High-heeled defiance

I wish to be a kind person. I wish to give my support to good, liberal causes.

But...

Regretfully, I think Nietzsche and his successors were right. Liberal, Christian values do not quite meet the intense drives within us, or those that determine the way of the world.

There is so much in the world that I find horrible. So much that depresses, angers and scares me.

I sense, dark, destructive forces in the external world. This is not a Gothic fantasy or a paranoid projection: it's all well documented in newspapers. How people can read newspapers and not feel depressed by them is beyond me.

Thus I feel that signing petitions, putting loose change in charity boxes, being scrupulous about recycling etc., is not enough; it does not meet the intensity of what is bad.

What, for me, meets the intensity of what is bad without is the glorious, colourful (sometimes dark) and messy intensity of my private inner life. Including sexuality most definitely.

Allen Ginsberg talked of masturbating in front of the Russian tanks that were invading Czechoslavakia.

If that seems conceited folly, it is because it takes the sexual out of its private context.

Yet, aware of the dark forces in the outer world, I am queen of my own inner world. I decorate it with a beauty that defies its own impotence in the face of the external.

Do you know Percy Shelley's Oxymandias poem? Its sentiment is that time reduces imperial glory to dust. But glory need not be in denial of its own inevitable demise; it can be in defiance of it.

You will defeat me, but I will be beautiful until then.

The world has its weapons of violence; I have my high heels.

Marie Antionette died on the scaffold in the clothes of a humble, unadorned woman; as was right, for she was not inherently superior. But when they came to arrest her, she stood beautiful and proud in her powdered glory.

Let reality eat cake.