The revolution's here

In this appalling building there is so much of the god of my childhood.

The father god with his prick pointing up t the sky.

The judgemental father god always ready to condemn

The hypocritical father god that fails, over and over and again, to live out the values he imposes on others.

“We have done those things we ought not to have done”,

we were made to tell him in church,

“And we have left undone those things that we ought to have done.

And there is no health in us…”

And did I really have to make that confession every day, when I was forced to live as a boy, or just on Sundays?

Either way I came to believe it was true, and that there was no good in me.

No good in me at all…

And did the Queen believe that, I wonder?

After all, one of her jobs was to be head of the organisation that forced people to say such things for centuries.

Does the new prime minister believe this, I wonder?

After all, she has definitely done what she ought not to have done. She is borrowing millions and millions of pounds to safeguard the profits of the petroleum and energy companies.

She has authorised the return of fracking.

And she has not done what she ought of done.

She has not protected the poorest families.

She has done nothing to address tha climate catastrophe.

Nor the hideous climate injustices that have caused such unimaginable suffering to so many people in Pakistan.

She has not done anything remotely useful or helpful.

And there is no health in her.

How tired I am of hating these people.

It has been going on for so many years…

I don’t remember hating the queen but i always hated the stiff upper lip stoicism she always, and absolutely right up to the end, so strongly exemplified.

We have to find different ways of being in the world.

One of the beautiful things I experienced in my first night in Oslo  was a bronze statue in the city centre.

I approached it from the back and was struck by the fact that it represented a woman wearing trousers.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a statue of a woman wearing trousers before…

And when I got round to the front of her I saw that she was bare breasted.

But there was something strange about her and when I got close I saw that one breast was missing.

There was a lesion where the right breast should have been.

And when I looked at the statue’s title, I read:

“Cecilie: Woman with Incurable Breast Cancer”.

And everything became clear.

I learnt that she’s a mother of 3, and was diagnosed when she was 42 years old.

She wanted to be part of this sculpture project to raise awareness of the situation of women like her so people could talk about it and it would not be a taboo.

And so here she is.

Full of life and looking death in the eye.

Looking with open eyed courage at the unknown darkness.

And I know I want my art to be like that.

To look with wide open eyes at the world around us, the best and the worst.

And that the clarity of my gaze give us courage and hope.

I don’t know if Cecilie is dead yet.

I know the Queen is because last night in Copenhagen I went to see the opening of a play called “Baking Race” at the lovely Blaagaard Teater.

I had been having such a lovely conversation with the company’s PR man who had been saying, perhaps a little wistfully, that he would love to know, maybe just for an afternoon, to know what it felt like to be not disabled, and not brown, and not queer, and I said that maybe he would discover that he hated it…

And then we were called to put on our stylish headphones that glowed with a beautiful blue light and walk for ten minutes from the theatre to the play’s performance space above the local library while music played and words were spoken in our ears that I couldn’t understand a word of but which somehow I really enjoyed hearing when suddenly he whispered in my ear “Queen Elizabeth has died”

And I can’t pretend to have felt much and then we got to the venue and the play was about 2 lovely women contestants in a bake-off whose task is to create the chocolate replica of a picturesque Danish sailing ship…

And in the process they discover that it is actually a slave ship bringing the sugar and the cocoa and the vanilla pods that are the main ingredients of their apparently innocuous recipe…

And I remember that even though we are not taught this in school, that the Royal African Company was begun by the British royal family in the 17th century and was the foundation their vast personal fortune.

And of course our dear queen devoted herself unsparingly to her royal duties but she also devoted herself very shrewdly to the maintenance and growth of her family’s fortune.

This utterly ordinary and in no way particularly gifted family, cruel also as almost all families are, which is immensely rich simply because it happens to have inherited the fruits of centuries of state sanctioned thuggery, exploitation, and theft.

And yes, her death is all very sad, I know, but the question remains how do we redistribute this obscene wealth belonging to them and all the other grotesquely rich people so that we can live together in an even marginally less obscenely unjust world…

That’s what we were aiming for, i remember, in our hippy days

And all of a sudden there’s me on a melancholy pilgrimage to Free Cristiania ..

“Bring out the instigator

Because the revolution’s here…”

And suddenly there’s dear Thunderclap Newman singing in my head again, and I’ve forgotten him for years and years and years…

Playing in my head as i go through this shabby, squalid entrance to this place which I remember, when me and my lover Susie were part of our commune, was a symbol of the free society we thought we were creating:

“And you know it’s right,

You know that it’s right

And we have got to get it together

Now….”

And we did know it was right but we did absolutely nothing to get anything together.

I don’t recall a single conversation about how society was actually going to be transformed, just a very strong feeling that it was bound to happen.

Fools that we were…

Because the change did happen.

Only it didn’t come from the left, as we assumed it would.

Instead it came from the right.

And now we are living with its grotesque and miserable legacy of injustice, environmental damage, and terrible suffering.

The broken down squalor behind this gate is perhaps a fitting memorial to naive and broken dreams…

But in our defence it is worth saying that we did not know what the new society would look like, we only knew it would be different from everything that can had been gone before, and that it could not be reached by the old revolutionary methods that had been tried and had failed in the past.

And as I slowly and melancholically retraced my steps to me hotel, clunking along on my two sticks, with my ankles hurting badly, another memory came to the surface.

Because back then, in 1968, I had no option but to live as a man.

Not as far as I could understand it.

The only future I could see for myself was a solitary one in the closet.

Solitary because I could not see how anyone could love as repulsive a person as me;

And in the closet because to come out would mean that everyone would despise me.

And I literally thought the shame of it would kill me.

But now as I write this, many many years of struggle later, here I am crossing the border between Denmark and Germany on a female passport and with a rail ticket made out to Frau Doctor Professor Jo Clifford …

… with all that that entails…

And I know the revolution did, in fact come.

Just not the one we were expecting or that I even dared to imagine.

But a revolution in what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman.

And that must be the most fundamental revolution of all….

This is the website of Hamar cathedral, whose building I so dislike but whose Bishop is lovely:

https://www.kirken-hamar.no

You can point your phone at one of those clever things at the base of the statue and it will take you to this fabulous site, with a film about Cecilie and about the project. Also in English…. https://www.brystkreftstatue.no/en/about-the-project

This is a lovely neighbourhood theatre in Copenhagen….

https://blaagaardteater.dk/program/baking-race

More about Christiania here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania