EVERYTHING WHICH ARISES IS WORTHY OF PERISHING

 When he reached the age of fifty my good friend Currado Malaspina entered the swelling ranks of the nearly content. Unattained aspirations, unrequited fantasies and unrealized goals were suddenly foregrounded as his own background began to recede. He developed an unhealthy habit of counting in his head his former mistresses, lovers and wives. He began his daydreams with the phrase "what if" and revived old grudges with reveries of revenge. He became a man immersed in a past buried within an irretrievable web of circumstances and missed opportunities. 

To Currado the present became increasingly remote while he suddenly became effectively impotent.

Thus began the La Décennie Noire, Currado's dark decade of inactivity and depression.

Currado at the seaside sanatorium Sihirli Dağ, Izmir, Turkey 2005

Or so reads the conventional rendering of my good friend's mid-career creative impasse. The truth, as is typical in such cases, is much more nuanced. 

Rilke observed that "works of art are always the result of one's having been in danger," and so it was with Malaspina. Experiencing a profound decline in his formally robust libido, Currado began consulting with a battery of doctors, therapists, healers and hypnotists. Each one made the same sober evaluation. 

Currado was getting old.

Finding this unacceptable my resourceful friend found succor from a reliably familiar source - the brazenly naked, deliciously fluid, erotically charged commotion of human flesh in flux. With his ample resources Currado hired actresses and dancers, acrobats and hookers, weightlifters and bus drivers, women, men, young, old, anyone who would take their clothes off for him and pose.

The result was "Ten-Thousand Figures," a vast, Olympian act of voluptuary reclamation.

Detail from Dix-Mille Nus, 2001 - 2011, Currado Malaspina

   
The success of this enterprise is a matter of some dispute. Currado claims his legendary vigor returned within weeks. Others suggest that Malaspina became deeply disturbed at his burgeoning bisexuality. There are even a few skeptics who insist that the whole thing was one big public relations hoax.

One thing remains certain. As Currado enters his seventh decade, an age where one should find at least some small measure of sagacity and fulfillment, muddling insecurity remains the prevailing leitmotif for this overgrown adolescent genius.

LES CAHIERS DU PALIMPSESTE

I have heard from many quarters that Currado Malaspina's Palimpsest notebooks are based on a perversion.

To some people it's a perversion of faith, to others a perversion of fact but all of Currado's detractors agree that les Cahiers du Palimpseste are a corrupted, premeditated, ignominious sacrilege. 

 From sources both liturgical and cabalistic, my militantly laical colleague has turned the genuinely sacred into a soup of Daedalean banality. After mastering post-biblical Hebraic orthography (a skill not commonly shared among most Diasporic Jews let alone French Roman Catholics), Currado has filled dozens of notebooks with fragments as well as extended excerpts from the medieval verse of Ibn Gabirol, the Lurianic speculations of Hayyim Vital and Shalom Sharabi as well as the more contemporary metaphysical poetry of the Toronto based Itai Hoki-Kerach. 

The reaction has been fast and fierce.

The associate chief rabbi of Kehilat Iris in
Auvers-sur-Oise called on Currado to justify his seemingly arbitrary use of apocrypha and prayer. René Maigrichon, past president of the Conseil des Institution des Juives Croyants went so far as to publish an open letter of protest in the weekly news magazine Le Vieux Typographe.

Even the legendary Belgian pop idol Isaak Guitara whose latest release featured several controversially explicit Ladino love songs called Malaspina "unjustifiably provocative."

Ironically in Israel, the religious establishment remains fairly nonplussed. "If all this gets people to take a second look at the Maharal then what's the harm?" said Jerusalem seminarian Yossele Scharf whose view seems to represent the holy land's pious mainstream.

And I suppose, on the other hand, that if it gets the haredi (ultra-orthodox) community a little closer to Art Basel, documenta and the Venice Biennale,  well, that can't be a bad thing either.

HASTEN THE MERRY MAILMAN

It's always a treat receiving a letter from my dear friend Currado Malaspina. The epistolary tradition is a withering flame, a weak fragile rump from a faded past whose futile inefficiencies are ill suited to our hyper-utilitarian age. The illuminated missive is a rarer bird still and I credit Currado's stubborn persistence in maintaining this form of expression. For this alone I look forward to his every note.

His awkward drawings with their unembarrassed intimacies are nothing but refined, visual versions of the boastful bombasts one finds among contemporary rappers. Typically, his renderings depict some unlikely sexual conquest by some self-satisfied protagonist whose appetites range from the illicit to the bizarre. 

The letters themselves are usually full of rich gleeful anecdotes, bitter ruminations and detailed analyses of the French medical establishment as seen through the prism of his own unfortunate ailments. 

I recently received a long note written on what looked like the kind of paper placemat one finds in Greek diners in Jersey. The paper had that faint wavy tooth running evenly throughout - the kind of surface that vainly attempts to grant some small degree of gravitas to the cheeseburger, the iceberg lettuce/lone tomato salad and the bottomless cup of coffee. (I even think there was a small gravy stain blotting the corner, but that could have been watercolor). 

The letter contained a manifesto of sorts. It was a rambling exhortation defending the resurgent use of the Mesmer baquet in certain remote convents in Brittany. He claims that it has cured him of gout and that it alone restored his esophageal motility. (Perhaps the placemat had some talismanic significance). 

I believe my good friend has lost his mind which is very bad news for him but great news for us!

I love these strange new screeds.