Of Torments and Quandaries

The ‘Non Victorian Chick' girl wrote to me recently (don’t’ worry: I have her permission to use her quote) regarding the posting, ‘Blinkered Justice?,  (Thursday 23^rd October).  A most insightful commentary, I think she really has her finger on the pulse when she writes:

“The thing about the picture that strikes me is that the girl is indistinct and fuzzy, the bars are clear and concrete, as are her hands grasping at the bars.

To me it seems a bit symbolic. The girl is becoming indistinct. She's fading a bit, becoming less and less herself. The bars are clear, and concrete. The prison she is trapped in is slowly causing her to fade, and become less and less herself as time goes on. Her hands grasping at the bars are clear as well. So if the girl herself is fading out, her desperation is mounting.  She is trapped, caged, confined, and there is no way out. And as her former identity slowly fades and becomes less distinct, her animal desperation is mounting, as she realises that in time, she will eventually become – unrecognisable.

In a concrete sense, the picture could suggest prolonged sensory deprivation. Her vision could be affected by contacts/frosted goggles/a blindfold worn for long periods of time. Her hearing could be affected by white noise/dripping faucet/ears plugged for long periods of time.  Eventually, she might have laser surgery - after she has lost the ability to read and write.  She could discover - when asked to write out another biography or confession - that she no longer knows how to read and write. She might discover, when told to count the strokes of the cane out loud, that she can no longer remember how to count. 

The Non Victorian Chick”

This got me to thinking (which is one reason I always encourage correspondence).  Years ago in one of my previous incarnations as an electronics engineer I would on occasion be exposed for a longish period to a 800Hz or 1KHz test tone - not especially loud - a very pure sine wave.  Now, the weird thing was, after I turned it off, for a short-ish period afterwards it seemed or felt as if something was missing from the background sounds around me, as if there was a "notch' in my hearing range exactly tuned to the test tone pitch.  This was a very, odd, weird and disconcerting effect.  I was just wondering what effect it would have on the subject of have a constant pure tone pumped into her cell or room in which she has been confined rather than good ol' white noise.  

Going back to the ‘forgetful nurse’, (see the posting of Saturday 18^th October) I always liked the dripping tap thing simply because it can be made to seem as if unintentional and yet, given a dead quiet room – and especially if used in conjunction with the subject confined to a straitjacket - it can make for a delightful torture.  This is especially the case if the subject is forbidden to speak unless spoken to first for fear of receiving a damn good caning otherwise while of course being desperate to remind her carer to turn off the handbasin tap tightly before leaving.

In a similar vein; within the story arc of the present thing I am working on - in one of the later sections - the heroine finds herself confined to a room wherein the lighting continually goes on and off (there may, or may not, be an institutional element - I'm not telling - suffice it to say that it represents a significant departure from my previous output).  But imagine a misbehaving fluorescent tube.  This is something that is easy to replicate in ANY situation - it just requires a faulty starter to have been put aside at some previous date, shutters on the windows or thick heavy drapes or some other way to cut out extraneous light and some form of confinement (and straitjackets are easy enough to come by nowadays, even privately).   

People come, people go – the flickering goes on and on and on, or the tap drips and drips and drips maddeningly...  And no one seems to notice…

But another though has just struck (nothing at all to do with the new book):  What if she has been left totally at liberty to do something about it herself, to get up and turn off the dripping handbasin tap, flick off the light switch (though that would plummet her in to total darkness) - physically at liberty, but restrained from doing so by discipline?  She is not allowed to; and if she does, there will be consequences...  The cane or the torment...  Which will she choose?  

Blinkered Justice?

Ever since I read about opaque contact lenses I have had a sneaking interest in such methods of developing dependency and thus control.  And then I came across this image, albeit with a different (although related) caption, and my imagination became instantly fired up.  Nothing much to do with the plot of the new book, but don't fret; work is still progressing well on that front.  

I may well add more to this posting as the day progresses.  It all depends on where I go, if I take my notebook computer and whether any new ideas pop up in my head.  There are all sorts of stuff bubbling under in my head inspired by this picture, but at present I don't seem able to formulate these ideas in terms of the written word.

It's Not That She's Cruel – She's Just Forgetful. Hey, Anyone Can Have an Off-Day!

Yes, unlike the last posting this one WAS inspired by a certain section of the plot of my new book, as much as it was by the expression on the woman's face. In particular the angle of her eyes is such as to make the addition of a 'think' bubble irresistible.

By the way, one thing I neglected to say last time was that I am also about to start work on what will be - to all intents and purposes - a biography of sorts, but one primarily focussing on my experience of living with dyslexia.

I have often thought of doing something like this over the years - usually when some humorous dyslexia-related anecdote or other has come to mind - and have always imagined it as a kind of after-the-event diary. And thus the provisional title I have come up with:

Dairy of a Dyslexic. From Udder-achiever to...

(Yep! That's right! I really CAN'T tell the difference between a journal and a bottle of 'Gold Top')

There Are More Ways Than One to Keep Her Under Lock and Key

I just love pictures like this!  Images that inspire and stimulate the imagination, often through their sheer simplicity.  Take this photograph for instance, at first sight nothing much going on, just a girl standing in a rather ill-fitting uniform dress.  But look deeper, take another look.  Just one glance at the girl’s eyes and a whole scenario suggests itself, opens up.  I found this on Tumblr and added it to my Tumblr blog last week – a welcome break from struggling with my new book (which this scenario has absolutly nothing at all to do with, incidentally).

“…That’s it… Good girl!  Look deep, deep, deep in to the pattern, mind emptying like a doll, just like a dolly, a plastic plaything waiting to be told what to do next, frightened to be out of its box…  Shall we put you back in your box where you’ll feel all safe and sound and secure?  Yes?  Then let’s get you back to your room, all safely locked away…  Come along, my Little Dolly School Child…  Yes, I think we’ll call you that from now on…”

“Yes, miss…”

‘Little Dolly School Child’ – How she hated the title the woman had just dubbed her, or how she WOULD hate it, once she came to be aware of it, consciously that is!  The school uniform summer dress she had been crammed into – and crammed WAS the operative word, it seemed at least a size too small, perhaps smaller – had been the last straw, at her age.  It looked – and made her feel – ridiculous and she hated herself for kowtowing to her governess’s wishes in letting herself be squeezed into it. 

But there was so much more to it, to her life, now, so MANY other indignities she had ended up submitting to since that woman had come to stay – a lock on her door, not being allowed downstairs, having a new room set aside for her high under the eaves decorated like a child’s room, a bed which looked more like an adult-sized crib, that rule about being ‘seen and not heard’.  This was only the latest manifestation of that woman’s domination – Somehow she just didn’t seem able to stand up to her.  But making her wear a child’s school dress was going a step too far.  They’d underestimated her; she was going to make a break for it, run away; all she needed to do was find some other clothes to change into first… Well such had been the plan at least…  But…

She’d made it to the drawing room – and become frozen in space as if her brain had just iced over. A spinning, shimmering, eye-catching mobile had been mounted in the doorway, just above head height – another hung in front of the window.  Both were identical to the one which hung above her bed and at which she had spent countless hours gazing, slack-jawed and glassy eyed while the ‘relaxation tape’ her governess had introduced droned on and on and on in soft lilting feminine tones about… About what?  She could never quite remember.  Where they had been installed she was bound to catch sight of one or the other of them – and when she did… 

She was utterly captivated, rooted to the spot, had been unable to move for over half an hour, totally under the control of an entire set of deep-seated post-hypnotic commands.  She was very much aware of the bars on her room’s window, she was totally unaware of the bars which had been erected around her mind, ring-fencing her personality in within her own body, didn’t even comprehend such a thing as being possible. 

The shimmering concentric series of hollow two-dimensional spinning stars, each mounted within a larger one and spinning independently from it, would seem hypnotic to anyone one.  But when that individual has been trained month after will-sapping month, the object set up as a hypnotic trigger, obedience to it deeply and patiently ingrained – well, as a security measure it was better than the strongest lock.  She hadn’t even been aware of her governess entering, of her governess layering trigger phrase on trigger phrase, deepening her trance, reinforcing the effect such that in future she wouldn’t even be able to get THIS far unaccompanied…  It was why she’d ‘accidentally’ left the girl’s door unlocked in the first place.

Developing Enema Dependency as a Route to Establishing a Disciplinary Environment

This is something I wrote last week for my Tumblr blog to go with this charming pic I found and has nothing at all with the plot of the new book (I am STILL struggling with the opening paragraphs – proving SO difficult!).  As you’ll probably know, I have used the idea of induced dependency to gain control over another individual in one of my books - Alice Under Disciplne, Book 1 - and elsewhere, but never by this route!  But it is a nice idea - and would work.

“Why the enema, Mrs Fotheringale-Sloane?  Because your stepdaughter’s learnt to submit to the enema, happy with the notion that it can do her no harm, whereas she refuses to take any form of medication offered her and is deeply suspicious of any foodstuffs or drink that taste or smell in the least bit ‘odd’ to her.  But you know, the alimentary canal can absorb some substances equally well when introduced from either end.  So what I am doing here is introducing a mild – at the dosage she is presently receiving – but deliciously habit-forming sedative to the mixture of soap solution, bowel irritant and muscle relaxant we’re using. 

You’ll have to stay out of sight of course, but I think you’ll notice the change in her already, when the nurse brings her in; more amenable, less argumentative, almost KEEN to receive her enema, though of course she wouldn’t admit it.  You see, each time she leaves this room she is left feeling calm, relaxed and infused with a pleasantly complacent fuzzy woolly-headedness – until the drugs wear off and the jitters begin.  And then she is whisked back in for another treatment.  And of course over time it takes a little more to ease her nerves, leaving her feeling a little more euphoric, a little more woolly-minded, a little less able to concentrate each session – which in turn, given time, will leave her easier to handle. 

She hasn’t become aware of any of this of course, the dosage has been incremented far too gradually for her to have noticed – and as her faculties become more and more compromis

ed, so it will become possible to move her on to stronger medication, and without the slightest hint of objection. 

The stuff I have her on at the moment is merely habit-forming from the psychological perspective, although we have gone to some lengths to maximize that dependency by helping her to associate the relief from anxiety she receives with the ritual of receiving her enema.  But the sedative I want to EVENTUALLY lead her on to in this way has a reputation of leading to a deep-seated physical dependency in habitual users – in short; she’ll become fixated on receiving her enema and all the ritual that surrounds it. 

Do you know, only yesterday she actually asked her nurse when her next enema would be, how long she’d have to wait?  Apparently she was ringing her hands and pacing up and down so much that eventually her pyjama bottoms fell down around her ankles, tripping her over – hah, hah, hah, hah!  Can you imagine?  How funny! 

Oh didn’t I say?  Yes we’ve got her in those hospital-issue pyjamas now – we simply refused to continue with her enema treatments unless she complied with hospital regulations and handed over all her outdoor clothes, every last stitch.  It was a good few weeks back now. Psychologically it would have been a very poignant moment for her; breaking with her old life and embracing the new; the moment she began to become a real patient. 

In fact we gave her the standard hospital haircut yesterday – we want her looking as much like all the other patients as possible.  She kicked up a fuss, but I took my cane to her bottom – six strokes soon quieted her down.  Oh yes, she’ll bend, touch her toes, for the cane now if I tell her.  The point is: the more she looks like the other patients physically, in her own eyes, the easier she will find it to begin to identify with them psychologically  - and the harder she is going to find it to hang on to her old identity…  I can promise that as  more time passes you’ll find the Amelia of old fading away before your eyes like an old snapshot in the sun…”                 

A Blog Update

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Amelia: A Girl Transported Back in Time: Victorian Schoolroom Discipline in the Twenty-First Century

Outside, the London traffic thundered, horns honked, taxis bobbed and weaved, police sirens wailed and screeched past and buses waited impatiently for passengers to board at their stops.  Inside, it was 1889 from dawn to dusk, night and day, right down to the typically severe Victorian schoolroom discipline.  It was a world in microcosm in which Victoria was on the throne,  corporal punishment was the norm, authority was unquestionable and a girl like this, even one of marriageable age, could - and would - be returned to childhood: and if you were to as much as show the young honourable Amelia Fotheringale-Sloane, heiress to the famed Fotheringale-Sloane estate, a mobile phone she'd turn her pretty head away in terror.

Nothing to do with the NEW book, but inspired by a sequel to one of my earlier works (one of the INSTITUTIONALISED series - some of you may remember it) which never got much further than a hint at the end of a story and a few words on my hard drive - oh well!  Something about this image just brought my mind back to it - I'm not entirely sure what, but that's often the way.  The cane resting on the desk is of course something I created and later added; you have to imagine the metronome is positioned somehere close to the viewer's position.

By the way:  I'm still hard at work on the new book, even though also still working with the artist, Roger Benson, and working on a book on Mad Cows Disease / CJD and other protein conformation disorders in the background.  

I'm also very soon going to reinstate direct, non-moderated, commenting on this blog, since it has been some while since there has been any attempt to post spam - perhaps as early as this very afternoon.  So there will no longer be that annoying delay between you writing in and you seeing your lovingly composed comment up in lights...  Nice, eh!