Discovering perversion (Memoirs of an Epicurean)

The things in the past, the things remembered, have a tendency to appear as disjointed fragments of unreliable recollection, or, at beast, as something recalled when its power has faded, distant from our here and now. So when I say, “memoirs of an epicurean,” you might expect to receive an unreconstructed jigsaw puzzle, or the entrails of an impoverished remembrance.

But memory has a trick up her sleeve. There is a rare kind of memory which, when it occurred, seemed of limited significance, like an unimportant turn in the flow of being, or a skip in the groove of the record of life. And yet, with distance, the power of such a memory doesn’t contract; to the contrary, it expands, it takes a life of its own, and it colours subsequent experiences. It provides a framework of how we experience.

It is these to these rare memories that the “memoir of an epicurean” refers to. They are memories that, with time, grew more powerful, eventually leading me to the realization that I am an epicurean. They are not then the memories of someone who was an epicurean. They are the kind of memories that make one an epicurean.

The power of these memories increases because they may appear, to the intellect, as inconsequential when they occur. This happens because reason doesn’t have the gift to rationalize them, since they are accompanied by a strange feeling, an uncanny sensation that pulsates in the moment and which is perhaps the beacon that draws our attention and makes us return to that memory, over and over again, as if it was the return of the repressed.

One such memory I have is of Jo. A violinist, or, let’s not exaggerate, a violin teacher. And my teacher too, for she taught me that the greatest pleasure in sex is not self-gratification, but the joy of giving joy. In other words, Jo taught me how to obey her. To an incurious eye, it may not have looked so, because I was the active or “dominant” partner. But to the perceptive eye, all my actions were in the service of Jo’s pleasure. The merest hint of lack of enjoyment in her face would have thrown me into despair and would have put a stop, immediately and without an expressed command, to any action that I was undertaking: for that’s what authority is, to enforce obedience without commanding. Jo taught me how to be completely under the authority of her satisfaction.

An easily overlooked girl, Jo was. Not ugly but not beautiful. Not stupid but nobody could have demanded of her to score high in an IQ test either. There was something somewhat neurotic in her. No doubt connected, although I don’t know how, to the fact that she was a single mother, which created a lot of practical obstacles to finding girlfriend-boyfriend time. Yes, it was that age, early twenties for me and late twenties for her, where we can legitimately use expressions such as “girlfriend” and “boyfriend.”

Please don’t judge me when I describe her as neither ugly nor beautiful. I am not actually describing her, I am describing my memory of her. The truth is, I can barely recall her face a quarter of a century later. But I recall her pussy very clearly, and in particular I recall the first time that I truly noticed her pussy. Her son asleep, between breastfeeding sessions, and we in the lounge, eager to fill the need whose role the other was there to fulfil. I was obliging. Sitting back on the couch, her legs up in the air, and my tongue licking, sucking and softly, oh so softly biting the ardently opened oyster.

And then, and that’s the moment that I recollect clearly, I inserted my finger in her while my mouth was still toiling away, and started rubbing what I later learned is called the G-Spot. My middle finger discovered the little roughness distinct from the rest of the wet skin. I recall enjoying that sensation on my finger, and concentrating on it, to such an extent that I failed to notice the change in Jo—her moaning dropped a tone, slower and more earthy than before, and her hips had stopped moving to let my finger command her sensation.

My finger did oblige but it also got tired, and releasing the pressure on the rough patch, it withdrew, somewhat abruptly, truth be told, as if it was gasping for a breath of air after a long dive. In that instant of withdrawal, two things happened simultaneously: I heard Jo say “Oh, bugger”—I can recollect the exact sound of her voice saying “Oh, bugger”—and my face was shower with her squirt. Was I surprised? I have no idea. Did I know what was happening? Absolutely not.

It didn’t even occur to me to ask myself, what is this, an orgasm or the release of the bladder? No, there was no thought at all, just the automatic reaction to drink as much as I could and to insert my finger again to extract more. In other words, my reflex reaction was to immediately become the slave to her satisfaction that was of a kind unknown, previously unimagined to me. In that very instant we established a contract, the contract for the rest of our affair. I was the slave to her squirting pleasure, which she would receive passively, letting me dominate her body, but if she gave me the merest hint of an instruction, I was to act on it immediately, feeling shame that I had not pre-empted it. I was obedient by anticipating her desire.

Cicero rejects the epicureans as selfish. He accused Epicurus that his first principle, “the end of life is pleasure,” is nothing but the justification of egotism. How far from the truth! The end of life is pleasure does not refer to the one receiving but to the end of giving pleasure. The end of life is the aim to give pleasure. Jo’s gaping, gashing pussy taught me that. And even though I didn’t put this lesson in rational terms back then, still instinctively I embodied it. And I have ever since, or at least tried.

Since her first quirt, in-between the complexities of life and the breastfeeding, my aim in life became to please Jo. And, if I remember correctly her increasing abandonment to me, the slave to her pleasure, her aim in life had become to be pleased by me. It was this rare instance when a relationship contract miraculously falls into place, the whole decalogue born fully engraved out of the exploding vagina.

I don’t remember much else about these roughly three months that our contractual agreement lasted. We fucked irregularly, some weeks no more than once, since life’s exigencies have the habit of inhibiting desire. But perhaps such external inhibitions also unfetter desire at those moments in-between the necessities of life, those moments determined by desire and which seem through their anticipation to determine the everyday. And at those moments we were seriously at it. We went through the whole repertoire of positions. I wasn’t too young not to know the mechanics of all these positions, and yet now that they aimed at this singular moment of Jo’s squirting every one of them was different. The same old actions, under our contract, were transformed into something completely new.

I always enjoyed the women’s behind as they were riding me “reverse cowgirl,” but I had never admired the convulsing back of a woman as she pulled up to release the valve of her squirt. Who doesn’t enjoy being sucked by a woman fingering herself, but how different is that from a woman who compulsively deepthroats you only at the precious few seconds of the unstoppable cataract. Ah, and the sensation of my dick in her arse as I fingered that rough spot to which I compulsively returned and the way that her rectum gripped me so hard as she was coming that I worried, naively, that it was cutting off the circulation. Perhaps that’s what was uncanny, it was all very familiar and yet so totally new.

Alas, how ephemeral and fickle novelty is. It assails us when we least expect it. But it plays us a trick. When the new is pleasurable, it demands to be recalled, even though, like Eurydice, we can never turn back to look at her, for in that very instant her internal mortification sets in. We discovered that together, Jo and I. After we had gone over our entire kamasutra, we contemplated ourselves and reached for the fig leaf. “Have a good life, good luck with finding another something new.”

Little did we know then that the new we had discovered was not only in the form of physical entanglements, but also and primarily as the injunction of the memory of the contract to serve the pussy, to submit to its authority. The end of living as the giving of pleasure.