Pining
“Well, if you thrash me you won’t turn me away! Thrash me, that’s just how you’ll keep me! By thrashing me you’ll have put your seal on me…”
-Lebedyev, in The Idiot by Dostoevsky
The words that come out at first free, but then end up binding. As someone who has struggled with keeping a personal journal, I have often been subject to the paradox of writing as both a means to personal liberation, a little puncture in the contained din of thought that allows out what usually remains ill-formed and raucous inside, and also as a restraint or bind upon emotional movement. By taking something intangible and nebulous, a thought or a feeling, prone to constant change and reinterpretation, and fixing it as a sentence in words, the freedom gained by expelling it from your head, making it capable of being examined as an object, is tempered by the fact that it is a physical admission of a mental state that can’t be denied outright, only amended. And even if the paper is crumpled or the blog bombed, the feelings it betrays still remain as words portioned out for proximate feelings.
With that explanation, or disclaimer, really, I admit this is only to say that upon re-reading Lebedyev’s words, I felt a twisted understanding. I bare witness to the silent and sustained affection that grows from feeling vulnerable and exposed in front of a person. Of course, Lebedyev is also talking about the bond which grows up in the dominator’s heart towards his victim as some thing capable of being owned and controlled. But I relate to this aspect less than the absolute desire to be “thrashed” if only that would mean that I might be bound the least bit to some person. Because ironically, by being beaten, the victim begins to share a part of their tormentor and actually own a piece of them.
(How horrible. I believe Nietzsche actually talked about this psychology of domination through weakness and meekness when he talked about how the Jews and Christians had ruined mankind with their religious morality.)
