A Synesthesic Sex Dream Plus Henry James

Someone I barely know in real life, but then in the dream I wasn’t me so I knew him much better. We were partners, we had each other’s back; we patrolled some kind of outland inhabited by ominous grey shapes that flickered and changed. We didn’t love each other but one night we sat by a campfire and decided to fuck – more as a scientific experiment than as anything else.

I was surprised at how soft his skin was – I mean, he was very muscular and toned, he wasn’t fat, but it was like there was a layer of velvet over his muscles and this was very odd because men don’t usually have soft skin. Unsettling too – it was info I was not sure I wanted, info I wouldn’t have if we hadn’t fucked. He had a kind of cinnamon musk odor and taste too – sure, I let him come in my mouth, why not?

That isn’t what the dream was about.

In the middle of the night, he turned to me and groaned and we found each other, fitted together, and began to move. My orgasm was a long way off – it was like chasing a siren through a hot summer night. Gradually, I forgot about that chase because this movement was like flying – I began to see mountains and the ill-defined crevices of valleys at night, and it was all mixed up with his breathing in my ear, some catch in his throat, some urgency in his thrusting when the mountains got higher –

“Don’t you dare,” I hissed, and flipped over so I was on top. Thing was I didn’t particularly want to position myself so I could come. His eyes were open, he was staring at me – a cynical look like he knew something that I didn’t.

“This doesn’t change anything,” I told him furiously.

“Wrong, baby. Wrong. This changes everything,” he said and began to thrust again, and I could feel the excitement but more particularly, I could see it – like the thin smoke trail of a fireworks waiting to explode. “Moan, baby,” he said. “Moan. Tell me my name.”

So I moaned. But I left him nameless because… Then. I. Woke. Up.

###

So! At the other end of the 19th literary spectrum from Samuel Clemens we have Henry James, black to Clemens’ white, the interior monologue wrapped in winding clauses like an Egyptian mummy. In order to read Henry James, you practically need a white board on which to diagram the sentences.

I can’t read Henry James. I have tried. All that adjunct punctuation exhausts my little magpie brain. I’ve seen all the movies though. Big houses. The Coliseum by moonlight.

Underneath all those coordinating commas and semi-colons, Henry James was writing romance novels.

Do you know what Henry James looked like? Neither do I. Neither did anybody – in his own lifetime or afterwards. For all intents and purposes he was invisible. He never married. In his own lifetime, this was thought to be evidence of a boyhood fixation on the cousin who became the prototype for the heroine of Wings of the Dove (Helena Bonham Carter when-she-was-still-beautiful naked, blue tile to die for), but – wink, wink, elbow shove – we know better, don’t we?

The sense that I can’t help you, see you, talk to you, touch you, hold you close & long, he wrote to the sculptor, Hendrik Christian Andersen, or do anything to make you rest on my, & feel my deep participation – this torments me, dearest boy, makes my ache for you, & for myself; makes me gnash my teeth & groan at the bitterness of things.

Gotta love that “feel my deep participation.”

Tried to read Daisy Miller yesterday. Gave up on page 3.