David Davis

something bad happened

In The Thief’s Journal, Jean Genet’s protagonist is given a package by Stilitano, this criminal he’s fucking, and instructed to transport it from Germany to the Netherlands. Only after smuggling the package does he find out it contained opium. But he doesn’t feel betrayed.

I understood, nevertheless, why God needs an angel, which He calls a messenger, to carry out certain missions which He Himself is unable to…For [Stilitano] revealing himself to me in this way, my gratitude rose up to him.

Words like resilience or defiance are not enough to articulate how Genet’s protagonists respond to suffering. Theirs is a transmutation by sheer force of will. This journal is not a mere literary diversion, his Thief’s Journal protagonist writes. The further I progress…the more do I feel myself hardening my will to utilize, for virtuous ends, my former hardships. I feel their power.

Their power is Genet’s. As the emotional fallout of tragedy, the sensations of depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress operate hypothetically, removing you from real time. Surrounded by if-thens and bulging with hideous potential, these states of being feel both fiercely attenuated and permanent as cold concrete. How is it that Genet’s orphans, itinerants, and prisoners can find not only pleasure—indeed, a form of eroticism, as our protagonist himself puts it—but honor, beauty, and adventure in their betrayal?

Something bad happened recently, so for the past few weeks, I’ve felt broken. No, that’s not specific enough: I’ve felt cis. That’s what despair feels like to me. It calls into question all other states of being, making happiness seem not just inaccessible, but specious. I believe that expanding one’s capacity for pleasure means encountering displeasure more often, and more intensely. When I’m down there like I have been, I’m asking myself: is the exchange worth it?

When I first started drafting this edition of DAVID, I didn’t think it was. At the moment, however, I do. Still, I’ve been dwelling on a line from Cormac McCarthy’s final novel, where a doomed woman tells her psychoanalyst, As long as you are breathing you can always be more scared. I don’t think Genet would disagree, and yet the contrast is astounding, isn’t it?

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