“Phaedrus”
is – was—an all-white canvas, three paneled, we call it a triptych. On July 19,
2007, Rindy Sam, a Franco-Cambodian artist was arrested by Avignon authorities
after kissing the middle panel of Cy Twombly’s triptych entitled Phaedrus. The
prosecution called it “A sort of cannibalism or parasitism.”
(Massive clouds billow under a
golden-white sun. Beams of light sweep across a frozen expanse. Vapors
gather about the plane. From the haze appears a young man: lank but hale, ruddy cheeked, head prodigious with plaits of auburn strewn with leaves of laurel. He has wide-set,
entreating eyes of a glacial blue and he flutters lashes long and twined. He wears a chiton
hemmed just above the knees and a pair of sandals. His shoulders jut awkwardly from
above a sunken chest against which he clutches a vellum notebook. From the belt
of his chiton dangles a small bottle
of ink. A quill pokes out from behind his ear.)
Phaedrus
-
To
what shall I compare this life?
It
is the bark cast off at daybreak.
To
whom shall I sing my song?
To
a young poet, whose untimely testimony
Pursued
him in habits of pride and shame.
Charity! Pathos! Love! Faith!
The virtues are one in you, O mother of the earth,
Form of the good, way of the righteous.
I have forsaken my home for a higher ground,
Have let spoil fine wines, have let grow cold lavish feasts,
Have left empty a throne not yet tarnished
For a worthier repast.
My tools are thine, O mother,
That you may do with them what you will;
Though they are abject and clumsy,
Though they can never renew their form,
I proffer them to you (an incandescent oblong blur)
For I have loved thee always and loved thee only.”
He swept the dirt from his cloak,
Rubbed the searing tears from his eyes,
Lifted himself among his newfound kin,
And awoke, chaste and resolute.
Smooch!
(Phaedrus sits
himself on a nearby rock, the curvature of which conveniently accommodates his
buttocks, and opens his notebook. Lurking vapors about him curl in upon themselves. A shadow passes over him. He knits his brow and touches quill to lips, remembering.)
Phaedrus: …And love?
Twombly: Love is a species of
divine possession.
Phaedrus: Is possession not possession
by a daemon? Is possession by a daemon not a malady? Would it not then follow,
perforce, that love is a malady?
Twombly: The daemon you refer to
is not love but desire. Desire makes decrepit the soul, detains it from its
proper station, the citadel of reason.
Phaedrus: And madness?
Twombly: The nature of madness is
fourfold. The first form of madness is imaged by Apollo and is prophetic. The
second form of madness is the work of Dionysius and is invoked in the mystic
ritual. The third form is that of poetic madness and is given to us by the
muses.
Phaedrus: And desire?
Twombly: Desire is appetite.
Phaedrus: And poetry?
Twombly: Poetry is god-given; poetry is atemporal and sempiternal. The appetitive soul mauls the soul of
reason. Having vanquished reason, it feeds of itself.
Phaedrus: Is poetry the highest
form of madness?
Twombly: As we ascend the
hierarchy of possession, we find there is yet a higher gift of madness.
Phaedrus: What is that, master?
Twombly: That of love.
Phaedrus: What sort of love? Love
for the polis? Love of wisdom? Love
of men for other men?
Twombly: The love which effaces
every human comfort and makes an enemy of happiness. The love which disdains
convenience and courts oblivion. The love which would abnegate its very being
to unite itself with that higher power from which all things come into being. This is the true nature of
love.
Phaedrus: Do you hear that? Do
you that rustling?
Twombly: I fear the nymphs are
upon us.
Phaedrus: They will envenom our
minds!
Twombly: We must be off then and
cut short our colloquy.
The Prosecutor: Ladies and
gentlemen of the jury, what you find before you is a lonely, hapless youth.
Hapless, yes, “unluckly; luckless; unfortunate”, “without hap.” “Hap” meaning
one’s “luck” or “lot” or “an occurrence, happening, or accident”, “hap” from
the Middle English, also root of the word, “happy”.
Do you remember what it was like to be happy? Happy when your mother
looked down on you and leaned down at you and embraced you at the ribs and you
felt a tickle there as you ascended and nothing in the world nor the world itself
was held as fast and secure as you were in that very moment? To experience everything born anew at every
moment. To watch the ocean spume and gurgle before you and the frothing wake scurry in pursuit? It’s as if all the fibers of existence are at once rived and rewoven at every successive instant. Do you remember your mother paring your
fingernails and she pinched the tip of your finger and you winced but didn’t
cry out because you were big now but there always seemed to be bigger kids yet
and when you ate Dots, you got bits stuck in your molars and scraped at them
with pared fingernails and little success --
Defendant: Objection, your honor!
The Judge: On what grounds?
Defendant: On the grounds of an
illegal use of zeugma!
The Judge: Objection overruled!
Please continue.
The Prosecutor: I’ll tell you
folks, things sure have changed since I was in high school. Gee, I remember a
time when the desks were bolted down into the floor. I remember a time when the
classrooms were separated by this folding partition and you could hear the
class right next to you as if it were the same class. It was always the other teacher who caught my attention. If I was in biology
and next door they were learning long division, well, by gum, I’d come outta’
that class fiddlin' with some equations in my head; if I was learning long
division and next door was learning biology, I’d come outta’ that classroom
with head full of lungs and kidneys.
The Defendant: I’ve never been
to the Epcott center.
Rindy Sam - …It was just a kiss, a loving
gesture…
A
woman’s beauty is transient; my mother always told me that, and I took it to
heart. ‘We wilt, every one of us, us flowers.’ That’s what she would say, very
sententiously, with heavy, empty eyes. Men age with gravity, men age with
silence and shadows; men are weathered, women wilt. My mother lived to 93,
lived in a home of wrinkles, for years, sunken. 93 squalid; squalid like
the tissue in a cat’s ear; squalid like a toothless grin; squalid like the brittle
silence in big rooms; We should hope for a hovel of our own. A hovel in which
to eat what little helpings we have, tend to our bruises, ask fewer questions. My
mother, once a beautiful woman, made a hovel of her bones and wrinkles. She was
a tough bitch, my father said. She knew what he meant. He died a few hours
later. I ask no questions. Nothing that time can’t heal.
…it was just a kiss, a loving
gesture…
How
turbulent it all was! I would have smeared myself across its
canvas. If you could picture it now. For a moment, picture for yourself, a big,
white, vacuous room, awash in florescence. Imagine for a moment how it felt to
be soaked in that light with those "intellects", motes suspended
in the sickly purity of the florescence, undetected, insouciant. They were hideous. I couldn’t bear it. That goateed geriatric in the ascot, his
arms folded sagaciously behind his back, not deigning to show…not deigning to
approve…not deigning. And that little slut with her little slut grin and her
tweed vest. The vest can’t change what you are. The 30, 40, 50 blinding pearls
you show off with every gaping grin of yours can’t change what you are.
Imagine how they
marred the scene! My Phaedrus! How complicit they all were in
all it raged against! And how valuable
this time had become! To do something rather
than nothing and to be seen doing it! The currency of it all, the shimmering
mounds of seconds piling, piling, piling, inexhaustible.
He was a tabula rasa crying out, pining
for touch.
(The
lights dim, a disembodied chorus of voices echo from every direction.)
The Chorus –
My
Phaedrus is and is not. There is no signature of creation which he does not
already contain.
The Defendant - That fucking
light! That fluorescence! It begged me!
The Chorus - Entelechia, the continuous being-at-work, the entelechy of all being.
My Phaedrus, the entelechy of entelechy, endlessly perfectible, perfect in its
endless perfectibility.
The Defendant - Then you
understand? You understand my kiss?
The Chorus - My Phaedrus contains every kiss in an infinite series of kisses and
contains the infinite distance between each integer of the series of kisses. He
contains the serial infinity of an infinity of an infinite series of kisses.
The Defendant - It was a moment
in time, indelible, singular.
The Chorus - There is no temporal act which can add to or subtract from the
infiniteness of his being.
The Defendant - Just a kiss, a loving gesture. You must
understand!
The Chorus - He is the fulcrum upon which the micro- and macrocosm pivot.
Smooch!
(Phaedrus and Twombley lie dead. Nine blue nymphs dig in their entrails, hair matted with dried blood, faces splattered with fresh blood. Ravenous, beautiful, they claw and tear.)
We feasted on limbs
In the pure lunar light:
Cold and naked,
Driveling plasmic gold.
His lids were caked with silt
-- We cleaned them –
His wounds were filled with
pearls
-- We sowed them in earth –
In the night, on our star,
We ate his remains:
Heart, Brain, and Eyes
Our faces smeared
With mortal rouge,
We rummaged his guts
In the pure lunar light.
There is resolve in the purity
Of this light, the coldness of
this stone --
Quenched by a tincture of blood.
We, the dream of a body:
The fear, the lust, the silliness
Of this dead boy, our Phaedrus.
Sheltering pearls, wriggling
pearls
Still living, never quenched,
Pullulating from his viscera:
The inexorable offspring,
Blistering, hatching into new
life,
-- They tore through our skin—
That festering throng
-- They melted our eyes --
Gurgling molten into life.
End.
An Afterword from Mr. Twombley:
Twobley’s the name, Cy Twombley,
Please don’t kiss my triptych!
When I smear paint, it’s art;
When you smear lipstick, it’s a
crime.
Trust me, I used to be a
cryptologist;
That means I know how to disguise
intent.
The code is not embedded, nothing
is,
But here you stare and are folded
back into yourself,
Not that that’s the point, there
is none.
Brain, parasite of the body, primeval
eavesdropper, shriveled carbuncular ,cud-chewing schemata,
Out! Out! Out!
