KINDNESS AND KINK

‘In human relationships.’ wrote Graham Greene, ‘kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.’

I forget which novel that’s from. I suspect it’s ‘The Heart of the Matter’ which I first read when I was about fifteen and already given to lying. Not major lies, just small tweaks of the truth: promises of undying loyalty to girls I’d just met, promises to my parents that I wouldn’t propose marriage to girls I’d just met, promises to me that I would, in the not too distant future, treat my body with more self-respect. So to be told that in some circumstances lies were a thousand times preferable to truth made me feel a thousand times better. The kindness bit, however, had no traction with me. I was fifteen. Few boys of fifteen are kind. Many can’t even spell the word.

But kindness will grow on you if you let it. I don’t mean fridge-magnet, ‘random acts of kindness’ kindness. I mean the full, generous comprehension, appreciation even, of the otherness of another’s nature. Not what they believe - which half the time is execrable nonsense. And certainly not their prime political allegiance, which all the time is execrable nonsense. But the shape of their affections as breathing, palpitating beings; how and whom they love; the friendships they seek and often fail to find, what drives them or disappoints them erotically…

Judge not, lest you be judged is not quite what I am talking about. More ‘judge not, lest you miss out on an adventure of your own affective processes. Judge not, less you confine your own soul and make of it a caged bird that hops on and off the same old perch, stares crazed into the same little plastic mirror and at last begins to rip out its feathers.’

The saddest story grown men and women tell is of risks not taken, out of fear, primarily, of owning to outlandish and foolish desires.

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I have just been watching DTF St. Louis - a seven part HBO television series which one does scant credit calling a comedy, though its’s funny, and no more credit calling a tragedy, thought it is infinitely touching. It defies definition, in the way that people defy definition, when they are lonely with longing, without being sure what they are longing for.

DTF stands for Down To Fuck, which is the name of a dating agency in which, if you are lucky, anything goes, and that includes, if you are unlucky, everything that doesn’t. The series tells the story of two men, at the precipice of loneliness, who become friends, no matter that one of them preempts the dating app by fucking the other’s wife. That that should feel more of an opportunity for the men’s friendship to develop than an obstacle to its continuation - that the husband should want to watch the infidelity unfold; that the lover, in turn, should want to spy on the husband and the wife; that the wife should agree to indulge them both; and that the two men should find themselves in their less than stylish underwear, confessing love for each other - would be farcical it were it not acted and written with that kindness that saves all human passions from derision.

To the detective charged with finding out why one of the men is suddenly found dead - I won’t spoil the story by saying which - their behaviour is incomprehensible. In a wonderful scene in which he searches his heart to find knowledge of comparably weird desires, the detective finally acknowledges his youthful weakness for a lacy bra. This is an angelic moment. To be kind, in the best sense, is not only to withhold judgement on the bizarre; it is to withhold judgment on the utterly conventional. Indeed, it is a measure of the film’s grandeur of soul, that it should see the irregular and the regular as equally deserving of humanity. We are all freaks and we are all not.

The scene to which I have already made mention, in which the husband and the lover struggle with their feelings for each other, not sure whether to call it love but not sure what else to call it, is one of the finest I have ever scene on film. Birkin and Gerald wrestling naked in ‘Women in Love’ is clumsy by comparison. The men in DFT are not naked, but are more vulnerable as a consequence, worried as to how they look in the least flattering of pants, their every movement to and away from each other registered with a painful compassion - for it breaks the heart to behold such tentative neediness and to recognise the trembling humanity we share.

Be kind to yourself, Watch the film.