Mirroring

D and I always mean to compile a catalogue of the rooms at the Kew Motor Inn, with room-numbers paired to brief descriptions; but we always mean to do this only when we are leaving, and then it is too late to start. The next time we arrive there we are intent only on fucking, and so forget all about the project. The Kew differentiates Mirror Rooms from Deluxe Rooms, and the former always have a ceiling-mirror above the bed, and a wall-mirror along one side of the bed. Most have also a mirror on the wall facing the foot of the bed. Many Deluxe Rooms also have wall-mirrors. There are occasional rooms that have mirrors placed on opposing walls in such a way as to generate those multiple, receding images that so fascinate children. Gently curving away into the distance are multiple couplings, perfectly synchronized - as if an infinite number of sexual acts were occurring simultaneously. But without the catalogue, I cannot tell you which rooms those are.

Metaphors of mirroring and reflection are among the most fertile for thinking, talking, and writing about sex. I find the sight of myself vigorously fucking D slightly unsettling, for she looks quite a few years younger than her age, and I look quite a few years older than mine (I can, for example, ride Amtrak as a senior without raising any suspicions, though I am in fact fourteen years shy of the qualifying age). A clip featuring D and I sent in to a free porn site would probably be labelled 'tasty MILF gets banged hard by old guy', even though we were born just six months or so apart. But apart from that unease, I like mirrors a lot, and with D in particular I enjoy seeing her being well fucked, and like to watch her watch herself being well fucked. I like to see her seeing how good she looks being fucked. But already, the reflection here is intellectual and emotional as well as visual, a matter of feelings, desires, thoughts, intentions as well as of light-rays, shapes, hues.

There are mirrors on some of the ceilings at the Liberty Inn, and I was in one such room with a new partner in pleasure just before the holidays. B is a lot of fun, with a complicated and interesting sexuality that hardly overlaps at all with D, Q, or F. We had met for a drink one evening, and for an almost entirely innocent breakfast, and then set up an assignation at the Liberty Inn. I will try to post about that in the next few days.

Back, though, to mirrors. Mirror-sex mirrors the kind of mirroring that goes on anyway in sex that is any good, for sex aims at the pleasure that happens between two people, not the pleasure that a person can have on their own but prefers to have in company. I use a mirror to shave, and it helps to shave with a mirror, though I can also manage without if I have to. Sex is often like that. I used to have sex like that. It is definitely better to have sex of this self-pleasing sort with another than with oneself, but it is not radically distinct. If the feedback loops tighten around me when I am fucking a woman who fucks me back - when we are truly fucking each other - sex is not self-pleasing at all, though I do of course get a huge amount of pleasure from it, and that is presumably a large part (or all) of my motivation. The difference is not visible. It cannot be seen in pornography. It does not show up in the mirror. Nevertheless, when I look at the reflection of, say, D and I fucking, I am in some way both inside and outside the sexual act, feeling what cannot be seen and super-adding it to the image in the mirror. What I feel is not my pleasure but our pleasure, the pleasure we get from pleasing each other and being pleased by the other, the giving and taking of pleasure that is reflected back and forth between us.

It is very unusual for me to have sex in the dark these days. Intra-marital is mostly in the mornings, extra-marital mostly in the daytime. I like to see the person I am fucking. I like to look her in the eye. This has many of the features of mirroring, for as I drive my cock deep I can also see that depth register. Q, who thinks a lot about sex, is very interesting to fuck in this lights on, eyes wide-open manner, and there is something very pleasing about the way that we can communicate through our glance as well as through the fusion of cock and cunt. It is also fun to watch her repeatedly climb to the tipping-point of orgasm, when her eyes roll up and her steady gaze - visual, intellectual, emotional - is broken. If I am not coming myself, I can ride out her orgasms while my gaze holds steady, and that kind of watching is very like watching in a mirror: I see, I feel, I notice, I attend, but with a kind of detachment or distance that is an analogue of the distant image in the mirror.

The metaphor or mirroring has its limits. Mirrors facing each other can generate the appearance of infinity, as the image bounces back and forth, and sometimes sex seems just like that. But in order for there to be an image at all, there must be something placed between the mirrors - the thing whose image is to be multiplied indefinitely. And this thing, whatever it is, blocks the light-rays, preventing multiple reflection. If sex is relentlessly and exclusively other-pleasing, there is no reflection, just as if it is entirely self-pleasing. But between people who delight in both the other's pleasure and their own, sex really can generate something multiple, joint, and inexhaustible. Of course, with the mirrors, you can angle one slightly, and then repeated reflection takes place. But fucking does this even when the mirrors are precisely square on. That, anyway, is how it often seems.