28 January 2004: The Inanna Dialogue, Part One

We've got a very special guest here in the Hypnogogic Malcontent studio today. Please give a warm welcome to... Lila!

Lila is the creator of a website called Guttergaunt. Billed as a "sex and dream blog," Guttergaunt is an online journal devoted to the two major obsessions Lila's life: her extremely vivid dreams, and her love of bondage. A good portion of her entries consist of serialized memoirs of her earliest bondage experiences, which occurred during her tender teen years at the hands of female schoolmates.

Lila and I met through an online personals ad in late August 2001, and were lovers for about seven weeks. Since then, our friendship has consisted of avid reading of one another's websites, email exchanges about same, and bumping into one another at our local comic shop every few months.

For those who aren't already fans of Lila's, I highly recommend Guttergaunt to you if you're a fan of what porn site ads refer to as "Hot Teen Girl-on-Girl Bondage." Especially if you like your Hot Teen Girl-on-Girl Bondage well-written and laced with far more in the way of intriguing insights and wry humor than you're likely to find on a porn site.

So what's she doing here, writing in my journal instead of hers? Read on...

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Dear Lila,

I am writing to ensnare you in a project that will eat a huge amount of your precious time, and mine as well, to no forseeable gain. Interested? I knew you would be!

I stole this idea from Dave Sim, creator of the comic book Cerebus (of which I know you're not a fan). When Alan Moore (of whom both you and I are great fans) completed From Hell, Dave initiated a dialogue with him which consisted of a long exchange of many long faxes (email would probably have been a more convenient medium, but Dave doesn't do email). Basically, it started out as a discussion of From Hell, with Dave simultaneously playing the roles of interviewer, reviewer, and Dave-musing-on-the-things-Dave-likes-to-muse-on. Discussion of From Hell remained the central theme, but the conversation rambled all over the place, going off into all manner of fascinating tangents. Lots of discussion of the nature of reality, time, and synchronicity. Really good Kabbalistic lessons from Alan. Intriguing and hilarious anecdotes, both personal and historical. Lots of religious argument. A discussion of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a grand metaphor for all the repressed shadow of the Victorian era – said discussion, I’m fairly certain, being where Alan got the idea to include the Jekyll/Hyde character in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

It’s one of the best written conversations, one of the most fascinating meetings of great minds, that I’ve ever read. The whole thing ran to somewhere between twenty and thirty two-column pages of tiny type, and was published in installments in the back pages of Cerebus, under the title Dialogue: From Hell.

Dave did a similar dialogue with Niel Gaiman upon the completion of Sandman (or did that come before the Alan Moore one? I don’t remember which ended first, From Hell or Sandman), and another one, very recently, with Chester Brown, upon the completion of Brown's Louis Riel. Both of these were also great reading, though neither was nearly as long, as brilliant, or as interesting as the Alan Moore one.

Anyway, what I’m proposing is that you and I hold a similar dialogue (by email, not fax). I’ll publish it in installments in my journal, posting new installments as material accumulates. Whenever you and I deem the dialogue to have reached a good endpoint, I’ll paste the whole thing together and give it its own huge page somewhere on my site (much the way you’ve been doing with the serialized stories you complete). You, of course, are welcome to reprint as much of it as you choose on your own site, as well.

If this collaboration turns out to be half as interesting as I’m expecting it to, it may well serve as the prototype for future, similarly-structured dialogues within our little community of online journalers.

As you know, most of my journaling for the past couple of months has concerned the work I’ve been doing in the latest Paratheatrical Research ritual lab, entitled Initiations. This lab has been one of the most powerful and profound pieces of the Great Work I’ve ever done. I’ve got a whole lot of processing and integrating to do, and this dialogue is going to be part of that.

So why a dialogue with you, of all people?

Well, first of all, if you (or anyone reading this once it’s posted online) haven’t yet read my entry of January 23rd, “Inanna and Erishkigal,” read it now, or the rest of this won't make any sense.

One of my first coherent, conscious thoughts, when I came out of the Inanna/Erishkigal Personal Polarity ritual, was, “Man, Lila would have loved that.”

I mean, I spent two months working up to being able to experience full immersion in one of the oldest recorded initiation myths... and when I got there, the mythic initiation turned out to be a hot girl-on-girl bondage-and-domination scene.

A darned good one, too.

Among the people I know, you’re unquestionably the foremost authority on hot girl-on-girl bondage-and-domination scenes. If someone in my circle of friends had had a profound mystical vision involving the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, or a profound mystical vision involving aikido, I assume they’d be really interested in having a conversation with me about it, because I’m the person they know who does that stuff all the time.

That's why I want to have this conversation with you: because I had a profound mystical vision, an initiatic experience of channeling two ancient goddesses... and it took the form of a hot girl-on-girl bondage-and-domination scene, and you’re the person I know who does that stuff all the time.

So let me get things rolling here with a very broad question:

In my recent writings about initiations and the Inanna myth – especially that final Inanna/Erishkigal experience – what, if anything, has resonated with you?

Hey Nicky,

What a cool idea!

Actually, despite not being a Cerebus fan, I’m quite familiar with Dialogue: From Hell. It was reprinted, with a new introduction by Mr. Sim, in Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman, a compilation that was published last year to commemorate Alan’s 50th birthday. It’s the best and longest piece in the whole book, and I totally agree with you about how great it is.

As a matter of fact, I just finished re-reading it. A lucky chance, from my perspective, or probably, from your odd teleological perspective, a deeply significant synchronicity. Ha! How do you like that? I said “teleological!” A new vocabulary word I picked up from reading your site. And, as you may have noticed in my more recent writings, I’ve also been rebelling against the strict, by-the-book grammar lessons learned in my childhood from horrible nuns, by deliberately emulating your blasphemous habit of (gasp!) beginning sentences with “and,” “but,” and “so.”

Shame on you, being such a bad influence on poor, innocent little me! This week, it’s big words and improper grammar, next week I’ll probably be putting my elbows on the table at dinner, and from there it’s a quick, downhill slide to Bedlam, Ruin, and Eternal Damnation.

So (hee hee!), the reason I just re-read Dialogue: From Hell was that I’d just finished reading the first four compilation volumes of Promethea, which had been highly recommended to me by both you and Ace. Wow. It’s my favorite thing Alan’s ever done. In fact, it’s my most favorite comic ever. (“New York’s first Multiple Personality Disorder mayor!” Hee hee hee! “Weeping Gorilla!” Ha ha ha! And the bit with Sophie’s dad made me cry for like half an hour.) One of the reasons that I finally got off my ass and made the trek to Comic Relief to pick up the Promethea books (along with the latest Nyx... have you seen Nyx? New R-Rated Marvel title, part of the X-Men/Mutants canon, about this hot little teenage raver chick discovering her mutant powers. Underage sex, drugs, realistic characters, S&M... super cool stuff), uh, where was I before I started those parenthesis?

Oh, yeah: what finally got me around to following up on your and Ace’s recommendations of Promethea was that both of you mentioned that it was full of information on the Kabbalah. And was it ever! The complete guided tour! Plus tarot, tantra, and the chakras! I finally feel like I understand some of what you weird magician people do and think about now. Which, as I was saying, was why I finally started reading Promethea: so I could understand all those fucking Kabbalah references in your fucking weird-ass journal entries.

Anyway, that’s why I just re-read Dialogue: From Hell: because the first time I read it, all of Alan’s ravings about the Kabbalah were completely over my head, so I decided to read them again now that I’d taken his Kabbalistic comic-book crash course. So, you see, I come to this conversation well-prepared. Your friend Mindwarp’s Corridor of Madness blog even helped me finally get the beginnings of a clue as to what the heck happens in a “paratheatrical ritual lab.”

Promethea also conveniently provided my first exposure, apart from the references in your journal, to the myth of Inanna and Erishkigal. It doesn’t have the whole story, of course (though I did go find the whole story online after reading your January 23rd entry), just those three panels where Jack is telling Promethea about the initiatic symbolism of the pre-coital striptease, at the beginning of the tantra lesson.

Hee hee... and Promethea says, “Isn’t this rather lofty symbolism when you only want me to undress?”

Of course, as you can probably guess, I thought the brief glimpse of Inanna and Eriskigal was the sexiest part of the whole issue. The tantric sex between Jack and Promethea was really interesting, and I love the way those two characters relate to each other, but , as you know, I’ve got rather a one-track mind when it comes to sex. If there’s no bondage, domination, humiliation, or other power play, it just doesn’t get me hot. Since the tantra scene was strictly a consensual, mutually respectful, relating-as-equals kind of thing, I didn’t find it sexy in the least.

On the other hand, that one panel of Inanna kneeling naked before Erishkigal... Yum. Erishkigal with her blue-black skin, and the tiger stripes on her face, basking in that classic “Hmm... what shall I do with you?” pose... Just thinking about it makes me want to rub up against things.

As broad as your question was, I’m not sure if I’ve answered it yet. I seem to have talked a lot more about comics than about initiation.

What “resonated” with me? Well, I certainly found your account of your Inanna/Erishkigal initiation experience totally hot. You were right – I would have loved it. If that was a common sort of experience for you mystical types, I might have to seriously re-think my agnosticism.

I think this is a really interesting topic, but I’m not sure quite where to go with it. Fortunately, since this is a dialogue, I can just hand it back to you for round two. Feel free to ask me some more specific questions, if you’ve got specific avenues you want to explore here.

In the meantime, I’ve got a couple of specific questions for you:

1.) You called your experience a “hot girl-on-girl bondage-and-domination scene.” It was certainly hot, and seems like the ultimate in domination/submission, but was there really any bondage, or did you just toss the word in for extra spice?

2.) I’m new to this whole Kabbalah thing, so I want to double-check this. Kabbalistically speaking, your Inanna/Erishkigal experience was a “climb” up the tree of life from Chesed to Binah? Do I have that right? If so, that’s across the Abyss, right? I guess you even said as much, in your entry of January 27th. I guess all that I’m really asking here is this: crossing the Abyss, that’s a pretty big fucking deal for you magician types, isn’t it? I mean, I only know this from Promethea, but Alan makes it sound as if it’s the big fucking deal. Am I right on this? Can you walk through walls and do the Jedi Mind Trick now?

Stay tuned, folks...
The Inanna Dialogue
will continue as soon
as we get around to it.