And the thing about prison is; it’s a reckoning. You are sent there to learn. You must come out redeemed, or else, alas, it was for naught. Oscar Wilde was sent to prison in 1895. He was visited by the 1st Viscount Haldane — a lawyer, eminent statesman and philosopher. One must think of Lady Diana attending to the victims of AIDS. Like them, Wilde was the most disgraced man in the known universe. Like them, he stood convicted of one the most heinous of all human crimes (desire) — and yet Haldane found in it his heart to drop by. He told Wilde that, indeed, he was blessed to be in prison, and that he must make the most of the experience. His lecture was not merely didactic, but specifically helpful: he referred Wilde to his most popular plays — the ones that had held London in thrall for nearly a decade. He judged them to be without merit; the sad harvest of a superficial life. Haldane hoped very much that Wilde would learn a lesson from prison; that from hardship, profundity would emerge -- like a phoenix -- that he would find himself, at last, capable of authoring a 'great work.' Before prison Wilde wrote the most beautiful comedy of all time (The Importance of Being Earnest). After prison, he published a pile of pretentious pseudo-intellectual bird doo—doo called De Profundis, and died soon after, a broken man. (Perhaps Wilde thought if he named the work ‘Profound,’ that would make it so.) So we must ask ourselves— what is the lesson to be learned from the prison of Covid-19? Public Health is God’s Parole Board — we go to them, every month or so, our suits pressed, sporting a cheery, pasted-on smile — and we plead. Yes we have learned our lesson! From now we will be good! We will not spread COVID-19! Inevitably the weary, inscrutable warden closes his book with a sigh, and looks down at us dourly, his jowls jangling with dread — for he dislikes being the bearer of bad news: “I’m afraid you have not convinced us you are ‘cured.’ It is not yet your time.” On the way out, of course, we cry a little bit. But what's the use of crying really? Crying was for when there was joy; tears exist to be joy's opposite. Anyway, if we were to cry now we might never stop. I hear a snatch of a tune, and I remember, and I think — was that real? Was it a dream? Did I really gad about like that, having fun? Did I have friends? Were their nights of drinking? Was there a society of people who knew each other, and — much to their mutual delight — were addicted to whatever melodramas they had concocted, and yet still loved each other, despite all the plotting and planning, the backbiting and jealousy, the gossip and lies? We were connected, it seems; and that connection had to do with the fact that we would actually gather, in person, and sometimes we would screw each other — sometimes just flirt — and then deny it — and we would make fools of ourselves, and end up lost, in a dark corner at the end of the night, staggering with drink, and reveal ‘the truth’—‘he beats me’ or ‘I don’t really love her’ or ‘I did something…..with him…don’t tell anybody!” Isn’t that what we lived for? My lover always used to warn me: ‘I hope you never got to prison; you wouldn’t do well there.' I'd say well no, I’ll do fine, I’ll be the prison bitch, and take it up the — (well, you know). But there is not even the solace of prison rape; that is abandonment indeed. Remember the very attractive ‘woke’ idea of the ‘death of intention’? Up until now I’ve deemed this a toxic notion. Perhaps you know what I am referring to? If you call a trans person by the wrong pronoun — even by accident — you will be met with stubborn, unrelenting anger — but you will not be asked to apologise. Instead you will be ostracised in whatever way is possible or merely convenient. If you say ‘I didn’t mean to!’ the trans person will say: “So sorry, but ‘intention’ is done.” Did you not know ‘intention’ has died? Oh yes, the woke masses have had it up to here with our endless prevarications, justifications, our fabricated ‘reasons,’ yes — our fallibility even; there is simply no excuse any longer for the atrocities we have committed. And then for us to whine — ‘I didn’t mean to.’ Sacrilege! I have been in prison for a year now. I have learned this. I now believe intention is dead. All of these months when the powers-that-be decreed we remain indoors, and we said ‘Why?’ and they said “Because it will make you better people’ — that was their intention. But since good intentions mean nothing, it matters no more that they wished to end a pandemic; for they destroyed our lives. I won’t go through the litany. I won’t tell you what has died: you know. Look inside yourself. If you liked to stay at home before, you may never go out again. If you once resisted the toxic polarization of society; well get with the program, you're certainly one of the polarized now. But more importantly, you've caught a glimpse of death. It’s something we weren’t meant to know. Sure, we might see a corpse at a funeral and turn away. But we were were never meant to live inside a dead body. That is the nightmare of certain horrific illnesses (no, not COVID-19) — to be trapped in a body — with limbs that cannot move, but a fully functioning soul. I’m not so sure we will ever recover. Well, they don’t want us to recover really; they are doing everything they can to stop our return to the ‘old’ way of life; that’s what they mean by the 'new normal.' A year ago one of my friends said “I don’t want a ‘new normal,’ I’m not going back to some f-in ‘new normal,’ I was never normal back then and I don’t intend to be normal now." I won’t say it’s was all a plan; I’m going to be charitable instead and say it was an accident — an accident we can blame on the ‘best of intentions.’ Doesn't that make you feel better? To know that your life was ruined for a noble cause? For many of us, this has been the veritable discovery of melancholy. And for some that sadness will never go away.
