and cause a ruckus, allegedly once shitting on the table. Plato called him “a Socrates gone mad.”

Very little survives of Diogenes’ philosophies because he didn’t believe in writing. He said that teaching a man with written words was akin to feeding a man with painted figs. Most history of him is anecdotal. What’s funny is that most every story speaks of him with great affection, and though he sounds like a typical mad bum, he was loved and respected. Diogenes The Dog was loved the way a filthy pet may still be loved, partly in spite of its filth, and partly for it. His philosophies were taken seriously.

Many versions of his tale say that he was eventually captured by pirates and sold into slavery in Corinth. Diogenes himself had once owned a slave named Manes who abandoned him soon after he moved to Athens, which may have led to Diogenes inverted understanding of slavery (“if Manes can live without Diogenes, why not Diogenes without Manes?”). He felt that any master who requires a slave to do work for him needs the slave far more than the slave needs the master. As a slave, believing himself the freer, he said that his skillset as a slave was “governing men,” and was put in charge of teaching his master’s son asceticism.

Most stories of Diogenes end with this story, which is the most likely to be apocryphal: when Alexander The Great was conquering the world, he sought out Diogenes in Corinth, having great respect for the greek philosophers. He, followed by some portion of his army, approached Diogenes, who was sunning himself. Alexander looked down on him and asked if there was anything Alexander The Great could do for Diogenes. Diogenes looked up and said “yes, you can stop blocking the sun.” Alexander’s troops reached for their swords, but Alexander stopped them. He looked at Diogenes a moment and said “were I not Alexander, I should wish to be Diogenes.”

Addendum: Laughing in the Dark (H)

Another example of someone making humor out of devastation. Comedy out of tragedy without time… That’s a feat.

And while we’re talking Bob Flanagan: