Our Lady of the Turks – Carmelo Bene
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Marian apparitions
There are idiots who have seen the Virgin Mary and there are idiots who have not seen the Virgin Mary.
I am an idiot who has never seen the Virgin Mary. It’s all about this: to see the Virgin Mary or not to see Her. Saint Joseph of Cupertino (the “remarkably unclever”), a swineherd, grew his wings by living his own clumsiness, and at nights, in prayer, he earned his way to the altars of the Virgin, in awe, like flying. The idiots who have seen the Virgin Mary, have unexpected wings, they also know how to fly and land on the ground like a feather. The idiots who don’t see the Virgin Mary don’t have wings; the flight denied to them, and yet they fly anyway. And instead of landing, they fall, as if someone, having weights on his ankles and wanting to get rid of them, decides to cut off his feet and drags himself towards safety amid the mockery of the guards – confident, and rightly so, of the imminent bleeding that will stop him.
But those who see, do not see what they see; those who fly are themselves the flight. Those who fly don’t know themselves. Such a miracle annihilates them: rather than seeing the Virgin Mary, they are the Virgin Mary that they’re seeing. Bliss is this paradoxical crazy identity that empties the prayer of his subject and in exchange deludes him into the objectification of himself, inside another object. Everything that is different is God. If you want to hold someone, you are the embrace; when you kiss, you are the mouth. The illusion is divine. This is a saint.
And so it is for all the saints: fundamentally unprepared, or rather, hopeless, useless. The altars move towards them, driven by the stupidity of their psychosis or by balancing telluric forces – but this is excluded. This is how a saint loses himself, through uncontrolled idiocy. An altar begins where the measure ends. To be holy is to lose control, to give up weightiness, and weight is to organize one’s dimension. Where a witch has passed, a fairy will pass.
If they had given Joseph of Cupertino an apple that was half-green and half-red, half-poisoned, he, who had butterfingers, would have lost it. He could not get lost nor save himself, because without intention, inept.
He who has never thought about death is perhaps immortal. This is how you can see the Virgin Mary.
But the idiots who see the Virgin Mary, do not actually see her, like the two eyes staring at two eyes through a wall. The miracle is the transparency, the sacrament is this insanity, because a blinding faith has barred these eyes, has changed the layers – the layers were made of stone – it has changed them into veils. And the eyes saw the sight. A gaze: either man is so blind, or God is objective.
The idiots who see, see themselves in a vision, with all the variations that faith brings: if worms, they see themselves as butterflies, if puddles, clouds, if the sea, the sky. And before this alter ego they kneel as before God, they confess to a second sin. Divine is everything they have unconsciously learned about themselves. They saw the Virgin Mary: saints.
The idiots who have not seen the Virgin Mary, are horrified by themselves, they look elsewhere, in others, in women, the everyday pleasantries by now become rituals… And this leads to a myriad of altars. Passionists of communication, they do not bring god to others in order to find themselves, but themselves to others in order to find god. Humility is of uttermost importance.
Our contemporaries are stupid, but prostrating ourselves at the feet of the stupidest of them all, means praying. We pray like this, today, as always. Spending time with the most erudite ones doesn’t mean getting close to the absolute anyway…
To be kinder than the kindest ones, to finally be the biggest idiot. Religion is an ancient word: for now let’s call it politeness.