Winning adherence to any set of convictions is difficult to achieve, particularly if the desire is to sway public opinion away from the norm. The norm of course becomes the dominant form, and this whether or not it is the best or most effective way of achieving harmony in relations between all subjects. Skewed of course and always subservient to the will of controlling forces.
Now it may well be that love between the nations and the peoples of the world is preferable to war, but if it is not promoted and exemplified then it is war that will win out. I am very sorry to say. Any level of influence to the alternative grows only very slowly and is dependent upon responses from the masses.
Love between actual individuals, love not influenced by gain and control, is even more difficult to achieve. Love between men that is love and not the need to dominate and control is a greater challenge still. When we are all wrestling with our demons.
Perhaps this is ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ – an actual concern and union with the other, until there is no separation of being.
Thank you for all your gifts, Oscar, not least your ability to provoke thought.
I wonder if I am suffering from ‘writer’s block’, or if I am just lazy.
You see, even though I know you depend on these letters coming through, that you want to be remembered to the world at large, that there is the danger that you will be lost to history, that your significance will be eclipsed, I still only think of myself and whether I can be bothered to write anything at all – let alone a missive to you!
There is something so very over-indulgent about suffering from any sort of ‘block’; the inappropriate inability to do something that one does want to do, but which one denies oneself in order to whip up some sort of self persecution, contribute to the fear of failure, and just be thoroughly self centred. It is the ‘I cannot be bothered’ that is the most worrying thing, because it is like a self-denial, as if what I might have to say is not worth anything even to myself. Too much time is spent dealing with the realities of a silencing ethos that is culturally and morally generated, without adding to it myself!
And of course I do not take account of the fact that I am very, very lucky to have open to me the means of expression that allow me to say whatever I want to say; although that said, there are strictures in every culture, boundaries that one cannot cross without inviting reproach. I can however express this version of myself, be true to some notion of who I think I am, and make known across this platform my observations, thoughts, commentary. It is certainly not true everywhere. There are places across the globe in this the twenty-first century where certain words and certain phrases will get the author into a lot of bother, where neighbourhoods will erupt in condemnation, where lives are sanctioned, restricted, or even curtailed. I know there are many people across the globe who may be interested to read these letters along with you, Oscar dear, but they are afraid to ‘click the link’, because they would then be revealing something about themselves that their society, their family, their belief-system, would utterly condemn.
That is a real ‘writer’s block’; when one might know what one has to say, but is not allowed to say it.
You skirted issues yourself, Oscar, although there may not have been the vocabulary to address those obsessions of yours that got you caught by public disgrace.
I do not know; but mealy-mouthed and petulant refusals to send these short letters to you seems more to do with an abject sloth than a mental deficiency known as a ‘writer’s block’.
Tell me, please, why it is that it is something of a learned human ‘nature’ to celebrate life in all of its rewards and plenitudes by overindulging in food and drink! I just do not understand it. Why is it that any form of celebration – even the celebration of the everyday going particularly well – has to be capped off with feasts and wine, and spirits and strong coffees, with sweetmeats and treats, all of which do more harm than good!
It seems to me that it is learned behaviour, but it is a very strange one. So, I am in a very good mood, and I have achieved whatever it is that I have achieved, maybe a trip out went well, maybe everything fell into place the way that I wanted it to, and so I decide I am going to treat myself, to round off a good day by spoiling myself. And there of course is the rub. It is literally spoiling myself!
Now I am not someone who is ridiculously over indulgent, as you well know. I will accept an alcoholic drink or two, I will partake of a bottle of wine, I will order a fairly extravagant meal in a restaurant, maybe a dessert, maybe some cheese and biscuits; but these occasions are actually few and far between, and in the current health dilemma that dominates all social interaction (see my earlier note to you entitled: Pandemic!), there is precious little opportunity to go out and make merry. So, like most of the populations of the world, any momentary celebrations have to be practised in the home. You well know from me, Oscar, that my home environment is singular, that I live alone, have occasional visitors, but that most of my time is spent on my own in my comfortable surroundings, and therefore able to indulge my tastes for celebratory meals at the drop of a hat! And I do so maybe once every week, perhaps once every ten days or so. And every time there is the same result, to a greater or lesser degree, of a hangover that forces me to waste much of the ensuing day in recovery, nursing myself through the stomach pains, and the headaches, and the inability to eat properly. I do not even really enjoy the celebration when it is happening! Yes, I must like the moment when the alcohol takes effect, when I feel excited and happy, laughing at life as it presents itself around me, but I always then go too far, have to be rid of the wine, and all of the food, and so devour and drink it all, go to bed not really aware of what I am doing, and sleep a very heavy sleep, to be awoken early with a chronic dehydration and the sensation that my body is in rebellion. And – one more and – I have been doing this for years, perhaps all my entire adult life!
It is socially acceptable, and in certain circumstances even required. I have been at important occasions where to refuse a drink, a toast to whatever, is frowned upon, and I have been with people who insist that they will buy you a drink, that you will drink it with them, whether you want it or not. I have had ‘fun’, shared happy times, tried new things, new beverages, new foodstuffs around the world, and not really taken account of the cumulative harm that I am doing to myself. You must know what I mean, Oscar dear, you were a gourmand and an imbiber with expensive tastes which you also indulged, and which you shared willy-nilly.
Well, nowadays I find myself saying every single time – it has to stop!
I have fairly recently conquered the excesses of my diet, and I intend also to limit to an absolute zero my intake of alcoholic beverages. You note I say ‘intend’, which leaves a certain wavering point, but I shall take things, as all the self help programmes dictate, one day at a time!
I have a suspicion that you never stopped at all – that you carried on with your indulgences until your very end, with only the enforced respite of imprisonment interrupting you. I get the impression that you had a sense of yourself as if you needed no improvement, despite the condemnation of your age, despite the wagging finger of censure. I suppose you felt you knew best.
How far away your world seems, and yet how very near. I read about you in history books, I consult biographies, I view the films that commemorate your life, your contributions, and of course the infamy of your trial, punishment, the aftermath, and I am struck by the parallels that still exist today.
It is true to say that the rise of social media – which is very much in the hands of the people – allows a form of self expression hitherto unheard of, and that within those realms it is perfectly possible for young gay men – men who would have been those you would have known, men who would have been you – a level of communication with the world at large that has until now been impossible. This means that we receive a competition for attention, and that we can choose what to view in the face of all the realities around us.
So, for instance, it is possible to watch ‘TikTok’ videos that affirm gay experience, make of it a positive, create a dynamic where there is acceptance, tolerance and love – where there is also fun, and enjoyment, and where all the varieties of youthful gay expression find platform. You can exist in a world where this is all you see, because there are so many of them, they are short and sweet, they send a message of hope and of solidarity, and they allow serious points, and trivial points, to be addressed with a candour that is refreshing, and zesty, and undeniable within their sphere of influence.
Equally, there is the opposite, just as powerful, with just as many followers and adherents, and these opposing forces do battle to try to dominate dominant discourse, to become the argument which wins out in popular consensus. I do not know if either of them actually ever wins out, or whether they are avidly and momentarily consumed to bolster burgeoning identities, lost to the sands of time, noticed fleetingly to confirm, or to subvert, a world view, and then reality, and mundanity, become the playgrounds in which they are to be lived out. It is like looking through holiday brochures, and then having to walk home in the rain.
I feel such affinity with the creators, and makers, and stars of these short videos, admire their wit and ingenuity, want them to be right in their assertions that being gay is the best thing in the world, that there are strides ahead to be taken, that understanding is everywhere, that love wins. And I think of you, dear Oscar, the great wave of popularity on which you sailed for many a year, and the parties, and the associations, the rendezvous, the trysts, that you enjoyed, seemingly unendingly. So very precarious, the assumption of rights, rights of passage, rights of representation, rights of being. All bound within legal strictures that can shift and alter, be inclusive, be exclusive, through time, from place to place. Gay people have fought for changes in national laws; others can do the same.
Perhaps tolerance and understanding will become the bywords of human advancement.
A miserable day of rain and cold in Chortleton, not helped by the fact that we are in the midst of a global pandemic! Yes! Coronavirus – Covid 19, or so it is called.
You died, my dear, before the Spanish Flu of 1918, so you may not know what I am referring to, although I suspect that airborne respiratory diseases have been around forever, come in varying strains and levels of severity, so there may well have been something within your lifetime that was a cause for concern.
Of course in this era there is a popular belief that we will be able to defeat any illness that comes our way with mass vaccination programmes, and to some extent that has been proven by the almost total eradication of certain ailments through these means, but so far no one has come up with a vaccine strong enough, or effective enough, to defeat this one. The whole world is therefore and as a consequence on red alert! All sorts of measures are in place almost everywhere one goes to try to curb the transmission rates between individuals, because it is by breathing, coughing and spluttering over each other that the disease it seems is most efficiently transmitted. No laughing matter, I can tell you, as thousands upon thousands of people around the world have succumbed to the virus and their lives have come to an end.
There are those who are completely swaddled within their own homes refusing even to see the light of day, and there are those who are entirely blasé about the whole affair, pretend that it is not happening, or that it cannot get to them, or that they will with no doubt be able to fight off all of the symptoms easily and robustly. There are those who are completely and utterly paranoid, and those who are completely and utterly deluded. I cannot be crass about it though, Oscar dear – apparently the forces of evil turn against anyone who dares to question either one way or the other, so one is left to one’s own devices and to one’s own musings, and a need to protect oneself above all else.
In that respect the life of the older gay male is actually something of an advantage – nobody wants to know you anyway, so there is little chance of social interaction, the young keep their distance, more frightened of the spectre of old age than the possibility of infection (in most cases they seem able to fight it off quite easily), and of course living alone, or in a couple, means one is limited to intercourse only with a known other, or indeed with the self. Little trips to the shops, wearing a mask, and speedily, are well within the capabilities of the early retired gay male, who can snicker and guffaw in secret (because of the face mask) at almost any even vaguely amusing happenstance that might occur!
Party people do have to beware – whatever kind of party one may be referring to; events that are ‘super-spreaders’ seem to take their toll!
A little something – written some time ago ….. (some sort of frustration – who knows?):
Goddamn this place.
This place which is EVERY OTHER PLACE I CAN THINK OF.
And mine are not the grievances of a tiny minority, but the grievances of a silent majority – silent because they do not choose to speak – only to perform. Silent because that is the safest escape route (the way to get on your bike mate).
This which has the surface veneer of acceptance, of tolerance, of understanding, of commitment, of promise and promise again. This which keeps the eyes watching at the window, and the lump in the throat and the claustrophobic self-absorption, the tentative reaches of self-destruction. The way – a way – to have done with it. A run away. So often to slam the doors with a soft thud, final to the ear, and lock and bolt and barricade and sit in fuming madness.
‘In your own asylum’, they say, not he, they, they all say, they in their judges’ robes who note and surmise and pretend that they know it all, for what they see around them is all they wish for. The same bland toleration and acceptance, boring to the nth tprw.
This permitted level of intercourse. Fuck you(rself).
To force again those hysterical reactions, those screams and tears and blinding tempers, those tantrums and high pitched, nervous enquiries, that deep, wounding concern. That frenzy of animated mental activity which grapples for words and explanations, rationalisations, calming, soothing, whispering arms around your shoulders. As if to rub it all away. As if you might ever have been a fool to yourself.
As if you have been wrong (again).
As if.
As if that could ever be so.
Seeing not with eyes but with distorted visions of pressing temples, and of pain, racking, hacking, bleeding, neverending … there is the wet poisson (just like a smack in the face, attack in the face, the little knowing pick me up).
I do not believe it again.
Sempre idem.
Sempre – always.
(I think it means ‘always the same’, but who cares if the wonders of education, marvellous, full and encyclopaedic education leave me in a state of ignorance?)
Who cares what lessons we have learned?
Who cares to place in perspective all the little details, all the shadings and the colours to paint a dream of a glowing picture?
Who cares to have the beauty of the truth, or the truth of the beauty, or the real thing?
‘I know I say that I don’t’, (when I do).
‘Don’t you?’
‘Have you been lying to me, is that what it is?’
‘Have you got everything you came for?’
Bitter, biting, barbarous thoughts. Looking on the dark side of the moon. Keeping the smile until it can be used again. Like noticing a clump of blue flowers, that you notice are forget me nots. Forget me not … (as if it were possible).
I know a man who thought of death and contemplated suicide. And there they are.
I feel an expanding frustration. I feel intolerant, and I will not accept all you offer because it is not enough … and no, I will not leave you alone.
I will always be in hot pursuit, even if you hang yourself. You think and you believe whatever it is you think and you believe, as if whatever it is is all there is, as if there is no more.
No more, they cry, but my dagger twists too.
I wish that I could be a silly fucker, but I’m just too good at it.
No more, they cry, because they are shivering wrecks within their suits of armour, and what they want is to run home to their mummies. What they need is to …
Take some control.
Forge that big old hand of destiny.
Put things into some perspective.
What they’ll do is knock themselves cold, senseless and incapable, not able to, not even able to stand up and see …
We live under the impression that things were more basic, less refined, more brutal in your time, but if you could see the levels of brutality that exist in this day and age, Oscar, you would be horrified. You see, we know all about everything nowadays, whereas I think in your time it was far easier not to know; we are bombarded with hard facts moment by moment, when in your time you were dependent upon word of mouth and the printed word to learn about anything. In that respect at least I think you probably had an easier time of it. There is no real possibility of living in blissful ignorance these days, except that, and this is the strangeness of it, the sheer incessant nature of reportage, of updates, of information, makes it impossible to take it all in, so that actually much is simply filtered away, not prioritised, unmarked in its effect. Often the most terrible tragedies are reported in news reports, and are then quickly brushed aside because some more humorous story is given significance. So maybe it is the case that blissful ignorance is in fact the normal state of being, even as we are being saturated with information.
You knew what your knew; we do not seem to know what we think we know.
“A child who finds himself rejected and attacked on all sides is not likely to develop dignity and poise as his outstanding traits. He develops defences. Like a dwarf in a world of menacing giants, he cannot fight on equal terms. He is forced to listen to their derision and laughter and submit to their abuse … He may withdraw into himself, speaking little to the giants and never honestly. He may band together with other dwarfs, sticking close to them for comfort … Or he may out of despair find himself acting the part that the giants expect, and gradually grow to share his master’s own uncomplimentary view of dwarfs. His natural self love may, under the persistent blows of contempt, turn his spirit to criticism and self hate”.
GORDON ALLPORT, THE NATURE OF PREJUDICE, (Addison Wesley, 1954), pp. 142-143.
Published, as you have no doubt noted, long after your death, and probably in a mode of expression somewhat alien to your own times, although you too wrote about giants, had something of fairy-tale mentality, so I cannot see that it is much of stretch to come to an understanding of what this quote is actually saying.
It is interesting to note that the prejudice from which you suffered was not in and of yourself, was not as such self-directed, imposed upon yourself as a reaction to the word of the giants that surrounded you, but was more purely their own, or society’s own, in which you passed for so long as someone to be praised and lauded, to be revered even, until the prejudice came to be public censure.
I do wonder what it must have been like to be the sort of dwarf that you were, so very popular, until the giants waiting in the wings (with their bouquets of cabbage leaves) finally got to you. It is almost a strange mystery that condemnation has to be pointed out, and then whipped up, before it is anything at all. Bizarre, Oscar, that there must have been people you knew who on one day were your ardent admirers, and only days later were in direct opposition to you spouting their venom in print and in voice! And the silent, more lethal I fear, who said nothing but had their thoughts, and who let those thoughts run free and become a lynching once those thoughts were given permisiion to be.. All just a media storm? An early media storm? Public opinion urged into being by confirming suspicions, by offering proof, by retelling a story which had been of victory across stages (even continents, so we are told – after all, you did tour America!)
I hope you enjoyed my recent epic poem; it was a labour of love some time ago, and I felt keenly that it should be aired. I appreciate the time you were willing to give to it. All rather introspective and difficult to follow, I know, but that’s me for you – rather difficult to follow but well worth the effort with the multitudinous rewards that can be gained! I continue, as you know, to question shared perceptions of reality, on all sorts of issues, and to keep on occupying a position of opposition to mose established tropes – particularly around the rule bound societies that ordain how we as individuals are to live our lives. Now I know that things have changed drastically through the centuries, and that you yourself witnessed some of those changes, but essentially versions of the status quo keep on trying to reassert themselves and power is retained in the hands of a limited few. You poked a finger at the seat of power, pinched its bottom with ribald wit and caricature – and look, dear Oscar, where that got you!
I am hoping I will fair better. I am living a life of relative seclusion, and am therefore not open to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in quite the same way you were – not yet at least. This is my very first foray into any form of public declaration, and to date I have not courted fame and notoriety in the ways that you did. Not that there has been no impact. Of course I have operated within the confines of my own society for many years, and at several junctures have found myself having to make choices which either uphold or challenge the modus operandi. Where there was a choice, then I made a choice, but of course on many occasions my choices were actually dictated by the society around me, and therefore limited in their scope. I could do x or y, both of which may have been unpalatable to me, but neither of which could be avoided, unless I wished to place my liberty and well-being at stake. That is how serious making a choice can sometimes be; you can stand in defiance of some movement or other, some dictate which is unquestionably wrong in your own mind, some person even who grabs power for themselves and then abuses it, but then there will be consequences, and sometimes they can be dire. We have seen it over and over again. You must have seen it too, although I get the impression that in your time there were not really the means of mass dissemination of facts and materials, uncontrolled by corporation or state, so that merely hearing about things must have been difficult.
In our age we are besieged by information, and some of it we accept and some of it we reject. We are influenced one way or the other by the dominant mores, and every now and again we may exercise our right to choose, if choice, itself, is actually available to us.
All I know, Oscar dear, is that you were treated most unjustly, and that it is that legacy of injustice which still to some greater and lesser extent holds sway, in varying ways, across the entire globe.
In this day and age I have some pride in who I am allowed to be, but I am well aware that it is allowed to me, it is not a given.
Best wishes to you, despite your levels of ongoing castigation,
We’re you always waiting for Bosie? And all the others? It seems to be the prerogative of youth to keep the older and the more learned waiting for them to deign to find the time to make a call, meet an assignation, keep a date.
Of course I was just like them myself when youth was on my side, but now, alas, I must be the one who does the waiting and has to practice patience and must be understanding and accommodating. I wonder if such attributes do come with age, or if they are forced upon us by the emergence of a circumstance which makes of us dependent. I could of course just get on with my own life, but the hankering for the presence of youthfulness, the magic the young bring with them keeps me hooked like an addict!
Letters to Oscar Wilde 