Is Rape Irreversible?
ESCAPE FROM RAPE
CAN A CHILD SURVIVE PEDOPHILIA?
It is difficult to answer such a question. We don’t even know how many children are the victims of such acts that have to be considered atrocious and most of them are incestuous, all the more untouchable for the concerned children.
Even if the limit between which and what is difficult to set, a joke is always a joke for the joker but an attack, an assault, a treacherous blow for the target of the joke, especially when under ten or even under fifteen.
It is difficult to set a divide between love and desire and a child does not know at all that there is such a divide. An older child, an older sibling for example can easily take advantage of this fuzziness to satisfy his appetite.
The child will never forget but the child might have had recourse to a simple strategy that I consider a simple survival device for a child. Separate your mind from your body. Let your body react instinctively to the “aggression” and keep your mind somewhere locked up in a universe that does not contain the assault not the assailant.
Some might tell me this divided personality is schizophrenic or may lead to schizophrenia. Some might even think it is in a way producing some kind of autistic stance. I am not sure. But what I am sure about is that such kids are spared the suffering, and they in fact spare themselves from the suffering. They might develop some other consequences like indifference or hostility to sex, the impossibility to love or express love, but they will be able to develop their mental abilities and spiritual skills, even though there might be some kind of chasm deep under.
The story of Joe Crittle is such a story and he is such a man who was verbally, physically and psychologically raped and yet was able to mentally remain detached from this fact, to let his body instinctively “enjoy” the experience, and yet to keep it behind, under, below and underneath his everyday adult life. He was a survivor and yet one day the shielded door he had installed between him and that experience broke open and he had to vanish, to lose all social position and existence and sit on the shoulder of the road with a begging bowl at his feet thinking over and over the contradiction and continuity between this childhood harassment and the beauty he found in churches and Hildegarde von Bingen.
But was it really a contradiction, or a continuity? Wasn’t it just the same and identical stuff, flesh, thinking, vision, enjoyment and endurance? When his past started invading his present he had to choose between assuming what became suffering or escaping this suffering once and for all? The answer to this dilemma was hard and a friendship he contracted with a younger man became unbearable because he suddenly identified with all those who took advantage of him when he was a child, a teenager and even a young man.
The end is heart-breaking and yet so beautiful.
AN UNTELLABLE STORY
A dramatic Confession
THE NINETEEN STATIONS OF SARAPHIC LOVE
James Crittle, a famous pilot of the French Air Force, later turned university professor, on February 18, 2015, was found dead in full uniform Rue Montmartre in Paris. He had used some cyanide to put an end to his life. The French Air Force took over his funeral in Bordeaux, but Joseph and Magdalena Seth, two young people who had been his friends up to three years before when James Crittle stepped out of their life without any explanation, hearing the news on the radio decided to claim his body since he had no known direct relatives.
They are entrusted then with an important envelope addressed to them and that contains the manuscript of this “Untellable Story” and my name and contact. I had been James Crittle’s friend some fifty years earlier when I was going to the university and met him then. He had obviously kept track of me over these years.
I here try to give you his confession, since he calls it a confession, about his first twenty years in this life and I just try to put, as far as I can, this text into perspective with an introduction. Joseph and Magdalena Seth added a short conclusion. Most of the pictures and illustrations were in the initial envelope. We decided to use them, with some prudence though because some of the people on these pictures are totally unknown to us and they were not identified.
We also retained some documents from East Germany and the USA and his military papers, considering they had nothing to do with this “Untellable Story.”
Jacques COULARDEAU
Olliergues, France
March 14, 2015
Format : Format Kindle
Nombre de pages de l’édition imprimée : 201 pages
Éditeur : Editions La Dondaine; Édition: 1 (13 mars 2015)
Vendu par : Amazon Media EU Sarl.
Langue : Anglais
ASIN: B00UP4CX88
$ 8.51 — EUR 7,84
EXCERPTS
James Crittle, a famous pilot of the French Air Force, later turned university professor, on February 18, 2015, was found dead in full uniform Rue Montmartre in Paris. He had used some cyanide to put an end to his life. The French Air Force took over his funeral in Bordeaux, but Joseph and Magdalena Seth, two young people who had been his friends up to three years before when James Crittle stepped out of their life without any explanation, hearing the news on the radio decided to claim his body since he had no known direct relatives. […]
GIVE OR TAKE TODAY 1
“Take a step ahead
“A step forward
“It’s enough to be told
“To be liberated
“It’s enough to tell
“To be free.”
Listen to the story
To the story teller
The voice of some phoenix
Abandoned in the night
Forlorn in rejection
Rises from his own ashes
The ashes of his trauma
God bless the child!
ROD OF REBIRTH
(Bordeaux, Tour Pey-Berland)
[Inspired from Hildegard von Bingen]
I salute you, wand evergreen
Erected strong and vigorous by the wind
Summoned by our sensuous prayers
Your time has finally come
To bloom and blossom between our limbs
Climaxing its fertility
I salute you, rod evergreen
You satiate my thirst
My inner fire inflames you
With the noesis of love
CRUCIFIED NIGHTMARE
“There is in every one of us . . . a type of desire that is terrible, wild, and lawless . . . Shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons . . .? Anything received into the mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unalterable . . .”
My dear Plato, what about any casual act from any non-casual person performed casually on a child? Is there any road to rebirth from such acts? Is the noesis of spiritual and mental love, not to speak of carnal sex, enough to purge the mind and the body of these casual events?
“Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.”
VERLAINE — JE TE HAIS
(en français dans le texte)
[ . . . ]
Verlaine, je te hais
Des plaisirs évoqués,
Désirés,
Convoités
De ce Rimbaud que tu te fis
Comme s’il n’était qu’un
Moucheron dans une pissotière
Que d’un doigt tu aurais écrasé
Percutio
EXCERPTS
Crucified Nightmare 1 to 12, + two poems inspired by Hildegard von Bingen [Kyrie Eleison (Coutras, Eglise Saint Jean Baptiste) & You need eternity (Bordeaux, Basilique Saint Seurin)]
Excerpted from An Untellable Story, a dramatic confession, The Nineteen Stations of Saraphic Love,
Amazon Kindle 13 mars 2015, in
Percutio N°9, 2015,
Bill Direen, ed., Editions de Titus, Dunedin, New Zealand,
http://titus.co.nz, © October 2015,
Recorded excerpt at https://vimeo.com/138818370 or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hc0YYG-yJQY&feature=em-upload_owner
by Jacques Coulardeau in 2015.
AN OPINION
A certain ‘Je ne sais quoi’ — Percutio with JAAM
Percutio http://alpha.books.online.fr./, (Latin — to pierce) is an interesting and important New Zealand-International hard-copy poetry magazine.
It comes from the Deep South of Aotearoa-New Zealand, where it seems so many distinctive poets reign, but it resides in France. It comes out irregularly. It features a bewildering array of internationally-based contributors, ranging from ‘conventional’ poets through to off-the-wall experimentalists. For example, Jacques Coulardeau who, ‘has contributed to Percutio almost since its inception. He is a very interesting outsider on the French ‘scene’. He researches what he wants to, but has a strong interest in US politics and European music’. I — Rapatahana — can only wonder as regards the existential je ne sais quoi of an outsider in outsider France, home of Camus, who lent this title, of course, to Colin Wilson…such are the interesting personages found in this publication. Indeed, William Direen, head sherang at Percutio and a particularly interesting character himself, points out further about Jacques, ‘He was recommended to me by Université Paris Dauphine, who saw in him a renegade academic, and could not find a place for him within existing structures’!
Percutio is the brainchild of Direen. He writes, ‘The magazine began when I realized that many of the people I visited when I was overseas were writing, and they were unpublished. They were often my friends and their writing was of a high standard. They were also constructively bridging cultures. Building bridges (poetic) rather than walls (polemic), and describing reality rather than blowing their own trumpets. That’s where it came from.’ For William there has always been a financial struggle to produce a finished product- ‘It has been a passion and not a job.’
He continues, ‘You are probably aware that Percutio is not funded nor supported in any way by any national institution. It is registered as a periodical in France, and for the moment we have simply continued with that, editing, crediting, and giving writer bios in French…Significant French influence on NZ culture has gone largely undocumented…Percutio also published writing by German writers, and really, there is no editorial swing one way or the other. We also had articles on Sri Lanka and travel writing…’
Even gaining distribution channels for the annual issue, has always been difficult, ‘Until last year it was distributed in New Zealand by the time-honored means of passing around contributor copies or copies purchased online. In France, however, people have been more supportive, with some support from individuals.’ Reiterates William, ‘It has never managed to recoup all the costs involved, but it is not a money-exercise. It is something I felt I had the qualifications to do, as an English graduate and experienced editor; I was in the ideal position to realize the project (travelling fairly often and meeting unpublished, often neglected, and marvelous, writers and artists). With a poetry magazine, someone has to foot the bill, but I have been pleasantly surprised each year by material assistance from unexpected quarters.’
Direen continues in this surprised mode, ‘This year, Atuanui Press/Titus Books in Auckland (chief practical collaborator and serious business partner for Percutio) have undertaken to present it to bookshops the length of NZ, and this has meant that it is, for the first time, being offered to people outside the circles of the contributors. i.e. the “book-buying public” (which is, of course, is its own information system with its own standards and industry ethics). I’m very happy about this.’
He has quite definite views (about many things, actually) but most especially regarding poetry within his home country of Aotearoa-New Zealand, ‘Published Novazelandian/Aotearoan poetry I have had the pleasure to read seems to me to have been strongly influenced by contemporaneous economic philosophies. I do think that more than ever NZ poets need affordable access to literature, and they have to be able to read it in places where they can think about the content. So printed books (or, eventually, fully evolved electronic books) should be available for sale or sharing, and libraries need to acquire works that may seem to defy market-driven logic. This is very important for poets in the most isolated country in the world. Literature frees the mind. The lack of it may stultify and turn us into economic slaves.’ And to conclude, Direen states, ‘What would I like to see? More of the good, and less of the terrible…Percutio does carry a lot of daring work, but, as mentioned, isn’t that what poetry is? Isn’t that what literature should be…too much poetry, particularly on the web, is really a nice layout on the page for ideas that might be better expressed in prose, and especially in journalism. In fact, for the most part, it IS prose.’
I conclude this summary of this interesting poetry publication with work from Direen, himself also a well-known musician, including being in The Bilders with Brett Cross. It is an extract from a longer poem called ‘Centre’. It is a reminiscence of Wellington, when Direen attended a course in Electronic Music run by Douglas Lilburn.
But recall light things
… Lilburn in The Glen … cicadas,
His studio an analog of the Garden.
I saw him listening and heard
Welcoming and thereafter
Waves noise sense-syllabics inflected by natural context,
Death, sun and leaf, growth and predation,
And such desperate clausal anomalies as our verbal selves
Our adventurous ones self-imperiled
Purchasing disturbances
Of optic and audio messaging paths.
Facebook page for Percutio, https://www.facebook.com/titusbooks
Link page to Percutio videos, https://vimeo.com/percutio
Link page to all contributors to Percutio — ever, http://alpha.books.online.fr/Percutio/html/PastContents.html
(NB. Direen believes that, ‘I think this issue P2015 will be the last issue of Percutio…I doubt I will have the time or money to edit it next year…’)
Cover photo credits are due to: David McKenzie — 2015; Catherine James — 2012; Nigel Bunn — 2008; Arno Loeffler — 2007. William Direen was happier to have these here, rather than his own visage.
