The poet falls in love with the world and constantly dies for it—circle of frenzy and release—Orphée! Or the poet expires so that his (her) words may live [is that the same as not having a social life?]. He falls literally into the hands of L’Amour La Mort. Orphée (Jean Marais) and his Death (Maria Casarès) stalk each other. Their primal attraction is poetic divination and fate, seen in love’s mirror as mutual fire-in-the-eyes. “It’s not about understanding; it’s about belief.” Expectant, vain, exalted, Orpheus takes his lover’s vow, poet’s creed: “Toujours?” “Je jure.” The rhyme of ‘always’ and ‘I swear’, oath of eternal enactment, is the same for artist and lover: to go all the way through the mirror’s veil. “Say forever.”
For Cocteau the drama’s a Parisian romance played out between pompadour and high heels. The scene borrows glamour from Hollywood to push the metaphor and make it itch: The eternal oath is sealed with a hot kiss. She’s in two-piece wasp-waist Escoffier and he’s all jawline and blond raked hair. Where earlier the radio of inspiration might have been the muse’s wellspring, now it’s background music to an embrace. Casarès lights a cigarette. “Do you love this man?” demands the judge. Casarès exhales, says nothing. Insistent, “Do you love this man?” “Oui.” Orphée swells and gasps; Death’s black gloves and pearls. Alone in the adjacent room—“Mon amour”—they touch; they kiss. They fall to the bed. Casarès’s teardrop face—pointed chin and radically upswept eyes like Satan herself—is bathed in light. They lie down forever and swear.
After fifteen years and perhaps a dozen viewings, I’m watching the movie again with my students, having offered to initiate them into Cocteau’s mystery: the resonant unfolding charm of perfect metaphor, each side ceaselessly amplifying the other. This is the heart of the movie, the scene that’s always held me in thrall, Death explaining the universal chain of command that I’ve read as Creative Order, the order of Form calling the poet to work: “transmitted by so many messengers that it’s like the tom-toms of your African tribes, the echoes of your mountains, the wind in the leaves of your forests.” But this time I’m feeling weak at the knees; something new in the scene disturbs me—I feel oddly embarrassed, shocked. I’m pulled out of the poetics and land in the purely transgressive nature of the kiss: unsettling, scandalous. He’s kissing death. It may seem moody and romantic but he’s making love to death …
Why am I so unbalanced now by this familiar scene? [D.H. Lawrence: “Why does the thin grey strand/ Floating up from the forgotten/ Cigarette between my fingers,/ Why does it trouble me?// Ah, you will understand …”] These well-worn words have redefined themselves: kiss of death, The Kiss of Death. How altered my sense of this stock phrase, how literal its reinvention … How fearfully, now, behind each stolen kiss; how courageously behind each true one … How familiar death has become in my casual life; how complexly my friends have embraced it. Ah, you will understand … AIDS … AIDS.
For now overlaid upon Cocteau’s poetic myth is a real kiss, newly fabled. My old friend Marshall is nursing his dying lover, Ken. The frame cannot be bleached of Ken’s wilful blue sores, skeleton-haunted body, feverish lips. Hollywood lighting will not erase the shadow in his cheeks, ashen tinge of skin. In a pale room, on a San Francisco hill, the morning before Ken dies, his lover’s oath continues: “I love you baby.” To his mother: “This is my farewell kiss to you.” To Marshall, eagerly, “Kiss me, baby.” Ken doesn’t have the advantage of a cinched black dress and pearls. He’s wearing padded hospital diapers, pulling them down because he feels they’re not sexy. He says to Marshall, “Suck my lizard tongue.” Marshall does.
I’m shaking in the juncture of Cocteau’s spirit-zone and my friend’s house. Do actual death and disease derange the vital romance of this lived “scene”; do they disgust and terrorize, black out the spotlight, stop the radio? I’ve seen in the announcement of this true kiss a hail of blisters, spiral rashes, white spots on the tongue, thin lusterless hair, sunken cough-wracked chests, purple swollen noses, fading eyes, parched throats. In my work, at my desk, on the tip of my pen, on your lips, on your tongue—I see Jackson’s distended lymphatic neck, Eric’s giant eyes, Iolo’s broken walk, Chuck’s pushing skull, Leland’s loose-pulling skin. These are the images that would stop the kisses, silence the poem. They don’t stop Marshall, who’s met his fate in Ken’s love, not in his death. Whose oath takes him within the failing heart of his beloved, and beats there. Marshall, who delivers a fearless kiss in the transfixed zone where death’s permanence lets love keep living.
Before encountering his death, Orpheus is dead-tired, his form has gone flat. Celebrity has leeched from his work the edge of daring. He pleases. “Orpheus …your most serious defect is knowing just how far one can go,” but no farther. In the words transmitted from the zone by dead Cegeste and the Princess—discrete surreal phrases and the formal purity of numbers—Orpheus rediscovers his passionate disequilibrium. He pushes through to a place he doesn’t understand but believes in, down through the layers and accretions of mud, language, faces in the mirror, beloved’s glances, worn rhythms to an intuited measure found in a black and pure embrace.
The poet meeting his fate in poetry, the lover in loving: propriety serves neither, both must go too far. In that rapturous clasp of Orphée and his death I recognize the grip of devotion, the intent out of bounds, the pure work. [Robert Duncan: “Our uses are our illuminations.”] Throughout the Zone—“memories of men and the ruins of their habits”—and haunting the house, mere information restrains hand and heart, the giving and the art. Many are abandoned by those unwilling to go far enough. “Will it be easier if I say goodbye?” asks Marshall, standing there. “Yes,” answers Ken, “Say goodbye.” And here the kiss of death is love’s wound healed by love’s avowal.
PRINCESS I must leave you, but I swear I’ll find a way for us to be united.
ORPHEUS Say “forever.”
PRINCESS Forever.
ORPHEUS Swear to it.
PRINCESS I swear.
(1992)