ABSTRACT
Can you bring out the beauty in someone’s personality or do you merely bring out their ugliness, as do cynical people?
THE NEGATIVE AND THE POSITIVE
Wicked, rebellious and heterodoxical people are curiously attractive. They fill the broadcasting schedules of television companies; they fill the pages of newspapers and magazines; they are everywhere on the internet and while atheists proclaim that God is dead and that Satan doesn’t even exist, Satan’s powers seem to have thereby crossed the oceans. What do we have here? We have Travis, wallowing in the transporting delights of the forbidden weed; Steve, paying a terrible price for the same sin. We have Desmond: gambler, ex-gangster, ex-street fighter, joker, egocentric, mercurial, wicked, lovable, now blending the passion of past sinning with the chromatic glow of the spiritual positive. We have Ivo, moving from martial arts to meaning, private hell to public healing; we have Denys, transmuting from married, mortgage-paying policeman with two children to whip-wielding, brothelcohabiting, transsexual prostitute, now an agent of the four gender society inspired by Wagner, himself a blend of satin-inspired, musical genius and prescient Nazi. What have I, in turn, done with my life? I have eaten too much, drunk too much, smoked too much, trained too hard, studied too hard, worked too hard, travelled too much. I am utterly overeducated, overqualified, I have luxuriated in the delights of the senses, from the fragrances of perfumes and the intoxications of wine bars to the iniquitous caress of chiffon, the lines of sin show on my countenance and the curve of my lips and my body aches with the pain of decades of physical delight – from running to sex, from weightlifting to dancing, from boxing to modelling. Like all maximalists I am almost ready for Oscar Wilde’s ‘Club for tired hedonists’. Like Denys, and like Wagner and Keats, I know the penetration depth of sensuality. Sensuality is in no way disjunctive or incompatible with spirituality. Via sensuality hidden reaches of the Self can be externalised by taking advantage of inner chromatic music to plunge deeper than reason.
