Response to that challnege-whatsit-sthingy
Title: Words Unspoken
Author: tawg
Word count: 1,720
Characters: NA/DB
Summary: Danny knows a lot more than he ever lets on, but some things are harder to decipher than others.
Notes: Response to iamstillthemoon’s challenge. I stole from consulted so many texts in writing this that I feel like it should have a bibliography attached. You should all probably take that as a warning.
The rises and falls of Nicholas’ flesh, the bumps and taints of scars and bruising give him away as a quaint and curious volume, a landscape in Braille of the sacred and profane. Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore -
Nicholas cannot be marked as heterosexual, in that heterosexism describes social or personal structures which are defined and regulated by exclusive and compulsory heterosexuality. To be heterosexual you must first be sexual, and Nicholas had all the passion and libido of a house brick. Though, to assume that the boundaries of sexuality were so cleanly defined was naive, bordering on offensive. Within the scope of the nineteenth century sexual preferences were inserted into the physical being and tied to morality and modes of conduct, providing layers and layers of Foucaultian potential for Nicholas to achieve. But the potential was there, with many a flirt and flutter.
Art has often been equated with madness. Or irrationality at best. And that’s how Nicholas stares at Danny that first night - after hushed words in the locker room, during drinks in the phoenix of a pub, and before the stumbling run to Danny’s nest, hands fumbling and sweat forming under light jackets - as if he is a madman, bewitched as empty words achieve a fullness as they flow past Danny’s lips. Words of manful adoration, of a distant respect edging into cautious curiosity. Short statements delivered with an honest shyness that Danny hadn’t been certain that he’d possessed. All art has a meaning hidden within it; it is the meaning that separates it, lifts it above the base and urbane.
Nicholas is boyish in his fear of intimacy, a facet of himself hidden cleverly behind emotional indifference, allowing the infliction of pain without the self being swayed. Beneath the steel-grey eyes, the windows to something soft and tender that had long since been boarded up, there was something inherently lonely. And where there is loneliness there is a part of the inner that reaches out. After painstaking weeks of beating against the exterior, and the violent crack of a single question - “But aren’t you lonely?” - Danny finally manages to brush fingertips with the desperation within. It’s an act of charity, but for whom remains shrouded in curling, whispered words.
And so the impenetrable fortress of Nicholas is taken, the dirges of hetero-oriented asexuality echoing through the dreary December streets. It’s a beautiful performance, watching the subtle hints of a million thoughts flickering behind the cracked-grey-eyes. But still there remains that disbelieving stare that will not fade until the streetlights are extinguished by the power grid and the sun begins its slow creak across scratched floorboards. Danny is mad, surely, but it’s a seductive madness.
Man can never be without religion, however perverted his idea of god, or degraded his worship. Be it a notion of a mystical source and end of life, a belief in the survival of the human spirit, or elementary moral ideas and a variety of ritual symbolisms. Belief stems from a mad desire for rhyme and reason, for meaning and justification. For Justice. The law had its traditions, its spectacular initiatory and mortuary rites. Its men of the cloth.
Cloth that is admired and protected - a challenge to the world, stripped away and stored with varying elegance at the end of the day only to be replaced with a new cloth. Layers of armour and intimacy taken and gained, strewn across un-vacuumed floor as the first drumbeats of initiation into the realm of the carnal-sacred. Prayer and worship, priests and altars have no place in these rites, yet Nicholas’ body is not unlike that of an alter for all the hails and graces smoothed against it as the two men sink below the very base in effort to find the hidden spark of something that justifies it all.
There is no sharp demarcation between secular and sacred life - the Saint adorning Nicholas’ throat is a small token of proof to that, as are the muffled blasphemes pressed into the crook of Danny’s neck, imprinted within teeth marks to the skin stretched taut across his clavicles. Profane markings of secret, sacred moments never to be divulged or discussed, but tracked and recorded upon closed eyelids.
The lived perception - the one that filters in through the minds of the living - is not a geometric one, nor photographic. It is a swell of perceptions, as if various points of view are being seen simultaneously. For the rest of his life, Danny is sure that he’ll never be able to see Nicholas as anything more than a hundred vivid memories from behind smeared and rusting frames; the tempted recluse, the shy audience and the laughing cohort, the lazy cautious strokes over skin cast golden by the streetlights outside a half-shaded window. The eyes that never quite meet their target. The lips that remain closed, silent.
Just as one can speak without saying anything, one can also say something without uttering words. At work, on duty, Danny now encounters most often a fill-in-the-blank brand of silence. Crime scenes with aghast parents gaping “That’s my -?”, or troubled young women weeping and choking, with a bare “And then he -” escaping from between swollen lips. Utterances that are most commonly completed in silence when a topic is particularly delicate, crossing over into the barb-wired terrain of the taboo. Emotional overload, emotional overflow, words swept away and lost. On paper such statements seem so bare and empty, meaningless as fingers pause over keyboards, uncertain as to the correct manner in which to punctuate the sobs being transcribed. The meaning comes while speaking it, or remaining silent through the emptiness where words should belong.
Haragei. As soon as an experience is expressed in words the real essence of it disappears. It took the Japanese to coin a noun for the stereotypical repression inherent in the British, for the loaded hesitation of fingertips brushing across skin while a pained silence stretches further and further, until the two of them are on opposite sides of the world. Oceans and continents of silence that could really mean anything.
Danny wonders if he is like an experiment to Nicholas, ever the detached observer; or if the barrier between them is less severe, with him being a new flavour to be experienced; considered and analysed. There is something almost ritualistic about their trysts, but the underlying intention of them is just as confused as the contested definition of the word itself, of the concept. While Durkheim sees ritual as a social function that sustains the status quo, the Turner-wise view is of a social process that makes a transformation possible. Just as Nicholas could be slowly breaking forth from his chrysalis of hard security as the result of grasping hands and open-mouthed kisses over flushed skin, equally likely is his consent to the repetition of events because it is easier than disrupting the course of the affair. Not a clarifying feather fluttered - the stillness itself a reply so aptly spoken, though one of meaning veiled in the beguiling countenance adorned.
Danny’s hips shift beneath Nicholas, rocking and pressing while hands slide against sweaty skin and toes tangle themselves in bed linen. Silken sad uncertain rustling of sheets crumpled by their tousling. Nicholas has his face pressed against the curve of Danny’s skin where neck becomes shoulder and front becomes back, his jaw above a collar bone, his nose below an earlobe. Face to face, but never looking at one another.
Nicholas doesn’t believe in love, and over talks of neural impulses and chemical concentrations in the brain, Danny discovers that Nicholas has a hard time believing in anything. That’s why he joined the service, that’s why he doesn’t like people. And while Danny does his best to laugh it off with his mouth that was always curved, as if in direct mockery of Nicholas’ own hard lines, he works the same beat, and sees the same things, and has to concede that he had no definitive reason to believe. Idealism very rapidly turns into cynicism, yet the two aren’t so different in their composition. Both are a defence against the simple and present world which holds out only exactly what is there.
And all that is there are two men, sweaty and clutching and struggling to keep their groans low and private. Danny’s legs are around Nicholas’ waist, and his hair is plastered to his forehead. His hands are hard and pressing against Nicholas’ back, fingernails digging into shoulder blades and Danny can fancy that he can hear them crack, feel them separate into finger-like shards beneath his grip, shifting and changing with each rock of Danny’s hips into something elongated, stretching and avian, tearing the skin of Nicholas’ back into twin shapes that are all of his name and nothing of his disposition.
The distinction between truth and meaning. The question wasn’t as to the truth of the status of their interactions, but as to whether it meant anything, anything at all. The presence of perspiration can be a truth or a mistaken perception, but the meaning of being slicked with another man’s sweat, of licking the salty tang off a cheek that was loosing it’s smoothness to a 4 am stubble, or the burn of muscles and the stretch of flesh and the harsh breaths in the air. A hopeful ritornello, surcease of desolation and entreating of Dionysiac desire. A sensual familiarity rising within Danny and carrying him up to the dizzying place where the falling Angel meets the rising ape.
Danny was choking with all that was building up inside him, the uncertainty and the arousal and the overly-analytical hope. A dull worry over his liver, seeping back into his blood and making his body burn and his brain dizzy. A heavy weight in his stomach shifting, rising into his chest and crushing his lungs until he has no choice but to open his mouth - his swollen panting mouth - and allow the three sacred words that he had been choking on for what felt like a lifetime flow over his tongue and hang in the crushing air. Offensive, perhaps, now wicked and profane. Nothing that is true to the soul ever escapes from the lips in perfectly rehearsed form.
Through closed eyelids he saw Nicholas turn away, and drowned slowly in the realisation that it meant nothing.
Author: tawg
Word count: 1,720
Characters: NA/DB
Summary: Danny knows a lot more than he ever lets on, but some things are harder to decipher than others.
Notes: Response to iamstillthemoon’s challenge. I stole from consulted so many texts in writing this that I feel like it should have a bibliography attached. You should all probably take that as a warning.
The rises and falls of Nicholas’ flesh, the bumps and taints of scars and bruising give him away as a quaint and curious volume, a landscape in Braille of the sacred and profane. Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore -
Nicholas cannot be marked as heterosexual, in that heterosexism describes social or personal structures which are defined and regulated by exclusive and compulsory heterosexuality. To be heterosexual you must first be sexual, and Nicholas had all the passion and libido of a house brick. Though, to assume that the boundaries of sexuality were so cleanly defined was naive, bordering on offensive. Within the scope of the nineteenth century sexual preferences were inserted into the physical being and tied to morality and modes of conduct, providing layers and layers of Foucaultian potential for Nicholas to achieve. But the potential was there, with many a flirt and flutter.
Art has often been equated with madness. Or irrationality at best. And that’s how Nicholas stares at Danny that first night - after hushed words in the locker room, during drinks in the phoenix of a pub, and before the stumbling run to Danny’s nest, hands fumbling and sweat forming under light jackets - as if he is a madman, bewitched as empty words achieve a fullness as they flow past Danny’s lips. Words of manful adoration, of a distant respect edging into cautious curiosity. Short statements delivered with an honest shyness that Danny hadn’t been certain that he’d possessed. All art has a meaning hidden within it; it is the meaning that separates it, lifts it above the base and urbane.
Nicholas is boyish in his fear of intimacy, a facet of himself hidden cleverly behind emotional indifference, allowing the infliction of pain without the self being swayed. Beneath the steel-grey eyes, the windows to something soft and tender that had long since been boarded up, there was something inherently lonely. And where there is loneliness there is a part of the inner that reaches out. After painstaking weeks of beating against the exterior, and the violent crack of a single question - “But aren’t you lonely?” - Danny finally manages to brush fingertips with the desperation within. It’s an act of charity, but for whom remains shrouded in curling, whispered words.
And so the impenetrable fortress of Nicholas is taken, the dirges of hetero-oriented asexuality echoing through the dreary December streets. It’s a beautiful performance, watching the subtle hints of a million thoughts flickering behind the cracked-grey-eyes. But still there remains that disbelieving stare that will not fade until the streetlights are extinguished by the power grid and the sun begins its slow creak across scratched floorboards. Danny is mad, surely, but it’s a seductive madness.
Man can never be without religion, however perverted his idea of god, or degraded his worship. Be it a notion of a mystical source and end of life, a belief in the survival of the human spirit, or elementary moral ideas and a variety of ritual symbolisms. Belief stems from a mad desire for rhyme and reason, for meaning and justification. For Justice. The law had its traditions, its spectacular initiatory and mortuary rites. Its men of the cloth.
Cloth that is admired and protected - a challenge to the world, stripped away and stored with varying elegance at the end of the day only to be replaced with a new cloth. Layers of armour and intimacy taken and gained, strewn across un-vacuumed floor as the first drumbeats of initiation into the realm of the carnal-sacred. Prayer and worship, priests and altars have no place in these rites, yet Nicholas’ body is not unlike that of an alter for all the hails and graces smoothed against it as the two men sink below the very base in effort to find the hidden spark of something that justifies it all.
There is no sharp demarcation between secular and sacred life - the Saint adorning Nicholas’ throat is a small token of proof to that, as are the muffled blasphemes pressed into the crook of Danny’s neck, imprinted within teeth marks to the skin stretched taut across his clavicles. Profane markings of secret, sacred moments never to be divulged or discussed, but tracked and recorded upon closed eyelids.
The lived perception - the one that filters in through the minds of the living - is not a geometric one, nor photographic. It is a swell of perceptions, as if various points of view are being seen simultaneously. For the rest of his life, Danny is sure that he’ll never be able to see Nicholas as anything more than a hundred vivid memories from behind smeared and rusting frames; the tempted recluse, the shy audience and the laughing cohort, the lazy cautious strokes over skin cast golden by the streetlights outside a half-shaded window. The eyes that never quite meet their target. The lips that remain closed, silent.
Just as one can speak without saying anything, one can also say something without uttering words. At work, on duty, Danny now encounters most often a fill-in-the-blank brand of silence. Crime scenes with aghast parents gaping “That’s my -?”, or troubled young women weeping and choking, with a bare “And then he -” escaping from between swollen lips. Utterances that are most commonly completed in silence when a topic is particularly delicate, crossing over into the barb-wired terrain of the taboo. Emotional overload, emotional overflow, words swept away and lost. On paper such statements seem so bare and empty, meaningless as fingers pause over keyboards, uncertain as to the correct manner in which to punctuate the sobs being transcribed. The meaning comes while speaking it, or remaining silent through the emptiness where words should belong.
Haragei. As soon as an experience is expressed in words the real essence of it disappears. It took the Japanese to coin a noun for the stereotypical repression inherent in the British, for the loaded hesitation of fingertips brushing across skin while a pained silence stretches further and further, until the two of them are on opposite sides of the world. Oceans and continents of silence that could really mean anything.
Danny wonders if he is like an experiment to Nicholas, ever the detached observer; or if the barrier between them is less severe, with him being a new flavour to be experienced; considered and analysed. There is something almost ritualistic about their trysts, but the underlying intention of them is just as confused as the contested definition of the word itself, of the concept. While Durkheim sees ritual as a social function that sustains the status quo, the Turner-wise view is of a social process that makes a transformation possible. Just as Nicholas could be slowly breaking forth from his chrysalis of hard security as the result of grasping hands and open-mouthed kisses over flushed skin, equally likely is his consent to the repetition of events because it is easier than disrupting the course of the affair. Not a clarifying feather fluttered - the stillness itself a reply so aptly spoken, though one of meaning veiled in the beguiling countenance adorned.
Danny’s hips shift beneath Nicholas, rocking and pressing while hands slide against sweaty skin and toes tangle themselves in bed linen. Silken sad uncertain rustling of sheets crumpled by their tousling. Nicholas has his face pressed against the curve of Danny’s skin where neck becomes shoulder and front becomes back, his jaw above a collar bone, his nose below an earlobe. Face to face, but never looking at one another.
Nicholas doesn’t believe in love, and over talks of neural impulses and chemical concentrations in the brain, Danny discovers that Nicholas has a hard time believing in anything. That’s why he joined the service, that’s why he doesn’t like people. And while Danny does his best to laugh it off with his mouth that was always curved, as if in direct mockery of Nicholas’ own hard lines, he works the same beat, and sees the same things, and has to concede that he had no definitive reason to believe. Idealism very rapidly turns into cynicism, yet the two aren’t so different in their composition. Both are a defence against the simple and present world which holds out only exactly what is there.
And all that is there are two men, sweaty and clutching and struggling to keep their groans low and private. Danny’s legs are around Nicholas’ waist, and his hair is plastered to his forehead. His hands are hard and pressing against Nicholas’ back, fingernails digging into shoulder blades and Danny can fancy that he can hear them crack, feel them separate into finger-like shards beneath his grip, shifting and changing with each rock of Danny’s hips into something elongated, stretching and avian, tearing the skin of Nicholas’ back into twin shapes that are all of his name and nothing of his disposition.
The distinction between truth and meaning. The question wasn’t as to the truth of the status of their interactions, but as to whether it meant anything, anything at all. The presence of perspiration can be a truth or a mistaken perception, but the meaning of being slicked with another man’s sweat, of licking the salty tang off a cheek that was loosing it’s smoothness to a 4 am stubble, or the burn of muscles and the stretch of flesh and the harsh breaths in the air. A hopeful ritornello, surcease of desolation and entreating of Dionysiac desire. A sensual familiarity rising within Danny and carrying him up to the dizzying place where the falling Angel meets the rising ape.
Danny was choking with all that was building up inside him, the uncertainty and the arousal and the overly-analytical hope. A dull worry over his liver, seeping back into his blood and making his body burn and his brain dizzy. A heavy weight in his stomach shifting, rising into his chest and crushing his lungs until he has no choice but to open his mouth - his swollen panting mouth - and allow the three sacred words that he had been choking on for what felt like a lifetime flow over his tongue and hang in the crushing air. Offensive, perhaps, now wicked and profane. Nothing that is true to the soul ever escapes from the lips in perfectly rehearsed form.
Through closed eyelids he saw Nicholas turn away, and drowned slowly in the realisation that it meant nothing.