Lipstick Traces (42 page)

Anything was possible; the heresy overreached itself. “The women of Schweidnitz,” Cohn writes of one Free Spirit collective, “claimed that their
souls had by their own efforts attained a perfection greater than they had possessed when they first emanated from God, and greater than God had ever intended them to possess.” To these women, the Holy Trinity was only a horse. They rode it “ ‘as in a saddle.’ ”

It remains the all-time blasphemy; today we recognize only the catchphrase, severed from its history. One could find it in the
Village Voice
in 1984:

All that remained was the irony of severed history: according to the ad, to be a free spirit was to be ready to leave one’s work for a moment of pleasure, and Corzealious means “fervent heart.”

But the poetic conviction of the Free Spirit remains so fierce that one can almost believe that the little notice was allowed to appear—that time was permitted to continue, that the world was not destroyed—because, in their day, those of the Free Spirit did not refrain from those acts to which their nature moved them. Like the Ranters, they stripped off their clothes and preached naked; if they did not commit incest or murder it was because they wished not to. Naturally their inquisitors made no such distinctions. To the church free spirits were capable and culpable of atrocities beyond description, of ecstasy beyond God’s word. According to law, those heretics who refused to renounce their beliefs went to the flames; many laughed. All this Heinrich Suso knew when an apparition of the Free Spirit approached him.

It was about 1330, in Cologne. The cult could not be suppressed; the church was losing control of the mass to enemies who meant not to subvert it but dissolve it. Suso felt himself on the verge of temptation.

“Whence have you come?” Suso asked the spirit.

“I come from nowhere.”

“Tell me,” Suso said, “what are you?”

“I am not.”

“What do you wish?” said the man of God.

“I do not wish.”

“This is a miracle!” Suso said. “What is your name?”

“I am called Nameless Wildness.”

“Where does your insight lead to?” Suso asked.

“Into untrammeled freedom.”

“Tell me,” Suso said, “what do you call untrammeled freedom?”

“When a man lives according to all his caprices, without distinguishing between God and himself, and without looking before or after . . .”

Killing time in the monastery, Michel would have read these words in
The Little Book of the Truth.
It was everything he wanted, everything he was fighting against. The wedge was in.

Michel drew back. He dreamed of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where the Free Spirit first loosed its words, where he had lived without work and without money, sleeping on benches, begging meals, peddling ass, conning tourists. How different was it from the vow of poverty he took at Saint-Maximin, and how different was that from the plea of free spirits as they went from door to door hundreds of years before: “Bread, for God’s sake”? “They ask for little,” a political scientist wrote in 1970 of Left Bank cafe squatters. “They are willing to pay with their health. Violence and self-destruction are forms of existentially necessary penance. Every man is his own Christ.” The same words could have served in 1953 or 1871 or 1924 or 1949. “Generation
to generation,” Nik Cohn wrote in 1969, judging the hippies after reading his father’s book, “nothing changes in Bohemia.” But in Saint-Maximin, touching the Thomist philosopher’s stone, Michel felt his hand freeze.

Everything came to bear on the startling return of his urge to smoke. Against the simple lust for a cigarette, the rules of the monastery lost their force. Michel determined to leave; the fathers refused him. In secret, so as not to disturb the other novices, the fathers finally sent him on his way. It was a ceremony: Michel’s tonsure, the fringe of hair around his shaved skull, was removed. Like Frenchwomen who slept with Nazi soldiers, he was exiled among everyone else. With a naked head, exposed to all who saw him as a sinner, a reprobate, a deserter, a freak, he went back to the world. Waiting for his train to Paris, shunned by everyone else on the platform, Michel was filled with regret.

In Paris the existentialists were already a tourist attraction, the Deux Magots a stop on the tour. Michel slept in the parks and went to mass. Once more he abandoned the church. God dogged him. Michel knew of the Free Spirit and would have lived in its house if he could have found it, but the Free Spirit was gone, so Michel reached again for its mouthpiece, and in Nietzsche he found age-old words: “Nothing is true; everything is permitted.” Prowling the side streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Michel made new friends in the bookstores: Heidegger, Sartre, Camus. They opened up the void; he dove into it.

He panicked. Done with the Dominicans, he made straight for their archenemies, the Jesuits; a priest sent him off to teach German at a school in Normandy. Soon, Michel was sure, he would become a Jesuit monk. But he was not allowed to teach; he was forced to drill. God’s school was a military academy. He quit and returned to Paris.

These constant, countless reversals: psychiatrists could have been called in, but the pathology was social. As the years went on it became epidemic. In Berkeley in the mid-1960s, I used to wonder at the way friends made the world new each day by cartwheeling down the street, moment to moment
exchanging Trotskyism for anarchism for Stalinism for the occult for drugs for religion while professors who in the 1930s were Communists and now were Freudians explained it all. In every case there was a received answer to every question, which meant there were no questions. Everything seemed possible, and the prospect was terrifying—so “nothing is true,” one basis for “everything is possible,” was exchanged for one truth, whatever it was. Everything was present save a critical spirit, which might have made real the great adventure in doubt that, as Descartes described it, lay behind his “Cogito, ergo sum”: his dead slogan. No doubt the mad multiplication of choices by which “the sixties” are known led straight to a surrender of choice in the next decades, a surrender to authoritarian religion, authoritarian politics—for some, freedom from doubt was always the point, peace of mind worth any price. An aide to Senator Jesse Helms, tribune of the American right, could speak of the need to go back beyond Descartes, explaining that inside all the vulgar propaganda of fetus murder and racist nightmare was a true project: the repeal of the Enlightenment, the rebuilding of a world where the affirmation of one’s own thoughts was sin, the return of the will to God. Everyone knows history moves in circles; the surprise is how big the circles are.

Michel pressed on. In Paris he found kindred souls: poets, part of a gnostic cult called lettrism, led by a messiah called Isidore Isou. Chafing under the master’s yoke but not ready to throw it off, in a blank parody of their sect they formed the Circle des ratés, the Washouts’ Club.

I found my place among the disillusioned and embittered failures of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Like them, I settled down in the cafes on the Boulevard Saint-Germain or the bars of the Rue Jacob and proclaimed that life was pointless and absurd.

Everyone was bored and forcing himself to be bored. Thanks to Camus we had learnt that man is a stranger on earth, has been “dumped” on this
“scrap-heap” and forced to live in a world of which he will never be a part. If he tries to participate, he gets lost, “objectivises” himself and disintegrates. And if he does not try, he is still in the wrong, for he is neglecting the responsibilities he has towards everything that exists.

All that was left to affirm was despair, hate, sloth, self-loathing. With that affirmation a whole culture had been built on Roger Shattuck’s vacant lot: a cultured sleeping sickness, a slow suicide. As Mourre wrote
In Spite of Blasphemy
with the archbishop looking over his shoulder, it may have seemed only an act, “a mask to conceal our disappointment at not having found the truth, beauty and good.” But in the months before Easter 1950, Michel found the words carved into his cafe table, each crossed out:
WARHEIT
, no truth,
SCHONHEIT
, no beauty,
GÜTIG
, no good.

Or so I like to imagine—as if, after the Second World War, a few thousand cafe tables had been commandeered out of a Berlin warehouse by French occupation forces and shipped to Paris, fair exchange for art treasures the Nazis had shipped the other way. As if, sometime around 1918, Raoul Hausmann and the rest of the Berlin Dada Club sat around one of those tables. As if, having boiled their knowledge down to words Hausmann would not bother to commit to paper until 1966 (“Dada,” he wrote then, “was the issue of an indifferent creator”), they got out their pocket knives and put the logical conclusion into the wood—and in this fantasy, it wouldn’t matter that Michel Mourre would never read the words Hausmann finally wrote. Those words were according to the rhythm of the century predestined, its natural language, or its anti-language: as Michel sat sodden in his cafe, Hausmann’s words would trap him in a vise. Whatever one man can remember is another man’s fate. “An indifferent creator”—setting down the words in 1966, Hausmann was translating all the manifestos he and his comrades launched nearly half a century before, as they fought for the destruction of idols, the destruction of the talismans that said every compromise was made in heaven, “the destruction of the Beautiful, the Good, and the Truth, by the strangeness and intransigence of Dada, the fearless innovator.”

In Saint-Germain-des-Prés all that was left of the fearless innovator was a messiah who called himself Isidore Isou; all that was left was the Washouts’
Club. There was nothing new under the sun; what was really interesting was that there was no sun.

Tasting negation, taking it into his mouth, Michel could never swallow it. What he lacked was what Hausmann’s words still contain, the fury of an old man still refusing a world still refusing to satisfy him: a final intransigence, the harshness that comes from cutting all ties, the sense carried by the French word “franchise,” which means “candor,” but also “empowerment.” Bound to the stake, Michel would have felt recantation rising in his soul; cut free, he would have yearned for the flames; loose in the labyrinth of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where couples of all combinations fucked in the courtyards, dope was sold in the doorways, and the future of humanity was decided in the cafes, Michel always kept one hand on the string. Nevertheless he would inspire people more bent on franchise than he ever was—people whose goal in life was to find a way to say a no so strong it would create the will never to take it back. So it was for Guy Debord and Johnny Rotten, neither of whom has ever acknowledged the other, though Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid surely gave Johnny Rotten
Leaving the 20th Century
to read, and Debord surely read the papers Johnny Rotten made; even though
Leaving the 20th Century
begins with a fanciful account of Michel Mourre’s invasion of Notre-Dame.

The innovator was fearless because it came out of itself. The innovator was first of all intransigent, and it could not be satisfied. But even from beyond the grave precursors demanded fealty, and followers could only affirm negation, make it false, turn it into ideology, reify, trap whoever created it; to be a negationist was to be ready to acknowledge that one did not exist at all. The mysticism of the Free Spirit progressed through its several stages: only the strongest made it to the end, and the end was oblivion, the “annihilation of the soul” that had emanated from God. If one was lucky, after that fire there was a new soul; if one was not, there was nothing. In the fifteenth century the mystic Pico della Mirandola wrote it down: “If by charity we, with His devouring fire, burn for the Workman [God] alone, we shall suddenly burst into flame in the likeness of a seraph.” Pico was an enemy
of the Free Spirit. But as Robert E. Lerner says, Pico’s words “could just as well have been written by Marguerite Porete,” the Free Spirit adept burned on the site of Michel Mourre’s cafes in 1310—and she could have written James Wolcott’s
Village Voice
review of
Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols,
the band’s lp. When the record appeared in late 1977, Wolcott declared himself unsatisfied and looked instead to the Sex Pistols’ imminent American tour—the tour that ended in San Francisco, on 14 January 1978, with the self-destruction of the band. “I want to see Johnny Rotten laugh unmockingly,” Wolcott wrote. “I want to see him burst into flames.”

The most distant sort of Free Spirit inheritor, Johnny Rotten was by some epistemological alchemy being judged on the strictest Free Spirit terms. It was as if his faraway ancestors were present to match his trademark stare, standing in the crowd to throw it back at him—as if his first line, “I am an antichrist,” delivered just right, was enough to raise his unacknowledged ancestors from their graves. Unfulfilled desires transmit themselves across the years in unfathomable ways, and all that remain on the surface are bits of symbolic discourse, deaf to their sources and blind to their objects—but those fragments of language, hidden in the oaths and blasphemies of songs like “Anarchy in the U.K.” or “God Save the Queen” (“God save history,” Rotten sang; “God save your mad parade / Lord God have mercy, all crimes are paid / When there’s no future, there cannot be sin”), are a last link to notions that have gone under the ground, into a cultural unconscious. All that remain are wishes without language: all that remains is unmade history, which is to say the possibility of poetry. As the poetry is made, language recovers and finds its target: the history that has been made.