Читать книгу The Monk and the Skeptic - Frank Browning - Страница 8
ОглавлениеIn which Brother Peter agrees to interrogation and offers praise to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
New Year’s Day, 1986. Sylvester, the titan of queer soul, took over American television’s Tonight Show, that evening hosted by the comedian Joan Rivers, and sang his gold-plated anthem, “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real.” A few minutes later on the talk show set, Rivers asked him how his parents reacted when they found out he was a drag queen.
“I’m not a drag queen,” he retorted. “I’m Sylvester.”
Thanks to YouTube, anybody, including Brother Peter, can call Sylvester back from the grave to relive the moment. My first conversation with Brother Peter, to my surprise, opened with the case of Sylvester and what it meant to be “mighty real,” what the difference was between Peter’s reality in clerical robes, in denim, or in biker leather. He told me about the two drag shows he’d gone to the previous week.
“Drag shows?” I said.
“Yes,” he answered in the same tone as if he’d gone to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. He had known these particular drag artists for at least ten years. One of them—whose nom de guerre is Madame Raymonde, modeled after the famous heart-of-gold prostitute from the 1930s film Hôtel du Nord—had made his name singing in a Parisian piano bar where Brother Peter was an intermittent regular. Brother Peter had seen some of Madame Raymonde’s sketches online, but he’d never been to a full-fledged drag show.
“Drag? Why drag?” I asked.
“The idea of changing your personal presence completely, the idea of a ‘total transportation.’”
Silently I waited for more. But priest that he was, nothing was forthcoming. It was for me to pose the questions, and when I wanted more, to ask for it. Some people would have stopped the dialogue then. Too much work. The game too tedious. Had he averted his eyes as though bored or genuinely closed off, our encounters might have ended, a glance at the watch, a clearing of the throat, and a shrug. But behind the formality of his confessional training, within the priestliness of the moment, I took his silence instead as a signal of reticent frailty, an indication that he would like to speak and speak not as he would in his formal confessions but to someone he hoped was a kindred spirit.
“So do you make a total transformation in all the identities you wear?” I asked.
“I think I do transform myself, but listen well: all that is form, outside of things. It’s obvious that when I’m in the monastic robes that haven’t been altered since the Middle Ages or when I’m in street clothes that’s a ‘transformation.’ No question. But I’ve done nothing to my sexual identity. I’m a man and I remain a man, unlike these boys on stage who change completely their gender from masculine to feminine. But even though I can feel people may look at me differently depending on whether I’m in my monastic habit or in street clothes, I’m still exactly the same person.”
Sooner than I’d anticipated we were cutting directly to questions of spirit, flesh, identity, and the most mystical of moments in Christian mythology, transfiguration: What is the nature of the human body, how does it (how do we) express our essential nature, and in expressing what it is that we are, do we touch, are we guided by the light that is the integral beauty of the soul? Or is it still possible even in this passage of testo and twitter identities to hold on to the notion of integral selves and essential souls? We’ll return to much of this in a later conversation addressing the question of the Christian idea of an eternal body (old, worn-out, and flabby like Lazarus or the hunky archangel Michael in our family Bible whose warrior physique was one of my earliest jerk-off images). At the beginning of our talks I was much keener to know of Brother Peter’s own personal transformations and how he navigated these several identities so clearly linked to his own dress habits—white hooded robe or leather and denim that hugged his ass tight. Underlying Thomistic theology concerning physical transfiguration would have to wait.
We dwelt instead with Madame Raymonde, otherwise known as Denis D’Arcangelo. “Actors live with permanent transformation, becoming other personalities when they’re on stage. Off stage when I knew him, he dressed like any other guy,” Brother Peter said. “I never saw him looking like a woman, always just a man.” Madame Raymonde is rather more like Dame Edna Everage, the Australian cross-dressing comedian, than a real spikes-and-sequins drag queen. Though Dame Edna became a BBC and later an American television phenomenon of the 1980s—and officially at least was straight—Madame Raymonde is far from straight. Her accordion-playing accompanist sometimes joins her in tap-dancing routines, dressed in flimsy flapper-era outfits at overwhelmingly gay clubs. Together they keep a European touring schedule that would have exhausted Sarah Bernhardt. They are everything that Brother Peter is not: slutty, lower class, peppered with sex and the gutter. “[She] often does songs that are very sad, inspired from the demimonde of working-class bistros, of prostitution, of the women and men who work the streets,” he began. As he spoke a softness came to his eyes, the suppleness of sympathy crept across his cheeks, not at all like the paternalistic priest ready to take confession, but more that of a fellow traveler who had had his own experience in the worn pathways that trim the bushes of desire and loss. “She comes out of the same tradition as the dance halls of the 1930s that were loose . . . naughty,” he added. He looked across the table where the tape recorder spun and began to hum a tune I didn’t know. He had agreed that our conversations should be recorded, but only our conversations. His eyes took on the same light he’d used at the Pierre et Gilles show. Our knees connected.
But we were working.
“Well,” he went on, “the performance was even more compelling because the poor boy—the accordionist tap dancer—had fallen and broken his knee that evening or maybe the day before, so he had to perform on crutches with his leg in a cast, which meant they had to change the dance routines. He had to be suffering. That is why it was so impressive. The show was very, very beautiful and very touching.”
“Touching?”
The hungry, cruising eyes softened toward empathy. “It made me laugh and cry. I cried because in some of their songs—and I believe that’s what interests me in these kinds of shows with men who play women—because they can say things about love, about tenderness, about frailty, about the need to be loved that people often don’t appreciate or don’t forcefully admit when it comes from a tough, virile man. You know, a woman can speak about feeling fragile, her need to be loved, the wounds of love and life, the search for a great love that so often results in disappointment, and thus she can express something more tender, more subtle than a traditional man [can].”
“Why do you think that is?” I asked.
“Because I think that in our civilization, society says that to be a man you have to be strong, you have to be a seducer, you have to be macho. We give very little attention to expressing feelings among men. That’s always seen as a weakness.”
“It’s the same in the Bible isn’t it? The men in the Bible, at least in the Old Testament, are emblems of macho ferocity.”
“The men of the Bible are able to express their feelings. They can cry, they can say that they love. Take David. David loved. He said so. He cries for those he loves, his friend Jonathan, his son Absalom when he is murdered. He doesn’t hesitate to express his feelings, his suffering, or his pain. In the Bible it’s more complicated than you say, more complex.”
He paused, waiting for me to say something, but this time I remained silent. The Bible my agnostic father insisted I read as one of the foundations of English poetry was also the Bible of fire and brimstone that battered out the hate and bestiality that echoed up and down the Appalachian hollows of my childhood.
“Well. In any case, the show, I can tell you, it touched me deeply.”
Brother Peter’s use of the Bible was not always as curt and formulaic as that response, but like many religious men who had come to their religious life late—he was well into his twenties when he took his orders—he was always cautious about revealing any fissures of doubt. He insisted that doubt had never touched him since he gave himself over to the order. My companion, Christophe, who was raised in the church, occasionally listened to parts of our conversations; for him, Brother Peter’s words varied little from mainline Catholic dogma.
To many gay priests—not a locution Brother Peter uses; he prefers to say that he is a man who is a priest who has homosexual desire—the conflict between desire and religious stricture is insurmountable, as it was for Rafe. The conflict provokes first a terrible wedge of doubt in the ecclesiastical regime, then it challenges the practice, and finally it weakens the faith. But what I found so compelling in our encounters (because our encounters were often as physically engaged as they were intellectually stimulating) was how they seemed actually to reinforce Peter’s faith. Faith, he told me at one point, had enabled him to understand the frailty of desire. Frailty is a word that came up often. He believed deeply that at a certain point the pure power of faith would release him from desire. It was as though his transformation from being an ordinary, secular young man raised far from Communion and confession into a man of the cloth had itself opened an extraordinary insight into the perpetual tension between soul and flesh. Touching the cusp of early manhood as a fairly standard heterosexual, including erotic adventures with women, he had not been visited by genuine love until he fell into his first grand passion with a man who happened to be a middle-aged priest (about which we will also return to later). Most of my gay and straight friends were ready to dismiss his account as a classic story of a closeted youth who finally realized who he was sexually.
But no, Brother Peter insisted with some agitation that by the simplest measure he had never had any problems becoming aroused by women, and he had no recollection of locker room or campground attractions to other boys or men. First he had a thoroughly unexpected spiritual experience unrelated to any other personal attachment, which led to his initial religious studies, during which he in turn fell in love with the older priest. As he told the story, it was a triple transformation: from nonbeliever to believer, from secular life to spiritual mission, from personal isolation to love. The switch from hetero desire to homo desire was the least profound of these transformations. His first intense spiritual revelations came not as a flight from forbidden desires (the usual clichéd track that took tormented, young gay men to the cloth); rather, his intensifying devotion led him to pursue the multiple contradictions of being fully human. Meanwhile, though he expressed no interest in living within a fully gay context, progressively he needed to engage deeply with the visible, organized gay world. Drag, transvestism, motorcycle clubs, making pickups in art galleries, admiring the hearty male bodies he found in the steam rooms of the public gyms wherever he was sent to preach: these were and are all doors to that experience.
As were his encounters with a group I would have assumed he would detest for its manifest blasphemy: the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
“Mother Rita,” he began with another smile.
“Mother Rita?”
“Mother Rita of Calvary, or ‘L’archimere Rita du Calvaire.’ That’s what they called her in France.” Brother Peter came to know Mother Rita when he was visiting France and working in Paris. Mother Rita remains the founder and mother superior at the Paris convent of the International Order of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, founded in 1979 in San Francisco. There are now thirty-one convents of the Sisters in eight countries. Regular fare for a soft news day on television, the Sisters—all militant gay men—appear publicly in nun’s garb with starched white head dress, white-face, and often full beards. Along with San Francisco’s Cockettes, they are the true mothers of radical gender-fuck. For a man who takes the word of the Bible seriously, not least the distinction imposed in the Old Testament on the inviolate distinctions between male and female, it was, to say the least, a stretch to hear Brother Peter describe the Sisters as kindred spirits.
“At the beginning,” he admitted, “I was a bit shocked, but when I first met some of the boys myself back at the beginning—and some, you know, are no longer with us for health and other reasons—and I spoke with some of my [gay] friends who were in touch with them, and then when I read their website, two things struck me. First their use of certain religious folkloric effects, like their robes and the white cornets on their heads. That didn’t bother me too much. After all, that’s just folklore [as was women’s traditional headdress in their variations from Brittany to the Alps to the Peloponnesus].
“In Europe, when people saw the nun’s outfits and headdresses in the nineteenth century, it was a sign of a caregiver, someone who visited the poor, someone who pricked your conscience, overall a positive image that drew people’s attention to the plight of the poor. [The Sisters’] presentation . . . oh, maybe it’s a bit silly, maybe even a little extreme . . .”
I broke in: “Well, it’s an obvious mockery of Catholicism.”
“No,” he answered, his voice stern, almost irritated. “Curiously not, and they often said to me, when they undertake a public action and they cross paths with real nuns in their habits, they said it always turns out to be a good day and a good action and everything goes well.”
“The real nuns aren’t annoyed?”
“I don’t know myself how the actual nuns react. On the other hand, to mock the actual religious celebrations inside the church, the Mass, the sacraments, then, yes, I would be very much bothered by that because that is not simply folklore like the habits and traditions that exist on the outside of the sacred [rituals]. To touch the things that are more deeply linked to the faith, that I stay away from. But using a cornet or a nun’s costume doesn’t bother me.” He repeated the point to be clear. “To touch prayer or the ritual celebrations inside the church—I am very bothered by actions that touch on what is most profound in the church.”
“But wait.” I said, “Isn’t that forgetting the origins of the Sisters? They started out in San Francisco as a militant homosexual rights group who argued that nearly all religious institutions, and specifically the Catholic Church, have brought on terrible suffering.”
He shook his close-cropped, sandy-haired head. “The ones I know, when they discovered who I was, were astonished to meet a real priest in a gay milieu.”
“A real priest?”
“A priest ordained by the Catholic Church and not . . . well, you know that among the Sisters there are some who wear the soutane, though that’s not always true anymore. And they were often very interested in having a serious religious and spiritual discussion with a member of the Catholic clergy.”
“They were not hostile or suspicious?”
“No, not.”
“What kind of religious discussions? What did you talk about?”
“Usually they ask, ‘Why are you a priest? Why have you chosen that path? What does it mean?’ And I say that one day I had a personal encounter, very real, of the presence of God in my life.”
Before I go on, and before many of you as readers roll your eyes with the remembered testimony of Tammy Faye or the perennially priapic Reverend Jimmy Swaggart, I should say I grew up surrounded by grade school classmates in Kentucky, usually adolescent girls experiencing the first premenstrual twitches of puberty. They would come to school recounting how on the previous Sunday they had been saved by Jesus! Oh yes! A wave of warmth had swallowed them up while they sat on the hard poplar pews as the Savior had entered their breasts and drawn them, half crawling, half running, forward to the altar where they fell to their trembling knees before the preacher, declaring how Jesus had led them into the light of glory. I was saved! I was saved! they had cried. And wept. And wept.
Too often, within a year, if not months, these country girls became pregnant by a more local savior who had taken them to the back of the barn for an even more penetrating embrace with the transcendent. In the United States, declarations about witnessing the presence of God in your life are as common as Rice Krispies and Twitter. No serious presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter, neither Democrat nor Republican, has dared present himself to the public without professing the critical presence of God in his life. But in continental Europe—apart perhaps from Poland—such sacred visitations are not the stuff of common conversation. Indeed, they are as rare as poetry inscribed with the quills of carrier pigeons. For Brother Peter, who was raised in a Mediterranean family with no tradition of religious observation, being struck by the light of God was as arresting an experience as it would have been for my grade school classmates to expound on the Heisenberg principle. All these doubt-refracted filters were present in my mind as I listened to his testimony, the sheets in the bedroom rumpled and my tape disk spinning.
“I found myself in a personal, living, real relationship with God and I went to the limit of what this relation would mean for me, which meant committing myself to a religious engagement and accepting ordination to serve the church, to carry forth the word of the Gospel. But the thing that always interests them [the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence], which is at the heart of the question when I talk with them, is that I don’t defend the institution of the church. The formal structure doesn’t interest me; I am there as a witness for God, the God who is love and who cares for and watches over all of us. So, they find out that I think more of what God says than the temporal heritage of the church. We can talk about how the church works, but what has always seemed the most interesting for me—and for them as well—is the authentic spiritual or mystical dimension of that history.”
“You mean that aside from gay militancy, you find a mystical, spiritual nature with the Sisters?” I asked, credulous.
“I don’t say that I found it. I say that they pose the question and that they are keen to encounter someone who lives it.”
“And your encounters have never been hostile?”
“I’ve never had a hostile reaction.”
Our conversations frequently returned to Brother Peter’s sympathy, even respect for costume, performance, transvestism, leathermen, and the dodgy exuberance that is at the core of what the gender theorists call performative identity—after Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and perhaps most approachable, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. They all, from a distinctly secular perspective, saw the gendered clothes we wear as fashioned from the fabrics of social constraint and possibility. Whatever our genes have given us in the apparent biological form of our flesh, the way we present and clothe that flesh comes as a result of the unfolding human story by which we invent our lives. In the heyday of French critical theory during the 1980s, I found myself deeply moved and motivated by the philosophical elegance and zest of its great master, Michel Foucault, already dead (by AIDS). Foucault’s key work—at least from my point of view—was his 1960s study of prisons and penitentiaries, Discipline and Punish, which argued that the rise of bourgeois capitalism demanded the creation of a self-policing industrial working class. The unified powers of state and capital won the collective good behavior of the workers by inculcating in them a fearful respect of being continually observed and judged for correct performance: timeliness, family duty, deference to authority. Even more than prisons, the public schools were the great enforcers whose primary mission was not to teach literacy but to discipline the young and thereby police the unruly desires of “the dangerous classes.” (For a portrait of just how dangerous those classes appeared to polite urban society, take a look at Patrick Suskind’s 1985 best seller, Perfume, which perfectly portrays the upper-class fear of what can happen when uncontrolled senses are married to the animal taste for blood.)
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, one of the best of the queer theorists, wrote movingly of just how provisional our perceptions of masculinity and femininity are, of the hunger of the flesh for the same and for the other. Little by little, however, I came to find all the derivative graduate school discourses that followed in the wake of Foucault and Sedgwick terribly arid. Hundreds of doctorates earned by the followers of the followers of the followers of Foucault were filling up English department faculties across America. Their convoluted sentences and impenetrable paragraphs crafted in the form of Immanuel Kant seemed to me like intellectual arthropods supping on the desiccated corpses of forgotten desire. They had neither dared to take on a nun’s habit nor screw or be screwed by a happy priest who revered both his leather and his robes. When at last, without searching, I came across such a monk, I realized that as much as I had benefited from the genuine insights of the gender theorists, I was more touched by the wings of myth that were the stuff of my priest’s daily routine.
Myth. The word, derived from the Greek mythos, set apart insight into the uncertain from the hard facts described by logos, the sort of knowledge that could be determined by cold, philosophical reasoning. Logos was the realm of the elite rulers and thinkers, mythos the belief system on which ordinary folk relied to guide them through the torments of dreams, desire, suffering, and hope. We moderns, descendants of Descartes, Locke, and the triumph of rational doubt that was the Enlightenment, have come to take myth as a synonym for false belief. We speak of myths as beliefs that reason cannot sustain, even as we blithely refer to the myth of Sisyphus as the original ancestor to the modern existential crisis. The loss of vital myth, I fear, has produced —and this is where Brother Peter and I most clearly converge—a dreadful loss. To live a life devoid of myth is like crossing a Kansas winter in an Eisenhower jeep. The English writer Jeanette Winterson, whose Dantesque tales cross the boundaries of gender, physics, time, and galactic space, speaks as movingly as anyone on the human necessity for myth. Years ago she told Bill Moyers on his PBS series Faith & Reason that while rationality “has freed us from many cruel superstitions, many nameless terrors . . . it’s not sufficient. There is a mythic truth, which is an imaginative truth, an emotional truth, a way of understanding the world which is not about the facts and the figures, but which is nevertheless valid.” Later, following what she described as an arid literary decade, she spoke to an interviewer for the British daily The Guardian about the necessity of guarding—though not obsessing about—the ever-present personal wound “that gives you the strength to go forward.” In that act of going forward from the wound, she said, you learn that “there are so many separate selves.”
To touch those separate selves on a daily basis, as Brother Peter does, or as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence do, or as the Greeks who prostrated themselves at the Apollonian temple at Delphi did 2,500 years ago, is to allow yourself to be sucked up into zones of mythic comprehension of human contradiction where reason alone is no aid. It is to give yourself over to what for lack of a better word is the zone of the soul, even as reason tells you that there is not and will not be any way of confirming that souls exist. If it seems contradictory to speak of the soul without being able to marshal the evidence of its existence, then so it is with the place of myth as well. Christian myth, Buddhist myth, Horace, or Harry Potter. We continue to generate greater and lesser myths because, as Winterson has said, they enable us to confront and ruminate on the fierce emotional and educational confusions of our existence that no amount of learning seems able to tame. They give us, or most of us, rocks of stability in the ongoing flow that is never the same from one second to the next. For my own taste, the all-knowing, all-powerful Christian deity that inhabited Brother Peter one day in his eighteenth year is a hoary old critter. I find him far less compelling than the Olympian panoply that called on the Greeks to choose a personal guide from among them and who then marked the earth with mounds and crevices where that god’s force was made manifest to his or her followers. Like Brother Peter, who doesn’t restrict the idea of grace to his own god but supposes that all those who track a path of decency toward one another will find habitation in the greater soul called eternity, for me it doesn’t matter much which mythic force you embrace. All that matters is that it respects the multiplicities that drive us to become inquiring human beings.
Or in plainer talk: To be alive and alert is to perform in an endless drag show, its artfulness measured by how gracefully we change our outer robes of identity.
Nowhere have I been more taken by the mythic zone than in contemporary Naples, whose sexual subculture I wrote about at length in A Queer Geography. The late magnificent actor Marcello Mastroianni said shortly before he died that Naples would always remain his favorite city because more than anywhere else, it had successfully profited from American ingenuity while steadfastly resisting the antiseptic orderliness of America. The most clichéd example of Neapolitan chaos is the traffic light, which is considered advisory at best. Neapolitans don’t hesitate to cross into the opposing lane of traffic, even if they’re facing an oncoming streetcar, if they feel that fate is with them. The sense of fate, another way of dealing with the unknown, blankets Neapolitans like the dust of Vesuvius, no less in matters of sex than in its half-pagan, half-Christian attitude toward death and the afterlife.
