Entre chein et loup…
“Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general’s sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile.”
-Jean Genet
I once was browsing through the Oakland library … I had the day off and was just skimming titles. What does it mean when you go looking for a thing you don’t know you want? I do it regularly. It’s an act of fatalism, and for those who are unwilling to indulge in such practices from time to time I’d give you a little loving slap in the face.
Maybe there were a few things that attracted me to the book I ended up grabbing…
the plastic coating was yellowed and torn
the book was not too big or small- a good week’s worth of free time
the title: “Prisoner of Love”
But why am I thinking of this right now? Perhaps you are someone who’s life is like an open place. You look up and you see the area around you- you are in a field and you can see the path ahead. I would say I live in a more densely wooded area, and I like it that way. Open spaces have their own claustrophobic effect. Unexpected or anticipated actions leave room for chance- a little roulette and a little lottery dressed up in a different suit.
Envision with me, the cabin I grew up playing around in the foothills of the Smokies:
The place is a ramshackle combination of bought, borrowed, or swindled materials.It’s nestled at the fork of two hollows and a creek runs down the right side of the structure. Bats crawl into the salvaged carpet lying in the soon-to-be kitchen, and the porch out back has no railing. I convinced myself I saw a dinosaur once here. Once, a pony stepped on my foot in a hollow down below this cabin. I stifled a scream and limped for a week in silence so my mom wouldn’t keep me from walking so close to it. Our neighbors let a traveling bum stay at their house on a hill nearby- my dad called them crazy.
How would you like to fit this in with what you know now? Maybe you can more easily take the advice Richard Rorty offers, in his book “Philosophy and Social Hope”. He suggests the drive to organize and “piece together” all that’s happening in your life is a futile one. If you have decided that events and thoughts fit together in a smooth and pleasant picture way (think pictures on the front of puzzle boxes) then you might be a little bonkers. Rather, Rorty suggests, you might spend your time concentrating on a few organized and highly developed aspects of your life and come up with something that is a bit less homogenous but ultimately more agreeable to yourself and reality.
In Genet’s “Prisoner of Love”, he recounts time spent with the Fedayeen,( a fragment of the Palestinian Intifada), back in 1987 when their future was still uncertain and potential. Genet draws connections between the Palestinians and American blacks as a people lost in history, and finds himself among kindred spirits. His tone of writing waves from poetic to logical, and he mixes the Fayadeen’s stories of struggle and issolation with stories from his own past; time spent in prisons, on the streets as an orphan, in jail for theft and prostitution. He weighs his understanding and the understanding of others in acute peaks of logic. These pass. They are swept away in the rush of the present.
He recounts guerilla encampments and nighttime raids into Syria and Jordan as though they were the rendezvous of lovers. The Fedayeen seem to inhabit some ideological no-man’s land and Genet adopts the same space. He describes “distant gunfire under the stars” and how it mingles with the songs sung from one group of soldiers to another. I think “Where are we?”, as I read Genet’s writing. If a book is working it’s magic, you are in there with the author…
In his book “Our Lady of the Flowers “, (his first published book, for which he was pulled from prison by the likes of Jean Paul Sartre who couldn’t stand to let a brilliant mind be contained behind bars),Genet divulges a bit of his colliding and mingling dualism that brings together two opposing ideas throughout his life:
“There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter. “
Genet admits (sadly? his delivery is romantic, but dryly logical) that the Fayadeen, years later, will only be remembered as “…brief flashes in a world wrapped up in it’s own smartness.” The soldiers and their families are dear to him- an acute presence in front of him, and then they are dots on a horizon. They trigger memories, but they remain what they are and do not become symbols for something else. A brief flash. A whole group- a whole movement swept up in time, as the author is being swept, relaxed and aware.
I like to think of Genet in all of the places he writes from, a man falling out of time and place and still fixed in it so firmly somehow. Realistic about the present- always a bit detached from it in order to make way for the future. Letting the past become a narrated story which he is born from, but nor responsible to. Genet draws conclusions from time to time, but they remain mutable, in the end we are sure we learned something, but nothing has been decided on- everything has simply been described to us.
