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Inhabit

Harold Jaffe

The girl was 18 when she left her village in Yugoslavia for Ireland, there to attempt to join the order of Loreto, nuns who worked among the poor and dying in India.
     She had gotten the idea of India from a series of letters a Yugoslav priest stationed in Calcutta wrote, excerpts of which were published in Serbo-Croatian in a Serbian weekly newspaper.
     What was she feeling when she undertook the arduous trip from Skoplje to Dublin?
     She spoke Albanian and Serbo-Croatian but could not utter a sentence of English.
     It marked the first time she had left her rural village.
     She recited her rosary, but what of the cold, the discomfort, the extraordinary strangeness, the arduous weeks of the voyage, overland then by sea?
     She arrived in Dublin, made herself understood sufficiently to impress, be admitted to the order of Loreto.
     The next year, in accord with her wish, she was sent to India to work among the poor and dying.
     I'd like, respectfully, to gain entrance to the range of feelings she was experiencing when she made her arduous journey from Skoplje to Dublin.
     When she was admitted to order of Loreto.
     When she slept that first night among the sisters of Loreto.

     You want to gain entrance to the range of feelings she experienced?

     Yes.

     And do what with it?

     Inhabit it.

[Pause]

     Vincent Van Gogh shoots himself in the chest but doesn't die.
     He struggles to his feet, bleeding, and manages to get to his cot in his room at the asylum.
     (It's just like him to shoot himself point-blank and fail to kill himself.
     Maladroit where he is not brilliant.)
     What is he -- Vincent -- feeling, imagining, when, suddenly undead, he struggles to his feet, then to his cot?
     The intensity, the range of feeling?

     He had to have been hallucinating, no?

     When his devoted brother Theo comes Vincent on his cot is turned to the wall.
     That is how he dies.
     Suicided by society.
     Artaud's words.

     Turned to the wall?

     Turned to the wall of the wall.

[Pause]

     Commenting on Vincent's severing of his ear, Bataille insists the severing does not represent a brut Christianity or Tantric Buddhism but is a mutilation which intentionally disrupts the body for no other reason than that life as constituted is indefensible.

     Say that again.

     Bataille insists that Vincent's severing of his ear does not represent a brut Christianity or Tantric Buddhism.
     That it is a mutilation which intentionally disrupts the body for no other reason than that life as constituted is indefensible.

     I'll need to think about that.

[Pause]

     Named Agnes Bojaxhiu, the Ethnic Albanian girl leaves Yugoslavia for Dublin, Ireland, to attempt to join the order of Loreto, nuns who work among the poor and dying in India.
     She is admitted to the order and the next year is sent to India, though to Darjeeling, in the Himalayan foothills, rather than to Calcutta.
     When she leaves Skoplje for the very long and arduous trip to Dublin, what does the eighteen-year-old pack in her small suitcase?
     How, en route, does she wash and dry her single change of linen?
     When under the harsh conditions she manages a few hours of sleep, does she dream?
     I'd like -- with respect -- to inhabit that dream.

     Prayer was her dream.

     No doubt.

     It sounds like you want to jump-start your own trip to the sacred?

     How many of the "masters" who came of age in the Sixties jump-started their trip to the sacred by ingesting hallucinogens?

     Meaning?

     Whatever prosthesis works.
     The brilliant Huxley --

     Which one?

     Aldous with his very thin legs in tweeds.
     Soon after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he ingested mescaline.

     For what reason?

     Unreason.
     Have a sideways look.
     Whatever prosthesis works.

     What did Huxley see in the mescaline?

     A parallel life.
     Simpler, infinitely more rich.

     Then he died.
     So it was too late.

     No,
     To see, however briefly, is a gift.
     Becoming what you see is another matter.

[Pause]

     Theo Van Gogh, film-maker, TV personality, and great-great grandson of Vincent's devoted brother, also named Theo, was brutally murdered by a young Muslim man on a bicycle as Van Gogh was getting out of his car in an eastern sector of Amsterdam where many Moroccan immigrants lived.
     Other reports claim that Van Gogh was himself on a bicycle when the assassin attacked him on foot.
     Van Gogh had a reputation as a racist and anti-Semite.
     He'd recently made a ten-minute documentary called Submission about the alleged Islamic abuse of Islamic women, which included a scene of semi-nudity.
     Muslim commentators in the Netherlands accused Van Gogh of courting controversy.
     The Muslim commentators claimed the nudity was confrontational and blasphemous.
     According to Dutch authorities, the assassin was a fanatical ethnic Moroccan who schemed the murder with seven accomplices, all of whom had possible ties to Al-Qaeda.
     Van Gogh was shot, his throat was cut and he was stabbed with two knives, both found in his chest.
     One of the knives impaled several pages from the Koran.
     Since then there has been a rash of violence in the Netherlands directed at Muslims.
     More than 20 mosques have been assaulted and at least two were burned down.
     Throughout the Netherlands Muslim (not just Moroccan) men have been rounded up and interrogated allegedly to seek out Al-Qaeda supporters.
     To deport straightaway those whose papers are not in order.
     Theo Van Gogh?
     He routinely called Muslim immigrants to the Netherlands "goatfuckers."
     He was a vocal supporter of the Bush war on Iraq.
     He openly expressed his loathing for Jews and approval of the Nazi death camps.
     Theo Van Gogh, murdered, has been whitewashed.
     Transformed into a martyr.
     More popular -- in a recent all-Netherlands poll -- than Vincent.
     Than Rembrandt.
     Theo whitewashed and the Dutch become Boers.

     You're apologizing for his murderers?

     No.

     You're interested in "inhabiting" the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh as he is being murdered?

     No.

[Pause]

     In his 1890 oil, Prisoners at Exercise, Vincent Van Gogh's inmates walk round and round in a narrowly enclosed, stonewalled courtyard. A stiff-backed prison officer, arms crossed, looks on, and alongside him, in relaxed poses, two important civilians confab.
     The prisoners are hunched, downtrodden, most with their hands in their prison trouser pockets. Except for one, in the circle's center, red-haired, intense-eyed -- Vincent himself -- hands held stiffly at his side. Unlike the others, he's not looking down at his feet, but glaring boldly, defiantly at the viewer in silent, furious protest:
     Why us?
     Because we dared to say No to your lies?
     Prison? What constitutes prison?
     And what about you in your finery?

     Revolutionaries tend to die violently.

     Unless they become counter-revolutionaries, get fat and thrive.

[Pause]

     Agnes Bojaxhiu arrives in India and travels to Darjeeling, the British-styled hill station, where she takes vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.
     After two years she is transferred to Calcutta.
     She learns Bengali rapidly.
     She has already learned Hindi.
     She tends to the poor and the dying.
     After seven more years she applies to the Holy See for permission to live outside the Loreto convent.
     Permission is granted and she devotes her entire time to ministering to the poor and dying.
     That she later becomes world-famous is an anomaly.

     She didn't cultivate fame?

     She publicized her work because she needed rupees.
     More resources to minister to the poor and dying.
     There are never enough rupees.

[Pause]

     Vincent Van Gogh wanted people to see his pictures.
     Fundamentally he wished to be a simple Buddhist monk.
     One wish does not exclude the other.
     What he would precisely not wish is a descendant like Theo whose furious hate and spite martyr him.
     And turn the Dutch back into Boers.
     But reflecting for a bit Vincent would understand.
     The world moves both forward and back.
     Proceeds by oppositions.
     Not like Hegel.
     Like Blake.
     Of course Blake did not "live" in the world.

     He lived in his dream.
     And you would wish -- respectfully -- to inhabit Blake's dream.
     Am I right?

     Blake, Bataille says, was a man who never pursed his lips.
     Of course Blake, who rejoiced in the '89 Revolution, never spoke French.
     Even Jean-Paul Belmondo purses his lips while speaking French.
     William Blake was haunted.
     He sat nude with his wife Catherine in the natural bower behind his small house in Sussex reconciling opposites.
     Catherine was illiterate which didn't matter one bit.
     What formerly was called "nature" helped, dreaming in the verdant green.
     He died while singing songs to Catherine.

     You, then.
     Will you die like Blake singing songs to Catherine?
     Like Vincent with his head turned to the wall?
     Like Theo, dissident film-maker, hate-monger, violently set upon, murdered, martyred?
     Like Huxley, his very thin legs in tweeds, sideways mover, ingesting sight?
     Like the teenage virgin from Yugoslavia en route to Dublin then India on a prayer?

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