CoL49: San Narciso [PC 49, 52/53, 98]

[Robin Landseadel]

> . . . when he returned, he was murdered while saying mass. . .
>
> 	http://www.salvadordalimuseum.org/education/documents/lesson_plan_5.pdf

There is much murder and mayhem during Mass in "The Courier's Tragedy."

	Angelo, then, evil Duke of Squamuglia, has perhaps ten years
	before the play's opening murdered the good Duke of adjoining
	Faggio, by poisoning the feet on an image of Saint Narcissus,
	Bishop of Jerusalem, in the court chapel, which feet the Duke
	was in the habit of kissing every Sunday at Mass.
	CoL49,  49

	Meanwhile, back in the torture room, the cardinal is now being
	forced to bleed into a chalice and consecrate his own blood, not
	to God, but to Satan. They also cut off his big toe, and he is
	made to hold it up like a Host and say, "This is my body," the
	keen witted Angelo observing that it's the first time he's told
	anything like the truth in fifty years of systematic lying.
	CoL 49, 52/53

Le Web de San Narciso:

http://www.terra.es/personal/santnarcis/menuesp.htm

Consider the short jump from St. Narciso to "Ritual Reluctance." St.  
Narciso is martyred as he is invoking "the word".  In addition, the  
link to San Narciso's story is from the Salvador Dali Museum:

http://www.salvadordalimuseum.org/home.html

	Flies, Flies, Flies - Another Dalinian Obsession

	Dali was drawn to flies like flies are drawn to, well,
	to picnic food!

	Why flies? In part, because he saw them frequently, flitting
	about his villa in Port Lligat. And because they occupy a fabled
	legend in Spanish lore, when large biting flies were said to
	have emerged from the tomb of St. Narciso and turned back the
	advancing French armies by stinging their horses.

http://www.dali.com/blog/index.cfm?v=10075

Sounds like a scene cooked up by the "Panic Movement."

"Surrealize the Dream"

	Another influence in "Under the Rose;' too recent for me then to
	abuse to the extent I have done since, is Surrealism. I had been
	taking one of those elective courses in Modern Art, and it was
	the Surrealists who'd really caught my attention.
	Slow Learner, 20

	. . .The dead man, like Maxwell's Demon, was the linking
	feature in a coincidence. Without him neither she nor Jesus
	would be exactly here, exactly now. It was enough, a coded
	warning. What, tonight, was chance? So her eyes did fall
	presently onto an ancient rolled copy of the anarcho-syndicalist
	paper Regeneracion. The date was 1904 and there was no
	stamp next to the cancellation, only the handstruck image of the
	post horn.

	"They arrive," said Arrabal. "Have they been in the mails that
	long? Has my name been substituted for that of a member
	who's died? Has it really taken sixty years? Is it a reprint? Idle
	questions, I am a footsoldier. The higher levels have their
	reasons." She carried this thought back out into the night with
	her.
	CoL49, 98

Assuming that OBA did library research on the subject of Surrealism,  
it would only be a matter of time before the Catalan Saint would be  
revealed—a perfect character and storyline for Theater of Cruelty.

	Having as yet virtually no access to my dream life, I missed the
	main point of the movement, and became fascinated instead
	with the simple idea that one could combine inside the same
	frame elements not normally found together to produce illogical
	and startling effects.
	op. cit.