The House of Pure Being

by Michael Murphy

  Some days after that encounter, I signed for the ten author’s hardback copies of my newly published book which arrived at the hall door from the distributors. It felt as if the well of words was overflowing, because the first-edition copies that I’d mentally ear-marked for Mary and Robbie as a valuable gift on into the future, were now redundant. They were never to receive them, a symbolic absence which had suddenly roared open into an eternal void.

  It feels as though I’ve deliberately turned my back on the people who understood my language in a way that approximated my own, in a considered betrayal of a part of myself, and that I’m the lesser for it. Isn’t that telling, the way I express the sensation as though it were my fault? Terry pointed out the pertinent question: ‘Who has turned their back on whom?’ It hardly matters now, because the devastation which has been wrought is the same. I shared a common field with my family, and I’ve had to cede my portion of that, and to withdraw, set out in a different direction on a journey all by myself, because they’ve chosen to take their stand with the abuser. It’s a sundering, a severance, without, apart from, separately, far away, different.

  The happening has also revived the anguished memories of my brother Kieran’s death from cancer fifteen years ago, which was the death of future possibilities. His death left me orphaned, and I’m experiencing that same loss again, or perhaps anew, given the protective safety of distance. Now is the time for the frozen emotions around that catastrophe to be reclaimed and honoured, which were buried in a hole in the ground with that final decade of the rosary, the last time we stood in a line as a family together and shared in sorrow. And we were left all alone in the cemetery.

  Part Three

  The Silence…

  ‘How are you?’ has always struck me as an absurd question, out of tune with what’s really being asked, until I discovered that ‘how’ is a derivation of the Old English ‘who?’ And yet, after the early morning pleasantries − ‘You’re welcome! May I get you something to drink – coffee, tea, water?’ − it’s the question with which habitually I begin each psychoanalytic session at my consulting rooms in Dublin, after the client has settled comfortably onto the couch: ‘Well, how are you?’

  For me, that unasked question, ‘Who are you?’, which is hidden deep in the expectant silence of the room, is the invitation to say something intimate about the self, the fruit of ongoing thought and knowledge which has been ripening unbeknownst in the shadow of other trees, way out on the edge of the orchard, over time. It implies that I’m open to hearing what the client has to say, and committed to the work of developing being, and being there, for the length of time it may take to arrive at the truth.

  ‘How are you?’ seems to be another question entirely to do with bearing, the manner in which you uphold your being in the world. Such a body language only serves to emphasize the full speech that’s required of that register to express the gesture articulately, and without inference, so that the hidden who question can be encouraged like a delicate plant deep in the unconscious, and brought forward to flower in the person’s conscious speech as well. And yet, there’s also something comforting and soothing in the simplicity of a tender ‘How are you?’ It’s a full-faced question that heals the soul, and makes the loneliness of being recede, if only for a moment. I’d never realised that my denigration of that how question has had the profoundest implications for the manner in which I’ve conducted my life to date, because it’s not a question that I usually ask of myself, being more concerned with constructing who I am through the various scenarios of the drama of the day.

  My brother’s knowing question, ‘And how are you now?’ meaning how are you given the present circumstances, the question with which I began and ended my first book, certainly has within it the sense of bracing yourself against the vicissitude of life, a two-handed protective shield against variation and mutability. He was giving the nod to a person hiding out of sight around the corner of language, and respectfully inviting them to break cover and speak, if that was their wish. By employing my brother’s quote open-handedly in my book, I believed that I too was giving such an entrance to all comers, more than willing to accept what they have to say. ‘And how are you now?’ invokes the ceremony of a blessing, the bestowal of a divine gift which has the effect of consecrating both parties. That valued communication is a spiritual safe house where the fragile gossamer of life’s mystery can be shaken out in speech, like St Martin’s summer in November, when cobwebs draping garden foliage reach out to brush your face with gentle filminess, nature’s softest fingertips, renewing the spirit with precious moments of golden autumnal tenderness, before this time in a side-by-side gesture of solidarity we can face again into the icy blast of winter’s north-easterly chill, arm in arm together; unless, of course, a silent blanket of snow starts to smother everything.

  From my years of psychoanalytic work, I’m very mindful of people who proffer the most valuable gift possible, that of telling me about themselves, or as we say with greater accuracy in Irish mé féin a labhairt, to speak myself. There are some exceptional individuals who have the courage to speak themselves out into the eternal stream of language. Like a cuckoo in a nest, they make a space for themselves there by deliberately elbowing others out of the way as they grow, constructing who they are out of the building blocks of words, a patrimony that belongs to all of us, but which they strive mightily to ingest and make their own. They’ve to struggle to do that, because others won’t yield them a place without a fight: every word of the language has to be gained, and then held. As Samuel Johnson, with huge insight, put it: ‘Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.’

  Some people begin their analysis by speaking to me about themselves almost in the third person, which only serves to shine a spotlight on the fearful pain of their alienation that has condemned them to live elsewhere, in the wrong person, or even in a different grammatical tense. It’s a punishment they suffer for not being able to interrupt the silence, and speak the truth about themselves. In all likelihood, the reasons for this have been outside of their control, trammels to which they may never even have adverted, and which had been imposed on them by someone else, essentially to control them. In the very few words of hope that I’d offer (my place is to hear, after all) I hold out a flaming torch that by the end of their analysis, after labouring for possibly many years, gradually they shall have inhabited all the memories of who they are in a language of their own choosing, and begin to live life in the present. They’ll have reclaimed old ground, and have brought those recollections up to date through a software update, and a rebooting. Their speech will have been pruned of other’s prescriptive voices, unoriginal reproductions that took to themselves the right to inscribe rules upon another’s body, to inhibit them with corrupting cursive chains that dug painfully into the flesh, behaving rather like computer viruses. Then for the first time, they’ll be able to speak to me in their own voice, and after time, in the most assured manner. As a final step, they’ll have taken home that torch blazing with the light of truth, for it will have belonged to them always and in the first place, but without their recognition or realisation.

  ‘Yes, I’ve got something to say.’ And isn’t that in itself something to be grateful for, because it enables me to continue on from day to day. I can expand upon that opening line, give a gloss as if the something were an unusual word requiring an explanatory note. And one word borrows another, hanging together and making further connections. Silence would bring that continuity to a shuddering halt. My story doesn’t yet have an ending, and it would be wrong of me to insert a final full stop before my allotted time ran out.

  Just imagine murdering the artist! Not only closing over the wing panels of a triptych and blocking out the blazingly beautiful central section, but actually removing it from view. Somebody deciding to deliberately disappear the artist, a mirror-image of what happened in Spain during the civil w
ar. People weren’t allowed to wear mourning after a loved one had been disappeared: they had to carry on as if nothing had happened. From the retrospection given by that premature conclusion, I was sixty-five when I died unexpectedly, the much-loved partner of Terry, sadly missed by my mother, and deeply regretted by my uncle and aunt, although they too wore no black, so that their neighbours would never suspect somebody else had blood on their hands.

  It’s the same way that I behaved after the surgeon removed my cancerous prostate. Every day I mourned in silence the absence of a penis that once ejaculated semen, but I didn’t burden anybody with my complaints; there’s so much more to be grateful for. Yet, from that narrow perspective, focussed in on the symbol of creativity that shoots blanks, I’ve continued on a different track. My spirit is invited by each new dawn to try again in a beyond of death. It’s a bodily resurrection which has fitted seamlessly with my life before, making unrecognised appearances on a lonely road. At the very least, I can always say something which has the power to change matters.

  The something I’ve got to say, and it’s a subversive imperative now burgeoning up as it does from underneath, is about my sexual identity. I’m homosexual; now there’s an admission that has the potential to change matters. I don’t announce it normally, because I used to wonder what people would make of the label, about which they’d feel obliged to have an opinion, for or against. I’m sure people with a high level of awareness register the fact subliminally when they meet me, but it’s not a topic that would come up in general conversation. I’d be wary of discrimination, when a particular person is singled out for subtle disfavour. I’d be disappointed to experience an acknowledged lack of interest from people, because of my perceived sexual difference.

  Homosexuality has been innate in me from the first gleaming rays of the rising sun, although I didn’t open up anything about that orientation until I began to experiment sexually in my late twenties with members of my own sex in whom I was mirrored. The loud cry of joy I set up on that first night of seduction was my delighted reaction to having freely explored the texture, the curves and folds of another man’s body, a man who’d held me reverently in his arms. It was the inevitable next step into adulthood, from having lived cheek by jowl with my brother, who shared with me his humour, love and loyalty, and in the varying expressions of his being, who was the first to ground my masculinity, after my father. The dramatic uncovering of the phallus was a sacrament to which I came late in my personal development, a benediction by a priest of Dionysus, who raised the monstrance of which I shall always speak well. I was in my thirties when I knelt before him smelling of incense, and worshipped there: received the white host melting onto my tongue. The phallus became a whetstone of humanity which has sharpened my understanding of what it means to be a man. Over the years, it has kept me sane within the symbolic presence of its parameters, my life regulated according to the rise and fall of its tides. Now, since the operation for cancer, it incarnates nothingness for me as well.

  Early one morning in the broadcasting studios, there was a retirement gathering for a technician when he’d completed his final shift. As we cut the cake, and toasted him with glasses of cava and orange juice, a young man was standing across from me, with his legs apart and arms raised, holding the camera of his mobile phone to his eyes with both his hands, taking photographs of the occasion. A large, circumcised penis was clearly outlined in the bulge of his grimy jeans, and a sudden surge of desire took away my breath and confounded me. I looked at this young technician with renewed interest, admiring the generally easy appearance of the thirty-year-old with the curling brown hair, the bigness of his body, its shape and muscular development. He lowered the camera and held my gaze with bemused blue eyes for a moment, and then he raised the camera again, this time turning his torso to the side to take another photograph from a different angle, which had the effect of emphasizing the curving thickness of his member sloping over heavy testicles, trapped against his right leg by the zip. The size of this young man’s penis astonished me, and it looked to be lazily semi-erect.

  Under the pressure of my gaze, the young man lowered the mobile phone, made a point of checking it briefly, and then he turned around until we were directly facing each other. He raised the camera again and focussed up on me through the lens: guiltily, I averted my eyes from his crotch, like a man caught looking enviously at the massive bonnet of a BMW 5 Series Touring. He grinned, so he was aware that I was disturbed by him. He bent his knees a little and thrust his appendage forward shamelessly. I was sure that he was being deliberately displayful towards me now, confidently proud of his vigorous endowment, and I was overwhelmed at such a sight: we seemed to be alone together in the room. He gently lowered the camera and gave me a broad smile. He’d have known that I was gay, and I presumed that he was straight, but there was no malice in that smile. I felt it as a gentle gesture of solidarity man to man, a sympathy which I was too emotionally retentive to acknowledge with the even slightest nod of my head: I knew not to go there. I had to walk away, out of the room and down the corridor, and for the first time I was stung with the anguish of being an old man, old enough to be that young man’s grandfather. My sexual life was over. After the prostatectomy, I’d been left with the stump of a non-functioning penis that over the past three years seemed to have withered away into nothingness, something I could never let another see. I considered the dart of my sudden desire to have been an obscene anachronism, out of place and time, depraved, unworthy because it no longer seemed to arise naturally from within myself, but had to be generated by an outside stimulus.

  I was plagued by the pathetic, romantic fantasy that he was going to follow, catch up with me and invite me back to his untidy bachelor flat for a mug of coffee, both of us trembling with excitement at the improbable adventure. As soon as we’d cross the threshold, we’d embrace. I’d sink to my knees and worship this character I seem to have idealised, as he rolled back his head and groaned. I heard those deep, inarticulate sounds expressive of sexual desire in my head, and they wouldn’t leave me alone. They tormented me, and continually broke my concentration. The sensible facts of my age and of his youth, that I was gay and he was straight, didn’t intrude to save me. I became angry that I was being subjected to such heart-scalding imaginings, a ludicrous drama in which I hadn’t taken a role since I myself was in my early thirties, when I was coming out. ‘What’s the point of this suffering,’ I muttered aloud, ‘now that I’m incapable of doing anything about it?’ I drew amused glances from my colleagues passing by, talking to myself. It felt as if I’d overdosed on caffeine. ‘You’re insane,’ I concluded, alive with the madness.

  It was late evening before I thought to analyse what it was in the chance encounter that invited such a strong reaction. The particular young man didn’t concern me: I’d never paid any attention to him before; indeed, I knew nothing at all about him. The essence of what shocked me, what had provoked me, was catching sight of the shape moulded by the cloth, and the breathtaking bigness of the shape. It was a talisman that resonated with me, for whatever reason: the visible representation of something abstract, undefined, a phantom out of a dream, intangible.

  Two days later, a memory came back of being sexually abused in the thicket at the end of our back garden at home by the young mechanic from the garage next door. I was seven years old, and it was the first time that I’d felt a burgeoning penis become fully erect against my body. In all of the encounters with that young man, I remembered he’d never opened the zip of his blue overalls. I’d never seen something then either, or so I’d thought. But I must have registered the imprint of his penis beating against his clothes, even though I didn’t have the words at the time to fill out the shape, or even to understand what was really happening to me out of sight of the others, and how I’d felt about it. Those episodes, and they were repeated many times, had sunk into the depths of unconsciousness, to surface now with all the frightening excitement of secret trysts, just the two of us,
me and the youth whom I took to be my older friend, that I’d experienced out among the bushes and the trees at the end of our back-garden.

  When I was absorbed playing games by myself, the young mechanic used to creep up on me from behind, tap me on the shoulder, and when I turned he’d ask, ‘Would you like to come with me, and I’ll give you more lessons in how to wind an opponent?’

  I was appalled that I should be so captivated by an image, tangible to me now in that historical context of my extreme youth. What I remembered above all was the urgency of his voice, the hoarse whispering against my ear in a rough embrace, almost a rising chant repeated over and over, gently and with increasing desperation: ‘Are you winded yet, oh tell me, aren’t you winded yet, be sure to tell me when you’re winded, do let me know when you feel that you’re winded …’

  ‘Yes,’ I’d say: ‘Yes …’

  I was filled with sadness that the passion of sexual activity was consigned to the past, now that I’d been emasculated by prostate cancer. Because of the radical prostatectomy, the fantasy of the mutilation of the penis has become a reality for me. Sometimes the poor, withered thing can hiccup up gobs of urine, never semen anymore because the surgeon has removed my prostate gland. As a man, I’ve been rendered voiceless in that department, uttering nothing: I have no thing. The echo of what I was missing, of what I’d been deprived of, pained me grievously. At least I was able to take delight in the healthy exuberance of that relaxed young man from a different generation, who’d so unselfconsciously inhabited his body that he was able to share it with all comers. Or perhaps towards the end of his display, he’d performed that erotic dance especially for me, whom he’d recognised as being thunderstruck, although he could never have surmised the reason why. I’d like to think that a connection was made, if only with my past, because it somehow redeemed the frank openness of what had happened between us. I’d witnessed his enjoyment, and he had recognised my desire. There was no trace of judgement involved, although I was full of self-reproach that I’d committed an offence through being seen to be desirous. And yet in his manifest enjoyment of his body, the young man represented for me a generous future. He held out to me the promise of further development, and the freedom to live life in ways that I never before would have deemed possible, nor even permissible. That young man’s erection enabled me to flesh out with words the nothingness of an image that breathlessly I’d experienced once upon a time as something tactile. Through his intervention, I found out that the power which had shaped and moulded my sexuality for the past fifty years or so was a memory. It has been alive in me for all of that time unbeknownst, sending me off like a medieval knight of old on a never-ending quest to find again the Holy Grail, which I’d lost. It’s the bowl that has dictated my responses, a rounded, hollow container used for serving food and holding liquid. And yes, this desire which has motivated me, this particular truth which has moulded me, has been my life. Only now it’s no longer consigned to the underworld of my past, but resurrected into life-giving words that are free-floating, and that also have the sovereign power to consciously collaborate with my future.