Funeral Rites by Jean Genet Page B

folly of that question even now, because it's not my reason that asks it but my love. Not having a scientist at hand, I put the question to myself. I waited for the answer, quivering with hope. In fact, hope made everything in and around me quiver. I was waiting for an invention that only hope could devise.
    That quivering was the flapping of wings which is the prelude to flying. I know that a resurrection isn't possible and wasn't then, but I won't allow the order of the world not to be disturbed for my sake. I thought for a moment of paying a man, a gravedigger, to unearth what remained of the child in order to hold in my hands a bone, a tooth, so that I could still realize that a wonder like Jean had been possible. My poor Jean-in-the-earth. I would even have allowed him to return to us in any form: that of two pieces of veneered black wood streaked with white lead, glued together, like a fantastic silent guitar lying in a bed of dry grass in a shelter made of boards, far from the world, which he would never leave, not even to get air, not even at night, not even during the day. What would his life be like in the form of a crude, stringless guitar without a pick, which could hardly talk and complain of its lot through a crack in the board? It doesn't matter. He would live and be present. He would be in the world and I would clothe him in white linen every day. The fact is that my grief, which made me rave, invents this riot of blossoms, the sight of which gives me joy. The more Jean changes into fertilizer,the more the flowers growing on his grave will perfume me.
    The appetite for singularity and the attraction of the forbidden in concert delivered me up to evil. Evil, like good, is attained gradually by means of an inspired insight that makes you glide vertically away from human beings, but most often by daily, careful, slow, disappointing labor. I shall give a few examples. Of the tasks involved in this particular ascesis, it was betrayal that was hardest for me. However, I had the admirable courage to move further away from human beings by a greater fall, to turn my most tormented friend over to the police. I myself brought the detectives to the apartment in which he was hiding, and I made a point of being paid off for my betrayal before his very eyes. Of course, that betrayal causes me tremendous suffering, which reveals to me my friendship for my victim and an even deeper love for man; but in the midst of that suffering it seemed to me, when shame had burned me through and through, that there remained amidst the flames or rather the fumes of shame a kind of imperishable diamond with sharp clean lines, rightly called a solitaire. I think it is also called pride, and humility too, and knowledge too. I had performed a free act. In any case, refusing to let my act be magnified by disinterestedness, to let it be purely gratuitous, an act performed for the fun of it, I completed my ignominy. I required that my betrayal be paid for. I wanted to strip my acts of anything beautiful that might be involved in them despite everything. However, the most heinous crimes are embellished with a bit of light when they are committed by a handsome person who lives in the sun and is bronzed by the sea, and I had to rely on a little physical beauty in order to attain evil. May I be forgiven for doing so. Because I envisage theft,murder, and even betrayal as emanating from a bronzed, muscular, and always naked body that moves in the sun and waves, they transcend this ignominious tone (which was an attraction for me) and find a nobler one, which is more closely related to solar sacrifice. But despite my life in the sun and my live body—the sort of life which I have been living since Jean's death—I am still attracted by so-called somber people, those in whom something reveals darkness, those who are wrapped in darkness (even if it is the darkness that is also the brilliance they radiate), those who are dark or fair with dark eyes, or with