Shooting in the Dark

in which we live is so ear-shatteringly noisy that when they are faced by muteness they become uneasy, as if part of their anatomy has been removed.
    I am their silence.
    The Trappists renounce speech as a mark of religious observance, preferring to commune in silence with the order of the universe. Traditionally we mark the death of someone special with a period of silence. And death itself, of course, is not renowned for kicking up a fuss.
    When all is quiet, folk seem to think that a storm is brewing.
    I have only spoken three words since they came for me. There was a remote possibility that they would have given me bail if I had spoken more, denied the charges they levelled against me. But I deny nothing; and neither do I admit that they are right. They are small people, the police, the prison authorities. They have no right to judge me.
    Neither do they have the ability, the qualifications to judge acts of a higher nature. Their minds are ideally suited to the everyday, the domestic, the functioning of the PTA and the Highway Code.
    They do not understand consequences, that one thing inevitably leads to another. They can never understand that, that one act becomes another.
    Kant is Sade. That is what I told them. I ran the words into each other so it came out as three syllables: Kantisade. They brought in a senior police officer and asked me to repeat it. He shook his head and left the room. One of the brighter ones decided it was a foreign language and they brought in someone from the linguistics department of the university. He went away to confer with his colleagues. Kantisade.
    I have heard nothing from Miriam. They asked me about her, wanted to know if she was involved. I didn’t answer. In my own mind I blamed her at first, for taking the bike. But it was my own fault. I shouldn’t have kept it. She was late for work and thought it would be all right to use it.
    They threatened me repeatedly and one of them took a swing at me in the cells. I didn’t flinch. Took another full-bodied punch in the eye and stood there feeling it puff up as the blood raced towards the damaged tissue. I am not afraid of them. They are little men. They cannot touch me. In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant said:
    Suppose that someone says his lust is irresistible when the desired object and opportunity are present. Ask him whether he would not control his passions if, in front of the house where he has this opportunity, a gallows were erected on which he would be hanged immediately after gratifying his lust. We do not have to guess very long what his answer may be.
    This is seen as Kant externalizing the voice of conscience. But what he failed to take into account is the emergence of individuals who can only fully commit themselves to a night of passion and find joy there if they are threatened by some form of ‘gallows’. I am not the only man and Miriam is not the only woman who needs to violate society’s prohibitions in order to achieve sexual fulfilment.
    Donatien Alphonse François Sade, known as the Marquis de Sade, showed us how, but it was Kant himself who set the ball rolling. In his definition of marriage, Kant describes it as ‘the contract between two adults of the opposite sex about the mutual use of each other’s sexual organs’.
    An interesting phrase, is it not? And one that has been pored over for many hours in the universities of the Western world. Interesting because if we didn’t know already that it was written by Kant, we might be persuaded that Sade penned it.
    Kant is Sade because the two of them together allowed us, no, demanded, that we reduce the sexual partner to an object, and not only an object but a partial object. Sexual pleasure and gratification is dispensed via a bodily organ, not by a whole human person. Kant said so, and Sade said so. And Kant is Sade.
    Together they are our heritage.
     
    The temperature today is well below zero. The windows are encrusted with ice crystals. In the garden hoarfrost is nipping the leaves of the plants and a deep ground frost has turned the grass verges as white as an old man’s beard. Even the pebbles on the drive are clinging together for warmth.
    The inmates and the screws are suffering. They button up tightly. One of the inmates is called Jack the Shepherd because he is a pimp. This morning I watched him blow his nail. Later he handed me a sliver of glass. A simple tool which will allow me access to the fair blind maiden at the heart of my