MY NIGHT WITH SAINT-AUGUSTINE
By popular demand, here is more of the story featured in my previous blog : it's only half of the first story of a compilation I hope to get published by an Erotica Publisher here in NY. Please make some noise, it will inspire them to sign a contract soon !
March 30th 2010 C.E
11 pm
He flips me over. That`s the two minute signal: the moment he starts fucking me from behind, I know I can start a countdown from sixty. When I get to zero, give or take a few seconds because, of course it's not an exact science, he's going to pull out and cum all over me. " Please, let him not ejaculate on my sheets. I just had them washed yesterday." I don`t care how much the papers say that prices have gone down with the economic crisis, I say it's bullshit, and it`s in the small details that we see it every day. Take my dry cleaning for example: it is getting more expensive every time. Or is it just the Chinese lady over there who's grown weary of getting semen stains off my sheets? Then she'd be raising the prices in the hope that I lower the amount of sheet staining sex I'm having. It never occurred to me that there could be a direct correlation between the amount of cum and the amount of money she asks of me. Note to self : ask her about the cum to money ratio next time. Next time will most likely have to be tomorrow if he does spill on my bed, because I have a date. I happen to know for a fact that no man likes to fuck in the sperm of another man. It's like arriving in what you hope to be a virgin territory, a Terra Incognita, and finding that a flag is already there, and that the land has already been claimed.
Ten minutes after he in fact made a mess of my bed, we're lying down, and there is this quietness that fills the bedroom; this overwhelming silence that screams: " it’s time you get the fuck out of my bed ! " but he just stays there, soft and sweaty, and there's nothing left to do but talk. I don't know about you but I usually find that the only decent subject for a post-coitum conversation is Love. This time, he breaks the silence first " I love you ". He doesn’t love me.
" I love you too baby". I don’t love him either.
Sex generates countless love declarations. I wonder how many people asked their partners to marry them, just for lack of having the guts to ask the true question they had on their mind: "how long do I have to hold you before I can make a run for the exit without being the asshole of the story?" Note to self : look into it tomorrow. I`m sure I'll find statistics. Internet has statistics for everything.
2am
I walk him to the door. No doubt my face is betraying a suspicious enthusiasm over the fact that he`s finally decided to leave. I open the door. "Goodbye". I`m about to close it with precipitation – just in case he changes his mind, you can never be too sure- when I notice that, Phil, my crazy neighbor from across the hall, has once again put his trash in front of my door, probably hoping I will believe they're actually mine. I don't, and yet I always take his trash down. I pick up the bag, and immediately the plastic rips : the discarded pieces of Phil's life end up on my feet. Can one person eat that many canned Chilis? The domestic habits of a person say a lot about him. You could probably tell his whole life by studying the content of his trash over the course of a few years. Sexual preferences, political opinions, state of his liver: it's all there in his trash. Back to Phil : I knew he lived alone and his only monthly visit came from an orthodox Jewish rapper; I knew, because he had told me over and over again, that he claimed to have invented the phone system that enables you to "press one for…,press two for…,press three to hear your three options again". I knew the world had not shown much gratefulness to him for his loyal services, and I knew he only survived with the money of his disability pension. I now also know that Phil is a man who eats chili, and who, apparently, has read at least one book in his life. I pick it up and I wipe the red sauce that's hiding the title on the cover: The Confessions of Saint-Augustine.
March 30th. 365 C.E Thagaste.
In 365 C.E, Augustine is eleven. He lives with his parents in Thagaste, Numidia, the actual Souk Ahras in Algeria, an agricultural district. His education has become a source of conflict for them: she is a fervent catholic, and he is attached to the tradition of Greco-roman paganism, mainly synonymous of polytheism. At the time, northern Africa is part of the all powerful Roman Empire, Imperium Romanum, which succeeded to the Roman republic that ended with Marc-Anthony's death in 29 BC.
Pagan rituals are still very much embedded in our unconscious fantasies. Who, for example, hasn't dreamt of being initiated to wild sexual practices by a secret society? Contrary to popular belief, they weren't invented by perverse filmmakers. Traces of such secret societies can be found in the Greco- Roman empire with Dionysianism. Dionysus, or Bacchus in Latin, was the god of wine and festivities. Countless orgies were organized in his honor, some of them involving rape and murder. During the dionysiac festivals, men as well as women indulged in the most unnatural appetites. Sex was an important part of a roman's life. At age sixteen a boy had to do the rites of passage in order to become a man and to receive the Toga Virilis.
At the time Augustine is eleven, polytheism and dionysianism are on the descent, and Christianity has risen to become the dominant religion. But because of his father's personal disbelief in Christianity, Augustine has not been baptized in his infancy. His morals are about to stray even further from Christianity when at this crucial age, he is sent to a school in Madauros, twenty miles away from Thagaste. This town has remained very attached to paganism, and soon enough his teachers initiate him to Pagan literature and to some of its most famous thinkers; among them Cicero and Plato.
We are in 365 CE. Augustine doesn't know yet that in 397, he will write about how sinful his boyhood was, how debaucherous his manhood turned out to be. He will write about the promiscuous detours that he took on his way to becoming the father of Christian philosophy. For now, Augustine is just another little pagan boy.
March 31st 2010
10 am
How did this man become such a prominent figure of Christianity? Is the question floating on my lips as I wake up and open my eyes on the first effulgence of spring.
Spring is particularly glorious in Williamsburg. Why? Because people here are young; and people here are beautiful. No one likes to see a short skirt deliver a pair of old wrinkled legs from the wrap of winter, and no one likes to see drops of sticky sweat getting stuck in between two rolls of fat of an obese redneck. I walk on Bedford. This street is to Brooklyn what main street is to Disneyland: it`s crowded with sex-crazed princesses - better known as models- , and with androgynous boys whose only virility is directly correlated to daddy`s American express card. In the kingdom of Williamsburg, life is beautiful. The dog-faced, the destitute and the rags are magically weeded out.
I am on a quest for the perfect outdoor patio where I can sit and continue my reading of Saint-Augustine. If anything else, I'll give him that he`s titillating my curiosity. What a life he had! They sure knew how to live in the Roman Empire. The Confessions are composed of 13 books. I've barely reached book 3 and already young Augustine has lapsed into the depths of countless asses and pussies. He’s done it with woman, men. By age sixteen, he's fornicated about three times per page: I counted. I figured that if a page is to a life what a year is to a dog, Saint-Augustine's cum has very probably left stains on all the archeological remains of the Roman Empire. I wonder if he took it up the ass or if he was the one giving it? I'm not the first one to be fascinated by the sex life of the world's greatest thinkers. I recall attending a party three months ago, with socialites and members of the elite (by Elite, I'm essentially referring to a small group of people that have giant sticks coming out of their ass, and who practice discrimination against people that have no comparable anal attribute): at the table next to mine, I heard a young woman ask the two fellows she was with "Which of Voltaire or La Boetie took it up the ass, and which was giving it?" She giggled. They were drinking Crystal and talking about Voltaire's practice of sodomy. How very chic. Unknowing that I would myself turn to philosophers for matters of sex, I remember thinking: " is that the new cool thing to do for people of the elite ? Drink champagne while debating the anal issues of philosophers? Our illustrious predecessors are probably rolling over in their graves."
Augustine was an early sinner. But according to his confessions, it's only natural that sin should occur rather earlier than later. Augustine believes that sin can be found even in the first days of infancy, because sin is in man's nature. You can only purge yourself of the bad that lies within, when you understand what it is you have to purge yourself of. Then you may turn to God and face him. I guess my turn to talk to God hasn't come yet, 'cause I’m not sure if I want to purge myself of anything, and even if I did, I'm not sure I'd know where to begin my confession.
I bump into the Mormon on the corner of Bedford and North 7th. And here are the words I never thought my mouth would ever have to articulate, nor my pen ever have to spell: I fucked the Mormon. I fucked the hell out of him; forgive the blasphemy. I fucked him more than once too. My pussy doesn't discriminate, and I practice maximum dick tolerance. May God remember the kindness of my cunt. I met the Mormon at a café in Williamsburg. I say Mormon, it's a bit of a stretch. In fact he was only vaguely Mormon, a reformed Mormon would be more like it. I used to go read quite often inside a café where he worked. I would arrive early in the morning, and he would take my order. The moment I started talking " black coffee, Oven baked eggs, Prociutto ", his dick immediately pointed north like a compass; heat exuded through his cheeks and his forehead. He liked me, and I have to admit I was turned on by this anatomic flattery. The situation was funny to say the least. Every morning, I'd be sitting, he'd be standing, I'd be trying hard to not let those obvious inches of awkwardness stand in the way of normal conversation. Soon he made a pass. I agreed to go on a date with him. I had a Bavarian sausage for dinner. Don't look for a perversely convoluted metaphor: I had a Bavarian sausage for dinner at Biergarten. This place is some sort of an institution in Brooklyn. If you want good steak, you go to Peter Luger, if you want good beer, you go to Biergarten. That's where I first had sex with the Mormon. In the men's lavatories. In there, he managed to moan something utterly inappropriate, and I'm not sure my ears will ever hear the same " oh yeah baby! Ride my cock!". In return, I managed to scream something even more inappropriate and chances are, his eardrums are as scarred as mine "I love you !". Some dude who was taking a piss on the other side of the door mumbled, both tenderized by the alcohol and softened up by this touching soundtrack "Aww, you guys are so cute".
That night I realized, in a cubicle that smelled of beer and urine, that I needed to fake love in order to have real orgasms.
I saw him five more time over a period of two months. Before sex, we'd talk in great details of what we'd eat the next day for breakfast, knowing perfectly well that he wouldn't spend the night over; after sex, we'd feel the need for our dialogue to escalate drastically, so we'd make plans for the summer to come, well aware that a few months from then, we wouldn't even remember each other's names. One should always fuck out of his district in order to avoid something of the like:
« It's so great to see you Julie! I mean Julia!
-It's Berenice.»
Anyways, I feel like sometimes we believed in the lie. Worse, we enjoyed it. It was like playing mommy and daddy. For some reason, doing the grocery shopping list before sucking his dick gave a legitimacy to the blow job that it wouldn't have had on its own.
March 31st 370 CE. Carthage.
"Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet"
In 370, Augustine, who is now sixteen, goes to Carthage to study rhetoric. He's become the cause of a guts-splitting pain to his catholic mother, for he is drowning in a life of lust and debauchery. He has succumbed to the desires of the flesh. Augustine has countless lovers and mistresses. He has also attached himself to the woman who will become the mother of his son, but whom he’ll never marry. After his baptism in 387, he will severely condemn all forms of extra-marital sex. He will even come to reject and denounce the love he had for the woman of his life. He will look back on his past as on a deathly plague, a plague that only faith cured him from."But I, wretched, most wretched, in the very commencement of my early youth, had begged chastity of Thee, and said, 'Grant me chastity and continence, only not yet.'"
The interesting aspect of Augustine's dismissal of sexuality is that it is not of the act itself, but of the emotions that crawl around it. Essentially, what isn't love for God, is lust, even if it is often mistook for love.
``There seethed all around me a cauldron of lawless loves. I loved not yet, yet I loved to love, and out of a deep-seated want, I hated myself for wanting not. I sought what I might love, in love with loving, and I hated safety... To love then, and to be beloved, was sweet to me; but more, when I obtained to enjoy the person I loved. I defiled, therefore, the spring of friendship with the filth of concupiscence, and I beclouded its brightness with the hell of lustfulness.``
Stay tuned for the end...
Lustfully yours
Sophie B
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