When Oscar Wilde told the customs officer in New York that he had nothing to declare but his genius, why didn't the official take out his truncheon and beat the bejasus out of him? asks Kevin Myers
Aside from giving the official a certain justified pleasure, it might have also taught Oscar Wilde a few manners: for he continued to be an insufferable and arrogant fop, though never quite as unbearable as when he talked about art.
Never trust people who talk about art, especially if they use art as an excuse for vapid aphorisms. Never trust people who say - as Wilde did - that all art is immoral. And never trust people who say - as Wilde did - that life imitates art more than art imitates life: for it's simply not so. As that other unbearable little dandy Byron once declared, "truth is always strange; stranger than fiction." Before the internet opened up an entirely unexpected world of evil, no artist could have ever imagined the potential sordidness of the male sexual appetite. We all knew of the "tiny minority": but nobody had the least idea that so many men were sexually fixated on children in such an abominable way. We simply haven't got the prison space to lock up all the males who use child pornography.
Layer by layer, the internet has peeled back the dark truths about human nature - alas, largely male nature. Did anyone in the darkest chapters of fiction or art ever imagine the world in which Armin Meiwes immersed himself? In his testimony at his trial in Germany, he exchanged hundreds of e-mails with other men on the subject of cannibalism and self-mutilation.
"Matteo" from Italy wanted to be nailed on a diagonal cross, with a flamethrower burning off his genitals; another wanted to be eaten before the Russian Orthodox Christmas; Andreas from Regensburg wanted to be collected in a cattle-wagon and pushed into Meiwes' slaughter-room. And the existence of this internet community is apparently not in doubt, both in their desire to eat human flesh or to be eaten.
The scenario presented by Meiwes in defence against a charge of murdering Bernd-Jurgen Brandes is so grotesque as to be beyond all invention. It is that together they severed and cooked and then both ate the victim's penis, before Meiwes killed Brandes, cooking some parts and deep-freezing others. To cap the fictional impossibility of this tale is the name of the victim: Bernd is pronounced "burnt", and Brandes actually means "burning" in German. The full story is far, far worse, but thank you, I've had more than enough.
The point is that we are discovering, through the internet, that there are probably no limits to human appetites or human evil: and that the internet is likely to become a major activator of new and terrible forms of depravity, enabling the hitherto solitarily perverted to meet and exchange ideas with others of like mind. Society has heretofore been protected from such people by their very isolation, and by the agreed taboos which prevented anyone ever being able to disclose their dark appetites without instant social ostracism.
The internet provides a lawless, taboo-free meeting place, a moral anarchy where no darkness is too dark, no sin too vile; and no hitherto unimaginable evil deed is now beyond the communal imagination of the disparate individuals, as they brain-storm their way to an abyss deeper than any single mind was ever capable of going. Beside this hell, the most wicked individual artistic mind is a mere Tinkerbell.
The utter inability of art to imitate life was again dramatically illustrated just as the Meiwes trial began. For no writer of fiction could ever tell the tale of Dawn Auty and be believed. She has terminal cancer. Her father died in October, her mother two years ago, and the greatest wish for what remains of her life was to marry her boy-friend Stephen Flood. Fascinated by mechanical things, she decided to go the church on a friend's motorised tricycle.
So while Stephen waited at the altar, in Blackpool, in England, she set out to join him, travelling on the wedding trike. But her wedding dress got caught in the drive shaft, pulling her legs right into the machinery, and causing the vehicle to stall. As rescuers arrived, poor Dawn kept crying, "I'm still getting married, aren't I?" Doctors had to amputate both legs, there and then on the roadside, one above the knee, the other below.
Dawn is now seriously ill in hospital.
The philosopher or artist has not been born who can weave wisdom from the raw fabric of this tragedy. Moreover, the creative norms of "art" would never allow such grand guignol calamities to be inflicted on one single individual, and critics would damn into perdition any writer who attempted to tell Dawn Auty's tale in fiction.
We allow art a tight rein because we daren't begin to contemplate where, unleashed, it could take us: we cannot bear the monstrous unfairness of Dawn's fate, or the unspeakable evil of such internet societies as those inhabited by Armin Meiwes.
So we create supercilious, mannered conventions which exclude from art things we call "bathos", "sentimentality", and "implausibility", to protect us from the terrible, the random and the grotesque deeds of nature, and nature's creation - ourselves.
And we employ art-policemen (called "critics") to patrol the boundaries of fiction and drama to ensure that art never really explores the otherwise unfathomable depths of the unfair and breathtakingly evil world that we inhabit.