Writing

Contemplating agedness

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

You did not reach a ripe old age yourself. It is a great shame that your treatment at the hands of the judicial system basically contributed to the foreshortening of your life, so that you reached only your 46th birthday. I for one am sorry that this was the case. In fact in your age, the late Victorian age, life expectancy for men was not too dissimilar from the age that you reached, although the prevalence of infant mortality skews somewhat the recording of accurate death rates. Nevertheless, lives on the whole were not long, and certainly not as long as they have come to be all these years later. Now it is common to hear of people living until they are over 100 years old, at least in the West, where not only medical advancement, but also economic plenitude, ensure that many are well cared for into their dotage.

What happens to them though is a different thing altogether, and comes to be slightly alarming. In the countries you inhabited, in Ireland, the UK, France, and even America that you visited, it seems to be the case that the aged are not treated with veneration, but are more often than not parcelled off into care homes, to be kept out of the way, and to lead quite restricted lives. Any health issues become the dominant issues of existence, and since the medics have plied these people with drugs for half of their lives, very often there is the onset of dementia, and of Alzheimer’s disease, taking their toll upon any quality of life. Through this age of the pandemic of Covid 19 the very aged are kept isolated completely from the rest of society, even from their loved ones, in efforts to keep them alive and well (something which of course fails because these people are already old and frail). I must say, Oscar, I do find it bizarre that such efforts are made to keep people who are at the end of their lives going, celebrating the fact that 96, 97, 98 year olds keep on living within their peculiar rest home scenarios, while young people are sent out on to battle fields, are put in dangerous positions everyday, sometimes losing their lives pointlessly. Cars still zoom around cities, polluting the very air that we breathe, mass production of plastics persists, choking natural resources like waterways and seas and oceans, landfill sites become poisoned deserts where certain members of humanity have to eke out a living – and yet, where there is privilege, where there is plenty, keeping a few doddering old folk going beyond any version of a natural end is the priority.

Now I know I am being controversial, and that one day I may well be one of those ancient crones, but I pray to the memory of you Oscar, that should I find myself in such a position I will be fit and healthy and compos mentis. From my standpoint, as it is, in the present, I cannot think of anything worse than a gang of experts making decisions for me and choosing to keep me going no matter what state of being I may be in.

Oh, and it does have to be said – being very very old and very very gay may be a mix that is difficult to endure – unless of course I happen also to be very very well and very very rich too!

Your friend, as always,

Algernon B.Duffoure.

Seeing the future

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

I was wondering if you knew what was happening to you, and if you could foresee what would happen. With the benefit of hindsight it all seems utterly predictable, as if you should have seen what was about to occur, that you could have planned differently, been more aware. I am wondering now if that is the case for all of us, that there are set inevitabilities about existence, and that all we can do is welcome each of them as they come. Very little happens that is truly surprising, that is so out of the concept of the ordinary that it becomes even remarkable.

Yes, there are natural disasters that suddenly crop up on news media that make us all sit up and think, but I wonder how unusual they are for the people affected, or for the people who have been arguing that these supposedly freak occurrences were bound to happen at some point in time. There is always some cause to whatever effect, even if it is one that is not readily foreseen. It is almost as if we are actually taught to ignore the obvious. I am in pain. I ignore the pain. I self-medicate in one way or another in order to try to suppress the pain. I seek medical advice and they too work to suppress the pain. But the pain persists, grows, becomes something more difficult to conquer. I die, it is reported, happy, and having lived a fulfilled life. That old story. Nobody seems to want to investigate the pain. My village cannot fish because oil tankers have polluted the water. People keep jumping from the top of tall buildings. Oscar, I do wonder if we ever learn anything of value at all.

With best wishes to you, as always,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

A state of wonderment

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

My state of wonderment is not at the effect of all that surrounds me, is not the appreciation of all of the elements of being, nor is it any form of sensory overload – it is all about wondering.

If you had lived.

If you had never got into so much bother.

If some level of tolerance and understanding could have saved you from persecution.

Today such levels of supposed tolerance and understanding do exist, but the same parade of characters and caricatures populate popular consciousness, are displayed within the media, all doing what they have been doing certainly since your time, and probably a lot longer. Women simpering around men, gay men kept in the background, or allowed to perform, to reveal levels of absurdity, make everyone laugh.

Things have moved on, things have not moved on at all – it is a constant theme of mine, Oscar dear, because I just keep on being reminded, and I do not have to wonder for very long, how things would be if …. because they never are.

The dominant order asserts itself, and reasserts itself.

I remember that when you were in prison they put you on a treadmill, and do you know, Oscar, that in the United Kingdom the use of the treadmill as a punishment for misdemeanours was outlawed by the Prison Act of 1898 – one year after your release. Ah, the hands of fate ……

Only ever variations on a theme.

Best wishes to you,

Algernon B. Duffoure

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Dissent

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

Is there room for dissent?

I am asking because it seems to me that the position your adopted was one of dissent; you did not agree with the overriding moral assumptions of your age, and you made that known. Or, at least, you put forward a different moral spectrum, harking back to the assumed societies of the Ancients, in opposition to the moral trajectory of your own age.

It was not well received, as we now know; and you paid a heavy price for insisting that your point of view should outweigh the feeling of your age. It leads me to wonder if that is the total capacity for dissent. There is some room within a free society (or one that calls itself ‘free’) for the voicing of views that go against the common trend, for them to be made known to some degree, for them to be heard, but it is through the course of history, beyond the interventions of any interlocutor, that opinion is changed, raising the dissenting voice to one that has influence. You spoke very eloquently about what you termed ‘Greek love’, that which exists between an older, educated, trusted male, and younger acolytes requiring teaching and instruction, and I am sure that in many respects you have a fair point. Of course it is the case that the younger learn from their elders, that a view of the world is formulated alongside, or even in opposition to, dominant tropes put forward by those who have lived the longest, but we know, Oscar, that your form of education went a little further. Your form of education did involve some level of exploitation, buying and selling, trading one thing for another. So it does have to be said, I think, that when the voices of the elders are essentially corrupting and are putting forward messages that are not really of benefit to humankind, then they do have to come under question. Which in some circuitous route does lead me back to the notion of dissent.

It is very difficult to argue that you were right in your views, but just as difficult to argue that you were wrong. Depending upon the stance taken either position would have been one of dissent, although I suppose arguing for ‘Greek love’ did fly in the face of the vast majority of opinions held at the time, and in your particular society, and so it would seem that that was where the dissent actually lay. It is not necessarily where the dissent would lie today. There are those who argue vehemently that free sexual expression across all sexes and genders, inter-generational and socially proscribed, is to be encouraged, promoted, and entered into the statutes of legal frameworks as characteristics that are protected. These arguments see the historical age itself as voicing a dissent to the current dominant order, hiding behind the archaic and the out of date to persecute freedoms expected. So that dissent shifts, and as such is policed, shut down, countered in a cultural warfare that allows some things to be said, and some things to be muted, misrepresented, marginalised.

There must be a common ground. Beneath all of the positions held and assertions made, the learned rhetoric and adherence to beliefs, there has to be some measure of common ground; some argument that says: ‘This is best for humanity, really is, truly allows freedom with consideration of others, recognising all of our needs, all of our honest desires.’

Goodness knows, Oscar, why such questions preoccupy me; I want to find for you some understanding.

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Miracles

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

I was noticing how easy it is to breathe. I was thinking about it because in the midst of the pandemic which is currently gripping and affecting the entire planet, it is still easy to breathe. Easy to breathe even though we are constantly being told that air quality is deteriorating and that the lungs of the earth, the rain forests of the Amazon, are being decimated. My breath still flows, in and out, regulated, barely noticeable, expected, in spite of dire warnings that traffic pollution is choking our major cities, and that we as a race are susceptible to the blocking of our airways through allergic reaction, through infection and the dreaded virus of the pandemic itself. There is an ongoing and ever increasing narrative which seems to threaten even this most basic of requirements – the fear that we have created a planet where it will no longer be possible to breathe, and that that will be our collective demise. I wonder why it is that we have to subject ourselves to such a level of fear?

Of course I am also quick to acknowledge that if any one of us does suffer any form of breathing difficulties then of course measures need to be taken to protect us. It is self evident that the most basic of life forming activities have to be safeguarded above all else, and that should any of the threats that are so meticulously detailed come to have actual impact, then we as a collective, as a human race, need to eradicate them. But still I am left wondering why it is that these threats, generating abject fear in very many subjects, have to be the grand narrative trope of our age. We are poisoning and choking ourselves, or so the story goes, and no matter what efforts we put in place to try to counter this, the creeping certitude of annihilation is everywhere apparent. This is the undercurrent of out age, the subtext, as if we as a race will bring it upon ourselves because we know no better, because we are sinners, because we give in to greed and lust and all seven of the seven deadly sins. Because we are stupid children who require nothing but self satisfaction, a kind of self-pleasuring and self indulgence, no matter what the consequences for those around us or for the world itself. Oscar, dear, I just do not buy it.

Yes I know that I am compromised, that I am co-opted into ways of being that I might come to question, that I take flights, and drive a car, eat some mass produced foodstuffs, drop a piece of litter once in a blue moon, but I cannot recognise myself as the arch villain out to destroy the planet. I am conscious and aware and do my best, as do most human subjects, to avoid the sorts of consequences with which I am being threatened. And if I do not understand all of those threats, because the big businesses and corporate giants, the state monopolies and intensive farming techniques, keep me ignorant, despite my enquiring mind, then all I can do is all that I do.

I know that your world was not encountering this, not to the same degree. But you were classified as a sinner by your society, to both a greater and a lesser extent, and you were branded by your world, and made to live out a life ever conscious of the sins you had supposedly committed, and I just have a suspicion that such tropes are endlessly repeated, if differently classified, just to keep us all controlled. You can do this, you cannot do that … we are feeling it all keenly at the moment.

Best wishes to you, as ever,

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

What we have

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

I know that your incarceration will have been a very low point in your life, but it has crossed my mind that actually it served you well in unexpected ways. You did after all write the epic letter to Bosie, ‘De Profundis’, a great work which reverberates its truths through history, and you were inspired to compose the poem ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, which similarly now holds an enviable position within the canon of world literature.

What is more, in the depths of such deprivation, you were thrown back on to yourself alone, with none of the stimuli of the world in which you had so eagerly moved, none of the distractions, the pretences, the dreamy romanticism. It is no doubt true to say that I have no idea of what it must have been like, and never can have, because such regimes are lost to us, altered through time, different in the ways they take their effect and have their impact. The world in so many ways is seemingly so different. Yet I cannot help thinking such a level of loss, of enforced denial, that the inability to sate the excessive appetites of success and celebrity, may in turn lead to some appreciation of what we all truly have, which is very little, which is only ourselves. I know that public censure must have been extremely hard to bear, but to recognise the nobility of the self even in the face of castigation, to see that the two lungs will breathe, the heart will beat, the senses remain, must have offered some little solace. It is all just making me appreciative of the fact that I have all of these things and also my liberty (such as it is in our modern era).

I am increasingly aware that my possession of health and well-being are the most powerful tools that I have in navigating my way through a life which is not uncomplicated, not un-beset by daily issues, by problems great and small that arise from time to time, by expectations and disappointments, by dashed hopes and broken promises. Thinking of you, Oscar dear, leads me to acknowledge that the most basic of advantages that all of us possess, just the breath that flows, the blood that pumps, is enough; everything else is ‘icing on the cake’.

I have a part to play in maintaining my health, my mental stability, my feelings of ease, my joie de vivre. I feel in some sense that I have a duty to myself, that I must expect of myself not an unwavering recognition of my needs, but always the ability to pick myself up should I fall, to set myself back on a familiar path should I digress, to keep on taking steps forward. I, like the majority of the earth’s inhabitants, the overwhelming majority, perhaps even, in some sense, everyone, can transcend, remind, imagine, reach. I am presented with choices at every juncture, and I have the ability to make choices that are of help to me and my world. It is, in so many ways, a glorious thing to be thrown back upon one’s own resources, to have to manufacture for oneself the road map leading back to some sense of salvation, of preservation.

I am happy.

I can continue to be happy.

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

An alternative

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

I hope this letter finds you well. I hope that your presence across the span of history is somehow at ease, and that you can view from your vantage point with compassion. After all, your own faults were more known to yourself than they were to anyone else, and that is true of all of us.

I have been writing to you recently about how slowly time advances, and how changes in opinions and social mores are even slower, but that if we wait long enough, and look back through aeons, there are indications that some elements of human evolution are to the benefit of man, and beast, and planet itself. Admittedly they seem few and far between, particularly as the worst possible elements of human interaction keep on reasserting themselves, even in the face of the best. I suppose one has to assume that it was ever thus – but I wonder if that need be the case?

Evolution seems to imply a state of being that is not one of stasis, that there is movement, that there is change, that alternatives come into being. I have been giving this much thought, as set in my ways as so many of us are; as you were, Oscar, even to the point of your own demise. Is the failed hero a real hero?

It seems to me that change comes also very, very slowly, and that in reality change comes in the smallest of moments, the tiniest of gestures, in those quick and fleeting seconds where one actually does do something that one did not do before. I think that it is in its insignificance that its actual significance lies. Taking an alternative route, a different course of action, and actually making a decision that is unlike decisions that have been made before, that would seem to me to indicate real change. It is as simple as choosing not to butter one’s toast in order to reduce one’s fat intake, and then repeating the action, day after day, until a ‘new normal’ comes into being. Not to put the cigarette to one’s lips; not to fill the glass of wine brimful; not to ignore the neighbour as they appear in their garden, but to say: “Hello”, and then to say: “Hello” again; not to put one’s cross into a familiar box on the ballot paper, just to move one’s hand, just before it happens, whatever the consequences may be imagined to be. Taking the alternative, with precision, or sometimes recklessly, and re-charting the course.

If you, dear Oscar, had not …. but then of course, you did.

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

In the now …

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

I wonder what happened to you when you received the missive from Queensberry, Lord Alfred’s father, calling you a ‘sondomite’ (sic). I suspect that you flew into an over-emotional rage, or maybe you rolled your eyes in a world-weary way, or guffawed at his poor understanding of the English language, or felt superior, probably that above all, felt superior to his brutish ways with your over-developed sense of aesthetic propriety. It must also have been very strange, in that moment, to be confronted with some level of truth, if truth it were, that you were a ‘sondomite’ (sic). It must have been disconcerting in the back of your mind, thinking over the many conquests that you had enjoyed, the interplay with the ‘street-arabs’, the establishments through which you had prowled in your search for the ‘panthers’. Even if in actuality you had never practised the art to which ‘sondomite’ (sic) refers, I am sure there was the ring of truth to the accusation – remember the ‘soiled sheets’ that were referenced by the chamber-maid at your trial, or did she lie? Was she paid to lie? That ring of truth must have smacked you hard, caught you sharp, made the very instant when you read the word – ‘sondomite’ (sic) – one that chimed sonorously something of a death knell in your mind, a reverberation that has never left you through history.

I am concentrating upon it, Oscar dear, not because I wish to torture you in any way, not because I wish to bring up the most painful of memories for you (and I am sure this was not the most painful), but because I am interested in what we all do when moments occur that rattle our being, shake us to the core, make us stop and stand still, and start to think things through. My suspicion, as I say, is that you reacted in an over-dramatic way to the accusation, whether or not that was made manifest in your behaviour or outlook; I suspect that inwardly you ‘flipped’. This of course jeopardised the next few moments, and then put into question your reactions as they ensued, as it must for all of us, when we are shocked, when we are caught up short. Those ripples of after-effect come to condition to no small degree all that happens next, but only moment by moment, each second unfolding, becoming something in itself, building up the slow minutes, and then the passage of time, and then those little ripples swell to be a tsunami. It puts into our own hands a huge amount of power, as orchestrators, as directors, as the ones who are in change of fate as it unfolds, the future as it is made known, destiny. There is probably a time for the over-dramatic, for the flying off the handle and taking sudden control, but is it a time linked to high emotion, linked so inextricably to fear, making of each act, each singular response, something of a portent? My dawning understanding is that in those moments our actions may well be ill-judged, and not fully formed, and not take into account all of the many influences and variables that might come to take effect. For you, Oscar dear, with your wounded pride, and your public reputation to defend, and the investments of those who were close to you, those who were benefiting from your wealth and your celebrity, it was the precursor of a now infamous doom. Or so the narrative goes. That is the story that is told. It may be true, it may only be an interpretation. It may be myth. What we know however is that you were carted off to a prison cell, that you did undergo what was known as ‘hard labour’, and that your career was left in tatters. Rightly or wrongly, justly or unjustly, that bears the ring of truth.

My own interpretation is that you did not remain steady, and that your ego came to the fore, and that you played a greater part in your downfall than might at first be acknowledged, that in effect you were not only a victim of the age, but an architect of it. Now I know that you were given few choices, that as the net tightened around you there were fewer and fewer outcomes possible that might have brought to you a different fate, but I cannot help thinking that choices are always present, no matter the circumstance, and that therefore different conclusions can be reached. You may not have come to be a symbol of your age, nor a touchstone for liberatory potential, but you could have been a happier man. It is a question, is it not: to put yourself on the cross to be crucified, or to live on?

I am presented with my moments, moment by moment, the now, and now, and now. The lessons to be learned from your example reach deeply, and take me into contemplation, and make my choices ever manifest …

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Levels of Irritation

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

The wind is blowing today. I expect you listened to the wind from inside your cell, as well as witnessing it in all its fury within society. I find it is beginning to irritate me.

It is irritating me not because there is anything particularly unusual about it, not because it is a more terrifying wind than there has ever been, and not because it is destructive, or incessant, or creeping in between the gaps of the buildings I inhabit; it is irritating because I am allowing it to be.

I think of nagging children who pester and cajole, but who of course give up entirely if one does not accede to them; of pet dogs who want to be stroked, to be played with, to be the centre of attention, but who slope off to sleep if one does not participate, waiting at the sidelines until one is ready for them. I think also of my amounts of money, that flow in and out of my life, of the anxiety that accompanies them. When there is much, I worry about the amount disappearing, and when there is little, I worry that I will not have enough; all absurd, pointless and absurd.

Like you Oscar, as is evidenced in the works that you left behind, there are very many things that irritate me, and I have to acknowledge that I am very easily irritated. The banalities of a class system which oppresses not only those who are oppressed but also the oppressors, who have to conform to set standards, who live in shabby gilded cages, working within the narrow confines of their pretended respectability. The denial of natural love, of all the many loves that have dared not speak their names, the ways of being between peoples that are gentle, and friendly, and giving, the loves that radiate in small scope from those at the touchline watching the absurdities of action. All of the mothers, all of the siblings, all of the quietly watchful, holding hands and caressing, putting their loved ones to bed with kisses across the eyelids; the many loves that are not sensationalised, and which continue, beneath the surface, barely acknowledged. Even those that involve desire, regulated, careful and caring, a man with his arms around the shoulders of his closer than close buddy, and a young woman kissing her girlfriend goodbye.

It just seems to me, Oscar dear, that irritations are largely invented, and allowed to fester, and if they are truly real they can be addressed. But if they are the buzzing of the bees, the singing of the birds, the crashing of the waves, the howling of the winds, the touches of a friend, the embraces of a lover – then they do not need to be any more than you and I, and we and they, allow them to be.

Your friend, as ever,

Algernon B. Duffoure.

Inviting Pressure

/ Michael Michael / Leave a comment

Dear Oscar,

Of course I know that what you chose to do – to stay and face the music, to own up to your approach to life and aim to justify the ways in which you chose to live – became a cause célèbre that has come to influence the ways in which more modern societies have developed. I know that by being steadfast you did uncover a side of your world’s mores that could be objected to, that probably needed reform – that in being addressed has put right some wrongs and opened up alternative ways of being. Nevertheless, I am being slowly persuaded that so much of what ‘hits the headlines’ and becomes the touchstone of an age is in actuality a lot of fuss about nothing. It just seems to take history for that to be the case, and the generation and popularisation of sets of ideals that go against whatever it was that caused the ultimate umbrage at the time.

You see Oscar, you did, in hindsight, sort of invite disaster, and a huge amount of pressure to be heaped upon you – so much, it might be argued, that it was impossible to behave in any way that might be deemed rational. You steadfastly held your position, and although that may be seen as laudable, the price you paid was so high as to deny you existence at all! Did that have to be the case? And did it have to be the case that your legacy of martyrdom still sticks like a mal odeur even around the modern depictions of the homosexual? I think of the century of suffering that has been enacted since your too early departure from the planet, the inevitable fight for freedom of expression, the fiery street protests, and the battles that were fought with words, and with rocks, and bricks, and cricket bats. It may have all been inevitable, but I do just wonder. I do just wonder if not inviting disaster might also have been an option; that you could have exited to Europe and used your mightiest of weapons, your pen, to argue for a more just society where there would not be persecution – which also had a ring of inevitability about it, as all societies were advancing in the greater sense, and still are around the globe, and ‘old’ ideas become replaced with ‘new’ ones, and democratisation, such as it is, for now, seems to hold some sway. Do you really believe that without your humiliation and suffering there would have bee no gay liberation? Somehow I think it would have been different. I worry that the taint of your treatment lingers even in the face of the most advanced developments. I worry that I need to worry, and that is both the point of this letter, and what I most ardently wish to subvert and deny.

All may not be so well with the world, and all of us carry some worldview where we know of instances where there are injustices and misdemeanours, but it is also true that all is also well with the world, because flowers do continue to grow and bloom – even green carnations! I know as well as you did that I can provoke disaster, that I can invite pressure into my life, that I can cause a stir, worry myself silly, pick and probe and prod and upset everyone who surrounds me, but I do wonder to what end? To get my own way? To be right about whatever it is that I wish to undertake? To try to mould the world in its entirety to my point of view? It all seems rather foolhardy, Oscar dear, when it is obvious that humanity loves humanity, and always will. The differences and the factions and the fights and the oppositions are so few and far between compared to the commonalities of being: the air that we all need to breathe; the water that we all need to drink; the sustenance that we can engender for ourselves, in all its forms, for our mutual well-being.

I am doing my utmost not to invite pressure into my life, Oscar, without compromise and with a sense of being true to myself and my world. I wonder what your life would have been if you had been able to do the same.

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.