I never set out to hurt anybody.
There’s a certain pain around my memories of the women with whom I’ve enjoyed intimate relations. It comprises loss and consequent sadness, guilt, shame, and for reasons I can’t quite fathom, I need to put the word violence into this frame of pain. There’s a different sort of pain associated with the women I’ve met and liked but not enjoyed a carnal relationship. What might have been!
Guilt? Yes, guilt’s woven into the pattern. Threads of pain, her pain, my pain: the public consequences of my private pleasures. Guilt; my mind plays with guilt and gilt and I wonder about the colour of guilt; probably not gold.
Then I’m off thinking about Tony Blair, our gold-plated, keen-as-mustard, young Christian, Prime Minister. His barrister’s mind must be working at white-hot speed to defend his well being against crushing guilt. Perhaps we’re lucky to have him in place; it means we can bolster our own self-righteousness as we witness his multiple deceptions, his sleights of hand, his wild tarantellas in front of the cameras.
We know it all ends in death; the wide sea to which we all return.
Once you bring in sexual freedom as a principle (it’s rather like drinking champagne) then it can easily out-bid the fuddy-duddy old ways of commitment and faithfulness, the whole bad faith and violence of marriage And it helps to tell each other stories of sexual repressions as the grounds of our neuroses, the sickness of our lives, the sickness of our society.
Oh yeah!
What did Tony Blair do? I can believe that he believed in military intervention for good humanitarian reasons (Kosovo) and then was persuaded by the neoconservative agenda with regard to American foreign policy in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, or let’s be a bit more generous, American foreign policy with regard to the rest of the world. Stories were told of the evil Saddam Hussein and the terrorist threat, especially potent in the aftermath of 9/11. A case was made out not to feel guilt about the thousands who were due to endure terrible suffering and loss, and thousands more who were to endure torture and death.
After all we want to live in a world in which ‘I’ can do whatever ‘I’ feel like doing.
And somehow in all this it’s other people who have to pay the price.
Let’s remake the world!
Let’s not!