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 tinted as a fabulist’s list of imaginary beasts, barked the 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 damne, 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 happened, mon frere? Sick of ignorant India, philistine Africa? Was there 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 sponsorship of your ‘cleansing’ 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 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 at Life with the acid of fictive alternatives long enough, a pear tree will bear a partridge, 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 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 dueling 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 imagine 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 thought 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 Assisi licked a leper.
How opposite the aseptic impulses of the mass of men was every instinct and action of this charming and corrupting individual. 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 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. My Baudelaire, what did you see, what did your senses register? 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.
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