First Declarations . . .
The title of my intensest work, Flowers of Evil, says everything. I am all declared in this paradox. It was gestated with the paitience of an elephant's child, which labors 14 months in the womb before its gigantic birth, the size of a black coup caught in a rain of elemental perfumes. I am positive it is worth all the lies I have told to see it to print; it is also, I may mention, almost worth all the truths I have had to suffer to bring it off in rage and paitience. People... their faces go up in flame when they read it. And yet, they deny me everything, all the glory that they were so willing to load down Satan with, they leave me bereft of, although they declare me his disciple. Hypocrites! I am tired, even, of seeing through their terrible, tepid hearts; pale as the starved spit of a saint! Willess imbeciles. The virtue of my trepanned treatise lies exactly in its faults, and these may all be summed up in one singular, monstrous phrase: it is honest!
So my friend commented to his mamaire in 1857, writing under a shaky lamp on trembling parchment, in an absolute livid fury the night before he was to stand trial in front of the justice of France on charges of what were, in retrospect, irrefutable immorality. His brow was like an egg, with a characiture of hatred drawn in shadowed lines above the black, bleak coals of his eyes.
"Let my poems revenge me after my death!"
In his agitation, Charles had knocked his bottle of squid ink to the floor.
"Yes! stain the globe with death!"
He smiled at the wicked thought.
"Yes, after all, why not? Why not the death of all of France for this effrotery? How can they be so prodigal of their good credit in the eyes of posterity? What credit have they accrued through just acts? None! I witness it! I have staked my life on my poems, so why shouldn't they?"
He laughed and sent the black bottle sailing at a cat, his Jeanne's Chuchu, with the toe of his shoe.
And to think, the other day I heard de Banville, waiting for his mistress by the theater stagedoor, in the mode of the poete mal, attest to me that, "of all the young poets of today... it is Baudelaire alone who lives, although he is dead!" I was livid at his insolence. What right had he to speak of Baudelaire at all, now that the great man was dead-- this peon who had hated him so much in life? That I did not strike him is to me an eternal shame. And yet, I confess, I was such a coward, so much of a hollow spirit, so empty of heart, that I merely concurred when he went on or averr, "he, he is the one one looks to, the one I read at midnight for dark consolation when I find my trivial life too hateful."
How many hours have I spent turning the honored pages of that sacred book of his myself, seeking just such pardon of the passing hours! In that heavy binding always on my table were the impeccable sonnets and chansons of Hell, written in blood by the Prince Himself.
Time and again, Charles had railed at me about how the poet is the most debauched and blessed of men. A sinner with the conscience of a saint: a god with a velvet hide in incessant need of stroking. "It would not be a vice, if it were not attractive." Indeed, and we would be liars to say that at all times we stayed away from its low, red, embracing light that stained our features in a supple glow, as if we could witness the birth of our own souls from the mass confusion of sensations life bombards us with. Charles would shudder at his own feelings of attraction, at the strange enchanment fervent prayers might throw over a murder to make it more... delicious. On such subjects, such sensations of the innermost man, he could discourse for hours, and time with him would pass away like a dream until only the dawn and exhaustion would put an end to his explorations. I would then excuse myself and search feebly for the door out of his apartments, with only the vaguest sense of which planet I was on, while at my back, he would laugh like an infernal incarnation, instructing me still:
"Sleep is death, Bonadventure. Let the absinthe uncurl your nerves into this faultless blue sky, the same one that will shine down on you in your tomb when your friends gather to tell spiteful tales about your existence one last time to your insensate face!"
A supreme and unnerving lack of sentimentality, that was his gift. Dull, regular and virtuous as a tax-clerk in that respect. But, ah! How he yearned to find something of goodness in his constitution... but he wouldn't lie about the fact that he didn't! A tiger looking in a mirror sees a tiger. A dandy staring in that silver abyss, sees the dwarfish agglomeration of all of humanity's shortcomings. He might stare for hours, telling me, or, more likely, his priviledged self, "I am the only object of my own affections, my love stains only myself..." And then, perhaps after a pause of ten minutes or more, having undergone some disturbing revolution in his thoughts, with a ragged breath, he would annunciate in a harsh whisper, "beast, fauve!"
"Gautier! Is it better to gaze with a pitiless eye at a scab, or to tell yourself you are in the best of health?"
"Please, Charles, it is a disgusting thought. Would you care to see my new verse romance? Dangers, thrills! A real cliffhanger."
Then, as though I were not there, as if his voice issued from the throne of God in imperishable rectitude:
"This man searches for his vices away from home."
"By the diety, what do you mean?"
"In my heart are Abyssinias and lions, terrors, and the thief-cheats of virtues, exchanging, by their exact machinations, curses across the burning churchyard of my soiled veins."
You see the sort of frustrating friend he could be. And this sort of abuse, or insight (I could never keep straight which it was, not even to myself!) was interrupted only by bouts of the most desolate, creaking sobriety, absolute dustbowls of interior work, when not so much as a sigh would escape the man. And that, after you had travelled all day to be in his company, at his express invitation!
The distractions and miseries of Paris afforded him his only outlet at such times. His sadness, which made the grand chandelier in his rooms project black beams at noon, was greater, and perhaps nobler, than the crepes and sorrows of his contemporaries. He was sad for all of men by being sad for himself alone, the imperfections of his coarse body, the "smashed assets of my rotten soul." Yes, here on the rue Voltaire, lived a martryr of all mankind! It is true, my friends.
Sainte-Beauve, that constipated critic, declared that he had discovered in the sadness that spurted from Baudelaire's pages, "the final symptom of a sick generation. "
If only we could all bear our portion of that sickness as incandescently as did Baudelaire, perhaps we would be free today of this deadweight of guilt that pulls our tired skeletons into the slough of despond, while still no less animated by the muscles that sink us, and yet cry out to be transformed into wax feathers and transcendent wings!
Here was the clairvoiant, the first seer who operated through the passionate analysis of that classic 19th century Parisian emotion: Remorse. He was such a theological innocent, that he did not hesitate to discover himself on the cross, broken and exalted. Gautier told me of his "interior camera eye" which he deemed manly. "Pitiless to others, he nailed himself as well." First he would help the soldiers put up the unrepentant thieves, then he would ascend himself to the nexus of suffering consciousness.
The great erotic roarings for that slut, Jeanne Duval! A circus of sex and sin, the clasp of bodies ignorant of death. And yet, no man was more intensely aware of his ultimate demise; the disposition of his eternal estate was, for him, a constant pressure he continually sensed, as if mercury were filling the room, squeezing his lungs, shining at his lips ....
Oh, I saw it all myself with Rimbaud! Arthur! Strapping and lambent. Unable to be comforted. Risking, and willing to risk all of that penetrating intelligence to discover a single tingling truth that no thought could unseat. His facility to apprehend made him suspiscious of his every apprehension. And he did not trust God to care for what he had created....
"The work is ... difficult; my comfort is that it is useless."
And then, after enough years had passed, he would no longer smile, even at his own evil wit.
Yes, he was the first to see: that if we are to understand heaven, whose intimations form our only sense of sequence and worth in this daiseychain of misery that afflicts all living consciousness, it must be, will only be, through our senses. His doctrine of correspondences, where sight and hearing intermingle their horn and ivory gateways to the sullen soul, that was the first step: to test the equipment of our senses by overloading them, to see and find out what they really consist of at bottom. What is the exact quality of sin? What are the furry sensations of virtue? What is the color of hope? Perversions, condemnations, every experience seared to its uttermost, only then would the harp of the self be tuned to catch the vibrational beauties of the immanant or transcendent without being liable to deceptions! Revelation has not been vouchsafed to us.
This is the scientific method he was the first to establish in poetry. Absolutely.
He had his cold delights, like many men.
Holding his enormous head, and strutting before the fireplace like a conscience-stricken peacock. Always in fine wares, and I daren't say a word against him, or he'd... he'd.... Well, he'd make me look into my own heart so far, I didn't want to live any more. He could turn an evil phrase! How he knew me, without being a whore himself, I don't know. Vile lashings of that spiked tongue! Ah! My heart was scissored by his whips! How did he ever manage it, knowing me like he'd been through every degradation with me, spitting at my pimp.... and... other things. He would say, "Love is the reason." But no love ever spoke like his.
The next moment it was all "devotion without content, oh my miserable dear, it is the finest thing under the sun! For you I pour these roses over with my blood. Your masses of hair bury me, and, like a vampire of desire, I arise... !"
Such things. The erotic and the gnostic compellingly combined. I could... stand on his words and see the world. That's what it was. That's what it was like. No one's ever done that to me, before or since.
Hand me that wine. There's a love. Put your pants on.
Without the incantation of a formula, there is no science. Lacking science, how can one have a poetry of mists and amulets, razors and daisies? If a heart should miss a beat, but then return to its effortful circulation, the circumlocution of its everyday existence, that petty farce and sham, we are brought to a new knowing of the heart, an awareness that it exists. To stop hearts, that is my experiment. If they start back up again.... Well, I tried. My own one day will forget itself.
How to see reality but through enchantment? How to create a vision that enchants yourself? This is the only difficulty: to be made to believe by words alone, so that reality may be completely blotted out, as in an opium stupor, or lonely Poe upon his lover's tomb chanting verities, and then to dismiss the fiction that has dismissed the world. Ah! That must be what it is like to be alive for a moment. An ocean of feeling--- eviscerated!
Is this sanity? Yes, if properly punctuated.
Attend to life, and then depart it. This is how one cultivates the "Voice from beyond the tomb." Velvet Weltunshafft!
"Nerval, how shall we blend all effects, all expressions?"
"I forget."
"Do you really? As a child, I was too new to forget anything; everything was too close, too sudden to forget. I had yet to be touched by that wand, Nostalgia. One needs a death."
"Now I remember."
"That must be a poem!"
His apartment on the rue de Salleon was like himself and called forth feelings and memories by their departure. To actually be there, in the room, was a deliquiscent form of absence....
An infinity of absence was the only decor, a plaster and candelabra evocation of staring at the sea, that intense feeling of nothingness such immensity commands. He stood, a dandified shard of driftwood, in the soft shadows where the uncertainties of the candles' lights overlapped.
He addressed Remarque, a 'poet of debauch,' as he styled himself in those days:
"Remarque, do you not find Jeanne attractive, the whore?"
Remarque turned to Baudelaire, affecting indifference, and answered:
"She'll do."
"I find in her the cruel rumor of a lion's beauty, her neck alone is a downspout of godly bloods, always as hot as a slap, below the arched frontiers of her nostrils.... Notice how the curve of darkness lingers into a comma, the invitation to experience for yourself, again perhaps, the very essence of all scents... and where would that lead? Oh, she is dangerous! Such a city of desires is impossible to fix on any map, and must be continually re-explored in the blindness of the bed."
Remarque was becoming sensibly aroused by this description.
"Well, it is as you say.... it..."
Baudelaire abruptly turned his stare across the room and said, in the most agreeable tones:
"What do you think, Jeanne? Do you like your portrait? It is fleshed out in Remarque's heavy stare. Do you like him? What do you think of him? An intense young man by all accounts."
Jeanne, undisturbed, drew on her opium cigarette.
The rolling paper and the herb combined to make the room smell of orange blossoms.
"Oh, I cannot stand this," cursed Remarque, and in a single swift motion stood before us, disrobed. He strode toward Jeanne, who exhaled with an unimpeded ease, and looked... I could not tell where her eyes were directed, they were too heavily lidded. Either to myself or Baudelaire. Was there an appeal in her glance? To this day I am uncertain. But Remarque shifted her petticoats-- always of the lightest available material for such garments with Jeanne-- and mounted her from the rear.
"Nudity is, of course, such a perfectly pitched expression," said Baudelaire, turning to catch my attention, as I was bolted to the sofa, "of boredom."
From the quiet precincts of that sodden tomb to which I often find myself returning in yellow moonlight on the anniversary of an eve immortal to both monuments and their harried makers, I often imagine I am hearing a voice: insistent, familiar, insinuous.... A voice climbing out, uncoiling like a distant mist upon the other stones of the deserted graveyard, so full of destroyed hopes. And then, I suddenly recall to myself those lines engraved on more than marble or the embarrassed red dead sandstone of these quarters of the, well, the so thinly departed:
Confess to me, the excited living man, what dread,
Like pleasure, can I expect in this soulless old body
Deader than the dead?
Then, perhaps with recourse to a comforting pipeful of burning weed, I realign my attention again to that voice, the voice of the man who wrote those lines while still so desperately full of dread de vivre, and I hear the dry rattle of one of his exact and pedantic 'Lists of Dismissal' with which he would categorize all of human life that confronted him:
"I acknowledge, of course, without the slightest hesitation or secret resentment," began the copper door of the tomb turned to an unpolished green, almost as if its moldy angel were whispering, "before any and all of my future biographers, that founder of Baudelaire studies, and his industrious son, so busy among my papers, like restless rats making their nests in my embalmed thoughts, Jackie Creep and his kid, who knew me when I lived, and refused to publish me or alleviate my sufferings, or sit still for my endless tirades; also, the admirable and cloudy Claude Pliede, whose trim texts refused to straighten my crooked soul, but printed my deformities in fat exactitude for the cold examination of the world; my thanks; to U. S. Bandy-About, I give a nod to his pale glimmerings, so warm about my bones, the first of many friendly maggots to come and keep me company; I appreciate the arrowlike help of the tidy misses of the Biblioteque Nationale , Conservateurs en chefs, Depts of Manuscripts, Divisions of Manuscrits Occidentaux, and their gofer colleagues and snappy staffs, Depts des Imprimes and Dept des Periodiques, for giving my biographers access to my nastiness, without which I would lie uncaressed and forgotten... until Judgement Day. I must record, as I sort through the assorted business cards in the moonlight, my abject gratitude to that lonely Monsieur Jerque Suffragette, who reminds boneheads of the whereabouts of that damned intruder Andy Billy Bonadventure's papers and the web-ridden analyses of his own too long,-- too brief!,-- whatever length just not the right length, life; to the Conservateur en chef de la Maison de Victor Hugo, who lets men and women peer at Mme Hugo's crudescent correspondence, and keeps the windows of that penny-edition palace so clean, my very sincere thanks indeed; and last, though far from least in this burn-first document of a rotted consciousness, I am abjectly grateful to the Mayor of Honfleur, that repository of town-tales and creaking stacks of back issues of the tinily titled L'Echo Honfleabagis. Translations of my soul into foreign tongues, I am incompetent to judge the badness of; let the spirit of pouting Poe, whom I have honored or not with my misscribblings, stand with a flaming sword over their necks; and for godsakes, Bonadventure, don't title your own memoirs with a quote from my ouvre."
My father was an enigma. But an enigma with twenty slick answers from the Sorbonne, and a stipend from the Count of Praslin. His mystery, as regards the world, was mostly resolvable in economic terms, the commonest and dirtiest denominator to which humanity enslaves whatever can be discovered of that truer enigma: "ourselves."
How many times did mother repeat to me the tale of his charities on behalf of the ancien regime? Scouring warring streets ragged with cries of "Liberte, Egalite ... Etcetera!" to get one last line of credit for his imprisoned Count, to spring him from the bad old Bastille 'once again.' And all this merely so that my father could again pursue his diurnal doubletrack of duty and dissolution. By day, the Count of Praslin's children came stomping and laughing into the well-appointed chamber in the main household , yanking on his liturgical frock, and settling down only when he would recite, in a voice that moved like vodka over ice, the daily grace. This stunned them into stillness, and they remained cowed and ready to begin the day's work, their satin slippers lined up on the oriental carpeting in the very model of military attention.
By night, my father would escape gasping from the solid ornamental doors of buffed brass and begin to make his way to the sullen, sullied quarter where he made his apartment.
Strolling rotor-erect first to the via Seculae, then subtly strutting over the Vinge Bridge which let him down onto the golden-toned Rue de Rouge Ruine. Perhaps Minks or perhaps Vital, or even the self-flagellantly outrageous Whippe Strange, would call a greeting from one of their studios or the wine shop and an evening of discourse, both coarse and crowned, would commence is some nearby hovel.
He spent the rest of that hideous "mass" revolution drinking wine from bombarded cellars, routing God from his tongue (a punishable offence in those degraded days), and "drawing pictures for the instruction of The Public." My own run-ins with the Napoleons of '48, were still many fat annuities of papa's resuscitated royals away. Needless to say, when the plundering hubbub was banished, and the Count had come again, he remembered with loads of lucre my father's angelic agency in extracting him from the raunchy ignominy of the too-crowded hoosgow.
It was on the annuities of this limited luxury that I came into my own "damned adolescence."
I thought him the most exquisite, perfect nobleman in all the world. In the days before we were married, he came to the house in a 'royal' carriage, had his gates opened and shut by an old flunkey absolutely decked out in gold braid, and bearing a great golden wig on his old head, like a bonfire of money; even his shoes seemed dipped in gold, so much the better to scurry after his master Baudelaire, pulling his chair, or wiping the soup from his lip without imperiling his pronunciations on the current politics of the day-- the dratted revolution, of course. I remember standing at his knees, my white veil giving a weird halo to the candles in the stifling room; his head was full of large beautiful grey curls, and his eyebrows were as exact and black as mama's. I did not know then that one day I would keep his house, or maintain myself in his bed as his lawful wife. I was only nine at the time.
Years later, laughing at me in his dashing way, Joseph-Franscios corrected my misimpression, declaring that he had not only to tip his flunkey at his house just as if he had taken a cab, but he had to thank him for his pains as well!
His manners were always kept to the 'perfect pitch,' and he was well known to have a brilliantined mind, and also additionally the naive vigor; good bold shoulders, you know. And the bonhomie of La Fontaine, the fabulist.
My father was always a mystery. He seemed content to paint and sketch in his retirement from official life, always smelling of books, or saturated oils and rich pigments. There was one large canvas of his that hung above the lumped ashes of our spacious fireplace, the 'hellmouth,' as he called it, and which was a very fine example of what my father, rightly, I think, acknowledged as his 'detestable painting.'
It was St Anthony, aghast in a disastered desert, hunched in the overwhelming night with a stab of shine that marked his fisted crucifix, a dead Joshua tree intruding its bone-dry root into the background, while a gibbering Devil , spare and dangerously red as a side of slaughtered beef, dangled a whirlpool of temptations from a bright string, a tornado on a rope holding 'images of all that could be desired.' All of Anthony himself was cloistered in blackness in the moonless desert night; only the charm of the crucifix, the tortured whirl of the temptations, the Devil's hide, and, here and there, sharp highlights of Anthony tormented face were dimly visible in the voluptuous midnight.
The thing always seemed to me to be no more than a grown schoolboy's nod to God, until one early evening, I found my father out in the dark garden in his discarded cassock, his 'painting frock,' as he called it, hunched over a newly numinous canvas, just stretched in the potting shed that afternoon, and begun in a quiet frenzy as the sun bled out of the sky, and the world was once again turned over to the shadows.
The evening was one my mother, pale angel, would have described as 'splooched with dew.' My father was quiet, concentrated-- a large man in his overhanging cassock, intent, 'at work.' Beyond the black tempest of his shoulder, I could see the strange myrtle blotch of a bacchante gripping a thyrsis instead of St Anthony's crucifix, and surrounded by a bowing crowd of blobby cupids adorned with rose complexions and miniature erections. Instead of a desert, there was a rich and wild Grecian countryside, like the uneven hills upon which Bryon died.
My father went on painting for some hours, possessed by his subject, and undeterred by the evil mimicry of the mockingbirds that inverted the songs of the dawnsingers, or by the myriad bites of the mosquitoes that enticed them and made his hand start away to the kill again and again. Eventually the night itself mitigated against his continuance, and with the moonset and the failure of any more illumination, even I could see him no longer from my anxious perch against my window in my nightshirt, where my sleepless cheek had rested against the cool windowledge. When, at last, he came through the house and passed my room in the hall, I could hear him laughing lightly to himself a strange whistling laugh, and then the loud slam of the bedroom door, and the softer slamming of his closet door in the bedroom where, after his death the next year, I discovered he had always kept the picture, and where, years after that, I learned from my mother, he would often shut himself in with a lamp and a bottle of heavy vintage.
After such an unveiling, when I roam again in my mind past my father's more orthodox composition, standing before the decayed fireplace, I begin to understand Gautier's comment about himself: "Why should my prose be easy to the apprehension? I am saying --simply-- things which I do not believe."
The frost webs in crisp increments the department's windows. A perfect cold clear winter's day. I have watched the sun incise its blank parabola from seven thirty this a.m. until this hour-- past three p.m., as it sinks into the abyss of Paris. And what do I have to show for these hours' passage? Nothing. Shuffled memoranda immemorially. I could have been distinctly sauced by now, or taking a chilled tour around the park doing absolutely nothing, down by Malmorte. All that has happened is that I am now seven hours older.
Finis! The Minister no longer knows my name. Pierre pinches all the juicy 'initiatives' and I'm left with nada. Who am I?
Other Servants of the Service are in the limelight. Widgetsonne, Martin-Sobriquet (both), Melmott (hated by every man in the service), and even little Dumus.
It has been conveyed to me that, after starting out so prominently last year, a period of obscurity and 'good behavior' would be prudent and beneficial, show I was 'serious,' etc. All that has happened is that I have become obscure and passe. I should have realized that my enemies, who are innumerable (why?!) will now do their best to exploit my downcast condition in the most wretched fashion.
And this will also ruin my gelid and discreet afternoons with magnificent Marie (for which I am late!) ---
I had the pleasure to meet Mme. Baudelaire only twice in my life, but her impression is strong and lingers on the mind of one sensitive to the traces of a fabulous youth tragically foreshortened; a subject of almost infinite meditation to one at first caught unawares in such circumstances ....
The Madame, as she was always known to me, had about her the impeccable starkness of the religious convert-- one to whom the simplicities of a religious life offer, if nothing else, a burnt-down and stripped landscape in which to suppress our more wiry emotions. Her mother, a penniless Catholic exile maintained by charity in an introverted England, expired, just after Napoleon's rescinding of the more harsh laws restricting the practice of that barbaric faith. By luck, or a darker, fuedal sense of life-debts, she was adopted by the Praslins-- a family who owed much to Joseph-Francois Baudelaire's own Draconian sense of mystical debts and holy accounts of interpersonal obligations. A gothic, almost pointlessly legal atmosphere hangs over the entire spiritual and sexual proceedings of that family-- from a certain point of view.
"Bounce in, bounce about,
God will know how to bounce you out!"
This is how the Madame welcomed me into her dim abode. There was a lightness to her manner, and a hidden leven in everything she undertook. Perhaps this was the outcome of what Charles said was true of all of his family, right back to Eve: "idiots or maniacs, all of them vivid victims of terrible passions." In Madame, this factoid only became apparent in retrospect, upon my own remembered reflections of our discussions, which were mainly concerned with how to coordinate Baudelaire's defense before the Minister of Justice on the ridiculous and petty-minded immorality charges resulting from his publication of certain inflammatory poems.
"If there is no feeling, how can there be a poem? My Charles knows this, and follows the rule, although the world may make him pay."
She poured me a small cognac and opened a heavy curtain to let the daylight into the chamber.
During one of these meetings Madame, always elegant, behaved a little strangely, perhaps freed from her usual restrictions by the desperation of Baudelaire's case, the death of her own group of friends, herself having had some cognac, or even, as I suspect, a more than usual sense of her own lost lightness and youth, wasted on an old man (M. Baudelaire) whose sensibilities diverged from Madame's to the utmost degree and in every particular. She had all the enthusiams of the young, he the cynicism and clarity of age; she was vibrant, he ironic and reserved; she was devoted to an active social calendar, and all the joys and inanities that go with such essentially meaningless diversions, he had his cronies, artists all, devoted to late nights and philosophy. Into this divided house fell Baudelaire, a child of the most unique sensibilities. He who had always "felt like a globe unto myself, a little criminal, ecstatic world, utterly extraneous to all of my neighbors and contemporaries, with whom one is so arbitrarily supposed to feel a pervading peerage."
"Life is so like the death God warns us of in the Good Book," she sighed. "But then, we are all accursed; my own life was crippled by my sense of goodness, the wish to do one good thing back for all the kindnesses I had received from the prodigal Praslins."
I must have looked shocked, for she continued, "no, do not be so alarmed, M. Bonadventure, at a certain age everyone sights down their own life like a sharpshooter finding the nervous heart of an unsuspecting hare. Do not bother to respond; I know this much is true: my grateful spring of innocence has evaporated into bitterness. And I do not even have the cruel, cosmic sense of humor of my child or my first husband to laugh at myself. Ahh... Mr. Bonadventure...." She put her hand upon my arm, and breathed my name in a most compelling manner. I confess I felt myself stirring. But then I realized the exile that would await me at Baudelaire's hands if he were even to suspect.... and I drew back from her heavy familiarity. But not before she apprised herself of my state by a quick touch that seemed far too sure, and alluring, for one of the Madame's age. It seemed to me that some of her lightness had come back to her, and she dismissed me with a glance, turning calmly to the materials of the case before her.
As I stepped down the hall, seeing myself to the front door, I could hear her singing to herself, in a renaissance air,
"Bounce in, bounce about,
God will know how to bounce you out!"
"You know, don't you, that I never found a permanent grave for the old man's bones, don't you?" Her grin was almost... rapacious as she said this; and I understood that the 'old man' was Baudelaire's father, a stern and distant character by all accounts, but not one to ever (even in death) lightly dismiss.
"Music strode upon my weeping soul as a spike-heeled goddess. The world was banished, and I myself was dispersed, disintegrated... a kaffir woman in the same room with a white. I did not exist. Only this ravishment, this perfection; these horrible colors of a rapidly opening space, unfurled beneath me, a desert dawn bleeding into my being." Oh, yes, his 'raptures' could go on and on, and I steeled my nerves to follow the heightened contradictions and activities of his imagination's high flight; for I knew that it was I, and not he, that would be the poorer for having closed my ears to his pure vintage.
Eventually, he interrupted himself.
"Bonadventure, what time is it? Has my little clock flung the bold-faced day into its ashy residence?"
"It's eight o'clock, if that's what you mean."
The specter of a smile appeared upon his face, and then flashed away.
"Wagner! At once, your cloak."
We rattled out into the wary streetlight. Charles' short cloak, as he raced ahead of me, looked as though a devilfish had ascended from the deep and attached itself at his neck. Perhaps it had come to this misty midlight from the bottom of that despotic, extraordinary brain!
As we reached the gleaming steps of the Palais Theatre, I wondered, like a slaughterhouse lamb, what final sight awaited me.
"Everything that is excessive, immense, ambitious, in the snakey spirit of ambling man... all swirl together in this Wagner's ardent, invincible ... sound!" And with this mumbled preamble, Baudelaire swung open the Palais doors with both hands, and, along with the powerful ruminative scents of pipe tobacco and a minx mix of women's scents, came ... the sound.
If we are born blind in a waterfall of milks and wonderments; if our skin cannot comprehend the varieties of space that console and confront us in that first minute; if indeed it is several years before we may tell our mothers and fathers of our interior tremblings and triumphs; if any of these dizzying statements contains even a marginal shade of truth, then how can I tell you anything at all about that moment when the Palais' frosted glass doors parted before me and the world dissolved?
Tannhauser opened on the 9th at the Palais Theatre to a cautious audience full of rumors and smoke about the large Germanic Wagner, whose bludgeoning explorations in music seem ready to smash or reinvent all of Europe at a stroke. The place was packed. Gentlemen were hard put to maintain their dignity in the jostling crowd which, although well-heeled, was visibly affected by the performance as Tannhauser, a wandering minstrel and poet, comes to Venusberg through a plunging cave extraordinarily brought off by the canny set designer Mallot. In Venusberg, the singing Tannhauser sees Venus herself at her bath and becomes unutterably smitten and turns into a sinning Ulysses dallying with a coy Calypso. All his holy songs turn to pagan paeans. Eventually, through an accidental word, he is reminded of his faithful Elizabeth whom he left in the world above; he exits, his brow and throat both knotted with regret and anxiety. Not a few of the lesser peers let out with a harsh laugh at Tannhauser's stricken conscience, much to the shame of Paris and themselves. Upon his return, a singing contest is arranged throughout the kingdom, with the winner to be betrothed to the loyal Elizabeth, ably played my Mme. Simpelle, whose soft white gown was a marvelous organization of fair fluffs and diaphanous falls. The other contestants, whose songs touch lightly and ably the themes of fidelity and truelove, remain chaste. Into this churchlike atmosphere, contrite, and with a deep spiritual love evident in his eyes and manner, Evan Tannglehott, who played Tannhauser, comes, his song starting with a single long and beautifully oscillated note, as if to literally draw his heart out of his mouth and present it to the listening Elizabeth.
And then, on an ambiguous turn in the leitmotif, where we begin to hear the echo of Venus' throbbing theme, Tannhauser transforms from a cloroformed and arsenicpale choirboy of heavenly affection into a blazing bacchant, and his song discovers that all that had the urge and ability to ascend in Tannhauser can descend with the demons at as rapid a pace, back to the underground frolics of voluptuous Venusberg. The struggle of the entire soul of man to believe in even a single ideal--- it turns restlessly, hopeless upon that single note! until even our idea of heaven is tinged with the demeaning determination of the despotic, and even our most clouded and closed nightmares of Hell display some tinge of heaven.
Mother, dearest maternal sog-lump of my too tired heart, my consolation, my courage .... No one will read about me listening to Wagner. My booklets, so beautifully brought out and bound by Pouncelle, come back with their pages uncut! As if the eye could not help instruct the ear! As if both were not frail funnels to the human heart itself---Satan's parade ground and God's golfcourse combined. Wagner is sweetly, rapturously, aware of how our tortured senses overlap in this happenstance deemed by the ignorant, Life. How much more clearly can we understand space through his recreation of its very concept in his uncompromising tones, the blank tabulation of every vagrant impulse that traps us between our ears! This is passion, this correspondence of the visual and the aural, and the radical of all these intersections always always the sodden heart herself, passive and useless spoof of the final agony of God that it is. Mother, I would murder to maintain my opinions against the world! My pen hefts with the clean weight of a throwing knife. Whether lit cigarettes shall suffer or the attentive girl's nose be dispatched is the very substance of Fate.
Now, as to the matter of your harping tirade that I appear on your doorstep in Honfleur ... I cannot! Do not reduce me to such bourgeois displays of filial piety. On your breast, the reeling dreams of opium would not abate, and I would curl again into that solace you alone provide, and which your body itself produced, our inevitable, enviable sympathy.
Instead, I call you to me, mamaire, for say three weeks at the agreeable end of august, not so bad in the shadowy city, or three days if you cannot be so long bereft of the company of your housecat, or three hours which I, like Wagner, shall transmute into an eternity in remembrance.
Your letters are full of errors that a few hours of conversation would unwarp. I loved you passionately as a child! Come, be reasonable. Come.
Apparition Below eternity's turning stair Despair, where Destiny has tossed away the spinning key and light and joy refuse descent, there a solitary criminal, locked in Night's Motel 36, say, the targeted artist God has packed apart in dark mock,-- it's I!-- I fingerpaint the murk; a cannibal cook with fangs and open shirt, glazing and raping a black plum-- my heart!-- -I see a dim shimmer like a drowning face, a lingering phantom in this absence Night, an opiate dream, a Japanese paper grace: that, when it unlimbers, a father above a beaten child, to the towering tip and top of its bleak height, I know-- at last!-- the lovely revelation of the mysterious thing She! ashy girl triumphantly luminescing.
Portrait Coffins and gout burn down intensest flames with which our young brains were crowned. Her eyes, two soft thumbprints of still burning coal, her tart heart, where my bland heart and soul were drowned, her sixty minute kisses, slavish and profound, her passion, an edelweiss in the wastes of life, have all eviscerated into the syllable, Wife! Before me, pastels I had arranged and ground, wiped, like me, to a wrecked face of dirty brown, thinner in sincerity, in luster paled, such is the sum of Time's ribald tale .... Nigger, killer of Heart and Art, never shalt thou in my steel recall destroy her who made my fame and charged my joy!!! ---So I hear my voice falling in the void.
Sixteen, ultrathin, and wickedly alert, Charles loitered at my oily sandalwood doorway. Under his breath he was humming his alma mater; "for the first and last time," he informed me. That day was the day of his baccalaureate examinations, and he had creeped by on the strength of his graceful Greek.
"Do not give me a name, even in your own imagination," I warned him when he asked. "I've seen too many young someones evaporate in the cipher of myself." He said nothing, but lit a little cigarette very elegantly, tossing one for me when I licked my lips. That's when I showed him into the recesses of the house and motioned him through the great red door, the equator of so many young men's sexual explorations.
Dearest Step-Father:
As you know, the harmony in our house has been about that of a glass windchime in a hurricane. Never will the marshal and maker's spirits mix into anything other than a soul-searing hangover, where each retreats again to his opposite corner of oblivion, that cozy closet where memory abandons both its charms and hurts. But, more to the point, and as you would say, "Speak seriously, Charles, for the Diety's sake life cannot all go by in inimitable phrases, men must come to an accounting, especially when they find themselves on intimate terms with each other, as you and I do in this household, whose composition was beyond both of our controls." Sententious, yes, but, Polonius, not without a point.
Yesterday, leaving the Lycee, I stopped at the charming ices stand where an incomprehensible old Italian dispenses his lickable ices, and getting my usual bittersweet lemon treat, I enjoyed my first refreshment-- as a bachelier. The exam mastered me, but I managed to submit myself to its inherent tyranny so well, with such devil-may-care dexterity, that I extracted a pass.
But, really, I did not begin this letter as an exercise in self-advertisement. No, much to the contrary, I began it, indeed, to congratulate you, good Colonel Aupick, on your promotion to marshal de camp, which I picked up from the notices in the ink-thick pages of The Universal Monitor. Much news overtakes our tiny clan of three in the same tick of time. Fate has set our typeface with a single swipe of its rigid paw.
My congrats are real and naturally flow from my regard for you-- unlike many other of the compliments you will no doubt be receiving. I am happy, extremely so, but mixed with this happiness, for both yourself and myself, but more purely for you and the family good fortune of your promotion, is inalterably mixed an almost unbearable anxiety. I frays all of my resolutions, yet refuses solution-- or even resolution, remaining as tenuous as a half-remembered dream whose pleasant stuffing, as one pulls at it to reveal more and more of its substance, begins to turn into shreds of human flesh--and one's own at that! This is the pillow on which I have slept all night.
My future is all unsettled, my tastes and inclinations for a 'career,' vary by the hour, and all my horizons, seeming a circle impossibly vast, shrink to a chokehold through which may not pass even a single free breath. Oh, do not suppose your offer of a prime place for me in the establishment militare holds no glow for me-- indeed military parades and the sway of glimmering braid have often whittled an idle hour away from me in deep pleasure-- but it is the golden attraction, for me, that the cage has for the horrified bird.
My life, whatever it is and whatever it may come to be, will not fit in such finely milled limits, however spit and polish.
Much news overtakes our tiny clan of three in the same tick of time. Fate has set our typeface with a single swipe of its rigid paw.
My congrats are real and naturally flow from my regard for you-- unlike many other of the compliments you will no doubt be receiving. I am happy, extremely so, but mixed with this happiness, for both yourself and myself, but more purely for you and the family good fortune of your promotion, is inalterably mixed an almost unbearable anxiety. I frays all of my resolutions, yet refuses solution-- or even resolution, remaining as tenuous as a half-remembered dream whose pleasant stuffing, as one pulls at it to reveal more and more of its substance, begins to turn into shreds of human flesh--and one's own at that! This is the pillow on which I have slept all night.
My future is all unsettled, my tastes and inclinations for a 'career,' vary by the hour, and all my horizons, seeming a circle impossibly vast, shrink to a chokehold through which may not pass even a single free breath. Oh, do not suppose your offer of a prime place for me in the establishment militare holds no glow for me-- indeed military parades and the sway of glimmering braid have often whittled an idle hour away from me in deep pleasure-- but it is the golden attraction, for me, that the cage has for the horrified bird.
My life, whatever it is and whatever it may come to be, will not fit in such finely milled limits, however spit and polish.
"I am the superior degenerate of a race of defectives!"
"Do not mind, Bonadventure, it is the absinthe that has dashed the reason out of his mouth."
"My father, three and a half decades my mother's elder, forcing upon her hothouse maidenhood the obscenity of his sex. The combination of depravity and tenderness, does not the eye rebel from seeing? I am a man in love with what wounds him, my persecutors are the only ones who would dare touch me...."
"Charles, this self-pity is monstrous; I am the last to code anything you say, since I have profited by it so many times in the past, but really!"
"monstrous? Yes, well what do you expect from a monster?" His shotglass rang against the bar. Gautier poured him another.
"Is there nothing for us to do besides talk? We've been three hours at this scab-picking."
"But if the blood is golden, let them bleed! Isn't it worth everything to tell a truth on God, that grand street monte player? Theo, Beauty rhymes with more than Duty, you know."
"And soul with more than foul, Charles."
"The complexities of the starry sky are not defined by the dreams of the starlings who lose their way in it."
"What does that mean?"
"It means, dear Theo, that I cannot be blamed for the obtuseness of the friends I choose; neither mine nor their own."
"Ah, mother, what strong and secret solace you have given me for my exile among males!" And, saying this somewhat in the manner of a salute to one absent, Baudelaire turned on his triumphant heel and fled the establishment. Gautier and I were dumbfounded and, although I did not then know the Madame as I was to come to know, or think I knew, her, I must still confess that this outburst on Baudelaire's part still resembles in my memory nothing so much as a surprise.
Dear Madame de Aupick,
Young Charles is a competent scholar, but perhaps "taking it easy" a bit too much. He is solitary and will not mix with the general school population. In his own mind, it is apparent from stray remarks he lets slip in conversation, he exalts himself and abases others, and, although there is a pool of talent and achievement that quite outclasses anything Charles has yet shown us, he continues to degrade and dismiss the verifiable accomplishments of others. Needless to say, this is not acceptable. The worst of it is that the other children, not comprehending the fake maturity of his distant and ironical attitude, are taken in by the mystery he poses to them, and he has quite a following of admirers an, even, not a few imitators. But one dark lone wolf is quite enough for my little lycee; you see my meaning, I am sure.
Perhaps a military academy could develop his obvious and natural, if unusually expressed, leadership abilities. If young Charles finds a subject that "catches fire" within him, I feel certain that he would be fully capable of inspiring others to action and sacrifice of the very highest caliber, even unto the death.
In the meanwhile, please see to it that he learns at least a few less condescending manners.
Cordially Yours,
Phillipe Praxis
In my dreams, my heart opens up to me like an egg filled with tar-colored snakes. Last night, consumed and tormented by the acrid stink of my own existence, I lay shelled in my stale linens for several hours, listening to the hiss of the gas jets in the streets, the occasional off-clop of a slow horse bringing his drunken master home for a sleep in the stable. Finally, my ears began to hear that nothing that accompanies coming unconsciousness. In a moment, I had opened my inner eyes on a pander of my acquaintance, wearing quite as bright a yellow vest as Huysmans sports, and posing affably before an impossibly ornately carved set of doors done in a dark stained heartwood. I felt the dread of familiar welcome in his smile.
"Monsieur, for ash Wednesday we have something special I passed in, avoiding contact with his sallow extended hand, and coughed at the heavy incense that laced the parlour in a cheap attempt to disguise the heavy opium use among the prostitutes; ladies, I will swear by my champing blood, of inestimable value if, to unbearable boors, of questionable virtue.
In my hand, rank with unchaste sweat, I bore a goldleaf and cerulean tome of my own postulant blooms, my Flowers of Evil, which I have just had back from my grandly deliquescing publisher. My heart was once again my own, in my own hands, whole and en-tomed, even if still loudly confused.
Around me on the walls were colored placards of the dead: erotic paintings decorating this hydra's lair of inconsequential desire; mocking rhymes of lust mated in couplets beneath depictions of cool couplings in exotic circumstances. A Raja and his elephant quickly consummating in Piccadilly, a lily-stockinged schoolgirl engaged in a minuet of dry kisses with her brother's red toy soldier while an erstwhile papa beams approval as warmly as a bribed mayor in the country. These things, dusty talismans of bygone urges, along with their antique tongue-twister limericks, gave me the impression that I was the last live man standing in the morgue.
I turned my attention from the walls. Before me, grand as an odalisque, sat the mistress of the establishment, or Madame. A slab of rich Italian marble laid between us, set with fine ball olives, licorice-stick cocks, vaginal aspics, and lead goblets brimmed with difficultly procured blood-wines. I looked directly into eyes, which had a vanished aspect I could not quite understand. Then I addressed her, and there was vermillion in my tone.
"Mother...."
"Son," she said. "The book."
Her hand, stiff as pinewood, shot out from a spider body of gathered and stitched pitch velvets, demanding the release of what, after all, contained all of my self and manhood. The depth and fatigue of my hesitation had all the qualities of a surgeon running his thumb meditatively over the scar he inflicts.
My mother smiled. It was the second smile I had been given that evening.
"Felicity..." I asked, hesitating even more, "is she?" My question was almost an admission.
"Felicity is not... otherwise engaged. No, not at all."
At this, the living vision of a waterfall appeared at the doorway behind and beyond my mother; this waterfall, this downfall, I could only call Felicity. Mother now, as I looked away, reached out to touch the delicate binding of my skyey book.
"Charles...." Felicity began.
Her vision mined my eyes for a response. In myself I felt the unleashing and echoing register of an intimate calamity, as if I were about to betray a family murder. The load of my book dropped (or was it lightly tugged?) into my mother's under-girding hands. I looked from face to face, Mother to Felicity and then back again, imposing my own desperate pleas upon their soft and approving countenances that now alternated with the speed of a shutter.
Yes, perhaps here, in the final graveyard of desire, where cash and sex intersect and power and love are plain upon every face in confinement, I had found a momentary harbor for the exploded rubbish of my soul.
Here, the taste for death, the distaste for love, balanced for a single second on the soft hair of my inoperative desire. For you see, I could not... not with Felicity... in Felicity.
"Love, which tempts us with its contretemps, will, like a Python beheaded in its deathgrip, never release its victim. This is an image of the human affections which once disturbed me greatly, despite or because of its inherent truth does not matter, until one day, greeting my dear Jeanne from her toilet, I noticed in her sigh a hint of the laughter that would move through her when she heard my death rattle. Yes, very definitely, Gerard. I have seen in her smile the sine curve of derision at its nefarious inception. In her ecstatic cries, delight at my helplessness. In her interest in the poems I dedicate to her beauty, I have spotted the clinician scanning a patient for defects, abnormalities that can be depended on to produce future fees. Who has not used their eye to crucify, their weakness to command? Bonadventure, Nerval, I know you do not have the power to imply otherwise, not while you quail here beneath my scrutiny; my gaze which implores with the desperation of a slave. Looking at the pair of you, I have no hope for my own freedom, certainly not any freedom from love's delusions."
This is how Baudelaire counselled Gerard de Nerval in his romances, which he always prosecuted with the desolate innocence of a child.
"But Aurelia.... The thunder that accompanies her kiss, is it from fear then that my own pulse responds?"
Nerval seemed almost mortally abandoned, ripped to shreds by the mechanical continuance of Baudelaire's arguments, steady and regular as a clockwork's cold progression; adding up the little nothings of a second until the sun is gone. I sat there beside him and did nothing at all to help.
O the ropes of regret that bind one to the experimenter's steel table! And for what? The hope of something new!
I glanced at Nerval--- the look on his face, it was...--- but then Charles was at the helm again, pressing on into wilder spaces---
"I hold myself above the lovers like a disembodied bulb, prepped to flash out a recording light; I am but the instrument of a crime scene photographer."
"But, but, but," Nerval hiccoughed, "you yourself once said that 'an artist is someone with the beautiful inability to settle for some one else's reality.' What is a photographer besides the visual memoirist of that reality?"
This is the worst tack to take with Baudelaire if you want to get anyplace in a discussion--this quoting himself against himself--- the absolute worst. He considers it a form of kidnapping; a form which produces only a clumsy kind of intimacy of disregard when the true operator of such bad feeling should of course be oneself who, knowing the victim, could construct an orgy of self-loathing and produce a ream of ripping 'ransom notes,' which is what he occasionally styled his poems to be as he would thrust a revised sheaf at me for my purview.
"We already know that I am my own worst enemy, and my own best critic too, as you so ably quote, Gerard. Do you really love me so much, that you would torture me this way?"
The gentle Nerval, who had not a single schoolyard dart nib in his arsenal, flinched as he replied.
"Of, of course I love you Charles. You know that I would never .... if...."
So Charles, charmingly, knowing the soul of this love-cuffed Nerval, leapt like puma for the undulating jugular.
"Well, then, tell us of this Aurelia, the one love without a wound."
Nerval,--- have I mentioned?-- always wore what was called a chevalier's tie, a type of bowtie that played itself out near the throat in a single silken lump, a bolted bobbin of very fine material that jumped up and down whenever he swallowed hard--- which is what he did now. Nerval, whether through some mistake of nature or freak genius of God, had the stiff face of a Greek tragedian's mask; the same fixed features, the enduring-- if never daring-- stare.
"I was out walking this morning," he began plainly enough, referring to one of the kilometers-long and incessant treks that his perennial insomnia forced upon him most summer evenings, and which commenced at three a.m. or thereabouts and often continued on until noon, his head full of restless delights or the morose melodies he would hum loudly with all the grace of a thirsty horse.
"And dawn was infiltrating the city, crushing the dreams of thousands with morning's daily visibility. I had just turned down the rue de Mortefontaine, when," and here Nerval's mask of a face didn't exactly change, but the lines that had been worn into it by lavish feeling, became more pronounced, more deeply drawn. He began to chant something, but so feebly that both Baudelaire and I had to lean into the soft aura of his whisper.
"A lady leans on her copper windowsill,
absence-eyed, yet fair in antique crinoline...
"Deep in the dream of another life, Aurelia, we've lived together--- and live there still! Impeccable Utopias! Hesitation's engorged expectancy! Vague enthusiasms of dreaming youth! The aspirant's purest wish of aspiration! All, all were there, unmauled, in the blessed bouquet of her being. The only torch that responded to the sun herself: Aurelia! And then, I know you will not believe me but I do not care, --not a pence,-- then she looked at me; our eyes met."
There was such a long pause at this point, so 'glorious' a hesitation, that I was afraid that Nerval would leave it at that, and lose his side of the argument to Baudelaire without a fight, resonant phrases notwithstanding.
And then Nerval looked up with, well I don't know rightly how to describe it-- but, I guess, something of a lambency in his eyes; a saint's glance, a martyr's transformation, these words are empty....
"She resembled the ardent virgins in that choir portrait by Loungemains, the one in the Louvre that floats there in the blue room. I close my eyes, just now, and see her in a sort of wondrous self-containment looking over the adorable shoulder of a sister in perfection. But, as strongly as that image leapt to life when I saw it, compared to the dirty Paris streets, so much more bright and lively is her image to me. I had never thought that souls could change bodies while they lived, or that two souls might inhabit a single frame. Pythagoras disapproved of it, and I learned in his school. But that glance of Aurelia's, that instant, I felt her take complete possession of me, of all that I could feel to be myself or my soul; and I knew her as well, as sharply as anything that moves beneath my crosshairs; and there I have remained, since that moment, gentlemen, staring from that copper windowsill, and there I am now."
"So I told Nerval, whose gaze never quite met the horizon, but, like a lunar lightbulb, instead hovered ever above the sinkline where the rest of humanity lives and breeds, I told him the truth of love, and in thanks for the pains he took to acquaint Bonadventure and myself with his azure dream, I cut his heart out with my tongue until he had to admit that it was there, beating and bleeding before him."
"Charles, the covers; I will wrap myself in them completely, you know how I love the feather-licks of silk, all except for my left ear. That I have always dedicated to your poetry exclusively, and now I will let you rant against its membrane; do, dear. It is my prettiest ear, is it not? You have always said so."
"I took for him the example, so unlike ourselves, jaded Jeanne, of two lovers who are very much, as it is said, in love with one another. No matter how truncated their reason, no matter how engorged their duelling desires, one-- either male or female -- would be more hypnotized, more delirious than the other at any given instant. This one, true to itself, will injure or torture the other with its coldness, the minutiae of withdrawal, the angst of insufficient affection; or else, wishing to comfort and uphold the beloved, the lesser loving lover will trampoline into a net of little lies and nefarious fictions, thus comforting the other and undoing itself.
In this way, even the torturer or surgeon may be the victim of the situation, the unequal validation of battling blossoms; evil blooms of what may be termed "love." And what of lovemaking itself, isn't it just a pair of wildcats in claw-withdrawn attack? And sometimes not even that, not even that tiny retraction of the bestial scratch of our natures in this dark liaison. Muscles stiffen and contract as if in the death rictus, the supple troubles of the face stretch and distort into a form of skull, or slacken into a mash of unwilled facts-- as if death had taken the soul from its smelly bottle. Well, little ear, my pink and pouting conch shell, are you listening? What do you think? What can you say to me? Am I wrong? .... You too are now among the dead, your face bereft of speech, the chilled enamel of your teeth protruding from your wet lips only to drool .... Still no response? When I first met you, do you remember the occasion? I stood unobserved among a small battalion of my friends whose poems I couldn't quite bring myself to abhor; their works had the softening effect on my aesthetic judgement that occurs when one first sees a shivering kitten bald from mange. Out of that pack I advanced,-- you had a blue velvet boostier, and your face was sunk so deeply in a whirlpool of cosmetics, I almost couldn't discern the stern glance of your crunched skull. I knelt before you as never before any other, dirtying a tailored knee in the beer and sawdust of the floor. 'I want to bite you,' I said, and you turned to me those glacial eyes, at once so cold and so hot, twin extremes indecipherable in their effect. 'I want to bind your hands in the hair of dead children, immortal and unstained. I want to draw you to the ceiling by your wrenched arms and see you naked-- so that I might, on my bended knees among shards of shattered glass, worship your upraised feet.' Your friend, I remember, screamed at my suggestion. But you, dear demented Jeanne, placed, very stealthily considering the crowd about us, my prayer-struck hand upon your cunt. And only then did you deign, so great was your grace-- that evening--to smile."
Ah! Young Franscois has put away the plates at last; the burnt bits of bacon, always too crisp or too flaccid, fried eggs solid as Gibraltar, cream cheese, asparagus, a soup thin as a saint's blood, a wicked spray of asparagus that mocked my inoperant manhood-- yes I have advanced to that grim age, Marlene, and even my animal interest has waned along with my wang-- some gruyere and jam. A delight, really. And for the topper, a dollop of Nougatine and a sallow slice of dry cake. Hmm.
And now I have returned to my garden, taken up like the taming of Africa by my wife and old Jacques (old even to us!) A new trainline encroaches on our simplicity in the dead distance, sighing to a halt at that satanic gingerbread house concoction of a stop, which I can only think of as the fiendish application of a little girl's nightmarish dreams of a house brought stunningly and wrenchingly to powdered life. Ech! Jacque's one concession to barbarity out here in the garden is due to me-- a bonfire pit where I roast my bones in some old man's prelude of Hell, and which I enjoy inordinately even in the swelter of August. I collapse on my old rattan chair, once so new I thought it would never be of service, like the rigid blankness of babies; you never imagine that they could grow into something as useful as a prostitute or an amanuensis: yet, I have seen both emerge from their swaddling clothes in my passage on earth, and that is another delightful meal for me-- of my memory.
Let me see-- yes, in this ratty stack of manuscripts, here is all the soiled heart of that genius and compatriot of ours, Baudelaire. Before the bonfire, which is gratefully releasing my knees from the purgatory to which they have been condemned daylong, is the right place to read one last time, such words of fire:
" 'Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.' Too true, too often! our eyes are clotted with cancerous growths, we plunge into the abyss not knowing one thing from the next, thinking to do good, we execute the innocent; harping on virtue, we innoculate the guttersnipe against reforms; blessed by a bounty of spirit or nature, we waste both and grumble at our spendthrift style! It seems to me that the only sure delight can come, must come, through the certainty of sacrilege; to know the good and to knowingly disobey. To have the mind of Jesus and the perversity of the Devil. For, by doing so, we at least KNOW what we are doing, and are not just rockets loose in the mist. In this way, all of our morality has the utilitarian angle of an angel's mirror: we see ourselves , not as we would be (as occurs in the instructive mirror of church) but as we are, by our willful deformity from the indestructible elegance set before us.
Woman-- take the savage in her natural state: her lyricism is that of the bestial mass, the "beast with two backs." There is no exaltation of the essential self in such an act, there is only a total and self-degrading abasement before another, an acknowledgement of need , an exchange of uses, as at an agricultural fair. It is the sick bargain between the abject gambler and the croupier,-. one agrees to give up all he has the other, equally debased, agrees to accept the debt. A disgusting exchange! Nothing is given, all is hard trading and walleyed vision. Despicable!
We sex ourselves where we excrete. God has jammed our noses in the foul joke; the moaning misnomer named "love."
George Sand is one of these women, crying like a mounted hen about her glorious degradation. "I have humiliated the men by taking my pleasure with them! haha!" That they have turned her pages, or cut into her supple fonts does not appear to have crossed that great empty gap she calls her "mind, invincible and indivisible." The artist never tears himself into needs, petty dramas or lazy lapses of the integral vision; his abysses are interior ONLY! He never come out to play. He remains maestro and intimate only with himself. The stage of life is a sham which never attains anything of interest; copulation is the entry under another's proscenium-- the artist never leaves the green room of himself.
All love is prostitution of the purer impulse. The more a man sates his sex on the arts, the less randily he hankers after the mottled artifact (of the woman, the man, or the child). If one is to choose degradation as a sensation, an artistic experience and type or route of salvation from dim ennui, only the ideal of degradation will serves the turn. Congress with Satan, fly the church perch of the limited self in the direction of homely Hades; invoke the delights of the damned, and tell yourself that you are going down, down down--- all the way. To seek God carries the insecurity of a lust for promotion in another's incomprehensible eyes; paitience, humility, and a divine sign are all required passwords for this tourney of the soul. Uncertainty of the limitless light, I must renounce the doubtful path-- although it goes to Heaven itself!
Every kind word is a kiss in the mist, uncertain of where its finally planted; every curse condemns with surety.
I put my old feet closer to the flaring conflagration, causing the glittery conders to crack and grind.
To lose one's way in the sewers of the flesh; all the annals of love throughout time are but the jottings of sanitation superintendents.
Strip down to your virginity, then lave it with gravesores. This is the only likely turnpike.
The paper browns at its edges and sashays in the updraft before turning a double somersault and crumpling to its utter destruction. It is so beautiful to watch the light take away the inky weight of the words, their dirty intrusion onto the page. Now another page flies, fumbles, and folds. It seems that, as an artist, I have turned to burning. The beautiful soul-croaks of my friend-- chasing oblivion once again (and I pray, finally) in the flames.
Here in this garden bonfire, I reverse the heroism of embattled Byron. Instead of pulling the boiling organ from the conflagration, I here consign to fire the scattered pages that Charles had described to me one day in his last illness as My Heart Laid Bare.
The prick, swollen contortionist, turns up its oily face to his persecutor; there is a defect in its symmetry, the casual smoothness of its wrapper that was once so usual, unremarkable, pale and rosy. The deformed prick puckered its slim slit, took in a premonitory breath, and began, increadibly, to speak:
"Well, evil man, you have used me as a blind man uses his stick-- thrust into every slimy obstacle in your periplum's path! Odysseus did not abuse his wily wits with such prodigal purposelessness as you have used me! A divining rod born to locate vile mud would be cleaner after 300 years of dirty village service than I am at the the end of one day in your pulpy hands! Benedicte! I grew with you, and as you grew, in modest shadowed compartments, listening to the pure mumbled buzz of your mother's voice above, your own answers polite and tame as an angel's. This occurred for many years. I was powdered and sweet to smell or look upon.
"Then, from I know not where, a heat, a black lamp, a rising lava, an untamed flame, a fire, began to creep and increase along my veins, one evening after prayers, under the clean linen; up from the fat base, where irritating hairs had only begun to appear that lapping spring, a cauterizing stream began its inevitable flow. --Ah! that night has been the end of all my days since!-- Because of you above, and your contemptible lack of imagination! You could have sought out an iron collar, a spike of ice to finish the inferno roasting my pink hide, a snip with a scissors or even, meakly, like a priest, wool underwear would have done the trick and abolished this hazardous destiny you have embarked BOTH of us upon!
Simpleton!
But, no! You became a creature of soft gloves and furtive arrondisments; quick showers and false perfumes. And all the time, I alone would be left to feel the fire. And when it came, in sheets of faces like the shroud of Turin, obliterating the horizon the way a fire races through the forest, leaping even faster uphill than down, high on' its own heatwaves, then-- and then only!-- you would turn your spoiled attentions to me, trying to dig myself a common grave in your thigh, or hiding behind the cool coins in your pocket for a minute's respite. You would uncover me, startled and turgid and scarlet as a new-baked loaf of cinnamon bread, to the frightful ices of the night air. A single moment of relief and reprieve that hurt almost as much as it satisfied! But even this relief was a lie, for no sooner had I stood naked beneath the wan moon's cynical scowl,than your hand was upon my throat in a wrestler's chokehold, as if you would tear me from the very root of your ugly being! A feat, by the way, which you never managed, and which would have been best for both of us-- and I would be free at last from the omnipresent odure of merde.
"The lavender of your pomp, the plump of your palpitating hand soon brought me off in a miasma of fetid regrets. I sank, a shucked and scabbed husk, back into the truncated winter-stubble. If this was all, I would have been satisfied, knowing how adulthood degrades the child, and how pleasure lives leavened with disaster. But, no. This was not the end, nor was it the worst of it. Each night like a vampire I arose, not to suck but to flood the world! And you, my shambling harness, were glib in your approaches, fine in your dandy's appurtenances-- ties of newly drowned silkworms dyed black in the blood of Brahma bulls who died in rut, old with incestuous connections-- a waistcoat of pomegranate, textured with the ruffing of pale Italian underaged hands, pointed shoes of the most uncommon cut and polished as a banker's glance.... All these and all this, just so you could stick me like a sopping candle-end into some skeleton's eye socket! Pocked debaucheries! Nights of imagined flight only, your soul never leaving, really, its nest of scars. Assignations of gaslamps, wet roads, and stained, undignified sofas. And all the time you held me like a runaway coal being danced across an unlighted room to the firebucket.
"But now is when I have my satisfaction, my conclusion, my wild apotheosis. Do you feel the bramble-branch pulled through me every time you piss? Do you note the bruise-tinted discharge that chums the chamberpot like a fish-boat? Look at me, at what you have done to me! I am no longer the tender ribbon of pink that sat with you in the tub; I am moiled in distortions. My proud crown sags with the fatal lapses of a beached jellyfish. I, pouting dowser,"
and here the purpled prick, agitated by his passionate appraisal of our differing powers over our mutual fate, wept a single, large, yellow and grey-pearl tear and continued "... we, have gonorrhea!"
I will record here this one generous, or noble, impulse of the prick in this wayward dream of mine. And that charity consisted in diagnosing itself with a simple case of gonococcal urethritis, and not the virulent madness, the compact degradation and cancellation of future hopes a case of syphilis would prophesy. I have been to the doctor since this dream, a Dr. Revieu, and I have, indeed, gonorrhea and syphilis both.
I passed a paralytic syphilitic this morning on the street. After a few inquiries made of the house owners in whose gutter this human stump rotted, I discovered that the man, who appeared older than my own father had seemed to me as a child (and I was born in my father's sixtieth year!)-- was only thirty four years of age, and wasn't kicked from his terrible stoop because, like Electra, he was the son of the house-owner.
Two days ago, I passed my eighteenth year.
"Money, money, money! I require money so that I may see her again! I must pay to have my heart tortured. Isn't it ironic, Bonadventure? The romantic Poet must put his fingers into a filthy purse before he can wash them in the pure source of his mistress. She is very exact. 'Cash first.' And into the lamae lockbox it goes, franc after filthy franc. And all because my mistress is a prostitute, and I am discerning enough to require the professional touch in all my personal matters. My tailor-- the best. My barber-- a master with his little hatchet and oils and talc. My mistress--a prostitute! It is too late to regret my sensitive nature now; that Rubicon I have skated across far too long ago, that Jordan I have boiled in for far too long already to change now, or even wish that I had a desire to change. No, no. If I am a scoundrel, if I am a saint, I need the same thing: money!"
We walked the rue Flambeau. It was late afternoon, and the paving stones shone out as if gilded in horse piss. Knowing how much Charles hated to rely on such a recourse, but seeing no other option myself, I was about to suggest to him his usual method of procuring extra capital. The golden ore of my own trust fund was simply not liquid enough to support more than one islet of leisure and indifference; namely myself.
"Write to your half-brother, Alphonse."
Baudelaire scowled, but gave no other indication that he had heard me. I watched an ambidextrous boy kill one bird with two stones.
"I have already written to Alphonse--- for the last time! It is not that, not at all. That is not the difficulty, despite the manner in which the mauling knocks of the debt collectors trouble my contemplation at all hours. The difficulty..."
"Yes?" I prompted.
"Is tonight."
Now, I scowled. "What is difficult about tonight?"
"I MUST see her tonight."
We came upon the bird the boy had killed; its bright eyes had been mashed to the consistency of blueberries in a burnt muffin. Baudelaire lifted it up in one palm and addressed himself, and all of his "difficulties," to the murdered starling.
"Warm," he noted. "But what animates its chaff is fled." Baudelaire's aspect, as they say, darkened. "You are like me," he told the starling, "when I am denied the sight of Louchette. We seem toasty as loaves, but we are dead."
Needless to say, I advanced him the money he needed on the assurance that Alphonse's 50 francs was to come first to me, and only then to his other necessities. After a curt nod of thanks, he said to me, as he pocketed the money:
"How alike the pair of you are! My friend and my mistress, Bonadventure and Louchette. Both prostitutes!"
Here it comes again: the charity catcall for cash; but this time it is for the last time .... I'm tired of playing the wily prostitute to your flagging generosity; I will no longer help you to get it up, Alphonse.
But, with this excuse of its being the "last time,"I feel free enough to ask you for double the amount I requested last time. If you can see your way clear to peel off 100 francs from the wad the crooked lawyers jam into your pockets, dear judge and brother... ? Your last disbursment, you should know, went for books and medicines. I had an intolerable headache, brought on no doubt by too much late night reading.
It seems I forgot about my tailor-- an exquisite artist! An amputee would grow a new leg just to wear a pair of pants fitted by this nimble little man. But a tailor can ruin a gentleman's reputation faster than any other acquaintance a man might have. Everyone with any style sees Tripadore, and any one of these fellows might drop the question, in seeming generosity, 'I know Charles Baudelaire goes to you, of course; he's an impeccable man in his insane way, but tell me, if he owes you a little something, so I might clear it up for him. As a tribute to his dissolute genius, of course.' Ah! And Tripadore would let the terrible truth slip; the friend would be unfortunately short of the required cash, and.... in all the clubs you are 'That deadbeat, Baudelaire.'
I tell you, it makes me feel like skinning a cat!
So, if it is alright, I will go over to your friend M. Guerin's tonight, and ask the advance of him with your guarantee, nes pas?
And again, I say the "Last time," to bind myself to a line of honorable conduct in the execrable matter of money, and to assuage any alarmist jump that may travel through your nerves or your checkbook when you receive a letter with the blotted and black return address of
Yours Truly,
Chas. Baudelaire
666 Crossways Court
the Vampire Cave, just West of Paris
P.S. Am now involved in translating the fourth act of Timon of Athens, so don't worry about the future; this show will go big!
P.P.S. I send you my warmest regards for the new year, which I hope will find all your family in supreme health, etc. I have firmly deferred any reform in my general behavior until 1841, after the new year.
"Yes, yes, yes, you little wretch, I must have fresh bidet twice daily; the water in this one's thick as the skin of a cat! I am accustomed only to roses and clovers-- and cool in August! The water should not feel as if it had just drooled out of a giant's ear; it must be sweet, and cool, and nice. Right, Juliette? Do you have it? Good. Now, run! or Louchette will whack you like you like the dirty boys to do, you little harlot. What will the Madame say if you forever disappoint even us poor prostitutes? "
"Yes, Louchette. I think there is a note pinned to your door. A gentleman left it at the front door earlier today."
"A gentleman? And did he ask for me?"
"No; he just wanted to leave the note. That's what Marie told me."
"He wanted to leave a note, and not come up to my rooms? That's a touch strange. He did say the note was for me specifically and not one of the other ladies?"
"Oh yes, Louchette. I can read, and it has your name upon it."
"Hmm. Did you know the man? Did you see him?"
"I saw him when he was leaving. I forget his name, but he was the one with the 'evil eye.' "
"Julliette! Forget your gypsy ways, you are a French girl now. You don't want to go back to the orphanage, do you?"
"Oh no, no, no, Louchette! Do not let them drag me away! Not there! Not again! I couldn't bear it!"
"Well, Madame won't care how pretty you are if your keep up with those witchy superstitions. Men in Paris will shrink from your caresses, no matter how sultry. And that will not be good for business."
"Yes. I know you are right. I shall not say it again, Louchette." She paused, " thank you Louchette."
"Yes, well, enough of that, what else can you tell me about this gentleman?"
"Oh, he was handsome, but pale, very pale, like a corpse laid out; the corpse of a prince or something. And very correct in his way of talking. Just like a real gentleman. But... but .... If.."
"But what?"
"But, he had the saddest smile I ever saw, as if everything he loved, well, like he could see it, but it was all on the other side of a terribly big piece of glass. Like sometimes the way the really beautiful tropical fish look out at you in the new aquarium. Like they could see the wild ocean, but knew all the lands of the world were between them and home."
"Charlie," Louchette said to herself. "It must be Charlie."
I can't for my Mistress be an illustrious Lion; The soul of my Soul has bruised off all its luster. The mocking Universe stabs invisible glances, And Beauty no longer flowers in my sad heart. For a pair of slippers she has sold her soul; And when Bon Dieu giggles at such infamy I am a Tartuffe, a hypocrite, a liar, My thoughts are sold out, my dreams as an author .... Yet you are content to bizzarly chat As we promenade past midnight down a ruined street; In your head, your eyes turn down-- like a dying pigeon's-- Trained on the crimson rivulets torn by talons Of Men who spit jiggers of semen and shit On your distant face, simple, poor and impure. You are Famine in the dead of Winter Constrained to lift young dress in the chilly air. --My beautiful one, my everything, my richness, My pearl, my light, my laughter, my suchness, Here in my groin you are my vanquisher, But in your two hands you re-heat my heart's core. Signed, Anomie
Dear Charles,
My dear love for you is strained to the point where the viol of my affections is becoming the cat-scratch of a weary fiddle in an alley. PLEASE tell me the names and addresses of all the men you owe money to--- a fact which only you can know! You bemoan your affairs with the eloquence and despair of a modern Job, but when help arrives from the skies in the improbable shape of a purse, you spurn its disbursment and claim-- falsely!-- that you will "take care of this small distress myself." As if it were a pimple, and not a series of improvident debts that could land you in jail! You owe, not 2000 francs as you pretend, but closer to 4000. You send me that list of expenses you had very carefully and obligingly kept since our last set-to on the 'execrable subject,' as you call it. Do not spend all of your of inheritance before it is disbursed to you! You will find yourself in circumstances that you, with your delicate and languishing nature, will NOT ABIDE.
Enclosed is cash for your immediate needs. But, I won't send over the whole of your debts in cash to you directly, as you proposed once, because I fear you will simply spend it all on whore and opium. or, as you might say, to improve a single line in the , thus far, wierdly managed sonnet of my existence.
There you go again! Trying, as you put it, to find a rhyme for God, who you then decide to give the pet name of "The orange."
Good Alpohonse,
Lets us consider like gentlemen and accountants what is to be done with your brother Charles. Two hundred francs to dress a woman in the finest crinoline, a woman, however fine her personal qualities --- taken in dancing parade FROM A BROTHEL!
our cafe oleo last afternoon has enlightened me considerably as to your brother's current careen into the abyss. In the army, I have seen every sort of dissipation and twist of selfhood into ruination; those men had better cause than our Charles, and I have shot several of them for less glaring outrages. I have developed a plan of attack.... But I must see you again, face to face; we must pour over the sores in his soul and unearth the charitable being who once, in his long uncut hair at seven, would totter over to my lounge chair, with his mother on my lap, to deliver, carefully and unspillingly, the Spanish scotch that was discover closest to Cordova's corpse on that harrowing campaign among those dark and savage people who value independence over civilization.
Tell Charles nothing of any of this! You have always been so apt at straightening out his young poetic ass, that I beg you not to fail or lose nerve when I disclose my plan to you tomorrow.... Say 3ish at the Victorie?
He is made of ashes. Like Kimbo, patted together from the ashes of the world-creation. Like Kimbo, his eyes are full of tricks and mischief, the original fires not yet quite out. Oh, the man is in love with thunder. Last night during the great shakedown from the sky, he took up B'llambe's short spear with the blade like a palmleaf to end the enemy's heart at one stroke , and danced, white and naked, in the lighting storm; himself a stroke of fallen starlight.
I must bring to him the blank tablature of my affection, on which he may write his desires. This is the way of all true women, mother has told the story many times. When their ship is repaired, they shall sail far away, to India, to France, blank tablets once, now thick with the dreams of their peoples.
Eat of the Guyana, I said with my hands, and he ate of what my own arms had plucked for him to covet. our days commence in the charms of detail drawn onto the world by the great fire, each thing of the day waiting for us to touch it rightly, and burn ourselves upon it, and have the burn-scar in our life-memories for always. Each night sinks down to caresses, the last meal and lying like a soul and its shadow before the dying fire of which he was made, until the oblivion enters us, and we are for a timeless time all dream and daring.
He is blushing and getting dark with the days. His eyes pop out white with thoughts of me. I must find a way aboard the floating forest that his compatriots swarm over and thunder at day after day. Last sun, his eyes looked farther away than the moonshine. I am apprehensive, the Guyana fruit is like holding weeping stones from the river in my arms as I come to him. Heavy and wet and mourning the apart-time which must come. Soon, says B'llambe, they go, the great ship little like a dragonfly on the bold line of the world; and then, you blink once, and they sink into never-was. So B'llambe says. But Patri'ce went, I say; she went, and is she nothing now or a Frenchwoman? Have you seen her gossiping at the well, or fetching faggots, or dancing for a man? But she is, she is a tomaade," I say, remembering the word. B'llambe walked away, but I remember who she talked to at the tradepost, the fat man in his white suit. I will go too, 1 will ride the ocean, and cross the bold line of the world.
They smell in the boxes with the invisible punch-holes. They lock me, dressed in a long cloth made all of scratches, into one of the boxes. They say I am "too love" with "Shaarl"'. How can it be? I see him only once a day in a hurry in the magic glass in the wall. Is this what it is to be "Maade"?
My stomach levers around like watching a fly too long with your whole head, and not wisely just with your eyes. Ah, mother, have I been unwise?
An ocean voyage! Improbable and frantic as any carnival. General Aupick, my damn stepdad, has pulled off a miracle as surprising as any bouquet floresced from an old clown's sleeve. Debts beset me; my inspiration had fled after Louchette, a prostitute pinched in the face and vain as a queen, dismissed me from the cathouse steps with a pale finger.
So, a change of venue for my insanity and insouciance, says the General; my first good turn from that quarter, and enough to balance out the rest. Two days ago, I slung a gunny sack across my back, packed my finest cigars, and called for a stylish handsome to deliver me to the docks. On the S.S. Croesseus, I put to sea, embarking as, of all things, a pilot's apprentice. But my periplum begins and ends in the spine, casting its vigor through the ribs perhaps, and taking in the exotica of the splayed pelvis, and the rank pursuits of the hand and head.
Met Capt. Saliz-- oh, a vile man, as full of tough talk as the sailors with their Spanish mustachios and idiot cynicism. None of them have read a literary journal out of Paris in their lives, and any talk of poetry or the sublime crimes of the heart come through an awkward discoursing on sea chanties, the Lay of Lilian and her Wagging Sea Beastie, or the sad masterpiece, whose pathos they could not parse to save their souls, Reginald, Reginald.
The commercial passengers are worse, for one comes to expect nothing at all from the seadogs, mere hooligans of the waterways, but the passengers seem like men on a Paris street, just misplaced by the plucking of a puppet string onto a jumping deck, the slick soles of their shoes causing them to slide into each other in a type of random hazard, a shuffleboard effect where the pucks are people.
They think their cheap perfumes and political opinions out of Le Monde makes them gentlemen of consequence. Any idea that cuts against their piggy prejudices inculcated in childhood causes an expression to surface to their faces that I can only imagine describing as hideous.
The sailors, with whom I sling my hammock in a darkness as clotted with the rank of rot as a stable, are all about my age. I attempted on a few occasions to get some of them to unpuzzle a poem with me, but they merely used the occasion to mock by smallness, my delicate nature, and what they kept calling, in a sing-song dismissive way, "the insanity of poetry."
The abuses! Confined in my cloth coffin last evening, I lay inflamed by half wakeful dreams of Louchette, the triumphant terror of her hair, the deranged insistence with which her clear cuticles kept thrusting themselves into my mind without a moment's respite! The constant loudness of the sea performed an unpunctual act of mesmerization on me.
The ceiling swung back and forth in the gap of the hammock above me; then six strong and hairy hands leapt across the canvas and pinched the hammock tight, until I was shut in tight as the proverbial pea. Between my legs, the canvas thumped and bulged, once. I had no idea what was going on.
In the next moment, everything became deliriously clear, as blow after blow landed on the hammock, and was transmitted to my body and skull like a cascade of rocks. If I had rolled blind down a steep desert slope, my injuries could not have been more complete. My every inch suffered insult.
The next instant, as I retched on myself in a shameful nausea of relief, the beating of the virgin sailor, his shrieking initiation-- for that is indeed what it was--was over. I crawled like a sick dog onto the deck, unable to bear breathing the same cabin air as my persecutors. I stared at eternity from a lifeboat until the sky herself shaded from its immense nightblue into a recognizable shade-- of bruise.
Dear Aupick,
I have been unable to care for and form the character of your son as we projected over those hot whiskeys at port. He remains an absolute stranger to the fellows on-board. He finds the passengers execrable-- an indifferent sample of all that was so boring and uninspired upon land, whose only further recommendation now is a salty baptismal.
To the sailors, he bears a very querulous face. His reaction is two parts horror and one part aristocratic snub; although he swears his only thought of them "is based 100% on smell." Indeed, his entire deportment is such a mystery to me, that I can think of no right way to encapsulate it in a phrase, or by analysis give you a right idea of its type and temper. He induces a morbid amount of thinking about-- and, as the ship's captain, I certainly have much to think about on so wide-ranging a voyage, the Cape alone should supply my nightmares with material and my days with activity-- indeed, I find myself doting on little else, but offers zero revelations.
Here is a sample of our dinner conversation from earlier tonight. His face was slightly discolored and clouded, as though he were withholding a judgement of lightning bolts for the sake of his dinner-table manners.
"So, M. Baudelaire, how are you taking to the sea? This cruise your father arranged for you would seem just the thing after cramped and cold Paris; it's a very healthy life we provide on shipboard, is it not?"
"It is extraordinary."
Then my first mate, oblivious to the ambivalence of this response-- he is a 'character', and 30 years at sea have washed off his more sharp, perceptive edges-- chimes in:
"Extra-extra-extraordinary, you might say, young Messier. I remember my first voyage as if it were yesterday and I was sober the livelong day. Everything about the life on board a ship pops out at you like crab from a dark hole. The sea seems to mean a something extra, as well, like its all a drama of some, ah, piquancy; ain't that the gospel, cap'n? Like it all stands out at you; how small you are on the face of the world, and yet, since there is nothing else human around for miles, how concentrated and exact the attentions of the universe seem. Like a drama, like I say."
"Well, that's quite an observation, Kreeger...."
"Hell must make a similar impression."
"Really? M Baudelaire, please go on."
"The stunned aloneness of each corroded soul is like this desert of the water; nothing without, and all within. A concentration of the eye on everything inward must soon result."
"T'ain't a preacher alive made me feel my wrong so hard, young fella. You goin' to preaching school in Paris when you decided to jump ship and sail with us?"
"How I passed the time in Paris, I cannot say, for I cannot understand myself. A man would hardly bee in hell if he could truly know who he was-- and thus avoid himself."
"Know himself to avoid himself!" ejaculated Kreeger, "bit like a man meeting a mirror, and then deferring at the sight of its contents'."
"if only, I had such a mirror. I would give my life, and all of your lives as well, to possess such an instrument.'
"Don't you think such a statement," I interjected," a bit, well .... over-generous?"
He looked at me with such a maturity and completeness of ice, that -- although it was subtropical, and we were rounding the coast of Africa in its summer season,-- I felt my sweat seize up in clear, cold rivulets upon my brow. And down my neck stung the needle of an inner shiver.
'Not a syllable, Mon Captain."
And then he beheaded a shrimp with a clack of his neat teeth.
She has that voluptuous selfness of a cat.
Haute and rigor battle at her brown brows; her mulatto lips, thick as a split caterpillar, are bloodied by her incessant nibbling on betel nuts. Her talk and manner of speech are indistinct and lazy-lovely; she pads about with the subtle self assurance of a calm Cleopatra. Never have I beheld any creature under the sun with her symmetry and sublime self-sufficience. She never races anywhere, but always arrives at exactly the right time. Just when my crumple heart begins to gnaw after her elliptical absence, that is when she is bound to arrive, her hair wreathed in the perfumes of exotic trees. Half the time her arms are loaded with an offering of koko-l'taanga, the rich and subtle fruit heavy against her breasts, and graced with an astonishing pinkness when they are sliced and served, often with a dash of cayenne and brown sugar. Altogether, an experience that stimulates.
She is, I believe, one of the half-caste Muslims, descended from political prisoners brought hence a hundred years ago. occasionally, I see her kneeling and touching her forehead to the dust, which smells of sheep, a fleecy affluence of the air. The quaking aqua of the water, peered at from every hill, makes one quite conscious of the embittered liveliness of the sea, as if God had but one huge eye, and it lay in the sea, and it watched you, incessantly.
How many times had Baudelaire put us in horror, or in ecstasy with his vivid recollections of Africa-- the crimson continent, as he called it, for the sake of the bloody sunsets, and the perennial overcast of the red-leaved trees in that part of the place where he had visited, as if he had examined all that was before him through the thin skin of a wound.
Under shadows so black that they are violet, thin men of dust collapse, giant eyes cast to the horizon, where the light will eventually escape them. But during the day there is no thought of this abandonment, only thought of the sun itself, huge and disproportioned, condensing a vulvic vapour over everything,. where desires and regrets condensed in the limitless afternoons. Their love of the aimless, their contentedness, stand out as sovereign in this atmosphere. As though in a painting of Eugene Fromintin, the contemplative and the violent are conjoined; the barbaric parades and travesties of justice that pass daily under foriegn eyes in those extraordinary climes, are but dissolute pages torn from some gigantic child's album of nightmares. The dervish and the slave-trader, the stun of colors impastoed upon the retinal nerve, all whirl and wound the senses like knives and feathers.
Also, there was an incident of bravery; the ship was scraping the Cape, winds-- intemperate with Indian prayers-- bore a confused language from the graves of sailors.
The sea, it seems, had meditated upon their destruction. For long after the midnight pipes were pocketed, the rum toddies swallowed with a final, harsh gratitude in roughened throats, the passengers long abed and dreaming of missing their steps on familiar stairs, and the nightwatch had joked itself to silence, and the only man aboard who stood awake was the man at the helm, and the bowman looking for rocks with his extended nose, the sea began to uncurl its water parchment and whisper into the solemn sails the story it had concocted, not above, but within the star-obscuring clouds: the dismasting of the Victorie had begun.
"Ho, Franscois! Foggy patch is being blown clear."
"Rudolph, I see it not. Whereabouts?"
"Port ahead; squinney ye blind bastard."
Franscois squinnied; strange shapes, like those sculptors see in an uncut marble mass appeared to him-- the blank potential of all shapes, all figures, all portents blew cold before him.
"Ay, I see it. 'Tis like a beard blown by without a face to hang it upon."
"No beard so large but that it be God's, Franscois."
"The wind's about, and coming from a bad place."
"Gabriel and the Judgement never would feel so cold as this, friend Rudolph."
"Get the others up here! It'll be the Devil's own squall."
"All? All the new bait as well?"
"Hurry, damn your eyes. There's treachery in the air."
Baudelaire was aroused with a head-punch, and thinking himself under fraternal attack again, withdrew a sinister knife he had procured since his last attack, and sliced open the palm of the mate who'd summoned him. The man gripped his hand shut hard, but refused to cry out.
"I'll settle with you later. there's a squall out to blow us into kingdom come. All hands on deck."
His first storm at sea! The boathold moaned like a whore in labor; the night withed everything, all its mysteries and anguished vengeance against hubraic humanity beyond the weak stabs and rays of the wildly swinging lanterns. And Charles into it! With a scrap of verse in his trim waistcoat, and the knife put ready up his sleeve, and a sailor who could take a single second in the upended dark to shove our young friend into oblivion, and no witness and nothing ever to be said!
Yet he scrabbled along the unfamiliar rigging, and threw his curses into the black void of creation as they furled every scrap of canvas that still hung its ass into the arriving gale.
"Ho, matey! Off the cross-tree! Nay, let it go! The wind's too injurious for any man!"
"Down ye come, Baudelaire! This one' lost; there's a crack i in the grain!"
And Baudelaire shimmied, limber a chimp, to the deck. They were to lose the mainmast, which meant hard sailing ahead, but the winds were pushing the ship nearly to sideways just then, and if that canvas but once filled with water, the whole escapade would capsize.
"Grab that sway of ropes, you three. We need to break her off this way, and not that, otherwise the other mast'll go too!"
An amputation at the thigh, and nothing less than that is what it was, with Baudelaire taking a lead among the men that hauled the dark corpse of the tree overboard, free and clear and carefully into what wicked seas! A wrong judge of the tide or impinging wind, and all that bolt of lumber would come back into the ship like a needle whittled by Satan to take 'em all straight down to Hell. But it was managed; it was managed, and with no mean skill!
A soapstone kilned in limitless Hell; such is my heart. Once, soft to the touch, easily carved, a semi-porous compact of talc, with some serpentines to be sure, mixed in. Now, hard and small as a thrown marble. What colors I have are fixed deeply within, and are not amenable to change.
Baudelaire, his lies as distinctly tincted as a fabulist's list of imaginary beasts, barked his embroideries of his far travels on my then malleable heart. Riding elephants and writing poetry, daylong in the dust, brown faces with white smiles, the mysterious femme, who spoke her own indecipherable patois, and danced for her master in the campfire while he recited recondite sonnets on the sunlike nature of her hot skin. But what really happen, mon frere? Sick of ignorant India, philistine Africa? Nowhere for your soft talk and godless insinuations to roam, once you were out of the rancid aviary of Paris? You once laughed at a man who, "Looks for his sins away from home." Did you scan the skies, and miss the dirty laundry of your old back alley, crimped linens yellowed against the bricks?
To accept the General's advice and sponsoring of the cleaning" sea voyage, that engineered a failure for the old fuck right enough! He can't Fix you, Baudelaire! To hell with his good intentions! His spic and span epaulets! Once out his sight again, and with his francs crumpled in your corduroys, you managed a quickie sin with a married Creole, and cut his the bluster of his cause (your soul) with the saber of your sins. And a sonnet to celebrate! Oh, Baudelaire, I must love you ...
Well, Baudelaire was always a liar; every true poet sees life in the light of such lies. It's a kick against the nastiness of Nature's necessities. Maybe, if we lash with the acid of fictive alternatives long enough, a pear tree will bear a pidgin, a rutabaga will blossom a rose, a tear will really ensnare a sigh, and love will, will really... love....
He came home ratty and burnt, and for once, I think, genuinely glad to see me, his teeth tight upon a whalebone pipe.
"Bonaventure."
"Baudelaire! I have just received your letter yesterday that you had crashed in Africa, "Wave-born and wanton.' How have you made it home so suddenly?"
"On the wet tongue, on the duelling wings of anguish and sanity."
I was too overcome, as they say, to talk, and held him in my arms for a moment-- the last moments in which he was ever to tell me an uncut truth. He stiffened beneath me, creaking and a bit over-perfumed because of what I imagined must have been his relatively unclean accommodations aboard ship.
"Yes, well, my friend, I am afraid I am becoming something of a Mme Guyon, and Paris is my wad of spittle," he said softly, with something like a small laugh following this statement.
"As God appoints it," I conceded, and though of that Mme Guyon who, ashamed that her own extreme cleanliness and abhorrence of slime was a rejection of the Creation, put a large gob of spit from the street into her mouth, and was transformed with the most joyous feelings of recorded Christendom since St Francis of Asissi licked a leper.
How opposite the apitetic impulses of the mass of men was every instinct and action of that charming and corrupting individual. The General Aupick had sent him away to dissuade him from pursuing his vocation as a poet, to make him see the wide ways of the world at large, beyond the literary coffins of a few salons in Paris, or the habitudes of his sickly mistresses. Instead, what has occurred? The Albatross has been more surely cornered into his hunching identity as if one familiar with stars and skies and all high things," whom the rough sailors knock to the uneven deck to mock, and who "cannot fly, he has such large wings." But this albatross has been warned, and made more careful of his precious feathers, more sure in his imagination that flight is the only respite and the only reward. He has been irrefutably and eternally turned into both a saint and a liar at one stroke.
And still my mind runs hazards at the strange, dead man: What did he see and sense? The fluidity and strangeness of being at sea, on ship, the yaw and terror of the storm, the immense laxness of an inundating sun, thick scents of musk and lardy tar, the amazing demon of a woman's ash-and-honey face, the whipping of a black man in a dry square, the tumble of unknown tongues, vistas that would forever shrink the past into the miniature luster of a pearl, all lost....lost in a field of stars.
: : f I n I s : :
NOTICE:
THE FOLLOWING SNIPPETS ARE NOT NECESSARILY TO BE INCLUDED IN THE FINAL VOLUME OF THIS WORK :
... [Baudelaire]
What is in your power, what candle sways in your dim glimmer, dear absinthe, to make the clearest head see farther than its native commission? Amber oracles, jaded membrames vibed to the gibes-- not of this war-lost world-- but to the celestial joke, the fascinated flabbergaster, the which in the quizzical widget-- the maybe in the byplay twixt man and all the rotten gods that laugh at us from the hollow portal of their gungrey heaven.
Absinthe! Granular lave for a fascinated tongue! How you bless and stupefy-- framing my meditations in oblivion--- On what authority do you erase my grace? I sample a pull of your muds, and struggle to a stratosphere made of my own torn veins; another cup, and my brain has sheened to lead, a dull semi-protruding orb held in a cro-magnon's skull. Soon, I am nothing but stone; rolled, doomed stone. Whatever of soul or spirit persists and operates, does so without connection to my bludgeoned body, my desecrated nest you have drowned in your six ounces of sipped infamy, absinthe.
Now the expertiment takes on a tone of the eternal-- the longed for, the real.
'I believe that I am a verb and not a personal pronoun. A verb is thatwhich signfies to do; to be; to suffer. I signify all three.' -- us Grant, Personal Memoirs.
This Grant is dashing after a mastery that Napoleon would know in his saddle sores. As the subject of a democracy, and not the Emperor of Europe, Grant must go forward in silence, procuring victory after victory-- victory in its essentials, as he would see it, the conflict carried further and further into the Confederacy. He cannot crow to the crowd, they would burn him for his originality before the war was won for them. Which system of governance is the superior, then? I must ask you. Must a drafty silence ever be the price exacted from genius? Must a hundred millions of people be constricted under an Emeror's heel before a single man may come into the glory of his natural scope?
Democracy is a dark cassock, and demands unstinting allegience from all who don its sloched soutane; only a man whose individual genius is duty, is obedience, may come into his sovraign place in such a scheme-- a man such as the honorable Lee. A killer and thinker like Grant, must subvert either himself, as his silence shows, or his nation-- which his wild iron will would never allow, driving the lightning of his mind's divinity into the churlish ground.
Grant was ever a souant soul, daunting even the most prideful stallion as a mere boy without so much as a whinney. But what did he see, the sunset wind wakeful against his face, in that uncreated world of the young United States, from the precocious height of his conquered mount?