Cocteau continues to get pounded by the tribunal:
“What, then, is a poet?” they harass him.
The poet answers, “In creating poems, the poet uses a language neither living nor dead spoken by few and understood by few.”
They then go on to ask whether such language is necessary at all. Now, realizing that they already posses the answers which they seek from him, he can no longer hold back and answers, “To contact their like in a world where the exhibitionism of boring the soul is usually practiced by the blind.”
The tribunal is a preventive measure or so the judges claim, whose purpose is to prevent the poet from becoming too distracted from mortal concerns.
They tell him that the worst punishment for a poet would be to live in between two worlds or what a film director would call in “false contrast.”
The tribunal condemns him “to live” and sends him off.
In a satirical vein that is aimed at both, post-modernity and his critics, Cocteau asks Cegeste, “What is this statue that eats autographs?”
To this the young poet answers: “It is the instant celebrity machine. Fame for anyone in a minute or two. Beyond that, of course, it becomes more difficult.”
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