110
MARK MIRSKY
Only a few perfect beings are dead and naked here below, during
their earthly life. Saint Francis was one of these. His thoughts were
always fixed on the nakedness and poverty of the crucified Christ.
Saint John of the Cross was another, for the desired nothing in the
world except nakedness of spirit. But if they could bear to
be
stripped naked, it was because they were drunk with wine; they
were drunk with the wine which flows daily on the altar. This
wine is the only remedy for the shame which possessed Adam and
Eve.
that essential difference between Greek and Hebrew culture. I heard
the Talmudist, Rabbi Soloveichik, lecture on this: the Greeks regard–
ing the body as beautiful, unveiling before each other in the nude,
parading; but the Hebrews considering it sacred, covering the flesh,
like the Holy of Holies, only to be entered with awe, which might
explain some of the excesses of the Orthodox, making love to your
wife through a hole in the sheet - what mysteries imagined on the
other side?
Ah, I am drinking a strong local orange liqueur steeped
in
rock sugar, making myself drunk after praying thankfulness in
Hebrew to the fruit of the tree, trying to enter your world, Simone.
Shame! You hate it, but what can it be but the most powerful
of human perfumes, consciousness? What
is
shame but an exquisite
awareness of our bodies, something we suppose unknown to the
animal. And where is all your mystical talk originating but in that
shame, that need for a spiritual cover to justify the abandon of can–
nibalism, sex, castration. You could not imitate the Talmudists, who,
when the power to overcome shame, the evil urge, toppled them,
went to a dark place, in private did the deed of their heart so as not
to shame the name of God in public. It
is
our lot that we cannot
live in happiness with consciousness but are swept up with a hunger
to do what we understand is cheap, sad, awful. Only a fool fathoms
himself.
Simone, you mated with words, concepts, abstractions:
... the God who is other than the supreme Deity and at the same
time identical with him, is disguised under a great many names ...
Dionysus, Prometheus, Love, Celestial Aphrodite, Pluto, Cora, Per–
sephone, Minos, Hermes, Apollo, Artemis, the Soul of the World.
Another name which was marvellously favoured was Logos, mean–
ing Word or rather Relationship and Mediation.
