March 17 — Saint Pyotr Ilyich Lebedinoe Ozero, Composer

Would the Council of I sanctify Saint Pyotr Ilyich Lebedinoe Ozero if it were in a sanctifying mood these days?  Probably not.  Would it include him in the inner holy circle of the 81?  Definitely not.  Has not even the Vatican, in its omniscience and infallibility, desanctified saints, depopicized popes, and de-de'd almost everything in its time (which has been quite a time!).  Might the Council of I do the same?  Maybe.  But as it's not in a sanctifying mood these days, it's also not in a sanctifying mood.  Plus, it likes this proper, regardless of what it thinks these days of this saint who, truly wasn't a bad guy in the realm of creation, but not being a bad guy is different than being a member of the holy 81.

***

Lebedinoe and Illyich sat across from one another, making furtive declarations from the abyss of their sameness.  The time was 1839, the place was Votkinsk, gays were not permitted love.

Illyich, Lebedinoe said, You are my man.  Not just my man ... my polar bear, my vodka, my corruption, my snow and ice, my czar, my seagull, my crucifix and swan, my woman.  And he wept lightly in his praise.

Lebedinoe, Illyich said, You are my man.  The man who reams my dreams.  The one dangling from desire.  My turd and spangles.  He wept too, but madly.

What shall we do, though, said Lebedinoe.  According to the Law, our very thoughts are punishable by drowning in a reservoir of vodka.

Many Russians have desired nothing more.  And Lebedinoe, was not last night worth a hundred drownings?

Illyich, you forget so soon.  Twas worth a million.

Even if the drownings are not in vodka?

Not in vodka?

I would drown for you, Lebedinoe, though it were but wine.

Only if we were in each other's arms.

And naked.

And ...

Don't say it, Lebedinoe ... I'm bashful.  And he gently clasped his lover's hand.  But yes, just the way you say.  I would die like that.  With you.

What shall we do, though, Illyich?

We shall love.  We shall love.  We shall love!

What do you mean Illyich?  We are loving.

No, no.  We shall love better than any have loved before and better than any shall love since.  Man and woman do not know how to love, they only know how to talk about love and how to fight; only man and man, first in God's design, firm and sweet in his imagination, can love the way love was meant to be—to the tune of infinite visions and suckling dreams.

And Illyich, the very fact that our love is forbidden propels us to even greater heights.

Yes Lebedinoe, we shall rise to the very seat of God.

And love shall be our transport.

Yes, love shall be our train.

Such love.  The two bit, but were not bitten.  Shackled, but in ways each would be shackled.  They made Life stretch in Votkinsk:  she invented words and waltzed with cats.  Love and Life took those two transgressors and placed them just slightly higher than the angels.

As we’re all taught in Grade 2, though, when lovers visit angelic peaks, odd things happen.  Thus it was that an illicit baby grew in Lebedinoe’s scrotum and, soon enough, St. Pyotr Ilyich Lebedinoe Ozero was excruciatingly born through his father-mother’s urethra.

As was the custom in that land, the parents were brought before the Tribunal of Lineages and, when the authorities requested the mother's name, Lebedinoe said, It is I.

So they were taken to the great abyss of vodka at Russia’s desolate centre, boulders were tied to their genitals, and they were thrown in, with no time to either find each other's arms or for the vodka to take effect.

Swift death, dim death, dance those lovers mute.

From the impossibility of their union, from the silence of the powers, from the limitless confines of desire, from the fat spiders in the corners of your closeted hope, from the thorny heights of Heaven, Illyich’s and Lebedinoe’s baby grew and sang a Russian song that bound and binds the world.

But it was not long until the black abyss murmured once again, muttered a clear declaration of despair.  On November 6 1893, from that unity we can hope for but never know, it whispered, May Pyotr’s soul rest with the souls of all the saints, and dragged him down.  Love may reach high once or twice an eternity … but, alas, then … so far to fall.

So do not hope for love, my friends.  Or, if you must, if you be cursed with hope, seek it small, seek it short, seek it shallow.  Be as practical as metal.  All other forms are dark and doomed and neither drink nor pill can offer any comfort.  And you shall fall, fall to the very silence of your soul.

On December 4 1976 the Council of I elevated Pyotr Ilyich Lebedinoe Ozero to sainthood, for creating beauty in the face of despair, absence, persecution, and silence.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

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.

March 15 – Malfeasance of Bach

Due to certain unusual formattings, Bach's Malfeasance does not appear as the author intended.  This unintended effect, however, seems to infer certain other intentions.  The Council of I doesn't particularly give a turd whether the original or modified form is comprehensible to anyone.

***

Friends.  Scholars.  Charlatans.  I shall share with you, this Grand Day of Caesar’s Death, the taxonomy and evolution of art.  While the faces of art are as infinitely varied as screensavers and leaves, its categories are strictly finite in number; specifically, seven:  dance, music, painting, architecture, literature, food, film.  And this is also their peculiar order in time.

Picture with me, if you will, on the screen of your

imagination­—if it hasn't yet been savagely attacked and

destroyed by the Great Beast, Television—Maria gnawing on

her uncle's thighbone.  She stands up, gorged on blood and marrow,

just as the sun drips over the horizon and spews its crimson spittle

for her pleasure.  She removes her porcupine pelt and with primitive

intensity and spontaneity flails her body for the gods.  Thus dance

 was first among the arts and we know from confused experience

that dancers are most severely misplaced in time.

Then came music.  Maria sang.

Grunts, whistles, howls, croaks.  She sang, and

while tigers may have plugged their ears, music, in a manner

of singing, was born.

 

Some time later, she dipped a freshly bitten prick in

blood and drew a fresco of her victim on the luscious curves of her

        cave wall.  He may not have liked it, squirming in the

        spiders in the corner, but she showed it to her friends,

and they approved.

A thousand years, a thousand leers:

Maria, out to impress an itinerant magician, razed

her cave and in its place build a coiled tower of bones and eyes

that lured that fine man in.  When he finally escaped, smitten, bitten,

with one less arm, he shared her design with the rat-gorged hovels

of the earth, and towers sprang in magnificent

     rebellion.

					0 BCE & CE 1000 CE 2000 CE

At the intersection of brutality and civilization,

what is commonly called Christmas, words were frozen into

stories, and literature was brought into the world with forceps.                                       

Wasn't this fun, chiseling alphabets?  Look—

anyone can do it!

During The Delicacy itself, Mario sprinkled cocoa

on a Frenchwoman, and nibbled with his friends

to create the culinary arts.

And in this pleasant present day, the great director,

Mario Maria Marionette, combined all previous six forms into one,

changed three dimensions into two, packed a thousand people in a

popcorn bag ... voilà ... film.

To be thorough in our investigation—and not simply historical—we must make two further points:  points which should please the scholars among you, whom I know are satisfied only with the most precise and rigorous logic (which is why we respect you so much), and perhaps also you charlatans, who are satisfied by games and masks.  (My friends—they are satisfied with anything.)

The first point is a risky one, but must be made.  Each art has a primary and secondary practitioner; the whole shebang looks like this:

Art	Primary Practitioner	Secondary Practitioner
Dance	Choreographer	Dancer
Music	Composer	Musician
Painting	Painter	Dealer
Architecture	Architect	Builder
Literature	Writer	Publisher
Food	Chef	Waiter
Film	Director	Actor

Now in some cases—such as literature, architecture, food, painting—we would never say the secondary practitioner is as great as the primary, but in the remaining three—dance, music, film—we can always say that the greatest secondary practitioners are superior to the mediocre primary practitioners.  Thus, Bogart exceeds Just Jaeckin, Gould Schubert, and Anna Pavlova Yasmina Ramzy.  But we cannot say that any secondary practitioner—no matter how great—equals or exceeds the greatest primary:  Gould does not equal Bach, Whelan Balanchine.  This is simply because the primary practitioner is closer to creation's center, transforming the unknown to the known—and the secondary practitioner is inevitably left the task of interpretation—like the shuffling scholar, who spends his gray decades writing about artists or politicians, but always somehow distant from the action.

Now secondary practitioners, unlike scholars, are in the action—in some cases are the action—so they leave you scholars in the outhouse; though you may write a thousand refereed articles opposing me and win the Bribitzer, you'll still be out in the petunias.

We could, naturally, as is the rage these democratic times, extend art outward and include in our loving arms:  quilters, performance artists, software developers, cabinet makers, news reporters, managers.  They too are artists.  But why stop there?  Prostitutes create guilt, cops tickets, priests and morticians lies, secretaries power, rock stars lust, the wealthy envy ... we're all artists!  Mothers create.  So do roaches, spores.  Even meteors, planets, rocks, stars do, in their own special way ... the whole universe is an artist … — … yippee!

But for the term to have any meaning (if everything's an artist, everything's also a chair, a weed, an analysand, a tune, a tomb), it must suffer the burden of limitations; my shebang and table stand; scholars, go home.

Point two.

If sainthood's all about purity, which of the seven forms is the most pure?  Can we say that one of them definitively offers the potential for a more polished mirror of the world?

Dance and music, after all, being the oldest and simplest—no tools are required other than the body—lay a certain claim; their immediacy and transience—ignoring recent technological developments—are characteristics we could associate with purity.  Food too, here a moment, consumed the next, the foie gras entier but a memory on the tongue, being so necessary for survival, yet this survival raised to the power of art and beauty!—surely, surely, food is the purest.  Yet when we examine architecture and note that this most utilitarian enterprise doesn't only serve utility, but sends the greedy masses into awe—not just for a moment or a year, but for millennia!—who could say no to architecture's prerogative?  Painting's claim to purity is that the two share four letters—this surely is significant.  Film was the first form to eliminate a dimension while increasing complexity, which must count for something and begs the question—what one-dimensional form awaits us?  Literature uses the very medium that defines humans—words—working with these tools of imperfection to transcend the world.  If literature is the most pure, its purity arises from its precise enmeshment in human frailty; its purity is so pure because it is so impure.

What say you charlatans?  Whose side are you on?  Are you flesh’s squirming advocates?  Sound’s?  Do you defend the splash of color?  The hard display of edifice?  Word’s wormy wanton?  The kitchen’s kitsch?  Or pomo’s prick and power—light’s projection?

All of you ... all six billion charlatans and four hundred million scholars (friends, stay out of this) ... cast your vote for the Crown of Purity.

***

We're here in Purity Central, the votes are in, and the results are ...

5,999,999,999 to 1

 ... no, wait, ... the 1's been murdered ...

to 0 ...

for

...

music

Some quotes from our excited participants—

The very voice of God (God)

The universal language (Sapan Shah)

Makes me feel good (Jaylan Xacutti)

The perfect propaganda tool (Klara Pölzl)

If music be the blood of strife, flay on (Billy Whipstick)

***

There you have it, there it is, music's got it.

On this Malfeasance of Bach, this consecrated Ides, when saints are betrayed by their friends and plundered, turn your speakers to 100 decibels, turn your iPods to deaf, crank your heart to Can ... or if eternity's not your thing, Piranha Carey or M&Ms ... hunker down in purity's beady bath:  six billion charlatans can't be wrong.

March 11 - St. Homer, Primal Bard

This was his life, his day in the tempest of time.  When men lived in the liver of darkness, when civilization had not yet stretched its discontents into the womb.  When the sun scratched its way up the hill of the sky and Apollo, the god who sings while we mortals tumble over our mistakes to our bed of worms, clawed his lust into Adara, a common goatherd, near Smyrna on the Sardis plains.

He stood on the cliff of youth, having seen his father once riding the sky’s rough chariot through a rip in the laws that divide the sight of men and gods; having watched marauders hack and burn his mother’s herd, stake her to the bed with greedy seed and drag her body through lechery’s hours to lightless death.

Aphrodite was bored one afternoon and peered over Heaven’s balustrade to laugh at man’s affairs.  Look¾there was Homer in the fields picking the scabs of his gloom, bitching that his paternal blood hadn’t cast him for a better fate.

He’d do.  She’d throw love at him; the afternoon was going to be all right.

Even Apollo took time out from poisoning his arrows to sit down with the other gods and laugh at his son’s lobotomy.  Sure, the gods lose their minds too when passion stalks, but for them it doesn’t matter; the only consequence might be on earth¾a hurricane, genocide¾nothing that upsets the senior scales.

Anyway, there was Homer, getting married, with his brain left behind in some temple toilet.  Five months into the fiasco, he found her in bed with a Sminthean priest, so he slit the throat of this brute who stole his love and left the comforts of matrimony to wander in blood’s kingdom.

Vengeance against the human race became his vow.  His goals were drifting and death.

A migrant family passed him on the road, he nailed their feet together and threw them in the earth.  Boys leaping off a cliff into summer water.  He put arrows through three of their heads mid-air and got the rest of them tripping on their fear.  Seven Ephesian women washing their children’s clothes, he amputated and raped them; their spirits crept back to dust.   Entire towns were his specialty; gaining access to the leader was easy¾he had a lizard’s tongue and an oiled mind, knew how to camouflage himself in other people’s wills.  Once he slaughtered the kingpin, the townsfolk fell like sheep.  The flies descended to their feast.

He joined an army and marched on Megara, the inhabitants found death on spikes.  In Argos the children were chained and burned while the adults hung upside down, nailed to their houses.  Messene:  citizens force-fed frogs until they gagged to bitter night.  The eyes of Theban lovers were shoved in their beloveds’ mouths, the beloveds’ tongues stuffed in their lovers’ sockets like grotesque hors d’oeuvre.  Patra became a synonym for carnage, Beroira an experiment in pain.  He scalped the Chacisian children and threw their brains to dogs, cooked the dogs’ stomachs and made the parents eat.  Old women were fed to pythons, young women thrown down wells with sewn mouths.  He’d lure youth into a gang, telling them they’d rule the world, and train them in the arts of siege and carnage.  Then he’d creep from his tent under the moon’s embers and drive a flaming javelin through his students’ heads.  A passing chariot was an invitation for bloodshed, an old man an opportunity for gravediggers.  He slit throats like bananas, counted murder among the tasks that made a man.

Homer, crammed with anger, many-sided son.

Zeus and Hera shocked Olympus by uniting for once and campaigning to kill Homer and stop this usurpation of the murderous rights of immortals, but another odd alliance, Aphrodite and Apollo, developed stratagems to delay the inevitable … they thought the kid was good for more amusement.  Plus, Apollo loved him; his romp with Adara was still wet on his mind.

But after ten years of song and slaughter, Zeus said he’d had enough … Homer would die that afternoon.  So Apollo grabbed him while He Who Thunders was raping some temple priestess, and locked him in the couch of the sun.  For entertainment, he gave his son a present, a mirror in which he could see everything he’d done¾the whole grisly mess parade before him, on endless repeat.  Each day—another bloodbath, each night—more rapes and screams.  Homer didn’t flinch.  He didn’t pray.  Didn’t weep, repent … as he watched his useless life strut on and on.  He wrote.  Dipped his pen in the human soul.  Looked in Apollo’s mirror and wrote with the ink of night his life and lives and life.

The sun rolled down the sky’s greasy back into the vast vat at earth’s hard edge.  St. Homer too stumbled to blindness, hissed to death in the river that’s always cold … brave bard, who lived to tell the human tale.

Who was born this day?

What bedraggled horror crawled from cold silence to cling to words’ pale fire?

Only this … the rumor of a man, a story.

Let us honor them today with our souls and flesh.