You wouldn't understand.
If I could save time in a bottle The first thing that I’d like to do Is to save every day Till eternity passes away Just to spend them with youIf I could make days last forever If words could make wishes come true I’d save every day like a treasure and then, Again, I would spend them with youBut there never seems to be enough time To do the things you want to do Once you find them I’ve looked around enough to know That you’re the one I want to go Through time withIf I had a box just for wishes And dreams that had never come true The box would be empty Except for the memory Of how they were answered by youBut there never seems to be enough time To do the things you want to do Once you find them I’ve looked around enough to know That you’re the one I want to go Through time with
the last house on the left
dog shows and boxing
This French writer, a dramatist and convicted felon, became one of the leading figures in the avant-garde theater. Genet has described in his works an underworld of male prostitutes, convicts, pimps and social outcasts. For a long time he so addicted to theft that he stole diamonds from his hostesses at a literary reception. However, his life changed radically when such prominent figures as Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Cocteau clamored successfully for his parole. He subsequently escaped the criminal world to become a writer, who glorified the underworld and homosexual love. "O let me be nothing but beauty alone! Quickly or slowly I will go, but I will dare what must be dared. I will destroy appearances, the casings will be burnt off and will fall from me, and I will appear there, some evening, on the palm of your hand, calm and pure like a statuette of glass." (from The Thief's Journal, 1954)"In writing out for his pleasure the incommunicable dreams of his particularity, Genet has transformed them into exigencies of communication... Genet began to write in order to affirm his solitude, to be self-sufficient, and it was the writing itself that, by its problems, gradually led him to seek readers." (Jean-Paul Sartre in Saint Genet, 1963)Jean Genet was born in Paris, the illegitimate son of Camille Gabrielle Genet, who abandoned him to the Assistance Publique, an organization that supervises the care of unwanted children. François Genet, his father, was a labourer. Camille Gabrielle worked as a seamstress and maidservant; she died in 1919. Until the age of 21, Genet was a ward of the state, who was raised in state institutions and by a family in the village of Alligny-en-Morvan. Genet's foster mother hoped he would end up a priest. As a child in Morvan, he spent hours in the drowsy, shadowy outhouse, daydreaming and reading. The toilet was his refuge: "Life, which I perceived as distant and blurred through its shadow and smell - a softening smell in which the odour of elder trees and the rich earth predominated, since the outhouse was all the way at the end of the garden near the hedge - life reached me as singularly sweet, tender, light, or rather lighted, stripped of its heaviness."At the age of 10 he was accused of stealing. During adolescence he spent five years at the Mettray Reformatory. He escaped from there and at age 19 joined the French Foreign Legion and deserted it soon. Then began a period of wandering throughout Europe. He was charged with vagrancy, homosexuality, theft, and smuggling. From 1930 onwards he spent time in various European prisons.In 1939 Genet started to write. He produced between the years 1942 and 1948 several autobiographical novels, in which he depicted the rejection of the bourgeois society that had repudiated him. These works, that celebrated thievery and homosexuality, included Our Lady of the Flowers, first published in a limited edition by L'Arbalète of Lyons in 1943, and Querelle of Brest (1947), in which the amoral sailor and murderer Querelle proclaims "My wife is the sea; my mistress is my captain". In Miracle of the Rose (1946) the chains transform to a garland of flowers. Genet meditates on the meaning of imprisonment, and when a murderer named Harcamore is executed, Genet ascends to paradise at the moment of execution.In 1948 Genet was convicted of burglary for the 10th time and condemned to automatic life imprisonment. However, by 1947, his works had gained attention from such writers as Jean-Paul Sartre, André Gide and Jean Cocteau. After the sentence, they petitioned the President of the Republic for his release. The request was granted, and he expressed his gratitude in a poem extolling the values of criminals, in which a prison cell can turn into a place of monastic meditations or scene of sexual fantasies."THE BISHOP (after making a visible effort to calm himself, in front of the mirror and holding his surplice): Now answer, mirror, answer me. Do I come here to discover evil and innocence? And in your gilt-edged glass, what was I?" (from The Balcony)In the late 1940s Genet started to write for the theatre. Several of Genet's plays were too controversial to be performed in France. His first play, The Maids, made a significant contribution to the theatre of the absurd. It was based on a true story of two maids, sisters, who killed their mistress. Deathwatch (1947) used the prison setting of his earlier works, but later dramas explore the symbolic landscapes of loneliness and despair. Genet also abandoned traditional concepts of character, plot and motivation. The Balcony (1957) was set in a brothel. Madame Irma, proprietress of a brothel known as the Grand Balcony, provides the setting and all that is necessary for the acting out of her client's scenarios of wish-fulfillments. The clients play such roles as Bishop, General and Judge. A revolution is going on outside the brothel. The rebels overthrow the figureheads of the old regime. One of Irma's girls, Chantal, becomes a heroine-martyr. Clients who have played Bishop, General and Judge take the place of the former officials. Roger, a defeated revolutionary leader, arrives to enact a scenario in which he is the Chief of Police. False figures remain in office, but another round of revolution starts. The Blacks (1959) was an elaboration on the notion of a play within a play, and The Screens (1961) took place in the midst of the French-Algerian War."Criminals and police are the most virile emanation of this world." (from The Thief's Journal, 1949)Genet's autobiography, The Thief's Journal, appeared in 1949. It depicts Genet's youth and the "forbidden universe" of opium-rackets, prostitution, begging, stealing. Genet regards thefts as a holy vocation, which he practices with a religious devotion. Representatives of the law and of the criminal world became for him sublime homosexual icons: "If I wanted my policemen and hoodlums to be handsome, it was in order that their dazzling bodies might avenge the contempt in which you hold them. Hard muscles and harmonious faces were meant to hymn and glorify the odious functions of my friends and impose them upon you. Whenever I met a good-looking kid, I would tremble at the thought that he might be high-minded, though I tolerated the idea that a petty, despicable mind might inhabit a puny body."After 1966 Genet largely gave up writing and spent his time lecturing and supporting radical causes. In the early 1980s the German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder made a film based on the author's novel Querelle of Brest. Genet died in Paris on April 15, 1986. A collection of Genet's letters, Lettres au Petit Franz, sent to François Sentein in 1943-45, appeared in 2000. The letters include glimpses of Parisian life, a depiction of his arrest when he was accused of stealing a book, and thoughts about Jean Decarnin, whom he loved.In his study Saint-Genet: Actor and Martyr (trans. 1963) Sartre proclaimed Genet to be the prototype of the existentialist man, whose distinction between good and evil is the result of personal choices and decisions. Other writers, like François Mauriac, criticized Genet for being a prisoner of his own world of crime, where the author "goes around and around like a squirrel in a cage, imprisoned in the dungeon of a vice from which he cannot escape".
jean genet