He was five feet, three inches tall.
Neither of his legs were fake.
He was born on this date (September 8th)
1873.
This happened in Laval, France.
That is 3,637 miles away from Brooklyn, NY.
Because the universe is expanding, Brooklyn,
NY was closer to Laval, France at the time of Jarry’s birth than it is now. In
fact, everything was a lot closer then to everything else than everything is
now. The explanation for the rapid development of mass communication can be
found in this ever-increasing alienation of one thing from another. High-speed
internet being the latest manifestation of our desperate attempt not to lose
touch with each other altogether.
He lived only thirty-four years.
We say “only.”
Many people live much less, maybe two or
three years at most after the onset of puberty.
He did not serve on either side in the
American Civil War, having been born eight years after its conclusion.
He was, however, in the army (French) but
not for long.
His unsuitability for military service
became rapidly apparent.
He was, to make a short story about a short
man shorter, a disciplinary virus.
If he were allowed to persist among the
ranks, armies would be smaller, soldiers, ever an endangered species, would
eventually become extinct.
His bicycle: a Clement luxe 96 racing model.
A typical outfit of clothing: full cycling
regalia with the addition of porkpie hat and hooded cape.
He was openly homosexual.
He met Oscar Wilde.
He stepped out with Wilde’s lover, Lord
Alfred Douglas.
Did they all three have sexual intercourse?
We suspect so.
He was dismissive of women. He thought a
woman’s only valuable asset to be her natural submissiveness. Still, his first
great patron was a woman, Marguerite Vallette-Eymery, a controversial writer
(under the name Radchilde) in her own right, (Monsieur Venus and La
Marquise de Sade.)
Jarry to Marguerite Vallette-Eymery: “Madam. You are an insignificant
bundle of atoms clinging together. But we grant you one quality. You do not
cling to us!”
His deathbed request: a toothpick.
He kept owls.
He bent forward a lot.
He drank prodigiously: two litres of white
wine after waking, three absinthes between 10a.m. and noon, red or white wine
with lunch, with more absinthe. Coffee and brandy throughout the afternoon. At
dinner: aperitifs and more wine, two more bottles typically.
At the end of his life he drank pure ether.
Question: Did he and Isidore Ducasse, aka
Comte de Lautreamont, ever meet?
Answer: No. While Jarry did count
Lautreamont as a literary influence and professed admiration for his work,
Lautreamont would have already
been dead 10,019 days on the day Jarry was born. It would have been difficult,
then, for the two men to have ever met.
Qualification: Due to certain persistent
uncertainties and irregularities in the account and record of Ducasse’s death
of plague at age twenty-four on April 4, 1846 it is entirely possible that he
might have survived his illness and still been alive at the time of Jarry’s
birth. For that matter, if he had survived, Lautreamont would only have been 61
at the time of Jarry’s death.
Revised Conclusion: From the aforementioned
facts we conclude nothing, definitively, either way.
Therefore: it is entirely possible that the
two men met.
He lived for a while with Henri Rousseau.
He died on November 1, 1907 of meningeal
tuberculosis.
As of today, Alfred Jarry has been dead
51,135 days.
When you are dead that long, you will be a
lot deader than he is now.
Some
anecdotes:
He once went to the opera wearing a paper
shirt with a paper tie painted on it.
He wore yellow high heels and bicycle racing
shorts (badly soiled) to Stephen Mallarme’s funeral.
He practiced his shooting against the side
of a neighbor’s house. When the mother who lived there pleaded for the safety
of her children, Jarry replied, “Madame, should I accidently kill one of your
brood, I should be happy to make some more with you.”
Andre Gide on Jarry’s peculiar manner of
speech: “A nutcracker, if it could speak, would sound no different.”
Question: How accurate are these anecdotes?
Answer: No more or less accurate than most anecdotes.
Question: Is it possible that Jarry is still
alive today?
Answer: Yes.
Things Jarry said:
“Blind and unwavering lack of discipline at
all times constitutes the real strength of all free men.”
“God is the tangential point between zero
and infinity.”
“The work of art is a stuffed crocodile.”
“It is one of the great joys of home
ownership to fire a pistol in one’s own bedroom.”
“It is mad to try to express new feelings in
a mummified form.”
Things we can be “almost” certain that Jarry
didn’t say but not absolutely positive*:
“I wouldn’t miss Ben Stiller in a Focker
movie for a million simoleons.”
*Note: Jarry was given to wild bursts of
“irrational” utterance not just in his texts but in his personal life as well,
not nearly all of the latter having been recorded. These utterances were fueled
by an extraordinary imagination as well as the massive ingestion of drugs and
alcohol. The point is: he might have said virtually anything. The probability
that he might have said the above words either entirely by chance as a form of
“nonsense” poetry or in a moment of psychic lucidity or even both is miniscule,
one must rationally concede, but, one must concede by the same rationality, not
quite zero.
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