April 27 - Saint John the Lady of the Devil’s Party

Any knowledge worth having is hidden; the good stuff lurks just below the surface, tantalizing us with its shadowy limbs which seem to be undressing, inviting us down.  Once we’ve leapt in, though, mad with desire, consequences safely, sanely, left in some closet, our phantasmagoria fights with us and we almost drown in our lust to grasp what we thought we saw and seem to hold.  Whether we live or die really doesn’t matter¾the rush of the dive is why we breathe, truth’s hot clammy fingers clinging to us, providing for glorious seconds relief from the heavy facts of earth.  The world’s paved playground is information and tedium, but the swamp of unknowing vitality and desire.  Is there a bottom to this swamp?  A bottom called God or Reality, annihilation or nirvana?  A bottom without a name?  The lovers and monsters who seduce us down seem to be the only bottom there is¾and they’re endless.

What does the dive lead to?  Insulin, holocausts, SARS, Raid, genocides, rape, car fatalities, iPods, the Oedipal complex, tears, plastic, IR guided missiles, government policy, fuzzy peaches, sewage treatment plants, divorce, multinationals, votes for women, Draino, many many babies, and, very occasionally, art.

At the swampy shores … that’s where the poet lives.  Not earthy enough to trust the facts, too acquainted with the ways of monsters to romanticize the dive, he hides in the prickly weeds and the ideologies of survival and hopes for the best.  But he can’t help himself¾his soul sides with the monsters.  He holds out as long as he can, clinging to the sane precipices of the world, then feels the seduction of open night and lets go.  It’s in that fall he produces any work worth saving, the rest suburban trinkets.  He dies soon afterwards, knowing that everything worthwhile is in the past and the only thing left to do is mutely scream.  So he joins his creation and omits the scream.

On December 9 1608, in Cheapside under the sign of the Spread Strumpet, St. John was born.  He lost his eyesight and fell into the swamp in the 50s, where he transformed intellectual nihilism into metaphysical drama and substituted the tyranny of Hell for Heaven.  When he emerged, covered with the Devil’s slobber and the green slime of words, he married a third time and died of gout on November 8 1674.  The Council of I raised him to sainthood in 1790 for believing nothing and disguising everything.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.