March 29 - Saint William of Emanuel and Immanuel

On a day when London dripped with beer and headless angels sang from St. Paul’s cupola, I went to Hell to speak with the Devil about some matters that concerned me.  Before I arrived at his office, I found Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Hosea sitting in a river of fire, though it appeared not to harm them.  They were eating babies’ hearts and wearing skirts of human flesh and I asked them why their fashion and manner were so strange.  Isaiah said that prophets have always been likewise and if it were not so the world would fail, for it depended on the prophet’s diet for its sanity.  Then I asked if prophecy was dying, and as a world of method and machine arose if madness and genius would fall?  Jeremiah answered that prophecy had always been an art of the few and time could withstand its living absence for a few centuries without vital loss, but if it should disappear for long, the world would have no foundation and fall itself to madness and fire.  I turned to Ezekiel, stooped and hairy with humiliations, and asked him if it were true whether prophets were hatched not begotten and as Ezekiel was thinking, Gomer, Diblaim’s daughter, arose from the river seething with nymphomania and began gnawing on Ezekiel’s belly.  But he led her downward and they mated and so it was with each of the prophets.  And I too was invited to join, and I did.  The seed mixed in Gomer’s voracious and plural womb and on November 28 1757 she gave birth to one in whom prophecy and sainthood were mixed, at 28 Broad Street in Golden Square.

This madman suffered the lifelong indignities of the self-proclaimed sane.  More alive than the card-carrying living, he danced his dance on fire to the tune of tombs.  What seemed walls to many were symphonies to him; his head throbbed with song, his flesh with holy lechery.  When he had tea with Queen Charlotte and she proceeded to lift up and pull down to display her Eucharist, St. William imagined climbing onto the royal personage and filling it with the cry of God, then ran home to his wife and ravaged her.  On August 12 1827 Elijah descended in his chariot of fire and took this saint from glory to glory.

St. William recently dined with me; we fed on powdered bone risotto and soup with saffron, ginger, the eyes of medieval kings and friar foreskins.  I asked him of his art and he said he thought in images and could not do otherwise.  I also questioned him about his prophetic role and he answered that all art is prophetic and that the artist is replacing the prophet in madness and genius to sustain the world.  Not wishing to detain him, for I knew he had other dinners to attend, I posed a final question about the nature of angels and whether they existed only in the mind or somehow also in the world of substance.  And St. William left singing through my apartment’s northern wall and I finished my meal alone.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh. 

The Turin Horse

Bela Tarr, king of transforming existential bleakness into cinematic beauty, surpasses himself in his reputedly last film, The Turin Horse.  While the 7.5 hour Sátántangó remains his masterpiece and one of the crown jewels of cinema, Tarr’s finale consummates his grim vision and is, perhaps, the most relentlessly perfect depiction of monotony and futility on screen, blended through the bleak fusion of music, image and word.

Musically, the same droning bars drone in the endless wind—ponderous, becoming almost unheard in their heavy repetition, a litany of endless necessity.  Imagistically black and white with Tarr’s characteristic long takes, the unredeemable darkness of existence is redeemed only through the beauty of artifice the creator constructs, the gap being infinite—our source of irony, despair, hope and emptiness.  Verbally, silence dominates—a silence so rich in its persistent presence, so wholly aligned with the grave muteness of the father’s and daughter’s eyes, that dialogue between them, when it sparsely happens, broaches comedy.

Yet comedy, of a kind, assumes center stage during the three intrusions from the external world:  the vatic booze-obtaining Nietzsche-paraphrasing neighbour; the bawdy vaudevillian descent of the gypsies; and the rough reading of the book, seemingly a manual for cleansing violated sacred spaces.  Prophecy, violation, procedural cleansing—perhaps a mythic allusion to the 120 years between Nietzsche’s collapse and the filming of Tarr’s slow minimalist serene finale.

But little shocks from within the hopelessly enclosed world of the two protagonists remain scattered around the three larger ones:  the almost perverse eroticism of the daughter putting on her stockings, the endless potatoes and the variations of their eating, the reversals and blendings (the horse once leading is now led, the occasional merging of daughter and horse through empathy, the shift from looking through the daughter’s eyes through the window to looking through the window at her following the escape failure, the binding of father and horse through struggle, the insular union of father and daughter), and perhaps most intensely the father’s face (perfectly chosen, it embodies the film’s central theme of chiseled void and, like the theme, like the void itself, one encounters each time a kind of vertigo upon seeing it).

The six days of the film mirror the six days of biblical creation, but unlike the latter account—for which the final creative day is the climactic transcendent production of humans—The Turin Horse’s final day is brief, encased in darkness, portending death, the trees of knowledge and life withered and silent.

Tarr’s films demand deep empathy and attention; there is no escape, as in Hollywood, from the stark brutalities of existence.  Like reading The Four Quartets, one escapes instead to life’s poetic center—which only feels like an escape from life because we so frequently devote ourselves to sheltering ourselves from it.

Ostensibly, by being in the title and dominating the opening take, the horse that Nietzsche wept over (in Turin just prior to his descent into madness) is the film’s protagonist.  As the story progresses, however, the viewer begins to suspect that—no—the father and daughter jointly share the lead.  But by the end, when nothing has happened and everything has happened, it’s hard not to conclude that futility itself plays the central role—as in some of the great works of Western literature:  The Iliad, Oedipus Rex, Macbeth, and Blood Meridian.  Which curiously brings us back to the horse as the obscure center:  dumb, violated, forever irredeemably monotonously itself.

Does art, does beauty, provide the grace required to redeem necessity’s omnipresent horrors?  We know what Simone Weil would say.  But I might only allow Tarr to respond with his films.

2:0 - the world of 2 (3)

2 is strife and tension—a war between life and death, love and hate.  This war, in the world of 2, has no resolution until death.  We build necessary walls to control the war.  We form families, get jobs, seek lovers.  We have houses, cars, routines.  But families change and break apart.  Jobs end.  Lovers leave or we leave them.  We get bored of houses and cars decay.  The same routines no longer meet our needs.  The more one runs away from this war, the more one lives a living death, becoming like a lifeless battery encased in a useless shell.  But make no mistake—the war is still there, now lurking like a spy, now erupting like a warrior.  The degree to which we deny it in ourselves is the degree to which we deny it in the world.

The more we build tangible structures around ourselves to shield us from the tensions in the world of 2, the more we sever ourselves from the very blood of our existence.  But, also, the more we live only according to the rules of this war, the more we accept 2 as the only reality and live as beasts divorced from a larger destiny.

[

This war of 2 includes the struggle between subject and object — between myself (my needs, desires) and the world (other people, possessions, nature).  It also includes the struggle between myself and words, ideas and symbols.  The first is my struggle for survival and domination.  The second is my struggle for meaning.  For many, the first struggle is the second struggle.  In this case, I find meaning through my body (food, clothing, shelter, sex) and my domination over other people and things (status, possessions, security, sexual and relational conquests).

I experience myself as an utterly isolated individual in an ambiguous world.  To reduce my terror I try to append as many objects as possible to myself to add stability, continuity and security.  The more objects, the greater the odds that they will not all leave or collapse at once, ensuring a life which, while hardly trouble-free, at least has its major and minor catastrophes spread out in time.  This way of speaking is not a description of existence as it can be, should be or even is always lived.  It is only a description of a life lived solely from within the confines of the world of 2.  Today, however, the world of 2 dominates and many only live their lives, consciously or otherwise, building a wall of objects around themselves.

March 22 - Saint Jane of the Bourgeois Supremacy

When Rev. Addison G. Fitzwilliam entered the ballroom, Maria leaned over to her sister and whispered, He’s got it all¾a Stilton carriage, ten thousand a year, a home as beautiful as Prince George, and a Cambridge degree.  I bet he’ll ask you to dance.  Lizzy B. blushed.  It’s not as if she weren’t attracted to these attributes, even succumbing during her solitary nights to the common temptation of composing elaborately developed conjugal fantasies, in which repartee and evenings of music filled a house built from camaraderie, respect and laughter, but that these longings in themselves seemed insufficient; it was as if nature had placed within her not only the respectable ambitions of any normal woman, but something else she couldn’t quite name, as indefinable as the first soft thoughts that gently pull a dreaming sleeper into the day’s routine.  Could Addison Fitzwilliam be so extraordinary as to fulfill these more intangible longings?

It is a truth grudgingly acknowledged that a man in almost any situation, assuming he’s negotiated the rage of youth, his upbringing and temperament incline him, his sexual orientation and spiritual convictions permit him, the cultural context in which he was formed encourages it, depending on his particular configuration of sadism and masochism, whether or not his fate is so constructed, if he tends to believe the romantic education society carefully instills within him, perhaps even based on his degree of fame, fortune, luck, fortitude and manner of diet, will want a good wife.  A woman, on the other hand, while she also has the urge, it rests on a different foundation¾his is for the dark necessity and hers is for the convenience and the game.  She sees marriage as a pleasant plant on the windowsill of a living room; he sees it as the cornerstone of his identity.

So it was that Addy, as he was called by friends, initially resisted the edifice of monogamous charm, wearing the fashion of arrogance instead of tact and confidence, while Lizzy followed the rules for uncaught brides, seeming to be disinterested while during the entire courtship pining after him to such an extent she’d see mirages of him in her milk.  But things being what they are and time known to be parsimonious with the only gift it has, the two lovers achieved a wedded state and from this most fortuitous union brought into society on December 16 1775 a daughter, whom they named St. Jane after a medieval martyr they had heard about from the vicar’s uncle.  The product of this particularly well constituted consummation grew up seeking a husband who was as intelligent, witty, talented, attractive, astute and self-sufficient as herself, and remained a spinster until she died.

She departed this Life on July 18 1817, after a long illness supported with the impatience and compulsions of a Christian.  The detached indifference of her heart, the perspicacity of her wit, and the amused causticity of her mind obtained the regard or fear of all who knew her and the warmest envy of her intimate connections.  They knew their loss to be irreparable, but in their deepest affliction were consoled by a dubious hope that this pretty, silly, affected, husband-hunting butterfly wrung more drama out of morality than most other saints get from terrorism, murder or mayhem.  St. Jane was buried in Winchester Cathedral and raised to sainthood on March 22 1845.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

March 20 - Saint Moses, Mythmonger and Creator of Creation

The reader should be warned that although Moses' status among saints is secure, the legitimacy of his Proper is hotly debated.  Various reliable but anonymous sources suggest that Moses' proper Proper was stolen from The Alhambra Christmas Eve 1491 by a pack of Basques and replaced with the following, of dubious authenticity.  Dr. Louis Vanderslug, Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar Dental Chair of Neoontology at the University of Azpeitia, for example, has written in his seminal work, Propriety and Proper in the Whopper of Faints,

… the [present] “Whopper of Poses,” aside from its overtures of thinly … disguised lunacy, rests its authenticity on the most doubtful of foundations and thus should be … considered with only the most considered (sic) skepticism by even the most (sic) receptive and naïve reader.  It is … the opinion of most [scholars] today that the oldest and most reliable “text” consists only of every second “the” or possibly “e” in every second “the” in the penultimate … paragraph.

The reader should thus proceed warned … or not at all.

(The reader should also be warned that Section IV of this Proper--the proper of this Proper, its eye and wound--has not translated well into the Kingdom of Blogger and thus has lost key elements of what might, in polite society, be called meaning.)

***

The official records of the West have it that God, the Lord Almighty, Yahweh Sabaoth, He Who is Beyond Names and Outside Time, manufactured the world, its satellite and sun, the surrounding cosmos and stars, the waters and heavens, trees, grass and flowers, the fish and firmament, birds and all multi-legged creatures, from nothing.  As has always been the case, however, the story behind the story is another thing.

I was there:  Moses, a chosen scrim in the kingdom of masks, drawn out by the Council of I to be the journalist of the world’s beginnings.  The whole pantheon was chattering - names, unnamed, the unnamable - in putrid scrimmage and credit, and garudas screeched from the Aumaum trees in bliss and discord:

I

Life sat in a hut of herself on the edge of Nod, munching on memory gristle, stoking the firmament of her thighs.  A troubled youth, yes, a troubled youth, Life had had.  And nightmares that would have killed one killable.  She wore baggy magenta stockings and a douse of rouge, and peered at herself with the scrutiny of a committed lush.  I have been, she muttered, been to Lusitania.  To see the coronation of a queen.  And been had by the regal stockboy.  Had, on a stack of sounds.  Life sang a little less than sweetly on Nod’s gnarled edge and poked her coals with a trammel hanging from some violence.  Perhaps, once an egg always an egg.  Alway, alway, sausage, assuage.  I think I will.  And the stockings, roused, bestrode the firmament and Life was Life and Life came forth and Life had another round.

II

Ho Hsu lounged in an anteroom of Heaven, smoking turtle.  His Kiton suit was tidily pressed and the rosa rugosa in his lapel shone like a lack of virgins.  He had the numbers.  He had the charm.  When the steward gave the sign, Ho casually cantered to the middle paternoster and waited magnanimously for its arrival.  Bouquets of spelt tickled nostril hairs with scents of swoon.  Dingless ding and yawn.  Only she from that other region inhabited the lift and the two communed egregiously and not lukewarm while their carrier wooped unimpressively to further heights.  The Committee of Perfect Happiness awaited, as expected, as did PowerPoint, projections and a flagon of pipsissewa.  Ho Hsu speeched.  The noble members foibled.  In the end, the vote was 22-21 for yes.

III

Gaea picked a worm off her face and examined it in the imperfect light.  Tear 2.  But hunger being what it is and worms being worms, the cenotaph did not last, but ceased, somewhere in the banter of the Chocky Mountains.  Itstory or is it Hitstory?  Oh shit, I’ve had a historectomy.

True and noble, rouble, trouble, woeful is the worm:  this is the claw and the profits and everyfling you need below.  Bloo bloa beraign, hearth, the birth, is good.  Rue and rubble, stew and stubble.  Another one.  Juicy?  Yes.  As juicy as a newt.  Ooh, and another.  And a brother and a cistern and a dotard and a gun and a mortar and a fodder and a blarney and a fanny and a shrew.  She ate, oozy bait, the webetreefate, but the corms kept on woming and I-uh slept on stuffing and AI bent a-bloating till the ace of worms pulled a rump and there was Eve.

V

Just seven minutes after Timoshenko had received the Odor of Ferret from the No Bell steeple in Eden, he returned to his rabidatory nonchalantly and closed the door.  I’ve got another few beers to live, he thought, I’ve another few whores to hose.  And he opened up his Babble to stage 9 where it spake of Tubal-Cain yammering a word together on a rhyme.  This is me, he told his knife.  I yammer worlds.  I’m the lead clinger in the junk kettle band, Three and Two Makes One.  Good name.  Where was I post-eward?  Oh, yes, in my widdiful rind.  I will bam some continence together.  I will ham a price.  Timoshenko paused mid-hammer.  He looked into the widow of his goal.  I will baguette with my patent demon and my need a fetal url.  Amen. Hymen. Ramen.

VI

Mr. Suzuki, while I have been led to understand by the formulae that have been crowding out my life, howling like banshees in drag in day, to imagine, not under the influence but in complete sobriety and wakeful, that the dictionary is the adjudicator of time, the architect of space, a holy poly balloon, the pissing cousin of make-believe, a mote of might, a walliwash of power’s hour, approached, slinking and stinking like a fog, and intimidated that you, whom the world in all its drawers and hangings adores, not least since you have sockumented¾this is the claim¾that everything I stuff into my ugly face is made from refracted zeros and pis and golden ratios in the armature of mathematics’ gross defense, some cosmic calculator on crack, think otherwise, would I be abable to take this opportunity to ask you if it’s true?

VII

Dis does not desire death but daiquiris.  Dis digs da utter side:  great vats of prostitution, laws tumbling down the mace of justice, monkeyspheres in metaverse, slabs of MMORPG tears, e-whoring with the Pope’s maid Mary, that construction of my face in alt^.more, rampant blogs of yggdrasil, acid raining down like bootcake, surf and rinse forever san san francisco, post-post and popo in the sage of now, pop the posthuman tart, my body’s like uh like a borg in Sweden, let’s google truth in Talkohm, we shall slimudate damnocracy, assistance is utile, I love you like a velvet sweatshop, Christ is in the stem cell, holy wheezes, fook, there’s Steve.  Dis summates desire, but finds possession is still an e-eternity away.

It was then, in the midst of this pantheonic conversation, He came, Yahweh, that being beast, came from the dark deceptions of my soul, and said, Moses. Fool. These others, they are chaos and void and nothing’s good. Stuff their cackling down, Moses Fool. Would you sit in their inebriations forever? Would you name their babble wise? I have a nartive stuffed in my yam; it twill bring order to the udder’s mess; here, tis hidden, wiggling, goodly, in this apple; for my sake, for his wake, for Bill Blake, slake a byte.

I did.  I ate his nartive pomme.  And that, as they slay, is history.

***

Friends, this Moses, this one drawn from story to story, was himself drawn from a yarn, a spool of earth or death or heat, a linen chat.  He is the son of my mind and the child of my soul.  He is attacked on all sides and discredited in the resolutions of the world, but he is not drowned; my fabled boy.  He is begotten at the dawn of night, he is birthed when love lays dying.  Do not think, then, with this elusive ancestry, that he is less real than you; that his filmy kinship to time leaves him somehow fictional and you a truth.  Hasn’t my mottled man demonstrated through the dating dance of cinema and history that you’re the dream and he a giant in the stock of being, an ineradicable hunk who dams and liberates days and Danes?

I don’t care, honest colleagues, whether his story is true, whether his body was real, whether you exist.  I don’t care about crawling back to zero to rock the cradle of light.  I don’t care about the source of anything, solid origins, calculating ends.  You go ahead … excel in nailing numbers to the sky.  But I, I shall believe in grey, grey’s mascot, Moses, who walks the divisions of the earth like one who’s been confused, who sees the earth as now and then and always, as the story of a story of a dream.

This old old saint, bold enough to write his death, dancer in the diaper of the stars, is my father if genealogies are woven from different threads.  I look in the chapels of the world for neglected datelines.  I sit in the lap of one who made belief.  I smell his hoary nascent breath.  Moses.  Moses.  Moses, son and father of the man:  we will honor you today with our souls and flesh.

***

Don’t be taken, seekers, after facts.  Poses was the greatest fraud in history.  He had a pedigree in dissimulation from the University of Canine.  He was a member of the Nude Yerk Chitty Priest Divestment.  What separates Moses from Poses in the history we call word?  Only no.  So, say it with me.  No.  Then say Poses.  Poses.  There, you’ve got it, Skank:  Poses had us all.  He smeared his rotten nartive on history’s eyes for three souchong centuries; the sorry Orient ignored him and the rest believed him.  Creation out of nothing’s the stuff of drunken dreams, parted seas and chosen faces delusion’s oldest schtick.  How could one story ever satisfy anyone but one?  Poses played a game; he won, but only till the time we found his no and rhyme.  That trickster of our worldview, of Bethel and Babel, disgospel and drivel, never existed; plus his story’s maladjusted, it’s diseased.  So we from our sinus heights, with dishtowels and caramels, of libels, spaniels, yokels, zinfandels, umbrels, supermodels and newsreels, defame today that bastard of Carmel, that charlatan, that poser, Moses - no, Poses - with our burning flesh.

March 17 — Saint Pyotr Ilyich Lebedinoe Ozero, Composer

Would the Council of I sanctify Saint Pyotr Ilyich Lebedinoe Ozero if it were in a sanctifying mood these days?  Probably not.  Would it include him in the inner holy circle of the 81?  Definitely not.  Has not even the Vatican, in its omniscience and infallibility, desanctified saints, depopicized popes, and de-de'd almost everything in its time (which has been quite a time!).  Might the Council of I do the same?  Maybe.  But as it's not in a sanctifying mood these days, it's also not in a sanctifying mood.  Plus, it likes this proper, regardless of what it thinks these days of this saint who, truly wasn't a bad guy in the realm of creation, but not being a bad guy is different than being a member of the holy 81.

***

Lebedinoe and Illyich sat across from one another, making furtive declarations from the abyss of their sameness.  The time was 1839, the place was Votkinsk, gays were not permitted love.

Illyich, Lebedinoe said, You are my man.  Not just my man ... my polar bear, my vodka, my corruption, my snow and ice, my czar, my seagull, my crucifix and swan, my woman.  And he wept lightly in his praise.

Lebedinoe, Illyich said, You are my man.  The man who reams my dreams.  The one dangling from desire.  My turd and spangles.  He wept too, but madly.

What shall we do, though, said Lebedinoe.  According to the Law, our very thoughts are punishable by drowning in a reservoir of vodka.

Many Russians have desired nothing more.  And Lebedinoe, was not last night worth a hundred drownings?

Illyich, you forget so soon.  Twas worth a million.

Even if the drownings are not in vodka?

Not in vodka?

I would drown for you, Lebedinoe, though it were but wine.

Only if we were in each other's arms.

And naked.

And ...

Don't say it, Lebedinoe ... I'm bashful.  And he gently clasped his lover's hand.  But yes, just the way you say.  I would die like that.  With you.

What shall we do, though, Illyich?

We shall love.  We shall love.  We shall love!

What do you mean Illyich?  We are loving.

No, no.  We shall love better than any have loved before and better than any shall love since.  Man and woman do not know how to love, they only know how to talk about love and how to fight; only man and man, first in God's design, firm and sweet in his imagination, can love the way love was meant to be—to the tune of infinite visions and suckling dreams.

And Illyich, the very fact that our love is forbidden propels us to even greater heights.

Yes Lebedinoe, we shall rise to the very seat of God.

And love shall be our transport.

Yes, love shall be our train.

Such love.  The two bit, but were not bitten.  Shackled, but in ways each would be shackled.  They made Life stretch in Votkinsk:  she invented words and waltzed with cats.  Love and Life took those two transgressors and placed them just slightly higher than the angels.

As we’re all taught in Grade 2, though, when lovers visit angelic peaks, odd things happen.  Thus it was that an illicit baby grew in Lebedinoe’s scrotum and, soon enough, St. Pyotr Ilyich Lebedinoe Ozero was excruciatingly born through his father-mother’s urethra.

As was the custom in that land, the parents were brought before the Tribunal of Lineages and, when the authorities requested the mother's name, Lebedinoe said, It is I.

So they were taken to the great abyss of vodka at Russia’s desolate centre, boulders were tied to their genitals, and they were thrown in, with no time to either find each other's arms or for the vodka to take effect.

Swift death, dim death, dance those lovers mute.

From the impossibility of their union, from the silence of the powers, from the limitless confines of desire, from the fat spiders in the corners of your closeted hope, from the thorny heights of Heaven, Illyich’s and Lebedinoe’s baby grew and sang a Russian song that bound and binds the world.

But it was not long until the black abyss murmured once again, muttered a clear declaration of despair.  On November 6 1893, from that unity we can hope for but never know, it whispered, May Pyotr’s soul rest with the souls of all the saints, and dragged him down.  Love may reach high once or twice an eternity … but, alas, then … so far to fall.

So do not hope for love, my friends.  Or, if you must, if you be cursed with hope, seek it small, seek it short, seek it shallow.  Be as practical as metal.  All other forms are dark and doomed and neither drink nor pill can offer any comfort.  And you shall fall, fall to the very silence of your soul.

On December 4 1976 the Council of I elevated Pyotr Ilyich Lebedinoe Ozero to sainthood, for creating beauty in the face of despair, absence, persecution, and silence.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

March 16 — Saint George, Novelist

Women.

I’ve watched you carefully these last few centuries.  I’ve peered into your mirrors when you’ve been away and seen the wisps of vanity struggling, straggling in your mirrors’ inebriated eyes.  I’ve listened to your pedicure chatter, your Pillsbury dreams, the desperate self-satisfaction of your bluestockings.  And I doubt evolution.  I doubt feminism’s claims.

I do not doubt its demand for equal opportunity; I am no dogmatist, traditionalist, tyrant.  I support the -ologies and -isms with equanimity.  But I doubt the depth of your need for art.  I doubt you crave another world with sufficient intensity.  I doubt your bodies permit you to sacrifice yourselves for what doesn’t exist.

Are my doubts thoughts you immediately reject?  But that simply identifies you as a pedant, not a saint … for saints consider, saints accept.  Are my thoughts forbidden?  Art has no taboos.  Are my thoughts incorrect?  But my thoughts are simply extensions of my body, and my body is beyond correctness and its opposite.  You, even you, have taught me this.

You’ve shown you can sacrifice yourselves for this world.  But can you sacrifice yourself for another?

You’ve lacked opportunity, it’s true, but opportunity does not guarantee sainthood.  Opportunity is only one ingredient;  there’s also chance, focus, passion, wit, intelligence, perspicacity, rage, detachment, vision, boldness, genius, obsession, madness, morality, amorality, immorality, silliness, indifference, compassion, caprice, despair, ecstasy, fate.

Men are desperate.  You know this better than they do.  And from that desperation they’ve created God, Odysseus, Hamlet, Starbuck, Leopold, Manhattan, Joanetti, Homer and nihilism.  They’ve hammered onto the face of nature a mask that has become our face.  They’ve poured into our brains molten ghosts and hopes that have become our minds.

(Men:  should you feel puffed because you think you vicariously participate in this praise, you are buffoons and lickspittles.  You should know there’s little chance you even know what I’m talking about.  Just because Shakespeare was a man doesn’t mean you’re Shakespeare.  Get some logic, man!  You should not simply know you’re not a saint, not even capable of becoming one, but also that you’re hardly beautiful.  You’re ugly, stupid, untalented, witless—and proud!  Proud of what?  At least a woman in similar circumstances has the honesty to be insecure.)

What then propelled St. George, born on November 22 1819 in Warwickshire, to create one of humanity’s most powerful novels?  With realism, psychological perspicacity, sophisticated character portraiture, acute discernment of the small and large mutations of our moral lives, sharp compassionate depictions of society’s constraints and ours, she anticipated the narrative methods of modern literature and did so without a man’s annoying bombast.

I’ll tell you what I think propelled her.  The few female saints—St. Virginia, St. Jane, St. Simone, St. Sappho—each was plain or plainer.  And St. George, perhaps the greatest of the lot, was magnificently, awe-inspiringly ugly.  She had a low forehead, a dull grey eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth full of uneven teeth and a chin and jawbone qui n'en finissent pas ... but this great horse-faced, quiet, anxious, sedentary, serious, invalidical English lady, without animal spirits, without adventures, without extravagance, assumption, or bravado, made us believe that nothing in the world was alien to her, and produced rich, deep, masterly pictures of the multifold life of man.

Which beautiful woman has ever created greatness?  She can’t help but know her beauty is greater than greatness, for it has come without effort (though not without cost).

Feminism has only grasped one half of the equation for sainthood—opportunity; the other half—ugliness—it assiduously avoids.  It wants to have its rake and eat it too … which may be the path of dreamers, but is not art’s path.

You want to become a saint?  Your beauty is a locked door to sainthood’s land of fire.  Uglify yourselves!  Make your noses like witches’!  Put your hearts on the altar of duty and chisel your faces in the manner of horses!  What has your beauty achieved thus far but war anyway?  What has it accomplished but blood and deception?  A few spasms in the night.  Can you take the sins of the world on yourself, and laugh?  Can you sleep in the powers of Hell, and still rise to kiss the day?  Can you create and slay God as if it were the same act?

I am curious.  I doubt my doubt.  Opportunity may be enough.  You may rise on its back, like eagles or rabbits or something.  I give you two thousand years to claw your way to sainthood, two millennia to awaken the sleeping divinity.  Go.  Now.

And who am I?  I am a fly in history’s outhouse, a cackle in purgatory.  I weave in your outlaws and wind in your nymphs.  I don’t believe anything until I see it.  Words are cheap, though all I trust is words.

And what do I say?  I say St. George was a saint.  Not because she was ugly, but because her ugliness gave opportunity to her genius.  You disagree?  Fine.  But don’t waste your breath arguing with me; that proves nothing other than you’re offended.  How easy it is to be offended!  Instead, prove yourself in time’s tough theater and word’s wily web.  Don’t hold a mirror to yourselves or even to the world.  Instead, create a world that is this one and another.  That is so horrible and resplendent I don’t simply see this world better, but crawl into your book of worlds and never come out.  This is what I want from you, woman:  to substantiate your words with words of worlds.  This is what I want more than your beauty.

Having depicted Christian morality without the dogma, and the futility of ambition without a cure, St. George died on December 22 1880 and was elevated by the Council of I to sainthood on April 14 1986.  Ugly, a woman, a saint—let’s honor her today with our souls and flesh.

March 15 – Malfeasance of Bach

Due to certain unusual formattings, Bach's Malfeasance does not appear as the author intended.  This unintended effect, however, seems to infer certain other intentions.  The Council of I doesn't particularly give a turd whether the original or modified form is comprehensible to anyone.

***

Friends.  Scholars.  Charlatans.  I shall share with you, this Grand Day of Caesar’s Death, the taxonomy and evolution of art.  While the faces of art are as infinitely varied as screensavers and leaves, its categories are strictly finite in number; specifically, seven:  dance, music, painting, architecture, literature, food, film.  And this is also their peculiar order in time.

Picture with me, if you will, on the screen of your

imagination­—if it hasn't yet been savagely attacked and

destroyed by the Great Beast, Television—Maria gnawing on

her uncle's thighbone.  She stands up, gorged on blood and marrow,

just as the sun drips over the horizon and spews its crimson spittle

for her pleasure.  She removes her porcupine pelt and with primitive

intensity and spontaneity flails her body for the gods.  Thus dance

 was first among the arts and we know from confused experience

that dancers are most severely misplaced in time.

Then came music.  Maria sang.

Grunts, whistles, howls, croaks.  She sang, and

while tigers may have plugged their ears, music, in a manner

of singing, was born.

 

Some time later, she dipped a freshly bitten prick in

blood and drew a fresco of her victim on the luscious curves of her

        cave wall.  He may not have liked it, squirming in the

        spiders in the corner, but she showed it to her friends,

and they approved.

A thousand years, a thousand leers:

Maria, out to impress an itinerant magician, razed

her cave and in its place build a coiled tower of bones and eyes

that lured that fine man in.  When he finally escaped, smitten, bitten,

with one less arm, he shared her design with the rat-gorged hovels

of the earth, and towers sprang in magnificent

     rebellion.

					0 BCE & CE 1000 CE 2000 CE

At the intersection of brutality and civilization,

what is commonly called Christmas, words were frozen into

stories, and literature was brought into the world with forceps.                                       

Wasn't this fun, chiseling alphabets?  Look—

anyone can do it!

During The Delicacy itself, Mario sprinkled cocoa

on a Frenchwoman, and nibbled with his friends

to create the culinary arts.

And in this pleasant present day, the great director,

Mario Maria Marionette, combined all previous six forms into one,

changed three dimensions into two, packed a thousand people in a

popcorn bag ... voilà ... film.

To be thorough in our investigation—and not simply historical—we must make two further points:  points which should please the scholars among you, whom I know are satisfied only with the most precise and rigorous logic (which is why we respect you so much), and perhaps also you charlatans, who are satisfied by games and masks.  (My friends—they are satisfied with anything.)

The first point is a risky one, but must be made.  Each art has a primary and secondary practitioner; the whole shebang looks like this:

Art	Primary Practitioner	Secondary Practitioner
Dance	Choreographer	Dancer
Music	Composer	Musician
Painting	Painter	Dealer
Architecture	Architect	Builder
Literature	Writer	Publisher
Food	Chef	Waiter
Film	Director	Actor

Now in some cases—such as literature, architecture, food, painting—we would never say the secondary practitioner is as great as the primary, but in the remaining three—dance, music, film—we can always say that the greatest secondary practitioners are superior to the mediocre primary practitioners.  Thus, Bogart exceeds Just Jaeckin, Gould Schubert, and Anna Pavlova Yasmina Ramzy.  But we cannot say that any secondary practitioner—no matter how great—equals or exceeds the greatest primary:  Gould does not equal Bach, Whelan Balanchine.  This is simply because the primary practitioner is closer to creation's center, transforming the unknown to the known—and the secondary practitioner is inevitably left the task of interpretation—like the shuffling scholar, who spends his gray decades writing about artists or politicians, but always somehow distant from the action.

Now secondary practitioners, unlike scholars, are in the action—in some cases are the action—so they leave you scholars in the outhouse; though you may write a thousand refereed articles opposing me and win the Bribitzer, you'll still be out in the petunias.

We could, naturally, as is the rage these democratic times, extend art outward and include in our loving arms:  quilters, performance artists, software developers, cabinet makers, news reporters, managers.  They too are artists.  But why stop there?  Prostitutes create guilt, cops tickets, priests and morticians lies, secretaries power, rock stars lust, the wealthy envy ... we're all artists!  Mothers create.  So do roaches, spores.  Even meteors, planets, rocks, stars do, in their own special way ... the whole universe is an artist … — … yippee!

But for the term to have any meaning (if everything's an artist, everything's also a chair, a weed, an analysand, a tune, a tomb), it must suffer the burden of limitations; my shebang and table stand; scholars, go home.

Point two.

If sainthood's all about purity, which of the seven forms is the most pure?  Can we say that one of them definitively offers the potential for a more polished mirror of the world?

Dance and music, after all, being the oldest and simplest—no tools are required other than the body—lay a certain claim; their immediacy and transience—ignoring recent technological developments—are characteristics we could associate with purity.  Food too, here a moment, consumed the next, the foie gras entier but a memory on the tongue, being so necessary for survival, yet this survival raised to the power of art and beauty!—surely, surely, food is the purest.  Yet when we examine architecture and note that this most utilitarian enterprise doesn't only serve utility, but sends the greedy masses into awe—not just for a moment or a year, but for millennia!—who could say no to architecture's prerogative?  Painting's claim to purity is that the two share four letters—this surely is significant.  Film was the first form to eliminate a dimension while increasing complexity, which must count for something and begs the question—what one-dimensional form awaits us?  Literature uses the very medium that defines humans—words—working with these tools of imperfection to transcend the world.  If literature is the most pure, its purity arises from its precise enmeshment in human frailty; its purity is so pure because it is so impure.

What say you charlatans?  Whose side are you on?  Are you flesh’s squirming advocates?  Sound’s?  Do you defend the splash of color?  The hard display of edifice?  Word’s wormy wanton?  The kitchen’s kitsch?  Or pomo’s prick and power—light’s projection?

All of you ... all six billion charlatans and four hundred million scholars (friends, stay out of this) ... cast your vote for the Crown of Purity.

***

We're here in Purity Central, the votes are in, and the results are ...

5,999,999,999 to 1

 ... no, wait, ... the 1's been murdered ...

to 0 ...

for

...

music

Some quotes from our excited participants—

The very voice of God (God)

The universal language (Sapan Shah)

Makes me feel good (Jaylan Xacutti)

The perfect propaganda tool (Klara Pölzl)

If music be the blood of strife, flay on (Billy Whipstick)

***

There you have it, there it is, music's got it.

On this Malfeasance of Bach, this consecrated Ides, when saints are betrayed by their friends and plundered, turn your speakers to 100 decibels, turn your iPods to deaf, crank your heart to Can ... or if eternity's not your thing, Piranha Carey or M&Ms ... hunker down in purity's beady bath:  six billion charlatans can't be wrong.