lifestyle

Pandemic!

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

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!

I’ll keep you posted, Oscar dear,

But until then,

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Speech

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

My dear Oscar,

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 …

Who am I talking to?

You?

….. charming, don’t you think, Oscar?

Algernon B Duffoure.

What we know …

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

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.

I will write again,

Your friend,

Agernon B. Duffoure.

Today’s Quotation

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

Consider the below:

“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!)

All something of a mystery …

And about what …

Hope you like my artwork!

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Echoes

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

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,

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

The Wait

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

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!

Take care, Oscar dear,

Your friend and ally,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Eternality

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

I have a feeling in this modern era that I am more of a Bosie than an Oscar.  Over indulged and flighty, everything at my beck and call, able to pick and choose and reject and dismiss – to ‘like’ and, of course, to ‘un-like’.  Oh, I wish you had encountered the internet!  Where an ‘influencer’ can die and be mourned by millions, while many other millions never knew that such a person ever existed!

I have a feeling that you were actually very set in your ways, and that despite the reprimand of imprisonment, of public humiliation, of loss of career and income, you actually carried on as normal, selecting youthful companions across France and the other denizens you visited once you were in your retirement.  Very strange thing about retirement; you may stop one thing but you carry on doing all of the other things that have been the compulsions of living.  I do think there was an element of compulsion in your character, Oscar, because you seem to have had to keep on doing what you always had done, like some irresistible urge, some ongoing defiance in the face of censure and opprobrium, an obsession lived out in your own real time.  

Almost addictive.  

We think we know all about addiction in this twenty-first century, because we have invented drugs and formed habits that have become utterly all-consuming.  I think it is probably the case that much of the planet is now drug dependent, and where people think they are not, they only have to look to the ingredients of the foodstuffs that we are all forced to consume, to the levels of sugar, caffeine, nicotine, alcohol that have become the staples of virtually the entire globe, to realise that we all keep on returning to the same substances, the same stimulants, to regulate not only our waking hours but our dreaming ones too.

None of it was unknown to you, Oscar, and I would hazard a guess that you indulged in various illicit substances throughout your lifetime.  After all, there may not have been the multiplicity of chemical concoctions that we have now at our disposal, but your Victorian age was notorious for gases and potions, acids and poisons, that were mind altering in their effects.  Even before your time!  Samuel Taylor Coleridge springs to mind, Kubla Khan, Xanadu, the ‘pleasure dome’ of heady intoxicants transporting the romantic mind.  I expect it has all been going on throughout the millennia, the ancient world with its nymphs and satyrs, its gods and demi-gods, the mysticisms of the Orient, water pipes, and hashish, and transcendental meditation, the yogis of the Indian subcontinent, the dream-time of Australia’s originary folk.  A part, it might be argued, of the human condition.

The problem, of course, is that such behaviours encourage a stepping away from the established norm, a re-evaluation of that established norm, and very often a subversion of its intent and its effect.  In collision with that other part of the human condition which seeks regularity, order, compliance, rules and proscribed regulation.  You know, we all know, all about all of that.  I wish you had not been made to suffer because of it;  as I wish those of today were not made to suffer because of it too.

Love to you,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Oscar Wilde! Viva!

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

I write to you across the years – the many years since your death – the century and more …

I write to you across the years because I think you will understand me, and I think I am more like you than I might want to imagine or admit. I have the same desires, deep-rooted lusts, needs that overtake my very being and come to be my purpose in life, my essential self, my way of being. To the point where I do not even notice life slip by.

You were deemed a bad man, and you were punished for being bad. Your society saw you as greedy, as gluttonous, a gourmand, an ugliness. In my age I am more indulged for the sins that you committed, but there is no difference, and my blue, green, pathway-led lifestyle choices, my waywardness and neediness, my refusal to be a part of it, my dependent hegemony to the new/old and older/newer status quo demands that our parallelism is seen. All over the world. Whether recognised or unrecognised, whether spoken about or whispered in hushed tones, whether displayed or hidden from view, you walk with me and I with you, our banners fluttering in a mythic sky.

You were open; I am closed. You made yourself known; I lock a door on the world and do not even venture out. You faced your fears whilst my fears paralyse me to the point of immobility. I do not know why your star shining before mine dimmed the lights, nor why it is that your reflected luminescence is all that I can see to grope my way forward on a path not dissimilar but exactly the same, nor why it is that where I live and when I live boys hang from cranes in the same universe as boys kissing, as weddings and nuptials flit between and beside imprisonment still and beatings and the funeral cortege. I have all of your emotions de profundis to the clouds and space and beyond to worlds you never saw.

I do not think you were ever free and I too am never free. Just as your age and society made you, so my age and society make me, and the two are terrifyingly the same and overlap and coalesce and become inexplicably crushed beneath the monoliths of being that are the dictates of the norm.

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

…. a note ….

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

My dear Oscar,

Just a brief note to let you know that I have not abandoned you and that my tardiness is due only to sloth and diversion. Everyday seems to be filled with the nonsense of living – the need to do things you could not even imagine as being necessary. In your day there were no supermarkets, no cars, no air travel, no television – none of the things that fill our everyday. I believe there were telephones – oh if only you knew how great is their importance in this era, how they store and define each personality, how they have become the very existence of society – at least – in those countries where they are not being given a more significant usage. You met your boys in the flesh and spoke to them and charmed them and gave them gifts and did all that you did that got you into so much bother with actual people; now there is a virtual dimension to communication, to meeting, even to enactments of congress, playing a part, being the sort of person who …. everything sort of learned by rote so that before you even meet with them you know exactly what will happen and there are few surprises. Nowadays there is a need to escape reality, to take drugs more powerful than alcohol, to get lost in a hyper-reality, in order to feel that anything has happened at all. I will explain soon ….

Oscar, don’t worry … life goes on.

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Home

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

Please see below a collage I have made for you.

You will see how complicated our age has become, the questions that are now under consideration, how we have moved from poor you and poor Bosie to political condemnation, to ongoing imprisonment, even death. In our world, just as in yours, some ways of being are not allowed, and people are made to suffer if they practice anything outside the status quo.

I do not want to tell you that everything is bad and pessimistic; it is possible to drink champagne and get drunk, to have sex and dance and parade through the streets, to live a blameless life with freedoms to express yourself – you just have to be aware that this is not true everywhere and that there are limitations – just as there were for you.

You had a marvellous time with your boyfriends and your parties, with Bosie’s devotion and the friendship of others – your dear Robbie buried with you, John Grey who turned from you – moments of happiness preceding … you know what they for you were preceding.

I believe it is possible to live your life openly, to reach a ripe old age, to be respected, to have a good time, to be a part of everything – somewhere in the world. Maybe in some part of America – the land of the free – which you visited and enjoyed I understand – just not everywhere.  In truth America is also problematic – everywhere is ever so slightly problematic, if you are gay.  South Africa, they say, is good in this modern era, and some European states – like Norway … it should of course be possible simply to stay at home – wherever home may be.

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure