Puck

essay by Brian Charles Clark

I. Liquid Manifesto

Like a sacrificial virgin balanced on a ziggurat in an earthquake, Jean Genet step-dances in fits and trances, and in his resolute Fall disavows the validity of received notions of ontological and epistemological positioning. Genet’s narrators are Schroedinger’s cats: undecidably both dead and alive. Genet’s narrators are also liquid. These narrators, as for example Jean in Funeral Rites, rise to the level of their surroundings in a dialogical environmentalism (in the sense that the mental is enturned: en-vir–always already turning again) that has them “communicating” (in the sense that a dance is a communion) with “the other” (a prescriptive term about to be overturned) outside of the space-time continuum of Newtonian physics and Cartesian ontology, but still within the purview of persistent and visionary rhythms.

Liquid narrators are a better description that quantum uncertainty, for the very notion of certainty is prescriptive, capitalistic, and hegemonic. (Like an atheist is certain there is no god but is always engaged with the notion of god, so perpetrators of Heseinbergian uncertainty are certain of an uncertain universe.) Orphan, waif, scoundrel, betrayer, thief and fag, Genet is an othersider. In Pompes Funèbres (1953; Funeral Rites, 1969), Genet contradicts what Cixous will say some twenty years later in La Rire de la Méduse (1975; note 2; cf. the article on Kesey and Genet in Ralph): men have said something about their sexuality, and we have said things both profound and profoundly out of control. By the time feminists uncaged their inner animals and discovered their liquid selves, Genet was dead, leaving only his contraptions for ego inflation, these novels, these surrealist machines.

Genet’s novels are like semen stains on school clothes–not “pornographic,” but rather telling. Clothes stained with semen, unlike, say, the Mark of the Beast or the pink triangle of the concentration camps, are merely telling: these sign mark no value upon the wearer. Funeral Rites tells of othering, and its telling is made through the ear of a self that does not exist yet persists in attending to the rhythms that permeate our world (rhythms, as both gap and syndect [see below for a discussion of the gap]), focus attention, or better, inspire [for breathing is a rhythm] attendance). The desired and desiring “Eye of Gabès” (the wetted and winking asshole; see translator’s note, page19), the semen, the spit, like the vaginal fluids in Wittig’s Les Guerrieres or Bronner’s A Weave of Women, are the bearers of difference. And in the hydraulic fluids that do the work of carrying, we see already a narrative strategy that syndectically embraces good and evil, male and female, goddess (Mary Magdalene) and demon (Hitler). Genet says these narrativities “are my gobs of spit” (67) (By “narrative” I do not restrict myself to the traditional meaning of story. Rather, I postulate narrativity as an activity in which all living systems engage as they confront the gap.).

Here are the manifestations of Genet:

1. The Self is a prescriptive deception perpetuated by hegemonic powers that are at once homophobic, misogynistic and (Mary Daly’s term) mazing. Rather than a-mazing, “making clear a path,” prescriptive Self is mazing in that we are always left behind searching for the Self that is yet to become. No! The Self, contra Heidegger, is not “becoming” but rather othering. The “conscious” Self is not Dasein but in-sane. Insane: “outside of sanitation,” the sanity here being the prescriptive ghettoes of psychological “health” (“individuation”).

2. The Other does not exist. Every previous point of the manifesto must be disavowed, as the cartographer must disavow the coastline she has just drawn in favor of the rhythms of depositing and erosion. (Nothing holds, especially not the Center.) If not Dasein but othering, then not othering but something much more physiological: we are centerless chaosmotic percolators. (I steal this word from Guattari, whose last book is entitled Chaosmosis. Guattari’s concern was always for the particular and physiological, and he uses the word chaosmosis as a near-synonym for dialogical.)

3. Genet does not exist, except as a centerless chaosmotic percolator.

4. Liquids exist as centerless chaosmotic percolators. Liquids dis-solve the “problems” of theory (cf. the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus).

5. Goddesses exist: Psyche, Sophia, Ocean, Quantum Wave-Point: Genet is a Goddess, a Liquid.

We cannot help but build systems, and in Genet’s system these are the six visible facets of his crystal, the six ratchets of his surrealistic machine. (Any escape from prescribed system (e.g., Derrida) becomes for some other a system (Derridean thought). Any disenchantment from power (Foucault) becomes a co-opted and cooperative narrativizing (New Historicism). The point here is that it is only ever the practitioner (Genet) and never the theorist (Satre) who is able to “overthrow the System,” as the students of the late 1960s said.) At every turn (page versus page, thought versus thought, living self versus dead other), with every drop of spit, semen and shit, a fecund revolution gives birth to itself. Every previous point must be disavowed (waved away).

“Keep your laws off my body!” This is Genet’s battle cry and it points, like a wizard leaning on a staff at a crossroads, straight to his physiognosis. “My fingers… moved… over the cock, which was as hard as wood, but alive. The contact thrilled me. In the state of ecstasy there is also an element of fear with respect to the divinity of his angels” (155). Genet knows the male body, and he recognizes and plays with its animativeness. From here, a sixth point:

6. Psyche is animation.

It is a danger, with Genet, to ascribe a metaphysic to the body. The hegemonic reading finds, because it insists on finding, the singularity of Self and its dwelling-place, the Body. But if we lose these bonds of prescription, we discover that our bodies, as is Genet’s, are liquid. Genet, in this respect, is pre-Cartesian, presocratic. Listen to this latter-day Milesian’s self-historicizing disavowal of Self:

[Our] years deposit within us a mud in which bubbles form. Each bubble, which is inhabited by an individual will to be, develops and changes, alone and in accordance with the other bubbles, and becomes part of an iridescent, violent whole that manifests a will issuing from the mud.

In my fatigue between waking and sleeping, between pain and what combats it (a kind of will to peace, I think), I am visited by all the characters of whom I have spoken and other too who are not clear to me. (226-7)

Instead of genres, let us speak of lyrics and epics, of liquids and solids. No man, and I believe no woman, can feel a genre, but the rhythms and timbres of emotion and the persistence of volume (in space, in amplitude of emotion and energy) are the mud of the ground on which we stand, desperately embracing for what might be the last time. This relationship of bubble to mud, of lover to lover, of writer to reader, can never be dramatic enough:

7. Death, like life, does not exist. But even Genet temporizes, so let me say: Death, like life, is only temporary.

Our systems of binaries are only temporary–dirty, yellowed bandages on psychic wounds–and must be disavowed. In this insistence, Genet is difficult: “In my fatigue…” because it is the stress of liminality that reveals the wounded nature of the beast that systematizes. The stressed animal attains to a heightened attentiveness before the gap. In the passage cited above, the liminal gap is agonistic–“pain and what combats it”–but, as we shall see, this gap is not always so, for we must transform the gnomic “fight, freeze, or flight” to the aphoristic and ironizing “fight, flight, freeze, or fornicate.”

II. The Gap

“Jean’s body was a Venetian flask” (62).

Consider the presocratic aether—why does this Fifth Element return periodically to our tables of philosophy like an undeniable element? Perhaps this question, in the other words of other times, is the one that led Genet to write Funeral Rites. The aether fills the gap; the aether is the stuff that makes more stuff; the aether is the medium that allows vessels to communicate, that allows the alchemical work of psychical transformation to proceed. The aether is the phorein, “the ‘to bear’” that we name with the over-determined Anglo-Saxon word, work. (“I am visited by all the characters…”: the bearded Teuton Karl Marx looms and leers, waving his Manifesto.)

Genet, aether-dwelling, and with the aether, a bridge-builder, anarchist, disavows his own systematizing for the self-inscribing “will to be”: the aether is psyche. (Heidegger, always Heidegger. See Poetry, Thought, and Language. We have spent 2,500 years elaborating what the Milesian philosophers finished before they started (only because, though, a story must be told, or better, we must persist in our tellings. What we are taught is always overturned by what we experience: this is always the narrator’s dilemma, as we shall see). Genet’s Madonna—the other Mary, la Madonna Noire—is at home in Heaven as in Hell, in the Body as in the Spirit. She-Who is aethereal.) Psyche is, to borrow from Rider Haggard, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. Unlike Haggard, whose goddess (or at least transcendentally goddess-like) Aeysha is condemned by the narrator, Genet rarely protests against the necessity (Greek goddess Ananke) of either Psyche or the psychological. It is hardly fair to compare the Victorian Haggard (a starched shirt stuffed with dry toast?) to the liquid effluvia of the Hadean Genet, except that they both explore the same physis, the same physical stuff we erroneously and prescriptively label “the metaphysical.” There is no “proving” the “materiality” of “psyche”: there is only the constant re-perceiving, the continual re-demonstration of the experience of the psychic. In Haggard, Enlightened cynicism splits body from spirit (mind); in Genet, spit and shit give a ground to, and reveal the footprints left by, psyche.

The aether lubricates. This simplest of English sentences is already “in-sane”: it dwells in, and gives bridge to, the danger of contamination. Dwells in danger? Ontology, as in Heidegger’s dwelling-bridging, is said in adjectives. Barthes’ concern about music (that it can only be described in retrospect, and that therefore any critical theory of music flounders in its first steps before falling into useless systematizing) parallels the problem of Genet’s liquid poetics: such a poetics may be described, but theory can never penetrate what can only ever be experienced. (But again, let us disavow the “genre(s)” of “theory,” and immediately disavow that disavowal by saying that in the lyric essay one may at least imitate the spiny, punctuated rhythms of religious experience that occur when I read Genet. The aether divides but does not separate: Jean feels the “same rivers of love” for Riton while “not a drop” is “withdrawn from Jean” D. “I was preserving both youngsters under the double ray of my tenderness” (57).

Inspiration is lubrication: Genet enters me through my Eye of Gabès. I do not literally mean that I have anal intercourse with this particular copy of an English translation of the famous French novel. Nevertheless, chaosmosis does transpire and I am percolating. The petit mort of Nirvana or orgasm or prayer—by this very manifesto that is the result of my “relations” with Genet, I may not ask “who” are the participants in my relations with the text, but only embrace my disavowal of said participants. And here we arrive at The Gap.

No Self, but individuals. Nodes we are in information theory, or desiring machines to Deleuze and Guattari, shifting, wandering, perturbed in a landscape that is at once all a part of itself and no whole. For the animal, the gap between death and life looms large; one Jean lives on while the other is dead “And I weep if I do not bind Jean to this world in which beauty lives” (Rites, 168). For the Gap is (alas! I will wear the gears down on my adjective machine…) betweenness. The Gap is the certainty of Being and the uncertainty of Living, a phoretic binder that bears difference as a liquid carries particulate matter. The gap (for it has long since “settled down,” lost any sense of capitalization [though it remains a tool (pace Marx) of capital], and become as quotidianly plain as gravity) is the energia of narrativity, the source of cognitive turning. It is quite likely that I am speaking of what my philosophical inheritance names difference. (I say “likely” because it may also be the case that I am eager to create a link where in fact no difference but a befuddlement of vocabulary exists.) However that may be, I prefer here to speak of Genet in terms that he himself calls for: rhythms and images, music and poetry. The gap, then, is the silent part of the beat, for which English has no name. We may ponder the answer to the question about the sound of one hand clapping, but what is the name for the gap that falls between two claps, of one or of many hands?

We are confronted with this silent part of the beat all the time. We wonder what the othering individual is thinking, we contemplate the consequences of our othering actions, we stand at a crossroads and ask, Left or right? Right or wrong? Today or tomorrow? It would be too easy, and too dangerous, to reduce the gap to a phenomenology of linguistics (the Derridean “system”). Danger is attractive; still, we must be aware that many such phenomenologies privilege (overtly or otherwise) the human. Difference is not binary and humans are animals subject to the (other) worldly rhythms of body and soul that fill the world-gap. (We are not subjects, per se, but subject to the aether: I am Genet’s subject, not he mine.) The danger of systematizing the gap into a philosophy of language is that we run the risk of imbibing so much text that we black out and forget our rhythms, like alcoholics. (But nonetheless we must “Drink,” as Rumi, Rabelais, and Genet insist.) But this is a danger with any liquid, and to use, not abuse, is the gnomic rule of thumb to guide us here. The danger is attractive because, once we shed our pretentious and precious humanocentrism, we begin to see the gap as an energy source utilized in all living “systems.” For the gap begs perception so that it might be acknowledged and played, bridged, gone around, or filled.

The first of the dwelling-bridging sense to evolve was smell. Primal molecular gnosis, after the permeable membrane, the archetype of all physical (and therefore linguistic) systems, this first true orifice was a stop-gapper, a gap-bridger. The nose knows: the molecular perturbation of filia by dust, these couplings are the footprints of the endlessly moving gaps that continually confront the living organism. By these footprints the organism is able to detect a rhythm, the phenomenon of motion. For what is rhythm but the alternating presence and absence in perception of some othering thing that persists? In that othering thing which persists we might find food, danger, or mate; but first we must either query or answer: friend, foe, or fuckmate? The single-celled individual knows by its “nose.”

In his lust for danger (Genet displays “risk-taking behavior,” one could pop-psychologize) and for that which is the same thing, religious experience (more dangerous than any drug I know), Genet’s sense of smell is Heraclitan. “In Hades,” Heraclitus is thought to have said, “psyche proceeds by sense of smell alone.” Hades is an archetypal zone of liminality (rather than the Hell of teleoscopic Christianity), and the dwelling place of Jean-in-mourning is liminal as well. Corpses litter Genet’s Paris the way flies litter a corpse: like stink of shit. Jean stands contemplating the door that marks the gap between him and the corpse in the other room:

Death had shut the door. Though I questioned myself and questioned death with all kinds of precautions in my voice, that giant and yet ideal door was keeping a secret and allowing to escape only a very light but sickening smell over which the corpse drifted [sic], a smell of astonishing delicacy which again made me wonder what games are played in the chambers of the dead. (173; note too the fart of Jean D.’s mother on page 172)

Genet’s, and Jean the narrator’s, sense of smell is a synecdoche for the web of perception that alchemicalizes Funeral Rites. Jean is hyper-perceptive, a practitioner of a self-inflicted (he feels guilt, he mourns) surrealist psychology: he is a synesthesic. As he lays beside the sleeping German soldier Erik in a safe-house apartment, Jean’s desire becomes magma, a very hot and dangerous liquid indeed. This melting and melding liquid (igneous bears the sense of “melded all together”) displays or signifies itself as a “mass of cries of fear rising from my belly.…” Jean’s “strong, clenched teeth… on the alert” stifle the cries. “Finding no outlets, those cries punctured my neck, which suddenly let flow the twenty white streams of my fear through twenty purple ulcers in the shape of roses and carnations” (154). Jean touches Erik’s cock and is “astounded to feel the Fritz’s cock swell… and quickly fill my hand” (154). To touch “the angel’s weapon” is to risk experiencing “ecstasy” (155), to risk the “danger” of embodiment across the gap, the “danger of giving him body within my body” (62).

The “musical value” of a cry such as “‘I love you, oh’” is given that value by the sensual relationship of sex and death given body by music, for “the supreme song” is “to death itself” (55). Music at once presents the gap (the unknown, because silent, parts of the rhythm) and bridges it with drones and melodies, and so is perhaps our only way of expressing in an act both the gap and the syndect. Jean bears the musical staff that is penis (verge), orchard (verger) with its blooms (see note page 18), as well as the portée of the penis and the orchard, their “offspring” or “brood” which is also the place of the music-text. The “staff” in Genet becomes a divine devising rod that gives structure and form to divine narratives infused with the liquid Goddess.

III. The Manifestation of Liquid Music

The Magdalene, as discoverer of Christ’s transformation across the gap of death, acts as the aetherializing agent of Genet’s narrative. She is never revealed directly, only alluded to, but acts as the engine of othering, for she is the place where sex and death “come together,” as it were, as dwelling-bridges. To see her presence in Funeral Rites, we must understand something of the Magdalene’s reception in southern France.

In The Movement of the Free Spirit (1994), Raoul Veneigem demonstrates that the Cathar “movement” was an economic threat to the Church. The pursuit of “perfection” entailed a movement away from economic engagement with material culture beyond that which could be produced in the Catholic religious community. As the Cathar “community” became a de facto kingdom, its subjects became heretics. This threat resulted in the genocide called the Albegensian Crusade, while giving the French a mythology of martyrdom and diffident individualism. (This is not the only source; Joan of Arc, who also plays a part in Funeral Rites, is another.) The Cathars were Magdalene worshippers, possibly believing her to have been the wife of Christ, and the mother of their magical child. That this is likely nonsense (or maybe it isn’t!) makes not a whit of difference to human myth-making. The point is, the Magdalene is very attractive to a thief, for she is the trickster who makes a lie out of the Church’s story: she is a bridge to an other sort of economic individualism. And it was the Church that stole the archetypal images of individualities and autonomous communities and recorporated them into the monolithic body of Christ as a formal dogma of the One, the True, the Good and the Beautiful. Stripped of the possibility of individual religious experience in the same way a watershed might be dam(n)ed into a single flow, this edifice, for Genet, becomes not a target for destruction or even critique, but simply another lock to pick.

Through the Magdalene, Genet steals back the story of his body and his individualism. In his individuality he finds a storm (a riot, a war, an orgy) of personages, the othering images that fill and bridge the gaps of living. This Madonna might spit in your food (174-5), but only as an ego-deflating trick. And trick she is, the trick of Genet’s othering. In two intensely religious and Magdalenian passages, Jean the narrator reveals to us the sticky web of dwelling-bridging enabled by the Magdalene. In the Magdalene, Genet finds through his narrator Jean the multifaceted possibilities of the formalism the Church presents as dogma. Again, the Derridean idea of an “open text” is easily grasped here, but that is only part of the story, for it is Jean’s open body that is chaosmotically porous to her possibilities. (I use the word body here, but am tempted, in cognizance of our inheritance of the so-called “mind/body split” to say spirit-body, but this too leads to further semantophilosophical problems that I will leave for now unresolved.)

“Punk, ridiculous little fellow that I was,” Jean narrates,

I emitted upon the world a power extracted from the pure, sheer beauty of athletes and hoodlums. For only beauty could have occasioned such an impulse of love as that which, every day for seven years, caused the death of strong and fierce young creatures. Beauty alone warrants such improper things as hearing the music of the spheres, raising the dead, understanding the unhappiness of stones. (133)

This short passage indexes the major concerns of this essay. To understand it, we must first disavow our inherited disavowals of nature. Dismissed conceptually as essentialist and vague, nature should in fact be prized as a concept that at once positions us outside (“in the wild”) of the prescriptive Self and points back at the individual as chaosmotic animal. It is the nature of the animal, of any living system, to perceive the gap that confronts it and answer it with an emotional-aesthetic response. (See the “underground stream” of holistic and ecological philosophies of such as G. Bateson and Deleuze and Guattari. See also Masson and McCarthy, When Elephants Weep, 1995, especially their remarks on altruism.) Flight, fight, freeze, or fornication: the patriotic love of men (and, I assume, of women, but that is beyond my purview here) for their country and their willingness to die for that beauty is precisely the narrative confrontation of individual with crossroads. “To be or not to be” is exactly the sort of (seemingly) binary question that enables the individual animal to attend to its own story. To die “for God and country” reveals the liquid power of “faith,” as some would say, but more the energia or persistence of an experiential rhythm.

This rhythm is personified in the body of the Magdalene, a body that is visible as an image but that is undecidably othering as a force. The improperness of “hearing the music of the spheres” is then a theft from the monolithic structure of prescriptive culture, a giving-back of unmediated, natural, animal experience “to the loveliest armies in the world” (133). This dangerous, threatening tremendum of beauty, as raw and wet as a “spunk-filled mouth” (133), allowed the wife of Christ to stand before his tomb and perceive “the unhappiness of [the] stones” that had so recently blocked his crypt. (In The Psychology of Religious Experience (1965), Goodenough writes that the tremendum is “a Latin word… which has, as I use it, its simple original meaning of ‘that which must be feared’ or ‘the source of terror’” (6). The liminality of She-who-must-be-obeyed is terrifying. The Indo-European root of terror is *tres, “to tremble.” Trembling, from cold, fear or desire, is a primal experience of rhythm.) It would be easy to become sidetracked here, searching for the implications of the crypt itself; but throughout Funeral Rites Genet has insisted that death is a stop-gap: there is no crypt. As a dead brother, comrade-in-arms, or lover lives on in the living, so Beauty, Christ, and the Magdalene persist as rhythmic reminders, not of the transcendent, but of the quotidian path-finding of aetherializing psyche. The “unrevealed” of the mouth, the anus, and the vagina is not a tomb, but rather a revealing gap, a navigational crossroads that confronts an individual as the experience of the tremendum. The “unhappiness of stones” is felt by the Magdalene, and those that attend to her (“an attention to a kind of constant desire” [133]), as the emotion of the stones themselves. Stones, here, indeed have “scruple[s]” (Derrida), as stones, too, must be counted among those who experience the rhythms of life, and to block the tomb of the Savior is indeed a cause for some unhappiness. But to open the tomb, the mouth, the anus, is to let the fluids flow, one to the other.

The Magdalene-as-personage who dwells within Jean is the ambiguous reminder “of a terrible muffled grief that was rumbling in the profoundest depths of my misery and that awaited only a lapse of my attention to burst into sobs and despair” (216). Attention here is the “key to the magnetic fields” (Breton) in which the vibratory terror of the tremendum (grief bears its own terror) gives movement to narrative focus. The Magdalene imbues Jean’s multiplicious consciousness with all the characters he has known, those he has not known, with that of the mythos, the direct experience of the vibratory spoken word.

The mythos of the Last Supper, for example, is given as the Edenic and cannibalistic “fête” (216) of Jean attending (listening and scenting) his dead lover, Jean D:

What bread the feast brings me! In my memory, his prick, which used to discharge so calmly, assumes the proportions and at times the serene appearance of a flowering apple tree in April. (217)

As Jean attempts to deposit Jean D.’s remains “in the garbage can” that is “full of a heap of rubbish,” the Magdalene is positioned as the stop-gap between the “violent disorder of withered chrysanthemums” and the “one [flower]…which… adorned [the garbage can] with a sumptuous order” (217). The Magdalene, appearing through the image of dead Jean, is the “thorny branch which tears my gaze” such that “Today I dare not touch you. Your very immobility claws the void” (217). The anointing flower of spit, semen, of shit left in the road or wiped on a pant leg, is a vibrating signifier of the tremendum, of the uncontrollable, undecidable but nonetheless perceivable gap.

The Magdalene—and I’ll dare to add: like any wife—is “the holly” (217), the crown of thorns that at once pricks and is pricked. For Jean, the crypt (“you’ll be more comfortable in the refrigerator” [216]) is not a starting point of interpretation, but a verer, a “turning” point on the Way. There is a “rejection” here “of the world by the world” which “can produce humility or pride, can oblige one to seek new rules of conduct” and “that… enables one to see the other world” (218-19). The persistently othering world is revealed through “torn… veils” (218) and is “recognize[d]” as “a recurrence” of a “childhood love of tunnels” (220). Dark passages from which sprout the rhythms of “the angel’s weapon” and invite us, in answer to the perennial question of fight, flight, freeze, or fuck to “bugger the world” (220). Our holes are wholes.

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