From: [email protected]
Subject: Nurse Jones posting from beyond
Date: 18 Nov 92 17:33:33 GMT
From Nurse Jones, Spring, 1992
[Another entry in my Turing Diary. I wrote this after I had lost my
account. I was feeling a bit depressed at the prospect of being
netless for the rest of my natural (Bzzzzzt!) life.]
Oh my. Anita called to tell me that someone is reposting my year-old
diary, The List. So even though I haven't given her a copy she's
finally going to get to read it.
I feel obliged to comment on it in the hopes that some day you will
know how I felt.
Embarrssed.
Honored.
I've been too embarrassed to give Anita a copy of The List. And now
TheClone, apparently has taken that decision out of my hands.
Embarrassment is, as you might know, not entirely a negative state of
mind for me. Clone, you gave me That Feeling, even here, isolated as I
am, outside The Net. That's a long way to reach with such a delicate
touch.
I guess this means that I'm being slow-motion long-distance topped by
my Turing Diary. That's nice, somehow. It's odd, the kinds of intimacy
that can develop over The Net. Isn't it Michael? Michael? Are you
there, Michael? (sigh...)
Those of you that are left that knew me might remember that Jay shaved
my head about this time last year.
I feel so weird about it now, but it seemed so wrong/right at the
time. I feel lucky to have had that month. It's rare to have the
opportunity to live out a fantasy.
The List didn't even get posted until several months after my hair had
started growing back, but even then I got a lot of mail from other
women (men didn't seem to comment so much -- I wonder why?) that were
bothered, squicked, or horrified at what I had let Jay do to me. I
occasionally go through the campus of the local university and see
women with Sinead O'Connor hair. It has become almost acceptable...(?)
ALthough I was billiard-ball smooth. Maybe I was ahead of my time.
Maybe I'm just justifying it to myself, trying to make myself feel
normal.
It was so easy to slip deeper into The List once I had started, and
there was no outside referent -- no job, no friends, nothing but this
big empty house in a strange -- in fact alien -- environment (for me,
being from Indiana, the subtropical South is strange and alien). At
every step, I felt as though I was being daring, doing new and strange
things, but I wasn't hurting myself, so I kept on.
Here's an example of how it happened: Those of you that have read
about it know there was a List of stuff I would let him do to me. It
seemed so abstract when we made it up. Later, it was a little scary,
but I ALWAYS knew it wouldn't hurt me physically, not for real.
Shaving my head was on The List.
Once, before he shaved me, we were making love and he stopped in the
middle and looked down at me. He was holding my head between his
hands, and he brushed my hair back from my face and held it smoothed
back against my head with his hands. I could tell from the way he was
looking at me that he was imagining me with no hair. Then he kissed me
and the moment passed.
Several days later, I was standing in the living room looking out
the window in my bathrobe after a shower. I was absently running my
fingers through my hair, combing tangles out and Jay came into the
room and glanced at me.
I looked at him and pushed my hair back the same way he had, and I
held it that way for him to see. I made it a deliberately ambiguous
gesture -- as though I had paused while combing tangles out. But my
heart was suddenly hammering, and I felt very daring. As though I had
challenged him to do it. I really didn't think he would, but it was on
the List, and I knew what he was thinking; he paused and looked back
at me. I just didn't know if he really would do it. But taking the
chance... that was ... I dunno. It was exciting.
So now all 12 parts of Column One of The List are going to scroll
slowly through ASB and Neets is going to see them and and then she's
going to come over here like she does almost twice weekly already
these days and she's going to ask me about The List and she's going to
recognize the places in the house where it happened and ask questions.
I should never have posted the stupid thing. I could *die*.
And I can't even whine to ASB.
I feel so isolated.
Which reminds me of something.
Ever hear of Aimee du Bucq de Rivery?
Anita ran across her while she was doing some research for the
painting she's doing of me. She was reading about the Orientalists, a
bunch of victorian artists that were tittilated (is that one t or two?
Four, actually) anyway, they were ttitilatted by harem scenes, exotic
women, anything oriental, in fact.
It turns out that Aimee was a cousin of Josephine Bonaparte. In 1781
she had just left the convent where she was educated and was promptly
captured by Algerian slave traders cruising the Mediterranean for
french dumplings. She was then -- at age 14 -- sold to the Grand
Imperial Whatzit of Turkey, where she was made number one wife. They
took away her western clothing, her pubic hair (apparently they are
very strict about this in harems), her bible and her rosary, and
trained her in the erotic arts of the seraglio, and she STILL refused
to embrace Islam, imagine that.
Well, I don't know about *you* but I know when *I* would have given in
and, um, embraced....
Yep. Take away my rosary and I'm done for.
Anyway, the western world thought she was a goner (i.e. dead) until
years later she managed to get a letter smuggled out of the harem. It
reached her family.
A message from a ghost, sent to a world she was no longer a part of.
Sort of like this post. They never answered her, though. Noone ever
saw her again, she never left the harem. They never even tried a
diplomatic channel. She had become an embarrassment. She was defiled.
By a buncha heathens.
A very proper religious family, they were. I wonder how she felt about
them as the years went by and they didn't answer her letter.
There were frequent diplomatic contacts with the world that had
abandoned her, and the walls of her harem/prison were only a few feet
from the room where her husband/owner met with members of her former
social circle. And the French ambassador -- the man who, if he could
be made to officially acknowledge her existence, would have had to act
on her behalf to save his own honor.
She even glimpsed some of these meetings briefly.
Then everything changed. She had a son, destined to become The Even
Grander And More Imperial Whatzit and she didn't wanna leave anymore
anyway, merci. She actually became the eminence grise behind the
throne of the Ottoman Empire (or whatever Turkey called itself at the
time) and was manipulating Turkish foreign policy and having a grand
old time running the aging Sultan and his heirs and the entire
country. She molded her son into "Mahmoud the Reformer" and he
eventually disbanded the dreaded Janissaries.
By killing all 5000 of them. One of your more extreme approaches to
reformation.
From which you might be tempted to deduce that Aimee had brought up
Mahmoud as a French Catholic, but no ... he was just a conscientious
reformer.
She died in the harem after receiving extreme unction and a rather
lengthy confession from a priest imported especially for the purpose.
From all reports he was a bit shaken by the experience. Her tomb is a
stone's throw from the Hagia Sofia (AKA the "Blue Mosque") in
Istanbul. Today, right now, this very minute, her bones rest there. Of
course, then it was Constantinople.
Imagine. Constantinople. 1781. Fourteen years old. What an adventure.
Imagine what her life must have been like. Stolen by slavers. For
real. Sold. For real. Taken to a harem. For real. Knowing that people
she used to rub elbows with socially, people she knew, people who
*knew* (unofficially) she was a captive there, were visiting the
sultan's court, yards from where she was kept, and she could have no
contact with them. Ever.
When Anita ran across her name in a book on orientalist artists, I did
a library search for "Rivery" and came up with four references. Given
the circumstances, it isn't surprising that very little is known about
her. That bit about her pubic hair was in a biography of her ("Valide"
by Chase-Riboud, 1986) that was necessarily highly fictionalized. "The
Wilder Shores of Love" by Lesley Blanch seemed to be more factual.
Anyway, I ran across some interesting terms in a chapter on the chief
eunuch in the sultan's harem. Tribadism, irrumation, tete beche,
feuille de rose, culumonus. Not one in the dictionary. "Tribadism" was
the subject of a thread once, but I didn't follow it. I just know one
of you experts knows what these terms mean and would just LOVE to show
off if I could only ask.
Maybe this will get posted some day.
So anyway, based on the only surviving painting of her, done just
before her capture, Anita has decided that I look enough like her to
serve as a model for a painting of Aimee. She has started it already.
The style is that of the darling of the orientalists, a fella called
Gerome. The title is:
"A private sale"
I don't suppose I need to tell you who is being sold. Apparently you
get a discount if you take me without the clothing option.
Nurse Jones,
on special
this week only.
Big savings
out here in the
twilight zone.
On to the next posting
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