Won’t Be a Ghost

Scene 3

St. Sebastian Lecture. FRANCIS settles in for a lecture. Choir seated as audience. Choir-leader plays intro to “Adoration of St. Sebastian” on piano.

FRANCIS
In the dark of night, a Christian woman came to cut down and dress Sebastian’s body for burial. As she sliced through his ropes she discovered a small reservoir of life remained in Sebastian’s perforated container. She brought him home and nursed him back to health. So Sebastian, miraculously survived, and what did he do with this second chance at life? He walked right back out into the streets proselytizing. Outraged to learn Sebastian was alive, Diocletian decreed that he be stoned to death. This time death stuck, and his corpse was thrown into the sewers. But no one remembers that last part. When St. Sebastian was canonized, he became the patron saint of soldiers, pin makers, and archers. During the Middle Ages, he was prayed to as protector against the plague. Some scholars suggest the connection was made to St. Sebastian because the bubonic lesions looked like the saint’s arrow wounds.

During the Renaissance, St. Sebastian was one of the most commonly depicted religious icons, second only to Jesus and Mary. Tintoretto, Titian, Botticelli, and Il Sodoma all painted the saint as a beautiful young saint pierced with arrows. Why such a demand for a man whose main miracle was convincing two brothers to die? This is where it starts getting queer. In secular art of the time, the male nude was typically athletic, geometric: an exercise in precision, while female nudes were painted with accentuated, voluptuous proportions. If an artist or his wealthy patron desired a masculine nude in a sensual or typically feminine pose, he was able to do so under the pretext of religious iconography: Sebastian, the bound androgynous youth, vulnerable and proud with wound and arrow fused in hermaphroditic agony. St. Sebastian’s face in spiritual ecstasy was the perfect mask for the eroticism of his body.

___________Choir sings “Adoration of St. Sebastian”

CHOIR
Thy cry is like
a fawn, Thy cry thy cry —
One wonders, one wonders
what will sink under

Spill blood on me
Thy lips singing
Open for me
Thy wounds glowing
Thy thigh is like
a swan, Thy thigh, thy thigh —
One wonders, one wonders
what waves rise higher

Spill blood on me
Thy lips singing
Open for me
Thy wounds glowing

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