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.