As a teenager I became aware of the cruelty of the world, a homeless man without legs or a cat starving in winter shattered me. Drugs and alcohol helped but I still couldn't make peace with evil. So I decided to try and love it.
Life is suffering said the Buddha. To adore the torments so generously gifted by life is an art. Genet worshipped degradation with a religious passion.
Sartre even named his study on him : Saint Genet. The book has stunning insights into evil, though Sartre, naive and bourgeois, swallowed every big fish tale Genet fed him.
Genet is worth studying because he IS the existential hero in the flesh. To those who called Sartre mad, he could point to Genet, the man who invented his own nature, creating his own (inverted) values.
To be betrayed by one’s lover - this was his highest ideal and greatest ecstasy for Genet. He lived what people like Bataille only wrote about.
It’s all he knew. If one must suffer these things, why not learn to will oneself to love one’s fate. This is precisely what Nietzsche preached.
A genius born to a prostitute unjustly tossed into an infamous orphanage that shocked all of France when it was discovered the staff were merrily raping the boys, and having the boys rape one another, for their entertainment and pleasure.
He drifted into petty crime and in prison wrote his first book, some 300 pgs, with a pencil on toilet paper. The guards found it and threw it away.
He wrote it again, it got published to great acclaim and fame claimed him. Now he could mingle with the rich - and steal from them, which he often did, getting arrested as well.
Jailed a 10th time for theft Genet faced a mandatory life sentence. To Frances credit, after being petitioned by the Literati, the courts exonerated him. Indeed a great artist ought to be forgiven all crimes.
After a few novels and plays he got hooked on barbiturates, a low and dirty drug, and for the next several decades, besides a suicide attempt, endeavored in nothing of value.
Late in life he wrote one last travel book, on revolution, mostly to bunk with the Black Panthers and indulge in sexual fantasies, also camping in the desert with Palestinian militants.
Stanley Hauerwas said modernity is when the only story we are permitted to believe is the one that tells us there is no story. We are the story we tell ourselves we are.
The lesson of Genet proves this a lie. We can not create ourselves, invent our story, or project meaning into the world. We are part of a bigger story - one given to us.
Givenness is at the heart of reality. The great struggle is learn to receive this world as gift. The only sane response to a gift : Thanks-giving. It takes heart-breaking work, terrible sacrifice, and often an entire community to shape us into the type of person who can receive this world as sacrament.
So, I learned that one cannot love evil without being destroyed by it.
The painting at the top is, for my money, the greatest portrait of the 20th Century. Giacometti reveals the true Genet - trapped, restless, being undone by death, and wasting away…
