About saints. We don’t generally like impeccable things – especially when those things appear as people. (Except Debbie Harry.) This is the case with social media: Instagram-ready lives. We furiously envy, and many of us copy, but we don’t like (although we may ©). We’re too preoccupied with comparison. A green saint – make a film about a green saint that wasn’t a tragic remake of The Life of Brian. Call it The Walk Away. (Because Into the Wild has already been taken.) Among the homeless, are there those who sleep rough because they are seeking green sanctity? Hasn’t European society always punished and tried to eliminate the Roma, the Gypsies and Travellers, because of their different relations to property, to land, to houses? Say a saint became known, they would be microscopically examined for faults. Temptations would be offered them – young bodies, air travel, drugs, full-fat milk. There would be deepfake photographs of them refuelling their Ferrari or boarding their – flying their Gulfstream. (Had to look that up, as the only one I could think of was Lear Jet.) Even their smallest slip into our energized world, an upwards ride on an escalator rather than taking the service stairs, would be clipped and shared. Got them. They would have to remain in one verifiably green place, handmade of stone and slate, with tools made by traditional methods. Their critics would only be allowed in if they had walked there on foot, or (for the bigger networks) ridden a horse. All of this would, for some, seem to reinforce the impossibility of living a right life in a wrong world. And from this they’d derive, If you can’t be perfect, why even try to be a bit better? The saint could say, Just because I’m a hypocrite doesn’t make you any less a destroyer. The saint could say, I’m almost more than merely human.
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