Cut Free: An Essay

[ramses (imported)]

http://www.nerve.com/PersonalEssays/Sla ... ePrint.asp

Interesting essey that I ran across that I thought others here would enjoy. I hope it's ok to post it here...

Cut Free: An Essay by Lauren Slater

I was homesick. I was in Scotland. Three weeks prior I had broken things off with my boyfriend, a big, square-jawed, ponytailed Irishman who only later, in retrospect, I would come to recognize had suspicious eyes. And I was in Scotland. There is, believe it or not, much to be suspicious of in Scotland, a strange, moon-like land of arid tumbleweed, purple plains, porous rock formations covering the earth's crust like loofah sponges while in every lake a Loch Ness sleeps and the sun sets over an island called Skye. I was on this island, called Skye, the loneliest and loveliest place on earth, perfect for heartache and suicide. According to local lore there were at least three suicides every year; miserable women who, driven mad by winter's wetness, jumped off the glittering cliffs.

I had a bike. I had rented the bike for a few pence, and I was riding my heartache out, climbing the steep terrain. I was sweating, or maybe crying, and then I stopped. I wanted to catch my breath. And there, by the side of the road, I saw a swan.

I was immediately struck by its presence. A swan up close is not so much white as ivory, the beak brilliant, a glowing tangerine with two dark dents for nostrils. I followed the swan as it walked. It wove across a field and I went too, and then before me there was the sudden surprise of these cream birds everywhere, their bright webbed feet in grass so green it was almost blue. I saw the swans. I heard their haunted, throaty cries. Loose feathers flitted in the air and then the farmer said — he was suddenly there — "I keep them for fertilization."

He went on to tell me what this meant, the richness of swan dung spread like batter over flower beds, enormous white orchids with crimson pistils growing wildly every spring. He told me about swan feed and swan baths, swan eggs which are deep purple and fit perfectly in the palm. He told me he needed only one stud to sire an entire tribe. All the other males he castrated; he was on his way to do one now.

"You castrate?" I asked.

"The males are aggressive," he said. "Impossible."

I asked to see a swan castration. This is the sort of thing you do, maybe, when you are heartsick, or are a tourist, determined to make every encounter an adventure. He took me to the barn. The day was unrealistically bright, with a crayola sun, and the barn was dank, dark, the soap-white swan thrashing in a contraption that pinned its tubular neck down and hefted its fluffed backside into the air. My eyes adjusted. I saw the farmer fill a needle with a thick wet gel — "it's lidocane," he said. "It numbs the spot," — and then shoot it into the tail. I saw him take a knife, then — why, in my memory, is it such a dull knife, a butter knife? — and carve into the body of the bird, for a swan's testicles reside inside the gut, a part of its secret viscera. I heard ripping skin. I saw a bright red beam of blood well up, and the farmer reaching down, down, into the wound, a snapping sound, and then his hand emerging, two tiny sacs, severed and dripping as the bird started to scream.

Cut. Ten years pass. I am a psychologist now, happily married, I live in the city, and I never see swans. And into my clinic one morning walks an unusually handsome man. He wears black polished shoes, an expensive suit, and his nails are perfect, buffed, small red sunrises below each well-trimmed cuticle. This man has anxiety. He also has a girlfriend, a job and a house. We work together for months. We talk about this and that. He tells me his dreams, which involve tunnels, clouds and leaks. He tells me about a particularly beautiful dream in which he sprouts white wings that lift him so high into the air he goes past blueness and light, past planes and planets and finds himself in a pure space where he is sure he is safe.

This man's diagnosis is 314.29, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, a fancy name for nerves. Headaches, butterflies, worries and warts, that's what this man has. It's a psychiatric disorder as common as the common cold.

We do what is done in a case such as this. We do dreams, we do pills, we do deep breathing, etc. There is no doubt in my mind that this man is more or less normal. Sometimes he talks about his girlfriend. I am not at all attracted to him, even though he has such good looks. And, after twelve weeks on Paxil, this man gets better.

And we are talking one day, my patient and I, ten years after Scotland, The Isle of Skye, the Irish boyfriend, the bird with its neck pinned down and bright blood beaming in the slit, we are talking. It's near the end of his treatment and this man mentions to me that he is castrated.

"You're what?" I say.

"I had an elective castration years ago," he says. "Too many fantasies, and of the wrong kind."

"You're waiting," I say, "until the end of treatment to tell me you had your testicles cut off? Don't you think you should have mentioned this during the assessment?"

"It wasn't a part of my current problem," he says, "and I knew if I told you, that's what you'd want to talk about. You'd see that as central, when it's not. I used to have fantasies involving children, which bothered me a lot, so I took care of it surgically. Okay? And now I'm fine."

I squint at him. I look out my office window. I see a crow in a tree. The crow winks at me.

"How do you have sex?" I say. My voice drops. I am not his therapist anymore. I am an onlooker, driven not by clinical questions but by curiosity. "Your girlfriend . . . " I say.

"We have very good sex," he says. "Not intercourse, but it's a myth that castrated men lack desire."

"You feel . . . " I say.

"In the penis itself," he says, and I blush. Isn't this strange? So many men have talked to me about their penises, their throbbing blue bags, their lotiony spurts, their rapes and passions and never have I been shocked. I am a small woman, sturdy as a pony. I've worked in jails, in prisons, with gangs, in detoxes, I've been in all the dark barns with all the dull knives and the reptilian screams, and it has never shaken me. But a eunuch. A real live eunuch! Right across from me! A changeling! I picture his penis. I imagine its skin, like butter and velvet, its rosy, one-eyed tip never clouded by emissions, and suddenly I want to put it in my mouth. Does that ever happen to you, that you're talking to a stranger, or even worse a friend or a client, and suddenly you're picturing his penis in your mouth? A lot has been written about imagination, but its sheer inconvenience is never mentioned. I shake my head. He says, "I feel desire all along the shaft, and in the tip, and at the very base, too."

"Yes," I say.

"Did it hurt?" I ask.

"What?" he says.

"The operation," I say. "Did it hurt?"

"It took about eight minutes," he says, "and afterwards it felt like a toothache between the thighs. And then you're fine."

He leaves. His penis leaves. I run across the hall and bang on my friend Kaye's office door. "You wouldn't believe this," I say. I tell her the whole story. I tell her the tip, the shaft, the base, and we don't even pretend professionalism; we are smitten by the eunuch, we giggle and blush, we keep saying, "Oh my god, like a toothache between the thighs," and alone in my office again I touch myself there, between the thighs, and it feels very alive.

In my dreams, desire comes to me. It comes as the ringing of a phone, as a liquid crystal screen on which beautiful words rise and melt as though a part of a pond. In my dreams, sometimes, I rocket past myself, to places of pleasure that I cannot reach in conscious life, and I wake up in mid-orgasm, that toppling sensation, that deep drop down.

Orgasm is not dependent upon touch, for when I wake up my hands are pinned beneath my pillow, or fisted by my mouth. In the right frame of mind, I could come, perhaps, looking at a tree, or dreaming of a dolphin and its echoes.

Desire is relentless. No matter what science says, it appears not to need our digits, or our gonads to persist. What does this say about sex? That it is so much more than the hormones which sustain it? That, like life, sex has a soul beyond the body in which it's housed? That, like God, it is invisible, undefinable? Should we pray to sex? Can we be saved by sex? One thing's for sure, you cannot kill sex. Carve out the clitoris, cut off the testicles, bind the feet until they are putrid with pain, and still the urge keeps coming, we keep coming; alive.

How exhausting. Sometimes I just want to sleep. Sometimes I am soothed.

Three days after the operation in the barn, I went back to see the swan. It was evening in Scotland, but the sky was unpricked, a smooth black slate, and all the air smelled like ocean. "There he is," said the farmer, and there the swan was, paddling in a little pond, his wound held fast with black stitching. "Is he in pain?" I asked. "Oh no," the farmer said, and indeed the swan did not look to be. He glimmered dead white in the moonlight, the pond rippling beneath him; he had no more sperm. He had no more sex. And yet he glided on the vast dark wetness with a lot of confidence; he sang the saddest song; he thrust his neck down and beaked deep in, and time after time the swan came up triumphant, salty and dripping, a live fresh fish like a tiny silver maiden in his mouth.

[Hash (imported)]

I wonder if there's any truth to her story? Was this made up and if it was, what influenced her thinking? If it's true, I wonder what she thinks about castrated men, eunuchs now? Is she interested in them? Hope she writes more.

[speedvogel (imported)]

It would be interesting, indeed, to find out what motivated this essay and her feelings regarding eunuchs now.

A friend of mine, who is a shrink, says that most people in his business are motivated to get in to it account issues in their own life. In other words, it is the screwed up helping the screwed up.

Speed

[calmeilles (imported)]

Although it's a shame to throw cold water the swan stuff is inconstant with swan behaviour in several respects. They are monogamous, highly territorial, rarely flock and only in small numbers usually family groups and they are migratory. Ho hum.

[theGelded1 (imported)]

Maybe for Swans it doesn't fit

Geese on the otherhand fit quite well. I could see a city person mistaking the two. White geese have all the traits that you say swans don't. Personally I know how mean geese can be, if they didn't taste so good I'd not raise them

She may have changed the type of bird for literary purposes as Swans would make the tale better then say Geese. Or she mistook one bird for another. I can't be sure, but I bet that was a goose she saw snipped

[twaddler (imported)]

"

Does that ever happen to you, that you're talking to a stranger, or even worse a friend or a client, and suddenly you're picturing his penis in your mouth?

"

lol... all the damn time. hehehe.