“When at night I walk barefoot in my sandals across fields of snow at the Austrian border, I shall not flinch, but then, I say to myself, this painful moment must concur with the beauty of my life, I refuse to let this moment and all the others be waste matter; using their suffering, I project myself to the mind’s heaven.’
That’s Jean Genet, in The Thief’s Journals. Good stuff, I’d say
Genet makes an appearance in Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School.
Of course that isn’t Kathy Acker on the cover – it’s Peggy Moffat, photographed by Bill Claxton.
I don’t know if Kathy Acker was much of a walker. There’s some footage of her walking in the lower East Side that appeared in a 1984 South Banks Show, but far more pictures show her in the gym or on a motorcycle.
Still, walking crops up in more or less interesting ways in the book, when for instance, in Manhattan, Janey the book’s heroine and, I suppose, Acker’s alter ego, ‘walks up and down the same street as the hookers walk only the hookers make some money.’
Then Janey is in Tangier and, lo and behold, she sees Jean Genet walking along the street. Despite being warned that he has a reputation for being aloof and difficult, she decides she MUST talk to him, which she does and Genet is charmed by her.
She quotes him in her diary ‘Loneliness and poverty made me not walk but fly.’
In fact it appears that Acker did meet Genet, introduced by William Burroughs, though that doesn’t have much to do with what happens in the book.
Janey sees Genet again, ‘He walks along the white dust slowly, like he did yesterday. I lift my hand. His eyes light up and he smiles. I stand up. We shake hands for a long time.’
They travel together and after many difficulties and much experimental prose they end up in the desert outside Alexandria. ‘The desert is absolutely brilliant’ says Janey, who’s a sharp observer.
Genet tells her to get some sleep. ‘Sleep, she says ‘If I’m walking across rocks … it’s murder to my everlasting sleep
When they get to Luxor, Genet gives her money and goes off to see a production of one if his plays. Literary result: ‘She dies.’
I don’t know that Genet was much of a pedestrian either, though here he is in the company of some literary flaneurs:
But I do know he was briefly besotted with an 18 yeartightrope walker, Abdallah Bentaga, and eventually wrote a short piece titled The Tightrope Walker (Le Funambule).
It contains the lines ‘I would not be surprised, when you walk on the earth, if you fall and sprain something. The wire will carry you better, more surely that a road.’
This is irony. Genet paid for Bentaga to have high wire lessons but Bentaga fell and destroyed his knee, ending his tightrope walking career. Genet then bought him, what’s referred to in sources as a ‘small circus,’ the way you do. But then Genet started seeing somebody else, so Bentaga killed himself. How different from the home life of … well, of anybody you care to mention.
I did once spend an afternoon in Tangier, Genet having been dead for some years by the time I got there, and I remember almost nothing about it, but I know that I did do some walking and I also bought a postcard.
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