"Fear" by S. Alexander
Fear is the basis of cowardice and cowardice is the opposite to courage, but fear is not the opposite to courage. In many cases, fear is even the basis of courage, and so it is an extraordinary thing.
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"Music was a kind of penetration. Perhaps absorption is a less freighted word. The penetration or absorption of everything into itself. I don't know if you have ever taken LSD, but when you do so the doors of perception, as Aldous Huxley, Jim Morrison and their adherents ceaselessly remind us, swing wide open. That is actually the sort of phrase, unless you are William Blake, that only makes sense when there is some LSD actually swimming about inside you. In the cold light of the cup of coffee and banana sandwich that are beside me now it appears to be nonsense, but I expect you to know what it is taken to mean. LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to everyone of these essences, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry 'Wow!' all the time, which is LSD's most distressing and least endearing side effects.
...Music in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once. The grunt of rosin-rubbed catgut, the saliva-bubble blast of a brass tube, the sweaty-fingered squeak on a guitar fret, all that physicality, all that clumsy 'music making', all that grain of human performance...transcends itself at the moment of its happening, that moment when music actually becomes, as it makes the journey from the vibrating instrument, the vibrating hi-fi speaker, as it sends those vibrations across to the human tympanum and through to the inner ear and into the brain, where the mind is set to vibrate to frequencies of its own making.
The nothingness of music can be moulded by the mood of the listener into the most precise shapes or allowed to float as free as thought; music can follow the academic and theoretical pattern of its own modality or adhere to some narrative or dialectical programme imposed by a friend, a scholar or the composer himself. Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set to its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog's bollocks. Nothing else comes close".
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Ernest: Even you must admit that it is much more difficult to do a thing than to talk about it.
Gilbert: More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is of course obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it. There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other—by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought. Action, indeed, is always easy, and when presented to us in its most aggravated, because most continuous form, which I take to be that of real industry, becomes simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatsoever to do. No, Ernest, don't talk about action. It is a blind thing, dependent on external influences, and moved by an impulse of whose nature it is unconscious. It is a thing incomplete in its essence, because limited by accident, and ignorant of its direction, being always at variance with its aim. Its basis is the lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.
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"Maybe some of you reading this will think that men who can beat children like that are swine.
I feel terrible about that because the men who beat me were not swine.
Maybe now you’ll think people like me who can forgive their childhood beatings – or claim even that there is nothing to forgive – are victims of some sort of ‘cycle of abuse’. Maybe you think I should be angry, that I should damn the schoolmasters who beat me and damn my parents and damn the men and women who allowed it.
Maybe you think there is nothing more pathetic, nothing that more perfectly illustrates all the vices and impediments of Old England than the spectacle of the Old Boy trying to defend the system that chastised him with strokes of the cane.
Maybe you are right. Maybe I am a woeful and pathetic specimen. Maybe I do suffer without knowing it the disastrous consequences of a barbaric and outdated education. Maybe it has disturbed the balance of my mind. Maybe it has warped and thwarted me. Fuck knows. I don’t and, without wishing to be rude, you most certainly can’t know either. We are living in a statistically rare and improbable period of British life. The last twenty years are the only twenty years of our history in which children have not been beaten for misbehaviour. Every Briton you can think of, from Chaucer to Churchill, from Shakespeare to Shilton, was beaten as a child. If you are under thirty, then you are the exception. Maybe we are on the threshold of a brave new world of balanced and beautiful Britons. I hope so.
You won’t find me offering the opinion that beating is a good thing or recommending the return of the birch. I frankly regard corporal punishment as of no greater significance in the life of most human beings than bustles, hula hoops, flared trousers, side whiskers or any other fad. Until, that is, one says that it isn’t. Which is to say, the moment mankind decides that a practice like beating is of significance then it becomes of significance. I should imagine that were I a child now and found myself being beaten by schoolmasters I would be highly traumatised by the experience, for every cultural signal would tell me that beating is, to use the American description, a ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ and I would feel singled out for injustice and smart and wail accordingly.
Let’s try – and God knows it’s hard – to be logical about this. If we object to corporal punishment, and I assume we do, on what grounds is this objection based? On the grounds that it is wrong to cause a child pain? Well I don’t know about you, but when I recall childhood pain, I don’t recall the pains of toothache, a thrashed backside, broken bones, stubbed toes, gashed knees or twisted ankles – I recall the pains of loneliness, boredom, abandonment, humiliation, rejection and fear. Those are the pains on which I might and, still sometimes do, dwell, and those pains, almost without exception, were inflicted on me by other children and by myself.
I have paused on this subject of corporal punishment because the issue is so culturally loaded today as to be almost impossible to inspect. It comes in so many people’s minds very close to the idea of ‘abuse’, a word which when used within ten spaces of the word ‘child’ causes hysteria, madness and stupidity in almost everybody.
I know that had I dispassionately described to you the use of the cane without any comment, without summoning counsel for a conference in chambers, then many of you would have wondered what I was up to and whether I was entirely balanced. You will have to form your own judgements, but try to understand that when I think about being caned for repeatedly talking after lights out, or for Mobbing About In The Malt Queue, and other such mad prepschooly infractions, I feel far less passion and distress than I do when I think about the times I was put into detention for crimes of which I was innocent. If it should so happen that you could prove to me that one of the masters who beat me may have derived sexual gratification from the practice, I would shrug my shoulders and say, ‘Poor old soul, at least he never harmed me.’ Abuse is exploitation of trust and exploitation of authority and I was lucky enough never to suffer from that or from any violation or cruelty, real or imagined.
It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most clichés, that cliche is untrue.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me.
Bones mend and become actually stronger in the very place they were broken and where they have knitted up; mental wounds can grind and ooze for decades and be re opened by the quietest whisper. Kirk drawing attention to my singing, that was abuse, and he was just a silly child who knew no better. Mid Kemp and his mad bacon slicers, that was the Game and it amuses me.
Sidebar over".
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My own view is that most homophobia, if one wants to use that rather crummy word, has almost nothing to do with sex.
"But have you any idea what these people actually do?”
Self-righteous members of the House of Commons loved standing to ask that question during out last parliamentary debate on the age of homosexual consent.
"Shit-stickers, that’s what they are. Let’s be clear about that. We’re talking about sodomy here."
Oh no you aren’t. You think you are, but you aren’t, you know.
Buggery is far less prevalent in the gay world than people suppose. Anal sex is probably not much more common in homosexual encounters than it is in heterosexual.
Buggery is not at the end of the yellow brick road somewhere over the homosexual rainbow, it is not the prize, the purpose, the goal or the fulfillment of homosexuality. Buggery is not the achievement which sees homosexuality move from becoming into being; buggery is not homosexuality’s realisation or destiny. Buggery is as much necessary condition of homosexuality as the ownership of a Volvo estate car is a necessary condition of middle-class family life, linked irretrievably only in the minds of the witless and the cheap. The performance of buggery is no more inevitable a part of homosexuality than an orange syllabub is an inevitable part of a dinner: some may clamour for it an instantly demand a second helping, some are not interested, some decide they will try it once and then instantly vomit.
There are other things to be got up to in the homosexual world outside the orbit of the anal ring, but the concept that really get the goat of the gay-hater, the idea that really spins their melon and sickens their stomach is that most terrible and terrifying of all human notions, love.
That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand. Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the word’s full octave. Love as agape, Eros and philos; love as romance, friendship and adoration; love as infatuation, obsession and lust; love as torture, euphoria, ecstasy and oblivion (this is beginning to read like a Calvin Klein perfume catalogue); love as need, passion and desire.
All the rest of it, parking your dick up an arse, slurping at a helmet, whipping, frotting, peeing, pooing, squatting like a dog, dressing up in plastic and leather- all these go on in the world of the boy and girl too: and let’s be clear about this, they go on more - the numbers make it so. Go into a sex shop, skim through some pornography, browse the internet for a time, talk to someone in the sex industry. You think homosexuality is disgusting? Then, it follows, as the night the day, that you find sex disgusting, for there is nothign done between two men or two women that is, by any objective standard, different from that which is done between a man and a woman.
What is more, one begs to ask of these prominent homophobes, have the guts to Enquire Within. Ask yourselves what thoughts go through your head when you masturbate. If the physical act and its detail is so much more important to you than love, then see a doctor, but don’t spew out your sickness in column-inches; it isn’t nice, it isn’t kind, it isn’t Christian.
And if the best you can do is quote the Bible in defence of your prejudice, then have the humility to be consistent. The same book that exhorts against the abomination of one man lying with another also contains exhortations against the eating of pork and shell-fish and against menstruating women daring to come near holy places. It’s not good functionalistically claiming that kosher diet had it’s local, meteorological purposes now defunct, or that the prejdice against ovulation can be dispensed with as superstition, the Bible that you bash us with tells you that much of what you do in unclean: don’t pick and choose with a Revealed Text - or if you do, pick and choose the good bits, the bits that say things like “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” or “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
And please, whatever you do, don’t tell us that what we do, either in love or lust, is unnatural. For one thing if what you mean by that is that animals don’t do it, then you are quite simply in factual error.
There are plenty of activities or qualities we could list that are most certainly unnatural if you are so mad as to think that humans are not part of nature, or so dull-witted as to believe that “natural” means “all natures but human nature”: mercy, for example, is unnatural, an altruistic, non-selfish care and love for other species is unnatural; charity is unnatural, justice is unnatural, virtue is unnatural, indeed - and this surely is the point - the idea of virtue is unnatural, within such a foolish, useless meaning of the word “natural.” Animals, poor things, eat in order to survive: we, lucky things, do that too, but we also have Abby Crunch biscuits, Armagnac, selle d’agneau, tortilla chips, sauce beamaise, vimto, hot buttered crumpets, Chateau Margaux, ginger-snaps, risotto nero and peanut-butter sandwiches - these things have nothing to do with survival and everything to do with pleasure, connoisseurship and plain old greed. Animals, poor things, copulate in order to reproduce: we, lucky things, do that too, but we also have kinky boots, wank-mags, leather thongs, peep-shoes, statuettes by Degas, bedshows, Tom of Finland, escort agencies and the journals of Anais Nin- these things have nothing to do with reproduction and everything to do with pleasure, connoissuership and plain old lust. We humans have opened up a wide choice of literal and metaphorical haute cuisine and junk good in many areas of our lives, and as a punishment, for daring to eat the fruit of every tree in the garden, we were expelled from Eden the animals still inhabit and we were sent away with the two great Jewish afflictions to bear as our penance: indigestion and guilt.
I will apologize for many things that I have done, but I will not apologize for the things that should never be apologized for.
[...]
I will apologize for faithlessness, neglect, deceit, cruelty, unkindness, vanity, and meanness, but I will not apologize for the urgings of my genitals nor, most certainly, will I ever apologize for the urgings of my heart. I may regret those urgings, rue them deeply and occasionally damn, blast and wish them to hell, but apologize - no: not where they do no harm. A culture that demands people apologize for something that is not their fault: that is as good a definition of tyranny as I can think of".
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"And then...
And then I saw him and nothing was ever the same again.
The sky was never the same colour, the moon never the same shape: the air never smelt the same, food never tasted the same. Every word I knew changed its meaning, everything that once was stable and firm became as insubstantial as a puff of wind, and every puff of wind became a solid thing I could feel and touch".
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"He had fallen in love with Hugo Alexander Timothy Cartwright the moment he laid eyes on him, when, as one of a string of five new arrivals, the boy had trickled into evening hall the first night of Adrian's second year.
Hey don-Bay ley nudged him.
'What do you reckon, Healey? Lush, or what?'
For once Adrian had remained silent. Something was terribly wrong.
It had taken him two painful terms to identify the symptoms. He looked them up in all the major textbooks. There was no doubt about it. All the authorities concurred: Shakespeare, Tennyson, Ovid, Keats, Georgette Heyer, Milton, they were of one opinion. It was love. The Big One.
Cartwright of the sapphire eyes and golden hair, Cartwright of the Limbs and Lips: he was Petrarch's Laura, Milton's Lycidas, Catullus's Lesbia, Tennyson's Hallam, Shakespeare's fair boy and dark lady, the moon's Endymion. Cartwright was Garbo's salary, the National Gallery, he was cellophane: he was the tender trap, the blank unholy surprise of it all and the bright golden haze on the meadow: he was honey-honey, sugar-sugar, chirpy chirpy cheep-cheep and his baby-love: the voice of the turtle could be heard in the land, there were angels dining at the Ritz and a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square.
Adrian had managed to coax Cartwright into an amusing half-hour in the House lavs two terms previously, but he had never doubted he could get the trousers down: that wasn't it. He wanted something more from him than the few spasms of pleasure that the limited activities of rubbing and licking and heaving and pushing could offer.
He wasn't sure what the thing was that he yearned for, but one thing he did know. It was less acceptable to love, to ache for eternal companionship, than it was to bounce and slurp and gasp behind the fives courts. Love was Adrian's guilty secret, sex his public pride".
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"I shuddered, half at the cold, half at the horror of it all. 'This place!' I said. 'This fucking place… thing is, Matteo, it’s a hothouse. You wouldn’t think so with the snow falling all around us, but it is. We live under glass. Distorting glass. Everything is rumour, counter-rumour, guesswork, gossip, envy, interference, frustration, all that. The secret of survival in a place like this is to be simple.'
'Simple?' It was hard to tell whether the clear swollen globes of moisture that glistened at the end of his lashes were melted snowflakes or tears.
'In a way simple. Rely on friendship.'
'Yes, but...'
'If you’ve got a good friend, you’ve never really got any reason to worry. You’ve always got someone to talk to, someone who’ll understand you.'
'Like you and Woody, you mean?'
It wasn’t what I meant, of course. It was far from what I meant.
'Yes. Like me and Woody,’ I said. ‘I could tell Jo anything and I know he’d see it in its right proportion. That’s the trick in a place like this, proportion. Who would you say is your best friend?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Don’t know,’ he said, almost sulkily. ‘You see, thing is, I know, because my brother told me..."
'Know what?'
'You know, that I’m… you know, pretty.' He got rid of the word as if its presence had been souring his mouth like a bad olive.
Pretty! God I hated that word. Pretty boy, pretty boy… only a lumpen, half -witted heterosexual would think Matthew pretty. He was beautiful, like the feet of the Lord on the hills, he was beautiful. Like the river, like the snow that was falling now more thickly than ever, like nothing on earth, like everything on earth he was beautiful. And some roaring hairy-pizzled Minotaur had dared to grab at him and call him a prettyboy pricktease. Even his own brother had used that word".
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"Compromise is a stalling between two fools".
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"Matthew, the source of all my misery and all my joy, all my feeling and all my inability to feel, was completely blind to my absolute need for him, too lacking in imagination to be able to see that my happiness was entirely contingent upon him, and I blamed him for that without being able to see that I was trapped in a hole that I had dug. How could he possibly have known? How could he possibly have guessed? Until someone has loved they cannot possibly know what it might be like to be loved.
Such then was the spin of my madness. I expected the illegible and the deeply buried in me to be read as if carved on my forehead, just as I expected the obvious and the ill-concealed to be hidden from view".
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"I walked by his side, everything inside me crying out to make this speech:
'Come on, let’s just turn on our heels and leave this place. What does it hold for you? There’s nothing here for me. We’ll walk along the road to the end of town and, in the end, someone will give us a lift to London. We will survive there. Whom else do we need but each other? Me with my quick wits, you with your quick body. We could find work doing something. Painting, decorating, stacking shelves. Enough to buy a flat. I would write poetry in my spare time and you would make pots and play the piano in bars. In the evenings we could lie by each other’s side on a sofa and just be. I would stroke your hair with my fingers, and maybe our lips would touch in a kiss. Why not? Why not?'"
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"My feeling for Matthew had not altered. We never repeated the allegro rapture of our one sexual experiment, and we never referred to it. I still don’t know why it happened. Maybe he had guessed the depth of my feeling for him and had thought it was founded in lust and had as a result wanted to get all that out of the way because he valued my friendship. Maybe he was being kind. Maybe he was just a healthy fourteen-year-old who fancied a quick bit of nookie. Maybe he felt for me what I felt for him. I’ll never know and that is as it should be. I’ll always have that memory at least… the heat of him, the heat of him from his day’s exercise, the heat that radiated from the base of his throat, the heat under his arms, the heat-of-the-moment heat of that moment. Oh dear, will these memories never lose their heat?"
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"By that second year at King’s Lynn I reached a terrible low. I was seventeen now, no longer anything like the youngest in my class, no longer the fast stream clever boy, no longer the complex but amusing rogue, no longer the sly yet fascinating villain, no longer in some people’s eyes excusable through adolescence. Seventeen is as good as grown up.
Everything and everyone I cared about was growing away from me. Jo Wood was bound for Cambridge, Matthew would be trying for there the following year. Richard Fawcett was going up to St Andrews, my brother was going to an officer's training course in the Army. I was a failure and I knew it".
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"Yet I was unwanted, rejected and unthought of. My mother, yes, she believed in me, but everybody’s mother believes in them. No one else believed in me".
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Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.
'If they only knew!’ I screamed inside. 'If they only knew what I have within me. How much I can pour out, how much I have to say, how much I have inside. If they only knew!'
I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I possessed. Not magical power, not all that Carrie teenage telekinetic wank, but real power. The power simply to go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze and to transform. Yet I was unwanted, rejected and unthought of. My mother, yes, she believed in me, but everybody’s mother believes in them. No one else believed in me".
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"It was my eighteenth birthday. I had come of age here, in this place. I was eighteen years old. Not a fifteen-year-old discovering poetry, the beauty of algebra and the treachery and terror of growing up. Not a tormented fourteen-year-old whose life has exploded into love. Not a naughty twelve-year-old who broke school bounds to visit sweet shops. Not a grown up eight-year-old who put a new boy at his ease on a train. Not a funny little boy who cried when his mole was upstaged by a donkey and didn’t dare go into the Headmaster’s classroom because he was frightened of the big boys. Not a wicked little imp who pulled down his trousers and played rudies with a boy called Tim. An eighteen-year-old youth on the run. A somewhat less than juvenile delinquent. A petty thief who ruined people’s lives with theft, betrayal, cowardice and contempt. A man. A man wholly responsible for all his actions".
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"When August the twenty-fourth came round however, when it was my birthday, my eighteenth birthday, so Jo tells me, my mother was inconsolable all day, weeping and sobbing like a lost child, which is, I am afraid, howl am weeping as I type this. I am weeping for the shame, for the loss, the cruelty, the madness and again the shame and the shame and the shame. Weeping too for mothers everywhere, yesterday, today and tomorrow, who sit alone on the day of their child’s birth not knowing where their beloved boy or their darling girl might be, who might be with them or what they might be doing. I am weeping too for grown-up children so lost to themselves and to hope that they squat in doorways, lie on beds, stare in stupors high or wired, or sit alone all eaten up with self-hate on their eighteenth birthday. I am weeping too for the death of adolescence, the death of childhood and the death of hope: there are never enough tears to mourn their passing".