…[Charles Baudelaire, supreme poet]

 Evil Interludes
Aug 192011
 

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 weltanschauung!

“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 magic wand, Nostalgia. One needs a death.”

“Now I remember.”

“That must be a poem!”

…[Bonadventure, at Baudeliare’s apartments with Nerval]

 Evil Interludes
Aug 192011
 

“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 counseled 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 someone else’s reality?'”

This is the worst tack to take with Baudelaire if you want to get anyplace in a discussion–this quoting of 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-f….”

So Charles, charmingly, knowing the softness of the soul of our love-cuffed Nerval–leapt like a puma for his 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 choral portrait by Loungemains, the one in the Louvre that floats there in the blue room–as indeed the angels themselves must float in Heaven. 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–when 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.”

…[Flaubert, letter on eve of Fleurs du Mal court case]

 Evil Interludes
Aug 192011
 

What a man can say, you have said–imperishably and poignantly. The rest is for a monk’s meditation, or curses gnashed under the tusks of demons in Hell–as you might say! Any who have endured–ah! how wanted and wittingly!–an attack of the Ideal will know that the nacreous odor of your Flowers of Evil is but the sadness of separation from that Ideal, combined with an intenser appreciation of its reality. We live exiled from our rightful realm. You write of this exile as your lightning-limbed Satan might–with a clear-sighted anguish; to see the minarets of the heavenly mansion, but remain damned and disinvited! Our poetic selves live, sigh and thrive in an alternative vision of paradise that is not yet manifest. You are the first to see this: that there are new heavens we have yet to invent. That, in essence, is the catastrophe and surpassing chance of the poet; that is his moral obligation: to invent heaven. Could the court see the sincerity of this project of yours, your words would be carved in every cathedral in capital letters of gild and porphyry a foot high–and your government pension assured, incidentally. The impossibility of this actually coming to pass, however, and the certitude of its immanence nevertheless, gives rise to a possible impossibility, as it were: the impossimpable! (if one may coin so crass a term).

My fellow laborer in the fields of Elysium, good luck with your day of judgement. My wishes for lenient laws and a mellow judiciary follow your footsteps to the courthouse tomorrow morning!

Yours in art,

Gustave Flaubert

P.S. I have sent a messenger round to her Highness, the Princess Mathilde, but I do not have much hope for you there. Your tavern companions are too Republican!

…[Baudelaire, on his way to Bonadventure]

 Evil Interludes
Aug 192011
 

With enough words a philosopher may erase his meaning completely. But not his infernal stench. So it is with my poems…. It is not their sense that one whiffs expectantly, but the echo of their emptiness that excites. If I have changed, through some unknowable alchemy, your lunch habit from bourguignon to bearnaise, or, indeed, the reverse, from bearnaise to bourguignon, then I have succeeded as an artist! In inscrutability I trust. This mechanism of the body is more than its bits of wire and wood, yet we are puppets nonetheless. Punch me, and I piss. Caress me, and I sigh.

It was on such meanderings as these that my brain arranged its damaged afternoon while I awaited the release of Bonadventure from the moil of his malaise. I refer, of course, to his employment, which would furnish the funds for our evening at the cafe. I am aware of the irony. Nevertheless, ironic or not, this was my puppet’s plight. I watched the resentful sun sink into the sludge of an open sewer. Ah, night!

I went out the door, heading toward Bonadventure’s tawdry office. No doubt I would run into him on his way to my own place of deliquescing habitation. The air was both fetid and refreshing; adventure was in it. I was in constant contact, not with reality, but with that renewal of one’s hopes and expectations anticipation can command. How much more glorious and rarefied is this self-bliss than all the millions of realities that confront, offend, and inspire our merely mortal senses!

I would be drunk before the hour was out. Gladness bewitched me–could the solace of oblivion be far behind? The purpose of art is to give us thoughts troubling enough to be worth escaping. To drink because one’s own life is an uninspired drudgery is no more than to renew a scab by one’s idle picking at it; that is not creation, but recreation–however empurpled and painful the process might be. But, to seek out damnation and disorder from a profound disappointment with The Lord? Unassailable and deep are your motivations! Even you yourself will accept your excuses after the first draft of yeasty vintage, the aroma of all the soils of the earth impelled into your nostrils. Ah, night!

I turned the corner down Bonadventure’s street, the Rue de Blandblah, a wolf’s grin on my lips, and noted that the cafe to which we had planned to repair for the evening was between myself and his office. Surely, I could duck in for a quick one, supplying his name to secure the necessary credit from the barkeep. They knew us here. They were familiar with the contents of Bonadventure’s wallet.

I entered the cafe as one enters a tomb: with regret at such an entrance’s inevitability, and with solace at its eternal character. The marble tops of the little tables winked at me, friendly as unengraved headstones. Beyond the tables there stood the steaming silver urns of the coffee dispensers, the multifarious glitter of the liquor bottles, and below these the stained resonances of oak soaking up the brilliant flicker of a million sagging candles. And there was Henri, the barkeep. Hello, Henri! Yes, quite a long, dry day. And beyond Henri’s pin-striped shoulder, I saw a small, balding cannonball glaring at me with withering recognition. After too long a moment, I realized that I was looking at myself, mirrored in a portrait of Hell.

“Henri, a moment of your time, if I may,” I began politely.

I was about to confess the weakness of my situation to a social inferior, to confide in Henri that I was in an embarrassment of finances and would be dining out on the charity of an old-time associate and familiar customer of his; a school chum in fact, one whom I had played marbles with on the library floor as he taught me trick shots and I imagined being God to the planets, and the planets careening under the sofa. School chums! The most pathetic of associations, a bourgeois cliche.

And then….

I noticed a young boy lighting the chandelier, carefully bringing small tongues of fire into gorgeous accord, as when Wagner layers the cakes of his musical treats in the second act. The unapologetic joy of these jets of flame made me remember myself, how the poet shines in this squalorus pig-sty of a world: be it Hell or be it Heaven, who was to say? Either way, the poet must play, and the panjandrum pay!

Weakness is not the natural expression of genius, and in me confession most often takes the oblique form of accusation. What I would do, I accuse others of having done; at least I have the horse-sense not to work in government! This way of being was all part of my poet’s daily alchemical transformation from sleep-drugged and dreaming dud to dashing dandy. I first recall threading my schoolboy’s bowtie before a broken fragment of mirror in the secretly accessed attic of a cathouse on the way to class each morning. I tied my knot with a difference, as they say. And not with the regulation twist M. Aupick (or, for that matter, the hangman) approved of: such, at eight, was the picaresque extent of my rebellion!

I demanded a grand pinot noir from Henri, rather abruptly, and returned my dilettante’s attention to the wavery man in the mirror.

How inspiration flared and fled in the wavery mirror–pissed away in a moment’s undertaking. The mercury drop that had glowed with all the hallowed radiance of a fully-loaded moon, was splashed and splattered away by an irritable finger-flick as simply as the trace tear of an unwonted memory.

Yet, my eyes continued to look blindly, to stare at the figure receding to a grey chiaroscuro in the glass, full of their own moony insistence. How dully they intruded on a life as solemn in its unabated farce as a funeral procession. And look, how cordial and curled the crowning crepes of brunette hair…. How deep the pillow’s velvet, the immense pools of bruises, beneath the dry chalky eyes…. Even now, before the vinegared event of my demise, my moony pate is balding to its bone core. What hair adheres does so only as an ugly afterthought–whatever has stuck to the stone club that killed the coney.

Now, as the chandelier’s flare flattens and evening comes coolly through the saloon doors, the mirror robs me of my own reflections. The wine has a gelid, heavy aspect in my mouth, a sort of warm blood pudding. The mirror’s eye delivers me up to myself–flayed as a fish–my human minutiae gruesome in their Frankensteinian detail: pores yawning deep as ocean vents, the clownish nose a clubbed lump of unsmelling flesh; two ears daftly a-dangle as the faux-furred legs of a burst pinyata. Of these cheeks, inflamed with cheap drink, I will simply note their resemblance to rotten cherries beset with bees in the soggy field of an abandoned farm. As for the eyes… oh, the eyes of a narcissist! Probing pin-lights seeking their own centrality, some signal in the self-regard that can assure: I will abide! Piggy-small, yet swollen with a moron’s slow, indeed retarded, self-regard. Baudelaire, how many hours have you mooned to uselessness, transfixed in the squiggly pool of a mirror? Peered at more deeply, the eyes are two black balls balanced on bloodshot tundras of crooked ice; and, through the cracks in the ice, slow lightning bolts of red swell in ghastly littleness–as if the very fabric of sight has been shattered.

“Henri, another ‘draft of vintage from the dusky south.’ An apple brandy cordial, perhaps. I have a need to feel Edenic in my wickedness.”

My eyes had not moved from the mirror. This face, against God! How can it be accomplished? Judas made a hash of it, squandering his chance to shame the creator in betrayal and hatred. His ambition whittled him smaller than he actually was somehow, made him more miniscule than any man–even in the mere dregs of his nature–is. Not that way, not for gold, not as a slave to dead metal, not in incandescent hatred only shall I defy the deity. Against God, this face! Not in disbelief; not in despair shall I have my battle. But how then? How, Saint Judas, shall I proceed? Hear my wild cry, and be you wheresoever below, answer me! At least Judas is remembered, though reviled; his flower shines in the springtime. Even I, his modern afterimage, revile him. Tomorrow, I must be in court. And, whether damned or saved, I must have my vindication. How then shall I proceed? I’ll have to be drunkerer than this.

“Henri, if you please, a dram of absinthe…. Yes, put it on Bonadventure’s tab.”

Flash Forward …[Bonadventure, burning unpublished reviews]

 Evil Interludes
Aug 192011
 

“To review is to feed an appetite made for meat with frivilous bon-bons.”

Such was Baudelaire’s firm opinion of that art which first made him well-liked and respected in Paris. Both charletans and great men sought the stamp of his critique on their artistic and literary efforts. Only rascally musicians were immune to courting Charles’ views on their own merits; and this is simply because they were often too drunk to care–quite often at Charles’ apartments! Even the most negative review would be salted with some inestimable phrase divining the purveyor’s inherent genius; and this was more valuable than a symphony of unvaried praise from the army of newspaper reviewers.

It is best that I burn these unpublished drafts of reviews, for Baudelaire himself condemned the practice of reviewing–its evility was evident enough in the ease with which one is paid to opinionize. Forced by mounting court fees (and his mistress’ need for Egyptian eyeliner) to continue reviewing, and even rev up his output, Baudelaire poured his ire and despair (and hosannahs and hallelujahs) upon hack and fantastic craftsmen alike. All were subject to his inestimable eye and the unquiting tip of his quill. The family purse was tightened even more resolutely against his Vandal-like depredations following the public humiliation of being condemned in court–for his genius was stamped by the public prudes of the judiciary as ‘immoral.’ The sentiment was widely echoed, and the few who defended him did so in private, in personal correspondence they refused to have published. Because others kept their opinions to themselves, Baudelaire must cast his half-baked bread upon the waters!

Indeed, Baudelaire came to consider all the consequences of pecuniary opining a part of his personal catastrophe. If he was paid to think, how could he truly posses his own thoughts? He thought, in fact, that one day the world would realize that men are but paper figures, made more real by the reflected glory of the opinions of others than by what they have in reality made of themselves; and, reciprocally, they would value their own opinions of others more than those others, whatever their true merits might be; it was all, more or less, a transaction of commerce. And so, to the barbeque of souls, my little men! Puff, flame, and fade away…. Until even your afterimage is more imaginary than actual….

Young Franscois is no doubt abed by now, and his mother has washed the day’s fantasies from her face. Soon I will join her in the oblivion of sleep, her unconsious hand placed to my lips. So end my daily prayers–I who have no God, and am alone.

In the end, Baudelaire, too, prefered to be alone.

“He who would be great must of necessity be solitary. Only solitude reveals a man to himself, whatever riots of ugliness that mirror contains. When your mistress speaks, stuff your ears with cotton! Lash yourself to the mast of solitude should that siren Politics cry out from some dim shore. The attractive lassitude of an idea is more dangerous than a hundred years of sleep–ask Rip Van Winkle. Eject them all from the singular egg of your time-capsule: women, politics, ideas!”

And reviewing dabbled dangerously in all these things, and was reviled. He thought he might while away his time doodling translations of Edgar Poe; such money was, perhaps, more honest than the francs he forged with his reviewer’s invective. At least he could kick the dozing composers off his couch with a clear conscience!

…[Manet, at the opening of Die Valkyries]

 Evil Interludes
Aug 192011
 

The opera was a blaze of lights. As we found our seats, and the candles got snuffed one by one, Baudelaire began another of his educational exhortations.

“Come, Manet, push, push your paints. Explore! Artists are voyagers of the psychic wilderness–or they are nothing. Every brushstroke sends the artist further, not into the chiaroscuro surfaces of daily reality, but further into those abscesses and unlit cubbies of his own mysterious mind. There, and only there, we confront our own reality-making machinery–those stock characters who haunt the manikins we make of our hapless compatriots and conquests. There are the warehouses stuffed with the quotidian or outrageous furnishings that litter the landscapes of our dreams. There, at the business end of your artist’s brush, loaded with rainbows, you paint, always, your own astonished face–the face of an ape discovering fire!”

I felt as if my beard were being burnt off as he spoke. Such words! And yet, we were really here at the opera to do no more than scope out Mme. Sabatier in person, to lay eyes on the ‘white diamond’ as Baudelaire had dubbed her; it was a boys’ mission to the girls’ locker room–no more than that.

“Your silence does you credit, my painterly confederate. Are you familiar with the story behind Die Valkyries?“

I shook my head in the negative. It was the costumes and the dances (and the intense lighting effects) that most drew me to Wagner’s works; he left all of the senses spoiled with surfeit after his feting. Even the smells of Paris seemed remote after overwhelming yourself on his weltanschauung.

“It is a most unusual romance…. That love is best which touches least…. The plot is infantile, the music unsurpassable….”

Before Baudelaire could further quote the virtues of sexless, father-defying Brunhilde over husband-horning, humping Sieglinde, his wry eye alighted on the glitter of a microscopic pair of opera glasses. They floated on a gilt stick in a hand he deemed, beneath his breath (and, I think, completely unconsciously, so thunderstruck (E Major) he seemed) to be ‘perfect, arsenic-pale.’ When the glasses finally flitted away from Mme. Sabatier’s face, like a golden dragonfly forced by a new wind from its dancing attendance upon a winter-white water lily, Baudelaire had held his breath for a length of time that put the length of old Wotan’s son-slaying spear to shame.

“Here is a damsel I must defile,” he said in a gulp. “Not that she would allow….”

Then Mme. Sabatier coughed, rouging her cheeks and pinking her bent brow, while Baudelaire rose upright from his ensconcing seat, waving to dismissive silence all the harmonies of the charging Valkyrie, and proffering with profane hand his hemp hankie (designed to scratch more than succor the nose) toward the fat wart of her balcony (whose hiccoughing hawker he preferred to Wagner’s vital sublimity)–where two embossed cherubs (roly-poly in their roles) played cupid and concupiscent cur.

Shortly thereafter the curtain rang down like a rowdy waterfall, and the opera house bloomed once again into a disorienting blaze of lights. We found the street only by conceding to the thrust and tumble of the crowd. Baudelaire pressed me for Madam’s address and only eventually (two absinthes later) was I able to content him with an ironclad invitation to Madam’s next Sunday salon.

…[Baudelaire, in his ship’s hammock, returning home]

 Evil Interludes
Aug 182011
 

I can see Marseilles from my hammock. My eyes tighten, and the ship’s yaw and sway steady out to the stiff taps and clacks of some pegleg pirate rattling along the raw dock. I can see his greasy head, swathed in a kercheif of skull-and-cross-bones polka dots, a fantastic eye patch sewn from a sow’s ear, still rough with pig fur. Closer in, as my meditation’s spyglass reels in the seaside details, I recognize the old sea dog for who he really is: my rebel fellow traveller, Lucifer himself!

Lucifer lounges, with the dawn sun on his dirty brow gemmed with hellish sweats. Over his shoulder, the sun like a lapdog follows its namesake, leaping to Lucifer’s side. He has learned to be a spear of light, arrowing-out the tyranny of that three-souled Person of Law! I, too, must brighten and burn to a point. I, too, shall pare my nails with a silver hatchet and smoke the parings in a stolen pipe and knock the dottle on my cloven heel. The docks are rotted, but the master of lights smokes above them, clean-limbed and craven. He waits for me at Marseilles, a glint-rip in the fabric of reality gleaming leanly. My forever friend, my fiend, my genie, all hail! Lucifer the lightning-bolt, all cool style in his libertine repose.

He knew that “God” had gamed the racetrack. And he refused to be a greyhound ground down in its go-roundness, ground to dust by the eternal circuit another’s heart had hammered into a seamless globe and stars. J’accuse! roared the unsoiled boy, swift as Saint-Just to sweep his Creator to the guillotine. Swift as lightning! This would have been Lucifer’s self-crowning act of creative destruction, this exiling of the Life-giver to death eternal. Then… what freedom, and what dance! Walpurgis-nacht is but its nickel imitation, a penny-poor parody of such all-ways wild and lively Chaos. I unbind myself from the thorns and briars of the Law, their papier-mache pastiche of freedom hung in the gloomy humidity of the Lawyer’s courthouse. Let that be my final image of God the Good and God the Great: a Lawyer!

Is there madness in this kiss? The Devil and I see eye to eye: pirate and prisioner-sailor, both seeking to be free, to set the terms of our own release or damnation and manage a private jig with jilting Eternity. Will my Lucifer wait at the docks for me? If I were to prowl those bawdy boards whose backsides are slapped by the sea at the side of that piratical pegleg, what ribald adventures would ensue?

Perhaps it is merely a bad habit with me to pursue these theorums and piquant postulations, to ask these ‘unaswerables’ as often as I do. Sometimes, I feel as though I am nothing if I am not a question. Interrogating the real, the unreal, and all the possibilities in-between. Somehow, for me, this gives me the feeling of stretching into life, into existence. Otherwise, what is there for me… only boredom banal and ennui everlasting. I deride the questions of others, for they do not give me this sensation of reality. Clearly, it is not honest curiosity that motivates me, for then I would study and listen to others, gleaning knowledge and gaining certainty as my experience increased. Instead, I mope along metaphysical quays with my one-eyed rebel guide. Instead, I ply my brain and balls for experiences that are unique–so unique as to form their own basis, their own measure of what experience itself can be. It is a selfish motive, and an egoistic one as well. Limits should be discovered, not imposed. Such is my precis, such as it is.

Now, from my hammock, I can see that my adventure is nearly over. Soon I will be in Paris again and forever. There I am, taking in the evening air with Bonadventure, blathering on about his glad abstractions. Perhaps it shall be some summer ages hence, and yet he and I shall be the same. I will reminisce about my Afric adventure, and dutiful Bonadventure, reaching into his splendid gilt vest pocket, will extract a green twisted spliff he has aquired in some back alley marketplace.

“All the way from Haiti,” he will say, raising his long eyebrows in dark arches.

“All the way…” say I.

Haiti! There is a luscious Hell of naked dances and red-blood rituals; there a man, a poet, can bite himself out a chunk of life and live it. Here, in Paris (I will think), on my iron balcony overlooking the Rue des Desparages, life is just another civic duty; a function to be fulfilled before the tax man registers your deficit or gain. Today (my future me will think), I can see Lucifer again, cool and lucid, living beyond all yardsticks, all inches. Bonadventure will be laughing heartily at some brat plashing in the mud, tossing a horse turd to its tottering compatriot. Catch! Will life have changed one iota from this filthy image for me? Of course not. I will be perpetually catching my friend’s dirty turds. Bonadventure, I notice (in our future incarnation), speaks Turdish perfectly and perpetually. Still laughing at the children, he turns to me to speak: Turd, turd, turd.

And I? In essence, I am no better. Although my turds take on a certain formal stiffness through their becoming dried and sonnetized. I am no better than Bonadventure! No better than a filthy child wading in mud and piss. But they are laughing, all of them. The child delights in his play, and Bonadventure chuckles behind his weed cigarette. Even the horse laughs, when it passes, its teeth great ragged mad squares of white triumph: Ha, ha, ha!

I do not laugh. I would do much better altogether to stay out of this living mess. I should stand on the quay beside my friend Lucifer and pass back and forth before the brown froth a few dry, witty remarks. A few etherial in-jokes that mock the mire and satirize the shit and siphon the squealing hiss of laughter to… silence.