There’ll be no sad tomorrow
Don’t you know that it’s so …
and this summer, the newspaper goes on, the plague has reached Strasbourg, where it is estimated that sixteen thousand souls have expired. All over the world, Jews have been charged with causing the plague, they have been cursed, they have been accused of poisoning wells and springs and in Berne and Zofingen a number of them, put to torture, admitted their crime and it was discovered that the wells they mentioned had indeed been poisoned. So from the Mediterranean to Germany, though not in Avignon, where the Pope protects them, Jews have been burned at the stake, and in Basel townsmen have marched on the Council and forced them to swear not to admit any Jew into the city for the next two hundred years. The bishop of Strasbourg, the feudal lords of Alsatia, and representatives of the three cities have gathered in Benfeld and questioned the deputies from Strasbourg about the fate of the Jewish population of that city. The deputies replied that they knew of no crime with which the Jews should be charged. Then why, they were asked, had they covered the city’s wells? Thus a clamor of indignation rose against the deputies from Strasbourg and in the end the Bishop and the lords of the Imperial Cities agreed to annihilate their Jews. Thereupon Jews were burned in the cities, and when they were merely expelled, the peasants in the countryside captured them, drowned many, put others to death by stabbing. It was on Saturday, St. Valentine’s day, that the Jews of Strasbourg were burned on a great wooden platform in their cemetery. Two thousand of them. Those who asked to be baptized were permitted to live. Many children were removed from the pyre and baptized against their parents’ wishes. And in this way were burned the Jews in Strasbourg and in all the cities of the Rhine, whether Imperial Cities or free cities. In some places they were formally tried, in others not. In some cities, toward the end, they set fire to their own homes and died in flames they had started themselves. It was generally ordered that their property be expropriated and the promissory notes they held made void, and at Strasbourg it was decreed that no Jew be allowed within the city for the next hundred years, but before twenty years had passed, the Council and magistrates reversed this decision, and in the year of our Lord 1368, the Jews returned.
It’s been a hard day’s night
And afterward, Dragoness, one had to dance on as if nothing had happened, forget forget forget so that it would not happen again, cast up the sum of agony afresh, though to do so might be all but impossible, and recover the Renaissance that had been made and stolen by Vico and Calvin and Descartes, the Renaissance that ended swamped by its rationality and its history, its good, evil, predestination, Natural Man, its Faustian activism and its will to the tragic, that had ended incinerated in the ovens of Auschwitz and on the leveled plain of Hiroshima, while now the innocent cynics sing
You can’t buy me love
and the women who worship them attire themselves from time to time in the cardinals’ hats and the black and red garments of the Constable of Bourgogne and the Bishop of Beauvais and the she-Pope Joan, cover themselves with the Gothic cloths which were used in the coronation of the kings of Hungary and are preserved among the treasures of Bamberg and Ratisbon and resurrected from the Livre des Métiers of Etienne Boileau; the rain capes of the Passion of St. Bertrand de Comminges are worn by the Dianan nymphs who dance in the discothèques of New York and Paris and London, the saddles of the Apocalypse at the cathedral of Angers shake to the rhythms of freed slaves in every whiskey-à-go-go, and in the new Missa Luba Hecate, dressed like Eleanor of Castile, and angular Circe, pale as Our Lady the Virgin of Beaune, mix the ashes of Tournai and Valenciennes with the rotten vegetation of Gabon and Nigeria while shaking to the throb of John Henry and King Oliver and Johnny Dodds, Billie Holliday, Satchmo, Cannonball Adderley:
Hesitatin’ Mama, hesitatin’ blues
Tell me how long do I have to wait,
and the new pervigilium veneris is officiated by the virgin witches who have betrothed themselves to the angelic Satan and forever mock the jus primae noctis while charming the Priapus-Bacchus-Sabatius, the kid on St. John’s day with the short chin whiskers and thick lips and tight pants and cowboy boots and a large rowdy court of relatives, wolves, elves, gnomes, white cats, legless fat dogs, ox-headed hounds, black rabbits, who celebrate the Black Mass of the great synthesis, the great game of opposites outlawed by the judge called rationality and the hangman called morality and the jailer called history, and clamor to God that He release His thunderbolt, the punishment of sins and hells that no longer exist, and the new Sibyl and the new Pan profane the idols of twenty-five centuries of lying prejudices, terrors, excuses, and become themselves the altars — of service and sacrifice — in the garden — remembered and promised — and there begin the new dance of St. Vitus, the ballet of the existential revolution that digests everything and consecrates and sacrifices to the human purpose everything, in its pulse, its fleeting eternal validity
She’s got the devil in her heart,
and so, Dragoness, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, and you, Isabel, for I am talking to you too, to both of you because this Mass must be celebrated first by a woman: all Masses begin with an Introit, just as do the life of every woman and the lives of the men who are born of women; you, Isabel, will discover only what you accept and you must accept everything. And having begun with the Introit, we end with piety before the Anointed Priapus, before Christ-Bacchus who at the very end does not demand the love of the God who abandoned him but the consolation of the witch, Mary wise in lore of potions and sleep-inducing herbs: Devil Lady, Green Virgin, Rosemary, Angels’ Ass, Burning Hair, Vinegar Woman, White Princess, Juanita, Marijuana, and also the drugs that make desire and vitality live again, drugs that bear the names of women too but are children of the totemic snakes of Mexico and Africa and the witches of Oaxaca and the Peruvian Highland and the black Congo who go into the white world with their rhythms and mushrooms and songs and magic in order to become part of the New Renaissance, the renaissance of the Only Faith, that of body and soul fused upon the cinder ruins of a Dark Age of bankers and munitions makers and Talmudic commissars and Pentagonic marines, all the planners and orators of the crusades for collective death and individual degradation. And Isabel sings with the radio
Anytime atall, anytime atall,
and suddenly closes her eyes and hits the brakes and the car rocks, skids, finally stops just short of a plaster-flaking adobe wall in front of which a child of two is rolling over and over with his scabies-ridden pup, crying, laughing, and you, Elizabeth, screamed as if you had given birth and opened the door and ran to the child and snatched him up in your arms, crying, “I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it any longer!” by which you meant the terror, not just the terror of Isabel’s lunatic driving and the frightened baby but the terror of terror itself, and the child became quiet in your arms, as if he recognized you, and you lifted him and held him high, as if you were displaying him to the sun, while Isabel sat behind the wheel with her eyes squinted shut and her clenched hands wet with sweat, and Javier watched you and Franz calmly smoked his cigarette.