The Crucifixion of Grünewald, Or: J.K. Crucified!

When I look into the mirror, I see the portrait of a sinner painted by a Flemish Primitive, pictured in the authentic setting of his bedroom, surrounded by the symbols of suffering and substitution: a reproduction of a Grünewald Crucifixion or a photograph of Catherine Emmerich, showing her stigmatized hands. From the ugly but powerfully evocative physiognomy of this man with the perforated throat - ghostly-pale, hollow-cheeked - acute anguish and spiritual turmoil are emanating. The illusion is compelling and sure, manifesting a purity of vision, transforming the material world, affording an escape from the senses.

I still can see, you know. The tumor has closed only one of my eyes.

I still can see you all through the smoke of the cigarettes I've smoked all my life, in brothels and in monasteries. I still keep them obstinately rolling between the bloodless bones that are my fingers.

I still can see the doctors who prolonged my life and agony through operations on my eye and on my neck, swollen by cancer. They improved my eye sight but did not ease the pain, while my cancerous jaw turned eating into an excruciating task.

I still can see the doctors. They extracted most of my remaining teeth in an exceptionally painful way, as the anesthetic wore off before the end of the surgery. Some of them tried to halt the tumor's progress through treatments with the new X-ray technology, but eventually they all confined me to this deathbed, where I grow rapidly weaker now, working with a secretary on Crowds of Lourdes, describing the rites of the grotto and the horrid afflictions of those who come to pray here, the haemorrhage of bad taste, the vileness of the church of the Rosary.

I've seen no cures there, but I've observed great faith. And I do believe in miracles, although I can authenticate none.

Oh yes, I still can see you. And so I watch you as you silently move through my sleeping room - the spirits of the present and the past. And I remember. How naturalism came as a revelation to me. How, afterwards, I grew weary of the fin de siècle silliness.

I still know how I found what I was seeking, down there, in Germany, before Grünewald's Crucifixion. Let me shudder again in this deathbed of mine, let me close one of my eyes to revisualize the picture with the extraordinary lucidity of someone's last hours on this earth.

Thank you.

My friends used to call me J.K. - J stood for Joris and K for Karl, or Kristus in the Dutch tongue that was my father's language. And there He was, J.C., rising before J.K., on his rude cross, with arms like branches bending like bows under the weight of the body, the suffering flesh held to earth by an enormous spike, dislocated, bony fingers wide apart and contorted in a gesture of supplication, reproach, but also benediction. And here I am, with tiny thighs, trembling, greasy with sweat; with ribs like the bars of a cage - the flesh swollen and blue, turning green, beginning to putrefy, spongy, blistered. Blood is dripping thickly like congealing mulberry from my fluvial wounds; and there is a milky pus too, somewhat reddish, as the colour of grey Moselle.

Here I am. Above an eruptive cadaver a head is hanging down, lifeless, one eye half opened in a shudder of terror, face furrowed, cheeks blanched, jaw racked by cancerous contractions.

Here I am. Still laughing. Atrociously.

My torture was terrific, my agony frightening and causing literary critics such as the venomously hateful Leon Bloy to flight this room in the rue Saint-Placide, taking with him the clergy still mocking my conversion.

Here I am. Full of confidence in Our Lady who is coming to take me where I belong. Still waiting for Madame la Mort - she's hiding up there in shallow shadows, do you see her? Or has she already returned down there with the damned?

Surely she has to be somewhere, isn't she? Surely she has to be somewhore in the dark blue sky of night!

Do you see her? I can see her.

Look, she's standing by Berthe who was the first to take me down there. And after that, she took me up there, to the abbé Mugnier, the last of my spiritual guides.

Look there, Madame la Mort is standing by my dear friend now (there is a friend on each side of my deathbed, watching over me) - and Berthe's face is pale and swollen with weeping, and the abbé has joined his hands and drawn himself up before my corpse, contemplating with his red and smoky eyes my quivering throat, my choking cries.

'See me,' I solemnly whisper in his ears. 'I'm not the Adonis of Golgotha the Church has made of me ever since the Renaissance. I'm no longer the exquisite dandy with the doll-like features or the decadent youth with the curly tresses and divided beard. I'm a Flemish Primitive, now. I'm J.K. of St Basil - a vulgar Christ, ugly with the assumption of the burden of our sins, clothed in humility. Look at me! For I am frail of flesh, the Jesus Christ of the poor, the afflicted, the beggars and the helplessness, abandoned by the Father and crying out to a Mother with an infant's cry, as every man in torment cries.'

Look at me. I am willing to suffer the Passion with all the suffering permitted to the human senses, obeying an incomprehensible ordination and thinking of Lydwine, blessed girl of my ancestral homeland, vowing perpetual virginity.

Pursued by suitors, she resisted temptation. To avoid further distress, she prayed to grow ugly. Lydwine was granted all sorts of hideous diseases and afflictions, and that gave her the capacity to perform miracles. Saintly persons suffer, you know, by the doctrine of substitution and to redeem others. So I have to suffer saintly, dying like a thief in the night, vilely, sinking to the deepest depth, not sparing myself of the last ignominy of putrefaction.

Never before naturalism has transfigured itself by such a conception, such an execution. Grünewald was the most uncompromising of all realists. His Redeemer of the Morgue, this Deity of the Sewer, gave the observer eyes to see a realism that could be truly transcendent. Do you see it? You who are standing around my deathbed, hiding in the shadows, do you see the divine light playing around this ulcerated head of mine? Do you see a superhuman expression illuminating my fermenting skin, my epileptic features? The crucified corpse I painted down there was a God without aureole or nimbus and with none of the stock accoutrements except a blood-sprinkled crown of thorns - J.K. appearing in His celestial super-essence between the stunned and grief-torn Berthe and an abbé whose calcined eyes were beyond the shedding of tears.

Look at their faces, vulgar by nature, resplendent, transfigured with the expression of the sublime grief of souls whose plaint is not heard. Do you hear it?

Thief, pauper, peasant... they vanish in the liquid air and give place to supraterrestial creatures in the presence of their God. Never an artist has reached such a magnificent exaltation, such a summit of spiritual altitude. His art must have been obeying the unopposable urge to make the invisible visible - the crying impurity of the flesh, the sublime and infinite distress of the soul.

It had no equivalent in literature. A few pages of Emmerich upon the Passion may approach this ideal of supernatural realism, or certain effusions of Ruysbroeck. Ah, the mystic naturalism of the Middle Ages!

I have often halted on the treshold of Catholicism, you know - always finding I had no faith. There has been no effort on the part of God to reclaim my soul and I have never possessed the will to let myself go trustingly and without reserve into the sheltering shadows of immutable dogma. Certain books accentuated my disgust for everyday life and had me longing for lenitive hours in a cloister, where the monotonous chant of prayers in the incense-laden atmosphere would bring on a somnolence, a dreamy rapture of mystical ideas. But as I said it before and you have to write it down for me in this last memoirs of mine, only a simple soul is capable of savouring the delights of such a self-abandon. And my own soul was battered by the demon of lust and torn with earthly conflict. My momentary desire to take refuge in the timeless proceeded from a multitude of ignoble motives: from lassitude with the petty and repeated annoyances of existence, from quarrels with the waiter and the landlord, from the sordid scramble for money.

There were times when I threw down my pen and cursed the existence I had shaped for myself, because when I looked into the future there was nothing to see but bitterness. Only religion could heal me: it was without foundation or limit and promised a complete escape from earth into dizzy and unexplored altitudes. But since it demanded also a total desertion of common sense, I threw up my hands.

I did not believe and yet I admitted the supernatural and was attracted to the Church by its intimate and ecstatic art, by the splendour of its legends, by the radiant naïveté of the histories of its saints.

You, spirits of the future who are now reading my words, do you deny we are all hemmed in mystery, in our homes, in our streets - everywhere we go? Do you? Do you ignore the unforeseen and the inexplicable?

Please come and sit here by my bed now and listen to me, Jean. Is that you? Jean de Caldain, my faithful Secretary? Now the end is near, you have to burn it all - God will recognise his own! It is my last will and I appoint you as my Executor: all that you have written down for me in these last year of my torment, the many letters and manuscripts such as La Comédie humaine and Notre-Dame de La Salette, and above all the notebooks regarding the sinister chaplain of the Holy Blood - burn it all in a heart breaking, mind shaking auto-da-fé!

Read it to me, Jean. It's in the batch of recent press-cuttings. Read it to me. The snippet which announces that I have received the sacrament of extreme unction because I am in my death-agony now. Read it to me and then burn it!

I have to make preparations for the end, Jean. I want to be buried in my monastic habit, in my tunic and with my scapular. I want you to write down one single piece, Jean. You can burn the rest of my papers, but write this one down at my dictation - the invitation to my funeral together with my last words regarding the Case of the Infamous Canon Docre.

The wording should be absolutely perfect, so write it down very clearly. Do you read me?

And then, help me to arrange the communion-table, Jean. Please help me to place on the cloth a simple altar-piece, two coloured Dutch tapers in brass candlesticks, my antique crucifix and the reliquary containing the relic of Blessed Lydwine.

Thank you, Jean. And then, listen to me.

Listen...

I'm into this project together with author and researcher Philip Coppens.

The notes and articles J.K. Huysmans is talking about:

• Down There, a History of Satanism
• The Satanist Chaplain of the Holy Blood
• The Code of the Holy Blood
• The Holy Blood of Bruges, a New Jerusalem