WHEN AGONY IS ECSTASY

Catlin's depiction of an Okipa

When the young adventurers of the Seventies heard anthropologists talk about Sun Lodge torture among the Plains Indians, they could hardly wait to go try it out.  It had been forbidden by authorities on grounds that it encouraged warlike and savage behavior, which made it even more attractive.  Not many reported afterwards, neither about damage nor about spiritual transcendence.  

My premise is that since the prairie people had not learned to ferment alcohol (maybe for lack of sugar sources) nor had they found many hallucinogens beyond peyote (not wet enough environment for mushrooms), they had learned a great deal about auto-theogenic behavior — that is, how to push consciousness out of homeostasis enough to make a person visionary but not quite suicidal.  Thirst, fasting, solitude, pain were their resources -- always available and good training for hard lives.

In recent times publications like VICE, who actively look for edgy stuff, have reported on the practice of “suspension,” basically the same thing as Okipa.  The old Indians used skewers and thongs to tie chest or back flesh to lines so that by prolonged leaning against attachment to a central point (a major tree trunk in the middle of a circle of lesser trunks) the flesh and skin would be torn through.  This capitalized on the body’s reaction to pain and damage with such molecules as serotonin, natural anesthetics, even providing a “high.”  It’s related to the practice of “cutting” oneself in order to find consolation and peace.  A woman once told me about being in a car accident that threw her out onto the highway with grievous damage, but she lay there in great comfort — temporarily, until the “shock” and the natural opioids wore off.

This photo was taken in Moscow, they claim.

Modern suspension stories feature people who are paid to hang someone by using hooks, on the presumption that they have studied this and can do it with relatively safety and effectiveness.  It might be private, for the experience, or public as an exhibition, a freak show. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_(body_modification)  A whole body of technical and pseudo-technical terminology, technique, and metaphors have grown up around this practice, which justifies itself with Catlin’s painting of a Mandan okipa.  Philosophy that values the primitive, the tough, the excessive and the violent plus political times that are bleak, oppressive, fatalistic, and ascetic offer a context for this practice.  Many of the modern accounts are placed in the great prairie of Eurasia dominated by Russia.

A variation is an intimate group who form a circle or star on their hands and knees, webbed by hooks and connecting lines.  The idea is to pull against each other until the hooks tear through.  The suspensions in the above photo are not supposed to tear away, since the suspended person would fall.  They need help to be lowered and disengaged.  Google lists vids as well as reports.

These practices are related to many other pain-inducing strategies that have been claimed by the sexual category of S and M, for “sado-"  hurting others and “maso-"432 hurting oneself.  I note this only for the few people who don’t already know it.  We throw the terms around carelessly and often with the same craving for the forbidden as wanting to be whipped or fisted. 

I notice not many have been attracted to the tribal coming-of-age practice of forcing the eyeteeth out of the mouths of adolescent boys.  But the popular practice of labiaectomies seem very close to clitoradectomies, which are deplored in polite society.  Photos of these procedures are available on the Internet.  They are not usually included in discussions of pornography, which are assumed to be attractive.

Extreme plastic surgery seems to have become a signal of wealth.  Sometimes in primitive tribes the idea is to become more attractive by flattening the head or stretching the neck or lower lip.  I don’t see why repeated surgeries in order to look like a tiger are any different. The idea of the believer’s circle applies: inside the circle it all seems powerful and real.  Outside the circle it just looks psychotic.

These are not always practices meant to achieve a “high,” but are often meant to indicate a seriousness certified by irreversibility or the achievement of some marker of adulthood or other privileged category.  The traditional idea of “defloration” — breaking the hymen in a person’s first act of intercourse — is now jokingly referred to as “popping your cherry.”  The metaphor gets spread around to a lot of different “first times.”  In general our times seem disrespectful of human flesh.  I note many jokes about cannibalism or immolation on the CSI shows, though the characters sometimes remind each other that human life is meant to be valued.

All of this is a digression from two points I want to make.  The first one is that the Plains Indians had a culture that respected the displacement of ordinary consciousness and even saw it as a source of information about the ordinary world.  It’s not just unique metabolism that makes them vulnerable to the effects of alcohol -- in a parallel to the lack of antibodies making them vulnerable to smallpox.  It’s not just the burdens of stigma and poverty.  It’s also an expectation, an inevitability and jokey acceptance that supports clowning and self-abasement.  But then again a yearning for a mystic transcendence.  Our contemporary concern about harm is missing.

The second matter is that those who looked closely at the list of books on my "shelf" may have been startled to see “Urban Aboriginals” by Geoff Mains.  It is reflection, theory and practice by a man educated in endorphin metabolism and also in forest ecology, which he intelligently understood as related.   He was writing in 1984, early days for the understanding of brains, though one of the best early researchers, Panskepp, is mentioned.  He quotes Charles Tart, who sounds very much like Victor Turner, one of my key anthropological authorities for transcendent experience.  Mains respected systems, communities, and safeguards.  Sometimes he sounds like a member of a BBC-depicted British explorer's club.  I don’t necessarily agree with him, certainly never had his experiences, but want the mental challenge of tearing myself away from cultural assumptions as he did.  

Like the Mandan Okipa,  Mains' work could easily be mis-interpreted and illegitimately proliferated.  In any discussion of bodies, one is soon having to address what is actual flesh and what is virtual theory.  Many people will springboard from that into a kind of mysticism of initiates meant to vault themselves above others.  I don’t know many identified SM people but in my experience the best protection against an unwarranted assumption of superiority due to esoteric practices is the reality and tragedy of actual bodies, real people, trying to survive.  Maybe Catlin should have minded his own business.

Jean Paul Gautier mocking what were meant to be dangerous male harnesser.

"GENTLE WARRIORS" by Geoff Mains: a Review

“Urban Aboriginals” was a focused orderly account of a sub-culture.  “Gentle Warriors” is a murder mystery, but with no single assassin and a host of victims.  It is a complex and entirely believable interweaving of many elements of the San Francisco gay and straight forces in conflict brought to a climax by the idea that HIV virus was deliberately designed as a weapon of mass destruction targeting gays.  This idea is then turned around to deliberately target those who block the protection of the vulnerable, including gays.  

Mains was uniquely qualified to write this book because of his background.  I would include his Brit/Canadian/far-north identity.  This sort of idea mushrooms up in the aftermath of crisis.  One of my ministerial cohort, a classmate at seminary, lost his final church because he believed and asserted that 9/11 was not the work of Middle Eastern terrorists, but rather the planting of explosives by the CIA, only triggered by the airplanes.  We like our enemies familiar and named.

Always I’m delighted to find a powerful book that is about the part of the continent I know, and not just the major cities.  Mains used his knowledge most effectively in the Metis character of Marc, who is a mystic and knows the forest.  The sex scenes (both extreme and simple cuddling) are for me less moving than the visions of near-muskeg, fusion of a different kind.

Chapter 19 is a “vision” by Marc that moves the issue from sex politics in SF to a broad “ecology of evil.” (My phrase.)  He is sitting on a stump near the beginning of the northern muskeg, looking “into the tangle of stems and sedges and sphagnum at the bog’s moist edges. . . Here was Labrador tea, cloud berry and crowberry, blueberry bushes and various wintergreens.  Here was bog laurel, and throughout, the brilliant tiny red coins of swamp birch that clung tenaciously to the delicate branches of the little bush.”  He sees “a late-blooming one-leaf orchis, its delicate spike of tiny flowers poked tentatively into the cold air, its base lost in a tangle of browned sedges.” . . . 

Given this specific, he draws a principle:  “Here was that rare and special side in each of us; here were those hidden delights we refused to recognize or actively suppressed.  By denying them in ourselves, in others, we created hostility, fear.  And so often when others chose to express those very feelings, to live those delights, we stoned them with hostile envy.”  

Louis Riel

This is the “Gentle Warrior,” a person of vision, skill and generosity who can allow others to be different.  In the background hovers the spirit of Louis Riel, mystic, who tried to lead the Red River Rebellion, a breakaway community on the Northern prairie.  In the year this book was published, I was teaching in Heart Butte where many of Riel’s followers had taken refuge to avoid being hung in Canada.  Their descendants had mixed with Blackfeet.  Some of them were gay, as is true of every place.  But I had not expected to meet Riel in this book!

Here are the characters we follow in the order that they appear in vignettes.

1.  Marc, the Metis, begins the story.  He’s been tending bar at the Ambush in SF.

2.  Gregg, ex-Marine racked with PTSD.  He’s guiding his motorcycle down the streets of the West Hills of Portland, OR.

3.  Sam, who’s gripped by an ingenious plot, and Brian, his lover, are driving south through a winter storm, stopping for supper in Grants Pass.

4.  Back to Gregg remembering how he connected with his group of plotters in the past.

5.  Allan Bennett, straight, a politician out of the “House of Cards”, also plotting.

6.  Back to Sam and Brian, trucking through the Siskiyous, while over the radio comes the news that Ed Stevens has admitted that he helped the CIA deliberately create AIDS and spread it.

7.  Gregg was previously married to Ed’s sister, Jo-Lyn, who is the only female main character, who tries to take action on her own fundamentalist terms, and ends up collateral damage like all the others.  Jo-Lyn’s connection to her nursing infant is as erotic as any of the encounters between leather men.

These characters, along with a few others, weave in and out of the plot line in a “long arc story” worthy of a television series.  Some of it comes directly out of Mains’ experience and other parts derive from news accounts, books, and long evenings of listening to unguarded talk.  The central obsession is that AIDS was knowingly imposed on a whole category of men for political reasons disguised as moral reasons.

Those were early times, so the detailed and specific knowledge of the actual virus that we have accumulated now -- the proof (still doubted by some) that HIV was a species jump from SIV, specifically from the chimp version, though it can jump from gorillas or gibbons as well -- the proof that the virus was slipping around like an evil shadow at least a hundred years ago -- the knowledge that it usually (but not always) takes more than one brief exposure to be contagious but is satanically hard to get back out of the blood once it takes hold -- the actual ports of entry on each cell and the specific places on the genome that allow those two key ports to exist -- all this was unknown at the time.  

Because Mains is coming at this unfinished tragedy through multiple storylines, it conveys a lot of information about how lives are affected and why anyone would continue exposure because of their intense passion for physical relationship.  It’s a premise often followed in heterosexual novels.  In fact, some of those historical novels pick up on the mystical principles of courtly love and irresistible fate.  Mains is frank about the greed, fear and viciousness of humans who have power and always want more.

There are 59 short chapters, the first and last both belonging to Marc.  This character brings to awareness a kind of new religion that comes from appreciation of the complexity of both the cell and the cosmos, and marries that ecologically to the nature of human society.  “Another sister on this terrible guillotine of life, this machine that kills so coldly, that slices with presumptuous accuracy, so disdainful of charity.”  

The last paragraph of the book is this vision:  “At a window in the city where one can watch the Sun God climb Mount Parnassus, lifting his train of fog up the hills as he goes, a man wipes the tears from his face and smiles in remembrance.  The owl hoots one final time and sinks into silence.  The passage has been made, the message given.  It’s time to go on.”

That’s the message of both biochemistry and forestry -- process: life goes on.  But for all his warrior-words and their explosive charge, he’s a botanist.  In his tangled bank it is the plants that struggle against each other.  No mole gobbles worms, no wolf pack brings down a moose.  It’s the humans who are unreasonable and needy.

This book was published by Knights Press.  The editor-in-chief at the time was Tim Barrus.  He was able to get the book into Geoff’s hands just a day before he died.  This morning when I looked, “Gentle Warriors” was available as a pdf online.  I hope that means more people can read it.

"URBAN ABORIGINALS: A Celebration of Leathersexuality" by Geoff Mains

I am no expert on any of the matters discussed here.  Not sex, nor homosexuality, nor porn, nor leatherlit.  I am a broadly educated former Unitarian Universalist minister and English teacher, female, old, and rural, coming at this book from no polemic nor specifically moral position.  It is the very alienness that interests me.  How close can I get to understanding?

“Urban Aboriginals: A Celebration of Leathersexuality,” 

by Geoff Mains

This book has eight sections.

1.  ANATOMY OF A CULTURE

The first section makes the case that a group of men exist who are held together from the inside by their intense interactions, near-fusion, and from the outside by the larger culture which finds their activities abhorrent or maybe criminal.  These are big tough hairy guys like those on the American Western frontier.  Religious groups form with less affinity -- but they also erode and corrupt gradually.  Mains uses the idea of tribes, which in Canada are called aboriginals, meaning primal and earliest.  

Urbs, of course, are recent.  City people never really come to terms with what is possible and even ordinary in terms of flesh, as Mains says.  They never kill what they eat or even see it in life.  Rural people differ.  For instance, my niece has a thriving business doing bovine artificial insemination, very often thrusting her arm into another living being, feeling the guts and heartbeat.  She has only given birth twice, but I expect that’s enough.  Probably the more arduous chore was packing around a growing boy inside her for nine months.  I’m not sure the pleasures of serotonin and adrenaline from fisting compare at all with the roller-coaster of reproductive hormones in action.

But let that go.  Clearly there was (and possibly still is) a vibrant and creative tribe of mostly men.  How much of their passion is left is unknown to me.  There are still extremophiles.  “Extreme Fighting” or “Cage Fighting” is very popular in the nearest town, which is an Air Force base.  There must be a “tribe” formed around things like sport parachuting.  I don’t know whether bungee jumping is still popular.  Personally, if I were an athletic type looking for thrills, I’d take up parasailing.  But the pain would only be potential.  And there would be nothing of the intimate engagement with another person like oneself.  It’s flying alone.  I’ll admit “groups” are no longer my thing.

2.  THE FLOWERS OF PAIN

Two cultural irresolvables stand behind leatherlit.  One is the tension between individual and group.  The other is between dominance and submission, which is related to the first dyad.  I take Mains to be trying to find a solution for at least one kind of man.

There is no way that one person can be hurt by another without the hurter dominating the hurtee, and possibly the receiver being restrained.   The argument is that this is done voluntarily, with many safeguards and considerable medical sophistication.  This section is carried by reference to the military culture of obedience and endurance, which is powerful and easy to relate to prison life as well. I do understand the explanation of how pain works, how it can be neurologically fused with pleasure.  You don’t have to be a “cutter” to enjoy picking scabs, wiggling a painful tooth, little stuff like that.  We know that pain and pleasure are in the brain, though the relevant research is more recent than Mains’ work.

This is where emotion enters.  Intense emotion can etch sensation into muscles, organs and brain, imprint them.  The interaction of emotion and physical sensation can be dramatic, transforming, addictive.  Also introduced are shame, guilt, and terror.  Or euphoria and bonding.

Vicariously, virtually, our culture loves extreme pain and sex portrayed as realistically as possible:  Westerns, war films, crime films, terminal diseases.  CGI means that almost anything can be graphically depicted.  That’s mainstream or the next thing to it.  One dreads to find how what the secret culture does.  Actually doing extreme things is powerful and must be a component of PTSD.

3.  RITUAL PSYCHODRAMA

Spectatoring, analyzing, discussing appears to be part of the pleasure and the culture of leathersexuality.  This interests psychotherapists, this turning out of unconscious pockets.  One of the most seductive of experiences is going over a horizon into a new realization.  Maybe just as strong is getting someone else to understand something you’ve had to keep hidden or didn’t know was even possible to share.  Surviving an ordeal, a shipwreck, a massacre -- even one planned and scripted -- can also change consciousness.

All of this can go very wrong.  People die.  The culture overrides, corrupts and interferes.  A “tribe” can be independent and cohesive only up to a point.

4.  BONDAGE AND INNER PEACE

All these chapters quote other work, mostly mainstream and professional.  At least half are books I’ve read and used in the study of theology or anthropology or psychology.  This chapter is specifically concerned with the management of consciousness, the “connectome” as I am fond of calling it.  The actual states of mind include everything from hypnotism, to trance, to dissociation, to dream, to hallucination to whatever it is that yogis can achieve with meditation and physical disciplines such as posture or whirling.  

The chapter does not talk about external drugs. Some mind alterations practiced by traditional native peoples, like starvation, exposure. staring at the sun, are not discussed.  Nor is anything as drastic as a Plains Indian Sun Lodge that includes the ordeal of flesh bits being torn away, but sweat lodges are noted here, perhaps a bit too easily considering the recent deaths.  (It’s important to remember that Mains was writing in the Eighties, thirty years ago.)

The idea of ritual (Victor Turner and Von Gennep) is to somehow jar people out of their ordinary consciousness; while they are in a liminal fluid state introduce new ideas and evidence; then return them to a new ordinary consciousness with new understanding.  This three step process is so obvious it seems dumb, but it is an accepted and effective guide to a rebirth, an access to new energy.  It is used in both “primitive” ceremonies and religious rites.  It can happen to a person without any ritual or intent, just through happenstance.

5.  CELEBRATION OF THE HIDDEN ANIMAL

This is the chapter that discusses drugs, starvation, reward and punishment in terms of physiology and their uses in controlling consciousness.  “Feeling good is addictive and animal as well as human.  And feeling good, although not limited to these, is inexorably tied to basic functions.”  He means excretions (feces and urine) and the emotions connected to them that were installed in the earliest years, therefore at the most basic levels of the kitchen midden of ideas accumulated in the brain.  Enemas are not mentioned, though they are clearly acts of penetration and injection.

6.  SPIRITUAL EUPHORIA

Now it becomes clear that enemas were not in the last chapter because this whole chapter is about “fisting.”  So let’s be even more clear:  fisting can kill you by splitting your gut.  The gut is stretchy but needs a lot of coaxing, greasing, and relaxing.  Those who do this are EXTREMOPHILES.  They take major risks with their own bodies in pursuit of “euphoria.”  They do not do it alone, particularly if they have no expertise.  If it is unwelcome, it is not possible, and is the same as rape -- criminal assault.

I’ll approach this on physiological terms, the way Mains does, but using more recent research.  (“The Second Brain: A Groundbreaking New Understanding of Nervous Disorders of the Stomach and Intestine” by Michael Gershon)  The intestines have a kind of sock or second tube around them that is a netting of neurons connected back to the rest of the neural system, including the brain.  Gut muscle is “smooth,” non-striated, so it is managed by the autonomic neural system, which directly controls emotion and response to stress.  It is not voluntary but it can convey sensation.  More than that, it operates with the same chemicals as the brain.  Having a “gut feeling,” a visceral intuition, is not just a metaphor, though in the case of things like clenching fear or stammering stage fright, the message is probably coming TO the gut from the brain, or indirectly through organ secretions, rather than the other way around.  What fisting seems to do is to use these pathways to deeply affect the brain.  It can trigger euphoria, bliss.

Some individuals and cultures call this feeling “spirituality” and consider it access to another realm of being.  Those who feel this should not be discredited.

7.  THE PRISON OF THE FLESH

The next chapter is about how to think about feeling that one has become transcendent, powerful, and not like others.  “The experience of leather is an illusion of mastery.  It pits individual against drives, capacities and gaps.  It questions and breaks down the image of status, fear and guilt.  It does not provide freedom from any of these, but it sets men face to themselves and it gives them an energy to cope with the reality that they may come to see.  Minds cleared, conscious of new tools, and free of some of the burden of superfluous gaps, these men are perhaps better able to cope.”   (He does mean MEN.)

If you read this book as an intro to just another high or a porn (and it would be easy to read the little personal scenario vignettes that way), you’d be missing the whole point.  All this domination/submission, all this top/bottom, turns out to be -- among the truly initiated -- a symbiosis.  It begs the question of how to interact with those outside the magic circle, who go right on politicizing, stigmatizing, and even criminalizing the men inside.  There may be no answer to that question.

8.  LIVING IN THE CLOUDS

Generously, Mains identifies three other communities like “leatherfolk,” not in terms of physical practices but in terms of being tight communities in a hostile larger scene.  One is ancient Greece, one is Celtic witchcraft, and the third is Gnostic Christianity.  They are all “Western.”  The biophysiological threat that has wiped out much of the leather community , including Mains, was African.

Robert Scott Antarctic Expedition

Recent Robert Scott Re-enactment

Mains quotes Robert Scott, the Antarctic explorer who is so admired today that his lethal trek has just been duplicated by a team of extremephiles.  “I do not regret this journey; we took risks, we knew we took them, things have come out against us, therefore we have no cause for complaint.”   Extremophiles do not complain.