A Nomad Becomes All Men

Genet’s community is always impermanent. Never in his writings does he describe a place called home in which he bases himself. He goes to great lengths and personal pain in order to distance himself with any group that lays claim to the concept of home. When he does ally himself to any group that has a recognizable identity, it is always on his terms and often counter to the aims of the group. Genet demands to be the center of the universe. In fact, in one passage he tells us that he cannot bear the fact that people make love without him, and in another that nothing could ever console him for the fact that he, himself could not contain the world.

 

Though I have only browsed Sartre’s book, I agree with him as to the sainthood of Jean Genet. Genet, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, demands that the sacred manifest itself everywhere. By the sacred what I mean is what exists for it’s own beauty and glory, beyond all usefulness. Sartre was correct in saying that for Genet, what seems fact takes on the vastness of myth, and what appears as events are really rites played out in this mythology. This mythology was by no means homogeneous. Always shifting, the myths serve as the vehicle for a vagabond in a daydream, with never a goal, aim, or end in sight. This tailored cosmos did, however undergo a drastic change in nature at one point, but first let us examine his Journal.

From page one of first of Jean Genet’s most autobiographical books, the Thief’s journal, he takes us headfirst into his daydream, and similar to a warning that Lautremont had prefaced his famous chants, Genet makes it clear that by no means is this to be a book for the moralistic or lighthearted. “Lovingly pursued what is called evil” is how he describes his own life up to that point. He also clarifies that what he lives is not to be mistaken for rebellion, he seeks no such close relationship with a world that he despises. “Your world”, is how he addresses the reader, seemingly speaking to the reader from the page the way that Alice would from the other side of the looking glass. He is not speaking to us, but at us. From the first page he calls what he is about to submerge us in as a forbidden universe. And indeed it is a forbidden and consciously alien world to that of most persons who would buy this book. It is here that objects wholly lose meaning, persons are endowed with divinity, and for the author, the more humiliation he feels, the more abjectness he owns, the more he betrays everything or one who ties him to “our” planet, the more freedom he acquires. “You feel yourself living”, is how he describes his life. With each step away from us, his world assumes form and meaning, yet when his immediate world is entirely constructed, and the terms for its existence fully plundered (and fixed), he abandons or destroys it.

The situation of the Self within the self, as opposed to the situation of the self within an external, or given context recalls what Henry Corbin calls visionary space, a space created between, or rather born from personal mythology and given realities. This space cannot be situated as a “place”, because it’s very nature is such that it is situative, reality falls into place around that which perceives it. He calls spaces of this quality imaginal.

 

In this book that is rather difficult to follow (as are all of Genet’s books, Kathy Acker states that one must dream it to read it.), the author often portrays persons who he respect or admires. One such person is Rene, the queer basher, who is queer himself, though outside the world and socialization of queers. Genet sees Rene as victim and criminal, self contained, therefore isolated and autonomous, an act that contains it’s own consequence. Another person to be the object of his meditations is an old woman arrested for dousing both her deformed daughter and their house with gasoline and setting them aflame. He sees this woman as cultivating a monster upon which a new morality would be based. This monster is both the deformed child and the love of it, a love that the world is not allowed to touch or see. The woman raised the child in secret. Genet notes, “She was saved, that is, brought to trial.” As if the public condemnation of a criminal is the equivalent of canonization. The various thieves and pimps with whom he finds himself, along with his isolated heroes become for him an imagined, or dreamed community, a conspiratorial one. He says, “The invisibility we needed.” There are others whom he admires but does not ally himself with. For instance, in discussing soldiers he makes it clear that he shares with them a certain marginalization but that theirs does not go far enough. In them, Genet sees a group that exists on the fringes of society, still sits within society’s context and in need of interaction with it.

It is as a soldier that Genet first begins to practice betrayal. In this company he says that he felt welcomed to the world of men for the first time. Though this is said with a certain amount of affection, maybe a bit of nostalgia as well, he soon situates himself as a thief among this fraternity, speaks of it as betrayal, cutting ties with those who welcomed him and ensuring that he does not become one with those who enjoy commerce with society. In another example of a limited solidarity he sees a procession of Drag Queens at dawn, solemnly walking through the town to lay flowers upon the rusted and twisted remains of public restroom destroyed by citizens presumably intolerant of it’s transformation into a temple of prostitution. Genet tells us of one of his criteria for solidarity, which he clearly divorces from sexuality, “I followed them not because I belonged to them, but because their cries pierced the shell of the world’s contempt”.

Everyday objects in the Thief’s Journal serve as a kind of mantra, or door that opens Genet’s imaginal. One such instance has him observing a soldier play with a ball. He exchanges a glance with the soldier. In this glance Genet first becomes the glance, then the space between the soldier and the ball, next the foot of the soldier, the ball itself, and finally the idea between them, purifying all into archetypal images. There are two ways to go with a thing, the center of which is the thing itself. In one way we have the representation of a thing, the arena of objectification and use value, the other being taking a thing to it’s source, or essence, archetypal images that assume life within who imagines them. Genet takes the latter a step further by becoming the thing itself in its essential form. A result in this process is the destruction of linear time, which he calls, “caught in the ice flow of being”. Each moment extinguishes itself upon manifestation, leading nowhere. Genet is himself is unstable, subject to what he imagines each autonomous moment is in essence.

This metamorphosis is accelerated by what he described as the birth of intelligence, where the fundamental relationships between actions and things begin to fragment. Up to this point in the narration Genet had shared a common language with the world, that of common relationships based upon use value, but his aggressive divorce from morality seems to have the by-product of the decomposition of meaning. It is value itself that is rotting. He now perceives the nature of things as opposed to their function, and begins to base his love upon this perceived autonomy.

The author’s life was intensely nomadic, yet highly social. The socialization he experienced took place within alliances, very temporary, with others who laid no claim to territory or property. Affection within those communities was fiercely loyal, but loyal to that affection, not to the objects that it represented. When that affection became too established, or taken for granted, life would become empty gesture and habit. It is here that I think betrayal enters. Genet describes friendship as a bond that is needed to break. What I see in this is that it is not love that is betrayed here at all. Friendship posits people as objects related to and defined by one another. What transcends objects is the love one feels for them, and in order for this love to remain sacred, all objectification, use, or need must be severed. In his early years we have the blueprints for Genet’s conspiratorial community. The integrity of this community cannot be separated from its ability to negate definition.

It is Genet’s ease in flow, to perpetually shift and shed according to a myriad of self-willed contexts that brings him to an ultimate test to which his way of being in the world will fail. A record of this crisis is detailed in the small book, “What remains of a Rembrandt torn into four equal pieces and flushed down the toilet”. In these pages he narrates an experience on a train where his absent-minded gaze accidentally meets that of another passenger. The momentary meeting of the eyes becomes the vehicle for a complete loss of identity. This loss begins as Genet feels his identity and that of the passenger flow into one another through their eyes, with the conclusion being the knowledge that he was the other, or that all people other and of the same value as himself. Rather than experience this universal oneness as the liberal/humanist experience of a beautiful universal Brotherhood, this discovery fills the author with revulsion and panic. His conspiracy of thieves, thugs and whores was finished with a glance, the distance between Genet’s imaginal and “our” world had instantly evaporated.

When a world collapses, the person who lives it, in most instances will run in every possible direction in order to escape a personal apocalypse, yet owing to his entirely sovereign experience of subjectivity, Genet tells us sadly that there is no way of unknowing what is known, and that he must pursue this revelation as far as it will go, in spite of whatever catastrophic consequence.

 

Genet confesses that certain situations had forced him into poetry. It is often freedom of readily recognized structure that distinguishes poetry from other forms, and the poetry that he speaks of is a poetry that is lived. It was this way of living and composing poetry that eeventually pushed him to a wall, for he could no longer be any man, but was obliged to be every man. Difference between people was extinguished, or confined to the superfluous. With all of humanity reduced to a singularity, Genet tells us, “I was already bidding them a nostalgic farewell, and it was not without sadness or disgust that I was entering ways that would become increasingly lonely” When he stepped off that train, he was the only person in the world and every person in the world.

 

This little book has a Paris publication date of 1958. For a time beginning in the early 60’s Genet had stopped writing as well as having denounced his one film. We don’t hear from him again until the early 70’s, and within the interim was a reputed suicide attempt. Now, while specific causes for this can be attributed to one “fact” or another, I see a mind set and personal vision demolished, or flushed down the toilet, as perhaps a crucial background to Genet’s renunciation of poetic work and life. When we do hear his voice again it is allied to political causes, and though his politic is still supremely personal, the thief and whore poet is reluctantly among us.

 An apparent change in vocabulary distinguishes Jean Genet’s later writings from his more prolific days as a writer when he begins to speak for certain political groups in the early 1970’s. Most prominent is the substitution of the word, “real” for when he would have formerly used the word, “your” in addressing the reader’s world. He says in the preface to the letters of George Jackson that Mr. Jackson is in a real prison, or that the Panthers are armed with real weapons. Reality seems not just the common ground that the war over ideas, injustices, rights etc. are waged upon, but that which is loaded with the power of mortal consequence. The value is not placed on the context that power determines, but on the consequence of power’s use. Power seems to have punched a hole in the subjective and war declared not because power exists, but because through that hole its fist grasps for and seizes anything personal to destroy it.

  

Genet mentions his change in vocabulary when noticing that prior to his time with the Panthers and the Palestinians he would have avoided such words as hero, martyr, struggle, resistance, liberation and courage, but remains repelled by the words, homeland and fraternity. He is politicized to the extent that it is the personal at stake, and his heroes and martyrs are people he knows or admires who are willing to fight a power much stronger than themselves on that power’s terms, (with weapons that end life). But a politic that presupposes any nationalism or exclusive membership keeps Genet from wholly identifying with. He says of the Palestinians that his body, mind and soul belonged, but never all of him.

“Everything in the world was waiting for me to wake up to the world...by staying with them I was staying with my memory...their revolt was eternal, uncreated and consubstantial with me” Could he be speaking of what was formerly “our” world? And if so, in order to find a perfect expression in that world, how had he found the Panthers and Palestinians as a people that was always in him?

Rather early in the book, Prisoner of Love, Genet gives a comparison in the construction of pottery as made by a Tunisian and a Japanese potter. If the Tunisian makes a mistake at the wheel he lumps the clay together and starts a new vase, while the Japanese potter will use a flaw as a departure point for a more private expression of themselves. The Tunisian vase will supposedly withstand a millennium, having been created without flaw so complete as to remain unmovable, rigid and anonymous. The other, while not permanent, allows chance to enter the composition as a reflection of it’s author. This could help see how Genet sees himself in relation to both groups he now allied himself with. Both groups had concrete and determined goals within history, both a form, a vase. Not without affection he uses them as would a Japanese potter.

  

Though one in the United States and the other in the middle east, both the Panthers and the PLO are denied a physical place either to be called home or to wage war from. Since they lack a place the war they wage surges forth from the imagination. It is the idea and dream that form the borders of their countries. In the geography of these dreams Genet wanders his later years, and though his traces are difficult to follow, he does in his last book chart out a place for us to read or seek. “A border is where a human personality expresses itself most fully...it might be a good idea to extend borders indefinitely without, of course, destroying their centers, since it is them that make a border possible.”

A person as a place. The center, the seat of identity, alone is an isolated, amputated, and mute thing. It needs a body, or place from which to move, and is activated socially by what moves it to other things. To extend what moves a thing, or animates it, indefinitely, would contain the possibility of infinite inclusiveness. Because Genet sees a blurring of border rather than the friction and tension of borders colliding, he is able to see the overlapping of imaginary lines of territory, and deep inside those lines the thing that is a new country, world, or new map. The other night I was on a roof, drinking with some friends. I noticed how falling stars are most always born and die on the periphery of a night sky. Stupidly I asked, or wondered aloud why this was so. The answer I received was burdened with fact, mathematical and scientific, while the answer that I preferred was that the falling star is what gave voice to the sky, made it express itself more fully.

What Genet calls the material vagrancy of Islam, the wandering through space and time, he sees reflected in their calendar. This cosmic drifting of the stars and on the earth, without goal and open to change is a strong tie for him to Islam. In a paragraph about this material vagrancy, he seems to, word for word, describe himself. It recalls again that pre-Islamic theology of visionary space which sees geography as event rather than thing described by Corbin. The one who lives within it wanders through event, not space. The nomadism of Genet has an affinity with the caravans of old, which I would say were driven less by trade, resources or politics than by a view of life as event within event. What this geography calls for is an end to nouns, a vocabulary of verbs.

If the Palestinians and the Panthers operated from a terrain contained within a dream, they themselves were enveloped by that Real that Genet speaks of with caution, respect and contempt at once. The dream implies a dreamer, who in turn is subject to this Real, with whom it wages war.

 An interesting bit of conversation between Genet and his friend, Mubarak, an African officer in the PLO.

 “Are you an Arab or a Negro?”

 Genet asks him in the sort of friendly jostling, or provocative conversation that is characteristic of their relationship.

 “I suppose I need a perspective and I don’t have one.”

Political identity operates on borders, with other borders, often contrary to the intentions of the center, true identity. It is an attempt at communication that takes place externally from one’s own place of situation. Communication could be an example of a border’s extension as it is a movement away from the center. What, or whom Mubarak sees himself as is irrelevant to how he is perceived. In order to serve the ends of his truest self, his center, a political identity is donned in this attempt at communication. Being Arab or Negro is a political choice, and when I say that such a thing may be contrary to it’s center, it is to the extent that one cannot say everything at once, and being black or Arab is but one word in a sentence spoken in a conversation always to be seen in context. Despite all this, when a dreamer is in conversation with a fully awake power, trying to communicate or even preserve the dream, he risks having his skull crushed. While still dreaming the dreamer must remain fully awake because the pitfalls of sleep are many. There is a way of action Genet sees, or of conducting oneself while sleepwalking that is just as true to the dream as it is sure-footed in physical, actual geography.

“When someone makes a political choice they ought to be quite clear, but when someone enters a revolutionary trance, he ought to leave it quite vague, above all he should not try to understand”

 There is a tension in how to treat the revolution, or dream, and how to articulate it by the choices one makes. This tension is the high wire of the sleepwalker. Step one way and lose your life, another and you lose the dream. In both cases it is forever.

 “When the persecuted begin to resemble the persecutors what is called for is a super-human challenge to the rest of the world.”

 Rational pragmatism sells the dream to logic in order to succeed. The revolutionaries become the tyrants, and this is the price of selling dreams. Here Genet sees the challenge as two choices, “impossible heroism or a tolerance of an all too human behavior, sublime challenge or spinelessness.” Just some of the risks in dreaming.

 As a dreamer dreaming within a dream, Genet observes the qualities of these revolutionaries that draw him to them, the qualities that permit him to speak through them. In a passage about the Panthers he discusses their tactics in terms of strong vs. weak. He admits that the weaknesses are what brought the Panthers down as far as political goals, or in the terms of Power. He mentions the squandering of money, lack of rigor in the face of image, and slogans as replacing ideology. But above all, these weaknesses seem entwined with their honesty, transforming them into strengths, much in the way a Japanese potter will turn a flaw into a personal expression. Perhaps if the Panthers were to have made themselves in the fashion of a Tunisian vase they would have triumphed historically. Genet says the only way the Panthers could wage war was through the spectacular with the danger being that they would dissolve in this spectacular, which is in effect what happened. He goes on to say that they won as poetry, or survived through poetic gesture in spite of their own spectacle. (The Panther movie would have changed his mind as it finally absorbed the myth and poetry into a larger spectacle).

Of the Panthers he says that they were torn between a rejection of marginality and drawn to it’s ecstasies, that they were a people who had to “gash their way” through white society in order to be heard, “complete with murdered cops, hold ups and open arms”. By any means this is marginal, but it is marginality desperate to be heard. In the Palestinian case, he sees that their revolution may not necessarily be for territory, which was only a pretext, but for a complete metamorphosis of Islam. Here Israel was the obvious enemy, but within the Arab nations the Palestinians were cast out and looked upon with contempt as well. Genet stayed with the feyadeen encampments his five years among them, the feyadeen being the young fighters, the lowest on the ladder of PLO hierarchy. It was how they conducted themselves, without a hierarchy of their own, and always seemingly cheerful in spite of constant risk to their lives that kept him with them.

He says that they risked the “martyrdom of habit” if fears lead them to defeat, and because altruism and good intentions were not compatible with the realities of war. His deepest affection is with the feyadeen, and most of the book is a hymn to this affection.

With both the Black Panthers and the Palestinians what draws him is the joy in the lives of those people that the world called and treated as terrorists, and he says that we must by no means underestimate their intelligence, that they knew that they were just a spark in history, likening them to tracer bullets, a line of light that sears the night sky. (Falling stars on the borders of the sky). But as bullets they also are weapons. Genet the poet/spokesman says of them, “The sorrow in their lives requires a joy and mirth that will cauterize it’s own source.” The cheerfulness of those who have ceased to hope.

 At points he calls himself to task, pinch himself to awaken to his own dream. He reprimands himself for falling under the spell of the poetic allurements of rebellion, as he sees an almost invisible call to conformity in most rebellion. Genet has to keep with the dream, but in his own.

“More and more I believe that I exist in order to be the terrain and proof which shows other men that life consists in the uninterrupted emotions that flow through all creation.” Back to flow. “With a naked gaze more lively than profound, I sought in other people’s eyes the thin, silk thread that ought to link us all, the sign of a continuity of being that two gazes intertwining without desire would be able to detect.”

Near the last pages of this book, an old man, quite near death, has a desire for a house. He builds a garden, furnishes it sparsely, and moves from room to room in order to see the garden, or to view the sea. One day this old man sees a house identical to the one he has built in his mind, and he mentions to his companion how lovely it is. His companion mentions that the PLO can rent it to him, whereupon he sees how determined was his dream by the forces that control or destroy imagination. The house in question becomes a tomb, and the old man must find a way to abandon both it and its twin in his mind. The sea they overlook is full of floating corpses, and the gardens tended by slaves. In order to live, he turns from the houses and wanders into the desert.