My cheeks burn. I’ve burnt my fingers.
I used to notice Miriam leaving the room when Joe got graphic about what goes on in gay clubs or saunas, or out in the ‘cruising ground’ as he calls it, being ironic and a little nostalgic at the same time. Miriam explains the latter to me.
Then Joe says to me, You need to read what your brother says. You need to read those bits of the journal that are explicit about the sex he had with Edward or what he did with Benedict. That’s part of your brother. That is your brother, your religious brother.
We’d gone out and bought some more rum in the St Paul’s area.
There’s no point reviving some sanitised, saintly, idealistic view of him. Even if that nineteen-year-old youth might’ve written up his wild temptations and fallings into sin as if he were a medieval or a Hopkinesque pantheist.
The rum is working. I strum on my cuatro, ‘All day all night Miss Mary Ann …’
It will not be the truth if you don’t put in the dirty bits, Joe says.
Joe! Miriam exclaims.
But then, Joe goes on, wasn’t he in the writing of those very bits actually placing those accounts alongside equally lurid accounts by Aelred of Rievaulx in his own idiom, about masturbation, for example? What does he talk about - that gushing slime, the concupiscence? Joe relishes the word. I think, Joe says, that your brother was trying to redeem the body, take the body away from that demolition site that the church has taken it to. Church and state!
Joe and his demolition site! We laugh. Miriam comes back into the room.
She says, I find your brother’s struggle moving and beautiful and tragic. He was young, fired by Benedict, by the poetry, the ideas.
By Edward’s stunning good looks, Joe interjects.
By beauty, Miriam explains. He’s writing about beauty and what it does to us. But she says she doesn’t want to know all that goes on down by the docks or up some alley. She’s not being judgemental, she says, though she thinks she has her reservations. She just doesn’t want to hear the details. Some of it worries her and offends her.
J. M. doesn’t offend me, she says. I think that, yes, in times of prohibition you steal your moments anywhere, but with more freedom let’s leave those places, she says.
That’s when Joe says, That’s shit! People won’t be liberated in a decade even. Anyway, PC politics doesn’t change everything. There’s a hell of a lot of prejudice and hate out there still, enshrined in law. There’s a lot of internalised shame and guilt. I know, Joe says. He continues. Why is sodomy criminalised? Sodomy! The very word.
It’s for men and women too, heterosexual sex, Miriam says.
Yes, says Joe, but why?
I listen and say, We should have this discussion in Les Deux Isles on TV. Come and see what hate is like from priests, immams, pundits and fundamentalist preachers of hell and damnation. It’s like the mid-west in America. That stuff gets beamed down to the backyard. Then I venture an opinion. Isn’t sodomy, I mean anal sex, unsafe now, anyway?
It can be, Robert, of course, Joe jumps in, but it can be made safe. We make it safe for pregnancy so why not for disease. It’s safe for other diseases, so why not AIDS? Yes, I agree. We must be safer.
Even for Miriam and Joe, certainly for me, the acronym can be a heavy sound in a discussion.
We must demythologise our hate of the homoerotic, Joe proclaims. Coming back to J. M. I think that’s what he was trying to do. Poor bastard, at nineteen in 1963 in a monastery of screwed-up theologians and moral philosophers. Sick.
Joe! Really! Miriam says. Get a balance. You know that’s not half the truth. That’s not J.M.’s story. Get off your soapbox. We must respect all his story.
Miriam notices that I go silent. Miriam and I smile at each other; Joe leaves the room.
You must forgive him. You know he was the first person they met when they left. He’s angry but he’s hurt, very sore. He was their friend for fourteen years or so.
I know, I say. Some of it is too much for me, too much too quickly. You’re both right. I’m lucky to have you.
There was an account in the journal of ‘The Raid,’ as J. M. called it. I call it rape. J. M. going over the ground.
I have the debates going in my head.
The ground is beaten smooth. One of the dens where we boys come to smoke. The wind in the high trees howling, crying. We are both crying and looking at each other. Made to lie side by side face down.
We enter each other’s eyes, watery. Here in this luminous eye we see only each other. This is where we have curled, into each other’s eyes. To hide. We ravel up our selves. Only the roar of the wind. All ears. The river at the bottom of the valley. Sunlight on rocks. All ears. Parrots higher than the trees. Green in the blue. Imagine for an instant. Don’t imagine. We leave our bodies on the ground and ascend above them and look down. We look down. They are used by them. Utterly. We utter nothing. Someone says PLEASE. Someone says STOP. One goes in. One comes out. One goes in. One comes out. There is a crowd in there. Entrance. Exit. Pressing. How many more can fit into this room. It is a small room. It is small. It is little. Little. Very little.
The eye is the window to the soul. We climb through the eye into the soul. We leave the body.
The temple. The body is the temple of the Holy Ghost.
Now the room is so deserted. So abandoned. And the curtain of the temple was rent in two. But still it feels full as if that is its natural state. To be so filled up. Then emptied. Empty yourself. Then we can’t feel. I can’t feel anything, there, can you? Numb. I want to feel. I want to feel.
I don’t want to feel.
Fill me, fill me up!
Cleanse me.
Empty. Be emptied.
We climb back out of the eye, out of the window to the soul, into our bodies. Only the wind in the high trees. The sound of water over rocks. How ravaged. We curl into each other. Where in the world is there a place for us? Where can we stand in the open and say what has been done here? Who will listen?
We gather each other’s clothes, helping with sleeves and necks. We use spit to clean off the dirt. It smears. Makes a stain. Stainless. Pure. Like shit. Smell of shit and blood. And numbness. Will we die?
I want to feel. Don’t touch me. Who says that? Where do we go?
We stumble down to the river. Look at what’s happened.
The rock pool runs red with our blood. This is my blood which shall be poured out for you. Blood over blue stones.
We wash our bodies in the River Jordan.
That was one way in which he saw it. Who can imagine these two young boys, sixteen, with their fellow pupils, sixteen? ‘The Raid.’ What state of mind was J. M. in when he wrote that? There’s an early version and then it’s embellished some years later. This is the embellished version.
I was there. It staggers me. It shocks me profoundly. I was thirteen.
Miriam says, You can’t beat yourself for something you did or didn’t do when you were a boy.
I don’t fully remember what I did with my thoughts about what I heard they had done to my brother and his friend.
The new term began as if nothing had ever happened. There must be no scandal. There must be forgiveness. I sometimes saw those boys queuing for confession.
Until that afternoon. They stand all around. Out of the blue. I am there again as witness. A witness for the prosecution. But who does the prosecuting?
Words. Made to eat my words. Testaments.
Fill up. Empty.
The Abbot, whom I’ve spoken to again, said that there was a tradition of fasting, but it must be done with approval, and in moderation. Benedict had gone beyond what was recommended.
So, he did kill himself then?
Who can judge? the Abbot asks. It’s a matter of judgement. Think of the common good. Lest any be scandalised.
‘Take this and eat, for this is my body.’
I pick up all these implicit and explicit meanings in his writing. His puns. His poetry is a poetry of pain.