Notes: Page One:

Start with a soliloquy on memory, and about how we remember what gives us pain.

Melt to description of girl, while redoing her wardrobe. Recount relationship here, in broad strokes. ("Such a little Stoic! She even bore it uncomplaining when I bound her breasts too tight, just so she could look younger, and more the tomboy.")

From there, melt into a conversation about how they met, and dance around the relationship.

[Abuse segment, see below]

("So now I find myself here...") Conclusion retouching on the memory theme, and explaining that he had to leave her, as he had begun to love her. Moral: Love as loss of power, weakness.

Notes: Page Two:

"You scare me," she whispered. "You scare me because you can destroy me, and you scare me because I almost think I want you to. You scare me so much you make me hate you, and because you make me hate me."

* * *

Love is a fleeting emotion. Never trust a girl's love. Their love -- their love, for women do not love as purely and as strong as men -- is more their love for themselves. Love is more self-deception than any other emotion.

No, love cannot be trusted. You must, if you want a girl, force a deeper emotion, a more fiery imprint. She must hate you. She must want to hate you, and need you despite, or perhaps a propos, her hate.

--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--

FREEDOM: A LOVE TRAGEDY
Nemo est Sanctus

The memory is a terrible thing. It might be me, I suppose, but from talking to people I gather it is not. Happy memories are -- or happy memory is, which is not quite the same thing -- not particularly common. Mostly, we remember what scars us, what makes us cry if we don't keep it bottled up, both in the occurrence and in the recollection.

There are reasons for it, of course. For the Darwinian, these imprints aid survival. Animals who remember pain live longer. Danger vaccine. Psychological trauma is understandably long lived. This doesn't explain guilt, though. Guess that would be where God would come in.

The ironic thing is, though, now I remember things that should have made me happy, if they were flooding my mind a couple of days ago. Now, though, it's too late. Now my memory is dominated by these images.

(An old, gray, bespectacled accountant-type shares my world tonight. Sitting on a doorstep in a loosened tie and looking dejected. In other words, looking like an old, gray, bespectacled accountant-type. I wonder what memories something like that has. What tragedies plague his mind? Or perhaps just his existence -- old, gray and without beauty -- is tragedy enough. Perhaps only those that avidly seek perfection can reach appropriately balanced depths, or at least realize when we have.)

I suppose "a couple of days" isn't too honest. A relationship never ends overnight. But I can afford myself some illusions. I am merciful and beneficent. I'll learn my lessons when the emotions have decomposed. For now, the illusions are useful.

I remember redoing her wardrobe. It was a necessary second step; her wardrobe was simply unacceptable. Unattractive. All this "women's liberation" seems mostly to be from the responsibility of maximizing woman's beauty. (It was a second step, I say. The first was to rechristen her. When we met, she told me her name. I don't even recall it now. It was just too banal. I never used it. I would call her "lover" or "darling" or something. Anything to avoid that name! Even calling her house, I would ask to speak with the parents' daughter. But anyway, not long after she moved in with me I announced she had to have a new name, for her new life. From then on, I said, it would be Nikki. Poor girl never could learn to pronounce Nichtigkeit.)

We immediately disposed of the common clothing. Jeans, t-shirts, clothes of a bourgeois family vacationing in Disneyland! Burned. She ended up borrowing some of my clothes to go shopping. I selected everything, constructed every outfit as carefully as a sonnet. A couple of dollars and some comment about how she was my daughter even got me into the dressing room with her, so we could make sure everything went right against her complexion and with her shape. There was a time when clothing was made properly, for the individual, but the days of culture are now gone.

Such a little Stoic! She even bore it uncomplaining when I bound her breasts too tight, just so she could look younger, and more the tomboy. (So I told her.) It wasn't even necessary. I had selected her because I could tell her body was workable, but I wanted to see if her mind was. I found some excuse to go with smaller and smaller bras until we dispensed with them entirely, and I pulled off the black sash I use as a belt and occasional binding. I learned so much from her! In that girl I learned how beautiful a girl can be when obviously struggling for breath, but without struggling. It is one thing to feel a girl struggle and grow cold; it is quite another to see a strained smile as she continues about her day, weaker and sadder, but happier vicariously. I loved it so much I left it on her all day, as we went to all the other shops.

She may have suffered from an awful wardrobe, but I was fortunate to find her nonetheless. As fortunate for a poet finding the right words or a painter an exquisite canvas. She had deep blue eyes of pure innocence, though I had to break her of the habit of hiding them behind a veil of cynicism. Around me, at least. She would never have been taken into my home if she had not learned how to do that. In so many girls today the eyes have gone out, or seem to have, as the soul has died. It is not beautiful, but it is useful. You do not get so attached to such a one. I wanted her eyes to be deep. I had to put out the ego, and leave the body. I had to make her hollow. To her bones, she was a child: a small, slender child. It would be my mission and my honor to bring this bone to the surface, to join her depths to her full being.

It would be naive to believe one could just go out and find one's ideal mate. At first sight one may find something lovely, but nature never produces the perfect. I am not that naive. A sculptor cannot go out and find a statue. A poet cannot just copy words found in passing and expect something beautiful. True art is the refinement of the base leavings of nature, tested in the fires of the soul, and beauty must thence be created.

Take, for example, one nice girl. She was a teenaged whore. I was curious about how one could use heroin to perfect the slender form. The experiment went well enough, but the results were unsatisfactory. The drug was too much of an investment. If it was the only way, even if it were the best way, the investment would not be too great, but I am not convinced other means cannot be found. She was simply not worth the investment after a while. The experiment concluded by an unfortunate accident, when I measured out too much one day.

What did this canvas have going for her in her natural state? Poor, unrefined, and ignorant. Dirty and unclean, living on the street. Through care and vision, though, by the time she died she at least had a more perfect measure of beauty. I almost regretted losing the corpse, but even in death she would not have been worth that much of an investment.

It is certainly a pity one can no longer visit the tubercular wards, with the poor refined and beautified in a pallor and emaciation poverty never achieves in this age, and hardly ever did.

... I enjoy this hunt, though. And not of seduction. In this age simple debauchery is a given, not a grail. And not so much of love, either. Love can be useful, but I have better things to do than try to get a girl to believe she loves me. No, my hunt was for two things: trust, and emotional dependence.

Trust is an indispensable thing in a relationship. Without it, nothing interesting can be done. Friendships can be struck up. You can have conversations or go to bed with someone you don't know enough to trust. For anything interesting, though, trust comes first.

There is one thing -- if it ever had its own name I never knew it -- that comes and goes in popularity, and it involves cutting off the airflow during sex. The theory is sound. Orgasm's pleasure comes from the pain of anoxia -- loss of air to the brain. Kids just pull bags over each others' heads or other stupidities. I've always been more interested in more extreme versions.

A few times -- and again whenever trying to get a new girl to accept this -- I've just used my hands or a strip of cloth tied around the throat. As this got old I tried more attractive ideas or interesting configurations. A metal or leather collar is amusing, but a bit banal. Reminds one of the sadomasochism fetishists infesting and diluting the world today, wanting to be seen or "break" convention without actually risking anything. A pink sash or white lace can bring to mind a child, cuddling a teddy bear or kneeling at First Communion, but they are not very strong. Black lace is weak and banal. After much thought, I ended up mostly using simple rope. It is not elegant, having only the most brutal of beauties, but it is versatile. The beauty can come in later. Pink ribbon and white lace has a vicious irony hiding purple-blue bruises at the dinner table with her parents or friends. Black is appropriate necking in a graveyard or funeral parlor, or even everyday if she has a suitably striking pallor. Rope can be tied to any tightness. It can be set to loosen at a nervous girl's tug, or to tighten over time. It can be rigged to tighten as she struggles against her bound hands.

Most of all, it does not have to give way if one does not want it to. It can be anchored with a piece of metal, or even simply knotted firmly it can hold a girl with her hands similarly bound. One can watch her claw the rope, eyes bulging; walk out of her line of sight, casually commenting that you are leaving; caress a limp body in your arms, and feel her shudder awake with the pains of birth. The trick is in crushing the arteries to the brain, not the windpipe.

Before the pleasure became unbearably familiar, I selected a particularly pretty girl, and didn't even bother to possess her. I just held and caressed her, stroking her hair and her body as she stared in fright and kicked her bare, lithe legs. (I had, of course, bound the hands.) After a brief while she started straining and trying to scream, silently distorting her features. I cooed in her ear and tried to tell her it was pointless and she was just ruining the look, but she wouldn't listen to reason. As she weakened, her eyelids sagging, her lips turning a striking, wintry blue, she relaxed and regained her beauty, and I could kiss her again.

After she passed out I went ahead and debauched her. I fancied I could almost feel her muscles tightening in the orgasm of death, but rationally I know it was too soon. No matter. Cool, limp and yielding, it had the compounded pleasure of not being plentifully available, even in our culture of mass production. This was the debauchery of an artist, an adventurer.

Fortunately, one can experiment on the poor with a measure of safety. No one cares about the poor. Nonetheless, it would not have been possible without trust.

She refused to believe she could be happy without my love. My concern, of course, was always that she be beautiful. Happiness is a purely subjective affair, and has no true substance. Pain has a positive existence; pleasure is simply pain's absence. There came a time, though, when she asked me, "Do you love me?"

She had left her society's and family's beliefs and concepts of morality. She questioned their politics and values, and had deserted them for my bed and my life. And yet she bought their line that you have to live for others.

She believed she was such a liberated girl that such a question almost made me laugh out loud. I restrained myself, though. I was not done with her, and this would not be a useful response.

"You are the object of my love, and as time goes on you become more the object I love. The icon. You are not the person I love -- I love no person -- and ought not try to be."

She cried, I guess. I think the pillow was damp when I returned, after being alone with my thoughts.

She didn't leave it at that, though. Another time -- skin milk white reflecting the moonlight, I watched her from across the room, she looked on, languid -- she told me she loved me. The words were simple. "I love you." The tone was anything but. Choking, shy, almost inaudible, but with a firm resolution uncommon for the girl. Displeasing.

I walked across the room and slapped her face. It was the only time I lost control. A drop of blood welled up over her lips -- a beautiful blood red streak across her alabaster skin -- and tears welled up in her eyes. They didn't flow, though. They evaporated in the fire of her eyes.

She never made the mistake of saying that again, and I never made the mistake of striking her any harder than necessary. I know people who are abusive for the "fun" of it, so insecure in themselves that they have no confidence in their control over themselves or over others. Philistines. Every blow of mine was with an artist's deliberation.

God created nothing so beautiful as what man can -- the tears on a beautiful girl's face -- and that night I realized too how truly beautiful the tears of blood.

All of a sudden, I am assailed by memories!

The lover, pale against the sheets, silently breathing in a deep sleep. My Nichtigkeit, skin pale and stretched tight against her slight ribs. My lover, gazing up at me with eyes clear enough I could almost literally see through her, a mouth constantly slightly open, accessible, "like a rose", waiting for me to taste, to close -- complete -- in a receptive femininity. My love, head upon my lap like a little daughter as I stroked her hair with one hand and her breasts with the other, her with her eyes peacefully, lightly closed; I, gazing in the air, telling her stories as she drifts to sleep.

"Man," I am telling her, "went down to nature, and she loved him. Embracing him, she caused him to love her, and made him forget his true origins. Man was enamored of nature, and she kept him to herself. But man is inherently female, and this relationship was unnatural. By accepting it, man accepted death. Only by seeing that nature is death, and leaving it behind, can man return to his true lover, accept his true nature, and ascend to God."

My love! Did I call her that? It was a slip, of the tongue and more. For I let myself fall in love. The constant companionship, the joy of seeing my work manifest on the canvas of her body -- my mind was distracted by her beauty, and didn't notice my heart falling into her tiny hands.

And so I find myself here. All the memories fade in the brilliant light of my love, a white, painful light. I slipped; in my weakness I became weak, and by loving I forced myself to lose.

How can I continue to work with her when I no longer love the object, but the person? If I see her, I cannot keep my eye on the ideal. I ought to destroy her, I know, to avoid my weakness leading me back into the destroying clutches of her woman's -- girl-child's -- heart. But I know why I want to destroy her. I cannot have her -- I cannot trust myself -- so I do not want anyone else to so much as set eyes on anything more than another exquisite corpse. I turn my back, and find myself in another slavery! I can prove my freedom only in voluntary renunciation.

You never truly possess something until you can destroy it. I tell you, that is not nearly so monstrous as it sounds. If you can destroy something, you will not. It is yours, and why would you destroy something of yours? It is only if one stands to lose her that one may justifiably destroy her.

One never truly posses something, though, if she in any way posses you. If you care about something, even to the extent that you care enough to want to possess it, you do not possess it, but it possess you. Freedom is proven in destruction; possession is proven in the voluntary loss.

Tomorrow morning, I will be gone with the storm. After time, she will come to realize I am not coming back. If there is still part of the human within that beautiful living statue, she will find the money I left her, maybe even a friend who still remembers her, and a new life.

I will try to find a new object. And a new, harder heart.

--SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB-SoB--