Phaedrus

“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!