As Christmas and the season of commercial goodwill to all men approached, I met it knowing more than ever I was not as other men, and that it was meant to be less rewarding for me. Adelaide, my landlady proved it with her Christmas card to me. It depicted a cartoon of a man who was putting an image of himself at the top of his Christmas tree. As affirmative humour went, it went a long way with me.
On the surface I felt more sociable with the new short hair and beard. Though part of me wanted to grow the beard again, but I had nobody close enough to discuss the matter with. I was glad that the previous 'old man of the sea' look was gone. The new look made it easier for me to smile. I felt lighter in myself for the change of appearance. The rules that I knew guided the language of church people that seemed to be both easier to understand and more frustrating in what they dictated was off-limits. Those rules had been a good holding place but in my head I still had the memories of old holding places where I was held unsympathetically. There, back then, nobody would talk about how the rules favoured the few, and I was one of the many. The memories of the lack of sheer indifference from those times seemed to be clarifying into sharper focus the more I wrote about them at night when writing could easily make me cry. But the tears helped me sleep. The longer I went on with the new appearance the more I felt that the holding place is what creates the self, and to be the different person I thought I could be I needed to be in a different place. In the meanwhile I continued my arguments with previous less comfortable selves I'd been with the nightly journaling.
If I felt only loosely out sync with my neighbours and friends in Lady Bay I felt much further out of sync with those I kept trying to maintain contact with from my Lincolnshire life. My longest friendship at the time was with Graham in Newark, who whilst he lived no more than a thirty minute train journey away, the distance of a few miles had hid a lot of changes both of us had made apart from each other. In the Gainsborough of my memory he had stood out for being one of very few who followed an Indian spiritual teacher, where when Graham asserted the teachings of this guru/teacher it was impossible to ask why and how such a minority spiritual path was right about the whole universe. A cynic/rationalist, would have thought his belief was 'following a cult' whilst trying to soften their language towards him. Only for Graham's reply to the unbeliever being to reinforce the damning description of 'he is in a cult', where cults always defy shared logic and push the adherent into a position of isolation. 36
I was doing no better. In my nightly journaling I had found a language for what made me feel isolated, but I was waiting for the doctors appointment for the course of therapy to make how I felt sharable with other human beings in a setting I trusted. Comparing our different senses of what isolated us, past and present that outside of a mutual appreciation of 'outsider' folk musician Roy Harper and other music, we were both isolated by language where the language locked away how we had created memory and experience, rather than letting us share how we knew what we knew.
It was a given that we did not discuss homosexuality: he would not have wanted to and I did not know how discuss that matter. But if, for instance, he had asked me 'You say you are Christian and yet your Christianity is unforgiving of your homosexuality. How does that fit together?' he would have been right, and revealed to both of us part of how painfully divided I felt. If I had replied generically 'Lots of American soul musicians have felt the pull between the sexual urge and the spiritual urge, and conflated the two.' I would have been half right. But he could still have scoffed 'Sophistry!'. As it was the conversation usually stopped at his assertion belief that 'The world we are both in now could be utterly changed forever by the right collective belief in the right instant to the right guru.', where me saying 'Can I at least call him 'Teacher? That is at least a bit of English I understand.'. would be seen as weak. He would stick to his own ideas in his own language, where he saw that as 'conviction'.
My faith was working for me rather poorly at the time. The conflict between knowing I was gay, whilst feeling led to be part of/supported by a Christian church which was an improvement on previous churches with how accepted the existence of homosexuality but parked it distance from ever having to discuss it. The new car park for homosexuality parked it closer, but kept it a distance from open acknowledgement. With the churches' belief in predestination, as drawn from The Bible nobody there would willingly get their heads around how some people's lives were randomised and anonymised. The churches refused to accept at face value personal experience where adults had had their lives randomised and anonymised by the authorities of the day when they were too young to stop the process. The church refused to countenance how that randomness etc had shaped their experience of sex.
In the new year I stopped all effort I'd made to keep in touch with Graham. I wanted my group therapy sessions to begin, when after more than than a year of waiting the doctor was saying nothing about when or where they might be starting. Given that my closest friendship was built on so much misunderstanding, then what chance had I of saying anything about resolving my contradictions to my family? They were part of why I had such contradictions in the first place.
The last time with family the time had felt right was in early Autumn, pre hair cut, and then it worked because of my father's absence. My sister was the only one of the family to learn to drive and own a car. She drove from Gainsborough to visit me in Nottingham for an afternoon. She brought with her her four year old daughter, and Mother. They liked the shared house I lived in when they viewed it, it felt homely. The high spot of the day was walking out after our afternoon meal to pick blackberries across the road from where I lived. There it was safe for Vicki-Louise to toddle behind the adults at a distance as we walked along. Vicki walked far enough behind to keep our heads at the same height as the horizon. Thus proving to me one bit of research I had read about where concerned mothers. Their concern was why children naturally walk at a distance from the adults who they want to keep as part of a wider world, whilst the adults' concern was that the child should walk beside them. The anxiety of the mother whose child did not walk beside them was the focus of the research. in their anxiety mothers were not concerned with that that the child had reasons for choosing the distances they did. But I too had reasons for keeping family at distance and establishing my own sense of perspective where I saw my family as part of the world. This time my distance was proven and quietly accepted.
Early in the new year I cottaged again. By this time, with the writings about it afterwards reducing the urge to a more occasional need than the silent compulsion it had been before. I had sex with a very easy on the eye hairy/chunky bearded man, where his appearance and ease of body language made the encounter affirmative for me in way I had not expected. We even briefly kissed before we both left. This was a major advance on a previous encounter where 'Thank you Malcolm' had been the payoff that changed how I saw myself. If with the kiss he was as silent and mysterious as the man from milk tray, then I was fine with that. The brief time with him was the best New Year gift I could give myself.
In some undefined way Graham's universal certainty against the personal randomness that some endure was part right: through the ether and via my sexual experiences there was a message looking for me to receive it where the message went something like 'He is a bear, you are a bear, this is a bear encounter'. After the newness of New Year wore off there were other messages ready to be be delivered to me which confirmed to me that my new self was ready for delivery too.
To be directed to Chapter Thirty Two please left cluck here.
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