Yes, yes, as I say, God saw fit to punish him. At the fraying end of his tenure of torture on Earth, my Baudelaire became God’s resourceful object lesson–a sort of quid pro quo gone awry–an arrangement between antagonists where neither would ever consent to relent or bend an inch. That was the arrangement–discordance in perpetuity! These two eternal wrestlers contended in the sweat of their souls, intimately interlocked, achieving stances and adopting postures impossible without their opponent’s resentful support. What was the secret to their transfixing configuration? How could such hateful inter-reliance become so absolute? For, indeed, there was not a molten move that that Polymorphous God could attempt but that some thrown-down part of Baudelaire would oppose it. An elbow bowed out to halt a blessing, a bead of sweat running with salt and exhaustion to slow the inevitable working out of some long trope of justice God had been spinning since Abraham.
And God, too, would respond to Baudelaire, as we all did, draping something aching over the man’s hubris and headstrong swings at a moment’s weakness in the Diety. But, of course, God is God. Sometimes, for several balletic or awkward gestures in a row, God would let Baudelaire plow on unopposed, unswatted. For God, you see, is as patient as a snake with a mouse in its slick belly. At these moments of inattention, Baudelaire would smile. A small, intense light that always burned behind his veil of selfhood would mosey closer to the cheesecloth, and he would shine from head to foot, licking his lips in unbelievable joy at his minute of unexpected liberty.
“No, no, Bonadventure. Unhand your wallet, for today I am a rich man! The coffers of Nebuchadnezzer held not more wealth than my locked and guarded heart.” And the gold coin would roll down the rosewood bar and the absinthe would rip my veins with a fanatic finesse. After midnight, he would dilate on the profundity of his richness, the wild wealth dripping from the rippling back of his beastly sojourn through Life.
“Sometimes, I think that there might be a way for me to stay alive forever and not regard the result as a curse. Sometimes, Bonadventure, blue skies are not only acid and sunshine. Sometimes they glimmer like a promise of health in a country as far away as Hope….” Oh, then what anxiety was in my skull! What trepidations tortured me! Was not this the very folly of the rebel angels writ on the tongue of man? How could my bible and my Baudelaire share the same language? Bach, perhaps, understood how this would turn out, with his rollicking concern for the contrapuntal.
That was Baudelaire, ‘alone beyond the thought of solitude,’ as he repeated to himself, thinking no one attending. Only against God, his great Enemy (whom Baudelaire on a whim oft represented as an exiled Irishman, apportioning the Lord of Hosts a broad brogue), could he define himself. ‘I am the Enemy of God,’ was, for him, not a statement of hatred, or even, really, adversarial intent; it was but a stamp on his passport into existence, a method of manifestation for one who would otherwise remain extinct–a mere ‘posture of vapors’ as he often mused aloud, stirring his white pipe-smoke with an inky finger.
Still, I must not admit to my weakness, my complicity. For I smiled when he expounded, and my chains felt lighter around me, and my brow less bound in iron. Ah, yes! I was assured that silken wings were rustling under my black frockcoat–that I could dream as ardently as any slave dreams of freedom. That immense, free feeling, the big spaces that open up within us at the uncauled contemplation–of owning the other slaves! Free to tyrannize in my petty majesty over all that I hated within myself. This was the vista I saw at Baudelaire’s prompting. And yet, I am now not at all sure that this was the freedom Baudelaire’s boasts proposed. There may have been something other, something more…. For Baudelaire, too, like God, was a snake; less patient, to be sure, but equally elaborate in his braid.
But, God is God, and the victor’s wreath was only granted at the titanic end of the struggle. Long years after Baudelaire first laughed and dared his creator to the powdered mat he went down to ignominy like the rest of us.
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