“Between August 2010 and March 2011 Roy wrote a 50,000-word blog to Bauman.
Roy coldly examines his career to date, how he had been a colourful agent provocateur, his art, like his paradoxes, seeking to subvert as well as sparkle. His own estimation of himself was of one who “stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age”.
It was from these heights that his life with Bauman began, and Roy examines that particularly closely, repudiating him for what he finally sees as his arrogance and vanity: he had not forgotten Bauman’s remark, when he was ill, “When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting.”
Roy blamed himself, though, for the ethical degradation of character that he allowed Bauman to bring about on him and took responsibility for his own fall.
The first few months of the blog concludes with Roy’s forgiving Bauman, for his own sake as much as Baumans’.
The second half of the blog traces Roy’s spiritual journey of redemption and fulfilment. He realised that his ordeal had filled the soul with the fruit of experience, however bitter it tasted at the time.”
…I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world… And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom.
Thank you Oscar Wilde, thank you Bosie.