When I set up this blog, when I designed its misbegotten structure, when I came up with the categories into which I would divide all future posts, one of the categories up with which I came was “memory or fantasy?”. At the time, this was a nod to the fact that pretty much all of my fantasies, if they weren’t already memories, became them soon enough. That is to say, the universe of fantasies that I didn’t instantiate was close to a null set.
That’s not quite true. There were a couple of fantasies I allowed myself to have that never actually happened, or at least that didn’t happen in quite the way they did when I imagined them. The whole oral swingers’ dinner party, for example. The, by definition, impossible, infinite line of women providing and receiving oral sex to and from me. The dinner party hasn’t happened yet. I tried, in earnest, 12 or 13 years ago to make it happen, but without success. In the time since, I haven’t really labored to make it come to fruition. I might yet, though.
The infinite line of women, well, I had my soiree in February, and that was neither the first nor will it be the last time that I have a sexual encounter with lots and lots of women. A year or so ago, though, there was a development in my psyche. I began to allow myself to fantasize about things that never would happen, whether because they couldn’t or shouldn’t, or even in my pegging and fucking example, because I actually don’t think I would want it to. I don’t think I would enjoy it if it were to happen. The fantasy is hot, as a fantasy, but not, I imagine, as a reality.
In this sense, it’s kind of like a woman’s rape fantasy. Hot to imagine. Horrific if it were to happen. It feels, and I wrote this a few weeks ago, a bit like a developmental achievement on my part, to have these new fantasies. Fantasies that can’t, shouldn’t, won’t happen. Fantasies whose hotness resides in the fantasy itself, and not in its execution. I think there’s something about the way I used to fantasize, which was profoundly concrete. Because I didn’t allow myself to fantasize about things which I didn’t think I could make happen, they weren’t really fantasies. They were plans.
I think partly, this was about fear. I didn’t want to fantasize about something that might not end up happening out of a fear of disappointment or loss. Partly, though, I think it was a more fundamental challenge. Not an emotional challenge, but as I said, a developmental one. I don’t think I had the ability to imagine something that wasn’t absolutely possible. This is related to my relationship to fiction. I think I write pretty well, but it’s never in my life occurred to me to write a story, to write a novel. I just don’t have that in me. Or didn’t.
Over the last year, it’s begun to shift a bit. I allowed myself to fantasize about a sexual encounter with a group of people that not only can it never happen, but it’s really important that most of the people in the group never know that I had the fantasy. There’s the pegging fantasy, and there have been others. I have a colleague about whom I’ve recently allowed myself to begin to fantasize. I would never, ever, in a million years, act on any of the fantasies I’ve allowed myself to have about her. But gosh, they’re hot.
It’s interesting to wonder how things would be different if I had instead of, or in addition to, the “memory or fantasy” category, a “fantasy or plan” category. I think I might experiment with that.
And a final thought on “memory or fantasy” as a category: part of what informed my relationship to that category, to those two concepts strung together, was a recognition that all memories, in some sense, are fantasies. Two people never have exactly the same memory of an event for this reason. Two people often have quite different memories of the same event for this reason.
But the truth is, while I created the category of “memory or fantasy,” everything I wrote in there either happened, happened in my mind, or didn’t happen only because events unfolded in such a way that a plan didn’t actually come to fruition.
I think I’m going to add that “fantasy or plan” category and begin to populate it. It should be fun.