Zach Bush MD is a physician specialising in internal medicine, endocrinology and hospice care.
He is an internationally recognised educator and thought leader on the microbiome as it relates to health, disease and food systems.
Dr. Zach founded Seraphic Group and the non-profit Farmer’s Footprint to develop root-cause solutions for human and ecological health.
His passion for education reaches across many disciplines, including topics such as the role of soil and water ecosystems in human genomics, immunity, and gut/brain health.
His education has highlighted the need for a radical departure from chemical farming and pharmacy, and his ongoing efforts are providing a path for consumers, farmers, and mega-industries to work together for a healthy future for people and planet.
The symbol of a bluebird as the harbinger of happiness is found in many cultures and may date back thousands of years.Mountain bluebird (Sialia currucoides) from North America
Origins of the bluebird as a symbol of happiness
Chinese mythology
One of the oldest examples of a blue bird in myth (found on oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang dynasty, 1766-1122 BC) is from pre-modern China, where a blue or green bird (qingniao) was the messenger bird of Xi Wangmu (the ‘Queen Mother of the West’), who began life as a fearsome goddess and immortal. By the Tang dynasty (618-906 AD), she had evolved into a Daoist fairy queen and the protector/patron of “singing girls, dead women, novices, nuns, adepts and priestesses…women [who] stood outside the roles prescribed for women in the traditional Chinese family”.[1] Depictions of Xi Wangmu often include a bird—the birds in the earliest depictions are difficult to identify, and by the Tang dynasty, most of the birds appear in a circle, often with three legs, as a symbol of the sun.[2] (See also: Three-legged crow)
Native American folklore
Among some Native Americans, the bluebird has mythological or literary significance.
According to the Cochiti tribe, the firstborn son of Sun was named Bluebird. In the tale “The Sun’s Children”, from Tales of the Cochiti Indians (1932) by Ruth Benedict, the male child of the sun is named Bluebird (Culutiwa).
The Navajo identify the mountain bluebird as a spirit in animal form, associated with the rising sun. The “Bluebird Song” is sung to remind tribe members to wake at dawn and rise to greet the sun:
Bluebird said to me, “Get up, my grandchild. It is dawn,” it said to me.
The “Bluebird Song” is still performed in social settings, including the nine-day Ye’iibicheii winter Nightway ceremony, where it is the final song, performed just before sunrise of the ceremony’s last day.
We went from the dark night and spiritual slavery to unknown wandering – in search of the bluebird.[4]
In L’Oiseau Bleu (“The Blue Bird“) a popular tale included by Madame d’Aulnoy (1650–1705) in her collection Tales of the Fairies, King Charming is transformed into a blue bird, who aids his lover, the princess Fiordelisa, in her trials.
Most to the point, a “blue bird of happiness” features in ancient Lorraine folklore. In 1886 Catulle Mendès published Les oiseaux bleus (“the blue birds”), a story bundle inspired by these traditional tales. In 1892 Marcel Schwob, at the time secretary to Mendès, published the collection Le roi au masque d’or, which included the story “Le pays bleu”, dedicated to his friend Oscar Wilde. [5]Maurice Maeterlinck had entered Mendès literary circle as well and in 1908 he published a symbolist stage play named The Blue Bird inspired by the same material. Two children, Tyltyl and Mytyl, are sent out by the fairy Bérylune (Jessie Ralph) to search for the Bluebird of Happiness. Returning home empty-handed, the children see that the bird has been in a cage in their house all along and create great happiness for another by giving their pet bird to the sick neighbor child. Translated into English by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, it played on Broadway from 1910. In the programme for the (revival of the) play at London’s Haymarket Theatre in 1912, the programme explained: “The Blue Bird, inhabitant of the pays bleu, the fabulous blue country of our dreams, is an ancient symbol in the folk-lore of Lorraine, and stands for happiness.”[6] The play was quickly adapted into a children’s novel, an opera, and at least seven films between 1910 and 2002.
See the German equivalent blaue Blume (blue flower).
Popular use of the idiom
The immense popularity of Maeterlinck’s play probably originated the idiom in English. In 1934, this was strengthened by the popular American song “Bluebird of Happiness“. Written by Sandor Harmati and Edward Heyman, it was recorded several times by American tenor Jan Peerce, for RCA Victor and also by Art Mooney and His Orchestra.
The bluebird is featured in the song “Be Like The Bluebird” in the popular musical Anything Goes.
The Academy Award-winning song, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” from Walt Disney’s 1946 live-action and animated film Song of the South, makes reference to “Mr. Bluebird on my shoulder” as a symbol of good cheer.
In the 1946 Japanese film No Regrets for Our Youth, directed by Akira Kurosawa, when Yukie and Noge reunite in Tokyo during the war, Yukie laments that she is not happy with her career and wants to do something truly meaningful in the struggle for freedom. Noge responds, “Who finds work like that even once in their lives? It’s like finding The Blue Bird of Happiness.”
A scene in the 1977 Disney film The Rescuers uses the bluebird as a symbol of “faith … you see from afar.”
In the 1985 film Sesame Street Presents: Follow that Bird, the Sleaze Brothers kidnap Big Bird and press him into service in their fun fair, where he is painted blue and billed as the Blue Bird of Happiness. In a play on the word “blue,” Big Bird sings the mournful song “I’m So Blue.”
The 2001 film K-PAX, directed by Iain Softley, written by Charles Leavitt and based on the book of the same name by Gene Brewer, contains a scene in which the lead character Prot (played by Kevin Spacey), claiming to be a visitor from outer space. He ends up in a psychiatric ward where he ‘prescribes’ a fellow patient with the task of finding a ‘Bluebird Of Happiness’. In a later scene, the fellow patient excitedly yells out that he finally found the Bluebird, resulting in pandemonium amongst patients spanning several floors of the institution.
The bluebird is also mentioned in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya episode “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya Part III” in 2006.
Musician Neil Young has a song “Beautiful Bluebird” about a lost love on his 2007 album Chrome Dreams II.
The character Luna from the 2012 video game and visual novel Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward wears a necklace with a caged bluebird, and the story is discussed in one ending.
The titular bluebird of the song “Birds”, from the 2013 album Government Plates by the experimental hip hop group Death Grips, is thought to be referencing Charles Bukowski‘s poem “Bluebird”, wherein the bluebird represents the vulnerability that Bukowski felt as a result of child abuse from his father.[7]
In the 2018 video game Red Dead Redemption 2, during the scene where John Marston builds the ranch at Beecher’s Hope, a bluebird is seen perched next to the gang while they are hammering and nailing the wood.
Bluebirds in nature
Three species of blue-headed North American thrushes (Turdidae) occupy the genusSialia. The most widespread and best-known is the eastern bluebird (Sialia sialis), breeding from Canada’s prairie provinces to Texas and from the Maritimes to Florida; discrete populations of this species are also found from southeastern Arizona through west Mexico into Guatemala and Nicaragua. The mountain bluebird (S. currucoides) breeds on high-elevation plains from central Alaska to Arizona and New Mexico, and the western bluebird (S. mexicana) inhabits dry coniferous forests from extreme southwestern Canada to Baja California and from the Great Basin south into west Mexico. Other all-blue birds in North and Central America are the blue mockingbird, blue bunting, indigo bunting, blue grosbeak and a number of jays, including the blue jay.
Europe has only a few birds with conspicuous blue in the plumage, including the great tit (Parus major), the various blue tits of the genus (Cyanistes) and the common kingfisher. The adult male of the blue rock-thrush is the only European passerine with all-blue plumage; this species is best known from its literary treatment by Giacomo Leopardi, whose poem Il passero solitario makes of the rock-thrush a figure of the poet’s isolation.[8]
The world rolls round,—mistrust it not,— Befalls again what once befell; All things return, both sphere and mote, And I shall hear my bluebird’s note, And dream the dream of Auburn dell.— Ralph Waldo Emerson, May-Day, 1867
And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens how joyous we shall all be! Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will be found mourning over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper of wonder, will return to the land. The very aspect of the world will change to our startled eyes. Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan, and sail round the high-pooped galleys, as they do on the delightful maps of those ages when books on geography were actually readable. Dragons will wander about the waste places, and the phoenix will soar from her nest of fire into the air. We shall lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the toad’s head. Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in our stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happened, of things that are not and that should be. But before this comes to pass we must cultivate the lost art of Lying.— Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying, 1891
Black Lives Matter (BLM) has raised mass consciousness against the institution of police violence and the brutality it inflicts on Black communities around the country. The movement has placed the question of police brutality at the top of the political and juridical reform agenda. The naked display of the oppressive state apparatus has now forced everyone, from the fascist residents of the White House to the liberal democrats of the House, politicians speak of the need to reform policing–more training, more screening, more record-keepings, judicial vigilance, and other haphazard sutures for the centuries old wounds. Many observers have pointed out the depth of this chronic pain and different ways it might be remedied.
Here I would like to propose that this acutely American dilemma needs to be viewed and explicated in close relation to U.S colonialism and imperialism. Race relations in the U.S. and the violence with which the country operates has always been accompanied by the civilizing logic of colonial expansion and imperialist wars that the United States has raged around the world. The two heads of the hydra of imperialism and racism stem from the same body of the political order that defined this imperialized nation from its inception. So long as the American war machine runs on high gear, leaving destruction, devastation, and death around the world, here at home, Black Americans will not be treated as equal citizens. Drone attacks overseas are inherently linked to the murderous impulse of the police against Black Americans.
The concomitant rise of liberal political philosophy and modern colonialism is an established historical fact. One might still question whether colonialism and the atrocities through which it expanded ought to be regarded as an aberration in liberal thought or as an inherent feature of its worldview. But one thing is clear, the British and American founding fathers of liberalism did not understand democracy and colonialism in mutually exclusive terms, both were understood to be different elements of the same civilizing project. Far from contradicting liberal tenets, writes Uday Mehta, imperialism in fact stemmed from liberal assumptions about reason and historical progress. Evoking the same sentiment, more than a century ago, Jamal al-Afghani (1838-1897), the anti-colonial Muslim transnationalist, ridiculed the seemingly incongruous attitude of British colonialists in India: “They drew their swords to cut the throats of the Muslims, while weeping for them and crying: ‘We kill you only out of compassion and pity for you, and seeking to improve you and make your life comfortable.’”
No other liberal philosopher has articulated and justified this contradiction better that J. S. Mill. His philosophy made clear the entanglement of liberal political thought with colonial expansion. John Stuart, like his father James, Mill was an employee of the British East India Company. But economic interest alone cannot explain his ideological commitment to the idea of progress and the higher civilization that the British afforded the backward Indians. He believed that the transmission of civilization to colonized subject could only materialize through a benevolent despotism. “England,” J. S. Mill believed, “had a right to rule despotically because it brought the benefits of higher civilization.” In a chilling assertion in his Principles of Political Economy, he declared that “the question of government intervention in the work of Colonization involves the future and permanent interests of civilization itself.”
There is no doubt that the plunder of human and natural resources of the colonies shaped imperial expansions. But the reality that the inhabitants of Africa, Asia, Oceana, and South America were all subjected to these atrocities has roots in a racialized worldview that gave legitimacy to Europeans to situate themselves on top of the racial hierarchy as the torch bearers of reason and progress. Th light of the world was the Europeans’ gift to all nations to overcome their superstitions, ignorance, tyranny, and backwardness. The light was lit by prey and pray, by plunder and proselytizing, by power and pauperization, and by pots and pans.
Despite her own prejudicial views on race, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt highlights that it was European imperialists who initially reordered “mankind into master and slave races, into higher and lower breeds, into colored peoples and white men” during their conquest and exploitation of much of Asia, Africa and America. That is how the ruling classes “imperialized the nation,” by expanding and acquiring new territories abroad and by solidifying and policing racial hierarchies at home. Expressed in no ambiguous terms by Woodrow Wilson, the U.S. president during the Great War, the goal was clear, “to keep the white race strong” and to preserve “white civilization and its domination of the planet.”
The eugenicist structure of the white supremacy that motivated great European and American ruling classes operated with great consistency within and outside national boundaries. The same generals who led the American conquest of the Philippines in 1898-1902 fought the wars of annihilations against American Indians at home. One of them, Brigadier General Jacob H Smith, explicitly stated in his order to the troops that “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and burn the better it will please me.” More than 200,000 civilians were massacred during the war. During a Senate hearing on the atrocities in the Philippines, General Arthur MacArthur (father of Douglas) referred to the “magnificent Aryan peoples” he belonged to and the “unity of the race” he felt compelled to uphold.
At the end of both world wars, sustaining the purity of whiteness and racial boundaries became increasingly challenging. The world wars shook the old structure of colonialism to its core. But that did nothing to change the colonial powers’ perception of racial superiority. Learning from the experiences of the two wars, the emerging superpowers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, entered a “Cold War” that meant that superpowers ought not to fight their wars in the European theater. Cold War was a misnomer. Proxy wars raged around the world and claimed more than 20 Million lives from 1946 to 1989. The old colonial structures had collapsed, but the propagated racialized ideology that peoples of Asia, Africa, Latin and Central America were incapable of exercising the right of self-determination persisted.
As the atrocities of American superpower proliferated around the world, Black Americans struggled for recognition of political rights and social justice at home. Despite legal gains, the ideology that incentivized the U.S. to commit mass murder around the globe, disincentivized it to put in place meaningful structural changes that would recognize racial hierarchies that informed the existing political order. The growing black population in Europe, Afro-Caribbean, North African, and South Asians among others, forced European states to face the consequences of their colonial past on the streets of Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, and London. What the authors of The Empire Strikes Back wrote almost forty years ago about the United Kingdom eerily resonates today with Trump’s America that “the construction of an authoritarian state in Britain is fundamentally intertwined with the elaboration of popular racism.” The kind of racism that has historically been exercised through colonialism, slavery, segregation, ghettoization, militarized border controls and mass incarceration.
Racism was and is not about an attitude. Rather, it is the problem of a political order that sustains and perpetuate that attitude through a complex system of legal and economic institutions at home and around the world. Black Lives Matter protests has now razed or forced the local and federal agencies to remove monuments that celebrated the legacies of slavery, lynching, and segregation. Corporate America now “recognizes” the pandemic of racism. Nike employees were offered a paid holiday on Juneteenth. The same goes for workers at Twitter, Target, General Motors, the National Football League and a variety of other businesses. JPMorgan, Chase, Capital One and other banks will close branches early. All those institutions that maintain and perpetuate the dominance of racism and imperialism are at work hard to coopt the movement. Centuries of racism in the Untied States will not wane by bringing down statues or tearing down monuments, despite their significant symbolic values, or having a half-day off at JPMorgan. The entire American political order, economic organization, and social hierarchies are informed by the question of race and a commitment to white supremacy. The veneer of great American ideology of meritocracy and opportunity is crumbling. America needs that ideology, the “American dream,” a myth that turned the land of slavery and indigenous annihilation into the land of milk and honey. “This mythology is not benign, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor explores, “it serves as the United States’ self-declared invitation to intervene militarily and economically around the globe.” The United States needs to conceal its racial injustices at home in order to advance and legitimize its imperialist ambitions around the globe.
Police brutality is inextricably linked to the military industrial complex. This link is not only through the sales of surplus hardware, uniforms, and other equipment. Yes, the military leadership stood firm against Trump’s recent transgressions and reminded him that the military cannot get involved in suppressing the right of protest for American citizens. But since its inception, the same military has operated as the instrument of imperialist projects that carried out mass murders and subjugated people of color around the world. In his recent book, Jakarta Method: Washington’s anti-Communist Crusade & the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World, Vincent Bivens shows how the U.S. masterminded the project of annihilation of communists and members of labor unions in Indonesia during the 1965 coup against the nationalist leader Sukarno. Although all the documents about the CIA involvement in the coup that brought the tyrannical regime of Suharto to power are not yet released, those declassified documents show how the CIA operatives provided the names of the unionists and members of the Indonesian Communist Party to death squads for extermination. According to more conservative estimates between 500,000 to one million people were massacred during the coup. More than one million were sent to concentrations camps many of whom vanished. Later it became evident, as Bivens discloses, that it wasn’t only US government officials who handed over kill lists to the Army. Managers of US-owned plantations furnished them with the names of “troublesome” communists and union organizers, who were then murdered.
What Bivens uncovers is that the extermination project in Indonesia, became a model for the U.S. covert operations in Latin and Central America. “Jakarta,” the capital of Indonesia, in this new sinister vocabulary of political oppression became the code word for massacre of civilians. In Brazil, Operação Jacarta became the modus operandi of the military junta. In 1971, in eastern parts of Santiago, up in the hills where many supporters of President Allende lived, a short message was plastered on the walls. “Jakarta se acerca” (“Jakarta is Coming”)! Or sometimes, simply, “Jakarta.”
I do not intend to provide an exhaustive list of atrocities committed by the United State around the world in the name of democracy, in defense of freedom. I bring this up to insist that Black American will not be recognized as equal citizens so long as people of color around the world remain subjected to the brutality of imperialized nations such as the United States of America. The drones that kill the Iraqi, Yemeni, Pakistani, Somali civilians, the bombs, the fighter jets, the missiles and guns that are sold to the tyrants, they are all parts of the same system of oppression that brutalizes Black Americans. The Palestinians know the meaning of ghettoization in American cities. The immigrants who are dehumanized by ICE understand the depth of police brutality and the meaning of murder with impunity. These voices need to hear one another. Black America has given voice to a global movement.
Protesters recorded a man singing during a march in Washington on June 3.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times
In February, I declared, somewhat winkingly, that Twitter is real life. My argument was not that what happens on that social media website is broadly representative of popular opinion but that what happens on Twitter is a good barometer of enthusiasm around movement-building and fandoms. And that elites tend to undervalue or dismiss what happens on the platform, suggesting that those loud voices making them uncomfortable aren’t accurate indicators of lived experiences.
Since, I’ve received a steady stream of gloating emails about how wrong I was. After all, I cited Senator Bernie Sanders’s online movement for the Democratic presidential nomination, powered in large part by Twitter, as a primary example of this insurgent force and referred to the candidate as “arguably now the Democratic front-runner.” Not two weeks later, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out of the race and endorsed Joe Biden, effectively cementing him as the Democratic Party’s nominee. If Twitter was actually real life, surely it would be Mr. Sanders doing virtual town halls from his basement campaign headquarters, not Mr. Biden.
The power of online movements has been at the front of my mind the past two weeks as Americans have gathered by the tens of thousands to protest police and state violence against black people. Millions, too, have followed along on their screens, amplifying protest messages, sharing donation links and expressing solidarity. Online platforms, especially Twitter, “have become like security camera grids, each with images of a dystopia,” my Times colleague Jenna Wortham wrote last week of the images of police violence against peaceful protesters.
Those images appear, at last, to be having a sweeping effect on our public consciousness of racial inequality and injustice, especially in regard to police violence. “The most urgent filmmaking anybody’s doing in this country right now is by black people with camera phones,” Wesley Morris, a Times critic at large, wrote last week.
For black activists and their allies, the only thing new about this experience is its widespread public recognition. This movement’s rallying cry — Black Lives Matter — was coined as a hashtag in 2013, after George Zimmerman was acquitted of Trayvon Martin’s murder, and scholars have been studying the internet’s central role in amplifying protest movements and racial inequality since before that.
“Social media participation becomes a key site from which to contest mainstream media silences and the long history of state-sanctioned violence against racialized populations,” Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa wrote in 2015 in a hashtag ethnography of the Ferguson protests.
They cite early hashtag movements like #HandsUpDontShoot and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown as “entry points into larger and more complex worlds” that helped illustrate that “‘#Ferguson is everywhere’ — not only in the sense of a broad public sphere but also in the sense of the underlying social and political relationships that haunt the nation as a whole.”
But as the activism dominated social media, it did not necessarily have large-scale public support. A 2017 Harvard-Harris poll suggested 57 percent of registered voters had an unfavorable view of the Black Lives Matter movement. And yet, these conversations didn’t disappear off the internet when they left front pages. They were there all along, in plain view for those who sought them out. They continued, despite portrayals to discredit the movement as a violent fringe and specious claims that “systemic racism is a myth” perpetuated by the media and so-called social justice warriors.
But what begins online and is castigated as an unrepresentative view gradually builds consensus, in this case, tracking to our current moment. When, at last, it reaches critical mass it is treated as conventional wisdom by those who once dismissed it. According to a new Times analysis, “in the last two weeks, American voters’ support for the Black Lives Matter movement increased almost as much as it had in the preceding two years.” As my Opinion colleague Aisha Harris wrote on Tuesday, “all of a sudden, everybody seems to care about black lives.”
The undergirding movement and struggle has been there the whole time. It was an articulation of a better future, even when it fell on unlistening ears. It was real life.
There’s a similar argument to be made for the insurgent-left politics of Bernie Sanders and his supporters. Throughout the primaries, centrist Democrats argued that the senator’s ideas were overindexed on places like Twitter but considered on the fringe and unpalatable to most Americans. But since Senator Sanders dropped out of the race in April, his policies have resonated beyond his base. Now staring down a pandemic, mass unemployment and a potential depression, centrists have mused publicly about a health care system like Medicare for All that doesn’t tie insurance to employers.
Similarly, the Sanders campaign’s racial justice reforms and intersectional economic programs now appear more acceptable to a political establishment that dismissed the proposals as unrealistic and radical. Twitter’s left-leaning politics weren’t (slightly) ahead of the times — they were merely disregarded as implausible or not representative. Or as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor at The New Yorker declared just before he left the race, “Reality Has Endorsed Bernie Sanders.”
This cycle is beginning to play out again during the George Floyd protests, where protesters have adopted a new rallying cry: Defund the Police. The demand has been met with scorn by the president and conservatives, and anxiety by centrist and establishment Democrats. The Biden campaign has rejected it as a bridge too far. Journalists and news outlets have qualified it — suggesting it’s merely an aggressive statement of support for reprioritizing police funding.
Of course, for tens of thousands marching in the streets waving #DefundThePolice signs, the phrase is not a dog whistle; it’s a bullhorn. It is, like Medicare for All, a call for a complete reimagining of what they see as a corrupt, broken system. The argument is, quite literally, to defund the police and build a healthier public safety system from scratch while investing that money in other adjacent community-support resources.
The slogan — just like Black Lives Matter — is blunt. Its intentions are clear: Imagine a world without the police state. But do a Twitter search for the words “defund the police Twitter real life” and you’ll see the dismissal in real time, suggesting that an overhaul of militarized policing is a fantasy held by a small number of extremely online leftists.
An argument about Twitter — or any part of the internet — as “real life” is frequently an argument about what voices “matter” in our national conversation. Not just which arguments are in the bounds of acceptable public discourse, but also which ideas are considered as legitimate for mass adoption. It is a conversation about the politics of the possible. That conversation has many gatekeepers — politicians, the press, institutions of all kinds. And frequently they lack creativity.
“Many times our politics and our political imagination is limited by our politicians. … I think people who could do more to try to imagine a different political world often times are obsessed with the filibuster,” the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates said last week on a podcast about reimagining the police state. “I’m not saying the filibuster isn’t important. … But I’m saying that there’s one group of people who have to be concerned about that but there’s another group of people who also should think long term. What do we want? What are the guiding lights?”
Right now, in the midst of a series of cascading, intersecting crises (racial and economic inequality, climate change, mass unemployment, a pandemic), what’s possible feels like more of an open question than in recent memory. But that possibility, while life-affirming for many, is deeply threatening to some: the rich, and the white and powerful, to name a few. And those who feel threatened will try to demean the ideas. They’ll be met with eye rolls as the out-of-step activism of the hyperpolitical Twitter fringes or the ramblings of the woke, coddled campus kids. Implicit here is that Twitter and the campus are siloed spaces away from reality.
Which is what makes the events of the past two weeks of mass protests so powerful. The marching in the streets, the waving of signs and defiant chanting as well as the choking tear gas and the grotesque shows of police force — they are positively, indisputably, physically real. And it is further proof that the online spaces that helped to galvanize these movements have always been rooted in reality. It’s just one that many refused to open their eyes to.
Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) is an Opinion writer at large.
“Practical experience and accurate observation show that one cannot influence one’s own dreams. There are people, it is true, who assert that they can influence them. But if you look into their dream material, you find that they do only what I do with my disobedient dog: I order him to do those things I notice he wants to do anyhow, so that I can preserve my illusion of authority.”
WASHINGTON—Following months of lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, an angry mob of heavily armed self-help gurus reportedly demanded Tuesday that Americans reopen their hearts. “It’s time for U.S. citizens to find a way to look inwards and embrace their own divinity or face the inevitable consequences,” said an AK-47 toting Brené Brown, wielding her weapon and threatening untold violence if the nation didn’t immediately allow itself to be vulnerable in an effort to accomplish its goals. “Our founding fathers created this country as a haven away from that little voice in your head that says ‘No.’ Frankly, it’s unconstitutional to deny others a glimpse of your true inner self. We will uphold the American ideal of love and acceptance with blood if necessary.” At press time, Marianne Williamson slammed a magazine into her FN SCAR and vowed to unleash hell on Earth until the nation welcomed the healing power of crystals.
CHINESE RESEARCHERS ARE HOLDING A PHASE THREE CLINICAL TRIAL IN THE UAE INSTEAD.
BY DAN ROBITZSKI / June 24, 2020 (Futurism.com)
Scientists at the China National Biotec Group (CNBG) had ambitious plans to run one of the world’s first phase three clinical trials for a potentialcoronavirus vaccine — but they ran into a snag.
The problem was that a phase three trial is the one in which scientists test whether a treatment is actually effective. In this case, that meant the scientists needed to be able to watch recipients of the vaccine candidate in a real-world environment where they could potentially be exposed to the coronavirus.
But with almost no new COVID-19 cases, even though China had been the epicenter of the pandemic, they found that it was no longer a suitable testing ground. So instead of holding the trial at home, Reuters reports that the CNBG is outsourcing its clinical research to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where more people are still getting sick.
The experiment itself would mark the final stage of testing before the vaccine is approved for use. A couple other experimental vaccines, like those developed by Moderna Inc, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson, have also reached phase three. But so far, none of the clinical trials have actually begun.
Details on the actual vaccine are still scarce. Reuters reports that the CNBG has developed two experimental vaccines and tested them on 2,000 people in China during previous rounds of trials. But the group didn’t yet specify which vaccine candidate would be outsourced to the UAE.
But in the meantime, outsourcing clinical research on the coronavirus seems to be a growing trend in China, because Reuters reports that two other groups there are doing the same: Clover Biopharmaceuticals ran an early trial in Australia, while Sinovac Biotech is also pursuing a phase three experiment in Brazil.
What is love? This question haunts the human psyche perhaps more persistently than any other. It has occupied our collective imagination for millennia, it has baffled scientists, taunted philosophers, and tantalized artists. So mystified by love were the Ancient Greeks that they itemized six types of it. But nothing defines it with more exquisite expressiveness than the love letter. At its best, it makes the personal universal, then personal again — a writer from another era or another culture captures the all-consuming complexity of love with more richness and color and dimension than we ourselves could, making us feel at once less alone and more whole in our understanding of love and of ourselves.
As we turn the leaf on a new chapter of modern history that embraces a more inclusive definition of love — both culturally and, at last, politically — here is a celebration of the human heart’s highest capacity through history’s most beautiful and timelessly bewitching LGBTQ love letters.
VIRGINIA WOOLF AND VITA SACKVILLE-WEST
The gender-bending protagonist in Virginia Woolf’s pioneering novel Orlando, which subverted censorship to revolutionize the politics of queer love, was based on the English poet Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s onetime passionate lover and lifelong dear friend. In fact, the entire novel is thought to have been written about the affair — so much so that Sackville-West’s son, Nigel Nicolson, has described it as “the longest and most charming love-letter in literature.” Be that as it may, the two women also exchanged some gorgeous love letters in real life, found in the altogether wonderful collection The 50 Greatest Love Letters of All Time (public library). Here is one from Virginia to Vita from January of 1927, shortly after the two had fallen madly in love:
Look here Vita — throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.
On January 21, Vita sends Virginia this disarmingly honest, heartfelt, and unguarded letter, which stands in beautiful contrast with Virginia’s passionate prose:
…I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it should lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is really just a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any more by giving myself away like this — But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defenses. And I don’t really resent it.
On the day of Orlando’s publication, Vita received a package containing not only the printed book, but also Virginia’s original manuscript, bound specifically for her in Niger leather and engraved with her initials on the spine.
MARGARET MEAD AND RUTH BENEDICT
Margaret Mead endures as the world’s best-known and most influential cultural anthropologist, who not only popularized anthropology itself but also laid the foundation for the sexual revolution of the 1960s with her studies of attitudes towards sex. In addition to broadening cultural conventions through her work, she also embodied the revolution in her personal life. Married three times to men, she dearly loved her third husband, the renowned British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, with whom she had a daughter. But the most intense and enduring relationship of her life was with a woman — the anthropologist and folklorist Ruth Benedict, Mead’s mentor at Columbia university, fourteen years her senior. The two shared a bond of uncommon magnitude and passion, which stretched across a quarter century until the end of Benedict’s life.
In August of 1925, 24-year-old Mead sailed to Samoa, beginning the journey that would produce her enormously influential treatise Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation. (Mead, who believed that “one can love several people and that demonstrative affection has its place in different types of relationship,” was married at the time to her first husband and they had an unconventional arrangement that both allowed her to do field work away from him for extended periods of time and accommodated her feelings for Ruth.) On her fourth day at sea, she writes Benedict with equal parts devotion and urgency:
Ruth, dear heart,
. . . The mail which I got just before leaving Honolulu and in my steamer mail could not have been better chosen. Five letters from you — and, oh, I hope you may often feel me near you as you did — resting so softly and sweetly in your arms. Whenever I am weary and sick with longing for you I can always go back and recapture that afternoon out at Bedford Hills this spring, when your kisses were rained down on my face, and that memory ends always in peace, beloved.
A few days later:
Ruth, I was never more earthborn in my life — and yet never more conscious of the strength your love gives me. You have convinced me of the one thing in life which made living worthwhile.
You have no greater gift, darling. And every memory of your face, every cadence of your voice is joy whereon I shall feed hungrily in these coming months.
In another letter:
[I wonder] whether I could manage to go on living, to want to go on living if you did not care.
And later:
Does Honolulu need your phantom presence? Oh, my darling — without it, I could not live here at all. Your lips bring blessings — my beloved.
Letter from Margaret Mead to Ruth Benedict, October 1925 (Library of Congress)
In December of that year, Mead was offered a position as assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History, where she would go on to spend the rest of her career. She excitedly accepted, in large part so that she could at last be closer to Benedict, and moved to New York with her husband, Luther Cressman, firmly believing that the two relationships would neither harm nor contradict one another. As soon as the decision was made, she wrote to Benedict on January 7, 1926:
Your trust in my decision has been my mainstay, darling, otherwise I just couldn’t have managed. And all this love which you have poured out to me is very bread and wine to my direct need. Always, always I am coming back to you.
I kiss your hair, sweetheart.
Four days later, Mead sends Benedict a poignant letter, reflecting on her two relationships and how love crystallizes of its own volition:
In one way this solitary existence is particularly revealing — in the way I can twist and change in my attitudes towards people with absolutely no stimulus at all except such as springs from within me. I’ll awaken some morning just loving you frightfully much in some quite new way and I may not have sufficiently rubbed the sleep from my eyes to have even looked at your picture. It gives me a strange, almost uncanny feeling of autonomy. And it is true that we have had this loveliness “near” together for I never feel you too far away to whisper to, and your dear hair is always just slipping through my fingers. . . .
When I do good work it is always always for you … and the thought of you now makes me a little unbearably happy.
Five weeks later, in mid-February, Mead and Benedict begin planning a three-week getaway together, which proves, thanks to their husbands’ schedules, to be more complicated than the two originally thought. Exasperated over all the planning, Margaret writes Ruth:
I’ll be so blinded by looking at you, I think now it won’t matter — but the lovely thing about our love is that it will. We aren’t like those lovers of Edward’s “now they are sleeping cheek to cheek” etc. who forgot all the things their love had taught them to love —
Precious, precious. I kiss your hair.
By mid-March, Mead is once again firmly rooted in her love for Benedict:
I feel immensely freed and sustained, the dark months of doubt washed away, and that I can look you gladly in the eyes as you take me in your arms. My beloved! My beautiful one. I thank God you do not try to fence me off, but trust me to take life as it comes and make something of it. With that trust of yours I can do anything — and come out with something precious saved.
Sweet, I kiss your hands.
As the summer comes, Mead finds herself as in love with Benedict as when they first met six years prior, writing in a letter dated August 26, 1926:
Ruth dearest,
I am very happy and an enormous number of cobwebs seem to have been blown away in Paris. I was so miserable that last day, I came nearer doubting than ever before the essentially impregnable character of our affection for each other. And now I feel at peace with the whole world. You may think it is tempting the gods to say so, but I take all this as high guarantee of what I’ve always temperamentally doubted — the permanence of passion — and the mere turn of your head, a chance inflection of your voice have just as much power to make the day over now as they did four years ago. And so just as you give me zest for growing older rather than dread, so also you give me a faith I never thought to win in the lastingness of passion.
I love you, Ruth.
Letter from Margaret Mead to Ruth Benedict, January 1926 (Library of Congress)
In September of 1928, as Mead travels by train to marry her second husband after her first marriage crumbled, another bittersweet letter to Ruth leaves us speculating about what might have been different had the legal luxuries of modern love been a reality in Mead’s day, making it possible for her and Ruth to marry and formalize their steadfast union under the law:
Darling,
[…]
I’ve slept mostly today trying to get rid of this cold and not to look at the country which I saw first from your arms.
Mostly, I think I’m a fool to marry anyone. I’ll probably just make a man and myself unhappy. Right now most of my daydreams are concerned with not getting married at all. I wonder if wanting to marry isn’t just another identification with you, and a false one. For I couldn’t have taken you away from Stanley and you could take me away from [Reo] — there’s no blinking that.
[…]
Beside the strength and permanence and all enduring feeling which I have for you, everything else is shifting sand. Do you mind terribly when I say these things? You mustn’t mind — ever — anything in the most perfect gift God has given me. The center of my life is a beautiful walled place, if the edges are a little weedy and ragged — well, it’s the center which counts — My sweetheart, my beautiful, my lovely one.
Your Margaret
By 1933, despite the liberal arrangements of her marriage, Mead felt that it forcibly squeezed out of her the love she had for Benedict. In a letter to Ruth from April 9, she reflects on those dynamics and gasps at the relief of choosing to break free of those constraints and being once again free to love fully:
Having laid aside so much of myself, in response to what I mistakenly believed was the necessity of my marriage I had no room for emotional development. … Ah, my darling, it is so good to really be all myself to love you again. . . . The moon is full and the lake lies still and lovely — this place is like Heaven — and I am in love with life. Goodnight, darling.
Over the years that followed, both Margaret and Ruth explored the boundaries of their other relationships, through more marriages and domestic partnerships, but their love for each other only continued to grow. In 1938, Mead captured it beautifully by writing of “the permanence of [their] companionship.” Mead and her last husband, Gregory Bateson, named Benedict the guardian of their daughter. The two women shared their singular bond until Benedict’s sudden death from a heart attack in 1948. In one of her final letters, Mead wrote:
Always I love you and realize what a desert life might have been without you.
From the wonderful 1998 anthology My Dear Boy: Gay Love Letters Through the Centuries (public library) — a diverse collection of missives covering the universalities of romantic love, from longing and infatuation to jealousy and rejection to tenderness and loyalty — comes the correspondence of Beat Generation godfather Allen Ginsberg and the poet Peter Orlovsky. The two had met in San Francisco in 1954, embarking upon what Ginsberg called their “marriage” — a lifelong relationship that went through many phases, endured multiple challenges, but ultimately lasted until Ginsberg’s death in 1997.
Their letters, filled with typos, missing punctuation, and the grammatical oddities typical of writing propelled by bursts of intense emotion rather than literary precision, are absolutely beautiful.
Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky in San Francisco, 1955
In a letter from January 20, 1958, Ginsberg writes to Orlovsky from Paris, recounting a visit with his close friend and fellow beatnik, William S. Burroughs, another icon of literature’s gay subculture:
Dear Petey:
O Heart O Love everything is suddenly turned to gold! Don’t be afraid don’t worry the most astounding beautiful thing has happened here! I don’t know where to begin but the most important. When Bill [ed: William S. Burroughs] came I, we, thought it was the same old Bill mad, but something had happened to Bill in the meantime since we last saw him . . . . but last night finally Bill and I sat down facing each other across the kitchen table and looked eye to eye and talked, and I confessed all my doubt and misery — and in front of my eyes he turned into an Angel!
What happened to him in Tangiers this last few months? It seems he stopped writing and sat on his bed all afternoons thinking and meditating alone & stopped drinking — and finally dawned on his consciousness, slowly and repeatedly, every day, for several months — awareness of “a benevolent sentient (feeling) center to the whole Creation” — he had apparently, in his own way, what I have been so hung up in myself and you, a vision of big peaceful Lovebrain. . . .
I woke up this morning with great bliss of freedom & joy in my heart, Bill’s saved, I’m saved, you’re saved, we’re all saved, everything has been all rapturous ever since — I only feel sad that perhaps you left as worried when we waved goodby and kissed so awkwardly — I wish I could have that over to say goodby to you happier & without the worries and doubts I had that dusty dusk when you left… — Bill is changed nature, I even feel much changed, great clouds rolled away, as I feel when you and I were in rapport, well, our rapport has remained in me, with me, rather than losing it, I’m feeling to everyone, something of the same as between us.
A couple of weeks later, in early February, Orlovsky sends a letter to Ginsberg from New York, in which he writes with beautiful prescience:
…dont worry dear Allen things are going ok — we’ll change the world yet to our dessire — even if we got to die — but OH the world’s got 25 rainbows on my window sill. . . .
As soon as he receives the letter the day after Valentine’s Day, Ginsberg writes back, quoting Shakespeare like only a love-struck poet would:
I have been running around with mad mean poets & world-eaters here & was longing for kind words from heaven which you wrote, came as fresh as a summer breeze & “when I think on thee dear friend / all loses are restored & sorrows end,” came over & over in my mind — it’s the end of a Shakespeare Sonnet — he must have been happy in love too. I had never realized that before. . . .
Write me soon baby, I’ll write you big long poem I feel as if you were god that I pray to —
Love,
Allen
In another letter sent nine days later, Ginsberg writes:
I’m making it all right here, but I miss you, your arms & nakedness & holding each other — life seems emptier without you, the soulwarmth isn’t around. . . .
Citing another conversation he had had with Burroughs, he goes on to presage the enormous leap for the dignity and equality of love that we’ve only just seen more than half a century after Ginsberg wrote this:
Bill thinks new American generation will be hip & will slowly change things — laws & attitudes, he has hope there — for some redemption of America, finding its soul. . . . — you have to love all life, not just parts, to make the eternal scene, that’s what I think since we’ve made it, more & more I see it isn’t just between us, it’s feeling that can [be] extended to everything. Tho I long for the actual sunlight contact between us I miss you like a home. Shine back honey & think of me.
He ends the letter with a short verse:
Goodbye Mr. February. as tender as ever swept with warm rain love from your Allen
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY AND EDITH WYNN MATTHISON
In 1917, during her final year at Vassar College — which she had entered at the unusually ripe age of 21 and from which she was almost expelled for partying too much — Edna St. Vincent Millay met and befriended British silent film actress Edith Wynne Matthison, fifteen years her senior. Taken with Matthison’s fierce spirit, majestic beauty, and impeccable style, Millay’s platonic attraction quickly blossomed into an intense romantic infatuation. Edith, a woman who made no apologies for relishing life’s bounties, eventually kissed Edna and invited her to her summer home. A series of disarmingly passionate letters followed. Found in The Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay (public library) — which also gave us Millay on her love of music and her playfully lewd self-portrait — these epistolary longings capture that strange blend of electrifying ardor and paralyzing pride familiar to anyone who’s ever been in love.
Writing to Edith, Edna cautions of her uncompromising frankness:
Listen; if ever in my letters to you, or in my conversation, you see a candor that seems almost crude, — please know that it is because when I think of you I think of real things, & become honest, — and quibbling and circumvention seem very inconsiderable.
In another, she pleads:
I will do whatever you tell me to do. … Love me, please; I love you. I can bear to be your friend. So ask of me anything. … But never be ‘tolerant,’ or ‘kind.’ And never say to me again — don’t dare to say to me again — ‘Anyway, you can make a trial’ of being friends with you! Because I can’t do things that way. … I am conscious only of doing the thing that I love to do — that I have to do — and I have to be your friend.
In yet another, Millay articulates brilliantly the “proud surrender” at the heart of every materialized infatuation and every miracle of “real, honest, complete love”:
You wrote me a beautiful letter, — I wonder if you meant it to be as beautiful as it was. — I think you did; for somehow I know that your feeling for me, however slight it is, is of the nature of love. … nothing that has happened to me for a long time has made me so happy as I shall be to visit you sometime. — You must not forget that you spoke of that, — because it would disappoint me cruelly. … I shall try to bring a few quite nice things with me; I will get together all that I can, and then when you tell me to come, I will come, by the next train, just as I am. This is not meekness, be assured; I do not come naturally by meekness; know that it is a proud surrender to you; I don’t talk like that to many people.
With love,
Vincent Millay
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT AND LORENA HICKOK
Eleanor Roosevelt endures not only as the longest-serving American First Lady, but also as one of history’s most politically impactful, a fierce champion of working women and underprivileged youth.
But her personal life has been the subject of lasting controversy.
In the summer of 1928, Roosevelt met journalist Lorena Hickok, whom she would come to refer to as Hick. The thirty-year relationship that ensued has remained the subject of much speculation, from the evening of FDR’s inauguration, when the First Lady was seen wearing a sapphire ring Hickok had given her, to the opening up of her private correspondence archives in 1998. Though many of the most explicit letters had been burned, the 300 published in Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters Of Eleanor Roosevelt And Lorena Hickok (public library) — at once less unequivocal than history’s most revealing woman-to-woman love letters and more suggestive than those of great female platonic friendships — strongly indicate the relationship between Roosevelt and Hickok had been one of great romantic intensity.
On March 5, 1933, the first evening of FDR’s inauguration, Roosevelt wrote Hick:
Hick my dearest–
I cannot go to bed tonight without a word to you. I felt a little as though a part of me was leaving tonight. You have grown so much to be a part of my life that it is empty without you.
Then, the following day:
Hick, darling
Ah, how good it was to hear your voice. It was so inadequate to try and tell you what it meant. Funny was that I couldn’t say je t’aime and je t’adore as I longed to do, but always remember that I am saying it, that I go to sleep thinking of you.
And the night after:
Hick darling
All day I’ve thought of you & another birthday I will be with you, & yet tonite you sounded so far away & formal. Oh! I want to put my arms around you, I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort. I look at it & think “she does love me, or I wouldn’t be wearing it!”
And in yet another letter:
I wish I could lie down beside you tonight & take you in my arms.
Hick herself responded with equal intensity. In a letter from December 1933, she wrote:
I’ve been trying to bring back your face — to remember just how you look. Funny how even the dearest face will fade away in time. Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just north-east of the corner of your mouth against my lips.
Granted, human dynamics are complex and ambiguous enough even for those directly involved, making it hard to assume anything with absolute certainty from the sidelines of an epistolary relationship long after the correspondents’ deaths. But wherever on the spectrum of the platonic and romantic the letters in Empty Without You may fall, they offer a beautiful record of a tender, steadfast, deeply loving relationship between two women who meant the world to one another, even if the world never quite condoned or understood their profound connection.
OSCAR WILDE AND SIR ALFRED “BOSIE” DOUGLAS
Even as we make historic progress on the dignity and equality of human love, it’s hard to forget the enormous indignities to which the lovers of yore have been subjected across the 4,000-year history of persecuting desire. Among modernity’s most tragic victims of our shameful past is Oscar Wilde, who was imprisoned multiple times for his “crime” of homosexuality, driven into bankruptcy and exile, and finally succumbed to an untimely death. But Wilde’s most “sinful” quality — his enormous capacity for passionate, profound love — was also one of the most poetic gifts of his life.
In June of 1891, Wilde met Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, a 21-year-old Oxford undergraduate and talented poet, who would come to be the author’s own Dorian Gray — his literary muse, his evil genius, his restless lover. It was during the course of their affair that Wilde wrote Salomé and the four great plays which to this day endure as the cornerstones of his legacy. Their correspondence, collected Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters (public library), makes for an infinitely inspired addition to the most beautiful love letters exchanged between history’s greatest creative and intellectual power couples.
In January of 1893, Wilde writes to Bosie:
My Own Boy,
Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days.
Why are you alone in London, and when do you go to Salisbury? Do go there to cool your hands in the grey twilight of Gothic things, and come here whenever you like. It is a lovely place and lacks only you; but go to Salisbury first.
Always, with undying love, yours,
Oscar
Letter from Oscar Wilde to Bosie, November 1892 (The Morgan Library)
In early March of 1893, Wilde channels love’s exasperating sense of urgency:
Dearest of All Boys — Your letter was delightful — red and yellow wine to me — but I am sad and out of sorts — Bosie — you must not make scenes with me — they kill me — they wreck the loveliness of life — I cannot see you, so Greek and gracious, distorted with passion; I cannot listen to your curved lips saying hideous things to me — don’t do it — you break my heart — I’d sooner be rented* all day, than have you bitter, unjust, and horrid — horrid.
I must see you soon — you are the divine thing I want — the thing of grace and genius — but but I don’t know how to do it — Shall I come to Salisbury — ? There are many difficulties — my bill here is £49 for a week! I have also got a new sitting-room over the Thames — but you, why are you not here, my dear, my wonderful boy — ? I fear I must leave; no money, no credit, and a heart of lead —
Ever your own,
Oscar
* “renter” was slang for male prostitute in London
Their affair was intense, bustling with dramatic tempestuousness, but underpinning it was a profound and genuine love. In a letter from late December of 1893, after a recent rift, Wilde writes to Douglas:
My dearest Boy,
Thanks for your letter. I am overwhelmed by the wings of vulture creditors, and out of sorts, but I am happy in the knowledge that we are friends again, and that our love has passed through the shadow and the light of estrangement and sorrow and come out rose-crowned as of old. Let us always be infinitely dear to each other, as indeed we have been always.
[…]
I think of you daily, and am always devotedly yours.
Oscar
In July of the following year, Wilde writes:
My own dear Boy,
I hope the cigarettes arrived all right. I lunched with Gladys de Grey, Reggie and Aleck York there. They want me to go to Paris with them on Thursday: they say one wears flannels and straw hats and dines in the Bois, but, of course, I have no money, as usual, and can’t go. Besides, I want to see you. It is really absurd. I can’t live without you. You are so dear, so wonderful. I think of you all day long, and miss your grace, your boyish beauty, the bright sword-play of your wit, the delicate fancy of your genius, so surprising always in its sudden swallow-flights towards north and south, towards sun and moon — and, above all, yourself. The only thing that consoles me is what Sybil of Mortimer Street (whom mortals call Mrs. Robinson) said to me*. If I could disbelieve her I would, but I can’t, and I know that early in January you and I will go away together for a long voyage, and that your lovely life goes always hand in hand with mine. My dear wonderful boy, I hope you are brilliant and happy.
I went to Bertie, today I wrote at home, then went and sat with my mother. Death and Love seem to walk on either hand as I go through life: they are the only things I think of, their wings shadow me.
London is a desert without your dainty feet… Write me a line and take all my love — now and for ever.
Always, and with devotion — but I have no words for how I love you.
Oscar
* The fortuneteller’s prophesy apparently came true — Wilde and Douglas travelled to Algiers together the following January.
In 1895, at the height of his literary success, with his masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest drawing continuous acclaim across the stages of London, Wilde had Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, prosecuted for libel. But the evidence unearthed during the trial led to Wilde’s own arrest on charges of “gross indecency” with members of the same sex. Two more trials followed, after which he was sentenced for two years of “hard labor” in prison. On April 29 of that year, having hit emotional and psychological rock-bottom, his reputation ruined and his health deteriorating, Wilde wrote to Douglas on the eve of the final trial:
My dearest boy,
This is to assure you of my immortal, my eternal love for you. Tomorrow all will be over. If prison and dishonour be my destiny, think that my love for you and this idea, this still more divine belief, that you love me in return will sustain me in my unhappiness and will make me capable, I hope, of bearing my grief most patiently. Since the hope, nay rather the certainty, of meeting you again in some world is the goal and the encouragement of my present life, ah! I must continue to live in this world because of that.
Another letter, written on August 31, 1897, shortly after Wilde’s release from prison, reads:
Café Suisse, Dieppe Tuesday, 7:30
My own Darling Boy,
I got your telegram half an hour ago, and just send a line to say that I feel that my only hope of again doing beautiful work in art is being with you. It was not so in the old days, but now it is different, and you can really recreate in me that energy and sense of joyous power on which art depends. Everyone is furious with me for going back to you, but they don’t understand us. I feel that it is only with you that I can do anything at all. Do remake my ruined life for me, and then our friendship and love will have a different meaning to the world.
I wish that when we met at Rouen we had not parted at all. There are such wide abysses now of space and land between us. But we love each other. Goodnight, dear. Ever yours,
Oscar
Oscar and Bosie in 1893
But perhaps the most eloquent articulation of their relationship comes from a letter Wilde wrote to Leonard Smithers — a Sheffield solicitor with a side business of printing erotica, who became the only publisher interested in Wilde’s books in his post-prison years — on October 1, 1897:
How can you keep on asking is Lord Alfred Douglas in Naples? You know quite well he is — we are together. He understands me and my art, and loves both. I hope never to be separated from him. He is a most delicate and exquisite poet, besides — far the finest of all the young poets in England. You have got to publish his next volume; it is full of lovely lyrics, flute-music and moon-music, and sonnets in ivory and gold. He is witty, graceful, lovely to look at, lovable to be with. He has also ruined my life, so I can’t help loving him — it is the only thing to do.
More of their exquisite correspondence appears in Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters, but that one sentence alone — “He understands me and my art, and loves both.” — is an immeasurably beautiful addition to history’s most profound definitions of love, a sublime manifestation of the highest hope one creative soul can have for a union with another.
Consciousness, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more
What is love? This question haunts the human psyche perhaps more persistently than any other. It has 
Look here Vita — throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.
Writing to Edith, Edna cautions of her uncompromising frankness:
