"You feel yourself living" - Jean Genet
There is no other source of beauty than the wound - unique, different for each person, hidden or visible, that every man keeps within, that he preserves and...he withdraws when he wants to leave the world behind for a temporary but deep solitude.' — Jean Genet, from The Studio of Alberto Giacometti 1957
'It sounded vaguely like the kind of thing
Christ might have said if Christ had a sense of humor.
The empty bar that someone was supposed to swing to him
Did not arrive, & so his outstretched flesh itself became
A darkening trapeze. The two other acrobats were thieves.'
- Larry Levis, from Elegy with a Darkening Trapeze Inside It
"He went out into the freezing street, wearing a torn and tattered jacket — the pockets were ripped and hung down — and a shirt stiff with dirt. His face was poor and unhappy, shifty, pale, and filthy, for we dared not wash since it was so cold..." — Jean Genet, from The Thief's Journal
Swept up the nightly flesh harvest, a macabe experience,
one of the strangest of my longish life, and flushed the silt
of my existence down the toilet with blessings to the underworld
deities who may be nourished enough to grant a reprise.
Waking in such sheets is passing strange feeling the grain of surface
me forced out and off from what is within seeking to be free and
move, perhaps as mulch, out into the world of the living.
I am sure I will write of this experience often,
the Purgation poems or something like.
Synchronisitcally, all night telly on the Catholic station, I awakened
to hear Father B. speaking of St. John of the Cross so sat up to drink
a tall glass of water and listen and heard of the mystical path in the
Dark Night of the Soul again, good to be reminded, of that purgation
period, that kenosis or emptying out of one's entire meaning, all the
striving-after, seeking almighty rafters to hang out upon and keep
above the fray, et al, sand paper skin my knees hurt elbow too raw
red oozing each move a pain a prayer of sorts.
Awakened to Rome and the most handsome African face in the screen,
a prisoner in St. Peter's attending the Mass for Prisoners, one of the
final masses near the end of the Year of Mercy Pope Francis inaugurated
a year ago...I watched the mass between nods and naps and those
amazing male faces of prisoners leaning forward, on knees, greatly
moved me and, as always, was struck by tremendous lust for the men
and for the Mass and thought how appropriate it is that it is flesh and
blood that is eaten at the Table we're unable to escape the animal nor
the perambulating spirit that lunges leaps crawls toward some integration
once transcendence is given up on, the hope of it, and one lands on one's
knees or like me on his back raw red hairy jiggledy meatedness caught
in the corelatives which appear to be opposites
then wakened again where one of the prisoners looked much much
like St. Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers, from prisons French, sprung from
them because of his artistry, that mysticism of the dark, the underworld,
the excoriation of abjectitude, of alienation unsought but brought oneself
by fate, by world as fate, by human world as fate that would seize upon
a soul and damn him inside out...awakened to the most beautiful beatific
boy in the Vatican choir, a soprano, singing clearly and exquisitely a
plaintive pure and holy...Glory be I wept and slept some more one hand
upon my raw belly smelling the animal of me who would be once again
in those rafters...
Feeling less leathery enough now to take Crustacian Man out into the world.
May take Genet with me, read some of his proem, his writing on the tight
rope walker astounds, his last lover was an Algerian circus tight rope
walker who committed suicide...Les Saltimbanques de dolour...such is
the attempt to transcend via ropes and swings, a palomino's back upon
which balances a pale youth in tights holding a gay umbrella over his
head, his bluer than blue eyes fixed upon some other world anywhere
but here, not hearing the cheering masses crashing against him...
Sartre's book, Saint Genet, so hard to read, so well written, so dense
with rich thought and his own transcendent language requires a specialist
almost to read but one reads as one chants over, now, an open sore, or
fire, and discovers some depth and sanctity there or near or above in the
air close behind the ear each breath a prayer between crossed eyes and
scatter thoughts...such art of soul the cost and the wrest from the cauldron
beneath the rope, taut, hope springs wobbly on human wings of mind heart
sinew and sole...
I shall pray to St. Adrenala for surcease, to St. Seera Brall for increase
of St. Sara Tonin and Sra. Dopa Mene for release from the purgative, the
Via Negativa, Jesus executed between two prisoners, two thieves, appropriate
much, thieving grace in a graceless human world, Genet on one cross and
the scarred youth thrown from his circus horse on the other incomprehending
the word 'necessity' - all three craving the vinegar sponge for drink and a last
blood wink toward a setting sun of the Western world 2000 years ahead which is
NOW.
Will report in again from the Planet Purgativa, late of Unrequitia,
a staggering diva in these yellowed streets leaved layered by ginkgoes
and tamarinds, stray chimney fires of the wealthy wafting noseward.
******
Jean Genet, author of Our Lady of the Flowers and many other novels and plays.
No comments:
Post a Comment