The History of BDSM

It ain’t pretty, but it’s done. I completed a first, rough, provisional, tentative, preliminary draft of chapter one, about 6,000 words that runs from Roman mystery cults to the banning of flagellant companies in the 14th century. It’s far from complete, but it is something I’m ready to show somebody else.

One of the thing I realized was that I had big gaps in my narrative. I spent the last week on a crash study on medieval Christianity, the founding of the great monastic orders and the debates over flagellation and other forms of discipline. The church has never been entirely comfortable with flagellation and other forms of asceticism, perhaps because it makes possible a connection with Christ through the body, and not through established hierarchy of intermediaries.

What’s next is Chapter 2, roughly 1500 (Pico della Mirandola’s discussion of flagellation) to 1700 (the Abbe Boileu’s discussion), the disagreement over how the human body is to be viewed. The starting point is the disagreement over the St. Theresa of Avila and her “transverberation”, her eroticised encounter with an angel that repeatedly stabbed her with a spear. In another time, St. Theresa’s experience, and art depicting it, would have been sacred, but in this time, it could be seen as profane, the result of sexuality perverted by the unnaturalness of convent life.

I may extend it to the trial of Father Girard over his affair with Catherine Cadiere around 1730, but that may be saved for the chapter on sensibility.

I’m not sure that even with a good work habit I can make my deadline of a completed manuscript by the end of October. On the other hand, I have a lot of stuff already done and researched, I just need to put it together and fill in the gaps.

“Beware the man of one book.”
-attributed to Saint Thomas Aquinas

My first post on this blog was back in July, 2005. That’s six and a half years of blog posts on this, with no actual book.

It’s been fun, certainly, but I’ve realized that I could keep doing this indefinitely, without ever actually writing my supposed book. Blogging is certainly more fun than the grind of delayed gratification and possible rejection of conventional publishing, but an actual book, if published, means more status and money. While I’ve maintained a fairly steady output on blog postings, I’ve gone for six months or even a year without working on the book directly.

I also have to ask when enough information is enough. Is this going to be the last word on the topic, or is it one of many books on the subject?

You can look at it like two different modes of creative production. JRR Tolkien, for example, basically wrote one big story, the saga of Middle-Earth, investing just about everything he knew into it. It’s hard to see the the connection between The Hobbit and the Silmarilion, but it’s there. Tolkien wrote other fiction, but he’s been known for his magnum opus.

Michael Moorcock, by comparison, wrote lots and lots of novels short novels, allegedly writing 15,000 words a day at his peak. A lot of his generation of writers just wrote a lot more.

So, do I want to invest all my time and energy and hope into one great work, or write many different works that can succeed and fail independently?

The history of BDSM isn’t the last non-fiction book I want to write. It isn’t even necessarily the last book on BDSM I want to write.

So, I hereby state that by my 40th birthday, October 27th, 2012, I will have completed a first draft of my book, and will have begun submitting it to publishers.

This will be a much scaled down work of about 60,000 words, and more tightly focused than the encyclopedic 100,000 words I originally planned. Call it 10 chapters of no more than 6,000 words each. By necessity, this will mean leaving out a lot of stuff, in favour of a tighter narrative.

My biggest fear, of course, in saying this is that in 10.5 months I will shamefully admit to all of you out there (crickets chirp… chirp… chirp) that I didn’t do this. My success in this task is up to me and nobody else.