Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: childhood

  • kink shaming

    On the one hand, consensual sex is nobody else’s business. On the other, I feel sad for this person (surely a woman). I feel suspicious of her dominant/exploiting partner (surely a man). Sexual play is one thing. But if she is dependent on it, I start to feel like there are healthier ways for people to admit they need comfort and cosseting.

    As a friend who is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and is working with her own inner child has said, she cannot imagine a more damaging thing to do to your wounded inner self.

    I want to say a little more about this. Like many oldest sisters I grew up caring for my little brothers and, in some ways, taking responsibility to parent the woundedness exhibited by both parents. I didn’t have a lot of opportunity to be little. I have a hunger for it. I’ve been 6’2″ since the age of 12 (and shy), and people attribute to me a lot of authority. It’s been so interesting to learn to own all of that and be unashamed and to teach myself, rather laboriously, to be able to say to my partner, I need to be comforted and babied, I need to be little, do you have the energy for that?

    It took me so much courage in adulthood to learn to finally be little. Asking for such indulgence and comfort and parenting straight out feels, to me, so much more enabling than other options I see people using. No blame to them, everyone is doing what they can. And again I emphasise that I am not speaking of individual people’s enabled choices for sexual play. But I’ve had damaged friends and exes who indulge themselves in tantrums, breakdowns, manipulations etc that demand cosseting and patient parental style understanding – which as a partner I will gladly give, only it feels so much more respectful to be asked for it clearly and outright. To be able to do this takes real work. I actually enjoy the sense of agency and grounded balance I have when aware and present for my own vulnerability and not trying to do something which would be so alien to my nature – dress up and protect that aching frailty by pretending it is sexy, hot, kinky, or hip.

     

  • Spanish nights

    Oh, Spain! Is so filled with amazing events! Walking home just now I saw a man busking with his telescope. It was pointed up towards the moon, a peach lying in dark glossy syrup, and his hand-lettered sign and the beast had attracted a queue of people eager to see the sky up close. His telescope was as big as three people bound together for the stake, which is what might have happened to a busker with a telescope four hundred years ago in this or most countries.

    On my way out as the blue hour deepened I ran across an angry demonstration. With huge signs they marched until they came face to face with police, standing legs planted apart in their sexy motorcycle boots and cavalier pants. The anger seemed to dissolve and the two groups faced each other chattering and laughing. I couldn’t make out the signs, I asked a hipster who is always begging with his brass Tibetan bowl, “Hablo pocolito Ingles?” Do you have a little English? Oh yes, he said, and launched into an explanation in Spanish. I gathered that the protestors were anti-austerity, “like Greece.” He said something something about the poor. At least that’s how it sounded to me. I thanked him profusely, the first homeless hipster beggar I have ever met, and hurried on to the bookshop cafe open til midnight which is where I plan to spend the rest of my visit if not my life. I found it yesterday and spent an hour in there, resolving to come back with my laptop. So hushed and filled with concentration is the atmosphere that people entering the shop instinctively begin to whisper to each other. That is, nirvana.

    Leading up to Palm Sunday people were selling sprigs of rosemary and olive branches in the streets. In front of churches you could buy yellow palm leaves woven into fantastical shapes like candelabras and I wish I had. Then on Sunday I got caught up in a huge motionless crowd and by dint of being 18 inches taller than everybody else could see the parade, standing waiting, women in black lace mantillas and impeccable heels, men wearing tall conical hats that to me shrieked Ku Klux Klan but I suppose they have appropriated, as nothing else they represent is ever original. At the front was a large float the size of a four wheel drive, higher and taller, and banked up with candles and scarlet rose petals. I walked on and later that night found another, similar procession, this one carrying a bier for the Virgin Mary, whose velvet train embroidered in gold dropped behind her so far it needed four people to carry it.

    I saw a man dressed as a Super Mario Brother with his blue foam head off, sitting gazing at one of the colourful balloons he sells, in a trance. I saw two giant Bart Simpsons with their heads off, feeding pigeons from a park bench and apparently unable to understand why I was finding them so delightful. I saw an immaculate lady all in tan with leather gloves lying back on a bench in the middle of a crowded square, her eyes closed to worship Sun. I saw a man crouched on a square of cardboard carving crosses from two twigs, his wares spread out in front of him. He was talking to a little girl. I saw two mounted police officers on their horses scrolling their phones. They were the centre of a circle of other phones as everybody stopped to take pictures. I saw the Museum of Ham that has whole hocks hung from the ceilings dense as balloons at a child’s birthday do. Another place called Paradise of Ham sells thin shavings of Iberian ham from pigs fed on acorns that costs 95 Euros a kilo. I saw a woman dressed as a bride hold out her skirts and curtsey, she too was busking, perhaps after the wedding had gone off. And in the midst of all this I saw a Swiss family eating an expensive dinner, their table facing into the milling night time street, and the parents drearily cheered each other in champagne as their girls, perhaps 14 and 9, sat slumped over their phones reaching for one potato chip after another and oblivious to all the glory that passes over us every moment.

  • dinner party from the sofa

    I was at a dinner party and came over all poorly. In fact I thought I might throw up and had to kind of bolt from the room. Must’ve been the Tramadol, an opiate fed to me by my beloved who had acquired it from his father, who suffers from extreme chronic pain. “They’re not really all that strong,” his father said airily. The headache that has been a companion for days now, for almost a week, had sharpened so if I turned my head it brought spasms of nausea. A small disagreement over breakfast had unexpectedly ballooned into a stand-up shouting match in this house where I am a new guest, pain in my belly from the sorrow of it all day. So I succumbed. “Take the other half, too,” he said when the pain did not ebb. Twenty minutes later we were at this party on the other side of the little winding road where the family live scattered in houses like little farms and I started to feel most peculiar. You know that dizzy sweating pressure that comes with acute nausea. Anyway I sat it out and everyone was kind and generous, including the two people who’d yelled at me. What I wanted to say was that the feeling of lying under a soft scarlet blanket on the long sofa in the living room, with a paper Christmas star beaming down on me and a row of red candles in the casement unlit, was so cosy and comforting I felt a whole mess of worries and griefs slowly melt and slide away. The heating was not on in this other room and the chill in the air felt to me healthy and fresh, deeply deeply invigorating. The sounds of communion and chatter from next door were so soothing and a delight. Over the adult voices and faint music I could hear the joyous prinkling of the little girl who was drifting in her seabed of uterine privacy when we were last here, who is thoughtful and nachdenklich, reflective, and has hair the colour of threshed wheat. They brought me a heat pack for my neck, they saved me some dessert. When we came out after our hugs the stars were so clear and so high and the sky had opened itself to the night, the heavens upon us, the peaked white houses standing about like sleeping horses, the night seemed to me sacred and blessed and the row of long needling trees threading the sky along the winding road into the distance led, one could tell, into all good, mysterious things. The white dog made a flickering song of joy along the slick black road as we wound our way home, breathing visibly.

  • crimes against children and our rage

    A sex offender or child killer gets convicted. Somebody posts about it on Facebook. Their thread fills up with eager commentary, almost lip-smacking: Got the bastard! May he rot! Hope he gets raped inside, hope he gets torn. There’s a self-righteous tone of “He deserves his victim’s fate, only worse.” This vindictiveness and the sense of moral entitlement sicken me. “He” had “that” done to him, as a child, almost certainly, or has been damaged in some way. Where is the difference between him taking it out on another child and us punitively taking it out on him? What is the difference between what he put that woman through and what we are now so virtuously decreeing he should suffer? It feels Old Testament, feels primitive. I discuss this queasy feeling with my local German, who instantly gets it. He says: in Germany on Facebook there are many Nazi pages, real Nazis, always hiding behind this same rubric of “death penalty to child molesters.” It’s under the flag of “save our children,” he says. I’m uneasily reminded of anti-abortion extremists who believe that “baby murdering” doctors are so evil they can righteously be shot in cold blood. Nobody deserves rape. Nobody, not even a rapist. They deserve a heavier sentence than a smuggler. They deserve to be stopped and prevented and given at least the opportunity for rehabilitation. Some are unrepentant and can’t heal, true sociopaths who need locking away, for the safety of the community. But who are we as a people to gang up and declare that we are pure and they must suffer. 90% of our most commonly available porn according to an article I posted this week involves violence against “the talent” – usually women. Foulness and entitlement and a spoilt, rotten, egotistical, moralising snatching of what suits us best, no matter what, pervade our culture and are draining the teeming seas, lopping whole forests and beheading mountains, rupturing the very liveability of the Earth. You can’t fight fire with fire or fear with fear. The fantasy that all the evil can be projected cleanly onto one monstrous, identifiable stranger who is then locked away is a dangerous and to me deeply repugnant fallacy.

     

  • making everything diamond

    making everything diamond

    Two boys scribbling either end of the dinner table. “What are you drawing?” 6yo: “It’s a diamond. With a rainbow inside it.” 4yo: “This is a machine for making everything dead.”

    Their mother, breastfeeding, laughs telling us how the 6yo asked her could they play “jumping over Amelia on the couch.” Amelia is three weeks old. She was wrapped and asleep and her brother said earnestly, “It’s okay Mummy. We’re not going to jump on top of her.”

     

  • all of Switzerland

    all of Switzerland

    At the top of a very high hill yesterday, what in Holland or Denmark would be called a mountain, with a view over all of Switzerland ~ so it seemed ~ my friend taught me to peel dandelion stalks so that they spring into pretty green silvery curls. Behind us a family with very young parents were playing hide and seek. They had built a fire and the father, when we showed up, was juggling with three sticks. As we sat on our sedentary bench facing the green nation, he sprinted round in front of us and flung himself panting on the ground, his eyes gleaming, intent on the figure of his youngest daughter who was counting “eis, zwöi, drü, vier, füf…” Our legs and the legs of the bench blocked him from her and pure animal concentration blocked him from us. It was as though he didn’t see us. My friend gazed down the length of his back then flung her spooling dandelion out into the green. “We used to play that when we were children, too,” she said to me.

    H2O HoL dandelion road

  • scandinavian tile

    scandinavian tile

    My host has Scandinavian taste and I love her house. The green river falls past the end of the garden. In my early twenties I visited and she and I ran down and flung ourselves in, again and again, fetching up winded downstream against the gravel island, hanging onto branches. You walked all the way back up the path and plunged back in. That was summer. The living room is populated with artefacts from an adventurous life. The upstairs office has rifles, a hammock, old round-shouldered business cards tacked to the corkboard with extra digits penciled in front of each telephone number. The whole house is filled with swimming trophies, and pennants for tennis. Her son was born in Africa and her daughter in Kalimantan. “I think we helped destroy the rainforest,” said my friend sadly, the first night I arrived when we were reminiscing about Indonesia, our lost homeland. She loves yellow and orange and the kitchen and bathroom are tiled in exuberant 70s clay, handmade tiles, each one of which is different to its neighbour. There is a photo of me and my two brothers and her daughter, average age six or seven, taking a bath together in a maze of these tiles, so small and the white bathtub so generous that it was intimate yet not crowded.

    H2O HoL orange flower on construction fence