Turning Danger into Performance – Silent Communions of Pleasure in Some Godforsaken Hotel Rooms

There were royal Ludwigs who were so poor that they had to borrow money from the men who carried their chamber pots.

What caused them to become impoverished?

People who possessed the inspiration to shorten the threads of their lives.

Jesus had only just risen from the dead when Parisians had to defend themselves against the Romans. The Romans displayed their superiority by opening a theatre on the banks of the Seine. On an ancient Broadway, the Romanization of the Celts took place. From 465 onward, the Merovingians under Childeric I and Clovis I staged performances on the open-air stage with thermal baths. The warm-up acts of the Carolingian Renaissance turned Paris into a capital. The Franks found themselves confronted with Danes, against whom they managed to defend themselves—through the detours of defeats, arrangements, surviving epidemics, refused handovers of keys, tribute payments, and intrigues—to the extent that Paris never experienced Scandinavian rule. Considering how successful the Vikings were as destroyers of existing power structures, it remains remarkable that their conceptual double axe—trade where possible, plunder where necessary (or vice versa)—did not take hold in Paris. They established themselves in the region and evolved into the Normans.

Virgil tells

Alisa and I walk at night through the floodplain forests of the Eder. My sense for word creation becomes caught up in the old German “Au.” The carefully chosen foreign word “alluvial” (deposited by water, alluvial) corresponds to the French alluviale, as in forêt alluviale—an alluvial forest. Alone, I enjoy a brief phonetic intoxication. Alisa senses that I am keeping something to myself. She feels excluded because I have kept my thoughts to myself for five minutes. To Alisa, this is like cheating. Sometimes I provoke her determination to love. I take her into my arms and kiss her until she sinks back into familiarity and becomes soft again. Her charm is a power. The next moment, my desire is there. I have never experienced this with another woman.

Dear T.,

this is your writing assignment:

“And I see the two of them in their bedroom, as they are just slowly undressing each other.”

To explain—the two of us, N. and I, give each other homework assignments. We improve each other’s descriptions of erotic scenes. I take Alisa and Virgil from the landscape and place them in Virgil’s bedroom.

My assignment:

They follow a choreography that gently prescribes itself to them. They experience no compulsion, and yet they are beside themselves in a kind of sibling-like astonishment. Alisa knows that he wants her to take off her panties, but not (not yet) her bra. How does she know? Alisa feels his hands on her breasts. He reveals them. Alisa feels her breasts resting in the balance of his hands. Virgil kisses her nipples. She nourishes his desire by kissing his neck and taking his body in her hand. Quite simply. Then he enters her with a finger. She suppresses a moan. Her muscles close greedily. She gasps for air and inwardly longs for more… She wants to release herself. Her pelvis tightens, the wave rises. Just before the moment of release…

N.: Dear T.,

Your gratitude reaches me. I feel it as though you were expressing it with your body. Alisa and Virgil kneel facing each other and look into each other’s eyes. They kiss tenderly and passionately and both experience the most beautiful feelings. Secretly, Alisa has looked at the picture of herself that Virgil carries with him everywhere. It delights a fantasy of silent communions in some hotel rooms. She would so love to be there when he pleasures himself. She wants to press herself against him from behind and embrace him while he masturbates with her image before his eyes.

T.: Dear N.,

Virgil’s abilities are so phenomenal that Alisa quickly makes progress in her training. She immerses herself in her level of practice. He advances her with sacred seriousness and never lets up in this endeavor, but he is also gentle-passionate, humorous, and uniquely intelligent. When she enters the realm of air-written letters together with him, it feels like coming home in the castle of language.

“Tell me more about yourself,” she asks him.

Alisa’s still-wet hair drips onto his shirt, traces continue to run downward, while he kisses her passionately and waves of desire are already spreading through her body.

Alisa tells

We went on a hiking holiday. Above the pension bed hung a swallow box, a solid piece of craftsmanship that spoke of the satisfaction of making things by hand. The absurdity of it reminded me of a story that had made it difficult for me to fall asleep as a boy.

It is about a Christian clergyman who is taken captive in the Orient. His tongue is cut out and a stone is placed on the wound. The man descends into madness, but the wound heals. He is kept in a pit and from time to time is led around on a rope. His captors live a cave-dwelling existence. Hardly a thistle thrives in their karst landscape. They keep goats, which are better off than the slaves who must look after them.

One night the prisoner is summoned to a religious gathering in a cave. He notices drawings on the walls documenting a water-rich world with crocodiles and wading birds. During the ceremony, the hero undergoes a transformation that turns him into a silent bearer of a joyful message.

An exotic origin saves the Christian from the fate of a goatherd without human rights. One can hardly imagine the lives of the exploited slaves as bleak enough. The community humiliates them. Sometimes they are degraded from morning until night. It is like television for the masters. There is almost nothing else to do. The men sit in the shade, occupy themselves with their weapons, and watch the younger generation torment slaves. The free men have no functions other than to father children and kill.

I tell you the story—it comes from Camus—you shudder and put your fingers in your ears, but I keep talking and try out my different voices while doing so. You hide away in the unfamiliar feather bed, and I am supposed to follow you into the snow-white underworld.

Spoken offstage

At the same time as his entering my center of pleasure, his tongue presses into my mouth. I moan into his mouth; he loves that. While his other hand applies stimulating pressure to my lower back before returning to my bottom like a little creature returning to its favorite place, I reach a climax in a surging wave and am immediately ready and receptive again.