-- a father, stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil. he wrote the play in the months that followed his father's death. if you hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable daughters, with thirtyfive years of life, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, with fifty of experience, is the beardless undergraduate from wittenberg then you must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the lustful queen. no. the corpse of john shakespeare does not walk the night. from hour to hour it rots and rots. he rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised that mystical estate upon his son. boccaccio's calandrino was the first and last man who felt himself with child. fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. it is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. on that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning italian intellect flung to the mob of europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro- and microcosm, upon the void. upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. paternity may be a legal fiction. who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?
what the hell are you driving at?
i know. shut up. blast you! i have reasons.
amplius. adhuc. iterum. postea.
are you condemned to do this?
-- they are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities, hardly record its breach. sons with mothers, sires with daughters, lesbic sisters, loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. the sun unborn mars beauty: born, he brings pain, divides affection, increases care. he is a male: his growth is his father's decline, his youth his father's envy, his friend his father's enemy.
in rue monsieur-le-prince i thought it.
-- what links them in nature? an instant of blind rut. am i father? if i were?