shelidonAugust 27, 2024Leave a Comment

This next novel will be my first I-novel ever; of course, it won’t be an I-novel of the Literary Establishment sort, but it will be an attempt to vivisect myself in which I will turn on myself the blade of psychological analysis that I have honed for the hypothetical figure so far. I will aim for as much scientific accuracy as I can; I will try to be Baudelaire’s so-called ‘victim and executioner.

I’m reading Yukio Mishima‘s Confessions of a Mask (Kamen no Kokuhaku), and I think his depiction of the early discovery of being sexually different (the narrator is gay) is one of the best I’ve ever read. Kochan, the protagonist, lists the cornerstones of his coming into awareness, and one of them is seeing the black-and-white picture of a painting of Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. The sensual picture of the male body being killed haunts the young boy’s imagination. I give you a rough translation of the prose poem he includes to explain his experience.

San Sebastiano – A Prose Poem

Once, through a classroom window, I noticed a medium-height tree swaying in the wind. As I watched, a dull rumble rose in my heart. It was a tree of unsettling beauty. It stood perpendicular on the lawn, a triangle softened by its roundness; the dense sense of its foliage rested on multiple branches that stretched upwards and outwards with the harmonious symmetry of a candelabrum’s arms. Beneath the vegetation stood a sturdy trunk, like an ebony pedestal. There it was, that tree, perfect and exquisitely shaped without losing any of the grace and sincerity of Nature, which maintained a serene silence as if it were its own maker. And yet, it was surely something created. Perhaps a musical composition. A piece of chamber music by a German master: music, a source of such religious and tranquil pleasure that you could only call it sacred, filled with the solemnity and vague sadness that mark the designs of noble tapestries…

And so, the analogy between the form of the tree and the musical sounds took on a certain meaning for me. There should be little surprise, then, if when I was assailed by both at once, stronger in their alliance, my indescribable, mysterious emotion must have been akin not to lyricism but to that sinister rapture found in the union of religion and music.

Suddenly, I asked myself: Was it not this very tree… the tree to which the young saint was tied with his hands behind his back, along whose trunk his sacred blood trickled drop by drop like a light drizzle after the rain? That Roman tree upon which he writhed in the throes of his final agony, as his young flesh painfully scraped against the bark, offering his last testimony of all earthly joy and sorrow?

In traditional martyrologies, it is said that during the period following the ascension of Diocletian to the throne, when the emperor dreamed of wielding power as limitless as the free flight of birds, a young captain of the Praetorian Guard was imprisoned and accused of the crime of serving a forbidden god. That young man had a lithe body that recalled the famous Eastern slave dear to Emperor Hadrian and the eyes of a conspirator, unshaken like the sea. He possessed an enchanting arrogance. He used to wear a white lily on his helmet, a gift brought to him every morning by some virgins of the city. And that lily, which gracefully fell along with his abundant, virile hair as he rested from the relentless stares, resembled the nape of a swan’s neck in a surprising way.

No one knew his place of birth, nor his origin. But anyone who saw him instinctively knew that this young man, with the physique of a slave or the bearing of a prince, was a pilgrim who would soon disappear. It seemed to people that this Endymion was the shepherd leading his flock; that he was the king chosen to discover a pasture greener than any other.

Moreover, there were maidens who were firmly convinced that he had come from the sea because the roar of the sea could be heard within his chest, because his pupils held glimmers of the mysterious and eternal horizon that the sea imprints like a pledge of love in the eyes of those born along its shores, who are forced to leave them; because his sighs were as sultry as the sea breezes during the scorching sun, and smelled of seaweed cast ashore.

This was Sebastian, the young head of the Praetorian Guard. And was beauty like his not perhaps destined for death? Perhaps the robust matrons of the new Republic had trained their taste for the good wine that made the bones tremble with the flavour of crimson, blood-red roses, who immediately sensed his scent under the stars, all in one instant, and didn’t love him for that very reason? His blood surged in a race, more furious than usual beneath his white flesh, ready to spill forth at any moment as soon as that flesh was slashed.

How could those women not hear the tempestuous desires of such blood?
His fate was not one to be pitied. No, it was not a miserable fate in any way. It was, if anything, tragic and proud, a fate that we might even call splendid.
Upon reflection, it seems likely that more than once, even in the full sweetness of a kiss, a premonition of ultimate agony crossed his forehead like a fleeting shadow of pain.
Moreover, he must have foreseen, however vaguely, that martyrdom, no more and no less, was lying in wait along his path; that this very mark imprinted by Fate upon him signified his detachment from all ordinary men on earth.
On the morning we speak of, Sebastian kicked off the covers and jumped out of bed at dawn, driven by various martial duties. There was a dream that had visited him at dawn—ominous magpies that crowded upon his chest, covering his mouth with their flapping wings—and it had not yet completely faded from his pillow. But the rough creaking in which he lay every night spread a fragrance of seaweed cast ashore; and so a scent like that would certainly have continued to lull him through a long sequence of nights filled with dreams of the sea and boundless horizons.
While he lingered by the window and donned his creaking armor, Sebastian noticed, on the opposite side of the street, a temple surrounded by a grove, and in the high sky above, he saw the constellation named Mazzaroth descend. The young man gazed at the magnificent pagan temple, and meanwhile, in the thin arch of his dark brows, an expression of intense disdain appeared, almost bordering on suffering, which suited his beauty well.
Unexpectedly, at the name of the one true God, Sebastian quietly intoned a few terrible verses from the sacred scriptures. And lo, his voice continued with a few terrible verses from the sacred scriptures.

And behold, as if the softness of his song multiplied a thousandfold and echoed with majestic resonance, he heard a powerful moan rising up, undoubtedly from that cursed temple, from those rows of columns that split the radiant skies. It was a sound similar to that of a strange gathering collapsing into fragments, reverberating against the celestial dome studded with stars.
Sebastian smiled and lowered his eyes toward a spot beneath the window. There was a group of virgins secretly ascending to his chambers for the morning prayers, as they always did in the pre-dawn twilight. And each virgin held in her hand a lily still asleep, with all its petals closed…