De profundis

Février 2004: Quelque part dans la campagne irlandaise dans les ruines d'une abbaye où le petit Oscar allait justement passer ses vacances.

De profundis clamavi ad te Domine
Domine exaudi vocem meam fiant
aures tuae intendentes in vocem deprecationis meaesi iniquitates observabis Domine
Domine quis sustinebit
quia apud te propitiatio est propter
legem tuam sustinui te Domine
sustinuit anima mea in verbum eius
speravit anima mea in Domino (*)

Je sais que l'humeur blogspotienne est plutôt à la poésie ( pour l'anglophone j'aime beaucoup Never Give All the Heart de Yeats et la Belle Dame Sans Merci de Keats mais ce détail ne surprendra personne!). Cependant, ce soir j'avais envie de parler de mon cher Oscar. Mes doigts n'ont pas l'énergie de dire ce soir tout le bien que j'ai pensé de l'éventail de Lady Windermere, pièce hélas retirée de l'affiche, mais ils sont encore émus de leurs retrouvailles avec son De profundis.

De par son nom, éponyme du psaume 130 (en VF, des profondeurs) que nous avions étudié en latin (jolie construction avec ad), ce texte m'a énormément touchée car il recèle le même cri que la prière (utilisée dans le rituel catholique lors de la prière des morts) et plus loin dans cette longue missive, O.W retrouve son ironie mordante. Wilde l'a composé alors qu'il entamait sa deuxième année en prison et qu'il n'avait reçu aucune nouvelle de son amant, Alfred Bosie' Douglas. Leur liaison avait conduit le père du jeune homme à attaquer Wilde sur ses moeurs et à jeter le dramaturge en prison.

Voici quelques extraits du début de cet epistole de la vie carcérale:

"...Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide
it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their
return. With us time itself does not progress. It
revolves. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of
which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and
lie down and pray, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula.

(...)

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow.
The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and
gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the
small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is
always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart.

(...)

When I was brought down from my prison to the Court of
Bankruptcy, between two policemen, - waited in the long dreary corridor that,
before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and simple hushed into silence,
he might gravely raise his hat to me, as, handcuffed and with bowed head, I
passed him by. Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than that.
It was in this spirit, and with this mode of love, that the saints knelt down to
wash the feet of the poor, or stooped to kiss the leper on the cheek. It
is not a thing for which one can render formal thanks in formal words. I
store it in the treasure-house of my heart. I keep it there as a secret
debt that I am glad to think I can never possibly repay. It is embalmed
and kept sweet by the myrrh and cassia of many tears. When wisdom has been
profitless to me, philosophy barren, the memory of that little, lovely, silent
act of love has unsealed for me all the wells of pity.

I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody
great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to
say so. I am trying to say so, though they may not think it at the present
moment. Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was
far more terrible still."

(*)Des profondeurs je t’appelle, Seigneur : Seigneur, entends ma voix ; que tes oreilles soient attentives à ma voix suppliante ! Si tu retiens les fautes, Seigneur ! Seigneur, qui subsistera ? Mais tu disposes du pardon et l’on te craindra. J’attends le Seigneur, j’attends de toute mon âme et j’espère en sa parole.