The House of Pure Being

by Michael Murphy

I seem to come from a disagreeable family. My uncle and aunt come over to us for Sunday lunch about once a fortnight. Terry is careful to cook food for them that’s nourishing and tasty, and easy for them to manage. Just before dessert, when Terry had left the room, I told them that he and I were going to have our Civil Partnership ceremony on Tuesday week next, and that they were more than welcome to come. I could see them freeze slowly in their chairs as my words landed. It was as if the blood in their veins had suddenly thickened, and they became immobile. There was no movement. My joyful news was received by them in stony silence: both of them appeared stricken as if I’d broken wind, and caused a noxious smell. I’ve learned over time not to try and fill silences, so I let it continue on. Eventually, my aunt was moved to ask stiffly, ‘And where is this going to take place?’

  Sensing the danger, I chose to speak about the reception. ‘In the Herbert Park Hotel in Ballsbridge.’

  More silence. Aunt Mary is an aunt by marriage, and we’d been talking earlier about the recent civil wedding of her niece. My aunt had described the outfit she’d worn, so she did have something new to wear. I began to collect the dinner plates, and left the room to total silence. In the kitchen I was furious, and angrily whispered to an astonished Terry to bring in the plate with the fruit-topped flan that he’d made for dessert. ‘Just take it in, take it in!’ I ordered desperately, flailing about, filling the dishwasher with their dirty plates, demented with the ugliness of the situation. I was shocked because I hadn’t expected such a discourteous response. Even though they were schooled in a different era, I never imagined that they wouldn’t be supportive of us. When I followed on with the sweet plates, the conversation was continuing without any reference to my invitation, even when they repaired to the couch afterwards for a hurried cup of tea. The pair left our apartment without delay for the journey home, and made no reference to what had occurred. To my shame, neither did I, wanting to forget the whole episode as an incidental digression. When I waved them away, I was left with the crushing impression that my aberrant behaviour had spoiled the Sunday luncheon of good humour, and I felt out of place and in disgrace. The letter inviting my uncle and aunt remained unopened, propped up against a decanter on the side-board. And the envelope is there still: I haven’t been able to touch it. Their names which were written across it in such joyful anticipation, reproach the living like an inscription on a gravestone, acknowledging a relationship which once was.

  We noticed that the usual phone call on the Monday night to thank us for the Sunday lunch didn’t come. Finally on Thursday night, when we arrived in late from work, there was a message on the answering machine. ‘Auntie Mary here. Please ring me urgently.’ And unusually, ‘If you’ve forgotten the number, it’s 295 635.’

  I should have been warned by the edgy, sarcastic tone of that addendum, but for a second time I didn’t perceive that anything was amiss. ‘They’ve probably thought better of it, and want to come,’ I remarked to Terry. But the seating plans had already been settled and delivered to the hotel. After their horrified reaction to our invitation, we’d presumed that they weren’t going to be there, so what to do?

  ‘Tell them we don’t want them there – and I don’t want them there – but make it light and fluffy. Say that it’s going to be a young crowd that they wouldn’t know: they’d probably be delighted anyway to be let off the hook,’ said Terry, turning on the television, and pulling over the armchair.

  I rang my aunt. ‘Hello, Michael here …’ Uncle Robbie answered the phone. He asked how we were, and then said, ‘Your Aunt wants to speak to you.’

  My aunt came on the phone. ‘I’m in a state of shock,’ she said. ‘We’ve just had a call from my sister in Limerick an hour ago.’

  Oh my god, I thought, I wonder who’s dead?

  ‘She told me she read in the paper that you and Terry are going to be married.’ She laid emphasis on the word married. It was spat out.

  Some of the newspapers had run with the story following on our recent radio interview on the John Murray Show, and sensationalised the headline, ‘Radio Star to Wed’.

  ‘We knew nothing about this,’ she berated. My aunt was the youngest in a family of several children, and a persistent cry over the years has been, ‘Nobody tells me anything.’

  ‘Don’t you remember I invited the both of you to our Civil Partnership ceremony last Sunday at lunchtime.’

  ‘I don’t remember that.’

  ‘You asked me where it was happening, and I said the reception was being held in the Herbert Park hotel,’ I reminded her. I decided to tell the truth about what I was feeling. ‘As a matter of fact you were both very rude, and said absolutely nothing about the invitation.’ As I spoke, I wondered whether I’d been too forward in naming what had happened around our table that Sunday lunchtime.

  ‘We were in a state of shock about it,’ my aunt responded vehemently, almost shouting: so she did remember. Her voice sounded frenziedly angry, and shot up an octave. ‘You know that one man can’t marry another man!’ she screamed at me down the phone.

  I felt assailed by what she was saying and by what she was about to say, and I put down the receiver into its cradle to bring the conversation to an end. I stood there looking at the answering machine, horrified and shaking, as her poison continued to emanate into the room. Her attack was deeply personal, which went to the heart of who Terry and I are as a couple. I didn’t want our home to be polluted by her vituperation, but it was too late: the damage had been done, and could never again be undone. When Terry several days later named the attack as homophobic, being seized by her hatred which had fastened itself to the doorjambs like a bucket of splashed paint, I recognised the truth at once. ‘Your Aunt wants to speak to you,’ my uncle had said, preparing the ground for the launching of her missile, and pointing it in our direction. The two of them had an hour to plan the ambush. I know that I’m fortunate, because this is the first occasion in my lifetime that I’ve been the butt of such malice.

  I don’t know whether my aunt’s rage was about having ruled themselves out of the running for attending our partnership ceremony by refusing our invitation, or whether she was furious that other people like her sister now know about our homosexuality: my conjecture is futile. I remember the fracture in her voice, her scornful tone, and the vigour of her attack. The altercation was deranged: it was a crank call, but it was rancorous and rancid, and it was better to have called a halt to it, because from my psychoanalytic experience, there’s no treating with the intractability of madness. If you enter into the querencia of the bull, his favoured territory in the arena, you’re liable to lose your domination.

  I warily took the phone off the hook, and dropped it rapidly onto the desk, still shocked. I kept looking at the receiver, listening to the beep beep beep, deriving comfort from the repetition, as the bullfighter inviting the bull to charge out from his safe place into the torero’s territory makes a succession of verónicas, passes with the cape, and starts to impose his will over the unpredictable animal. Later on, I made the decision to leave the phone permanently off the hook until the joyous celebration of our partnership was well and truly over. I decided not to afford my elderly relatives a chance to undermine our happiness with religious diatribes, if that was the likely motivation for their attack, or even excuses and platitudes papering over their bigotry to retain our friendly and supportive services: the indignity of accepting those impossible apologies for the sake of good manners had to be obviated.

  Terry was exasperated that I put down the phone. ‘Be a man about it, and take her on, even if she’s nearly eighty.’

  I did protest their rudeness, and that was an advance for me. I go into shock too quickly for my own good. It renders me incapable like a child, and leaves me unprotected. The encounter with such overpowering anxiety lacks the mediation of words so that it has a traumatic quality outside of language, impossible and inassimilable. My physical reaction, that striking back or acting again, anew, is the instinctiv
e, early one of cutting off contact with what causes me harm. I remember being beaten by my father when I was very young. Then I stayed in my Granny’s house next door for days on end at the times when I knew that he’d be around, at lunch or after tea, to register my disapproval of his behaviour, and to punish him by withdrawing my sunny presence. Eventually, after yet another beating, I moved house permanently.

  Terry grimly pointed out, ‘And Uncle Robbie was probably listening in on the other phone!’

  Of course he was. He always does, although he says nothing. My brother used to refer to them as ‘the stereophonic phone calls’.

  That night I had a nightmare. There was a raging wolf with bared teeth snarling into my face. At chest level, I was bringing down the lid on a stainless steel cage trying to contain him as he threshed about, and attempting to fasten it shut with a simple clasp which had no strength in it. Outwardly I appeared calm, but inside I was fainting with fright because this berserk, wild animal was so close in front of me; in my arms really. I awoke with a start, and lay there panicked on the bed, breathing heavily in the darkness. It was several minutes before I could bring myself to get up and go to the toilet, wondering what the dream was about, and what it could mean, and where it applied in my life.

  Too close for comfort! Some days later, I decided that the dream was a memory. The wolf is a pack animal: it operates within the intimacy of a nuclear family. And while the attack from my father when I was little set the template, the assault from my aunt had revived that. The cage represented my inadequate attempt to corral the problem, but the situation was beyond my skills. The wolf is a dangerous predator, a wild animal not amenable to immediate domestication, so I was right to keep clear of it. In both Greek and Roman mythology, the wolf is associated with the prophetic and oracular god, Apollo, the god of the sun, light and truth, of music and poetry. As an archetypal disposition, he favours thinking over feeling, and distance over closeness. So paradoxically, I can use his energy to protect myself through the creative medium of writing as author or composer, because the wolf represents an instinctive potentiality deep within myself. The image of the snarling wolf also displays the strength of my anger, where good manners are foolishly irrelevant. We had a cat once called Myrtle, who sat in front of the Aga. My mother would say to her politely, but vainly, ‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ when she wanted to get at the lower oven to heat the dinner plates.

  The People of the Book

  The People of the Book

  Condemn me for being

  A person who loves

  Those of my own sex

  The Christians the Muslims

  And even the Jews

  (Who attest to the lack of redemption)

  Believe that God says

  For me to be loving

  I’d have be living in sin

  The Nazis decided I’m ‘unter-mensch’

  A sub-human person

  To be burned in the ovens at Buchenwald

  The German Pope

  Following on in that tradition

  Decreed that as a human being

  I’m ‘intrinsically-disordered…

  With a tendency towards evil’

  A ranking so far beneath

  That of the heterosexual elect

  I’m destined to be burned in the fires of hell

  For all eternity

  The People of the Book

  See nothing wrong with that prejudice

  They consider themselves nice people

  ‘If it were up to them…’ But it’s not

  God is the despot here

  The People of the Book believe

  I have a dialect of sexuality

  Which must be suppressed

  For the sake of the family

  Or because the ‘grotesquery’ of gay marriage

  Poses ‘the biggest threat to our civilisation’

  Bigger even than global warming

  (I recall from those harrowing documentaries on television

  The same threat was laid at the door of the Jews)

  Do the People of the Book hope that the millions of us

  Will be obliterated off the face of the earth?

  Or should we voluntarily submit ourselves to castration by dogma

  For differing sexually from the majority?

  The People of the Book

  Ignore the advances in human psychology

  Which say that my dialect of sex

  Is a normal outcome of the Oedipus complex

  They say they take their instruction

  From Moses and Jesus and Muhammad

  Whom they preach with all the fanatical certainty

  Of the ignorant and insecure

  The People of the Book suggest

  That I should press my sexuality

  Between the leaves of the good book

  So that it can wither away like a desiccated flower

  For according to them my ‘out’ sexuality

  Is not orthodox not sanctioned

  By people who monopolize the deity

  The tragedy for me

  Is that the People of the Book

  Would exclude me from a sense of the sacred

  Which I find in the wonder of love

  And in the various expressions of human nature

  I can hear God speak through the human voice

  That tells me I’m alright despite my differences

  That encourages me to continue on when times get tough

  Helping me to hope for better

  That is humble enough to walk beside me on the road

  On every journey of my life

  That makes a commitment to a fellow human being

  Reaching out to lift the heavy burden off my shoulders

  That trusts me unconditionally with the courage

  To live out my truth in spite of doubt

  Responsible only to the best that I can be

  Flowering in my own way and at my own pace

  Without feeling the need to berate me as the scapegoat

  The outsider the stranger

  The prodigal son the neighbour

  That can always say to me the Jew

  Me the Christian me the Muslim

  Me the son of God

  ‘I believe in you

  Because I love you’

  And also (a dialect the People of the Book conveniently forget)

  ‘Because you are mine’ says the Lord

  During the twenty-six years that Terry and I have lived together, love between two men was a topic we shied away from in public as if it were something unseemly, because for most of that time, our existence as gay men was judged to be illegal. That was our training, as we lived life occasionally looking over our shoulder in case of an attack. My uncle and aunt haven’t had the benefit of the schooling that living with these realities has bestowed. Shortly after the legislation was updated to take account of present realities, there was a court case where a solicitor queried the probity of someone because they were gay, and the justice, Mr Cyril Kelly, interrupted to remind him that homosexuality was now a legal way of being in this country. His simple statement, and the way that he had phrased it, had a profound effect on us. We felt vindicated when we read about it in the Irish Times, and his words seemed to free us, cleansing us from a lifetime of dishonourable secrecy.

  An Ode to Those Labelled ‘Intrinsically Disordered’

  We remember the terror of the men and of the women

  Who are still denounced

  Once they were burned at the stake

  Their lives extinguished at Buchenwald

  Who are still in prison

  To have a legal way of being

  powerless

  Because they happen to be homosexual

  I owe them so much honour

  After our television and radio appearances, I received an email from Germany: ‘I left Ireland in 1986 not just because of the economic situation but also because of the homophobic and hateful environment
against gays at that time … One morning after a weekend of clubbing I went to work, and my boss said to me “Can I give you any aids or assistances with that? Do you need any help or AIDS?” The sentence was repeated at every possible opportunity in front of as many people as possible. Seeing as it is not perfect English it was clear to me what the real message was.’ And the writer concludes, ‘What would a confrontation with one of the owners of the business have got me in Ireland of the ’80s?’

  Although the edges of my consciousness have been deformed from having worn the straitjacket designed by Church and State for far too long, I had forgotten how profoundly crippling those times were, and how many people’s lives are still being damaged by ignorance.

  When Terry and I talked it through, we decided that the day of our commitment was of such great consequence for us, that we wanted to be surrounded by goodwill as we celebrated our love, one for the other. We wanted people to be present at our civil partnership ceremony who’ve wished us well in our lives, and in particular, all of those friends who’ve supported the two of us around the time of my cancer, and also around the publication of my book, and its subsequent reading in performance at the National Concert Hall. ‘If anybody asks what I thought of your book, I’ll tell them I haven’t read it, and that will be the truth,’ was the hostile response from my uncle to the story of my life, which astounded me. When I told him that I’d found a publisher for my book, my exciting news was deleted from the conversation through ignoring what I’d said, as if it hadn’t been heard. This wearying aggression, overt and passive, wasn’t something I wanted to have to deal with on the day of our civil partnership ceremony. On a solo run, eliciting a sharp intake of breath from me at the sudden flooding with foreboding feelings when I learned of it, Terry had reached out to my uncle in a text message earlier this year. He got back the rebuff, ‘We have maintained a dignified silence around Michael’s book.’ The vehement telephone attack I’d suffered from my aunt had buttressed their response. But I’d no idea why my life story, which previously had been lived in the silence of shadows, warranted such a depth of disapproval, dignified or otherwise, when it was lived out loud and in the open.