(no subject)
I am suddenly alone because the sky is blue, the tree green, the street quiet, and because a dog, who is as alone as I am, is walking in front of me. I am moving slowly but with a firm step. I think it is nighttime. The landscapes I discover, the houses with advertisements on them, the posters, the shipwindows I pass as a sovereign, are of the same stuff as the characters of this book, of the visions I discover when my mouth and tongue are occupied in the hairs of a bronze eye, visions in which I think I recognize a recurrence of my childhood love of tunnels. I bugger the world.
~Jean Genet, Funeral Rites.
The appetite for singularity and the attraction of the forbidden in concert delivered me up to evil. Evil, like good, is attained gradually by means of an inspired insight that makes you glide vertically away from human beings, but most often by daily, careful, slow, disappointing labor. I shall give a few examples. Of the tasks involved in this particular ascesis, it was betrayal that was the hardest for me. However, I had the admirable courage to move further away from human beings by a greater fall, to turn my most tormented friend over to the police. I myself brought the detectives to the apartment in which he was hiding, and I made a point of being paid off for my betrayal in front of his very eyes. Of course, that betrayal causes me tremendous suffering, which reveals to me to me my friendship for my victim and an even deeper love for man, but in the midst of that suffering it seemed to me, when shame had burned me through and through, that there remained amidst the flames or rather the fumes of shame a kind of imperishable diamond with sharp clean lines, rightly called a solitaire. I think it is called pride, and humility too, and knowledge too. I had performed a free act. In any case, refusing to let my act be magnified by disinterestedness, to let it be purely gratuitous, an act performed for the fun of it, I completed my ignominy. I required that my betrayal be paid for. I wanted to strip my acts of anything beautiful that might be involved in them despite everything. However, the most heinous crimes are embellished with a bit of light when they are commited by a handsome person who lives in the sun and is bronzed by the sea, and I had to rely on a little physical beauty to attain evil. May I be forgiven for doing so. Because I envisage theft, murder and even betrayal as emanating from a bronzed, muscular, and always naked body that moves in the sun and waves, they transcend this ignominious tone (which was an attraction for me) and find a nobler one, which is more closely related to solar sacrifice.
I hopefully recommend this book to any of you who have revelled in the smells of your own body.
~Jean Genet, Funeral Rites.
The appetite for singularity and the attraction of the forbidden in concert delivered me up to evil. Evil, like good, is attained gradually by means of an inspired insight that makes you glide vertically away from human beings, but most often by daily, careful, slow, disappointing labor. I shall give a few examples. Of the tasks involved in this particular ascesis, it was betrayal that was the hardest for me. However, I had the admirable courage to move further away from human beings by a greater fall, to turn my most tormented friend over to the police. I myself brought the detectives to the apartment in which he was hiding, and I made a point of being paid off for my betrayal in front of his very eyes. Of course, that betrayal causes me tremendous suffering, which reveals to me to me my friendship for my victim and an even deeper love for man, but in the midst of that suffering it seemed to me, when shame had burned me through and through, that there remained amidst the flames or rather the fumes of shame a kind of imperishable diamond with sharp clean lines, rightly called a solitaire. I think it is called pride, and humility too, and knowledge too. I had performed a free act. In any case, refusing to let my act be magnified by disinterestedness, to let it be purely gratuitous, an act performed for the fun of it, I completed my ignominy. I required that my betrayal be paid for. I wanted to strip my acts of anything beautiful that might be involved in them despite everything. However, the most heinous crimes are embellished with a bit of light when they are commited by a handsome person who lives in the sun and is bronzed by the sea, and I had to rely on a little physical beauty to attain evil. May I be forgiven for doing so. Because I envisage theft, murder and even betrayal as emanating from a bronzed, muscular, and always naked body that moves in the sun and waves, they transcend this ignominious tone (which was an attraction for me) and find a nobler one, which is more closely related to solar sacrifice.
I hopefully recommend this book to any of you who have revelled in the smells of your own body.