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 that I am hearing a voice: insistent, familiar, insidious…. A voice climbing out, uncoiling like a mist around 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 markers 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 allow myself to see the tomb door before me again. This is where my living feet wander in search of life, doomed fool that I am! I realign my attention to that voice crawling from the tomb, an outer voice that undoes my more inner integral voice, that distant misty voice. I listen to the voice of that 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 those who go on telling the world who I am, who I was, after I have given up the task for a futility and a sin,” began the copper door of the tomb turned to an unpolished green, almost as if its moldy angel were whispering. “To me, it is better to molder in the grave than talk about such nonsense. But, cursed with eternity, I have taken note of these ‘helpers’ after my demise. I acknowledge, of course, without the slightest hesitation or secret resentment, before any and all of my other 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 even to sit still for my endless tirades; perhaps they knew me best who saw me least and whose sympathy never actually extended to assistance. Also I acknowledge the admirable and cloudy Claude Pliede, whose trim texts refused to straighten out 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 the nod; his pale glimmerings, so warm about my bones, were among the very 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 (slipped through my tomb’s mail-slot) 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 cobweb-ridden analyses of Bonadventure’s own too brief (too long!)–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 M. Hugo’s crudescent correspondence, and who 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 wroth with a flaming sword over their necks…. And for godsakes Bonadventure, don’t title your own memoirs with a quote from my oeuvre.”
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