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, mushroom caps, 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 let 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 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 comes 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 serve 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; patience, humility, and a divine sign are all required passwords for this tourney of the soul. Uncertainty of the limitless light! I renounce the doubtful path–although it rise 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 cinders 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
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