The Quest for the Unconditional

Unconditional love: I know I’ve been able to give it once, maybe twice in my life. And my momma gave it to me.

Some of us spend our lives in a passionless affair with the quotidian and television. Merely marking time, days punctuated at best with light amusement. Others feverishly, fretfully, maybe fatally itch for more.

It has been called the search for the Absolute. But I’d like to cast off the highfalutin detritus encumbering that term even if I’m about to invoke it.

Religious mystics sought it. Sometimes using means very familiar to masochists and erotically slavish people. You know I’m going to mention them don’t you: the flagellants whipping themselves. But let us not forget invoking discomfort with hair shirts (now why haven’t I ever read of those being used in BDSM - the tack bras worn by some masochistic women are their kin I guess). The mystics fasted: we talk of food deprivation.

Certain pagans used liquor. Native Americans peyote. Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary and others found - or felt they did - access to this sort of special consciousness in psychedelic drugs.

Exaltation, self-annihilation, merging with the other,, apprehension of the divine, etc. Where does it all come from? Maybe after the human genome and brain chemistry have been mapped and several decades have passed we’ll know.

Thinking about myself - one of the few topics with which I can claim to be tolerably acquainted:

Long ago I was a freshly born young animal. On the other side of language and ideas. What was it like for my uncomprehending, purely sensual little brain to be caressed and spoken to softly? What was affection like for that primitive little creature? And the violence that surrounded it as it slowly began to speak and move.

Unmediated experiences left markings that began a map that I can never see but forever guides me.

Those elemental epiphanies of infancy and earliest childhood: maybe I want know them again. Unconditional experiences.

Looks like some sort of maniac if you ask me.

It doesn’t seem to be saying much to see the wellsprings of the desire for unconditional love in all this. Unconditional love has a good reputation. But those of us who have invested so much in the beloved know what a snare it can be, a quick path to personal damnation.

Love of love can be a very bad thing indeed.

My feelings about interpersonal power and pain aren’t the same as those of John and Jane Doe and the rest of the citizens of Anytown, USA. Nor are yours.

In writing about discomfort, deprivation, starvation, degradation, training, conditioning I’m hypothesizing an erotic liturgy whereby people like myself find the unconditional. Perhaps it is no more than pornographic theory.

In seeing ourselves as technically worthless, lowly, our neediness turned against ourselves we really are selfishness seeking unconditional satisfaction, real emotional and erotic satiation.

Putting it in this perspective I can even begin to see why some tops write with desperate anger about the absence of “true” slaves. They have their own vision of the unconditional.

But in expecting the ideal each condemns itself to frustration.

Sure, there are probably a select few who scale the heights and plumb the depths. And combine that with the routine business of living. That is the sadomasochistic equivalent of genius. And requires two geniuses.

The rest of us have to be content with having the kink equivalent of talent or maybe only good taste. And structure our lives within our possibilities and not our frenzied dreams.