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Auto: Chapter 3

An Autobiographical Piece Based on Personal Experience of Trauma: With Mingled Musings on Sexuality, Faith, and Literature

By Otto NimmPublished 6 years ago 11 min read
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Autoeroticism

There were undercurrents, of course, other factors than the feeling of being trapped and limited. Elements of freedom. And the erotic has always been the key one for me. Since P6, aged 9 or 10 (this is when I first became aware of such an aspect of the self). I remember when I connected the dots about sex, when it became something tangible. No doubt inspired by whispered words and giggles in primary school, I needed to know what this word signified.

One day, in our living room, I remember asking, point blank, “What is sex?” and then bursting into floods of tears. My mother rose to the occasion, and despite looking very alarmed, told me that she and my father would chat to me about it later.

This is one of the things they did well. They got me a book, for a start, from the library. Always a way to my heart. But they talked with me beforehand, and answered all of my questions, without making me feel there was any shame attached. I’m pretty sure we didn’t talk about masturbation, though. That was something I was to find out for myself. Very soon after.

And what a discovery! I remember lying face down on my bedroom floor, filled with an intense excitement about what I was feeling—something utterly new, something big (in several senses!), and rubbing myself. I stopped after a while, a bit shaken by the intensity of the experience, aglow with it, happy just to hug what had happened to myself. And this has been the experience of every new sexual experience since.

To date, this has been almost entirely autoerotic. I have explored my own sexuality in great depth, in the main entirely free from shame or restraint. Messages fed to me through books or older Christians that masturbation was wrong were either outright rejected or taken with a large pinch of salt for me.

I am glad that this self-exploration did not hold the claustrophobic sense of shame and restriction that many young people in religious circles feel. The idea that sex is not morally neutral, or even positive. The idea that it is always bad, suspect. For me it was almost always a freeing, joyful experience, that took me out of myself and deeper into myself, that was linked inextricably with my creativity, my joie de vivre, my best being.

It was unalloyed pleasure, wholly for me and my benefit, something I could allow myself, a gift I could give myself again and again. “Drink waters out of your own cistern, and running waters out of your own well.” Proverbs 5 v 15 is frequently interpreted to mean that marriage is the context for sex. But to my understanding of this verse, my own cistern signifies something entirely different.

A deep well within ME, that is my own, and not anyone else’s. And this is surely much safer than to disperse your fountains abroad, either in promiscuity or in committed marriage, which is still risky from many points of view. Solomon, in his wisdom, is, I believe, commending an understanding of one’s own sexuality, one’s own sense of pleasure, approving an activity which is in itself morally neutral and which can be morally good (or, like all things, bad if abused).

I have always felt a deep affinity with Solomon’s father, David. [Firstly, he was the underdog, the undaunted giant-killer, the original Robin Hood—my favourite Disney film as a child—stealing power from the overgrown, the overweening, the oppressor, and redistributing it (saving a lot of it for himself, as king).] In my imagination, and, I think in the biblical text itself, David is one of the most explicitly and openly sexual persons. And he is a “man after God’s own heart.”

I wanted to be that too; I still do. In his lusting after Bathsheba, his love for Abigail and Michal and others, and his intense friendship/homoerotic bond/ homosexual relationship with Jonathan (let us not twist, deny, or undervalue the fact that this love “surpassed the love of women”), his interactions with others seem informed by his sexuality in its great variety of manifestations.

And this is linked to his great creativity. He was a consummate musician, a peerless poet, one who danced before the Lord with reckless abandon. He was capable of feeling deeply and honestly—read the Psalms. When he spent long days tending the sheep and lying by those still waters, I have no doubt he drank deeply from his cisterns in soothing solitude. David knew deep deep joy, knew how to be close to God, and this is what good, God-given sexuality does for us. It makes us humble and grateful, it provides a comforting rod and staff; it is stable in availability and ubiquity, but unplumbable in essence—a figure for the God who invented it.

I am aware that this is seen as heretical by many, by those who would cry shame on such ideas. Who would say that this deep joy came from trust and delight in the Lord. As if it has to be either/or, as though sex isn’t linked to spirituality, as if God gives us the greatest of gifts only in order to deny it to a big proportion of the world: the young, the elderly, the gay, the poor, the widows and orphans.

This is not to say there are no limits. Like all gifts it can be abused. In harming others, in oppressing others, in damaging or controlling others. In becoming an idol. In becoming divorced from its emotional and spiritual side. In losing its complexity and power in order to become something knowable, predictable or controllable. This is true blasphemy.

[And I know its dark side. In having viewed pornography for my own satisfaction with a furtive flush and guilty spurt. I do not like pornography. In spending too long “researching” sex on the internet, obsessed with new techniques, devices, experiences. There are few textures, few objects, few places, I have not made use of. No part of my body I have not explored. I know the thirst of unslakable lust, the inability to achieve equilibrium, contentment, rest. I know sex as sensation, as a bodily function, as a mutilated experience. As something involving part(s) and not the whole.]

I am bisexual. Or, as I prefer to put it, I feel bisexually. It is not an identity; it is how I experience sexuality. And I believe this was the same for David. I do not think that anyone is born with a static or fixed sexuality. I suspect—though I cannot prove!—that everyone is somewhere on a spectrum of bisexuality, suspended between two poles, and moving between them constantly as they experience individual relationships and experiences, as they explore their sexuality in the (often immovable) context of their culture and milieu, as they sort through their beliefs and values on the topic of sexuality.

And this is not something to fear. Love, in its purity, drives out fear. The extent to which it pure will dictate how little room it leaves for fear. Each of us was once female, in the womb. Only later do we differentiate. Each of us has male and female “attributes” in our makeup and mindset. Each of us has a mixture. There may be a great variety in the extent of this blend; and there is certainly an obsessive desire to categorise and polarise these aspects.

But in this mingling is true creativity. When “feminine” and “masculine” attributes join, and neither predominates, a wonderful creative explosive harmony is born. True creativity, as I see it and experience it, is bisexual. As creativity always resides in a tension, a paradox, a contradiction, an expansive synthesis.

Autodidact

The tension between what was and what I wanted to be, the strain of a disconnect between what I was told and what I believed, what I was instructed and what I intuited, was always located firmly in the mind, the intellect.

Arguments are never enough to persuade a person about anything that matters: at best they can attain partial assent. Experience plays a bigger part in our decision-making and attitudes than many people are willing to allow: Bible-believing Christians (those for whom God’s Word commands a literal unbending adherence) in particular. My faith was often a mindgame. An acceptance of comforting and neat arguments, a pleasing logical symmetry that I could swallow and feel good about. A sugar-coated pill.

But my gut revolted, as always. It was a choice between head and heart: rarely both. Only recently have I been able to let experience do its work. To listen to the still small voice that is within me and without me. That does not thunder or come shrouded in fire and clouds. To trust myself. To learn (about) myself.

To be an autodidact. Self-taught. Taught through being a self. An individual, capable of individual thought. Not self-regulating, but self-aware, self-conscious: even self-obsessed on occasion. And why not? I can be a pretty interesting guy, from time to time.

Autocorrect

Autocorrect—the bane of my technological existence. I love to invent words, to play with words, to portmanteau and decimate and mutilate them. Autocorrect is not a fan. Autocorrect is an autocrat. With its own predetermined notions about what constitutes meaningful communication and what doesn’t. Of course, it can make for amusing miscommunications. Or for repeated frustrated attempts to impose my linguistic will on its stubborn recalcitrance.

And my life has been one of autocorrect: of adjusting spontaneous, creative, and “abnormal” urges and impulses in order to fit with the preconceived ideas of others. Coded systems. Value judgements that are so deeply and unquestioningly held that any derivation from them results in instant correction, instant repercussion.

I learned from an early age to autocorrect my behaviour. To act politely, quietly, obediently, unquestioningly. To suppress my sense of injustice or personal integrity. To allow myself to be enmeshed, undifferentiated. To use a certain kind of language—one that stayed firmly away from the vulgar, explicit, or offensive (despite the fact that these words all have important communicative functions). To use language based on a traditional fundamentalism. To shy away from those who lived differently, who refused to shoulder this yoke. To shun the ability to agree to disagree.

And yet I am grateful—infinitely grateful—for the language I have been given. A language formed and informed by biblical imagery, by beautiful words and concepts, ideals and platonic vastnesses. The rhythms and euphony of the Bible lies deep within me, and I am glad it is so. Verses, phrases, snatches of words rise within me, bidden or unbidden, and enrich my day with understanding and connection. I often wonder where people find their own linguistic forms and worlds who do not have this resource, this infinite and complex resource of linguistic possibility.

What is the value of autocorrect? It all depends on your intention. If you intend to conform to a certain, pre-existing, agreed-upon standard, then autocorrect is a benign secretary, a personal assistant that saves you from social gaffes and linguistic faux pas.

If, however, this is not your style; if you prefer the open-ended, the playful, the uncertain; if you can value the mistake, the slip, the putative error; if you understand that certainty means, automatically, assumption—and that an inflexible clinging to one rigidly defined system means loss of life, of vitality—then autocorrect becomes a curse. Something that can blight. A way of using language that limits, confines, controls, and deadens.

[Let’s take this to the level of childhood behaviour. I autocorrected even the most basic of biological necessities. I shat myself aged 4 because my mother was napping and I understood that her needs were more important, that I should not disturb her or do anything that might waken her. She was angry. Probably angry at herself, but this expressed itself as anger with me. Helpful.

I remember being about 7 and having a bad tummy bug. However, we had just got a new carpet. I knew that this was something I needed to not mess up (on). {After all, we were poor. I was continually made aware of the fact that we were poor and felt the burden of that.} So, I did what comes naturally to any child. I threw up into my cupped hands and carried the vomit—which in my memory fitted exactly into the receptacle I had improvised—into the kitchen where I could pour it into the sink. This to me speaks volumes about my capacity to self-deny, my disturbing ability to autocorrect.]

To bless is to use words to heal and build, to use words in a way that does not coerce or define, but that gifts you with generous linguistic possibility. To bless is also to listen, to be present, to withhold your words and fully respectfully enter the world of another’s language. To bless is to cross a gulf, willingly and graciously. It is to dismantle linguistic barriers, and to seek for true communion. A true communion that cannot be found from the strictures of a closed mind; a vulnerability that can never be achieved from a barricaded stronghold of fear.

I have moved beyond my desire to autocorrect, to censor. I thought this was the way to achieve reciprocity, communication, connection. But it is not; it is dishonest. I can pretend to agree with someone in order to make them happy. I can ignore my instincts and experience in order to fit into a pre-prepared mould. But there is nothing correct about such autocorrect. And freedom lies in expression.

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