I'm trapped

and to some degree it’s due to circumstances of my own devising. I didn’t need to start smoking, but I did — because of COVID-19. But COVID-19 is no excuse, and truth be told I smoked a little bit before anyway (don’t tell my ‘significant other’). Yes it became suddenly this: every day I must have a drink and a smoke (with my friend Denise) or I can’t get through the day. (And she had to listen to me read her this blog, because she’s a very dear friend.)  But that’s weakness, and bad for my health blah blah blah — so I’m trapped into stopping smoking. (I’m down to about a pack a week — yay! — but it will be a torturous last pack.) And bars are still barely open in Toronto, ergo, I'm in Montreal. There are men here, and there is craziness, and the luck of the draw, but I have no friends here, and we don’t have internet access (don’t ask me why). These two traps are thus of my own devising. I certainly don’t need to smoke, and I could afford the internet — but why can’t I make friends? Because I’m a semi-alcoholic (be kind, please) loner who loves crowds, and needs constant stimulation, and very few people are up to either a) providing stimulation for me or b) putting up with me providing it. But then there is another trap, not completely, I posit, of my own devising -- the aesthetic trap, the trap of words — the literary cul-de-sac we now necessarily find ourselves in. I just finished reading a novel by Elizabeth Von Arnim — Vera. You must read it: it’s Jane Austen writing Jane Eyre — a gothic novel with a realistic twist. A woman is trapped into marriage by a man who seems nice but then turns out to be a controlling monster. The last couple of days I felt that this novel was my life. It’s a realistic portrayal of what sexist men do to women; it’s Ibsen’s A Doll’s House written from the perspective of a woman married to a man who will not love her unless she agrees to be infantilised. And what ’s going on now in the artistic community is a kind of infantilisation. I ask you, who can be an artist right now? I know how Shakespeare felt — writers were never to speak of a monarch being deposed unless they wished to be drawn and quartered (except Shakespeare’s Richard II does deal with a deposed  king— we’ll talk about that later) — or what it must have been like to be blacklisted during the McCarthy era. I’m tempted to use a pseudonym because I am to some degree infamous (I understand my fame is quite limited  — I’m not deluded -- I know how small my influence is) and though I’ve always been associated with rebellion — never has rebellion been so rebellious, never has culture been so polarized, and never has the greatest sin been the spoken word. I encountered it first with the trans community, and now with COVID-19. It’s all very claustrophobic and makes me want to run around screaming like Joan Crawford in Strait-Jacket  — except that I actually identify more with Eleanor Parker in Caged because I can somehow believe she is actually nice. And I am nice; honestly I am — despite what you've heard to the contrary — I’m nice, but very flawed. (However unfortunately those credentials won’t get you very far these days.) It all started with the trans community,  I discovered I could not speak critically of a book by a transgendered person — Vivek Shraya — without the wrath of the entire internet coming down on my head. (At least that’s what people told me, I don’t do ‘social media’ so I don’t know, honestly. I only went to Facebook once — because someone told me about some praise I had gotten — go figure, doesn’t that just say it all about my narcissism? — only to find Gwen Bartleman, a dear old friend who I loved for so many years, was saying horrible things about me. Well all I have to say to you Gwen Bartleman are two words: 'David Pond.' And to those of you out there who don’t know who David Pond was, he was a kind, gentle man, who died.) Well anyway, apparently the whole digital world caved in around me, and I was a pariah, though Vivek herself never spoke to me — or of me (publicly) as far as I know. Though one of her friends (and mine — a mutual friend) did email me and said essentially: ‘I don’t think Vivek would have minded your blog’ — and they actually cc-d Vivek on the message, which is the closest I ever got to getting a reaction to my blog from Vivek herself. (Gee whiz, maybe we would have been friends if the worldwide web hadn’t intervened!) Anyway, I realised there were certain things you can no longer say about gender without getting your testicles cut off. Then along came COVID-19, and now I seem to be the only person in the world besides some morbidly obese, half-brained, gun-toting Trump worshipper in Omaha who has anything negative to say about Anthony Fauci, WHO or the effectiveness of lockdowns. (Oh yes -- of course an epidemiologist in Sweden — Anders Tegnell - agrees with me, but people seem to regard him as a mass murderer). So I am trapped by language, and this trap is not of my own design. (And yet it is, for I have chosen to speak this way in a kind of jumbled code that confuses memories, stories, poetry, theory, and opinion.) You might say ‘well if only you didn’t have outrageous ideas’ — but I can’t help that. Or ‘why do you have to express them?’ — but that’s me, too, I don’t know where it came from —  I wish I could beat it out of myself, and the world is trying, let me tell you. So the only way out of this trap is this blog (which is also a trap), i.e.,   this futile attempt at saying it but not saying it, at equivocation that can — because of the paradoxical nature of all language — revel only in persuasion and obscurity,  lies and truth. But there is no truth, so how can I claim anything I say here is true? I am trapped by my own trap: in the funhouse mirror universe I call art, where all is distorted and we see — not reality — but a freakish monstrosity which seems -- at least momentarily -- to calm me down. I know I’m not an Edwardian newly married virgin being terrorised by her tyrannical sexist husband, it just feels that way.  But ‘I think therefore I am,’ right?  Though lately I’ve realized that his oft-quoted phrase was, for Descartes, his only escape from being consumed by infernal, eternal doubt. Sorry, Descartes. Doubt will not go away. Though it frightens us all — it is perhaps the wretched key to unlock the door to — what? I won’t say to freedom, but to a place where we might not be quite so certain, again?