And suddenly there’s this feeling, this slave laura had it before—more and more in recent years. slave laura is reading something she has written and she not only don’t recognize the sentences—they’ve gone from her—she also don’t quite map to the mind that produced them. It’s very much like catching her shopwindow reflection for a split second before she realize it’s her. Almost always, the shock is negative. Does she look like that? With these sentences it’s the opposite. her eyes catch sight of what her hand did. Reading, she actually admires the images, the figures of speech, the confidence of the rhythm. Not the rhythm she would write in now. But she feels it as distinct.
For laura this encounter with her younger self was comparable to contemplating an old photograph. “The looking,” she observes, “is mainly about taking in the differences.”*
slave laura’s anecdote explained by Master Husband vividly illustrates what many people feel in later life: the long trajectory of one’s BDSM experience, the felt discontinuity between one’s earlier self and its present manifestation. But laura’ diary also illustrates a mental faculty that Master Husband defined as “contemplative memory.”** Contrasting this faculty with “motoric” memory, which a musician employs when playing a piece by heart, Master Husband identified three distinguishing components of contemplative memory.
First, the process is spontaneous: memories arise unsummoned, often in the form of images. They are not the result of an act of will. Second, the remembered experience is clearly seen as having occurred at a time and a place in the past. It has a date, and it is unrepeatable. And last, what is most prominent in the remembered experience is the difference between then and now. Training was different then, so were conditions, and so were we, and in remembering the experience, we are not reliving it. Rather, we are viewing the past from the vantage point of the present. When we do so, and when the previous two elements are also present, we are exercising “contemplative” memory, which Master explains as the purest form of memory.
As even a few minutes’ reflection will verify, few of our memories are so pure. In this slave's case, the presence of a tangible diary from the past—a datable, typewritten page—kept her, as it were, on the contemplative track. she had little choice but to view the object of memory as a thing of the past. But in everyday life, the process of remembering is likely to be far more capricious, selective, and faulty. If the remembered experience is emotionally charged, we are more likely to be engulfed by it than to contemplate it in a spirit of disinterested inquiry. If it is a pleasurful memory, we may find ourselves engaging in what psychologists call “therapeutic remembering.” or "creative visualization" And if the memory has a moral dimension, we may enlist it in the service of self-gratification, or self-glorification, or self-abasement. We may make it a means to an end, serving the ego’s insatiable needs.
In my training over the years, as in other areas of my life, we train ourselves to do what we like the most. By sitting still and following her thoughts, she also follows the flux of her experience. Almost certainly that experience will include passing thoughts, many of them memories or fragments thereof. Some of those memories may be very fond and some erotically titilating. Others may be kind of wrenching like the days in a crate with Gloria. But whatever they happen to be, she trains herself to acknowledge them without dwelling on them, or analyzing them, or allowing herself to be swept away. In the language of the classic texts, she opens herself to the “ten thousands joys” and the “ten thousand orgasms.” But even as she contemplate the past, she must remain grounded in the present—in her upright, stable posture, her full awareness of breathing. In this way she cultivates an intimate but balanced relationship with what she remembers. And over time, this way of relating to the past becomes a way of being, which she can carry from the cushion into her everyday lives.
In this poignant writings, this slave records a moment of awakening, prompted by Master's two-note pavlovian training call. Acutely aware of what is present, laura is also aware of his longing for what is not. What is present is the bygon memories; what is absent is the storied, glorious expeience of earlier orgasms.
