Canonized Despair
Adhering to an old custom of ours, we shall not at this point include a description of the figures and scenes of the Simon procession at Palermo or Syracuse (it is done though, and no use denying it … ), but will offer, instead of a figure or scene, some of the memories the author of the Breviary has of his journey in Sicily. Ever since he was a child and had learnt about the pre-prehistoric, Greek, Roman, Arab, Norman, Spanish and French history of Sicily, and since from the island of Capri his eyes first sought wistfully the shores of Sicily beyond the sea’s infinity, beyond the blue arc of the horizon: he had seen in Sicily (with adolescent Spenglering) the “Arabian Nights of cultures”, births and disappearances, carnival maelstroms, and the gleeful palm-leaved mummies of mutability on the revolving stage, the reeling showmen, drunkenly supporting each other, of eternity and ephemerality (in
brief, the contours of the Breviary … )
He is held captive by the countless golden and sable boughs of memory, by the hell-bent furore of capturing the moment and, also, perhaps, by a sense of its utter futility and when he burst into tears (at eighty years of age as the well-nigh eighty-year-old Hugo the Sceptic), he marvelled pondered and asked himself, why, in fact, was he shedding tears over his memories, his youth? Did he regret them? No. Did he wish them back? No. Did he really long to see Sicily again? No.
He read in one of Saint Hugo’s letters, “It is alien and incomprehensible to me why some of my learned fellow theologians prattle of vanished Time, about the quest for it and of finding it at last. In my soul memories constitute an eternal presence, and they exist in plastic form and plastic time and are unalterable-as by the same token they are also in God’s memory, in the impish bosom of the secretary-notary, the Holy Ghost.
Whatever has been, has entered (naturally with the endless variations of periods of time), the eternal IS.”
It wasn’t really evanescence that I was crying over but rather the fact that I was unable to understand the meaning of the secrets of Nature and History, of the juggling of good and evil, beautiful and ugly. The farewell is farewell, the adieu is adieu, but was I taking leave of carnal or spiritual pleasures? Kisses, food, drink, fight, play, money ?… I have never enjoyed even the bliss, the ecstasy of wearing a chamberpot of a crown: all my superfluity has been suffering and thinking; I have loved love with an all-too-infinite morbidity, but its doomed impotency has drowned all my letters and sound in writing and speech.
But I am no longer certain whether I am despondent or content, taking my leave in happiness or mortuary-sadness, whether I am comforted by the big chestnut fronds of eternity, or can laugh at my life’s futility (in the beginning was the most Logos-less Logos and Pain was its odalisque) -resigned? Embrace of forever feverish love? All-the-same and Passion? It happened to be in a museum in Sicily that I saw on the tomb of a bishop (named Giulio da Cunsero who was a liberal ecclesiastic as well as a great poet) the inscription of his own words:
“My soul longs for heaven, my body for earth.”
Philosophizing right, theologizing left: I could say the same of myself. And when I saw the most dazzling, multicoloured laminations of history on my very last (albeit who knows?) Sicilian journey, I always had him before my eyes with tears of inscrutability (in an espresso bar, an Italian girl in an almost frightening mini-skirt and spookish, gentian blue stockings noticed my tears, which I then tried to explain away by having swallowed something the wrong way, a cold, reading too much, choking from cigarette smoke, but nevertheless I availed myself of my petit-choking to press my knees between her Victoria-V thighs, two skittle-balls into silk dunes): yes, my children, history was my personal poetry on this Sicilian journey of mine; my subjective self pieced together into a mosaic by history. My recurrent, perpetual prayer and reflection, obligatory in a Breviary-about what? Where will you be, Sicily, you Syracusan, Agrigentoan, Palermoan (now already past!) history, a hundred million years hence, in the Universe?
The Breviary records with admiration that although Saint Hugo the Sceptic was similarly tortured by such thoughts (Lo, the biblical Tree of Life becoming the Tree of Death, the Tree of Knowledge merely a murderous blinding of the senses)-still with how much affection, wisdom, well-tempered crying did he acquiesce to our fatal stupidity and thought it worth his while (nay, the only worthy concern of his) to take the field-as we shall see-in the cause of his well-loved poor, with the sword of his poor: ” … he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one”, (said Jesus)-“Lord, behold, here are two swords” (the disciples replied; Luke 22. 36-38.).
At dawn. probably around four or five, I slipped out of the Conca d’Oro Hotel at Palermo because there were excavations going on nearby and the day before I had watched with my own eyes as they had lifted out a Latin sarcophagus carved at a later date with a royal or ducal coat ofarms.
The hotel: a hotel, nondescript, a mixture of dirt and the nauseating smell of waxing, red ragcarpets (slippery to the point of neck-breaking), WC’s flushing (urination or choking), dressinggowns rustling, slippers, pattering, dropping, appetite-killing kitchen smell, dim Art Nouveau mirrors and cheap neon-Cubism, jaundiced skeletons of lamps, the mail dumped on the threshold.
The sarcophagus is a kind of Breviary paraphernalia (standing in a puddle, half-sunk in a hole, the hoisting beams, over-white inside)-every tuft and stalk of the trampled grass is a suicidal nymph weeping for her marble dead on the slanting planks. Amorettes, angels, the pederastic bartering of love and chastity, Hellas-nude, Assyrian eagle, Christian soul: dangling little thingummies. Sacrificial offering-forever the fact, desire, compulsion, dread, business of sacrifice.
The feudal coat of arms is held aloft by running angels, legs in porno-straddle-stand, Nike-wings, St. Michael-wings, the wings of Ferdinand II’s falcons, the twittering of birds, Ascension and Assumption-history’s beloved pet birds: golden eagles and carrion-vultures, Rome-totem, German-totem, predacious and plucked: the harpyeagle masque-masses of Egyptian, Cretan and Cypriot high-priests in the dank mouldy or bonedry empty wells of the past; the dance of feather-headgeared eagles somewhere in Africa; selfmaddening rollings on the ground to the music of screeching eagles. (My favourite hunting-ground: Irish pagan-Christianity and Roman Christian-heathenism.)
When I was there last, montage and collage posters had long been in vogue-can it be that the Breviary is worse than these, a doddering copy of them? Cigarettes with Pharaoh, Coca-cola with Cleopatra’s death, lighter with the Altamira cave drawings: there was a stocking fashion-model staying in my hotel, and according to the stereotype (I’m still enjoying the idea), they wanted to photograph her with the pagan-Christian sarcophagus. The businessmen, promoters, lighting men were discussing the matter in the lounge yesterday-a pile of iridescent, star-spangled, clover-patterned lurex or mesh stockings either crumpled or stretched on tennis rackets-and they were selecting match, too.
Translated by László T. András
(An excerpt from Book VIII “Kanonizált kétségbeesés” [Canonized Despair ] of the author’s “Szent Orpheusz breviáriuma”[St. Orpheus’ Breviary]. Published by Magvető. 432 pp., 14.2×19.7 cm. In Hungarian)