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.