E.d. Note Eureka! Sometimes in the course of writing an entry I look at what I have written and say “yes, that is what I believe/think” but I realize I hadn’t thought of it in exactly those terms myself. It is one of the reasons to write here, publish essays and give lectures – I learn quit a bit from myself 🙂 This entry will form the basis of an essay – so you can now say you saw it happen… the moment of conscious understanding.
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In a recent comment on his blog Flagg discussed a little bit about ownership, and I wanted to take a second and comment about the concept here while I had it on my mind. Go read it then come back.
In my mind, ownership has to be organic in the context of even quasi-consensual relationships. I simply don’t know of any other way for it to arise or maintain itself. To be honest, I never understood ownership as a concept that could be based on a contract or set of voluntary agreements… ownership is something that happens.
On the other hand, I also have a concept of service/servitude that absolutely may be based on a contract foundation. This is much more common (in my mind) in the [[wp:BDSM]] community than what I consider ownership. Of course, this is granting most of those contracts a theoretical validity I don’t think they actually have… in other words, most BDSM relationships are about scenes and top/bottom games… the contract then grants them the illusory shape of a service relationship that does not actually exist. Service is outside the scope of this posting.
I have always known ownership was an organic process. My error for years was in thinking then that ownership either happened or not in the first few moments of contact between minds. Not literally moments of course, but certainly very, very early on. I believed this because I could and still can immediately tell when the potential for ownership exists. It was this knowledge I was talking about – but while the *potential* for ownership either exists or not between any two people from the moment of their meeting… the reality is not always so instantaneous; I had just never (until meeting a very special girl) been in a position where I felt the potential strongly without the reality falling into place without effort.
It turns out ownership can be a tricky and elusive beast… even organic things are not always simple. I am vividly aware of this from my own life. By analogy ownership will twist and turn, it will sometimes try and escape or defend itself. Ownership is sometimes something you need to work to pin down.
Like all interactions in chemistry and physics – it is inevitable when the right conditions exist, in the presence of the right catalysts and only between the correct materials. If your smart then and crafty, you can spot the potential for such an interaction and begin to manipulate the conditions and catalysts in order for the reaction to occur. You may need to purify some of the elements, you may need to remove some extraneous factors that are blocking the reaction and you many need to add quite a bit of heat 🙂
What does all this mean? It means that while you cannot force an organic ownership relationship to happen if the chemistry isn’t there you may have to manipulate the conditions of the interaction to allow organic ownership to manifest itself.
Yet, you many ask, if you have to work so hard to get the ownership reaction, is the resulting relationship not too fragile to survive?
No – they are not. The reasons are many and varied but in our analogy with chemistry and physics let us consider that many, many molecular reactions need specific conditions to occur but are then extremely stable to a wide range of conditions after that event. One example of this is the concept of a “state change” or “phase shift”.
Diamond is a fine, fine example such a shift in structure. Take carbon and heat it, add immense pressure and you get diamond under the right conditions. Once diamond is formed then you do not need to maintain the pressure or heat to still have diamond – the new structure (a lattice of carbon) is extremely stable all by itself. It will remain diamond until conditions fall so far to certain extremes that it simply cannot exist.
Many such examples have to do with crystallization of one form or another. We can think of the [[wp:Heat_treatment|tempering]] of steel in such a way as well. Once one exposes the metal to certain conditions one can induce changes that will effect the characteristics of that material for a long, long time to come… even when conditions are not so extreme.
I like it. I like it a lot.
I am in a process of purification myself, removing all those things inside me that prevent me from participating in the reactions I desire. In the process I am becoming better.
Oh, and it’s definitely long past time to turn up the heat 🙂