Most men like to talk about themselves, and/or obsessively about what interests them.

I don't like to talk about myself, because I know that I will not get very far without annoying, offending or repelling my audience.
My interests are so marginal and particular that there are very few people I can discuss them with.

Many biographies and autobiographies are tediously over-detailed. I have just read the autobiography of Oliver Wolf Sacks. So many names! So many syndromes and conditions! So bland! Such a start he had in life with wealthy, loving and intelligent parents! Jonathan Miller was a schoolfriend. He was very handsome, obviously had great charisma and. must have been as good at networking as he was adaptable and friendly. By the end of his life he knew or had known a galaxy of the famous, from the pioneering Russian neuropsychologist A.R. Luria to WH Auden, Thom Gunn, Harold Pinter, Peter Brooke, Robert de Niro, Robin Williams, and many others in the literary and artistic world, as well as dozens of surgeons and medical researchers - and his cousin, the impressive Abba Eban. Yet I feel that I know very little about him apart from his well-placed sociability. He is as hidden behind his stories about himself as he was behind his case histories in Awakenings, Musicophilia, Hallucinations, etc. Language is the great obfuscator, or, to put it another way, reducer from three dimensions to two.

Like Dr Sacks, I am attracted to the vulnerable - people in wheelchairs, or with strange appearances and conditions. But my bystander-compassion has found an outlet only with dogs, who are furry, demonstrative and transparent - and don't talk about themselves. I was attracted to Malcolm in 1992 because he was vulnerable and as handsomely doggy a person as I could hope to find. For many years he was a kind of emotional work-in-progress, and it was not until 2017 that we "officialized" our long connection with a barely-ceremonious Civil Partnership - even though we had never lived together and still live in two different countries, he as an Englishman in Northern Ireland and I as an Irishman in France. But thanks to amazingly-cheap air fares between Dublin and France, we see a lot of and talk a lot to each other. We have shared many meals and much music over the years. Thanks to e-mail and telephones we can share many thoughts and ideas. Moreover, my Irish nationality will be of benefit to him if ever for his own or my sake he has to come to France.

For me, dogless as a (siblingless, fatherless but friendless and certainly not unloved) child, dogs are the nearest creature to divine beings, not to be controlled but negotiated with, for they are creatures more rational and logical than we, humble and liminal, psychopomps who inhabit two worlds and thus have more than primary consciousness. Few people realise this, and even fewer would express it thus. Most humans prefer divinities to be completely imaginary constructs to be placated by prayer and often-ridiculous ritual. Christianity's humble sub-divinity has been foisted on a probably-historical ragged preacher whom almost all Christians would reject incarnate, just as Muslims and Jews are instructed to treat dogs as Unclean..

Our mutually-flattering discovery of forms of psycho-investigation and analysis distorts the perception and especially the value of our species as well as our individual flaws of personality and character.

We either wallow in our feelings, moods and activities aimlessly, or go questing for success, excellence or knowledge too goal-drivenly. We tend to lurch from extreme to extreme of behaviour, and never recognise the wilderness inside us which is full of wisdom.

We undervalue Appreciation for its own pleasure, without the urge to create or imitate or interfere. We should appreciate ourselves, our flaws, our inner wilderness, our bad luck or ill-judgement, as well as practising æsthesis beyond ourselves.

We tend to lurch also between luxury with cruel triviality and asceticism with its accompanying pietism. There is a perfectly navigable Middle Way which is the ascetic approach to æstheticism, or the æsthetic approach to asceticism. Eating bread but not drinking wine only makes wheat yet more successful in subduing and riding on the back of Homo sapiens. Mindless luxury is...mindless and obscene. The Middle Way avoids the mere attitudinising which is the near-universal answer to the existential questions which become ever more urgent as Homo sapiens becomes ever more irresponsible.

Appreciation of what is beautiful without and of the chaotic wilderness within does not involve a god, nor does it involve prayer. The latter boils down to beseeching attention from the former, and the former is a statistical unlikelihood.

It is a great boon not to have the oppressiveness (at the very least) of family. Friendship is a trap...for, really, we are all islands and friends tell us or imply, falsely, that we are not.

The solitary need not live in a cave, nor alone in a mansion. The solitary can hide amongst the normals, appreciating what there is to appreciate, doing as little damage as possible to the planet, and encroaching as little as possible upon other people.

All my paintings have been on found surfaces - chunks of chipboard (particle-board) from dumps, old bed-heads and cupboard doors. My 1990 "retrospective" exhibition at Down Arts Centre in Downpatrick was beautiful, elegant, spacious and vibrant. I arranged it myself and included lots of handsome, sculptural plants. The cleaning-lady liked it; the odd-job man liked it; children (especially young girls) liked it. My aunt Marcella took advantage of her bus-pass to travel the 25 miles from Belfast, and she liked it. What's more, she was impressed. Perhaps I managed to alleviate some of the disappointment she had felt at my wayward way of life. She also liked the bus-driver: he was "lovely and hairy"! Were the three of us trichophiles ? I think so - for Martha (my mother) loved hairy old men with long beards, such as she frequently encountered on her travels.

Only one item sold at my exhibition: a rather fragile pot, made at the Pottery For Pleasure class (what else could potting be for, I wonder ?) was bought by the owner of a mini-market next door - from which I had often stolen coffee. But not after his purchase.

A few years later, both Malcolm and I had an exhibition at the same friendly venue (now, alas! quite the opposite) in which he showed ceramics which he had made at the PFP class - his first sortie into artistic creativity. Such classes no longer exist, of course, due to globallistic-capitalist 'progress' and progressive 'austerity' so that the rich can get even richer at the expense of the lower orders who support them with their taxes. I am, however, well below the tax-threshold and have never paid it in the United Kingdom.

Many of the same kinds of people (including Oscar) liked it, and Malcolm also sold three of his hand-built plates. Our work, especially my male nudes, but also my Expressionist landscapes, does not appeal to the staid, pretentious middle classes whom I despise so much, and whose taxes keep me in welfare hand-outs. The world is only fashion. But, thanks to the friendly curator of the Arts Centre, it bought, on behalf of the local council, a half-naked portrait of a silver-bearded and well-known "local character" called Stan Daly, who lived in damp squalor on the same winding road as mine, and who had once let me take a slide-photograph of him.

I cannot actually draw. I hit upon the ruse of projecting slides and tracing onto the painting-surface, usually found pieces of wood or chipboard. It was much later that I discovered that this is how many well-known artists painted at the time - and even well before, with camera obscura gadgets to help them.

I twice had exhibitions in Belfast, one of them shared with hairy Tom the ex-potter. Nothing sold. Nor did any of my metamorphotos in Berlin. Although some of the latter appeared in a Bolognese magazine (no remuneration offered), I concluded that my work is unsellable. Even less so in France, where I was refused an exhibition in the splendid town hall in Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val on the grounds that my "work" was "inaccrochable" - a word also used by Gertrude Stein. One of my paintings is actually entitled L'Inaccrochable, and features me and the dog from Besalù sitting in the Arles Asylum converted from a Romanesque church which housed Vincent van Gogh for a time, before he went to Auvers-sur-Oise.

So I have made no effort to show or sell my work. School made me despise ambition and success. I have no love for St Sisyphus. As a result, my house became more and more full of paintings. This, plus the chronic fatigue, resulted in fewer and fewer paintings being done, so that my output now is perhaps one a year, and (following the same path as Tom the ex-potter) perhaps not a painting but a montage/collage/assemblage.

Writing unpublishable poems does not present such a problem - and is much more suited to fatigue.

A sexy old man (the same age of 75) who contacted me in 2016 via a *Bear* website did so (like Artyom in St Petersburg) mainly because of my pictures. He turned out to have run an art-gallery in Cahors where little concerts were also performed. He urged me to exhibit. But if the Northern Irish middle classes find my work daunting, the historically and notoriously "philistine" French middle-classes - who buy tear-producingly talentless daubs at a thousand euros each - will slink away, horrified or merely challenged.

He lives only twenty minutes away - and visited only twice ! As so often, and probably for some trivial shortcoming - or because I am disturbingly *au ban de la société* (beyond the Pale) - I was dropped 'like a hot potato'.

click for another

"When I was young" (he whined), people wrote letters and replied to them conscientiously. Letters were a Big Deal. We realised that a bit of work and solicitude was required to keep contacts and relationships going. Now, people fire off texts, tweets, e-mails and Facebook banalities quite casually, and thus they do not seem to realise that a relationship depends on a certain reliability on the part of both parties - so e-mails (the closest simulacrum to a letter) should be replied to reasonably promptly, at the very least.

But I am finding that many people are incapable of replying even to e-mails, or of telephoning to keep in touch - much less sending postcards - and I am at a loss to explain this. Are they all zombies ?

Talking of zombies...on the BBC’s wonderful Radio 4 there was a 45-minute discussion on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, which was quite exciting, really. Good ol’ Friedrich had this unfortunate notion of the Blond Beasts…maybe not unlike President Trump, which so easily was incorporated into the Nazi Weltanschauung. I don’t know where he placed himself, being neither a BB nor a slave. He was good in considering the unprecedented power of the Christian priesthood, who over the centuries have been unlike any other in their sheer and petty totalitarianism. Muslim Imams, Mullahs etc. have only local influence and not necessarily any power – until recently. Any Hindu can declare him/herself as Holy and a Guru. Any rich person can endow a temple devoted to a rat cult. “Pagan” priests I am sure did not torture followers who were ‘heretic’, because there were so many cults which were not competitive as only the Christian cults have been. One could simply go off and ‘worship’ Priapus or Dionysos, Artemis, Apollo, Bes or Cybele or…Caesar Augustus. Or several of them. I think Christianity introduced a new meaning to the word ‘worship’ which not even Judaism had done, since there were obviously many factions in Judaism as there still are today, none of them recorded as crucifying members or even leaders of the others. Which casts further doubt on the reality of The Crucifixion, which I regard as a ridiculous and hysterical fiction. As is almost every superstitious doctrine (Virgin Birth, Resurrection, Transubstantiation) of any of the surviving churches.

My Life is a Pilgrimage of Gratitude

for not being poor and married with at least two children,
for not being rich and protective of my wealth,
for having a buddy who has a washing-machine which works
(although in another country),
for having a willy that doesn't care whether it works or not (in any country),
for living in a beautiful and lush part of the country of my dreams,
for having spent most of my life reading great novels
and listening on the radio to great plays by great sensibilities such as Ibsen and Chekhov,
and, latterly, for having access to an unbelievable variety of music on YouTube.

But modern life is not so rich, beautiful and simple for most people, whether brain surgeons, hospital porters, or the beggars I am in awe of. There is very little freedom. In former times freedom was the freedom to roam, freedom to escape, simply disappear. Now that there is for most people no escape from employment, surveillance of one kind or another, paper identity, obligations to the state and institutions such as banks and school-systems, the greatest freedoms are the freedom to be (left) alone, and freedom from busyness, employment, compulsory or involuntary action. To that must be added freedom from the startling tyranny of portable electronic gadgets.

My unemployability and subsequent life of rich frugality was caused in part by my body-clock. I am not an early riser. I could never have held a job which required my presence before 11 in the morning. My first holiday job as a student was as a two-week stint as a dishwasher at the student hostel in Copenhagen where I later fell in immature, ecstatic, heterosexual love. I was required to arrive at 6.30 in the morning for the breakfast shift which ended around 11. It should have ended soon after 10, but I was rather slow. On the sixth morning I couldn't face getting up, and slept until noon. This caused such chaos in the kitchen that I did not skive again. Guilt ensured my punctual attendance - and I was exhausted.

I attended few 9 o'clock lectures at university - for my last two years only the 9-11 a.m. seminars on aesthetics given by my sympathetic professor, Bryce Gallie - who had told me not to bother attending for any other lecture, but stay in my cottage with my dog Elektra, and paint. He later became Master of the first college to be founded in Cambridge, in 1284.

It was, I guess, only the threat of physical abuse, social censure and unwillingness to further agonise my "aunt"-mother that got me to school until I was 17. Once I had left that institution, I was determined not to be a victim of the hierarchical totalitarianism of employment, and I took control of my life.

The job that I realised very late in life I was ideally suited for was copy-editing. For much of my life I have corrected typos and mistakes in books (thus getting into minor trouble with Northern Ireland Libraries). I notice when there are too many commas, or not enough. Hawk-like, I notice spelling mistakes and almost unnoticeable misuse of words (such as tending for attending). Had I known this in my twenties, I could have taken advantage of the surge of publishing in the 1960s and found a pleasant job and lots of entrées - in London. I even had a contact in London - Hugh Brody - who had many friends "in publishing". I doubt, however, if anyone in my third-rate private school - let alone my family - had ever heard of such obscure and lowly (though greatly satisfying) employment. I might easily have moved up the ladder to Actual Editing, a job with a great deal of cachet, which I would have taken very seriously and to which I would have brought a relatively open - if innocent - mind.

But instead I chose Permanent Unemployment (as a precursor of the Universal Minimum Income) in rural Northern Irish tranquillity, educating/entertaining myself through the BBC. It was at this time I started to paint. I am not a good writer of prose, but many of the relatively-few paintings I have done are very good, if completely non-commercial, like my poetry.

I am not very good at relating to people. I find them opaque. Although I make friends easily, and am a good and retentive listener, I lose them even more easily due to my forthright dissidence and dislike of "Western Values" and the upside-down Christianity they are based on. I would have been hopeless at Networking, even if I had known such a phenomenon existed. I am much too spontaneous/uninhibited and naive. If I don't like someone I make it abundantly clear, and, if possible, I remove myself. So perhaps I would never have become an editor, urbane and more or less corrupt.

Although I am not so bad at homosensuality, it is a rare and unvalued activity. I am not testosteronal or "very good at sex" - evidently so, when I have to inhale a mouthful of cannabis to "get going" at all.

I'm pretty sure that my prime interest in men was to find affection and friendship with someone I liked and respected, and felt an affinity to/affection for. The 'sex' was a fascinating - and potentially soul-destroying - means to an end: une âme sœur, as the French expression goes - a soul-brother along the lines of Rumi and Shams. I might have made an excellent Companion to Edward Lear - and would surely would have rejoiced in and with him in Southern Albania (including that large chunk annexed and ethnically cleansed by the insufferable, arrogant, whining Greeks). I started out naively thinking that many gay men would be 'marginal' and 'original' like me. It took a long time for me (always slow on the uptake) to realise that most gay men were 'wannabe normals' and are now safely in the clutches of a highly-circumscribed normality in the service of the religion of work; that very few have my breadth of interests, my contempt for civilisation which progressively infantilises and regiments its victims, my loathing of organised religion...which somehow accompanies my interest in Romanesque church sculpture !

But I found Malcolm.

Now I am a quite quiet kind of slow, queer quietist. I admire sloths.