the Dancing Master

".... stroking my whole body all night long until your fingers became fine sprays of white flowers until they became fine silver wires electrifying my epidrmis until they became delicate instruments of torture and the night wore on for too many hours and I loved you irritably as dawn reprieved us we are two live-wire women wound and sprung together we are neither of us afraid of the metamoprhoses trasmogrifications thee meltings the juices sqelching in the body out of the body-a split fruit of a woman we are neither of us afraid to sink our teeth into the peach it's not love or sex it's just that we are collaborating eveyr night on a book called "the Pleasures of the flesh made simple..." (Mary Fallon, (1989) Working Hot, p87 in Elizabeth Grosz, (1995) space time perversion p184.)

One of the great pleasures of a damn fine tome is sensing how ideas, woords, echo and expand with the mind, with experience etc.


I remember gasping deliriously struggling over the words in Liz grosz's assembled book of essays when I bought it 10 years ago. a bit like reading french now - a weird vertiginous dellight of almost getting it, getting it, losing it, finding it.... incrediible ideas slipping just outside my reach.

then reading rereading underlining, crosssing, commenting, scribbling pencil screeds in the margins - while working over THE WORD for my honours essay 3 years ago....

and now returning to the same well thumbed pages, tears spring to my eyes. Phrases now injested fully, ideas, rereadings, references worn into my own internal meanderings. And the pages of delicious phrases of desperate hope that I cling to now...... reminiscing delight, rebelieving... what was Adrienne Riche's phrase? "Inscribing with its unrelenting stylus....." She was writing about lies, actually, but it's great line.

and now, i'm wondering about everything. as bloody usual. deferring writing a lecture on queer theory, a faintly disguised sour hint of semen wafts up from my doona as I demure from my duties as a professional lesbian (guest lecturer, book reviewer, fledgling academic, what else). Delaying by angsted missives to that nice girl I still hunger for..... (hmmm sounds like the surname of another nice girl actually...) We cross each other at intervals and I hold my clawing hands back. eyes flit in proximity and we both type of strange aching longings towards 'boys' only she spells hers with an "i" and both of us rebounding madly blindly stupidly into more strange ambiguous messes. Life getting too hard? why not complicate it further?


Abel is in flight, in air, in a nonleiu of transit. maybe she's in the home town of another nice girl I seemed to have let slip through my fingers. I'm not sure when she arrives back. It's imminent. My stomach has clenched, i'm wracked with hell's wind pains and diarrhoeah. Funny tummy. I'm on the vergo of tears. i'm aching for her. aching for her beating heart under my hand, her haunches across my lap, my torso, my face, feeling her singing from the inside. My own cries and laughter as whe was inside me...... eternal infinite bliss. I still want her so much, ache for her, and her alone so desperately. Try to quench myself with someone new, so different, so extremly different is size, shape, tone, timbre........

He asks me what it's like wiht women, wanting a mechanical account. Statistics, size, duration, positions, speciificites... as if exstacy can be reduced to such details. Scrimmaging scraps? number and positions of fingers, placements of legs, arms, actions of lips, tongues, such careful choreography. you can't make an inventory of infinity. He asks me why I won't come in his presence, from his hands, lips, tongue, cock? why? is he not good enough? am I really gay after all?

Exstacy has no closure, no ending, no numbers, no statistics. It's not just that women never ask "did you come" - not just that fingers are more intelligent, subtle, sensiitive than even the finest phallus, it's not that at all. It's her burning need meeting mine, and mine meeting hers. It's fucking as a form of prayer, endless unending insane mad making terrifying opening. This exstacy used to terrify me. Sex with the nymph scared me so much that I pushed her away, roughly crudely, spat and hissed and wrote elegant vituperative essays in THARUNKA on postmodern queerness, bisexuality and non normative gender politics.

that was ten years ago. I'm no longer a girl, i'm a woman.

I don't need any easy foucaultian formula in which to bind the unbearability of my ambiguities.

yes it's there. People pay to hear it now. I have a line. a nice line. Several nice solid well conceived social analyses that enable me to hold his hand, his toso, hiss cock even, while my twat twitches looking at girls........

Even my school friends from the country, even their prepubescent sons can deal with this much: Sexuality is fluid. People change, people are attracted to different things at different times. you don't have the same idenity all your life. They know it say it believe it, and go to mass each week. (Get that one up ya George Pell!)

It's the strange internal dynamics of desire, that trouble me. as much as I try to be all open ended and deleuzian about the whole thing. Try to ponder our naked couplings as a rhizomatic becoming, a machinic assemblage. Tho there's nothing mechanical about our encounters.

there is somehting spcifically exquisite in the naked encounter of two torsos on each other. Of genitals butting up against each other's strangeness. Of silly yogic clamberings over the furniture and floor. Naked with him, my whole body feels like a face, turned towards and embracing the other. Extreme sports leviniasian imperative. and I don't know any other word for the reosunding intimacy of this carress than the L one. Agapo or Eros? what's the other one? dunno. words are often inadequate, still.

Exstacy is in the strange slippages between desire, carnality and knowing. Exstacy is not the tidy performance, the perfect score, the picture perfect porn, the seamless segue from clothed caress to naked gliding flesh. Erica Jong wrote of a Zipless Fuck - and this may have been before I was born - so maybe that's why it seems so passe, because I like wrinkles, fumbles, tears, tearing stretching clothes, buckling flesh and fingers, the odd disruptive moments, reminding of our own separateness. he can't know where he takes me as I beg and beg and plead, writhing around him instatiable and yet so satisfied. I can't know his thoughts as he comes, cries with another woman's name on his lips. am I meant to love her as well? Part of me does, inevitably. There's allways three in our bed, at least three, if not thirty. For me, a history of old lovers, old hatreds rises wihtin my like some strange orchestra, not orchestrated. a crazy chorus. schizo analysis eat your heart out.

And i want him to take me like I usually want to be taken by a woman. Expert hands and winning smile orchestrating me beyond myself. Abel's small frame and baby ways were a shallow disguise for how she was within me. she held me, inside and out, sustained, tutored, supported, tormented me from within. and without. And without, I feel so bleakly empty, sometimes that I wonder how i'll live through this, how i'll walk long and far enough to find another.... soft chested, hard handed wide lipped..... woman.

I like men, and I love sex to much to let genitalia stand in the way of a good time. good sex with a man feels like revindication of all the arseholes in the world. Something beautiful, noble and strong. Profound amitie, delight in the other et cetera, et cetera...... there's always this slipping outside though. My desire as excess, outside, incapable of containment. Ther's always the 5% of me of pain that won't be cured by any man, of mistrust, of terror. and the other wilder infinite slipping stretching beyond imagining. that craving towards the infinite, unbounded possibilities of pleasure, of myself, or her, of sensations that haven't existed before we create them sense them, explore them, push them beyond the limits of anyone's wildest dreams. Pole dancing ain't enough for this. Even if I open myself up to the crvane possibilities of beomcing a total hose beast, let myself get fucked in every hole I can think of by some army of caring ubermenches who'll still respect me in the morning - i'll still feel incomplete. Even drenched and drowned, I won't be sated, and I'll still have to drag myself away, with my longing and go for some nice long walk on a beach somewhere......

Life is so often, incomplete and painful. How do I not tread on his toes, How do I walk upright with dignity, hold my vulnerability, tenderness and desire in my frame. Not push it down or away?

And how do I be physically around Abel in this house, in a few days when she returns?

why am I writing this here, publically, when I haven't told him, or her or not even my diary? well, OK barely my diary, I have scratched out things in 2 languages on paper, in a book.

i don't think Abel reads my blog. tant pis, it's her loss. I'm don't think the dancing master has the time. And that nice cute girl at uni finds it too scary she says (what!?). so who reads it? why write it? I guess I've got friends and aquaintances who scroll down these long missives, wondering if i'm going mad, glad to see I'm still writing, misstyping. trucking on.

If I compose words here for the imaginary public, the imaginary girls like myself, stuck in some stupid zone of pain and fumbling. Stuck in some normative or prescriptive deinfition of sexual identituy politics, stuck in some dodgy gender studies course, suck in some dodgy queer collective/gay or lesbian (TM) bar, dodgier marriage or fucked up family, or small hell home town of rednecks. Maybe these words offer a disturbing comfort.

Maybe i write for my previous selves. the ones that were confused, hurt, silent, stupid. stuck in all the previous scenarios described above. Stuck in my own fear of becoming, feeling desiring things I couldn't didn't still don't understand.

It's hard being a bespectaced adenoidal articulate intelllectual. because its so damn easy to reduce life to some nice intellectual framework or political ideology. Preaching the word with glasses sliding down my nose. thick lenses hiding the doubt, the terror, the desire in my eyes. So here, reduced to disembodied text. Fingers fumbling over a keyboard, crossed legs clenching over a tender twat I write things to comfort myself. such fine fragile words, such honesty, such bad spelling!

So much more resolved than a torrent of tears I could have shed into my bed instead, eh wot?

such a brave mature articulate woman, she holds herself with dignity, walks with her pain, not afraid to look you in they eye, is she?

Such wordy brilliance clears a space away from me - where people don't enter. so it's another form of self negating stupidity, really..... but I keep writing, must keep writing. Feeding one words, feeding out words. Strange things.