Proper of Saints - Preamble

Religion has been weary for centuries.  Sainthood has been misnamed.  Religion, once lusty for the world, virile and verdant, has gradually become one of the gray divisions of culture, with all the attendant privileges, smells and limps.  Saints, still chosen by Roman pomp and its damp English shadow, are drawn from too specialized a section of society, from a narrow sticky strip of the soul.  Sainthood has not been modified for 2000 years; it still flops in the mud of asomatous bifurcation.  The criteria for sainthood have not been discussed in any meaningful way by those who name the saints; neither have criteria evolved to coincide with the evolution of God.

Sainthood is not a hermitic solitude, a selfless suffering, a sexless martyrdom; it's where the action is¾the deepest action.  And this is the problem:  this space, so deep it defies us¾we, who are its substance¾is not restricted to those of ecclesiastical bent, especially since those of such bent are not aligned with the world's present arc¾art¾but wear a particular belt of righteousness:  branded, blessed, by papal paps.  What is this deep space of purity, where saints of all descriptions dream and sometimes live¾saints so heterogeneous they make the Devil look united?

No saint is pure.  The difference between the saint and the sinner is not that the latter sins and the former doesn't, even that the one sins less, but that the former dreams of purity and the sinner doesn't particularly care.  The sinner is a pragmatist, bound solely to the world of sense.

But what is purity if it is not sinlessness, and only a dream?  What does one dream of and how does it feel to dream it?  If one cannot be pure, if one cannot even dream purity since it doesn't exist, if no one knows what purity is, least of all the saints, what then does the saint inhabit?  what does she breathe?  While the saint is neither pure nor knows what purity is, this lack of knowledge is the backbone of her dream life and she envisions her waking life as a path toward this dream of dreams.  I call this path purification and the one who walks it a saint.

I accept without question that purification's element is fire and the paths of fire, while they have many starting points, all descend to the same land, the home of fire, what saints and sinners alike call Hell.  It matters little to me how literal this land is, whether it's external, physical, whether it exists in circumstances, imagination or society's cruel children.  It matters little to me whether you call the land of fire Hell, hell, something descriptive¾that space in which saints are produced through fire's purification¾or something faintly lexical¾the name given to eternal perdition by the righteous.   What does matter is whether you believe in this space; if you do and desire to live in it more than anything else, you may be a saint.

You have heard that saintliness is renunciation, the loftiest human attitude, human creation of beauty, or turning pain to good account.  Yes, sainthood is all of these.  And who does these more than the artist?  Who renounces more than the artist, for who accepts more, and only she who is capable of great acceptance is also capable of great renunciation?  What attitude rises above all others so high it cannot help degrade them, for does not art degrade even compassion by including it, its opposite, and all other possible attitudes and values?  Who, from the bondage of the human spirit, creates more beauty than the artist in her home of the nothing of herself?  Who is so acquainted with suffering that suffering itself becomes the fuel that both threatens to engulf and effects transformation to the unimaginable goodness of the artist's longing?

The saint as defined by those purple birds, that servant of servants¾isn't he in his worthiness just one color on the palette of the artist's holiness?  Isn't he just one ingredient in the artist's dreamy stew of purity?  Isn't he just one of many inputs into the artist’s global factory, an input she must understand and not just understand as an outsider but in herself … whereas she's irrelevant to the saint's mission and demise?  What I am saying is that the artist includes the saint, but the saint excludes the artist.

Yes, I’m saying to you that the artist is the saint raised by the power of desire to be not purity, but purity's incarnation¾which the laws of flesh forbid to be pure.  That God today demands fleshy saints, bloody, reeking of imperfections, acquainted with his nemesis¾the Devil¾possessing résumés rife with amputations, and so longing for purity that their lives are nothing next to this longing.

Fire and purity can only be separated by artificial means, after which fire is comfortable, purity’s achievable.  This is the domain of those metaphysical scientists, so abundant today, who actually believe that ease and goodness are compatible.  They have succumbed to the putrid artificiality of plastic; they think it is beautiful, they would take it as their lover.

The world was created by fire and fire will end it.  We long for these two equal moments, when time and eternity mate, so much so that the priestly class of scientists sacrifice thousands of their scrawny members each year in the futile effort to claw back to the first spasm of time in their attempt to expose the universe's raw industries.  But there is only one way to travel to creation, to experience firsthand the fire that destroys and enlivens, to realize the knowledge that this fire can equally create nothing, something or anything, and that the observer of this knowledge, this strange time traveler, is but a venal puppet in fire's overwhelming purity.  The one so situated, who observes and knows she is nothing but a speck of ash in the great primal heat of creation, is the saint … the saint who is the artist.

A more prosaic comparison exists.  In the Middle Ages, when priests were more common than trees and indulgence was the intercourse of spires and squires, the saint in his thousand and one disguises was the aspiration of the commoner.  Almost everybody, if not a saint, was at least a monk or nun or had a relative who was one.  So today, when artists are more common than telephone poles and indulgence is intercourse, the artist in her thousand and one disguises is the commoner's inspiration.  Almost everyone's an artist or wants to be, but like the saints of old, where few were of any worth, few artists today are worthy of the name they claim.  An artist must be a saint before she is an artist.  She must long for purity and this longing must be prior to her art, the material from which her art is made.  Art emerges from the wound that opens between the dream of purity and the consciousness of its impossibility—the greater the wound, the greater the potential for art; this is why purity must be retained¾without it, art diminishes.  Artists are the guardians of this dream and the explorers and tongues of this wound.

How can a classical saint be saintly?  He cheats.  He lives off the suffering of others; he doesn't travel to Hell himself, but lives vicariously from the travels of sinners.  He attends their travelogues and murmurs exorcisms.  He is a piranha, a leech, a bloodsucker, in love with demonry but unable to consummate his love.  But the artist lives in Hell herself; she descends daily, daily lifting herself out; this continuous descent and ascent is her purification¾ authentic, potent, a totality of opposites and so a mirror of the terrible holiness of God.

The new saint fulfills God by futilely attempting to become Him.  This is the saint’s worship and rebellion, her challenge, her stake in the spiritual heart of the cosmos, which is nothing other than her own dark and reeking heart.

I, thus, to evolve with God and please Him, to please the dead, who are the arteries of God, to inform the yet-to-be, who require instruction in the ways of fire, to maintain the dialogue among the spirits of Hell, to uphold purity as the only object of desire, I revise, and by my revision transform, the record of the saints placed into time's incarceration, what has been in the record of the Church known as the Proper of Saints.

I recommend that interested readers continue to refer to that older document for historical and archaeological purposes, but that they refer to mine for the present and the future.

An issue of nomenclature arises.  Is it proper, considering the evolutionary movement I have described, to retain the ecclesiastical name in full, or is it more appropriate to revise it along with the content and call it the Proper of Artists?  This has the merit of retaining the traditional liturgical meaning in the first noun and updating sainthood according to our necessity in the second.  But then, would it not be better to make the revision full, acknowledge the impropriety of our aesthetic rebellion, this rebellion that is more conformance than rejection, and call our calendar the Improper of Artists?  This turns the original title on its head, accentuates our new position, one required by the progress of humanity, and boldly cuts the tie with anachronistic Roman circumstance.  Yet, as we push this further through the intestines of thought, the question arises whether it would be most apt to entitle our noble arrogance the Improper of Saints, thus clearly upholding the artist as the new saint while recognizing the efficient novelty of our action.  However, almost as soon as this new title surges through our brain, a new one arises, one that is not new but old, yet is made new by imbuing the old words with new meaning.  Yes¾new wine in old wineskins, which I fill and leave to age … and age … into the new age of artists, this age of saints.

Therefore, I title my calendar the Proper of Saints.  I recommend it to all who would be edified by the accounts of those who have taken the path of purity into the deepest regions of Hell, who have survived the Devil’s deadly lechery, who have renounced all by accepting all, who love the world by despising it and despise it by loving it, who create beauty for our redemption, who do not shy from suffering but turn it to good account, these men and women who lead us forward into the dark spaces of righteousness … these artists, these saints.

  

Note on Selection

The saints in this Proper have been chosen by the Council of I.  The workings of the Council have been explored elsewhere and its process of selection outlined in the Bavarian Code.  The saints from literature significantly outnumber the saints from music, the visual arts, dance, film and architecture.  Literature extends over 2500 years to Homer, as a named individual phenomenon, whereas the other categories (except for film, which is still in its infancy) can claim only about 20% of literature's time.  It may be true that literature is giving way to film on purity's path, but the millennia-old jewel still retains its supreme qualities and precedence.  Sainthood began with the word, and writers have labored longest in Hell’s darkest pits to mine flecks of holiness from deep within God's guts.  Thus we honor them not more than others, but we do honor more of them.

All this aside, the Council's standards, while necessarily shadowy, are high, arbitrary and final.