The Flame

To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
- Walter Pater

Rereading that famous sentence - often cited as the beginning of aestheticism, if not modernism - for the first time in years it struck me how well it captures on of the goals of kink and fetish play. To become as it were monstres sacrés: so rearrange our relationship within ourselves to step outside humanity.

Everybody wants to get high.

The means include intellectual effort, art, liquor drugs and at least among us BDSM.

OK, that is a lie.

Some people seem to turn it into a modern, industrialized process efficient and well regulated. You almost expect to see stamped on their forehead USDA Approved Kinkster.

Yawn.

But not having any ecstasy in tablet form I’ll take mine in romantic relationships. Though had I started much earlier I’d have certainly sought it with casual partners as I then did conventional copulation (or sodomy).

Over the last couple of years I’ve suggested schemes for heating up the pressure cooker (BDSM as gourmet sexuality?). Ideas partly born of the frustration of frequent separation or at least a colorful imagination. Some are probably daft, which doesn’t mean we won’t try them. Others retain a bit of allure - protocol, rituals - that I question more deeply. Seeming enhancements can prove encumbrances. There may even have been some really good ones. There are too many pages for even me to recall it all.

Nothing being easily planned much of the best was the product of luck, spontaneous happenings. In so much of life happiness seems more easily bumped into by accident than contrived.

Ecstasy can be sustained for only so long. The flame for a time dwindles and is snuffed out. People who can’t accept that wind up if not in the gutter, consuming a battery of psychiatric medications.

Thankfully I’ve come to appreciate that the play can go on more gently, without complications and contrivances or seeking to excel by excess. Sometimes pushing the envelope will only tear it.