The Importance of Being Earnest

It continues, sorry, this is helpful to me. If you want to read anything worthwhile, check out the Disability Blog Carnival #5 should be up at The Life and Times of Emma shortly.

Boys, I thought, were all a bit rubbish. I would occasionally meet a boy who I found attractive, but disillusionment was usually crouching close by in the bushes, ready to leap out as soon as the object of my desire opened his beautiful mouth. I guess I did tend to pick the maudlin romantic types who were only after one thing... being to confide in me their deepest darkest, most tedious and pathetic secrets.

Heartless bitch, you say? Please. The most notable example of what I’m talking about was a lad whose appeal was sustained for some considerable time on account of the fact we hardly ever spoke to one another. Lysander (who wasn’t called Lysander at all) was a wonderful guitarist and resembled a very young bleached-blond and slightly better-looking Tony Hadley, sixteen years old to my thirteen. He was drop dead gorgeous; I was very much taken with him and very pleased about it. This, I felt, was a good sign.

When finally we had a proper conversation, within the space of that single conversation, he managed to confide his desire to end his life when he was twenty (what would be the point of living after that?) but only, of course, after he had become a very famous actor whose loss the entire world would mourn.

This was fairly typical. Once I had placed enough physical distance between us to stop me banging his head against the wall in frustration, I fell into despair. You must understand that it wasn’t that I wanted anything to come of this – I knew very well that Lysander was way out of my league; he was very much the sort of young man that my peers were busy blue-tacking to their bedroom walls. However, I longed to feel the way about boys – any of the them - the way I had felt about Bathsheba.

Another thunderbolt was on its way, but not the one I wanted. Angela (whose name was not Angela) was a few years older than me and good at all the things I wanted to be good at. She was a great artist and an exceptional actor. And it happened before I knew it; I was turning up where I knew she would be, I had joined the choir and I was spending even more time in the beloved Art Block than previously.

Then our school decided – in their rather finite wisdom – to put on a production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Our school had a purpose built theatre on site but seemed determined to choose the most inappropriate productions a person could dream up for a school of girls. I was in loads of plays and the only time I wasn’t in drag was when I was the most inappropriately cast Anne Frank you’d ever seen (Anne being by far the tallest person hiding in the annex). Notable productions included the Hobbit, where there were no feminine parts at all and The Beggar’s Opera where the only feminine parts were ‘whores’. Dido and Aeneas had a few more ladies it in, but everyone has to sing well, nobody knew what the heck it was about and the title to which the girls inevitably referred to it lead me to looking up yet another word in our doorstop dictionary.

The Importance of Earnest has a cast of nine, including the minor roles of the butler and manservant. One of the teachers took the part of Lady Bracknell – which is, of course, the best role by far (and in case she's reading this, by far the most charming and astute character in the plot). Casting for the eight remaining parts was restricted to sixth-formers. All of which I considered terribly unfair – and still do. I mean, it was all very sophisticated and amusing as an advert for the school, but it didn’t benefit very many of the students; the best choices for school productions and those that allow armies of extras so that everyone can be involved.

Anyway, Angela was a sixth-former and got a part, an important part. And what had started off as irritation at being excluded became a mission. I insisted on being involved in the play. Well no. I offered myself up, in a very pathetic and desperate manner, that the production could do with me whatever they wished.

So I made bad coffee. I moved scenery. I made scenery. I helped put people into costumes; I bound breasts. I sprinted up and down the aisles of the auditorium with messages and more bad coffee. I quietly vexed about the presence of fresh lillies on the stage (did these people know nothing?). I made myself very useful. So useful that I was excused from lessons throughout the dress rehearsals so that I could provide yet more bad coffee. The theatre at school was even more beloved than the Art Block and most especially beloved when I could sit and watch Angela do rehearse her lines over and over and over.

And Angela was nice to me. Everyone involved was pretty nice to me, since I was useful and sweet and prepared to bend over backwards for the sake of this production (unfortunately they cut that famous contortionist scene from The Importance in the end). But Angela was a genuinely lovely person, so much so that I don’t feel the need to disguise her too thoroughly; I don’t think she would be deeply upset to know she was the object of a teenaged infatuation. I couldn’t possibly have been the only one.

At the same time, this stuff was happening away from my peers in an environment where I was already marked out as a bit odd since I was younger than everyone and had so eagerly embraced and mastered the role of everyone's skivvy. I didn’t have anything to conform to, so I wasn’t afraid of standing out of line. I wasn't so afraid of being outed as a deviant. There was still the shame, terrific shame. During the short period I was involved in The Importance, I twice allowed myself to get hurt. Not badly, I’ve never been beaten up and was very rarely hurt at all, but there were two instances during this time when I didn’t shut up or run away when I really ought to have. I'm still not sure whether that was increased courage, shame or coincidence.

In any case, the theatre was beginning to play an important part in this story elsewhere...

They arrived at an inconvenient time, I was hiding in a room in my mind.

Just before Christmas I started writing about arguments and promised to write more about the mistakes we can make we can make in our search for the truth. Today I wanted to write about the dangers of received wisdom.

Most prejudice begins life as received wisdom; messages that we have received growing up from parents and peers along with all sort of perfectly useful information. If you grow up aware that you should never to journey into The Old Tooth & Claw Pub on a full moon, you’re probably better off than if you had to find out by yourself. And if your parents told you to never play cards with a Frenchman, you may well tell your own children to never play cards with a Frenchman. You never played cards with a Frenchman, and as a result, you were never cheated at cards - at least not by a Frenchman.

When we consider our own history and the history of prejudice, we like to concentrate on those occasions where prejudice has lead to full blown atrocity, and in particular, we like to concentrate on the genuine sadists of those stories. The slave-masters or concentration camp guards who performed acts of violence and brutality which you and I feel pretty sure we could not have brought ourselves to do. Because we are nice people. We are intelligent people.

We don’t like to think about the nice, intelligent people who nevertheless did participate in these atrocities, as well as the ongoing inequality and oppression that provided a sociological springboard for them. This is not to take the responsibility of their actions on our shoulders. However, we do need to acknowledge our own fallibility.

The great sin of those who remain prejudiced is a failure to challenge received wisdom.

Just how great this sin is depends on context. If you were an ordinary working person living in eighteenth century rural Britain and you’d never seen a black person, but you’d heard tell of godless savages, cannibalism and witchcraft in Darkest Africa, you really wouldn’t have a lot of reason to think very hard about the ethical questions surrounding colonisation and slavery. You’d also have very little power to change things if you did.

It is however quite difficult for us to imagine a person coming into contact with slaves and failing to see their own reflection in one another's eyes. But some people – many people – choose not to question their thinking in the face of massive evidence which suggests it may be in error. This not because they are malicious, unintelligent or mad, but because they have an awful lot to lose; sometimes materially or politically, but more often it is purely psychological. The fear of the prejudiced can probably be summarised in three trains of subconscious thought;

1. (a) I am better than this person. The possibility that this person is equal to me represents the possibility that I am not as good as I hope I am.

1. (b) This person is completely different from me. The possibility that this person is not so different from me represents possibilities about myself which I do not wish to entertain.

2. This person is my enemy. The possibility that this person could be my friend represents the possibility that bad luck or poor decisions have lead to the misfortune or dissatisfaction in my life.

It is easy to see how 1(a) operates in sexism and class prejudice. The idea that you may have lead a privileged life and that others who have less are just as bright, capable and virtuous as you are is a pretty scary one. 1(b) is perhaps at the heart of both disablism and homophobia – although homophobia cannot exist in the absence of sexism; all these things are interrelated.

I would however suggest that 2 is the most powerful and dangerous, the one that fuels the fire of racism. Racism has manifest itself in extreme violence and cruelty on a much larger scale and on a far more regular basis than any other prejudice.

We all have misfortune in life, whether through our own mistakes, the mistakes of others or sheer bad luck. However, it is much easier to understand and cope with our own hardship if we have some focus for our distress, anger and frustration. And if this focus is a person, much better a caricature of an entire group, well then, that’s just super.

And it doesn’t take that much misfortune. Can’t get a job? Johnny Foreigner took it. Strapped for cash? Johnny Foreigner is costing you a wedge in tax. Anxious about crime? Johnny Foreigner is a law unto himself. Any fear or failure you experience in life can probably be traced back to Johnny Foreigner if you have the imagination. And we do.

We do. None of us are immune to this way of thinking. Sly Civilian has covered a number of instances where anti-racists and feminists have accused their opponents of being mentally ill. In other words

1. (b) This person is completely different from me. The possibility that this person is not so different from me represents possibilities about myself which I do not wish to entertain.

Which is deeply insulting to people with mental ill health, as well as an incredibly lazy way to view people who hold prejudice. If we simply dismiss their view, we will change nothing and are likely to become complacent of our own arguments.

The good news is that by acknowledging that the error is a logical one, we acknowledge that we can change our own thinking and the thinking of others in our pursuit of the truth.

There are places I remember

It’s all a bit tedious here just now. We're busy trying to get ourselves together, sorting out all the paperwork involved in the move and trudging our way through various telephone menus. Your call is valuable to us, as if they know; I could be an absolute time-waster whose call isn't even slightly valuable to them. Meanwhile we have managed to tell the most important people in town that we're leaving and this hasn't been quite as painful as I imagined it might have been.

I have been taken photographs of random bits of the flat. We have lived here five years, and it is a good flat. The best bit is, of course, the view over the river, but there are odd bits and pieces I suddenly feel compelled to record.

Like this foul wallpaper. It is not the most hideous wallpaper I have ever seen, but it is pretty gruesome. It is one of those items which someone must have designed, but you can't really imagine anyone sitting down and creating it, thinking, "Hmm, I'm sure somebody would like this pattern, in this style, in these particular colours on their walls."

And you can't imagine anyone choosing to buy it above any other type of wallpaper, above the inoffensive plain textured wallpaper we have almost everywhere else.

Fortunately, we have managed to keep most of it out of sight for the duration of our time here, behind bookcases and pictures.

While I was thinking about such things I fished out an old picture of the mural on the wall in my bedroom in Ipswich. It is not a good picture, having apparently been taken from lying on my old bed.

It was still there when my folks sold the house a few years ago and I do wonder whether the people who moved in there have kept it or destroyed it within weeks of their arrival. I have a secret hope that they may have covered it up so that someone might uncover it decades later and wonder who put it there. Before promptly destroying it themselves.

The other walls in the room were green, the woodwork was yellow and the carpet was dark red. But it all sat together very nicely. Honestly. No really, it did, I swear.

Venetian Tendancies. Florentine too.

Back in Whitby. This is continued from Thurday's excruciating post, about my falling in love with a girl.

Being a resourceful child and with nobody I could confide in, I sought out information on my problem at my local library. Here I met and befriended a dead bearded Venetian named Sigmund. Come on, twelve or thirteen years old, I felt there was something wrong with my mind and it seemed sensible to start with the one psychologist I had actually heard of. I didn't realise that he would be obsessed with sex. Naïve isn't the word.

I soon found that on best prognosis I was

"amphigenously inverted (psychosexually hermaphroditic); i.e., their sexual object may belong indifferently to either the same or to the other sex. The inversion lacks the character of exclusiveness."

I had always suspected that whatever was wrong with me would involve long words. I was amphibiously perverted, like some sort of deviant newt! Sigmund at least reassured me that I was not a "degenerate". People like me existed throughout history, he said and didn’t usually have any other sort of mental problem. In fact, some of us had achieved remarkable things. Woopey.

However, elsewhere in his works, I began to suspect something else entirely. I appeared to have become completely unstuck from Freud's psychosexual stages of development. I had sucked my thumb, but years had passed since I grew out of that and it hadn’t once occurred to me to stick anything up my arse.

In all seriousness, everything that I read even about infantile sexuality was so alien to my own experience that I began to entertain the possibility that I wasn’t developing normally. And truthfully, this was a far happier prospect than being ambidextrously diverted.

I may well have been a bit behind my peers with the old psychosexual development. I don’t know, because sex was only ever spoken about in the vaguest of terms. What I did know was that I remained more or less completely disinterested in the contents of my own or anyone else's underpants, whatever disgusting practices I read about in books. I did, however, develop a healthy preoccupation with naked bodies.

I’m not entirely sure how I managed to fill my official school sketchbook with (largely imaginary) nudes, produce a pop art version of Botticelli’s Venus and illustrations for The Emperor’s New Clothes as part of my school projects without anybody batting an eyelid. But the teachers, in that precious gouache-splattered sanctuary that was our Art Block, remained unfazed. One particular sketch in vigorous 9B pencil, of a naked man from behind, standing on a cliff edge with legs slightly apart, buttocks clenched, face and fists raised to the sky, was described as "Rather jolly!"

Through art and its appreciation, I could identify a palpable, if entirely aesthetic crisis. This is beauty, that is beauty. They are different. But is one better than the other? Perhaps.

I am unconvinced by the slope of Venus’ shoulders and David was obviously posing on a cold day. But that's accuracy, not beauty.

I am in far more awe of David as a work of art. I could (and did) copy Venus, whereas I couldn't sculpt something close to that in any medium. But that's skill, not beauty.

Venus is, perhaps, more beautiful. Her hair is fantastic and she has a softness to her. Her pose actually seems more natural, she is more animate, more sensuous...

And even trying to write about her I falter completely, because I have spent so much of my life trying not to arouse suspicion. It is quite hopeless.

Then there was the difficulty of interpretation. I loved all Michelangelo's naked chaps, particularly the painting on the Sistine Chapel Ceiling. And particularly Adam, I guess. I mean look at the guy. Is he not beautiful? He is stunningly beautiful. Once again, he was created on a very cold day, but hey.

And the other chaps on the Sistine Chapel Ceiling are similarly lovely. Muscular, but well-padded with it, wonderfully curvaceous and powerful and generally a bit of all right. See, I ought to be writing erotica, I'm so good at this.

And naturally, I said to an older friend who was about to go to Florence on a History of Art trip, "Those men on the Sistine Chapel ceiling are really sexy!"

My friend thought this rather funny. "But they all look like fat women," she said. "Michelangelo was gay, so he painted men who looked like women."

And for the first time I began to entertain the possibility that the lines we draw around this stuff might be completely wrong. There seemed no reason why sexuality would hinder a person's aesthetic frame of reference. Botticelli was also homosexual, but Venus isn't masculine. She isn't even slightly androgynous. She might not have the large breasts and flat stomach which characterise the current feminine ideal, but that is what some beautiful women look like in their birthday suits. I knew because I'd seen them.

And Adam is the same. He is not something out of Cosmopolitan Magazine; he does not fit with out modern ideal of masculine beauty, which is far more svelte - far more like David, in fact. But there are certainly some beautiful men who like that in their birthday suits. I'd seen them as well (I was on the school French Exchange Program, you see).

Unless sexuality could be reduced to a fetish for one set of goolies or another, we were surely attracted to degrees of masculinity or femininity (plus either, neither or both)? Masculinity or femininity are the cultural constructs we project onto the biological reality - in all its wondrous and complex variety - of maleness and femaleness. They are transient and often contradictory, but they do have a massive bearing on sexual attraction and how we understand our own sexuality.

Take the beard. Fortunately, we’re now reaching a stage where men tend to do whatever suits their own looks and tastes, but there were very few twentieth century heartthrobs who had beards. Meanwhile, there have been many cultures in history, as there are in the world today, where any man without a beard would be considered effeminate and thus not at all attractive.

A beard is a biological indicator of a sexually mature male. The idea that one can be attracted to a person without this feature is not at all surprising, because there’s so many other indicators we have to work with. However, that this - or underarm and other body hair, broad hips on a female, the foreskin etc. - might be treated as positively unattractive would be very surprising if we were to consider sex as a perfectly binary, purely biological, impulse.

You’ll be glad to know I wouldn’t have put this in quite so many words when I was a child, but I was beginning to see it.

Still, I couldn't get away from what seemed a very obvious fact: that in general, women seemed more beautiful than men. This was especially the case back then when boys were all sorts of weird shapes, sizes and textures, the poor things. This seemed so obvious that I wasn't afraid to say as much. The conversation would go like this;

"Don't you think that women are more attractive than men?"

"Of course not, I'm not weird."

"But surely you can see that women are better looking than men are?"

"Yes. But that's not the same thing. If I was only attracted to people because of their looks, I would be very shallow indeed."

So maybe that was my problem. Maybe I was not ambiguously inserted at all, but just extraordinarily shallow. After all, beauty did matter to me. Not the sort of uniform geometric beauty that might get a face on the cover of a magazine (and, as I say, varies from age to age), but something more universal, something which it would be impossible to elaborate further on without sounding extremely pretentious. Possibly because it's not universal, but something entirely personal to me. But I hadn't worked that out yet.

There's going to be more after this, sorry. Has to come out, but I will pace it...

House

So we went to look at this place. I was in that sort of adrenal high you get sometimes after a bad night where you feel like you’re positively buzzing, but actually nothing is working properly. Inhibition, for example.

Moved three times but I’ve never dealt with an Estate Agent before. Bless the poor chap, he was very nice and friendly, but he did live up to the stereotype. Convertible Beamer, immaculate dress and hair, insisted on calling me Debbie even when [...] gave me the rather over-familiar introduction of Debs and came out with some smashing lines, such as

“The decoration isn’t in bad nick, but it is rather… striking.”

“Of course, the colours look less vivid when the curtains are shut.”

“If the landlady would only go through and paint it beige, she could put the rent up by two hundred pounds and get some Americans in here.”

I’m afraid he was perfectly serious and I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. Fortunately, we redeemed ourselves by agreeing to rent it. The room with blood red walls and navy blue carpet was the most extreme, but there was nothing you’d actually need sunglasses for. And in fairness, the colours did look less vivid when the curtains were shut.

But crucially the chap implied, if it wasn’t in a bit of a mess, it would be well beyond budget. It is a detached bungalow, with central heating, good sized rooms, space to park and a bit of a garden. That is pretty damn luxurious for us. It is in a very quiet area, it is close to my folks without being within within walking distance. And despite the wrenching loss of the moors, we’ll be just inside Norfolk, between the Fens and Thetford Forest. So the countryside is very pretty, if somewhat lacking in breath-taking rugged beauty and seagulls.

This is, of course, complete madness. In the space of two weeks, we have decided to move two hundred and fifty miles down the country - something which needs to be achieved by the beginning of February. We don't have our own car just now, we'll need one very soon. We haven't told our Whitby friends we were even thinking of moving. The water tastes horrid down South. Stark raving bonkers.

However, despite being actually quite frightened about all this, I don't have any doubt that this is the right thing to do and that we'll be able to do it all right, somehow.

When you were here before, I couldn't look you in the eye

I made several New Years resolutions. Some were extremely dull and others rather vague and personal. I decided I would start to write about my Teenaged Angst, which should help me with two of them. Won't all fit in the one post, but this will be the scariest for me, which is why I will only get the courage to post it at two in the morning having travelled down to Suffolk today; extremely cold, extremely tired and unable to sleep for worry about entirely unrelated matters. I have to apologise in advance for the use of the word c*nt four times in this particular post. I have put an asterisk in it to avoid offending my own sensibilities. I am pathetic.

Bathsheba (who wasn’t called Bathsheba at all) taught me the meaning of the word c*nt. It was that deeply formative moment in a young person’s life when this fragrant young girl sitting next to you, this heavenly being with so much more grace, charm and sophistication than you could ever hope for, turns to you and says, “You are such a c*nt.”

And somehow you've never heard such a word up until now, but because she had said it, you become totally preoccupied by it. It is not to be found in your school dictionary, so that evening at the dinner table, you see no problem with asking your parents, “What exactly is a c*nt?”

And your father advises you to look it up in the doorstop dictionary whilst your mother recovers from her choking fit.

This was one of the two main reasons that I knew that there was something wrong with my feelings towards Bathsheba; she wasn’t a very nice person. Or at least, she wasn’t very nice to me. And given that she made it pretty clear she disliked me, she did have an infuriating habit of tolerating my company and using me as a partner in various classes when there was nobody else convenient (oh God, even Self-Defence). And just occasionally, when we were alone together, she would say or do something pleasant, worst of all touch me and I would be in torment, unable to think about anything else for a week.

The other reason was, to be frank, that she smelt nice. Considering her the most lovely human being that ever existed, I could have got away with, but we were twelve years old and nobody smelt nice. Clearly there was something very wrong with me.

At first, I wasn't sure what I had to be afraid of. I decided that the problem was that she was perfect and I was abhorrent. She was beautiful, charming and all those other things that make a person adorable whereas I was ugly, socially inept and evidently, a bit of a c*nt. I didn’t deserve to look upon such a creature, let alone love her as I did. And if she had an inkling of the way I felt about her, she would undoubtedly have had me beaten up.

By itself, this would not have been such a miserable position to be in. Infatuation does not need to be really unpleasant. We have all loved people who didn’t love us back. In this case, I didn’t have any expectation, I didn’t have any object, so I could not be disappointed or even particularly frustrated. All I wanted was to be near her, to see her and to hear her voice as often as possible without annoying her or arousing any suspicion.

Hmm, yes, the danger of arousing any suspicion. This I was very conscious of.

Bathsheba was not the first. When I was about nine or ten, I fancied myself in love with a much more tolerant individual who, despite my having no mental image of the lad above the age of eleven, still makes the occasional cameo in my dreams today. But that was all right. I couldn’t tell him and I knew he didn’t love me. But I could tell my friends, I could write his name in piles of dead leaves on the side of hill so that the angels could read it and know to take care of him (eek, well, I was only ten). Discovery would have been extremely embarrassing but he wouldn’t have hated me for it. He laughed at my jokes when nobody else did; he would forgive me that.

But nobody would forgive me should they learn of my feelings for Bathsheba. It was inappropriate. And of course, these things don’t happen in isolation; there was a difference here I was already conscious of. It made me feel like a rotten apple, festering with mould and maggots and all sorts of sliminess in a cartload of healthy, shiny, rosy red specimens. What if the way I felt about everyone and everything was wrong? What if all my feelings towards other women and girls were inappropriate?

So I became anxious about the frequency with which I hugged my friends or expressed my affection. I withdrew from them. As I have written about before, my imaginary friend turned up rather late in my childhood. At one point a close friend was very seriously ill in hospital and living close to the hospital, Iisited her everyday. Someone joked about me visiting so often she would be sick of me, and I began to worry terribly that I had overstepped that all-important boundary. My friend had had a brush with death, she had shards of glass imbedded in her neck and skull, and there was I, anxious that my reaction might seem over the top...

I was terrified of discovery. Not that there was anything to discover; I never did or said anything that would give anyone a clue about this. At this time, I had never even had anything which might pass as an unclean thought. I was extremely innocent - perhaps extraordinarily innocent. It was all to do with love, with affairs of the heart; not affairs of the goolies, not sex.

And for no particular reason other than the fact I've just worked out how to do this, before the “To be continued…”, I will leave you with perhaps the best song from one of the best musicals on film, which I’m always mentioning but nobody has seen. The film itself is very silly and quite rude, but it does have some very good songs in. And some remarkable lipstick.

Origin of Love from Hedwig and the Angry Inch (no subtitles, but the lyrics can be found here)


To be continued...

Moving

Another reason our trip to Suffolk was quite stressful was that we decided to move down there. Which means we’re actually travelling back down there tomorrow to look at a place.

We did talk about heading South this time last year, after Rosie announced she was pregnant. We speculated moving to Hampshire or Dorset, close to where they live or else East Anglia, where my folks and the rest of my family are. We discussed it at length over the first few months of this year, looked at Estate Agents etc., but then we decided that too much was going on and we’d stay put for the time being.

This time was different. On our way down South [...] stated that this was really something he thought we should do. I agreed we should think about it. But then a few days later, [...] popped into an Estate Agent near where my folks live and found somewhere that would have been absolutely ideal. Within a very short space of time we decided we would go for it, only then the landlord said that he had received an offer to sell and so that fell through.

The fact that we had even entertained moving so very quickly brought it home that this is really something we want to do now. And frankly, it makes me a little sad. Because I really love Whitby. I am not someone to have a great affection for places, but Whitby is a very special place. It has a great history, a thriving and very tolerant culture and it is a beautiful, beautiful town in one of the most beautiful areas of natural beauty in the whole world. I honestly believe that.

Unfortunately, over the past three or four years since my health deteriorated, I have lost access to very much of what I love about it. I’m not getting out so easily, I’m not socialising much, and indeed, the local culture revolves around drinking in smoky places which was always a difficulty for both of us. The wheelchair keeps me off the beach or from having picnics in the Abbey Grounds. And at the same time, we are making regular trips down south where all my family are, and where we have better access to a greater number of our friends.

Oh no, I know, we are completely mad. We could be moving within a month...