The Iris Murdoch Book Club: Episode 2

A Fairly Honourable Defeat

‘So let me get this straight: as the fifteen thousandth Palestinian child is ripped apart by an Israeli bomb, you will be attending an event called Queering the Kabbalah in JERUSALEM?’

‘I booked this over a year ago! Et ça n’a pas coûté des sous!’

‘Join world-renowned rabbi, neuroscientist and tantric practitioner Sam David and a select few seekers for a rigorous hands-on exploration of putting the sensuality back into spirituality. Be ready to open your mind, open your heart, and open your soul.’

‘Thomas, you’re allowing your husband to join a sex cult!’

‘An Israeli sex cult.’

‘Can we cool it with the anti-Semitism please? We don’t want to attract the Nazi hunters.’

‘It might up our engagement numbers.’

‘My darlings, could you please pretend to care about the book for a little while longer before combing through the lurid details of my private life!’

‘Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.’

‘Did you appreciated the BAME representation in this novel?’

‘Oh, I was absolutely delighted with the portrayal of a Jamaican victim of racial violence saved by the heroic actions of a cis white man!’

‘Talking about cis white men, did you see our favourite conservagay refer to drag as a queer minstrel show?’

‘Five years ago he called it a Gesamtkunstwerk.’

‘To give the bootlicking faggot his due, the social role of the male homosexual has long been to play the clown: to parade around our fabulous, fucked up lives for the titillation of the straights. Until the music stops and we become convenient scapegoats.’

‘Give me a break, Saint Sebastian! However thrilling the image of fucking Jonathan Bailey under the threat of persecution, it is nothing but thanatotic nostalgia at this point, my dear uranist. In the year of our Lord 2024, the role of homo sacer is played by the autogynophile.’

‘The wheel turns.’

‘In some HBD circles there is a theory that homosexual tendencies are the result of a parasitic infection, possibly fungal, like the Ophiocordycepts affecting insects, hijacking the host’s nervous system to encourage behaviour which allows the parasite to propagate.’

‘It must be a comforting to believe that the Other is controlled by a brain-rotting fungus.’

‘Don’t knock it till you've tried it, I say!’

---

Earlier that day, Tom was tidying up and getting started on the vegan Palestinian Makloubeh while Johann took Iris and Simone out for a long walk. While clearing the dining table, he couldn’t help but notice two words in the open notebook that Johann had carelessly left there: Tom’s cock.

Tom believed in the importance of transparency, but also in the sanctity of privacy. So he immediately put the notebook away and tried to put it out of his mind. Yet as he was chopping the vegetables, his thoughts kept returning to that phrase. Stop being so vain, he told himself. But was he not entitled to know what his husband truly thought about his member? If he really wanted to know, he should just ask Johann. But that would mean revealing that he had invaded his privacy, however inadvertently. Maybe it would help to have more context. Maybe it would help him to love Johann better if he had access to his unfiltered thoughts. Johann had always had his head in the clouds, but lately it was like he was stuck in another dimension.

So against his better judgement, Tom went back to fetch the notebook. At the top of the first page, in Johann’s childish, barely legible script, was written My healing journey, underlined twice. Tom started reading:

My Teacher told me to write a love letter to myself, so here goes.

Dear Self,

For years you’ve limited yourself by internalising the perceived judgements of others. You’ve been waiting for life to happen to you. But life is not something out there. Life wants to flow through you, if only you’re willing to get out of the way.

It went on like this for a while. Tom skimmed ahead for the juicy bits:

A few words about my Teacher. I became aware of her the first time I attended Triple S [the Society for Spiritual Seekers, if Tom recalled correctly]. Despite her unassuming physical appearance (pale, thin, a modest grey dress, thick round glasses) she radiated an otherworldly authority. She spoke slowly and deliberately, almost whispering, commanding the attention of every soul in the room. She spoke about things hidden since the foundation of the world. I was captivated.

She was the reason I kept returning to the sharing circles: the other seekers struck me as desperate, lonely people with various psychological disturbances, but her witness struck me as an image of the truth. She got thinner and thinner every month, talking about how she was progressively giving up all the things interfering with her connection to Source: sex, alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, mass media, carbohydrates, protein, fat…

Tom had never quite understood Johann’s devotion to that strange woman, right up to her (now less surprising) sudden death, but it fit within the pattern of his increasingly bizarre, but (Tom could only hope) ultimately benign attempts at dealing with the existential crisis precipitated by his father’s death. Fortunately Johann never completely lost his appetite, especially for sex, so Tom was never too concerned that he would try to emulate his Teacher’s escape from the prison of the flesh.

Tom read through several pages talking about child parts, shadow work and synchronicities, until he got to what he was looking for:

I am eternally grateful for Tom: his undying patience, abundant generosity and abhorrence of lying. In many ways, our relationship has only grown stronger since we’ve opened it.

It appears that Tom is satisfied with his little group of friends politely playing board games in the nude and then politely proceeding to fuck (although who can truly know the interior of another man’s heart?)

And yet, for me, sinner that I am, the thrill of non-monogamy was dimmed the moment it became ethical. Sure, I enjoy being desired and being acted upon in desire. And the pure animal pleasure is undeniable, although I’ve yet to find an equal to Tom’s cock.

But I wasn’t yearning for pleasure, exactly. I was bored of being a good little boy. I wanted to be bad. Bad, but not evil. Although who is to say what is evil? Is ‘evil’ not simply an epithet one reserves for one’s enemies? There can be no transcendence without transgression, my Teacher taught me.

Luckily, I had no desire to do something illegal, no interest in coercion or pedophilia or bestiality. My badness was very pedestrian — but it was still a betrayal. We had one rule - no exes. So I broke it.

Despite (or because of) our political differences, A and I had always had a great time in the sack. And although he had sworn to never have sex with another white man again, I knew I would be able to seduce him. So I did.

---

‘Love is the last and secret name of all the virtues.’

‘The events in the novel certainly problematises Rupert’s high-minded philosophy, so redolent of Murdoch’s own.’

‘It all depends on what you mean by love.’

‘The problem is not simply linguistic — we are all liable to forget the narcissistic component of love.’

‘My therapist told me that I should treat myself as I would someone I loved.’

‘She probably heard that on Red Scare’

‘I can never remember the difference between amour de soi and amour propre, much less implement it in practice.’

‘After all, we are merely animals that have managed to half-convince ourselves that we are capable of some higher form of love.’

‘Perhaps we are capable of it — at least for some precious, fleeting moments.’

‘Perhaps that is enough.’

‘You’re being terribly quiet, Tom.’

‘I simply have nothing original to add to this symposium.’

‘It reminds me of how East Forest whispers and all is love towards the end of his five-hour-long Music for Mushrooms. It’s a beautiful sentiment to contemplate when — well, when you’re five hours into a mushroom trip. Or on an unseasonably warm night, smoking a spliff by an open window, surrounded by your dearest friends. But like most mystical insights, it tends to fall apart when you try to think what it actually means. If all is love — all famine and disease and war and betrayal — then what good is love?’

‘It makes a certain kind of mathematical sense: if you accept that God is love and all is God’

‘And I am God and you are God, so I am you. And white is black. And black is…’

‘Eeeek! What was that? A bird?’

‘A bat?’

‘It almost got entangled in my hair! It flew into the bedroom!’

‘Simone! Leave it! Oh my God!’

‘Did she kill it? Is she trying to eat it?’

‘The horror of the world!’

‘That dog has definitely not lived up to her name’

‘It’s in her nature! Don’t be so squeamish. Give me a box or something, I’ll bury the poor thing in the park on my way home.’

‘Why don’t you and Johann try to reconcile the sacredness of nature with its wickedness after your next fuck sesh?’

‘Thomas! Are you delirious? What on earth are you talking about?’

‘Did you read one of my notebooks?’

‘You left in lying open on the dining room table!’

‘Well, if you had asked me about it, I would have explained that very little in it is literally true. It was an imaginative exercise.’

‘I knew it was a mistake to try and rebuild our friendship! I’m tired of being the racialised fetish object of your little white melodrama. I’ll take the mutilated corpse of that poor bat — and my dignity — and leave at once!’

‘Oh dear!’

‘She’ll get over it'.

‘We should go as well, before Sita opens another bottle.’

‘Next time: what could have been Israel’s last ever entry into Eurovision’

‘Inshallah!’