We Christians have a hard time with pleasure. I say “we” because I still identify myself as a Christian, even though I don’t share the usual Christian suspicions about carnal instincts and such. I just can’t believe that we would be condemned to experience all the pain and suffering and frailty of our poignantly mortal existences without also getting to have the other side, the glory of all that our senses can sense if we allow it to happen. How cruel a God we envision, who created us feeling and then placed such powerful restrictions on what we are allowed to feel.
I thought for years that my fetish was something bad. Even after starting therapy, and getting in contact with fellow fetishists through the Internet, I persisted for years in thinking that the healthy thing to do would be to get rid of my fetish and become a normal person with a normal sexual appetite. I saw my fetish as a blockage cutting me off from having true deep affection for people. In order to form strong lasting connections with people, I would have to dissolve the fetish from my consciousness.
It seemed like it would be a hard thing to accomplish, but I felt equal to the task of eliminating the fetish from my life. It was hard to imagine my life without it, but there were times when the thought of living without it was almost liberating. How amazing, to come up with a new way of relating to people that I had not yet imagined, a clean way without the distortions and strange games that the fetish involves.
But then the flipside of this euphoric imagining of the future without fetish was the guilt and recrimination to still be so weak to need the fetish in the present. I wanted so to peak over the hedge and see the other side, where people were smiling and frolicking, I told myself, when really, I was ready at any moment to dive into the hedge again and get tangled in the roots and the mud, and I would be satisfied living there beyond the reach of the light. I could not resist temptation, and cried for not being strong as I wished.
But then somewhere something happened which changed the equation. I realized that it was a trap to place so much importance on resistance. It was part of the coloring of pleasure, the darkening of desire. Certainly, yes, we must all learn to discern which feelings to trust and which to be wary of. But when nearly all feeling is branded as in need of resisting, I am inclined to mistrust not my feelings, but rather the person who is telling me to mistrust my feelings.
In college, I took courses in musical counterpoint. We were taught how for centuries, certain musical progressions were forbidden, including parallel fifths – two voices moving in tandem at the distance of a fifth. But then, in the 20th century, when many of the rules in music started changing, including many of the old rules just being thrown out the window, there were some composers who quite liberally indulged in parallel fifths. I remember quite clearly one of my music professors demonstrating what these passages filled with parallel fifths sounded like, while he told us that the reason this was forbidden for centuries wasn’t because it was bad; rather, it was because it was the secret gold hidden within music that was so incredible that composers felt indulging in it would be like looking at God’s face was for Old Testament Biblical prophets. And sure enough, this music he played for us sounded amazing.
Like those twentieth-century composers, I want to hold the gold in my hands. I am no monk, or ascetic of any kind. I want to feel. I have gone through the depths, and I claim the heights as my realm as well. I know I am only mortal, but when I have experienced the heights, I have lived through moments when time has ceased to have any meaning, when mortality is merely a punishment imposed on us by those who can never imagine how many layers of immortal existence there are.
I know there are consequences to claiming this rarefied territory for my own. It can be rather a lonely road to walk. When one comes down from the heights, all the menial, mostly meaningless concerns of life are still here waiting for us. Time re-imposes its deadly force upon us. We grow old and fat, and our joints lose their elasticity.
Yes, just as we are catching our breath, getting our bearings, the game will be nearly done. But having been in the wide open breathing in the fresh clear air, feeling life fully, doesn’t ever stop, really. Once you say yes to feeling, sure, that means feeling heartbreak, misfortune, sadness. It also means being connected to all the goodness and strength within life. And more and more, the infinite, nearly inexpressible goodness of existence makes itself known to us.
So I embrace my fetish, even though I still hardly understand it. I know that I will go through my hedge to get to what’s on the other side, and I also know that while I am in my hedge with my fingers tangled in the roots and my feet in the mud, the sunlight from the other side will break in on me a bit, and I will feel its warmth.
Yes, it’s true that if I had never gone through whatever led me to create my fetish, I might have some kind of clear path to experiencing sexuality. But what happened happened, and that is no tragedy. The tragedy would be ignoring or casting aside this great gift created by my psyche. This prism made by the little boy I was that might lead me from the safety of being in my lonely room to the brilliance and riskiness of deigning to touch another.
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