#see if you can spot them all

Row, Row, Row Your Boat

I pride myself on having a certain finesse, marrying the primal urges of my sadism and dominance with a civilised decorum, a bearing that makes my actions seem as considered as I imagine them to be. Deliberate, elegant, poised. 

Only, there are certain activities where the mask slips, and you can’t help but see the raw id underneath. Rope treads the line, as rope is wont to do, between brutality and beauty, but when you start involving cast iron in the equation, shackles and bars and rough, heavy collars, any notion that this was some high class pursuit, wandering around the green with mallets laughing at croquet or riding around the garden enjoying a spot of polo, flies out of the window.

This isn’t some Millistic ideal of the higher good, wafting above the perceived bad smell of animilistic urges. This isn’t that kind of Utilitarianism, where you can filter out different parts of the human psyche like oil and water. They’re mixed, one great big dark mess that swirls and whirls with all the beauty and power of a hurricane. It’s the mental and the physical and everything in between. It’s the considered thought and the instinct, riding hard together, all aiming to reach the same goal. 

Sometimes I forget that, slip into that detached aloofness that serves me so very well. Sometimes I wander away from the primal because, in all honesty, there’s some fear there, a heart of darkness that will carry me all the way down a dark river until I do something I can’t quite control. And, on so many levels, a loss of control is the last thing I want. 

But that’s to ignore its power, and the allure of that base desire. There’s something more pure about it, all the frills, the pomp and the circumstance, all stripped, leaving a strong core that has no allusions. There’s less to worry about, and less to think, too. Just that one idea, a driving force that will carry me to where I want to go.