020
THE KISS OF JUDAS
Here is a drawing by Aubrey Beardsley entitled The Kiss of Judas from Pall Mall Magazine, July 1893. Jesus feels his feminine shoulders melting into the hard and prickly bark of the tree where he reclines like a prince, long-haired and beautiful. We are in languor. The tree whispers his old trade back into his flesh. His mother’s voice is in the breeze. Yet, as I lie down with him, he hears neither.
 
His lips are wet and insipid. They are like spoiled fruit. He listens to the gently conceited echo of his Self as the wood folds like a fleece around his neck and back, and a dutiful sleep descends for him. His robes lap about him. All is peaceful with him. Aubrey Beardsley—since I have entered into ambiguity and anachronism—draws me as a child, or rather as a man deformed and shrunken, stunted in the banality of childhood, tilting my grotesque bald head at Jesus’ groin. At the same time as they seem to show us, these figures do not. The child in Beardsley’s illustration is not me but my descendant, one of the “children of Judas,” the atavistic traitors. Aubrey Beardsley died after twenty-five years of life, the same age as Jesus and I. The truth is that I had no children. Nothing gathers so well, or is as pregnant, as a lie. I become the opiates in Beardsley, the spatter of grease from the bacon pan as he finds breakfast, the tight knot in his black tie.
 
The buildings of the city of London flowed like a torrent of black oil toward the heavens, leaving only scuffed ankle-high white snow on the streets. As he walked, Aubrey Beardsley lifted his knees high and flicked the ice from his shoes with sharp motions of his toes. He gave the impression of a fussy pony trained to wear tight suits and to walk upright, fastidious and awkward, old manners impressed upon a raunchy recalcitrant brain. Rising, dressing, bathing—all were imposed upon him. To look into Aubrey Beardsley’s eyes was to gaze into satanic India ink, a swirl of loins and poisoned wells curling down into the bowels of the planet. All of the sex words bleached out of the Scripture scrolled like a pale, near-invisible dragon around his balls, the lozenge of his perineum, and the dripping catacombs of his skin. What hair remained on his body after his toilet was merely a fine smoke, an opiate auburn-black. His wrist was his reputation, the eroticist with the sunken face illustrating coils of sperm and stiff gods. Because his desires were terrible and shivering as thin dogs in the London snow, his copulations were monstrous and ornate. He saw all human bonds as lethal and treacherous. The world was without sympathy and as violent as he could imagine.
 
The gaslight fell on him through the snow. Beardsley was a sissy and a coward. His character had remained inchoate and suspended in the slime of his childhood, where he was thrashed for his filthy drawings. “So cold I shall perish before the front door.” The syringe in his coat pocket would freeze solid and be ruined before he could shoot it. Moments later, he was home. The black door to his house shone like a mausoleum of rook wings. The dogs, Gog and Magog, barked at either end of the street when he opened it, and the smell of flesh poured out. He took in the street once more, the occult layers of it shifting beneath the ice, the wrought iron, the gas flares, the serpent of cobbles, the Gethsemane of soot, the Golgotha of bloody corsets, the many veils of Hell. He slammed the door with a flourish of relief. “I am still young to have seen what I have seen.” He climbed his unlit stairs. “Such fevers.”
 
When Beardsley was thirteen, he had stolen in to see a spiritualist. She had laid cards upon the rotting straw of the mews where she had set up. He touched himself through the material of his trouser pockets and caught the flash in the woman’s lips. She stood over the cards and lifted her skirt and petticoats. The spiritualist pissed on the cards until they began to curl. The first card that she turned over depicted the image of a goat, wandering in a blasted desert. “Ah, the Scapegoat,” the woman said. The second card was the Hanged Man. Something shook and seemed to kick Beardsley in the stomach, and the first seed of his life squirmed into his underclothes. For a moment, he saw the twitching obscene feet of a suicide suspended over rosy dirt.
 
The spiritualist came closer to him, piss steam around her ankles, brass bells and gypsy things shifting with her steps. “You are an Outsider,” she said. “You will be anathema.”
“I want to be an artist.”
“You will only be trash, but a kind of spectacular, significant trash. Everything that you are, everything that you do, will be sick and dirty.”
 
Everything that the spiritualist suggested came true because she had suggested it to him. Thus formed the noose of solipsism from which he would never escape.
 
Now, he collapsed on his bed, balancing a port and lemon on his skinny chest. The walls of his room were covered with pornographic drawings, images from the Bible, and romances of Judaic dust, chivalric and warped children. “I was ruined before I ever slopped out of my mother’s inkwell,” he reminded himself. He shot up and tried to draw, quickly, before oblivion took him.
 
The following morning, he breakfasted with Wilde at the Pall Mall Club. The early drinkers fanned and coughed through clots of smoke, waiters limped, and kippers steamed on white plates. A stuffed monkey swung by its neck in the strange rigging above the bar, surrounded by jaundiced portraits and picaresque paintings of naval or hunting follies.
“Ugh, my eggs are cold, again,” Beardsley complained.
“Oh, do calm down, Aubrey. You sound like an old prostitute. Here, look at this.” Wilde gestured to an advertisement in the newspaper that lay between them on the table. Wilde read the headline aloud. “It says Spiritualist Medium Will Summon Biblical Witnesses. It says that this fellow relays the voices of characters from the New Testament.”
“Not the Old Testament, though?”
“No. Too untidy, I suspect. But, according to this, he does Paul, Doubting Thomas, and a bevy of tax collectors and cripples.”
“I wonder if he would do Judas Iscariot?”
“Aubrey, come, that would be too easy. After all, the Church has insisted on giving us all a little bit of Judas and, signally, the likes of you and me. The Gospels, dreary as they are, make it clear that Jesus was strictly on loan—he has come, been, and gone. Whereas, you and I recognize implicitly that Judas Iscariot is of no place, no time, no race, no planetary space. He is ubiquitous in our spirit and, therefore, is the only thing in the wretched book, beyond the fornications and brutish sacrifices, that is truly ours.”
Beardsley eyed Wilde across the table, the arrogant flop of his hair and the tight purse of his lips. “Go on.”
Wilde spoke solemnly. “To be an anachronism, to betray one’s time and place, is the highest of all the arts.”
“We are all the children of Judas.”
Later.
“Oscar? Did I ever tell you about the time I tried to hang myself?” As they exited the revolving door of the club into the freezing Soho streets, Beardsley let his fingers drift over the Irishman’s flanks.
“You never did.”
021
AUBREY BEARDSLEY pulled his ratty fur collar closer around his throat:
“I once convinced myself—although now I recognize that this is common in a certain caste of young men—that the universe existed merely as an ornate embroidery about me, that I was its agent, its concentration, and its scapegoat, that all else had been created by God as symbols and ciphers to surround me. Each experience became a message. Each sight, sound, and conversation became a code for something else. I was the only object in God’s creation that was not a phantom. And all these phantoms, eidolons, and angels existed about me for the singular purpose of examining me and of watching me examine myself under God’s awful lens. Every flame, birth, conflagration, worm, city, imagining, everything was an artifice, a moral burlesque . . . fucking, vomiting, dying, and conspiring about Aubrey Beardsley, whose trajectory was that of an artist. And in that scapegoat theatre, Wilde, I despaired.
“So, I fastened a rope to the cistern above my lavatory and pushed my face through the noose. I drank and drank until I was certain to lose consciousness, slump and fall, hang myself there. But the pipe was rusted and broke away. The deluge from the cistern washed over me, and, wretched as I was, I did not manage to die. I just sat there in the sobering slosh of my toilet. Ironically, that may have been the final proof that the universe really is set about me, and my affairs, and that even you are merely a cipher for my tuition. Or, rather, as I deduced, God is full of shit.”
“Amen. Aubrey, I am writing a new erotic play called Salome. In the play, Herod has John the Baptist imprisoned in a cistern. I want you to illustrate my play. Will you do it?”
Beardsley’s blunt hairstyle dripped with tubercular sweats, and he fought to steady his fingers as he inked the stripping of Salome and the destruction of John the Baptist. If there was to be Scripture, it should be illustrated with decadence. For, if it was anything, it was decadent. He dreamed in black and white. He was afraid that he was going to die young.