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.

Thoughts from Bonn & Köln on a Wednesday in a Fickle April

Near the close of what I think is my eighth trip to Europe, I sweep some thoughts from my mind's messy floor and display them in that other dusty ether--the Internet (the Ethernet?):

1.  Seen on a tombstone in Le Bourg d'Oisaris:  The true tomb of death is the heart of the living.

2.  It requires money to realize how unimportant money is; education to realize education's unimportance; art, success, knowledge, fame to realize ...  Only love does one require to realize its importance.

3.  Art is the sensuous expression of spirit, but also is refusing to indulge in this expression:  the art of presence, the art of absence; the art of art, the art of god (mysticism).

4.  The civilization of being able to drink, smoke, and talk about art in pubs.  This, along with its transit and architecture, is the primary attraction to Europe for me.  Who in the New World cares for art other than as an extension of Facebook?  Who still can envision and risk art through the potency of a life?  Smoking seems to help with this.  The techno-purity irritation of the New World, which seems all metal and money to me now.  How to use this feeling to subvert, exploit, transform, and transcend?

5.  Two nights ago, after watching Vertigo for the first time in Germany, after absinthe and nicotine and marijuana, I dreamed I worked as some consultant of vague concerns for an unnamed police force, in which the officers sat on the Chief's lap like little boys on Santa Claus'.  I thought--in the dream--"How pleasant! I am getting real money deposited in a real bank account in real life!  Then I woke up and realized it wasn't true.

6.  I travel not for the usual reasons (to evoke envy) or to entertain myself (when am I not entertained?), but to viscerally re-embody (or more deeply embody) detachment.  That I have to physically travel to do this is a weakness, of course, a sign of certain spiritual incapacities on my part.  I frequently and sufficiently maintain a kind of compassionate detachment while at home; traveling feels like refueling my spirit at an emptiness station.

7.  The difference between French and German bread is that the French use bread to carry things, as a mode of transportation, whereas the Germans use bread as a substance, as a thing in itself.

8.  One travels for the shifting surface magnetism of architecture and faces; underneath--the others, the self--everything remains the same.  The greedy mediocre human spirit in all its global horror.

9.  Sign in Bonn department store:  Uhren and Schmuck Service.

10.  Fleeing is an underrated form of power.

11.  In the past, the powerful had money and the slaves were poor; now, in the First World only, the situation is reversed:  the slaves possess money, social position; the powerful are those who step outside such possession.  I shall choose to accept this as true and, by accepting, transform my world through the power of vision.

12.  The Tao Te Ching presents a philosophy (of management) rooted in the Tree of Life.  The ruler-managers (sages) have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, lived, and live now to secure (re-secure?) the Tree of Life (which is simultaneously older and newer in the West) and point people to it.  The Tao Te Ching simultaneously as a pre-Christian and post-Christian (management) philosophy.

13.  I must write a cultural analysis of the difference between Europe and North America based on the experience of pissing as a tourist.

14.  Someone I meet here says I look like Catweazle, an odd creature from the Middle Ages who appears in modern Europe (some UK TV show that broadcast in Europe, Quebec and other places in the early 70s).  After I research the thing, I want to shave my head again, as I realize my present persona presents me too much as I am:  a medieval madman.  Far better to use non-hair to reveal to others what they need to see to protect themselves from themselves.

15.  I've never traveled for the usual touristy reasons--the museums and landmarks, the safety of the thing, the affirmation.  I travel to feel uncomfortable, jarred, fucked over, anonymous, displaced, ignorant.  Yet the experience this time of jostling from place to place irritates me, unproductively.  I'm now more inclined to stay in one spot--in this instance Köln--and explore it randomly on foot, absorb its character.  I wish to spend a month or six in every city in this way, to write a collection of psychic summaries of each city:  and thereby, through the collection as a whole, describe the human soul through its habitational incarnation.

16.  Always the bells of Europe, reminders that the Christian God once lived here.  Always the presence of art, but frequently ossified.  The young German artists I meet quietly criticize the art scene here, its associated psyche, as too intellectual, disembodied.  Tempting to apply this to twentieth century European history, of course:  the Cartesianism of a nation seeking unity through tragedy.

17.  So many German cities 50 years old in architecture, centuries old in feeling.  Wuppertal--which I visited to see Pina Bausch's 1980--an exception, magnificent in its spilled historicity.  The Köln Cathedral spared only because it served as a landmark for Allied bombing.

18.  The German flag:  black, red, yellow:  death, blood, piss.  Death on top.

19.  Exit sign for a town on a German autobahn:  Bad Durkheim.  Academic warfare even on the freeways here.

20.  One can largely stop fearing death, but it's hard to stop being irritated by the body's decline.  I handle the irritation through spiritual prosthetics.

21.  Traveling in Europe:  apes paying apes for packaged god.

22.  Historic sign on French freeway:  Les Poulets de Bresse.  These poulets are everywhere:  in the freeway gas stations, squawking at you from passing trucks and cars.   Everyone must have something to be proud of. 

April 24 - St. Hairy Clitoris, Primal Philosopher

Eleutheria was born into the world shortly after the alphabet was invented and men began to use words to build the foundation of what is now called civilization.  Back then, it was just called sweat.  Without a plan particularly, they placed brick on brick, and often a brick was a few generations or a life. Words became the currency on sophistication’s exchange and for the first time in history’s murmur, men were required to trade in words to survive.  Some did not, and fell back into the well of woods, where they wandered with beasts and negotiated life each hour in the disorder of unmitigated flesh.

Orphaned at 6, Eleutheria learned to fend for herself. Equally at home with the meadow’s butterflies and the city’s scrimmage, her favourite activity was observing the world. She’d sit for days at a time watching the churn of nature and men as if they were all part of her but not she one of them.  Then she became a woman and she was beautiful and all the men in the town wanted her. So she fled to the forest and hid, but the men found her and gave her to the mayor to decide what to do with her, and he made her his wife.  She was given the best food, a generous clothing allowance and three servants; in exchange, she was required to bear children and attend official functions and always be polite and show off her beauty.  So she grew bitter toward the world and swore dark prophecies against it.  On one of these nights she placed a hot iron on her face to disfigure it so that men would be repelled by her, and she ran into the woods and rutted with a bear and gave birth to St. Hairy Clitoris in 535 BCE.  She took the boy with her as she sat and watched the birds in the meadow and the men in the market. And no one talked to her and they avoided her eyes.

When St. Hairy Clitoris was 6, Eleutheria died. He went into the city and watched the affairs of men and listened to their words.  When he was a man, he began speaking, but the men in the marketplace resented him and told him his job was to watch.  St. Hairy Clitoris said, You’re right, my job is to watch.  And then it’s to say what I’ve seen. And he kept speaking. And the men told him he was too useless for the city - which was a place of action and not for one who simply sat around and criticized.

St. Hairy Clitoris said, You’re right, I am useless, and if you would listen to my uselessness, your lives would be more useful.  And the men of the city bound St. Hairy Clitoris to the ground and shat on him until he suffocated.

From the gap between his mother’s beauty and disfigurement,

From the gap between her fashion and his conception,

From the gap between the butterflies and the market,

From the gap between his silence and his speaking,

From the gap between his solitude and his desire,

From the gap between his uselessness and the merchants,

He wrote a book and its words are one and the one is fire.

The Council of I elevated him to sainthood on the first day a flower grew from his makeshift tomb.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

A Muted Apology for April Irregularities

The Secular Sadoo would like to apologize to those disturbed by such things for the lack of chrono-synchronicity between the proper dates of some of the Proper postings in April and the posted dates of some of the Proper postings in April; this lack some may consider to have been and even to be improper.  Although considering that the only two Propers (thus far) that have been affected have been The Malfeasance of Lesser Saints (which isn't technically a Proper) and the Proper of two mystics--the latter who surely can't care much about time as far as we're concerned and the former whom we surely care about but possibly not to the extent of caring about synchronicity--not much really has been lost.

We have attempted to return today to regular programming with The Bard Himself.  Praise be.  Our only excuse is that in a life and a world not governed by regularity, this April has been, if possible, even more irregular than most Aprils.  Mr. Eliot might chuckle.  But, then again, he might not.

April 23 - Saint William, Chief Bard

St. William was born on this day in 1564 in Stratford to John and Mary (Arden), who had been married about 1557.  She was of the landed gentry, he a yeoman.  William likely attended the local grammar school and would have studied primarily Latin rhetoric, logic and literature.  In 1582 at the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, a local farmer’s daughter eight years his senior.  The couple had three children, Susanna, born six months after the wedding, and the twins Judith and Hamnet, who were born in 1585.  The boy died in 1596, at the age of 11.

About the time of the twins’ birth, St. William moved to London, where he lived for 25 years as an actor and playwright, producing over 30 plays and 100 poems.  In 1599, he became one of the partners in the new Globe Theater built by the Chamberlain’s Men, a group of fine actors, business partners and close personal friends.  A few friends published his work after his death, and humans have been enjoying St. William’s words ever since.

The final five years of his life were spent in retirement back in Stratford, where he enjoyed moderate wealth and the satisfaction of a productive life.  He died and was elevated to sainthood on this day in 1616, and was buried two days later in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church where he had been baptized exactly 52 years earlier.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

April 22 - Saint Johann-Simone, Mystic and Martyr

In the black heart of God one finds no light.  The pious think otherwise, but the pious are acquainted with their wishes, not with God.  In the black heart of God, snakes abound; they feed on the excrement of human suffering and bury their knowledge away from mortal grasping.  The devout think otherwise, but the devout strive for fidelity, not God.  In the black heart of God, silence slaughters every truth that sprouts on earth.  The righteous think otherwise, but the righteous have never been to God.

Every century or so, God rips Himself¾on a sharp edge of history perhaps, or maybe on a rusty nail left over from the crucifixion.  When he does, one drop of black blood leaks out and falls to earth, and humans have a rare chance to see what God’s like.  Do they take it?  Of course not.  Humans excel at botching divinity, then running to join the ape kingdom as if that’s the only option left.

These leaks sometime take human form, though we’d never know it because we’re too busy hammering our reputations to the air, and if we have any remaining energy we use it to make fun of these freaks from outer space, then return to our lifelong pursuits with a beer in one hand, a cell phone in the other.

These forms don’t speak the languages we’re familiar with¾those from earth and Hell¾so we think they’re nuts, and if we don’t kill them, there’s no need to worry¾no one really pays them attention anyway.  Their words are like signals we think we see in the sky some night we’ve been drinking¾maybe they’re there, but who knows? who cares?

In their alien hunger they drown identity.  In their bleak souls names dissolve.  In their hideous autonomy they collapse gender.  In their passion for God a hole is dug for time and it’s thrown in, without even a stone to mark its passing.  Life and death are the same, as indifferent to them as an exploding star in a remote galaxy, noticed by no one.

Is God worried by all this?  Does he notice the scars that have formed across his body from all those rips?  Does he track these saints in a spreadsheet, on colorful graphs from three perspectives?  Is His blood gradually being depleted?  Maybe.  We’ll never know.

April 13 - Malfeasance of Lesser Saints

The Council of I, under the blessing and degradation of the dogs, in the year of our Word half-past nothing and faretheewell, through a special deviation granted by a Metro worker at Place de Clichy, aside from qualified exceptions, of and by and with, above all criticism but yours, therefore hitherto, because of the taboo and so invigorating marriage of necessity and freedom, notwithstanding, Frank, assigned a task force to determine the process for sainthood.  This was patently unsuccessful.  Consequently, a preexistent process was stolen from the Roly Chaotic Lurch, which in turn was pillaged from the Poly Semen Umpire, a theft from the Nascent Beer Beast, who plundered from Brahma while he copulated with himself.  Brahma, naturally, stole it from the future.  Having thus raided ourselves and hoodwinked time, let us disclose the goods.

Venerability

1. A name may be submitted to the Council of I for consideration of Venerability.
1. Names may be submitted by qualified members of the human species, dead or alive, subject to the remaining guidelines.
2. Non-sentient entities and sentient entities unable to speak a human language are excluded from consideration.
3. Submissions may only be made on February 29 in years whose digits add to 13.
4. Submissions should include full biographical details, complete oeuvre or portfolio, in the 12 most commonly spoken languages and any official language of the United Nations, should it not be included among the 12 most common and should the United Nations or rough equivalent exist, at the time of submission if a literary submission, along with a SASE.
5. Care should be taken to include relevant awards, degrees, certificates, even if considered trivial to certain sectors, social connections, titles, knightings, dameships, sightings, and cultural pedigrees; these will be used for statistical purposes only and disclosed solely in aggregate form to accredited parties.
6. A suffering biography should be included, tracing the candidate’s despair and afflictions, his/her methods and copings, his/her failures.
7. For each candidate, submitters must number 81, with the exception of candidates matching the criterion in h. below, with each submitter’s present and historical contact information (including all phone numbers, cellular phones, faxes, e-mail and postal addresses), sex, gender, and blood type clearly included.
8. Submitters may nominate themselves.
9. Any submission which includes an image of the proposed saint in any form shall be immediately and eternally disqualified.
10. Evidence of a miracle while the candidate was living should accompany the submission.  The following media are accepted:  CD, DVD, Blu-ray, 36mm.
2. If the Council of I agrees with the submission, the nominee shall immediately be promoted from human to Venerable and a song commissioned for the occasion.
1. Should the Council of I disagree with the submission, the submitter(s) shall be slain the following day at daybreak according to whatever method is most common in his/her/their culture.
2. The name of the human so made Venerable shall be inscribed in the Tablets of Destiny on the doors of Hell’s 6C elevator.
3. The name of the human so made Venerable shall be added to this Malfeasance in the Section of Venerability.
3. The Council of I may at any time, without cause or explanation, promote a human to Venerable or demote a Venerable to human apart from the above process.
4. A category of Barely Venerable shall be available for those about whom the Council of I is unable to decide anything.  A human made Barely Venerable shall be eternally disqualified from promotion or demotion away from Bare Venerability.

Blessedness

1.      For those humans made Venerable, by whatever process, submissions may be made to the Council of I for consideration of Blessedness.

a.      No human shall be made Blessed without first being made Venerable.

b.      The time elapsed between Venerability and Blessedness should not be less than the time it would have taken for the Venerable to denounce and destroy all originals and copies of his/her art.

c.       Submissions for Blessedness may not be made by anyone or thing with a post-secondary degree, whether honorary or earned.

d.      Submissions for Blessedness must be written in the composite blood of three extinct animal species.

e.      Submissions should include:  a conduct report of the candidate in the Venerable realm; a 21-second video clip of the candidate bathing in one of the following rivers:  Euphrates, Hudson, Styx; a 2,500 word essay on the relation between the candidate’s sexuality and religion, with sources appropriately cited in APA; 50 grams of the candidate’s flesh.

f.        Only Venerables may nominate Venerables to be Blessed; no Venerable may nominate him/herself.  A simply majority of all current Venerables is necessary to make a Blessed nomination.

2.      If the Council of I agrees with the submission, the nominee shall immediately be promoted from Venerable to Blessed and a plaque ordered for the occasion.

a.      Should the Council of I disagree with the submission, any relatives, friends or acquaintances of the submitter(s) who have a post-secondary degree shall be hung from meat hooks in front of Buffalo’s city hall.

b.      Any Venerable who has three successive failed submissions shall be automatically demoted to human.

c.       The name of the Venerable so made Blessed shall be inscribed on the Blessed plaque, which will be eternally hung above the urinals in the northernmost men’s washroom on the third floor of Buffalo city hall.

d.      The name of the Venerable so made Blessed shall be added to this Malfeasance in the Section of Blessedness.

3.      The Council of I may at any time, without cause or explanation, promote a Venerable to Blessed or demote a Blessed to Venerable apart from the above process.

a.      Even the Council of I¾may it breathe forever¾may not demote or promote directly between Blessedness and humanity.

b.      The exception to a. above is if all those in the Blessed category unanimously agree, without coercion, bribery or subterfuge, that one of their members should be cast from their midst, that member shall immediately, without debate or consideration, be made a little lower than human and his/her name struck from all records and his/her art and all references to it destroyed.

4.      No category of Barely Blessed shall exist.  One is Blessed or one is not and that is that.

Sainthood

1.      For those Venerables made Blessed, submissions may be made to the Council of I for consideration of sainthood.

a.      No human shall be sainted without first being made Blessed.

b.      Less than 5% of the Blessed shall be sainted within twelve centuries of their death.

c.       The Blessed shall be requested to appear before the Council of I to defend their candidacy; any Blessed who appears shall have their candidacy immediately and eternally revoked.

d.      A Senior Blessed (such defined as those who have had three or more unsuccessful candidacies for sainthood) must initiate a nomination for sainthood.  This shall be followed by validation by not less than 10% of the present Blessed population, not less than 25% of the present Venerable population and not more than 33.3% of the human population.

e.      A Blessed may be nominated for sainthood a maximum of three times, with an interval of not less than five centuries between each nomination.

f.        Requests for exceptions to e. above may be made in writing to:

The Council of I

21 Penny Lane

Rochester NY USA 14625-2217

                              (Note:  While the records and discussions related to promotions, demotions, nominations and submissions are not available, interested parties may write to the above address to request copies of exceptions requests.)

g.      Proof of two living and two posthumous miracles should be attached to the application for sainthood.

2.      If the Council of I agrees with the submission, the nominee shall immediately be promoted from Blessed to saint and a hole dug for the occasion.

a.      Should the Council of I disagree with the submission, Reprimand Form C-1342 shall be printed, addressed to all submitters, and stored in the Council’s personnel files for a period of not less than 17 years.

b.      The name of the Blessed so sainted shall be uttered briefly and inaudibly at the precise moment of sainthood.

c.       The name of the Blessed so sainted shall have a Proper written for him/her.  The entire cost of the Proper, including incidental expenditures, shall be fully borne by the Council of I.  The Proper shall be written by a qualified individual (the Council follows the 1513 Bavarian Code in this regard) before 51 further Propers have been written.

3.      The Council of I may at any time, without cause or explanation, promote a human, Venerable or Blessed to sainthood or demote a saint to Blessed, Venerable or human apart from the above process.

4.      The number of saints shall be eternally held at 81, the number of Blessed at no greater than 81 times 81 and of the number of Venerables there shall be no end.

a.      Desainted saints shall retain their Propers, but they shall be renamed Paupers, removed from the Proper and added to the Pauper.

b.      Desainted saints shall be known neither as Blesseds, Venerables, humans, saints, or desainted saints, but as desaints.  Let all who misname, whether through omission, commission, malice or curiosity, in written, oral or visual discourse, be circumscribed and their foresins nailed to Buggalo’s mare and the mare be ridden in the manner of old.

5.      No category of Bare Saint shall exist.  If one is not a saint, one is less than a saint and one is improper.

The Blessed

Blessed Filipepi Tondo; Blessed Oscar of controlled nature; Blessed Auguste of surmoulage and marcottage; Blessed Ruiz of muliebrous cubes; Blessed José y Lucientes of uiocide; Blessed Christopher of circumspice; Blessed Lloyd, Fröbelist; Blessed Roland, director and martyr; Blessed Il Prete Rosso, Pio Ospedale della Pietà; Blessed Edward, such sweet thunder; Blessed Dewey of the altonic reinventions; Blessed Gustav of bad hall; Blessed Daniel, Dumas’ Ding Dong Daddy; Blessed Leopold #9; Blessed Fyodorovitch, savage dissodant; Blessed Vassilievitch of the large hands; Blessed Orfeo of the Blessed Virgin; Blessed Miller, son of Clarence; Blessed Aristophanes, Reptilian and Fowl; Blessed Matsuo, weather-beaten skeleton; Blessed Charlotte of the three weird sisters, Blessed Blais, proto-nihilist; Blessed Benedictus, panpsychist; Blessed Niccolò, Satanist; Blessed Wallace, Vice-president; Blessed François, Carnivalist and Scatologist; Blessed Lucie-Ernestine-Marie-Bertrand of the subtle influences; Blessed Elizabeth, agoraphobist; Blessed David, proto-ecologist; Blessed George, citizen; Blessed Rajmund of the dark souls; Blessed Mallord of fantastic puzzles; Blessed Muzaffar al-Din, Mumtaz Mahal; Blessed P-A, painter; Blessed Henri-Émile-Benoît, Fauvist; Blessed Gustav of Der Kuß; Blessed Felip Jacint Domènech, Marquis of Pubol; Blessed Paul, father of us all; Blessed Max, frottheim grattist; Blessed Edvard, skrik and morbidist; Blessed Dedo, addict, sculptor; Blessed Franz, dodecaphonic motivist; Blessed Johannes, yet another German schmaltz; Blessed Achilles, impressionist and misnomer; Blessed Dmitri Dmitri of the Babi Yar; Blessed Jacob, Yankee; Blessed Jakob Ludwig Bartholdy, with a name like that you don’t need no title; Blessed Fryderyk, excessivist; Blessed Robert, whimsical syphilitic; Blessed Peter, another one; Blessed Franz, liveried.

The Venerable

Venerable Jean, thief and homosexual; Venerable Schlomogustav, mythmongers; Venerable Alexander the rapist; Venerable Vladimirovich, pedophile and cribbist; Venerable Ambroise-Toussaint-Jules of terrifying ideas; Venerable Krzysztof of moral anxiety; Veneficial Arthur of the poofy hair; Venerable Gerald Sir; Venerable Newbold, architect; Ventral Lanier, alcoholic; Venatical Jonathan of the single hair; Ventricle García, Andalusian dog; Venal Nałęcz, trilingual nigger; Venerable Mordechai, anarchist; Venule Marie, tediast; The Unvendable Cuthbert who declines; Venerable Pith of one’s negation; Venerable Jake of things; Ventriloquial Stéphane of it’s pure sound; Vinfinitesimal Cartesius, calculating cud; Venereal Marlais, dog; Ventral Key, poor son of a bitch and romantic egoist; Venerable Andreevna of the helplessly cold breasts; Venerable Émile, atavist; Venerable Gerritszoon, foiblist; Vendable Marie of the misplaced talents; Venerable Edgar of the three red roses; Veniable Ernst, Eubranchus; Venatoiral Airy Tottle, tedia episteme telos smelos; Venrisible Poquelin, castigat ridendo mores; Venerable Yi Li Me, sing kong; Vurnable Fanny, secretary for porcelain; Venereal Valerian, that man; Venial Nat of the scarlet bugger; Venerable Tom, writer; Vencynical Gustave, bourgeois; Venerable Johan, destroyer; Vengeable Ellis of the matryona; Venabsurdible Beauchard, pied noir; Venbabble Barclay Feckham Peckham Fulham Clapham; Unvendable OM of unmerited order; Venrisible Lydia’s for the youth; Venus’s Girdle Wills, Sebastian Melmoth; Verbosibble Bernard, antivivisectionist and fascist.

The Barely Venerable

The Barely Venerable Maro, the Barely Venerable Immanuel.

***

These saints under construction, these demi-saints of dishonorable mention, lustralling purgatives, still clambering on that hideous ladder though wormed.  Oh random time! Oh fickle fad!  Human scum leching after distant laughing dogs.  Here they are, the wretched pantheon, barking on air and stone, pissing on longgone churches.  Give them praise or mayonnaise or something.

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.