Friday, June 28, from my
Friday, June 28, from my notes again.
A little while later, in the upper basilica
I spent a bit of time in the bookshop and suchlike downstairs. A movie was playing on the life of St. Francis, and a passion with which I have been acquainted since childhood is awakened within me - the passion for revolution. I feel as though I have just been pounded by cold water, it is the fierce desire of revolution that is upon me, and not revolution merely but the revolution of the saint, a revolution of the inner world and the world without.
"Heroically, I’ll throw away my clothes ’till I’m nude-"* it’s all true, it’s all perfectly true. (The part of the movie I came in on had a brother stripping off all his clothes to cry naked through the town square that peace was everything.) Clothes are the things you throw away when you undertake a revolution.
Why have we now no passion for purification? Surely we do still, but it has taken some other form. Why do we condemn the excesses that the young enthusiasts of the Middle Ages were prone to? Have we any passion, anything like that?
I seem to be coming to understand the truth in a good many cliches. I really would have said my heart is swelling. I was trying to think of a way to describe this emotion, and had hit upon that phrase quite by chance before I realised that it had long been a most useless cliche.
*Footnote: Much bally-hooed translation of a line of a song from Shoujo Kakumei Utena. They try to excuse it by saying it’s an idiom for "I’ll strip away everything I used to be", but there’s also something intuitively right about the literal translation.
It wasn’t Brother Sun, Sister Moon, was it?
October 29th, 2002 at 8:33 pmthat made me smile
October 29th, 2002 at 9:01 pm