The Manifesto Soiree

by Jean Roberta

When slavery was abolished on the Emerald Planet, The Fourteen Families of the Millennial District vowed to protect their underlings to the death.

Lord Greenacre invited the others to a meeting where they drafted the Noblesse Oblige manifesto. All the heads of households believed that future generations would revere this document.

F20, the maid who served drinks to the assembly, seemed startled when her master asked for her opinion of the new law.

"It's not for me to say, Sir," she answered. The marks of the shackles hadn't faded from her wrists and ankles, and Lord G. tactfully waited until she was out of the room to explain that he had had to restrain her for her own good. A chuckle of recognition passed around the room. All those present had had to deal with a similar situation in their own households.

When M15, the lord's male secretary-in-training (and one of his sons), had finished typing the first draft of the manifesto into a portable file, he was asked to read it aloud. His young voice shaking only slightly, he began:

"Whereas we, the rightful inhabitants of this planet, recognize the need of all subject peoples for protection and guidance, we refuse to accept the arbitrary destruction of the relationships we have held sacred for five hundred years."

M15 paused for breath. A faint hum of approval could be heard over the sound of his breathing.

The slave went on: "The mutual obligations of master and servant are a time-honoured cornerstone of the culture of our planet, and must be upheld if there is to be universal peace."

Like shadows, a dozen slaves entered the room and stood against the wall, hands behind their backs.

"May I speak, Sir?" asked M15.

"After you have finished the task at hand, boy," answered his master. "Continue reading."

M15 continued: "We, the responsible landowners of the district, are under no obligation to accept irrational laws that are passed without our participation or consent."

"Amen!"

"Yes!"

"Well said!"

M15 cleared his throat. His voice tended to break suddenly from a boyish tenor to a manly baritone. "Our servants have no desire to be cast forth to die of starvation without our support."

One by one, more slaves entered the room. All the doors and gates of the Greenacre estate had been left unlocked. The lord was a confident man.

"We refuse to surrender to the threat of force,"read M15. His face remained expressionless.

"Somewhat ironic, wouldn't you say?" asked Lady Jadestalk.

Several of the older men frowned, while others rolled their eyes. "Not at all, my Lady," explained Lord Olivegarden.

When M15 had finished reading, the assembled lords and ladies agreed that only a fool could object to the manifesto, which contained self-evident truths. That some slaves recklessly favoured the new law and thought of themselves as citizens was clear evidence that they lacked the capacity for good judgment which would enable them to survive independently.

Civilization, it seemed, was to be preserved. Lord G saw no need to allow M15 to spoil the general mood of mutual admiration, and dismissed him from the room after he had finished reading.

Neither the lord nor his guests could see that his barn was already on fire.

As luck or fate would have it, I was visiting my "dangerously" liberal friends outside the district, and therefore I was spared.

It took several weeks for F20, renamed Sylvia Free, to find me and give me a copy of the portable file. "Don't tell anyone you're a Greenacre," she advised me. "And don't try to take back the land your ancestors stole."

I changed my name and found a job in the city. I never take my freedom for granted.

I Am Legion

You who read this are accustomed to thinking of yourself a certain way. If you look at your hand or anywhere on your body you think “This is me, this is my body.” If you ask a physicist, she will tell you the hand you’re looking at is mostly made of empty space, atoms with vast distances between them, composing galaxies of molecular chains. If you ask a microbiologist, she’ll tell you, in reality you’re a vast colonial organism, composed by volume of roughly 90% individual bacteria, and only 10% tissue cells. Your body contains an organic world of plants and animals existing in symbiotic and predatory relationships, comparable to a walking rainforest that reads blogs, fucks, cooks meals and raises children and earns a living somehow. And riding on top of it is three pounds of gray delicate protein running complicated storms of chemicals and electricity from which love, hate and desire emerge. As the kaballists propose, you exist on many diverse levels of definition, all at the same time, each unaware of the other.

So what is freedom?

Something happened to me recently, that shook up my ideas.

What happened to me, while sitting in the dark, was this.

A few days ago I went into the chapel across the street from the building where I work. The doors are open or locked almost at random, from time to time you just have to push them and try your luck. The chapel is normally almost abandoned between services except for the occasional Chaplain. This afternoon I was in luck and pushed open the door and stepped into the institutionally pristine, cool dark, found my usual place in the corner in the very back and sat and settled myself in.

As I grow older I become more aware of my interior solitude. I’ve often felt like a prisoner within myself but lately have grown to accept it more. I like people, I like to be around them, but I realize it will always be difficult for me to reach out to them. I always think of this as part of my karma. Its how I’ve turned out up until now. But because of what is about to happen to me in the cool dark room I’m beginning to change my mind about a lot of things. Who is running this show? How do you define that person?

I closed my eyes, the way I had been instructed when I was 18 years old in a small room with incense and flowers in downtown Atlanta and let the internal silence settle in until thoughts began to come. Then I began my mantra as I’ve often done in the many years since. But this time I had a clearer intention of what I wanted to do. My thoughts became reduced and reduced and finally reduced to a single point. And then – at long last – beyond. A perfect silence. A perfectly selfless stillness in which I seemed to disappear. I inhabited that untouchable virgin stillness without ambition, and for a short time I was completely happy.

Sometimes when the subject comes up I say to someone that I have lost faith in God. But the truth is way more complicated than that. I believe in God, but I have lost my faith in a specific definition of god and returned to a different, and far more ancient definition of god.

In my shallow studies of Kaballah and western mysticism, I’ve gradually acquired a better understanding of the eastern mysticism that had caught my imagination as a youth. I’ve lost faith in the theistic God, but in closing that door I found a freedom to restart and re-experiment. What I’ve found and come to believe is that God, reality and the Universe don’t exist at all in the way they appear to us. Everything we think we know about the world and ultimately about ourselves is flawed, and some of it is totally wrong. God, reality and finally even ourselves exist in several interlocking layers of different reality simultaneously. So the person writing this on the fourth of July in his favorite Starbucks, sitting at his customary table, with scrawled notebooks and pens and a couple of books on Carl Jung piled around – who is this person? As the demon said to Jesus “I am legion.” As Walt Whitman wrote “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

There is another way in which your existence exists on multiple levels, like Russian dolls, encased one inside the other. I’ve been reading a book called “Incognito: the Secret Lives of the Brain”.

You can hear an interview about that book here:

http://www.npr.org/2011/05/31/136495499/incognito-whats-hiding-in-the-unconscious-mind

The book proposes what Buddhists have proposed for thousands of years, which is that the part of you that you think of as yourself doesn’t actually exist. The Buddhists say the ego and its ravenous desires are an illusion. Scientists express it more prosaically, that the conscious part of the mind, the part of you reading this, is a small artificial construct of a much larger part of the mind, less like a person than like a ventriloquists dummy on the lap of a performer you can’t see but only get occasional glimpses of, whose motives are entirely locked off from you even though they pull your strings. If this is true, and it does seem to me to be, the conscious mind is moved by impulses and currents far out of reach below the surface. To me this raises questions of free will, and how much are we really free? It also means to me that the vast majority of what passes for religion in the part of America where I live is totally bullshit. That would also include what I devoted a good twenty years of my life to.

So suppose we go play with this sort of deterministic way of looking at ourselves. What are the moral consequences in the real world?

In the questionable corner of the literary world we erotica writers inhabit (if not lurk), it seems to confirm the moral position many of us including me, take towards same sex orientation. It’s not a matter of moral choice, but of genetic disposition. An electro-chemical switch that points this way instead of that way. Who would ever choose voluntarily to be gay if such a choice were even possible? I never chose to be heterosexual. I just grew up knowing even as a young boy that girls were fascinating and there was something exciting and primitive far beyond kissing I wanted to do with them that a hidden part of me knew exactly how to do, and the conscious part of me didn’t. But it was never a practical choice. A practical choice might have been to fall in love with myself, since it wouldn’t cost me money or expose me to rejection. But how dull to be in love only with yourself. When we fall in love with other people, we make an effort to cross the mystery that exists between people, and it’s the exploration of this mystery that the best erotica tries to probe. When we fall in love with someone, we fall at least partly in love with our illusions about them, the same as we might fall in love with our illusions about God. But those illusions – what power they have. They give us wings. They wound us beyond all healing. They make us larger, they stretch the soul. The attachments to our lovers, to our children, to our art, those are the threads and fabric of soul. In the last moments of our lives they might be all we have to show that we can be proud of.

What I saw in the dark convinces me that there is more than meets the eye. Even if what I think of as myself is only a mask that the bigger part of me wears, I feel a strong sense that under girding that part is a person that never dies. Even as a wave washes the shore and returns to the ocean, still it returns. There is eternity and we are eternity’s children. Even if we remain constantly strangers to ourselves.

My Room

The type of freedom I think most often of is the freedom to write. And I think I do it because when I was in college, being fed a diet of Charlotte Bronte and Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen, I realised just how precious that freedom is. How amazing.

Not only am I free, as a woman, to write, but I'm also free to write about sex.

That fact seems remarkable to me, sometimes. I mean, 150 years ago, women barely wrote. And if they did write anything, most people got sniffy about it. And if they didn't get sniffy about it, it's only because they thought the woman in question was actually some bloke called Currer Bell.

And even then they probably had some snide remarks to make about how often the book in question talked about curtains and dresses, and how that undoubtedly meant that Mr Bell had received a lot of input from his wife while writing the book.

Which is kind of familiar still, even today - oh of course women write about that romance nonsense, and about hair and shoes and things - but hell. It's better than the era Woolf was writing in, where women weren't even allowed rooms.

Though sometimes I think a bit of that remains, too. Not a lot. Just a little. I mean, I hear so many of my author friends talking about it - that lack of space they've been permitted, to pursue writing. There's always the kids they've got to look after, or the dinner they've got to cook, or the house they've got to clean, or the errands they've got to run.

As though their dreams, wants, hobbies, desires are so much less than the man of the house and his needs. I mean, I'm fairly certain that in most of these households the husband gets to come home and watch TV for five hours, or go out on weekends to play golf. And I doubt he feels guilty about any of this stuff. Why should he? Everybody Loves Raymond says that's perfectly acceptable and normal behaviour.

But I don't think a lot of women see "right, I'm going to go work on my novel for five hours" as perfectly acceptable and normal behaviour. Even the most liberated, the most free, the most modern of all of us seems to think that going to write is something they've been "allowed" to do.

And it doesn't appear to matter, either, if the women in question is earning a buttload of money from this career. It's not a career. It's a vice we're indulging. A hobby. Less than a hobby, in fact, because golf's a hobby and most men still seem to be given more time to pursue it than women are given time to write.

Even I feel a twinge, I have to say. I'm extremely fortunate - I get a lot of time to write, and my husband never questions it - but I still sometimes think: I should be doing more than this. I should be doing something less "frivolous".

Which I suppose stems not only from the fact that I'm a woman, but also from the idea of writing in general. It's just your thoughts on a page, after all. Who cares about that? How self-indulgent, etc etc.

But whenever I do feel that way I try to remember Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. Everything stood in their way. Society's expectations and prejudices. Their own feelings on the matter. Publishers who would never want them just because they were female. Their families.

And yet they did it anyway. They had a kind of freedom: the freedom to just fookin' do it anyway. And they paved the way for you and me, so I'm not going to squander that with excuses.

This is my room, and I'm going to write in it.

The Hero's Path

by Kathleen Bradean

Piquant

The ring of condensation under George’s glass spread. The water magnified the thin striations of the bar’s wood grain, each shift of color a mark of time. Light, dark, he counted each change until he got lost in the muddled swirls of a knot and gave up.

George wasn’t thirsty, but he was too conscious of how still he’d been. The next time the bartender walked past him, he lifted his scotch with a studiously steady hand. His lips burned as he sipped. He stared ahead, not meeting his gaze in the mirror behind the bar, but focusing instead on the rows of sparkling bottles displayed under spots of light. Green, clear, black; tall, squat, sloped; ancient names, trendy flavors; there were hundreds of choices, and countless combinations. He had only vague ideas of the possibilities. Even now, he wasn’t sure he liked the flavor of scotch, but he never ordered anything else.

He wasn’t even sure why he’d come back to Paris. The city was forever ruined for him. But as soon as his divorce was final, he’d bought a ticket. He enjoyed nothing and wandered restlessly through the streets for several days in search of something that eluded him. It had been a mistake to come. Tomorrow, he’d head home even though he had nothing to return to.

The bartender ambled over. He tossed a small napkin on the bar, drew a fresh highball glass from under the counter, and filled it with ice. He turned to the bottles.

“The Macallan twenty-five,” a woman said.

George swore he knew that voice, but when he turned toward it, he saw only swirls of cigarette smoke hanging in the dimly lit bar. The other patrons sat in booths far away. He was the only person on the short line of bar stools. He shivered and clutched his glass.

The bartender reached for the high back shelf where a few bottles sat on display above the others. He poured with a heavy hand then pushed the highball to George.

“Pardonnez-moi mais il doit y avoir une erreur,” George said. He spoke at the same careful pace as he’d lifted his glass. Parisians often switched to English rather than endure his version of French, but he always let them make the choice.

The bartender nodded to George’s side.

George caught her scent as he turned. It wasn’t strong, but he felt as if he were drowning in the smell of sex and copper. He flinched, even though he couldn’t stop himself from looking at the woman who had appeared magically on the barstool beside him.

Her elbow rested on the bar. She leaned forward, bringing her blood red lips to her cigarette, and her profile into his vision. As she exhaled, a mocking smile tugged at her mouth.

For a moment, he wondered if she had a daughter who was her exact twin, because she hadn’t changed. He peered closer to search for lines at the corners of her dark eyes or an errant grey in her black bobbed hair. Her smooth neck and unlined hands were taut as a thirty-year old woman’s, which was what she had been when he met her years before.

Finally, she looked at him. “George.” The slight shake of her head and tone of her voice admonished him.

He glanced around the bar. No one seemed interested in them, but he hunched forward as he whispered in English, “What are you doing here?”

“You summoned me.”

~~

George is about to relive the past. They won't be the same events, but it will pack the same emotional wallop. He's a man of habits. He knows the outcome will never change, but he keep doing the same thing. Alfred Einstein, I believe, called that the definition of insanity.

The past, even the mistakes, is a comfortable place. We know what will happen. It gets harder to let go and do something different as we get older because that wide vista of possibilities narrows over the years until everything seems inevitable. That's comfortable too.

Freedom is scary. It's full of uncertainty. What if I tried really hard and risked everything and had nothing to show for it?

Characters in books aren't real people. They're like real people. (I wish I could find the writer to attribute this quote to, but my Googlefu is weak on this one.) But like a character, one day I decided to be the hero of my own life. That's a fancy way of saying that I got fed up with my insanity - clinging to the same life and expecting a different outcome. I got impatient. I didn't want to be like George, drinking whiskey I don't like and reliving a past that wasn't worth it the first time around. Finally, I was more afraid of the certainty than I was of the uncertainty. What I found out was that most of the barriers in my life were ones I'd built for myself. When I stopped believing in them, they crumbled. Freedom, so the song goes, is just another word for nothing more to lose; I think that includes regrets.

Epiphany

By Lisabet Sarai

I still remember what I wore that night. It must have been summer, between my junior and senior years in high school. My sleeveless, dropped waist dress was light cotton, a rusty red with white polka dots. A line of buttons matching the dots ran from the neckline to the hem.

My boyfriend's parents were out of town. Looking back, I wonder that my mother didn't object to my being in his house, alone with him and his friendly Doberman, but perhaps she didn't know. I wasn't the rebellious type. I would not have deliberately lied. Maybe I didn't realize P. and I would end up there in his bedroom, after going out for a bite to eat in his VW Beetle. I can't recall.

We were sprawled on his bed making out (do kids today still use that term?), hot, wet, desperate kisses with lots of tongue. His hands wandered over my back and then, tentatively, cupped my breasts through my dress. "Take it off," he murmured, amazed, I'm sure, at his own daring.

"I can't..." I began. I knew that society required me to keep my clothes on when I was with a boy. I was well aware that girls who gave in to boys' requests would inevitably acquire a "bad reputation". Back then, even letting a guy get to second base (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_metaphors_for_sex ) would certainly result in whispered gossip and possibly in public taunts. Strictly speaking I wasn't a virgin, but my single sexual interlude hadn't taught me much. I was as awkward and confused as any sixteen year old.

P. kissed me harder, but he didn't press the issue. I was the one who wanted more. I wanted to remove my dress, to feel his hands on my skin. Resentment filled me. It seemed so unfair that society should forbid what felt so wonderful.

Then it hit me, quite literally like a bolt of lightning. I gasped. P. broke our embrace, afraid he'd somehow hurt me.

I didn't have to say no, just because other people insisted I should. I was free to say yes. I was dying to be closer to the guy I loved. Was that wrong? I understood that I'd have to accept any consequences, but seriously, was there a good reason why I shouldn't do as he asked?

"Wait," I told him. I stood up and started to unfasten my dress, one button at a time.

I wasn't deliberately trying to be seductive, but I felt the heat of P.'s stare as, button by button, I exposed my plain white bra and panties. I felt light-headed, jubilant, powerful. And free.

I don't think I knew the word "lust" back then. Certainly I didn't have enough experience to recognize it when I felt it. I saw my own excitement mirrored in P.'s face, along with a touching gratitude. He seemed quite astonished that I was trusting him.

I lay back down on his bed, clad in my underwear, more fevered and needy than ever. We didn't push things much further that night. It was almost as though the step I'd taken was enough for us, for a while at least.

Looking back now, I see that high school epiphany as a first step toward defining my own personal philosophy of sex. Why should I refuse pleasure just because someone else thinks it's not proper? Since that evening, I've said yes to many sexual adventures, and enjoyed almost all of them.

Of course, that was a golden time, after the invention of the Pill and before the discovery of AIDS. Sexual freedom had few if any restrictions. The Morality Police didn't yet have much influence. The boundaries between love and lust were deliciously fluid.

I learned something fundamental, back there in high school, not just about sex but about life in general. You can't allow others to make your decisions for you. Don't listen when someone tells you that you're not allowed to pursue your dream. Weigh the consequences and risks for yourself, but then don't be afraid to say yes, if that's what your heart tells you.

We all have more freedom than we realize. We just need to claim it, to make it our own.

Texture

By D.L. King

The first assignment in my college photo I course was Texture. The idea was to use texture to make something two-dimensional appear three-dimensional. I think it was the most memorable assignment of my four years worth of photography classes--and there were a lot of them; I majored in the subject.

I went on to teach photography at a high school for the arts and used that assignment with my students because I thought then, and still think, it was probably the most important lesson to learn in art. Make something your audience can feel—something they want to touch, caress, lick (maybe not a photograph, I’m just sayin’).

Texture in writing is as important. When I think of the equivalent to that photo assignment in writing terms, I think of writing to the senses. It’s easy to say, “Use all five senses in your story” but much more difficult to achieve. Like the illusion of three-dimensionality in 2D art, you want your reader to smell the sweat and taste the salt on the skin of the protagonist. You want them to see the tear as it gathers in the corner of his eye before spilling over and leaving its snail trail down the side of his face. The reader wants to hear his ragged breaths, not to mention feel those same breaths on their own skin.

When telling a story, the sense of sight is easy, but it often leads to the dreaded “telling” rather than “showing,” so be careful. And when you’re writing sex, using the sense of smell is easy, too. But let’s stop to think about more than just the smell of sex. That’s a given. What about other scents? Perfume, cologne, sweat, food, the earthy smell just after a quick rain, the smell of salt air near the ocean, a garbage strike in summer, a bar when it’s first opened for the day, before any customers arrive, the subway in August, the subway in January. You name it, it has a scent all its own.

Touch is fun. That’s where the need to lick might come in. The protagonist loves the feel of the whip as it caresses his back and his domme loves the feel of the goosebumps as they form on his arms when she whispers all the delicious things she’s planning in his ear before taking a step back again to let the whip kiss his buttocks. Not only might your reader imagine licking that very responsive skin, but your antagonist might want to lick it too, and then taste the salt of her boy’s sweat.

When I first started to write, I could do little more than incorporate the senses of sight and touch. The more I wrote (and was reminded in critique) the more texture began to seep into my stories. While most of us are born with all five senses, learning to use them to our best advantage, in life as well as in art, is not all that easy. My preference is to not let the good parts become overwhelmed with too many words. And if you do it right, all the parts are good, not just the sex.

D.L. King is the author of The Melinoe Project and the Art of Melinoe as well as many short stories. She edited the erotic anthologies Carnal Machines, Where the Girls Are, The Sweetest Kiss and Spank!

You can read D.L. King's blog here

Is Your Shampoo Bottle Upside Down?

By Kristina Wright

(Note: A shorter version of this column appeared on my blog several years ago. I had been thinking about it in relation to texture and writing and decided to expand on my original thoughts.)

Texture. We take our senses for granted on a day-to-day basis—until we lose one of them. And then it’s with a heightened awareness and feeling of loss that we notice everything we’re not experiencing. Burn your tongue on a hot cup of coffee or sizzling slice of pizza and for days there’s nothing there when you eat, no ability to savor the flavor of things you love. Get your eyes dilated—or lose a contact or break a pair of glasses—and be forced to navigate the fuzzy world around you and you discover it’s not only scary, it’s dangerous. Age brings a loss of hearing for some, sometimes gradual enough that it’s not missed too much. But the nuances are gone—that infuriating drip-drip of the leaky water faucet is gone, but so too is the ability to hear a whispered apology or the cry of a baby down the hall.

In writing, texture is that element you may over look initially because it is integrated so seamlessly into the story. You’ll notice the realistic characters, the thought-provoking plot, the dialogue that crackles with emotion, but you may not notice the texture—unless you go looking for it.

The movie Scent of a Woman is remembered for Al Pacino’s portrayl of blind veteran Frank Slade and several visually amazing scenes, including Slade’s sensuous tango with Debbie (played by actress Gabrielle Anwar), his death-defying high speed test drive of a Ferrari on the streets of New York and his riveting speech in front of Charlie’s (played by Chris O’Donnell) boarding school classmates. They’re all brilliantly acted scenes and can be found on YouTube. But none of those scenes are what I was looking for to illustrate my point about texture. I hunted in vain for the one scene that best demonstrated texture for me and how invisible it can be when it’s done right. Of course. That’s how it is with texture—it doesn’t beat you over the head with pretty women or fast cars or fiery speeches—it just is.

In the film, Al Pacino’s character lives with his niece, her husband and their two young children. In one scene, the niece is in the upstairs bathroom, getting the kids ready for bed. When the camera pans back, they look like your average middle class family in the midst of the typical pre-bedtime ritual: hyperactive kids, tired mommy, messy, well lived-in house. The scene is key to the plot only in that it demonstrates that Frank is an outsider in this family, one more burden for his weary niece to bear. It is a part of the framework that leads to his escape and ultimate transformation. But anyone watching the film would likely forget about this small five-minute scene in all the visually exciting scenes that follow. And yet, there is one thing about this onscreen moment that makes it wholly, completely believable. Every time I see it, it makes me think about how I can add texture to my own writing.

In the scene, there is a bottle of shampoo on the ledge of the bathtub. The shampoo bottle is upside down.

Did you just get a shiver up your spine? No? Well then, let me explain.

The set designers did a credible job creating a bathroom that looks like it’s used by a family with small children. Someone—maybe the writer of the screenplay, maybe a prop girl, maybe one of the actors, maybe the director—whomever it was, went one step further in realizing that a middle class family with small children would not have a lot of extra money. The mother would be busy and tired and preoccupied with the kids and her blind uncle and wouldn’t have a spare bottle of shampoo stashed away. She would save and scrape and make everything last as long as possible. Which would mean propping the shampoo bottle upside down on the bathtub ledge so that not even half an ounce of it is wasted. It’s a small detail, but it adds texture to the film and makes the scene—and Frank’s life—more believable.

When something feels off in my writing, I go looking for the metaphorical upside down shampoo bottle. Even if I’m writing pure fantasy, I try to make sure that it’s there, somewhere in the little details, giving my plot the texture it needs to make the reader—and me—believe in what I’m writing. A shampoo bottle is nothing but a prop. But an upside down shampoo bottle leaning in the corner of the bathtub, with the label peeling and shampoo leaking from the not-quite-tight cap? That’s texture. And just like any one of the five senses, it’s not absolutely necessary to have it, but it makes the story so much sweeter.