Cut the Conversation, Just Open Your Mouth

"If she had ordered me to throw myself down then, I would have done it! If she had said it only as a joke, said it with contempt, spitting on me-- even then I would have jumped!"

 -F. Dostoyevsky, The Gambler

It's opening time. The scent of dry cedar is mixed with just-below-frozen air. I've been obsessive as of late, and it has been as enjoyable as warm wax upon a wrist.  Fyodor and his dirty knees: How can I help myself? Ever since I came across that tiny book that was part of a mini library of classics, I can't stop reading him.

Am I the only one that reads Dostoyevsky like the big, glorious bottom that he was?

About a year and four months ago, I listened to Dostoyevsky's tale, The Gambler, as an unabridged audio book.  I ended up recording a change purse of excerpts from the narration. They were such deep displays of submissive desire.  It was incredible, really.  Yet not entirely surprising.   

It's Polina, it's all Polina! Maybe there would be no schoolboy pranks if it weren't for her. Who knows? Maybe I'm doing it all out of despair (however stupid it is to reason this way). And I don't understand, I don't understand what's so good about her! Good looking she is, though. Yes, it seems she's good looking. Others lose their minds over her, too. She's tall and trim, only very thin.  Seems to me you could tie her in a knot or bend her double.  The print of her foot is narrow and long.  Tormenting. Precisely tormenting. Her hair has a reddish tint. Her eyes, a real cat's. But how proud and arrogant she can look with them.  

Four months ago, when I'd just entered their service, she had a long and heated conversation with De Griers one evening in the drawing room. And she looked at him in such a way that later, when I went to my room to go to bed, I imagined that she had given him a slap- given it a moment before- then stood in front of him and looked at him.

That evening, I fell in love with her.

(pause)


I mean, come on.

And how gorgeous to describe someone by the quality of their footprint: That a footprint could be, and is, tormenting.

Incredible.

I close my eyes and tilt my head back.

(longer pause)

Sometimes, when people ask what, exactly, a bottom is, it seems so hard to explain.  And yet, this inexplicable leaning that a person may have has the instant ability to quicken a pulse and smudge want so deeply across a face.

Bottoms amaze me all the time. No matter what it looks like from an outside or constructed eye, it will always be the bottom that has the actual power in the relationship.  Tops would be nothing without their bottoms, and bottoms will forever blow my mind with what they want to, and will, do. 

"Well, yes, yes, to be enslaved to you is a pleasure.  There is, there is pleasure in the ultimate degree of humiliation and insignificance!" I went on raving.  "Devil knows,  maybe there is in the knout*, too, when the knout comes down on your back and tears the flesh to pieces..."

(longer pause)

I let my chin drop back to center space, and open my eyes slowly, and take in the room.

Oh, surely this says nothing of me or of Fyodor.

Only that I would like, very much, to be lost in a forest with him.  Simply to see what would transpire.

 

Beauty and pleasure to you on this first night of December,

-k.

***********

*=A knout is a multi-tailed whip that was, as I've read, used in Russia to flog criminals.

All images: Calyx tumblr
Title: Lyric from Fascination Street/The Cure
 All italicized text:  The Gambler.  This is a particular translation of the text. The exact passages, shown here, have quite different translations in other versions.  So strange to think that in the other translations, I would have barely anything to connect to.  I will cover my eyes and pretend that this is the most exact one.