Beautiful Blood

What if our very essence—our blood, our DNA—carries the memory of how we’ve lived? In A King Alone, Jean Giono’s notion of “beautiful blood” suggests it’s not the quantity that matters, but the quality: a life marked by justice, courage, and alignment with the good. Our daily choices imprint themselves on us, shaping the character of our being down to the cellular level—until death reveals something luminous:

In Marie Chazottes, we don’t find the quantity of blood we find in Ravanel (who was spied on) or Delphin (murdered) but we find quality of blood, liveliness, and fire; I’m not talking about taste. I’ve never, as you can imagine, tasted anyone’s blood; and I also have to say that this story isn’t the story of a man who drank, sucked or consumed blood (in our times, I wouldn’t have bothered to mention such a common act); I’m not talking about the taste (salty no doubt). I mean that, with her very dark hair and her very white skin, it’s easy to imagine the pepper of Marie Chazottes, to imagine that her blood was very beautiful. I said beautiful. Let’s speak like a painter.

I’m not forgetting Bergues. Not that he’s all that important, poor fellow, but he was courageous, generous, impulsive—not a victim but a vanquished adversary. It’s as if Langlois himself had disappeared.

Obviously there’s a way of looking at the world, not unlike in economics, where Langlois’s blood and Bergues’s blood are equal in value to the blood of Marie Chazottes, Ravanel, and Delphin-Jules. But then there is another way of looking that includes the first, according to which Abraham and Isaac proceed logically, one following the other, toward Mount Moriah; in which the obsidian knives the priests of Quetzalcoatl logically drive deep into selected hearts. And it is through beauty that we come to know this. Impossible to live in a world believing that the sublime splendor of the guinea fowl’s plumage is meaningless. Just an aside. I wanted to say it. I have.