The depth of desire

Recently a story associated with second life made headlines: a woman tried to kidnap the man she met in the second life™ world. He had dumped her. I'm going to write first that this is news because of its woman bites dog quality. Every day there are equivalent domestic disturbances where men do this to women. To write about this incident without saying the obvious, that for every time a man is a target of romantic violence, there are 10 women, would be a sham. Stalking, real and virtual, is a daily reality.

But that's not what I am going to write about, because I don't know the details of this incident well enough, and, frankly, I've had enough bleakness in my sl over the last week. We had to clean up some problems at Yedo, and currently are involved in finding out where, not if, some really gross violations of trust occurred. I'm not going to say anything, because the facts of exactly what happened are up in the air, and I don't even want to imply wrong doing on the part of others, when they could have just been caught up in a web. It hurts to have to do some of the things that renting sims on Second Life entails, and it's not a happy part of the business.

Instead, I want to talk about the depth of desire that would drive a person to believe that some how putting duct tape around their ex-lover's dog would be reasonable. There is a madness to the love of logic, and insane and overwhelming passion. People make promises that cannot be kept, they say things that they know aren't true but feel are true, they use others because of their own over-riding needs. Clearly the woman in this case has overwhelming needs that cannot be met, clearly within her, as within all of us, there is a burning need to be seen, and seen in a special light.

And we are all this mad.

I can't know what others experience exactly, since we are all different. Yet I know, because we are also all the same. I know well the tide where the entire center of my midriff seems convulsing with need, as if I am a body dragged along by a wave that carries me. I know the panged emptiness of rejection all too well, as if I am a corpse dashed on the rocks. Those conversations where everything seems to rise or fall, not even on the words, but on the pauses. On the long hanging silences, the waiting. The waiting. The waiting is the worst, when you don't know what the other person means.

Now that the woman here tried to kidnap the man is, sort of, an indication of the truth that it was probably a good idea to break the relationship off. But I can't help but believe, because I know this all too well from my own life, that the man made promises, whispered sweet things, painted a picture in broad strokes, and she saw this picture, and believed in forever more. Forever and ever more. Forever.

I am not a great believer in gendering too much of how we deal with others. Much of what we feel is different in expression, but the same in deep ways. But one area where gender impinges is in attachment and devotion, the quality of it. To be filled up by someone else, to be swollen with him, and carrying him. That's not something nature asks of men. I know there is a mirror of this in men, that this woman, this person, has given so much of herself, risked her life, truly, and given it in a way that will make her the moon that orbits the earth of her child's needs. To gaze on that and truly know in the way that only fertility can prove, of an acceptance that surpasses words and understanding. Well I've seen truly devoted men, I can see how their gaze is.

Almost every woman wants to hold at least one man in that gaze at least once. It is one reason, I think, that arrogant men have an attraction. A proof beyond proof again: that I, I am the first thing to disturb the equilibrium of his self love. I, that I, am the fist part of the world outside of himself that is real, that he acknowledges as piercing the solliphany of ego. No it's not my word, but I heard it once, and have carried it with me. A seed from someone's lips that has grown in my ear with passing years. Solliphany, that state of being wrapped in a belief that all the world is merely one's own reflection.

And that is what makes the woman's words so poignant to me. "I will not be ignored."

How often everyone feels ignored. Quite often that is the help that people need most, to simply be listened to, and paid attention to.

I've been ignoring you, my readers, and as a result, you have been ignoring me. I feel that pang of missing the writing here, even as I have been very productive elsewhere. It is part of the depth of desire, for second life, second life has entered me and filled me, and my poems and scant scribblings are the welling up of creative life it has created in me.