Un coup de fil et puis s'en va
La corporation puissante aurait pu appeler, mais elle ne l’a pas fait.
La tête pensante de la corporation puissante pouvait tout arrêter, mais elle ne l’a pas fait.
La nouvelle est sortie, ce n’était pas joli-joli.
Ça sonnait mal et pas glorieux, pour la compagnie.
Savoir qu’elle aurait pu, qu’elle a su, et qu’elle n’a pas actionné ses leviers
Non pas pour arrêter le désastre : il était déjà passé
Mais pour faire taire la nouvelle, comme si de rien n’était
C’est savoir que la tête pensante de la corporation puissante est digne de respect.
Qu’importent les torts qu’on aurait à lui reprocher.
Qu’importent les affaires croches et tordues qu’on voudrait lui attribuer.
Qu’importent ce qu’on dit, de la tête pensante, de la corporation puissante, de leurs leviers.
Il y a eu cette affaire, qu’elle a laissée étaler, sur la place publique, dans les revues scientifiques.
Elle n’a rien eu à cacher. Elle a assumé. Elle a laissé place à l’avènement d’une vérité.
Elle s’est montrée digne d’être la tête pensante d’un aussi complexe réseau de leviers.
Lovers’ sake vs. What’s at stake
“For your sake, mine, and everyone’s, let them call me your roommate.
Whatever, man.”
Likely said Grace Frick.
“For the sake of everyone, may you forever be forgotten.”
Likely said to his wife the man who carried the hopes of a nation on his back,
And over his shoulders,
William Bradford.
“For my sake and everyone’s, let it always be remembered, that you were my everything, and that apart from our love, absolutely nothing else ever mattered, neither the victories, nor the riches, nor the power, nor the devotion of a million followers. Your gaze is what made this life worth living, and now that you are gone, I’ll follow, as soon as possible, via a noble death, which could never be as noble as the life you allowed me to live, for the brief nine years that we had together.”
Likely said Hadrian to the wind, in remembrance of Antinous, Hadrian being one of the last wise emperors of an empire that would, a century and a half later, end up killing Jesus Christ and burning his followers.
On the day he picked the piece of land where the Mayflower crew would settle, which they would baptize “New Plymouth” [TO COME: more on what the French brought to the people who lived on that piece of land, before the docking of the Mayflower], William Bradford learned that his wife had killed herself a few days prior, while he was gone.
Dorothy Bradford's suicide happened after leaving her infant child behind, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, after months of horrendous circumstances on the water, on the Mayflower, after years of holding on to dear hope for a better life, and way back when she couldn't have any remaining clue to let her foresee that her husband would end up being remembered for posterity as ground breaker for America as a new country.
William Bradford wrote extensively about the Pilgrims’ circumstances and faith, before the Mayflower, on the Mayflower, after the Mayflower, in New Plymouth and beyond. William Bradford did not write a word about his wife Dorothy, let alone her death, which could have been an accident, with a less lucky ending than that of John Howland, another passenger on the Mayflower and ancestor of at least eight US Presidents, who fell overboard and was rescued. For the records, William Bradford’s first wife would simply disappear, until some historians pieced two and two together, and allowed the contemporary reader to picture what it must have felt like for 23-year-old Dorothy to follow then 31-year-old William, blindly, until her faith in this whole endeavor faded to the point of no return, on the day when she jumped overboard, right before his return from their final “expedition” on Cape Cod, as winter was already there, and the gift of God, as meant the etymology of Dorothy’s name, decided that she had had enough of this life, already.
Eighteen centuries before William Bradford was faced with a daily reminder of the hiatus between what he knew about Dorothy and what he would spend the rest of his life pretending, including in his writings, in order to keep everyone’s hopes alive, withholding the taste of despair to himself, biting the bullet for the team, the Roman emperor Hadrian lost his beloved to another “mysterious” death by drowning.
History will never know what happened to Antinous in the Nile.
Did someone try to get at Hadrian by killing his lover? Was his lover sick and tired of losing every single argument to “The Emperor”, so he let himself drown as his final farewell to the devoted, powerful, picture-perfect emperor, so Antinous could have the final say between them, for once and forever? All that history will ever know, is that Hadrien and Antinous were very found of each other, and felt very blessed to have found each other, that one of them died young and under mysterious circumstances, while the other died a natural death less than eight years later, neither old nor young, with a broken heart and a tormented soul, as documented by historians and brought to life by Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian.
If Hadrian had lived after Jesus Christ, he could have heard about the afterlife, including resurrection, through which humanity was allowed to believe in reunion of souls and absolution of sins, following proper repentance and mutual love.
Since William Bradford’s devotion for the message of Jesus Christ was lit in his heart by his self study of the Bible as an orphan, i.e. by his intuition in understanding the wisdom of Scriptures, Old and New testaments alike, he likely repented everyday following Dorothy’s death, for his lies by omission, as he documented, for the sake of building a nation, what went on in his heart and on “Plymouth Plantation”, keeping Dorothy’s story his secret, and the taste of her despair a ripple in the ocean.
Marguerite Yourcenar knew a thing or two about men looking back at their lives and hanging on to their last thread, hoping to win Fortune back into their lives, praying that she would welcome them again, i.e. that Fortune would allow decadent men to return by her sides, and judge them eternally worthy of her favours. Marguerite Yourcenar’s mother died ten days after she was born. Marguerite Yourcenar grew up found of her father, who dreamed of the writer’s life she ended up having, finding the Yourcenar anagram with her, using his patronym, encouraging her to pursue her dreams, to follow her interests and to read his books.
Marguerite Yourcenar’s groundbreaking career as an intellectual and a writer was nurtured in the life she had with her father with whom she learned and travelled, including to visit Hadrian’s villa in Tivoli in 1924, while Marguerite Yourcenar was 21, less than five years before her father died, leaving her orphaned at 25. When he passed away, Marguerite Yourcenar did not inherit much of the wealth her father once made over the one he inherited from his ancestors, before losing it all to gambling.
Marguerite Yourcenar was born Marguerite de Crayencour, bearing the particle “de” as the sign of the nobility she was born into, only to witness her patriarch dilapidate the whole thing, learning first hand what it looks like to be the ruin of one’s empire, the prodigal son who tried, but never made it better, faster, stronger than his father, let alone his daughter.
Marguerite Yourcenar’s keen eye on decline is worth gazillion praises and the read of aspiring rulers in the age of Le Déclin de l’Empire Américain, as beautifully depicted by Denis Arcand, at a time when the Catholic Church appointed its first ever American pope, born and raised in Illinois, with ethnical diversity written in his genealogy, whose devoted parents prayed the Rosary, i.e. the Psalter of Jesus and Mary, while the world got a preview of what a global response to threat could look like, in Ulrich Beck’s “reflective” modernity, as COVID-19 hit the globe, only a couple of years before ChatGPT.
Humanity may well have been playing Russian Roulette more than thrice already, but hope still lingers, into the Fade out Lines, humanity [Will] not Go gentle Into That Good Night.
As much as Marguerite Yourcenar knew the colour of her father’s despair like no one else, there is a perspective she could never relate to, which she barely explored in her phenomenal oeuvre, since, as she would say, she never missed her mother, nor was she interested in chasing her figure, since one doesn’t miss those who left before they had time to trigger care and wonder.
Marguerite Yourcenar did not spend her life and career trying to put the pieces of her mother back together. Marguerite Yourcenar didn’t carry a child in her womb, though she was a figurative mother to many. The mother figure was simply not Marguerite Yourcenar’s calling, but humanity received the gift of Marguerite Yourcenar’s wisdom on the heart of men, brothers and fathers, thanks to the trinity comprised of:
- 1) Michel de Crayencour, her father, with all his shortcomings, swimming in the ocean of his fatherly love, free of envy, jealousy, and preconceived ideas towards his daughter.
- 2) Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour, i.e. Marguerite Yourcenar herself, with her insatiable curiosity, flying in the skies of the custom-made curriculum she chose to follow so she could be educated like a man from day one, without being thrown into fighting world wars, like would have been her fate, if she had been born a man, in Europe in 1903.
- 3) Grace Frick, her soulmate and lover, aka the American woman who fell in love with her when Marguerite Yourcenar was 34, penniless and unknown to the literary world, brought her to America where she could rest, think, eat proper, write and work, all the while forgetting about her non-reciprocal love for her first editor, and who diligently built both hers and Marguerite’s careers for the 40 years they lived together, as hidden lovers, until Grace died first, after a long sickness, two years before Marguerite Yourcenar became the first woman to get into l’Académie Française, in 1981.
Marguerite Yourcenar had many talents, but on top of all her abilities, she had the utmost privileges to be born a woman raised and loved as a son by a notable man, receiving prime education and being truly free to let her curiosity feed her ambitions, and to be loved by a driven, humble, and organized woman, who cherished her as would both a wife and a husband, letting people call her “Marguerite Yourcenar’s roommate”, “Marguerite Yourcenar’s secretary”, and “Marguerite Yourcenar’s translator”, not dwelling on the state of what was considered acceptable in their times, since she was born as free as a white American woman in the early Twentieth century, all the while being intelligent and culture-savvy enough to see beyond Marguerite’s charms and be well aware of the potential encompassed in the gem that she had found in Paris, whom she brought back to New-England, in the USA, where she nurtured her, seemingly, for everyone, on the back-burner, but for Marguerite, right in the middle, i.e. front and center.
In 1927, at age 24, a year before losing her father, Marguerite Yourcenar was forever struck by a sentence from Gustave Flaubert’s correspondence, where he wrote that “Les dieux n’étant plus, et le Christ n’étant pas encore, il y a eu, de Cicéron à Marc Aurèle, un moment unique où l’homme seul a été.” Flaubert saw man as “alone” and godless, which Marguerite Yourcenar indicated, in her Notes supporting her writings of Hadrian’s Memoirs, would become the drive of her curiosity and work: “une grande partie de ma vie allait se passer à essayer de définir, puis à peindre, cet homme seul et d’ailleurs relié à tout.”
One could argue that Flaubert’s assertion around the period between Ciceron and Marcus Aurelius is applicable to euro-centric humankind since World War II, and that euro-centric humankind has not left the state of general hopelessness and dread that comes with a generalized sense of godlessness. One could argue, however, that Marguerite Yourcenar’s work on the historical figure of the Emperor Hadrien gives invaluable keys to imagining hopeful futures going beyond the current generalized sense of godlessness, if entered against the grain, i.e. reading Hadrian’s Memoirs, written in 1949-1950, after The Abyss (L’Oeuvre au noir), written by Marguerite Yourcenar in 1968.
Marguerite Yourcenar imagined writing Hadrian’s Memoirs in her twenties, before her father died and Grace Frick took her under her wings, in the United States of America. Marguerite started the work then, in the 1920’s, i.e. before WWII. She undertook extensive research on Hadrian, wrote plenty about him, and as she moved around, including in between countries, all her initial work and obsession for Hadrian stayed in a chest, in Europe. She left that chest behind in 1939, i.e. at the onset of WWII, as she left Europe to follow Grace Frick in the USA, avoiding WWII, before the chest was shipped to her to the USA in 1949, that is, ten years later, after WWII and before the Cold War, when Marguerite Yourcenar was 45. When she received the chest, Marguerite went through her notes, discarded everything, and started over her work on Hadrian, from a blank page, with (peri)menopausal maturity, well decided to explore the heart and bouts of an emperor that would not be the kind of men who marched over Europe, during and around WWII.
Marguerite Yourcenar wrote Hadrian’s Memoirs travelling across the US, including on the train and in restaurants.
In her Notes supporting her writings of Hadrian’s Memoirs, Marguerite Yourcenar indicates that she wrote all passages from Hadrian’s Memoirs relating to food, love, sleep, and the knowledge of man while on her road trip across the USA.
Therefore, one could argue that Marguerite Yourcenar, Grace Frick's protégée and France's first woman admitted into the Académie Française had her case of Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 memoir Eat, Pray, Love : One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, except she did it traveling across the USA.
God Bless America, c'est peut-être un peu ça
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