It is difficult to know when to take up pen and paper and to draw; it doesn't help that I don't believe in my ability to make the picture look like they do in my head.

Using Flash was frustrating though, I was rarely happy with the final .swf, too confined by the discipline of using only the Internet -taking sounds and images from it as if I walked the beach, picking up objects thrown away by others.

Though it isn't the offerings from the 'net that is at the heart of the problem.

I do much better with sound -which again, I take from the world and warp (just like Flash, changing the transparency and frequency) attempting to open doors into the other place.

The pictures unfold over days; OK, call it 'Active Imagination' if you will, I prefer to see it as journeying.

To quote from Jung:

I really prefer the term [active] 'imagination' to 'fantasy', because there is a difference between the two which the old doctors had in mind when they said that 'opus nostrum', our work, ought to be done 'per veram imaginationem et non phantastica' - by true imagination and not by a fantastical one. In other words, if you take the correct meaning of this definition, fantasy is mere nonsense, a phantasm, a fleeting impression; but imagination is active, purposeful creation. And this is exactly the distinction I make too. A fantasy is more or less your own invention, and remains on the surface of personal things and conscious expectations. But active imagination, as the term denotes, means that the images have a life of their own and that the symbolic events develop according to their own logic - that is, of course, if your conscious reason does not interfere.

It does mean that I should be using this precious time right now, before I try to impart knowledge of history, chemistry and biology to my unwilling students.


But before I go...
Sex.

The narrative unwinds; he grabbed me, he pulled me, he acted upon me; he expected me to respond in certain ways. I was straight out of a D/s relationship, I was cracked and poisoned and in need of trusting someone enough to be able to open my heart and to let my soul flow out and through.

It was hard to understand that now I was expected to cum (after three years of sex without that freedom) -I did my best to try to explain me: I like sex to go on for a long time, I like to burn, I like to reach the point of orgasm over and over but not to fall over into orgasm- this took us to many fine places, but there could be no healing...

I think it was his anxiety that blocked me, confined me, made me feel as if I should NOT -should not what?

Should not let go and be me.

The horse...both a gift and a curse. It carried me over his anxiety, but allowed him to 'ride rough-shod' over me. I entered into and became what ever was needed to open the doors; but he didn't understand that I did it because I had too; I was convinced that he didn't love me.

'I' made him anxious, I could criticise, have feelings, be outrageously demanding; it was easier for everyone if I just used what 'works' and using 'what works' requires a horse and the ability to ride.

On riding without the horse.
Last night, after the previous night of trying to explain that my needs were not a sub-section of his (meaning that it is quite possible for me to want sex and for him not too) I got the feeling that he was trying to show me that he had taken my words to heart. Oh no, now I find 'the uncouth man' in my bed; the man who touches me without being able to feel if I welcome this touch or not. To me it is incomprehensible, I don't understand why my lack of reaction (I am polite -perhaps I shouldn't be?) is taken as either assent or pleasure.

On the use of Domination and its alternative:
Now at this point the intelligent thing for him to do would be to exploit my discomfort and push further to force me into rage from there we could deal with the problem or to notice, and to begin to kiss me as if he wanted to go further and was intent upon seducing me by the quality of his touch.

On the damage of Gentlemanly behaviour:
I didn't think either thing was about to happen!

I thought the motivation was primarily *being good* and being good drives me up the wall, is full of statements such as 'I thought that you said' or 'Ah, now I understand and I'll never do the bad thing again'.

On the damage of pornography:
A consequence of entering into his fantasies is a part of me convinced that I'm second best and that his marriage to me is all about our outer-happiness, nothing to do with those darker, serpentesque energies I refuse to live without. The hurt part of me knows without a shadow of a doubt that my tits are not as attractive as the forbidden pair on someone else. After all, using logic -if he prefers to imagine sex instead of having the real, flesh and blood kind whilst lying in bed with a living, breathing semi-naked woman, whose tits are 36 D cup, with a narrow waist, big bum, who longs to be stroked and fucked...see, the logic is inescapable, why not touch the real one, why prefer the imaginary?

On the uses of pornography.
There have been too many times when I have picked up on his anxiety and backed off. When I asked myself where his anxiety came from and what I could do to reach through it and back to him it seemed to me that fantasy was the only path into knowledge available to me....I was right. The pictures and fantasies are like tarot cards...BUT only if both people know what they are doing or -in the case of outrageous error- one knows where to find her horse and how to ride it!

Conclusion.
I really do not having to explain how I feel about this to him; I'm always at the verge of despair when I speak, convinced as I am that I'm just his wife and therefore being asked to play a very different role to the one I chose for myself. But time and time again he has proved to me that he is confined by his habits and deeply ingrained beliefs about sex yet wishes to be with me, as me. I am also confined by conditioning, each time I have felt moderated, pushed away, each time I have not been trusted -each time I've felt his anxiety- I have backed off unto the point of shutting down. and this was where pornography and fantasy helped

And now we are here.

Time to draw...ah well it would be, but I only have time to run spell-check!

a man faced with death performs with calm dignity some spirited but unnecessary gesture that demonstrates contempt for danger.

I was wondering around the internets looking for a picture of a horse. I wanted a horse walking in the sea, actually- if I'm to start my red book.

The internet-waves washed me Arion (the guy on the horse); once kidnapped by pirates, this favored son of Lesbos (a poet and musician) was offered a choice; suicide, with the bonus of a proper burial on land, or to take his chances with the briny sea.

Arion jumped into the briny, still strumming his lyre and singing his praise to bright Apollo. Attracted by his singing, the dolphins (in another story dolphins were once pirates transfigured by Dionysus) bore him up and out of the drowning waves...

... Only I, still singing, washed
Ashore by the long sea-swell, sing on,
A mystery to my poet self,
And safe and sound beneath a rock shelf
Have spread my wet clothes in the sun.

Seamus Heaney

Which reminds me of today; and of that horse, my 'whore's horse' with whom I am (in the Jungian space of my mind) at the moment walking, along the brittle edge of light and air.

The internets also washed me words; I particularly liked 'When Sugar Plums Go bad' by
paeonia miko:

And I unravel.
Trip over the pieces of myself.
And this craving becomes more than I am, becomes all I am.
Reduces me til I am insubstantial, so disintegrated that I lose all my words and all I know to a fog.
I wander lost and lonely in that fog for days.
continue...

OK, the story one more time; after Gilgamesh (and before him, after a marriage that almost led me to suicide) I was left with two core beliefs: that sex -the quality, the pleasure, the sheer overwhelming magick of it- was not something I would live without.

Categorically my life is not worth living unless I am that close to someone, able to share that immensity of pleasure fucking provides.

The second core belief is that deeply, ultimately, inevitably I will be rejected because I consider sex so important and as a woman I am not supposed to; contemporary mythology still demands that I am supposed to be above all that, I'm supposed to either represent or actually be something higher.

I don't have any problem with the sacred aspect, what freezes the heart and mind is the concept of woman as above sex, in need of love.

My attitudes are in direct opposition to the 80's philosophy; as a woman I should be independent, strong, unwilling to pick up anyone else's problems, unwilling to risk my heart and soul just for a moment of eternity. But life, had taught me otherwise, I considered that sensible advice as prissy, an attempt to appear good rather than be actually good: to remain pure and noble, above the earth -unwilling to taste mortality.

So when the inevitable happened, when the pain from being rejected for being sexual and fertile came, I became all fire, I needed the good doctor to hold onto me, to forget all those useless rules that belong to the upper-world, and to sink with me into fire.

He would not.
And I died.

Unfortunately, not so it was my faith in him that died.

So I picked myself up and set out to do battle with that part of him that said it was so good. I took him back to those places where he had been shamed, to those places where he had experienced the pain of rejection and I loved him through.

But instead of understanding that I was doing this because I wished to make sure that this nice, kind, upper-world attitude of good and bad/safe and dangerous had to be transformed; instead he thought that I was doing it because I was 'kinky'.

Well kinky is what?

For me it is a demonology, an encounter with the Klipoth of the soul, the shadow entities, the half-born, half-made, the lost and the denied.

In fact I was outraged that he hadn't asked himself where the energy came from; it seemed amazing that he had a kind of oblivious attitude -like someone opening a phishing email, or using a credit card and thinking that the interest rate is of no consequence!

I'd thought that he was like me (able to see in the dark) or generous and willing enough to not reject me.

But I was wrong.

I realized again last night why he makes me shut down and withdraw; it is because he wont let me lead.

Sex isn't about one person doing something to someone else and the release of orgasm (unless that is what both of you decide to play with for the duration of a scene!) sex is communication, and that communication can take place in many, many different kinds of sexual relationship including Master/slave, including vanilla marriage; but without a dialogue, sex becomes a process with a beginning, middle and end/success and fail.

Communication is about mirroring, following, leading and sharing, it goes where ever it goes!

Last night it happened again, it took me some time to realise that the worst part is that he doesn't consider that I have any right to sex unless he wants it.

So that would be perfect for a D/s relationship?
I'd have thought so.
Read on...

The 80's script says, 'It is fundamentally wrong for someone to want to have sex with someone who doesn't want to have sex with them' and who on earth could disagree with that...except I'm not some stranger, or someone who wont reciprocate! I don't put a fence around myself somewhere up on the moral high ground when he needs to fuck me; to use me or to tell me fantasies, or look at pictures. I say fine, go there, I'll go there with you!

But if I need, then nothing can be done.

Well OK, I knew this ages ago and so the D/s thing came about as an antidote. I thought if I give him total control then it makes me safe, I can't ask or expect anything he isn't inclined to give. The D/s deal is: I agree to be grateful for anything he gives me. In return I get to see what is here, in this strange place, plus it makes his cock hard -and that's always good.

All that went wrong must be recorded in this blog, I can't bring myself to wade through the whole sorry story again..

---

Enter the image of the vampire; the image of a man who has lived for centuries, has loved and lost many times, someone who has lost his soul; vulnerability, the dark mirror of my soul.

I am sorely tempted!

Is £100 too much to pay for Jung's Red Book?

Basically though, Jung's Red Book is the book I'd like to make; what stops me?

Well with that thought in my head I'll play this track by Faust, continue waiting for the groceries to be delivered, do a mental inventory of all the pretty pens, pencils and paints we must have in this house and then try so much harder to take my dreams seriously!

Rainy day Sunshine girl!
Faust.

There is a time and place for breaking taboos, there are probably as may good ways as bad to enter into that hit of energy. My problem is that I love the energy too much. At the moment it appears to me like heroin, that now I know what it feels like, I can't function without it.

There is a cost to me; I get hurt. It is a damaging kind of hurt, one that makes me curl up inside and cry out for someone, somewhere to truly love me. The cost of the hit is my faith in the man who sleeps by my side, who said that he loved me, is the cost of destroying dreams; and without dreams as if in slow motion I hit the ground hard.

This morning I opened myself into orgasm, I was torn open by humiliation and psychic pain.

I had taught myself to feed on pain and had learnt to transform it into pleasure long ago, but I had always done it only when necessary -my back against the wall, and no plan B- remember there is a way to route the swallowed sword, there is a way to catch the bullet between the teeth; sometimes it is trick, all smoke and mirrors, other times it is real.

But my reason for doing it was never for fun; I have too much respect for drugs, both endogenous and illegal and both should, no! MUST only be used as a part of a ritual and within a sacred space...and I keep forgetting that the good doctor doesn't know either how or why.

The good doctor uses drugs (endogenous) to assuage anxiety, and to be successful. I believed that we had got over the 'but I thought it is what you want' on the other hand, perhaps not?

Put it this way, I do not know why he chooses to use this method on me; I can tell you that though I re-route the pain into pleasure, I am both sorry for myself at being so hurt, and angry with him for treating this energy with such disrespect.

For there are good ways and bad ways to break taboos; I personally need it to be done within a liminal space; there must be a barrier between this world and the other in place. The liminal space has an exit route -the safe word- and the poison being used must be drawn directly from the real-world, and made sacred by being taken across and into the other. The poison must be polyvalent (so it's real meaning cannot be fixed) the poison should never be used in the real world.

Finally, the person administering the poison must take care...

In our case 'the poison' is fantasy and I expect the good doctor to use it wisely; to draw it from something deep within him, and to understand that I only do this to take a hit of energy that would otherwise do harm. My problem is that I'm addicted, which is even more of a reason to only do this within a liminal space (a scene). I knew, this morning, when I felt the pleasure riding up on a wave of tears and dropped into a sea of broken glass that I shouldn't have accepted this pleasure.

But it was better than nothing..

I'm writing now because I've started at least three posts over the last week, had to stop writing, lost the thread and simply gave up trying to remember what I had forgotten!

But it's been too long, so tired as I am, I must write.

I liked Elisavetta's idea of the horse; as I tried to say, it made me think about the way I ride and why I ride and to ask myself why I and that horse are still together.

The answer isn't in my name.

I am RideFlame, but that name was born in the virtual lands of deathmatch. I don't even like it, I never liked it, but it always fitted me.

Anyway, the whore's horse implies a surrender to process, sex as performance -nothing fake- but a requirement to fit and fulfill certain expectations. I was always proud of myself for being able to ride, I was triumphant at overcoming myself, or being able to bend and mold myself and to go where I needed to go.

As ex-consort...I don't instantly see any other way to do it.

I'm still conditioned not to make my partner cum; to preserve the pleasure for as long as possible, it isn't my right or place to speed things up or to decide when I cum, or even to let go and to be made to cum.

Riding has other connotations too, of being ridden, in Norse paganism to become Sleipeir to be ridden by Odin, or in Vodou, to be possessed by a deity: to be 'horsed' and this is closer to my interpretation of The Whore's Horse.

At the moment sex divides for me into two kinds: the one in which I ride the whore's horse...or am ridden, where I am possessed by the deity and pleasure is an offering.

The other is so difficult because I have to be quiet and it usually involves him doing things to me which make me struggle, and try so hard not to squeal.

We are playing with horror -nothing deep or big, stay with me here this is light and fluffy, honest- it isn't hard for me to leave my horse to graze the sweet grass in the Elysian fields, whilst I play around the unfamiliar territory of outrage and disgust (things I never let myself feel when I ride/am ridden).

As much as I'd love to list the things that I really dislike; I can't!

He reads my blog!

Any kind of list would give him ideas about what pushes my disgust buttons. It is much more fun for me not to know what to expect -and if I write, I will be expecting him to use what I've revealed.

Innocuous things get to me, like cord wrapped between my toes, like being made to sit with my feet together and my knees pushed apart. I feel vulnerable, exposed, it's kind of medical -and I hate that.

When he pulled the cord around my toes (and the rest of me is immobilised, and I can't scream) I beat the bed in frustration...and the more frustrated and panicked I become, the harder he gets...which is where his confrontation with horror resides.

How does it feel for a nice man who doesn't want to bully or push or make a woman squeal or squirm to see the illusion shatter and see that nice isn't the truth of it? Well there sure seems to be a lot of energy in it, and that, gentle reader, is good enough for me!

It is so weird for me to be horrified by his cock, so un-me and so funny and yet I am truly on the verge of freaking out when I let myself react. It allows me to replay moments when I've had to keep my head, and ride when I've wanted to run!

The horror is all in the way he does it, the way he enjoys my disgust...needless to say, I do have a safe word -though I can't for the life of me remember what it is, something to do with tomatoes I think?!

...and the horse.

I was caught by Elizavetta's post: Requiem for a Whore's Horse.

It demanded that I take a walk under a grey sky as the light bled down into the earth where once in a dream I'd let the horse go, my horse go under the grey sky. The horse had come to me under the blue, in a garden as sweet as Eden. A grey horse with broad back and gentle nature and I could no longer see her.

A darkness fell and the horse of stars came to me.