Page 78 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
I have just given a poor description of the operation which consists in taking upon oneself the sufferings of others, but, aside from the fact I indicate its mechanism rather confusedly, it's too late; I'm too weary to make the effort to cast more light on it.
In order, not to establish Lucien in happiness, but rather that he may emit happiness, I want to fashion him in accordance with an image of him which I shall have first prepared, worked out and sketched by my own adventures. Thus, I gradually accustomed him to hearing me talk about them, to knowing that I was steeped in them, to talking about them himself without blushing, without pitying me or feeling sorry for me, for he has to know that I have decided that he will benefit from them. I therefore require that he know about my prostitution and that he acknowledge it. That he know the details of my pettiest larcenies, that he suffer thereby and that he accept them. That he also know about my origins and my homosexuality, my cowardice, my peculiar imagination which wishes on me a mother who is an old thief with a pale, shifty−looking face; my gesture for begging alms; my voice, which I used to crack and muffle, in keeping with a convention recognized by both beggars and bourgeois; my ingenious way, which I myself invented, of accosting queers; my faggotty carryings−on; my shyness in the presence of good−looking boys; the scene in which one of them refused my tenderness for the grace and impudence of a guttersnipe; another in which the French consul held his nose when, he saw me coming in and had me thrown out; and those interminable jaunts through Europe in rags, hunger, contempt, fatigue and vice.
When I was deserted by Stilitano near San Fernando, my grief was even greater, my sense of poverty even deeper. (When Arabs talk about the poor, they say “meskine”. I was mesquin [shabby].) It was no longer even his memory that I carried away with me but rather the idea of a fabulous creature, the origin and pretext of all my desires, terrifying and gentle, remote and close to the point of containing me, for, now being something dreamed, he had, though hard and brutal, the gaseous insubstantiality of certain nebulae, their gigantic dimensions, their brilliance in the heavens and their name as well. I trampled Stilitano beneath my feet as he lay battered by sun and fatigue; the dust I raised was his impalpable substance, while my burning eyes tried to make out the most precious details of an image of him that was more human and equally inaccessible.
In order to achieve poetry here, that is, to communicate to the reader an emotion of which I was ignorant at the time—of which I am still ignorant— my words make appeal to the carnal sumptuousness, the pomp, of the ceremonies of the here−below, not, alas, to the supposedly rational disposition of our epoch, but to the beauty of those that are dead or dying. I had hoped, by expressing it, to rid it of the power exercised by objects, organs, substances, metals and humors which were for long the object of a cult (diamonds, purple, bloody sperm, flowers, oriflammes, eyes, fingernails, gold, crowns, necklaces, weapons, tears, autumn, wind, chimeras, seamen, rain, crape) and to free myself of the world which they signify (not the one which they name, but the one which they evoke and in which I am mired); my attempt remains futile. I always have recourse to them. They proliferate and snap me up. It is their fault that I make my way through genealogical strata, the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, Carolingian, Merovingian, Byzantine and Roman times, the epics and invasions, in order to arrive at the Fable where all creation is possible.
I used to wonder what was hidden behind that veil of saliva, what the secret meaning was of the unctuous−ness and whiteness of his sputum, which was not sickly but, on the contrary, thrillingly vigorous, able to stir up orgies of energy. I would conjure up the vision of his prick. At times I would imagine it black, alive, detached from him and standing upright and rigid, like a leech, and similarly swollen with blood. (Excited in my random readings by coming upon terms evoking religiosity, I quite naturally made use of them in musing on my loves, which by being so named took on monstrous proportions. I would be swallowed up with them in an original adventure governed by elemental forces. Perhaps love, the better to create me, acquainted me with those elements which summon forth the heady words that are used to name them: cults, ceremonials, visitations, litanies, royalty, magic... By such a vocabulary, by the amorphous universe which it offers and which I contained, I was dispersed, annihilated.) In this disorder, in this incoherence, I wandered from village to village, begging my way. Every two or three miles along the coast of Spain the coast−guards
The Thief's Journal 76