Bloody ass
The Preface to Vol. IV of “The Breviary of St Orpheus”
Thomas Of Villanueva
by
Miklós Szentkuthy
Thomas was the scion of an illustrious and rich family; the red blood of feudal arteries and the azulejo, azure-silver of haute-bourgeois veins, mingled in a new and colourful stream beneath his skin, for he was born in the town of Fuellana in the great and holy country of Spain. The family possessed a smaller palace in the town and a larger one some miles away from it, with a French, geometrically laid out, park, an English game-forest, a pretentious (mannerist) labyrinth, a devotional way of the Cross and moss-covered caves of Venus. In the Park there was an endless succession of celebration lunches, dinners beneath Chinese lanterns, in the private chapel mass followed mass like the lenses in Copernicus’s telescope as he searched the skies-the poor of the town and neighbourhood were “in clover” (so the festive and solemn hosts thought and went on thinking), they were loaded down with alms; this, this was the greatest joy of the infant Thomas, to see the smile and gratitude of the beggars, he himself-secretly-always added something, he would steal anything for the pobres and necesi-tados as they departed. The kindly parents did not mind this.
It happened that Count Orgaz, a great relative of the family, departed this world of shades with piety that chimed in well with his life-the family desired to honour the eternal memory of the count’s unparalleled puritanism with sensational, hidalgo pomp and ceremony. Thomas’s parents (and this was the sacred custom in Spain for centuries) arrayed themselves in almost carnival-like fancy dress, and covered this with black velvet, silk, sateen, taffeta funereal cloaks and mourning-gowns-and why? After the interment came the pagan-catholic funeral feast. They took off the black, bat-like cloaks and at the funeral feast there gleamed far and wide the fiery-marble curves of breasts and the voluptuous rime of rose-coloured or indiana-blue powder mingled with drops of refined perspiration, all framed in the lace curlicues and balsam froth of the ladies’ décolletage.
The ten or twelve-year-old Thomas was also decked out in finery, leaping tailors flourished then tentacles of their measures around the boy, and there was a millstone of a snow-white collar for him too. Leading the way, the parents travelled in a separate carriage to Count Or-gaz’s griego- (or greco-) style private chapel, to the bier, to the requiem-the boy followed them in the other carriage. In his carriage his two former nan-nies, pert young ladies-they never experienced more piquant outings than when the court was in mourning-giggled and frisked about in the well-sprung carriage that floated and swayed like a swing, playing with each other and with the little boy. They jested about death and love, but at that time Thomas knew nothing of either love or death-or did he? In the darkness of his infant ignorance he already had some mystical presentiments of these two trump cards of our human destiny, hearts and diamonds, check and check-mate; such lurking, sensual, cryptic dreams which are perhaps worthier of the whirlpools of love and death than the thinner gruel of “clever” adults con-cerning this noble theme.
The carriage containing Thomas and the two requiem-nymphs suddenly stopped with a great jolt and the heads of the three occupants knocked together, a virtuoso or unintended billiard-stroke. Thomas was the first to jump out and he saw and heard the driver in the middle of a discussion with an army of beggars, a host of paupers all too well-known to Thomas. The “leader” of the beggars was complaining that all their lives they had partaken of thousands of charitable acts at Count Orgaz’s generous, almsgiving court, so they had set off singing and praying in a holy procession to the Count’s funeral and requiem, but-Count Orgaz’s new major-domo and dilettante master of ceremonies for the funeral rites had thrown and kicked them out with disgust-them, Orgaz’s sweetest gospel-children !- yelping as he gesticulated with a consecrated aspergillum like a mace that “it’s sacrilege to turn up in such lousy stinking rags at the bejewelled, pyramidal catafalque.” But they, the beggars and paupers, were neither lousy nor stinking nor ragged, they had dressed in the decent clothes they had last had from the count. That they were not leprous with jewels, bleeding with emeralds, Byzantine, Griego
or Greco, balsam-basilisk ceremonial robes, the Lord Christ and his servant Orgaz would obviously have forgiven. The “crusading and martyr” leader of the poor went on declaiming his holy Jeremiad-the driver began to seethe with rage against the rascally majordomo, long ago he had destined his whip for him, not for his horses-and the little Thomas dashed over to a weeping lad, who wore a fine, simple red robe, but the idiotic snob of a new major-domo had even ripped this when he banished the crowd blessed in the Sermon on the Mount.
Thomas (the nannies shrieked) stripped naked there on the highway: shoes, belt, collar, jacket and golden dart and bayonet flew-he ordered the weeping little boy to undress immediately, yes, they were to change clothes, the naked little Thomas helped to dress the poor boy, no theatre dresser could have done better. He silenced the nannies-Be quiet and don’t interfere in my business !-… the child Jesus too must surely have been severe often enough in Nazareth, and not only at that moment in Jerusalem when he chose God and the Scriptures instead of his parents … He sat the poor boy, now in gala dress, in the carriage, and ordered the two (now certainly not laughing!) nurses and the driver to give an exact and word-for-word account to his parents of what had happened here on the highway.
Our little Thomas went home alone; there he made straight for his mother’s dressing-room, for in it was a gigantic mirror up to the ceiling, and he wanted to see himself in it; he was twisting from left to right, backwards and forwards when his parents arrived home from Count Orgaz’s funeral with the beggar-boy between them dressed in the gala clothes of a Spanish-Baroque teenager.
At the time of the funeral, the parents were understandably amazed when the two (cowardly and disorientated) nurses presented the tricked-out beggar boy in the clouds of funereal incense in place of their Thomas-but(“having stifled their amazement at the amazing events in this intermezzo”) accepted what had happened with a gentle smile. Now, however, they requested their “tyrant” son Thomas to take off the beggar-boy’s red robe and give it back to him, while he, Thomas, was to put on once again the gala costume tailored for bim.
Thomas had a ready answer. Yes indeed, he would take back the gala costume, but not just yet. Why? Because! Thomas had discussed it with his priestly tutor, his moral and educational instructor, his confessor and the director of biblical plays for the domestic stage; this beggar-boy would play the part, in the family’s intimate passion-play, of the rich man in purple and fine linen who would have left (and did leave) the beggar Lazarus to die of starvation (Luke XVI, 19-31); this beggar-boy would play the rich Joseph of Arimathea, he would play Simon the sorcerer (Acts VIII, 18-25), and the third and youngest of the Three Kings.
The parents looked at each other and smiled; they had hopes and doubts about their son’s future sanctity, they prayed about it, on Mondays and Thursdays they dreamt of him becoming Pope, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays they dreamt of a Castilian princess to be his bride. So Christmas arrived; the “niño despota,” the child-tyrant carried things so far that at midnight mass he was server in the poor boy’s red robe, and thebeggar-boy sat in the front pew between his father and mother, dressed once again in his, Thomas’s, best clothes (the only way he could ‘read’ from his illuminated missal was by crumpling his stiff starched collar, larger than the circle of the Zodiac, well under his chin-he almost died of fright in case he was to be scolded for maltreating the gala robes).
In an orchestra, the chief roles are those of the conductor and leader (the first violin); when the great festivals arrived and school-dramas were performed with child-actors in palaces, refectories of monasteries, hospital “operating theatres,” common prayer-rooms of retreat-houses or the garderobes of convents, the conductor was always the child or youthful Thomas and the leader or first violin was his learned tutor, with whom it is impossible to decide whether Thomas talked more about theological themes or the complicated problems of Baroque dramaturgy. Was the question of questions (command of commands!) the charitable love of the gospels (Luke XII, 33-34) or the theodeo “cabaret” clothes of velour and moire? When they staged the poor man Lazarus, the child and youthful Thomas delved into the questions of the angels’ bodies, souls, existence, non-existence, their Hebrew and gospel interpretation and role, their female or male nature, their sublimated symbolism and pagan-rooted materialization, the historical and abstract role of Abraham built into scholastic works, and the “problematics” of hell and damnation, mercy and redemption (and incidentally he loathed the word “problematics” to the point of nausea as he leaned out of the red window of the Heart of Jesus!). But, when he had really fired the imagination of his tutor with the Talmudic labyrinth of these hair-splitting concerns, it was Thomas who cut the Gordian knot, almost fuming with impatience; he would recite again and again, repeating insistently the command of generous love, “Sell all that you have and distribute it to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven” (Luke XVIII, 22).
Thomas’s instructor, tutor, first violin and leader of the orchestra, noted in his Memoirs that nobody ever spoke with such delicacy, purity and tenderness, with such refined Elysian tactics and a knowledge of the blackest secrets of love (doubtless he was enlightened by inspiration), of those legends and holy pictures in which Mary Magdalen figures as a princess, in those years preceding her career as a courtesan, or where writers and painters depict Magdalen as the bride, or even wife, of St John the apostle. It was a salutary delight to listen to Thomas (continues the well-instructed instructor in his Memoirs) when he explained the legend in which the penitent and contrite Magdalen (M in the Greek text) is tempted by Satan disguised as a shivering beggar; he asks her for her long hair to wear as a warm fur coat, though in that case only her (unchangingly beautiful) nakedness will be visible … Magdalen cut off her ankle-long hair without a moment’s hesitation, for she knew that the Lord Jesus would cover her pagan-plastic curves with a thick cloud.
When his parents introduced Thomas to the professors at the University of Salamanca, they already knew from the instructors of all his fine and good qualities, about the indispensability of knowledge in the possession of love, and about the indispensability of love in the possession of knowledge. And then?Thomas began his career not with study but with teaching(“our Assisi, our Aquinas”)-when at the head of his pupils he arrived at the golden gate of the library, he recalled the meeting of Joachim and Anna, the parents of the Virgin Mary, at that Golden Gate (painted a million times!). Now he, the scholar, was Joachim, and now the library was the Biblical weddingchamber where the books (Anna, Anna!) awaited their loving and beloved husband.
Similarly, when he taught in the gallery of the library, with the stalagmites and organ-pipes of gold-bound folios behind him and a gigantic globe on the marble floor of the reading-room below, our young Villanueva would say, “This is it!The true and genuine balcony-scene from Romeo and Juliet: each of the books is a Romeo, each irradiating a cientifico love, and down below the globe, the World (and universe … ) is ‘Juliet,’ the ‘ganze Welt’ and the two of them are now holding their nuptials in Salamanca.”
Thomas acquired not only the laurels of a university degree and doctorate, but also a much more glorious crown: he was ordained a priest of his Church. He celebrated his first mass on Christmas Day and from the Gospel side of the altar said:
“Is there any greater and more rational miracle in the world than when the God who created the universe, the myriad of stars, the millions of lightyears and the atoms of atoms of atoms determined, as the Great Actor of transcendence, to don a human mask, choosing a stable as the only possible stage, and being born poor and beggarly, the sub-tenant of Existence, smelling of cows and donkeys? Do you like it or not? It must be accepted once and for all, that there appears to be a cosmic and dogmatic charm to poverty. And here and now and once and for all we must realize (and here the new priest Thomas raised his voice), that the sanctity of the poor, however deep and bearing Divine stigmata, does not, I repeat not, mean that we are to bury ourselves with mystical voluptuousness into the stinking Bethlehem of poverty for the greater glory of God. Whoever thinks that is the most idiotic of idiots. The poor man is doubly holy. First he is holy because through his poverty he is a thousand times closer to every primeval human affair in his nakedness than is the rich man. Birth, death, eating, drinking, sickness and marriage, table and bed, clothing and weather, animals, flowers, stars, youth and age, grief and happiness, all and nothing, distance and proximity, war and peace, secrets and knowledge, hearth and opium, the gnarled work of two hands and midsummer-night’s dream, suicidal disenchantment and spring resurrection-are closer, far closer to Bethlehem than the inhuman, abstract, golden-domed brothel of emperors and bankers. Secondly, he is holy because he is an infamous warning that poor folk should not exist! Angels, the three kings, frankincense, myrrh, gold, poor shepherds to the Even Poorer God, sheep, dogs, pipes, all holy material dancing with the Christmas star of Venus to guide them, Natura Infinita Bacchans-all this is a blessing on the poor, for only out of them can the definition of man be born and rebellion! Its leading players and minor parts are those who have now said the Litany, new St Johns, let them write new apocalypses about the great Nativity, the birth-nacimiento enigmatico: revolution from mercy, amen.”
(Everyone, indeed even more than everyone, will say, “How ridiculous!” To cite such an address from the mouth of Villanueva in his age, in his circumstances! Yet this address was indeed delivered and what is more, it was not followed by any kind of inquisition-like performance, discussion, confession, accusation of heresy or unfrocking, for the simple reason that nobody took the word revolución or rebelión to have its present historical and sociological meaning. They simply thought that these words were just baroque, mannerist and Marianesque metaphors, playful and frivolous rhetorical purple passages, which were used to depict the delights of charity in a piquant and skirtlifting way!
The laurel-crowned doctor of the scholarly love of God and love of poverty preached three famous sermons. This was the first of them. The third spoke of his deathbed, and in due course will be heard here. Of the second, this will suffice:
The sermon was preached in that royal-phantasque-surréal-légendaire-dogmatique church which was built to commemorate Christ washing the feet of the apostles. In this church was kept as a relic that splendid “lavoir,” of Greek workmanship, in which Christ our Lord washed the feet of his apostles with the intention of apotheosizing humility. It was brought back from the Holy Land by a bishop who had been on pilgrimage there, and in his deed of gift he emphasized with surprising frankness that it did not matter if the bowl was not genuine. The sight of it even so would move the faithful to fantasies of meditation and prayer from the dephts of their being.
In the church of the Washing of the Feet (humility! humility!) the pulpit, on the epistle side to the right, was suspended high on the wall, it might have been a lamp, a well-bucket, a swing, a boat or a rumpled golden nest-on itsrounded sides were the symbols of the four evangelists in marble, bronze and alabaster, a naked angel twisting in delirium, a buffalo or bison ducking its shaggy head between its front legs, a vulture treading at the ledge of the pulpit with its pincer-like beak, the lion (a guest-animal from a coat of arms?) blows into an enormous trumpet-in the middle the anchor of Hope clangs on a real chain, the heart of Love is a lamp with a real flame, the cross of Faith rears up to the sky from the bottom, the first step of the spiral staircase leading up to the curling balcony of the pulpit, like the skeleton not of exalted confession, but of despair. The baldachin above the pulpit is a scalloped shell, torn, slashed and curled; the statues of Jesus, Moses, prophets and the Lord God appear like raging, quarrelling, drunken fountains, intertwined in kisses, wrestling, embracing and killing, their curly hair matted. It was from this pulpit that the famous second sermon was preached.
All the details and other material relating to it are in the Confessions of Charles V, King and Emperor, from which we quote. A few weeks before the sermon was preached, the Emperor had read the Confessions of St Augustine (in other words, his confession of faith in praise of God); he too acquired the urge and inspiration to write (dictate) such a confession and confided his plan to Thomas of Villanueva, adding with a smile that just as Herodotus had used the nine names of the Nine Muses as chapter-headings, he would do the same. “Is that madness?”-asked the emperor, continuing to smile, “after all, my mother was Juana the Mad, my father Philip the Fair, and I am their most legitimate bastard, the most illegitimate rightful heir to their throne ( … he was well educated in Augustine’s style and the King of the Baroque age … ), so why should I not doit?” … And Thomas gave a kidgloved blessing to the moral, literary, historical plan (distantly? on his approach? warmly? coldly? did he mutter anything later? Charles Quint-Harlequin ?… )
Concerning the sermon, Charles V recorded the following:
I myself lived and died right through this sermon-vision! miracle! transfiguration! mystery play! extasis en actitud teatral !- in disguise; dressed as a mendicant Franciscan friar I sat at the right end of the fourth pew. Thomas described the gospel scene of the Washing of the Feet, the eternal example of all humility and its model of dogmatic worth, in the most colourful words, like a playwright of golden tongue and silver rhymes. And then? Then? He raised himself up and rose from the pulpit and flew from it like a migrant bird, swimming and floating, losing nothing of the totality of his material body and-he settled by the side-altar of St Alfonsus Liguori. He also took me with him, and put into my hand the relic, the bowl in which the feet were washed; I was to hold it, hold it! while he began symbolically to scrub the nethermost step of the side-altar, while he explained that the saint of Liguori in his humility did not heed the visionary, hallucinating nun who prophesied to him that he would be the founder of a world-famous order of monks, and he even refused obedience to Pope Clement XIII when he “terrorized him into becoming a bishop” in the Kingdom of Naples. Finally, however, he did bow his head, for (being a superb psychologist) he saw in obedience (paradox … ) an even greater independence for his spirit and anarchic freedom for his holy dreams. (Here in Charles V’s Diary, in a totally different hand the following marginal note can be read: Terpsichore. Marginalia to Casanova.)
After this we flew to the altar of St Dunstan; there, while washing the pedestal of one of the pillars, he related in charming, spell-binding words what a totally universal, Apolline and Dionysian man St Dunstan was, philospher, dandy, singer, and poet, sculptor and painter, versed in classical and Welsh poetry, a virtuoso performer on every instrument, goldsmith and scholar of Roman law, the beloved favourite of the King of England, but the king listened to Dunstan’s slanderers and banished the saint from his court; gravely ill, he accepted this “flattering” loss of favour with glad humility and became a hermit, living among the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey for his arts that were more varied than the colours from a Roman candle, and(when politics also having altered) they wanted to drag him away to be Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury, he sat more uncomfortably in his stall than an animal dragged to the slaughter.
(In Charles’s manuscript again there is a mysterious note in another hand: Erato. Black Renaissance.)
Thomas, floating on a raft of clouds, flew with me to the altar of St Francis Borgia; there on a pillar covered with black velvet Francis’s deathmask was to be seen, and at the foot of the pillar, seemingly trodden down and thrown on the dustheap, there was a royal crown, with the decoration and chain of an order of knighthood-and Thomas preached: This Jesuit Francis did not wish to be the grand master of the Order of St James or even its least servitor, this follower of Loyola renounced the viceroyship of Catalonia and the kingship; according to Christ’s hard (or feather-light?) command, he abandoned his richly-sensual, richly-fecund marriage-bed for the intellectual happiness of the Union Mystica (and never, never mystifica). Thomas kissed the hem of the black “skirt” of the death-mask, and from the lavoir of the washing of the feet (in my hand) sprinkled a few drops on the fabric, a symbol, holy water.
(Who wrote it? Who could have written it? But that other hand, that interpellation is here: Melpomene. Escorial.)
The altar of St Turibio was surrounded by half-naked statues, the voluptuous devotion of Aztec, Maya, Toltec, and Inca figures; Turibio was the Bishop of Peru, but he too had to be driven with whips to be consecrated with the holy oil of the Holy Spirit; only when he was told that the natives in ‘New India’ were being tortured to death by hidalgo-brigands or kept in serfdom to do menial work, did he set sail to go to their aid. After his death the Indians decorated his grave with fantastic orchids, parrot and bird-of-paradise feathers, and these feathers were now to be seen in glass reliquaries on the altar; at the time of mass, after Holy Communion, six-year-old children imitated the sounds of the “Christian” humming-birds on pipes called “Turibios.”
(Manuscrito misterioso: Cleo. Europa Minor.)
I approached the altar of St John of the Cross neither in a gull-winged galley nor in a G-minor gondola; we went on foot: Thomas seemed to be possessed by some deep emotion, and endless, murmuring devotion, spellbound and astonished. Above the altar there rose an iconostasis with five niches, like stage dressing-rooms with open doors; in four of them, there were coloured wax figures. St John of the Cross could be seen among tottering piles of books in the University of Salamanca-next he was the king of poets, with a lute in his hand, more ecstatic than King David, voluptuosidad consonante-in the third icon-niche the mortally sick John was to be seen tortured to death and hacked by drunken barber-surgeons, bone, blood, skin pulled back, a rainbow-like jelly of secretion-and (yes! yes! yes! here, in this church!) as devil-headed inquisitors, torturers, Caiaphases of cardinals nip his horse-radish-stalks of arms with pincers-then together with Teresa of Avila, with Mount Carmel in Palestine between them like a pyramid; Teresa and John appear to be playing hide-and-seek, peeping impishly at each other from left and right; in their hands they hold a joint ribbon of parchment with a quotation from the prophet Jeremiah on it: “And I will bring Israel again to his habitation, and he shall feed on Carmel … “(L. 19). And in the last niche? A solitary organ, which plays by itself “from the beginning for ever andever,” sonorously and lamentoso doliente, a soprano sings the Song of Songs, the favourite religious poem of St John of the Cross, “I have put off my coat; how shall I put it on? … I am sick of love” (V, 3-8).
When mass was celebrated at the altar of St John, they never read lessons; on the epistle side instead of the lectern there stood the relic of the bones of John’s hand, with fingers spread wide, and on the gospel side the bone of his foot. Instead of reading the lessons, the celebrant always kissed these, deep in meditation. This is what Thomas and I did now, sprinkling holy water on the footbone. (Washing of the feet! Washing of the Feet!)
After the sweetest, most tearful devotions, Thomas continued his sermon thus: John was once playing ball with his fellow-students near a river, and the ball flew into the stream; John immediately threw himself in after it, but the river was full of weeds, his foot became tangled with them and he might have drowned within moments. Then a snow-white female hand stretched out to him from the heavens, the right hand of the Virgin Mary; her thumb was snow-white coral, her index-finger a trembling, white compass-needle, the middle finger a willow-twig covered with diamond dust, the ring-finger twanging whalebone, the little finger the first April bud on the Tree of Life. John felt the hand to be so beautiful, holy and pure that he was unwilling to seize it with his muddy palm and would rather have drowned; like a troubadour poet, he struck up an Old Provençal, neo-Baroque hymn, during which he reached the bank like a gull with flapping feathers.
The preacher Thomas also began a hymn in praise of the mannerist literary style that had reached its ultimate perfection under Marino: every word was made by the most microscopic, learned and sensitive observation of Nature into palpable, visible reality, fantasy run riot, dreams, a rainbow-mixture grown fat on poppy-head seeds, are eternally present in every moment of a sentence, every half-uttered syllable, and together with them is every crystal, flower, animal in Creation, static stars and planets, the clouds of stars that screen infinity like snow; all this carnival, all these comets frothing with kisses run on wheels and pulleys of the strictest logic and mathematical reasoning, but atom-splitting paradoxes shatter the wheels into a hundred thousand splinters and cynical Nonsense displays its larva-flanks in exhibitionism made irresistible by the opiate of nihil ;- all that love can offer in body and soul, in sweet order and even sweeter pseudo-disorder, for the cannibal plants of our desires and the raving, blinding and deafening glamour of our gratification, seethes and bubbles beneath the arch of Aphrodite’s arm. The most succulent tavern-jargon, the texture of ideas and ideals of neo-Platonism, the unrestrained meteor-shower of puns, titillating puzzles, incestuous catapulting rhymes, anapaests that resound in Danaids’ casks, the classical world, Gethsemane-world, the maddened theogonies of the New Indies twine their fresh green-blooded arteries about our European souls that have been anathematized into a spectre, the grilled-chicken heretics of Cataluña Católica and Estremadura. It is almost as if new religions came to birth in the lawnsoft, adolescent girl’s breasts of similes and metaphors, every back-stage scene of world-history and clownish hero competes with the narcissistic salamanders of ghetto-cabalas, and madly frolicking, suicidal, ravishing and murdering Sport shrieks from the fiery appendix of every clause, so that Pain’s bat-wing and Parca-shade may cast night on the espiritual, sensual, divino, animal grammar of Orfeo Marino and San Juan de Agostino. (Marginal note, footnote, a barely-legible insertion like a centipede: Polyhymnia, Cynthia.)
Saint Boniface, at a time when he was not yet by any means a saint, was asked by his very imaginative, very mystical, very hysterical, very Füssli-romantic, very superstitious and very luxuriosa mistress to bring her relics from the Near East, parts of the bodies of Christian martyrs, to cure her sickness, give her the peak of sensual delight, blaspheme against the Olympus of which she was bored, and ease her path to Heaven with Christo-Judean grace. Boniface set out, but during his search for holy relics became more Christian than any martyr; he too became a martyr, and sent his martyred body to his mistress on the symbol of the struggling Church, a “Peter-Vessel.” On the altar to which the preacher Thomas now took me (yo, el rey) in the course of his sermon on the humility of the Washing of the Feet, the statue of St Boniface was to be seen on a bier-a long, weary evening cloud resting on the loving shoulder of a hill, on the platter of a plain-and his mistress, with long hair and long unction, kneels, mingling perfume with tears, a Magdalena Renata, to wash, stroke, confirm, christen and shoe Boniface’s feet with crossgartering. Boniface is smiling, he knows everything; generally a man knows everything if his blood is a martyr’s, if he died a “Christ-fish” gliding into infinity, if his love is the finest, if marriage and consecrating grace intermingle like the Tigris and Euphrates ;- in the temple of eternity which knows no walls, our earthly existence is an unwound clock-Boniface knowns that too (so Thomas of Villanueva explains Boniface’s Gioconda-smile and the tears that cling and tinkle like the long earrings of the mistress, not even touching the superfluous bowl of the washing of the feet or asking for me) Boniface knows this too, so does she, so do you, Harle-Quint: every human body, from birth to death, is a relic, for after all the plastic, eternal heir of the creative idea of the Lord God, its holy and most holy relic even in all its filth is the vessel of the Holy Spirit, the body of leprous beggars.
(Postscript, an intrusive scribble in Charles V’s notes : Euterpe. Confession
and Puppet Play.)
Carolus Quintus, you know that for you and for me ( … fellatio cum vocabulis … ) the fate of the Jews who live among us in great and holy Spain is a continual concern; that of bloodthirsty, chauvinistic Maccabeans, of humble, gentle questioners of Christ, of foxy, cunning, opportunist converts, of those steeped in mystical-magical daydreams in the ghetto-hovels that they themselves have chosen or been ordered to occupy by their Spanish and Arab masters, of philosophers pursuing supreme Logic and mole-like, gnome-like rationalism, of Shakespeare’s Shylock and of Imre Fortunatus, the finance minister of your sister Maria (Hungariae Regina!).
This seventh altar commemorates Pope St Sylvester I; if the Jews were allowed to depict man or God in sculpture, you might think, Your Spanish-spaniel Majesty, that you were in a synagogue, for in the altarpiece you see nothing but Jews, rabbis, cabbalists, philosophers, prophets, the most distinguished representatives of the Kosher School, Aquinaj of Haifa, all of which is nothing compared with the fact that you can see the empress and Saint Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine the Great, the discoverer of the Sacred Cross, in Jewish splendour, almost like a female Solomon; she is depicted most true to life, and why? because in every history, legend, document of Tacitean severity and fragile hymn of praise there is unanimity: as a result of her long stay in the orient, the empress “began to turn towards the Jewish faith,” indeed she adopted it in secret. At the head of her rabbinical “conclave,” she engaged in a religious debate in Rome with Pope Sylvester I, but in the synodical theo-gymnastics the pope was victorious, confirming his strictest and triumphant Aristotelian syllogisms with the raising of a dead bull; Helene repented of her blasphemous sin of apostasy, knelt at the feet of the pope and (like the theological repentant prostitute, Magdalena Renata) wiped them with her hair, smeared them with myrrh and kissed the twenty snow-white toes of Sylvester I.(Nor was Satan idle, for the devil does not sleep; he immediately fabricated, and refashioned, the novelette of the bull and Pasiphaë and vilified Helena with it.)
(In old plays, when a character betrays a secret to the audience, the author writes “Aside;” such is the flavour of the next note in the “Carolingian” manuscript: Callipe. The Second Life of Sylvester II.)
You may well stand amazed at the altar of Doubting Thomas, the apostle, Charles, earthly king and earthly emperor of an earthly kingdom. You see the dome of glass; finely-regulated clocks and cheeses for finicky epicures are kept in such containers. And here? A seemingly endless document, parchment “note-paper” stretches out before your eyes with an ant-like army of letters on campaign; from the end of the letter-for that is what it is, an epistle !- weightier than a bison’s udder or a bull’s testicles and redder than any redness, there hang seals, leads and anchors which have struck now ineradicable roots in the ocean-deep sand and soil of Ultimate Truth. And the apostle Thomas, bent double, with his head almost grave-deep in the earth and his bottom a Babel pushing up into the clouds, kisses these congealedblood seals; he has learnt the art of this moral movement from Magdalen who kissed the feet of Christ.
The letter contains Thomas’s doubts, his most sacred questions, which are not criticisms and imprecations but an anxious and respectful hunger for an answer in face of the panorama of the world’s secretiveness that is blind and brilliant at the same time. He wrote it in his solitude, to send it to Christ.
The letter has survived. Did he send it? Or did he not? Did Christ read it? Or did he not? This is one more item in the catalogue of unknowns.
The seals he kisses are the wounds of the Lord Jesus (the greatest in his side); plunged in them, he received if not an answer, then the absolute promise of an answer to come.
The letter:
I gaze at the crystal-fair flowers of created nature, I search them, seek them, query them-their flower-fair, geometrically-fair, bubble-and-berry-fair crystals, the laws of their life, with its whims, order and adventures; in my breast there whirl all the rotting bones of the dead, past mannequins of mortality, the forgotten ashes of the cremated, while my every nerve, my poesy and thought thirst for eternal life and eternity-here I shiver in the cloakroom of the most voracious mortality and nobody comes for the cloak he has cast off-man, star, primeval cell, when did they all begin? When will there be an end to them all? Or are these words “beginning” and “end” only prostitute’s cast-off shoes into which no woman would ever put her foot? Are our language and words the caricature of thought and truth themselves? A falsely-tuned and impotent death-knell? The two run and run together like a dirty satyr Silenus and an impudent siren Nymph-the most endless astonishment at the operations of Nature, the quadrillions of cells of flowers and animals which from a single cell multiplied into the most orderly and planned puppet-theatre, Garden of Eden-and beside the almost stifling, ecstatic madness of astonishment the slaughterhouse, cattle-axing certainty of non-knowledge, the knowledge of nothing. Whatever we turn to is contradiction, our affirmatives (and anyway we brought them to birth with such justifiable cowardice) are hermaphrodite negatives, our negatives wild asses that turn and laugh at us, furies that kick us into the grave and calculate our debts with the drumming of horseshoes on our coffins-Lord Jesus! If you are the way, the truth and the life, if you are the son of God, if you are God himself, why is it your will that for man, beast, life and understanding nothing has any way out? That this world of ours is a retching orgy of False-hood? That the Hellenic beauty of the body in our marriage-beds, caro carnalis, is even in our arms a kingling knick-knack, Hades takes it to his bastards-Petrarch’s Laura-a cheap game for idiot children … Why are our morals a rag-and-bone market of a thousand meanings? What is virtue in the south is sin in the north, what is a totem in the east is taboo in the west-pestilence plays the hurdy-gurdy, injustice bellows and bleats a Te Deum to itself, destitution and poverty on dung-heaps give rhythmic applause to their corps-de-ballet of crab-lice; stupidity is the only vulva (a purple-holed gristle-medallion) which titillates the filthy gangrenous priapism of vice .. . !
I rage, Lord Jesus, I rage, compared with me Jeremiah is a dilettante, Job an incompetent, bungling poetaster of torture and after that there is nothing else! Clinging to the straw of logic, its gossamer-thread, its possible, rare golden chain, and losing heart, yet believing, for there is nothing else, nothing else! after that, I bow in humility “at the feet, all corns and pearls”(I quote Jeremiah from the Apocrypha) of the incomprehensible world willed by the Lord God-with the black crown of secrets on my head, the spreading peacock-tail of marvels and their rainbow cloak on my shoulders, the Adamite fig-leaf of ignorance to hide the nakedness of my brain-ego te, mysterium, in humilitate et dubitatione adoro!
The seals
have two meanings. First, they mean that Thomas (the apostle Thomas and Thomas of Villanueva) has absolute faith in the person of Jesus Christ and in his personal promise that he will give a perfect answer to every doubt and question-tomorrow? the day after tomorrow? in the red dawn of Whitsun? on the eve of the Last Judgement, the “dies irae?” And secondly, they mean humility before the secrets of Nature and the promise of the Lord Jesus. The Lord Jesus said, “The greatest among you must bear himself like the least, the chief of you like a servant” (Luke XXII, 26; IX, 48; Mark X, 43). (Scribbled marginalia, the nota bene of a last sentence: Urania, Canonized despair.)
The last altar! The very first of themes! The abdication of the pope St Celestine! … How often have you prayed, you child of Philippine beauty and Juana’s madness, Charles, in the town of Halberstadt, in the church of Our Lady, before the coloured relief of St Philip the Apostle? The apostle’s left hand is on a book, and his right hand, dismissive and keeping at bay, banishes from him the devil, this world, heretics, Weltgeschichte noise, mist-navelled females, the badly-darned blue-stockings of “thought” pre-ordained to die. Our ninth altar depicts St. Celestine in this dismissive, resigned, romanico-pomposo, catolico sumioso gesture, in all its fullness. Beneath his feet (let us sprinkle them!) in eloquent Latin style, is his desire to the end of the world that there should not be any opposition between the goodness, peacefulness, poetry, and wisdom of solitary hermits and all the hullabaloo of the personality of world history (hitherto bloody, stupid, wicked, lying and hypocritical)-whoever called it up-Satan? Jahveh? The Lamb? The apocalypse of the Lamb, his sacrifice on Golgotha be the most natural idyllic order, the “common denominator” to use the thieves’ language of the algebraic Arabs, of our solitary weeksdays and our public histories. (Postscript: Thalia. Bloody
Ass.)
Clarity, comprehensibility and complete lucidity are the prime necessity in every epic and drama, hence we may deduce the following in connection with the scene now described. The most passionate sermon of Thomas of Villanueva was intermingled with his great vision; this vision he communicated step by step with his audience which, under the influence of magic, sacral mass-suggestion, fell into just such a visionary dream as did Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain. At the end of the sermon they all felt they had witnessed, and partaken of, a miracle and left the church in possession of a miracle. This miracle applies to the nine saints. The connection between the nine saints and the nine Muses? Their connection with the nine stations of the Breviary of St Orpheus?
Translated by G. F. Cushing
A’NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Miklós Szentkutby, who was born in 1908, is one of the most original and controversial Hungarian writers of this century. Some critics imply or even claim outright that Szentkuthy is the greatest living Hungarian writer. Others find his work unreadable and the zest that produces the flow of his often highly complicated sentences simply a form of verbal intellectual deviance. Just as the opinions of critics are strongly polarised, there are those, unswerving admirers of Szentkuthy, who keep his novels, poured forth in generous abundance, in the place of honour on their bookshelves; others passionately complain of his verbal diarrhoea and the lack of a clear-cut line of events in his novels. No reader, bowever, remains indifferent by the work.
What is definitely of lasting value in Szentkuthy is his ingenious use of the stream of consciousness technique, partly inspired by Joyce, which breaks down accepted forms and is inherent even in bis first novels Prae (1934), Az egyetlen metafora felé (Towards the only metaphor), 1935, and Fejezetek a szerelemről (Chapters on love), 1935. With these Szentkuthy made a radical break with the mostly realist traditions of Hungarian fiction, launching a one-man revolution in the novel. A constant feature of his later works, including Szent Orpheusz breviariuma (Saint Orpheus’ Breviary) is the non-linear representation of events: the line is complicated, entangled, lost in whirlpools, leading nowhere.
For Szentkuthy is a born manierist-there are few writing in Hungarian this century who sense more acutely the disruption of a once solid system of values and taste and the difficulties encountered by the birth of a new set of values.
Realism, social criticism, public commitment, social mandate, topical relevance, are all alien to Szentkuthy’s personality; as an opponent to bis superbuman verbal sabre-rattling, he has chosen an enemy of considerable historic stature the Catholic Church itself. For he is a natural blasphemer, a libertine, an alchemist, a magician, an arch-pagan-at least these are his favourite disguises-bebind whose heretic prose, never to be taken completely seriously, it is not difficult to discover some kind of hope that the bistory of mankind is, perhaps, not an entirely futile effort, and that, perbaps, writing is not an utterly useless occupation either.
What else could lend strength to this blasphemous rebel decrying the heavens in writing his monumental works? Szentkuthy’s output is so copious that its mere physical weight would almost crush a reader to death. He is one of those proud writers who misses nothing in any line in bis novels: he is the author of a world who is able to flash and reflect something from the very richness of creation in each and every line of his. Naturally, his desire for totality is also his limit as a writer, in that what he creates suffers from not being more condensed and lacking construction. He was educated not by writers of belles-lettres but by the whole of cultural history; at times he is strongly inspired by the fine arts. Unable to bave bis own novels published in the fifties and the sixties, he had to be content with writing excellent novels on Mozart, Haydn, Goethe. As a literary translator, he has procuced translations of Swift, Dickens, and Joyce. (His translation of Ulysses is far superior to the other existing Hungarian version).
To introduce Szentkuthy, we have chosen the opening to Veres szamar (Bloody Ass), the fourth part of bis series Saint Orpheus’ Breviary, in G. F. Cushing’s virtuoso translation. The writer’s deepirrational, if you will-faith in humanity may be felt in this volume too: bumanity, the bloody ass, is staggering towards its ontological destiny, awash in its own blood, along the road of History, unless its Messiahs, constantly reborn, manage to “check” it. The ass, washed clean of its blood is, perbaps, no longer an Ass, but the Stallion of the fairy tales. But this pathetic conjecture would be absolutely alien to Szentkutby.
I. K.