Intangible arrows quiver and stick in the skin
And I taste at the root of the tongue the unreal of what is real.
— Wallace Stevens, “Holiday in Reality”
1
“Here I call love a reciprocal torture,” Marcel Proust wrote in The Prisoner, the third volume of Temps Perdu, offering an aside that smarts with tenderness and calls into play the agony’s tortured relation to ecstasy in the matryr’s voice, in the light’s relation to darkness. The martyr’s agony is often described in relation to this extraordinary, overpowering light.
In an 1839 sermon on the state of grace, Cardinal Newman said that our eyes can only bear the “bright and overpowering” light “if we could see it as the Angels do.” Somewhere in Europe, a poet named Rainer Maria Rilke would lure the angels into the poem in order to see the unbearable. And somewhere in Russia, at the same time, Marina Tsvetaeva would correspond with him.
2
Elsewhere, T. S. Eliot would mention light and brightness in letters to Conrad Aiken while traveling through Europe in 1914. In a letter to Aiken dated July 1914, Eliot mentioned a new poem he’d completed and then raved about the “three great St. Sebastians” he’d seen:
1.“Montegna (a D’Oro)”
2. “Antonello of Messina (Bergamo)”
3. “Memling (Brussels)”
Six days later, Eliot mailed the poem he’d mentioned, “The Love Song of St. Sebastian,” to Aiken, along with a few lyric fragments. The poem sounded “very laboured and conscious,” too conscious of its own sentiment, too close to the surface of feeling. Allegedly, Eliot never published it.
3
“THE LOVE SONG OF SAINT SEBASTIAN” BY T. S. ELIOT
I would come in a shirt of hair
I would come with a lamp in the night
And sit at the foot of your stair;
I would flog myself until I bled,
And after hour on hour of prayer
And torture and delight
Until my blood should ring the lamp
And glisten in the light;
I should arise your neophyte
And then put out the light
To follow where you lead,
To follow where your feet are white
In the darkness toward your bed
And where your gown is white
And against your gown your braided hair.
Then you would take me in
Because I was hideous in your sight
You would take me in without shame
Because I should be dead
And when the morning came
Between your breasts should lie my head.
I would come with a towel in my hand
And bend your head beneath my knees;
Your ears curl back in a certain way
Like no one else in all the world.
When all the world shall melt in the sun,
Melt or freeze,
I shall remember how your ears were curled.
I should for a moment linger
And follow the curve with my finger
And your head beneath my knees —
I think that at last you would understand.
There would be nothing more to say.
You would love me because I should have strangled you
And because of my infamy;
And I should love you the more because I mangled you
And because you were no longer beautiful
To anyone but me.
The only unrhymed word in Eliot’s 1914 poem is “lamp”.
The word that moves between this song and another song written around this time is “infamy,” which appears in the passage from Dante that Eliot placed over the threshold of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
4
Back to Dante, we go. Straight to the Inferno, briefly, where verses 46-49 give us Paolo and Francesca making a long streak of themselves in air: / so I saw the shadows come, uttering wails, / borne by that strife of winds.
Paolo and Francesca, the lovers condemned to an eternity of winded tempest. The problem of course began with literature, as Francesca tells it:
One day, for pastime, we read of Lancelot, how love constrained him; we were alone, and without all suspicion. Several times that reading urged our eyes to meet, and changed the colour of our faces; but one moment alone it was that overcame us. When we read how the fond smile was kissed by such a lover, he, who shall never be divided from me, kissed my mouth all trembling.
A note from one of my 2023 notebooks: “In T. S. Eliot’s copy of the text, he marked the similes that introduce Paolo and Francesca: “And as their wings bear along the starlings, at the cold season, in large and crowded troop” (Inferno V.40-42) but didn’t provide a translation of line 42, ‘così quel fiato gli spiriti mali’: i.e so that blast, the evil spirits.”
Peter Colstee, Illustration 1. 1992
Peter Colstee made this oil-on-canvas painting after watching the film 'Mishima' (1985), and copying down the following part of film text:
The white masters beauty of the youth body,
hung against the dark tree trunk.
His hands tied by thorns.
I trembled with joy.
My loin swelled.
My hand unconsciously began a motion it had never been thought
It isn’t beautiful, per se, but there is something haunting about the expression on Sebastian’s face.
4
The first painting that Eliot listed in his letter to Aiken is one of the three portraits of Saint Sebastian by Andrea Mantegna. It is also Mantegna’s final Saint Sebastian, painted and kept in Venice. But I’m more interested in the first Saint Sebastian— the painting Mantegna completed in 1470, kept in Vienna.
Detail from Andrea Mantegna, Saint Sebastian. 1470 (Vienna)
I keep returning to the traces of heresy in Mantegna‘s first Saint Sebastian. . . the way Mantegna signed his name vertically (rather than horizontally), pulling the signature very close to the right side of the saint, and using Greek lettering to identify himself (rather than his first language, or the Latin used by the Catholic Church). The Byzantine edge in the naming. Forsaking the classical tree or the pole for a stone arch as the object to which Sebastian is bound. Not a tree in nature or a pole in the city’s outskirts but a piece of Rome, itself, an architectural form for which the Roman empire became famous.
In 1457 the painter had been put on trial for "artistic inadequacy" for having put only eight apostles in his fresco of the Assumption. As a reply, he therefore applied Alberti's principles of Classicism in the following pictures.
A rider can be seen in the clouds of the upper left corner in Mantegna’s Vienna version of Saint Sebastian. The cloud is white and the rider of the white horse is carrying a scythe which he uses to cut the clouds.
Some have interpreted the rider to be the ancient Roman god, Saturn, who was identified with the Time that passed by and destroyed everything that was left behind him. But Battisti thought the theme referred to the Book of Revelation. Revelations 19:11 gives us the “heaven having been opened” to reveal “a white horse, and he who is sitting upon it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness doth he judge and war.” This is Christ, announcing the Second Coming. And yes, every thread is torn.