The Royal Road

I remember reading Genet some years ago, and thinking he was the most exquisite model I had found for a way of living inwardly. He had been introduced to me previously by some very intelligent people, whom I had much respect for, as something akin to a god. I was curious. I expected something good, but I was skeptical. When I finally got around to opening the remainder copy of The Miracle of the Rose I had gotten for probably a dollar, I was truly ensnared. I understood why Sartre made him out to be a saint.

Yet he was a common criminal.

But not just any common criminal. Every event he wrote gets transformed from its base elements into an ecstatic epiphany or ritual. The chains around him become a garland of roses, being defecated upon is wielded into a form of blessing. All the oppression of prison is transformed into a backdrop of profound significance. The symbology is richly Catholic, but in essence pagan. It represented the most sincere and successful way of changing the meaning of things in a way that was useful to the individual, no matter what the situation one found oneself in. I wanted to follow in kind.

It was around this time that I decided to stop obsessing about being authentic and to actually escape who I was. I had been in therapy for a few years, and trying to be myself, the way I saw it, wasn't really doing me much good. I wanted to leave myself behind.

I couldn't act as Genet had. He had all his years of living at the hands of the state, in homes of unwanted children, in reformatories, in prison, where he had learned to do what he had to do. Compared to him I was a very straight up and down guy from the suburbs slumming in the city, trying to make the scene, working an uncool dayjob.

I didn't need to reinvent the world the way he did. I probably needed to feel disgusted with myself, more than I needed his kind of freedom, though I thought the opposite.

But at times, and I know this must happen to everybody -- you too -- something would happen by accident, and I would find myself in what might be called "Genet Space." The world would suddenly be spun upside down, and I would see things from a completely different perspective. I'd feel radically different, and for no reason at all. And even my uncool dayjob would be changed into something else -- an opportunity to observe and live among people, find a strange reverence for their struggles with exhausted hope and their scars. And often, I would feel like a spy of sorts, gathering information that I would make use of some day, for what I don't know.

We all need a way of escaping ego, or self-definition, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, to deterritorialize, find a line of flight, exit one's familiar plane of consistency. But this often takes more than mere imaginative play. It takes something beyond fantasy, something that made my attempts at escape nothing like Genet's. It takes giving something up. But that giving something up takes a curve of a very special sort which we keep thinking we don't have or don't know how to use. It's a gift we hide from ourselves out of fear of loss.

And be honest. For those moments, you can honestly say, you were missing nothing. So you can ask why do I resist so, to liberate myself of the heaviness of daily life, from these imagined encumbrances that make me so sick of myself?

Maybe because you love it.