Margery Kempe by Robert Gluck

Jesus gazed up past his brow at Margery. His irises were disorganized blue geodes. He had been crying all weekend--it was Monday morning and he was still crying. He whispered, "I'm so abandoned." He raised his head in sadness and his face held the slow joy of deep sky above the sky.

He stood and turned on the balls of his feet and began to ascend. Margery fell half asleep when she saw the deity turn away. She felt the strongest sensation of her life, a welling of aspiration and desire embodied in the blue of dusty gold, the long smeared shadow of neck and spine, his broad hips, the semicircles of his ass, his long slightly knock-kneed legs. He rotated near the ceiling; she became conscious of the weight of her breasts and the hair down her back. The played tips of his long toes floated past her eyes. He raised his arm as darkness closed in. Later she concluded he was pointing to heaven.

A few years back I took a class on Medieval literature in graduate school; we read part of The Book of Margery Kempe, sometimes called the first autobiography in English. Margery was a 15th century Englishwoman who claimed--if I'm remembering correctly, and there's a good chance I'm not--to be married to Jesus Christ. From the perspective of our era we might think that Margery described some kind of spiritual ecstasy, but in fact she was quite literal about it: Margery considered herself the literal, physical bride of Christ, and therefore practiced celibacy with her "earthly" husband. And after all, why not? The Catholic religion is based on the mystery of a real, physical presence.

Robert Gluck's fictionalized version of Margery's story brings that physicality to the forefront: Margery and her husband Jesus enjoy each other's bodies with literal intimacy. He fondles her nipples; she fingers his asshole. Margery gives herself up to Jesus with a physical desire that is an analogue of spiritual ecstasy. Against this backdrop Gluck presents a second story: the story of his desire for L., a wealthy man many years his junior, for whom his desire is also a kind of ecstasy, but also a kind of grief or pain.

"How can the two halves of this novel ever be closed or complete?" Gluck asks. "Or the book is a triptych: I follow L. on the left, Margery follows Jesus on the right, and in the center my fear hollows out 'an empty space that I can't fill.'" The juxtaposition between Margery-and-Jesus and Bob-and-L. is sometimes foggy and sometimes quite clear: like Jesus, L.'s appeal is the stuff of mystery, in its religious meaning, a property beyond understanding and accessible only through practices of mysticism. Like Jesus, L. has power; though love forms the structure of divine creation, what power do mortals have to deny it, or withhold their own love? And like Jesus, L.'s diffidence is painful; as Jesus begins to show his boredom with Margery, so L. begins to drift away from Bob. God's love for us, if the word even suffices, may not resemble our love for God. Margery Kempe makes clear how grief and loss, in a cosmic sense, is inextricable from love.

Though Gluck's prose is often brittle and fragmented, I admired the physical language of Margery Kempe: the book is full of asses, cocks, tits, cunts, cumming, shitting, farting, etc., etc. We often project our squeamishness back onto the past; we assume that medieval people avoided talking about sex because we do. We love to think of ourselves as the endpoint of progress instead of what we are, which is the inheritors of a Victorian disdain for the body. It maybe that queer literature, disposed as it is to expose our false notions of the human body and the desire for the human body, reunites us with a medieval sense of the body as real and meaningful. Margery Kempe identifies the body as the site not only of love and lust, but of grief, loss, frustration, despair.