Body Mod, or Illness?

One of my favorite web-surf’s is BME-Zine’s “Mod Blog”. Although I have yet to decide on exactly how I’d like to whittle on this temple of flesh I call home, Mod Blog is great “reading”/looking and inspirational. Often enough, it can have other effects and I will be the first to admit I rather enjoy seeing the attractive female figure nude decorated with ink, piercings, needles, and scars (the proviso being she has to be enjoying those things as well).
I’ve gone ahead and added a link to the Mod-Blog over there on the right, just to expand the eccentricity of my recommended reading. It’s not for the faint of heart, and I’m sure some people will be offended by it, and even I do not like everything there, but to each their own. Check it out before you make your decision.

Its that very realm of not digging some of the work people have done, or do to themselves, I’m writing about when I ask “Body mod, or illness?”
Now, I have a fairly liberal mindset about bodymods – I think tattoos, piercings, scarifications, brandings, and some re-shaping (I.E. tongue splitting) are cool. Would I do all of them? No. Not all of them appeal to me. I am a blacksmith, I will eventually get branded somehow – but I wont go out of my way to do it, and I like my tongue exactly as it is, thank you.
I am of a questionable attitude about the more extreme forms of modification, however. Once you start cutting things, or removing them, in a manner that begins to affect your natural, normal, function as a human being I begin to question your sanity.
Penile bisection. Nullo. Amputations. These are not taking an artistic approach to personal appearance – This is wanton destruction of the body.
While I believe the body is a shell for the…. Whatever - Soul, spirit, mind, whatever – I think it is a psychologically important shell. For most of us, our self image is connected to our physical reality. And the functionality of our self, is limited by the functionality of our physicality. We may like sex – We may like hiking – But if we have cut off our cock we are no longer having sex, and if we have amputated one of our legs we are no longer going for hikes. We are also fundamentally attacking the physical of our self.

I was looking through mod-blog earlier today, and as I scrolled down a picture of a woman with multiple flower scarifications on her back arose. Each scarification (together they covered her back) was pierced with multiple needles, one after the other with no room between for the entirety of each scar. 100+ some-odd needles in all. Very little blood. Blossoms of needles. My breath caught in my throat to see it. It was not shocking to me, I just had not expected it quite – Probably because of the fecundity of needles. But I liked it. It was beautiful.
Shortly there-after I came to a picture of a woman in a very heavy BDSM scene, involving serious clamping and skewering of the breasts. Yes, skewering – Stainless spikes, larger than the average #2 pencil lead driven through the flesh of her chest. I was nonplussed. It didn’t bother me – They’re her tits – but its not my scene either. I like some admittedly heavy stuff, but that in particular trips not my trigger. It doesn’t even interest me from an artistic perspective. But it doesn’t upset me either.
Then I came to the pictures of the guy with a DIY (that’s right, do it yourself) finger amputation. In the description of his pictures it was noted that he is also (voluntarily) bilaterally amputated above the knee, and has one arm amputated below the elbow. And now he is cutting more pieces off?
As far as I am concerned, this is a sickness. Same for those cutting other pieces off, be it toes, genitals, ears, whatever. It alters the permanent functionality of the body in a negative and irreversible way. No tattoo, piercing, scar, burn, implant, or even BDSM practice ala skewering does that – It may change the appearance, or cause temporary injury, but it is not permanent nor debilitating.
Advocates for these folks can say all they want to about how “freeing” it is to remove a piece of their body they never identified with, or to experience life as a “handicapable” person, and I still wont buy it. Past a point, I remain a square – A tool of the establishment, in that all of my psychology training reinforces my common sense, gut instinct, that this is a mental illness.
There are people who like to cut open their abdomen, and push objects inside. Either for the pure enjoyment of the act, or to get advanced medical attention/surgery. They enjoy this. There was a gentleman in Albuquerque, NM, a frequent flyer of the EMS system there – as they were the ones who had to take him from the county lockup where he invariably was to the hospital when he did this – who did this repeatedly, to the point of putting an entire package of Bic pens into himself, and finally, stuffing his abdomen full of feces. The latter act caused peritonitis, and killed him – In excruciating pain (as he was in most times when he did this). Presumably he enjoyed even that. I cannot imagine anyone would advocate for that man (and those like him) as healthy participants of “body modification” culture. So why do so for people who have parts off themselves? They may be incredibly smart, wonderful, enjoyable, human beings – As are many people with severe mental illnesses – But that does not change the fact that they are ill.

Of course – I’ll defend to the death their right to do that to themselves. It is, after all, their own body and they are not hurting anyone else to do it to themselves. Although perhaps they are hurting others with the same mental conditions, when they post pictures of their removals online and advocate the practice.
But I wont like it – And I wont claim it is sane or healthy. I defend peoples right to take drugs, or to jump off really tall buildings without parachutes – But I’ll never claim its healthy. Because its not. Some things are simply ill – Some people are simply ill. They don’t need encouragement, they don’t need to be “understood” and made members of a supportive/loving community that supports/loves their illness – They need psychological/psychiatric help, and a great deal of it.
And I have to wonder at the people who do support those with this illness, if their interest is not solely macabre in nature. If their enthusiasm is not for the individual, not for the “modification”, but for the suffering at the heart of it. Schadenfruede?

Literary Sex

I enjoy sex. I find it fulfilling, and fascinating, and, simply, fun.
However, I have an issue with writing about sex. Generally I find it distracting from serious literature. I wont say I dislike sex in my fiction, as a matter of fact I like it a great deal. I recently read John Ringo’s novel Kildar, which has a good amount of rather entertaining sexual encounters. I enjoyed the shit out of the entirety of the novel. That said, there is entertaining fiction and literary fiction. Not that literary fiction isnt entertaining, it should be or else it fails, but it is simply something different. Ringo, while being one of my favorite authors, is not a literary author. He makes far too much money and sells far too many books. I however am a literary writer. It is what I work towards being, and is as far as I am concerned my craft. In this environment I find sexuality verging on erotica to be distracting from the craft, the language, the writing.
However, my writing is a reflection of who I am, and things I believe in. Although I do not attempt to moralize or tell my readers how to believe, I hope that my writing gives a new perspective into unexplored areas. In many cases, these areas are unexplored to me as well as my audience, and it is through my writing that I work out some of my thoughts on them.
An area of recent shift to me is that of sexuality, and human relationships. I do not find my ideas there-upon that odd, and they are certainly not among some of the community I’ve surrounded myself with. There are however some of these ideas which are unresolved to me. As with everything else, it is in the doing that one works these things out, but as it is for writers, it is in the writing about it that we can flash upon, or cement in our own minds, things not entirely manifested to the mind during the doing.

And it is this which troubles me. It is hard to write about someone enjoying pain, or someone enjoying the company of more than one person (without denying actual love to either of them), or someone enjoying the plain, pure, simple, sexuality so many consider “natural”, without to some degree being explicit. Like all things, it is a balance I have yet to find a good way to achieve. I have with violence and action, and I am beginning to with the technical details which I enjoy and which are of import to the literary value for my fellow neobohemians who truly live and work in the remarkable arenas I write about the most, but sex is proving as yet a challenge.
I think, I really think, this is the perfect excuse I need for doing more research…

The Power of the Name

A year or so ago I stopped into the little convenience store in my home town, and ran into an old school mate I had not seen in several years. Roman and I never got along, and as I recall I did my 12 year old best to kill him, or break his face, on numerous occasions. Since we parted ways at the end of 5^th grade, he and I had been somewhat civil but it had been a good two years since we’d spoken last. He saw me before I saw him, and all he said was my name. Along with a quick flip of the head and a slight grin of camaraderie, but with the edge to it that is in all Roman’s actions. Something in his pig eyes says everything I will ever need to know about him. But that one word, loud and clear, while my brain was still trying to set a name to his face – And I have changed more than he – threw me for a complete loop. More to the point, it completely threw my Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA) loop into a tail-spin. I didn’t like it. In fact, I vowed to do it to him the very next time I saw him, and so I did. This incident left me with the urge to write a post here about the power of names, but I never quite got around to it.

The power of names is a strong one, and being able to name someone is important. It can give you power over them to know their name and use it, or them power over you to not let you know it. It can give you a bond, to know and use one another’s names familiarly. Names have power, they are how we identify those around us. In much myth, it is the naming of an evil which either gives it its power, calls it forth, or gives the person speaking the name a power over the evil being named.

I work and am active in an industry which has a pretty high washout rate. It is brutal, and filled with misdeeds by people of questionable character, or serious personal flaws, and corporate back-biting, company in-fighting, etc. Friendships that are forged are often sundered, particularly if the friendships had anything to do with partnerships. It’s a wicked business, and those in it are surrounded by the bones of the fallen, and the waiting machinery of their own demise. Its incredibly worthwhile, on many levels, and I enjoy it a great deal and would not do another type of art for all the money in the world, but I recognize that it I simply a rough industry.

I have been involved with this industry and community for a number of years, since I was a young man still in high school. I have made good friends, and good mentors, on this road, and am fortunate to still have most of them and only a very short list of actual enemies (just enough to remind me I am doing something right). I have, however, lost touch with many of those I called friend, who gave me guidance when I was a younger man just entering the world of being an adult.

One of those individuals, the founder and original proprietor of a small, but innovative, company, I haven’t spoken with in a couple years now. I was around at the time she began to develop her idea and her company, and we had a small level of communication in regards to that. I stayed in touch, and became one of her customers, and she and I spoke on a more personal basis on occasion there after. In particular I recall spending a few hours talking on the phone one thanksgiving, after the turkey was eaten, the pumpkin pie demolished, and all that. I sat in my yard, way out back of beyond, watching the sun sink lower towards the west, chased by the clouds of a graying sky, and spoke relaxedly and comfortably about my hopes, dreams and plans for the future. They were, to a large extent, different then than what I have come to do, and what I hope for my future now, but then they were ripe, and fresh, and truthful as any words ever spoken by a fresh out of school young man. This woman, this friend, offered me her counsels and guidance, in what seemed to be the same open, heartfelt, fashion. I didn’t exactly follow all of her advice (I am not studying at Harvard), but it was none the less good and valuable, and more importantly it meant a great deal to me, and I appreciated it.

Recently the company she started has fallen into disrepair, and her associations with business partners, and customers (many of them friends) have been sundered by poor practices and a lack of communication. Untruths had apparently been told to partners, employees and supplies. Among them was her name.

Hearing this did not, honestly, surprise me. And I began in my mind the process of writing her off as just another one, among many, who couldn’t handle the pressures of a successful business and cut and ran in a dishonest fashion. She wouldn’t have been the first in the business, nor the first I’d known, and certainly not the last.

And then I read something someone else in our business, who called her friend and had worked with her, wrote about his recent communications with her in an effort to straighten things out (including the transfer of her company into more capable hands). And he spoke well of her, with compassion, and consideration. This man is not someone I know well, but he is by all accounts a hard man, and has his own demons – And he spoke about our mutual friend with a heartfelt sympathy for her situation. And he said something that resonated, “Personally, once I call someone a Friend, I keep doing my best for that person”.
And I remembered a late afternoon phonecall, from my home to… somewhere, possibly Texas. From me to… someone, a friend. A person who gave me advice, who reached out from a place where no one would have thought badly of her for not doing so, to a teenager with ideas and hopes, and offered him her encouragement as a then successful professional.
I emailed the man who also calls himself a friend of my old friend, as I no longer have any idea how to get in touch with her, or what to call her if I did, and asked that he pass along my fond memory, and my best wishes, to our friend. Because I haven’t forgotten, and it is still important to me – And in the face of it, what has come about later, what has come about since, doesn’t matter.
So I have to ask, what is in a name? I knew Cameron, but there was none. So what? Who ever, how ever, that person is, they did something important to me, for me, with me, and that is something I will not forget, whoever they are.

A NeoBohemian Afternoon

I introduced a friend of mine to firearms today. Amanda has a bunch of friends like myself who are firearms enthusiasts, and was feeling a little left out of the clique of capability. She approached me with some questions, and I volunteered to take her out to the range.
So this morning I packed a brace of .22 pistols, and another of .22 rifles into the backseat of the truck and headed into town to meet her. After a short conference at her house to figure out where the shooting range was, we headed out to get lost. What passes for a range is an apparently rather of the way place, so after driving through a few yards I decided to head out of town to a piece of ranchland easily accessible by county road, with good hillsides for backstop in lieu of a proper range.
I began with the lecture on the four rules of firearms safety, and a basic introduction to types of firearms, the mechanics there-of, and the chemical action of burning gunpowder/expanding gas. She was very much into it, and asked several intelligent questions, and to her credit didn’t try to rush through it. Moving on to the shooting we began with a bolt-action .22lr rifle, to get her started one shot at a time. She did quite well for never having handled, much less shot, a gun before, but the gun was a little long for her small frame, so we stepped back to a Ruger 10/22 semi-auto. She did extremely well with this, keeping 90% of her shots inside an 8” target, at about 20yards, from a standing position.
As we progressed later into the afternoon, we moved on to the .22 pistols, with which she did well, though not quite as much so as with the rifles. We finished up, after much begging on her part, with my 1911 pattern .45. The .45 was a serious step backwards, in that she started anticipating her shots and flinching quite badly, but she had fun – although she didn’t enjoy the .45 as much – and was excited at the suggestion of going and doing it again soon.
After I’d shown her the rudiments of cleaning guns, we adjourned for today, and headed back into town for lunch. A scrumptious lunch at a nice little eatery, with questions about firearms history, and conversation moving from medieval warfare to modern science, was followed by a jaunt to the gunstore to pick up a few catalogs for her perusal, at which time we retired to a coffee shop looking out on the towns plaza, ordered coffee and sweets, and took up residence in the corner, smothered in deep, comfy, chairs by the window, with out gun catalogs spread out before us.
There was much talk of firearms design, manufacturers, and differences/advantages there-of, and coffee, and idle mindless talk of life, sex, cars, religion, rain, people, politics, more science, more sex, etc. We spent a few hours there, chatted with friends as they came and went, drank coffee, talked, laughed, schemed, plotted, and decided upon the fates of the world. It began to rain sometime around six in the evening, a light rain, under light grey skies, so we decided to go for a walk. Our conversations continued as we walked around town for another hour or so in the light rain, finally ending up back at my truck, where-upon I took her home.
It was a good day.