Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]

Gregg Glory [ Gregg G. Brown ] has devoted his life to poetry since happening across a haiku by Moritake, to wit: Leaves / float back up to the branch-- / Ah! butterflies. He runs the micro-publishing house BLAST PRESS, which has published over two dozen authors in the past 25 years. Named in honor of the wild Vorticist venture by Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, BLAST PRESS is forward-looking and very opinionated. He still composes poems on his departed father's clipboard, which he's had since High School.

…[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.”

…[Baudelaire, in bed with Jeanne]

 Evil Interludes
Aug 192011
 

“So I told Nerval, whose gaze never quite meets the horizon, but, like a lunar lightbulb, instead hovers ever above the sinkline where the rest of humanity lives and breeds–I told him the truth of love! In thanks for the pains he took to acquaint Bonadventure and myself with his azure dream, I cut his heart out with my tongue until he had to admit that it was there on the floor, beating and bleeding before him.”

“Charles, the covers; I will wrap myself in them completely, you know how I love the feather-licks of silk, all except for my left ear. That I have always dedicated to your poetry exclusively, and now I will let you rant against its membrane; do, dear. It is my prettiest ear, is it not? You have always said so.”

“I took for him the example, so unlike ourselves, jaded Jeanne, of two lovers who are very much, as it is said, in love with one another. No matter how truncated their reason, no matter how engorged their duelling desires, one–either the male or the female–would be more hypnotized, more delirious than the other at any given moment in the relationship. This one, true to itself, will injure or torture the other with its coldness, the minutiae of withdrawal, the angst of insufficient affection; or else, wishing to comfort and uphold the beloved, the lesser loving lover will trampoline into a net of little lies and nefarious fictions, thus comforting the other and undoing itself.

“In this way, even the torturer (or the surgeon, who hopes to help and heal) may be the victim of the situation, in this unequal validation of battling blossoms–evil blooms of what may be termed, mewlingly, ‘love.’ And what of lovemaking itself? Let us not exclude the deluded act itself from our examination. Between the two-backed beast roils a cauldron as miced as any incestuous thought. And isn’t love-making just a pair of wildcats in claw-withdrawn attack? Sometimes not even that, not even that tiny retraction of the bestial scratch of our natures during the dark liaison. Muscles stiffen and contract as if in a death rictus, the supple troubles of the face stretch and distort into a form of skull, or slacken into a mash of unwilled ovoids–as if death had snaked the soul from its smelly bottle. Well, little ear, my pink and pouting conch shell, are you listening? What do you think? What can you say to me? Am I wrong?…. Ah! You too are now among the dead; you snore as do the dead; your face is bereft of speech, the chilled enamel of your teeth protrude from your wet lips only to drool….

“Still no response? Then let me apostrophize a memory of us while you lie here, entombed in your carnal silks. When I first met you, Jeanne damne, do you remember the occasion? I stood unobserved among a small battalion of my friends whose poems I couldn’t quite bring myself to abhor. Their works had the softening effect on my aesthetic judgment that occurs when one first sees a shivering kitten bald from mange. Out of that pack I advanced–you had a blue velvet boostier, and your face was sunk so deeply in a whirlpool of cosmetics, I almost couldn’t discern the stern glance of your crunched skull, or the dusky hue of your lustrous skin, save where one droplet of stagelit sweat had exposed the true you, just an inch in front of your left ear. I knelt before you as never before any other, dirtying a tailored knee in the beer and sawdust of the tavern floor. ‘I want to bite you,’ I said, and you turned to me those glacial eyes, at once so cold and so hot, twin extremes indecipherable in their effect. ‘I want to bind your hands in the hair of dead children, immortal and unstained. I want to draw you to the ceiling by your wrenched arms and see you naked–so that I might, on my bended knees among shards of shattered glass, worship your upraised feet.’ Your friend, I remember, screamed at my suggestion. But you, my dear, demented Jeanne, placed–very stealthily considering the crowd about us–my prayer-struck hand upon your cunt. And only then did you deign, so great was your grace, that evening, to smile.”

Flash Forward …[Bonadventure, pacing beneath the statue of Justice]

 Evil Interludes
Aug 192011
 

I have already made some slight mention of Baudelaire’s reaction to the intrusive prudery of the courts of the Second Empire–that time of dull public morality and wild private vice when Inspectors, gendarmes, and all manner of prissy officials caressed in private the very evils they excoriated in the sunlit square. There was the question of who was to prosecute the case too–would it be the sympathetic Guilliarme Moldave? He had been known to visit many new artists’ studios, and respected Baudelaire’s criticism on the subject. Also, he was an evening companion of Mme. Sabatier, whose Sunday salons were well known as an hospitible refuge for artiste and thoughtful audience alike. It was the sort of ‘cultural’ event that Baudelaire refused to acknowledge–although his company was itself a perpetual pow-wow on the muse and her minions. The danger was Pinard, who Baudelaire had a penchant for nicknaming Pinhead Pinard. He was a priggish stickler about ‘the letter, and even the punctuation, of the law’ as he had famously declared. Rumor had it that he even lectured his own children on such fine points of law as judicial scarves and the correct angle for wearing the epitoge when a fatal judgement was handed down. A clash with Pinard could cost Baudelaire both his liberty and his renown–for Baudelaire was betting heavily on poetry book sales to float his independence from the hideous insufficency of his allowance.

Here, in the very shadows of Lady Justice’s skirts, I said a prayer–(cozener and villan in my day though I have been, let not the fiedom of false friendship be laid at my feet)–on the day Baudelaire went through those portals, just there, scuffing his slick black shoes petulantly on the stone steps, his mouth a pouty downspout as pronounced as any child’s. I can still recall the words I used then, pacing alone even as I am doing now.

“Dear blind lady with arms upraised, I beg you not to use my blue Baudelaire the way he would use you.”

…[Prosecutor Pinard, at a street fair with his kids, Aby and Helly]

 Evil Interludes
Aug 192011
 

“Aby, look, over there, past the elephant. It’s Punch and Judy!”

“But, Helly, the cotton candy is here….“

“C’mon!”

Helly had her way; like mother like daughter. Our group manouvered through the approving throng, ruddy hands linked, toward the puppet booth. There was Punch, with his outrageous warted nose, his fool’s cap and his bumpy club, screaming: to be let alone, to be given kisses, to get away with his witless mischiefs.

“Observe this miscreant pair of Punch and Judy, my little ones. See how Judy chases Punch with her whacking bladder? And note how offended Punch’s sense of justice is, how wounded his mein becomes. But where are the gendarmes? The magistrates to adjudicate? This game of tit-for-tat is a laugh riot, but only because of this sad truth: punches without justice yeild nothing but agony and hilarity. And platitudes, too, perhaps. But not much else.”

I thought for a moment of the Baudelaire case my team was prosecuting on the morrow. No matter how I proceeded, I would look like a dupe. Either in liscencious league with a polluter of public morality, or else a whip-whetting Philistine who punished innocent pursuers and purveyors of pristine Art. Art, in Paris, is always capitalized.

“Wow! Look at him run!” squealed little Aby. His eyes were festive with youthful delight.

“He better run if he don’t want a whack,” said Helly with authority.

Helly glanced up at me appraisingly, slyly. She whacked Aby with her ornate silk purse full of marbles and laughed, her eyes wide.

“Hey! Daddy, Helly hit me.”

“There is no justice in this world, my son. Hit her back.”

…[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.”

…[Baudelaire, entering the courthouse]

 Evil Interludes
Aug 192011
 

Pinard again! The same old goat who wanted to take the milky hide off of Mme. Bovary’s backside–and very nearly succeeded. Only the intercession of Princess Mathilde, an intimate of Flaubert’s, kept the lash from hashing his eternal pages. I have no such advocate, no such angel, at the Royal Court to ease my pungent bouquet past that Argus-eyed prude, Pinhead Pinard. Perhaps if he were informed (on the sly, quietly, mayhaps in a daydream while my advocate takes the reins before the sour judge) that my Fleurs du Mal were to decorate my own funeral barge, he would leave my lovelies unmolested.

The prude, at heart, is always the most prurient, the most truly depraved of men. His inner evil informs him of the deviant in all men, and to him there is no justice without punishment, for guilt is universal and no one is innocent. What then is the point of court? To shame mankind in its own ugly eyes. If every man could stand naked before the tribuneral, the prurient prude would demand that each and every man be damned–without exception! My heart agrees with the judgment, but not the punishment; that is the domain of domestic relations. It is a woman’s fate to excoriate her males.

Unconcerned with style or art, the constitutional prude must spend all his effort on maintaining a veneer of virtue. If only he knew the useful tools an honest art could bring to his task! Instead, in ignorant silence he delves the depths of depravity with his nose held high–a swimmer in human sewage. I could almost admire the conviction such perversity requires–if only it were persued with some flavorful flair!

My regrets are many, not least my pursuit of Aupick in the winter of ’48. If I had shot him, blown his head or his heart into the ditch, I could rest satisfied. Instead, I merely dabbled in rebellion. If only I had not been in the bragging vanguard when I attacked the Empire’s tin men, I would at least have some defenders in the press, and perhaps a Princess too. Today, I have no political convictions. Forced to cast a ballot, I would vote only for myself–and that ironically.

* * * * *

As the case proceeded, prosecutor Pinard recited the infamous rhetoric of the conservative Poignard Press like a psalm, snapping the paper pre-emptorialy and closing its fluttered pages with a most solemn and prayerful gesture when his service was concluded. The judge looked on wisely, his spectacles perched like Dame Justice’s scales on the end of his sloping nose. This holy recitation from the public scandal sheets was the soul, sum, and sense of Pinard’s prosecution. He was not persecuting me or Art, he was simply seconding the condemnation already visited upon me by the wisdom of ‘public opinion.’ In the service of public morality, what greater gauge was there than public opinion? Pinard’s hands were clean, ‘the people’ had spoken. Had the hack at Poignard Press not done his thinking for him, Pinard would have had no more darts in his quiver than the prude’s habitual disapproving scowl Nature provides.

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!

…[Baudelaire, welcoming artists of the 1849 Salon]

 Evil Interludes
Aug 192011
 

In they came, by ones and twos, the deluge of daubers: humble, hackneyed, or haughty! Some with long drooping mustaches and haunted, sorrowful eyes; others lively as spaniels nipping me with viper-vim wits and vain smirks curled tight as chameleons’ tails. Howsoever they came, I held them all in thrall–prisioners (parishoners?) of my pen. Success crested for those I loved best and shrivelled voidward for those I cursed. Such was the influence of intelligent comment in those days.

Down the furrowed carpet came Manet, his latest canvas coyly swathed in ratty blankets. He had the numb look of a digesting ox on his face. And yet, there was a hint of cunning….

“Unveil it,” I commanded. “And then persist in silence until I speak to you again.”

Manet did as I bade him, his resentful shoulders humping the awkward square onto the big easel that faced the light. He was backing away and folding the blankets as I fell to silence, the bell of my being quelled by a cupping touch.

The dress was a masterpiece of restless chiffon. Manet had not yet ensconced the goddess in a golden frame; she had flown semi-nude and nailed to her canvas magic-carpet right through my foul foyer! How pure, how whiter than steam itself! In fine, an unflinching effect. And how different from my salty and sinuous Jeanne–the dark Venus of vulva and black fire.

“Who… is she? Does she exist?”

Manet cleared his throat. “She is a Mme. Sabatier. A common enough sight at L’Opéra Grainier. Surely you have attended some of her Sunday salons?”

…[Bonadventure, before the opera]

 Evil Interludes
Aug 192011
 

“Music strode upon my weeping soul as a spike-heeled goddess. The world was banished, and I myself was dispersed, disintegrated… a kaffir woman in the same room with a white. I myself did not exist. Only this ravishment, this perfection; these horrible colors of a rapidly opening space, unfurled beneath me, a desert dawn bleeding into my being….” Oh, yes, his ‘raptures’ could go on and on, and I steeled my nerves to follow the heightened contradictions and activities of his imagination’s high flight; for I knew that it was I, and not he, that would be the poorer for having closed my ears to his pure vintage.

Eventually, he interrupted himself.

“Bonadventure, what time is it? Has my little clock flung the bold-faced day into its ashy residence?”

“Its eight o’clock, if that’s what you mean.”

The specter of a smile appeared upon his face, and then flashed away.

“Wagner! At once, your cloak.”

We rattled out into the wary streetlight. Charles’ short cloak, as he raced ahead of me, looked as though a devilfish had ascended from the deep and attached itself at his neck. Perhaps it had come to this misty midlight from the bottom of that despotic, extraordinary brain!

As we reached the gleaming steps of the L’Opéra Grainier, I wondered, like a slaughterhouse lamb, what final sight awaited me.

“Everything that is excessive, immense, ambitious, in the snaky spirit of ambling man… all swirl together in this Wagner’s ardent, invincible sound!” And with this mumbled preamble, Baudelaire swung open the Grainier’s doors with both hands, and, along with the powerful ruminative scents of pipe tobacco and a minx mix of women’s scents, came… the sound.

If we are born blind in a waterfall of milks and wonderments; if our skin cannot comprehend the varieties of space that console and confront us in that first minute; if indeed it is several years before we may tell our mothers and fathers of our interior tremblings and triumphs; if any of these dizzying statements contains even a marginal shade of truth, then how can I tell you anything at all about that moment when the Grainier’s frosted glass doors parted before me and the world dissolved?

And perhaps Mme. Sabatier, Charles’ new enthsiasm, will be in boxed attendance–her profile as ‘pure and reserved as Wagner is wild!’

…[Baudelaire’s review of Wagner]

 Evil Interludes
Aug 192011
 

Tannhauser opened on the 9th at the L’Opéra Grainier to a cautious audience full of rumors and smoke about the large Germanic Wagner, whose bludgeoning explorations in music seem ready to smash or reinvent all of Europe at a stroke. The place was packed. Gentlemen were hard put to maintain their dignity in the jostling crowd which, although well-heeled, was visibly affected by the performance as Tannhauser, a wandering minstrel and poet, comes to Venusberg through a plunging cave extraordinarily brought off by the canny set designer Mallot. In Venusberg, the singing Tannhauser sees Venus herself at her bath and becomes unutterably smitten and turns into a sinning Ulysses dallying with a coy Calypso. All his holy songs turn to pagan paeans. Eventually, through an accidental word, he is reminded of his faithful Elizabeth whom he left in the world above; he exits, his brow and throat both knotted with regret and anxiety. Not a few of the lesser peers in the audience let out with a harsh laugh at Tannhauser’s stricken conscience, much to the shame of Paris and themselves. Upon Tannhauser’s return to the world above, a singing contest is arranged throughout the kingdom, with the winner to be betrothed to the loyal Elizabeth, ably played by Mlle. Simpelle, whose soft white gown was a marvelous organization of fair fluffs and diaphanous falls. The other contestants, whose songs touch lightly and ably the themes of fidelity and truelove, remain chaste. Into this churchlike atmosphere, contrite, and with a deep spiritual love evident in his eyes and manner, Evan Tannglehott, who played Tannhauser, comes, his song starting with a single long and beautifully oscillated note, as if to literally draw his heart out of his mouth and present it to the listening Elizabeth.

And then, on an ambiguous turn in the leitmotif, where we begin to hear the echo of Venus’ throbbing theme, Tannhauser transforms from a chloroformed and arsenicpale choirboy of heavenly affectation into a blazing bacchante, and his song discovers that all that had the urge and ability to ascend in Tannhauser can descend with the demons at as rapid a pace, back to the undergroud frolics of voluptuous Venusberg. The struggle of the entire soul of man to believe in even a single ideal–it turns restlessly, hopelessly upon that singe note! Until even our idea of heaven is tinged with the demeaning determination of the despotic, and even our most clouded and closed nightmares of Hell display some tinge of Heaven.

…[Bonadventure, after the opera, at Baudelaire’s apartments]

 Evil Interludes
Aug 192011
 

“The lies we tell ourselves are not invariably valuable in and of themselves. As with mirrors, whose mercury backing peels and lets shine through either the shadow of black felt or the dazzling lights of a glass world fleetingly glimpsed through aghast gaps in our own face, the effect of a lie’s reflection resides more in the acuity of the observer than in the veracity of the facsimile to ‘the truth.'”

“So, then, the brushwork of the artist, the noble tones of the poet, the arias the maestro elicits from his able minions, are to be dismissed as useless tradecraft? The sloppiest pot and the most pristine vessel are of equal value as aesthetic objects, since, truly, the value is created in ‘the eye of the beholder?’ This seems an absurdity, and your own hard-wrought sonnets mitigate against your sincerity in putting forth this case, my dear Baudelaire.”

Baudelaire leaned against the green velvet couch like a panther at ease in the hot afternoon light of the veldt. Almost, there was a smile at the corners of his mouth as he contemplated the double fan of his fingertips pressed together in a calculating sophist’s homage to prayer. An eyebrow arched wearily, and he began to explain, to make his case, to reel me in as he had done many hundreds of times before.

“Never doubt the infinitude of art, the caress or sparkle of its multitudinous baubles. Simply know that it is a seduction; that all things are a seduction; and all the seducers are whores. ‘The truth’ is merely one color in the palette. Do we question the rouge of a lover’s cheek? Does her excitement come from being thrust against the skin of her beloved, or because a jealous husband is hunting her down–even as she gives you her ‘all’? Is your eye wide at the delight of her nearness, her having chosen you, or because you have cheated death for another night in the infinite ennui of existence? Do you recall her name after even just a little time has passed, or when in the clutches of consummation you confuse your lover with the deity and cry out as if in ecstatic prayer: ‘God, O, God!’?”

I felt both confused and intrigued by this line of thought. What was the source of my most cherished experiences? Did I gasp at a Venus de Milo out of some aesthetic apprehension, some revelation too deep for words, or simply because I willed myself to be seduced by her beguiling beauty’s promise of immortality? Would a wanton serve as well as a Valkyerie for inspiration? My eyes grew heavy as I pursued these imponderables. The room felt warm and distant, a cage swaying on a golden rope in a dark cave.

“I see you are peering precipitously into yourself, my dear Bonadventure. What inner dramas have conducted you to your own drear depths? What surfaces have conjured and compelled your inward gaze, mystic of the self’s endless principle? And, thus, you see, the mirror’s seduction is accomplished. Your eye, flitting among feather dancers and imperishable marble monuments, has come to rest on the rolling boil of your own inner state. What is this if not seduction? Seduction and betrayal. For now you are blind to what is right in front of your nose.”

I don’t know how he did it–if it was some form of mezmerization, or if indeed he knew the key to art and was telling ‘the truth’ about truth being but a color in the palette of seduction. But, whatever the case, on hearing mention of my nose, I focused on the reddened tip thereof, and was astonished to find a flame rising less than an inch in front of it. Egad!

“Your bowtie is almost completely burned away, Bonadventure. It was in egregious taste, but perhaps you are more attached to your mustache. Water?”

And so saying, Baudelaire threw the whole carafe of water at my head, dousing the flame, and commencing his maniacal laugh, as much like a macaque monkey as a three-penny opera’s evil genius.

…[Baudelaire, letter to his mother]

 Evil Interludes
Aug 192011
 

Mother, dearest maternal sog-lump of my too-tired heart, my consolation, my courage…. No one will read about me listening to Wagner. My booklets, so beautifully brought out and bound by Pouncelle, come back from the bookshops in teetering tiers, their luxurious pages uncut. As if the eye could not help instruct the ear! As if both were not frail funnels to the human heart itself–Satan’s parade ground and God’s golfcourse combined. Wagner is sweetly, rapturously, aware of how our tortured senses overlap in this happenstance deemed by the ignorant, Life. How much more clearly can we understand space through his recreation of its very concept in his uncompromising tones, the blank tabulation of every vagrant impulse that traps us between our ears! This is passion, this correspondence of the visual and the aural, and the radical of all these intersections always always the sodden heart herself, passive and useless spoof of the final agony of God that it is. Mother, I would murder to maintain my opinions against the world! My pen hefts with the clean weight of a throwing knife. Whether lit cigarettes shall suffer or the attentive girl’s nose be dispatched is the very substance of Fate.

Now, as to the matter of your harping tirade that I appear on your doorstep in Honfleur…. I cannot! Do not reduce me to such bourgeois displays of filial piety. On your breast, the reeling dreams of opium would not abate, and I would curl again into that solace you alone provide, and which your body itself produced, our inevitable, enviable mutual-dual sympathy.

Instead, I call you to me, maman, for say three weeks at the agreeable end of August, not so bad in the shadowy city, or three days if you cannot be so long bereft of the company of your housecat, or three hours which I, like Wagner, shall transmute into an eternity in remembrance.

Your letters are full of errors that a few hours of conversation would unwarp. I loved you passionately as a child! Come, be reasonable. Come.

Flash Forward …[Manet and Jeanne Duval, portrait in a wedding gown]

 Evil Interludes
Aug 192011
 

“Keep that dress down,” I repeated. (He kept saying.) “Charles was right, you are he most impudent puss.”

(All is well; he disapproves of me.)

“The extravagance of a wedding portrait for a mistress you will never marry!” I shook my head. I don’t know what exotic games Charles and his dusky lady had played, but they were well beyond me. (Still, there is a strange, strong gloom in his boys’ eyes…. I do not possess him yet.)

“It is a melancholy commission, Mlle. Duval.” (This would never do; I arched an inquisitive eye.)

“To paint me in the dress I am to wear to his funeral tomorrow?”

I nodded. (He was far too deadly earnest, even for a funeral. Damn that Charles’ detestable testament! We are still alive after all–and he is young.)

“You had better call me Jeanne. Would you say I am the most impudent puss in all of creation, or just Paris?” I demanded. (Her question was vexatious, but it did result in my expanding the geographic range of her impudence.)

“Let’s say,” I began, “in all of France.”

(I couldn’t let a man have the last word, however downcast his countenance or sad his eyes. He’d never be willing to pay if he thought he already owned me. But then, pure mulishness also left one deposited at the roadside with a long walk back into town….)

“And her dominions,” I insisted, pushing down my dress with caressing hands. To this demand, he acquiesced in silence; a man at his best.

(I kept quiet. Women have a fetish about having the last word. It is best to indulge them in their trivial preoccupations–this way, when something important comes up, as it was beginning to, it is the man’s turn to prevail.)

I gestured for her to continue to smooth down the lacy extravagance of her wedding costume with my loaded brush like a courteous conductor. This she did, her dull skin making a ghoulish twilit contrast to both the black ribbon at her neck and the fairy-spray of material she sat in–like a sullen child overwhelmed in the playful arcs of a lusty fountain.

(It is best to let a painter have his way in painting, Charles always said. That way, one cannot be blamed for the result.)

“M. Manet, what do you think of my feet? Are they too small for these dainty velvet slip-ons?” I saw him lick his lips as he let his gaze rove down my form–which was, if I may say so, ably displayed. (Irrepressible minx!)

“Smallish, perhaps,” I offered, not wanting to be drawn in (as it were). There was still too much painting to be done in the good lemon light of afternoon. Maybe when dinner time came… and the appetites began to lead the nose with evening scents… we could….

“Call me Eduard, please.”

(Oh, I had him! Now he would strum my fiddle, so little in the middle, and I would hold my nose at his male grossness (so one must appear to do). When we had kissed cheek-to-cheek in greeting, I had felt the hard earnest of coin in his pockets. And now another earnest was hardening as I paddled my feet in slow rotations.)

“This light, it stings my eyes. Look, a tear!”

He came close to examine me, peering deepeningly, as if leaning precipitously over a shadowed brink. Then, just as I was sure we’d crouch and kiss, he started abruptly away. “Do not be ashamed,” I almost cried. “It is only natural, after all.” I was cresting like a wave in my suggestive saddle of silks and crinolines. Where had he gone? The tear had obscured my sight, and now it was pitch dark in the room.

“I’ve shut the curtains. Some champagne to dash the pain from your eyes?” (Yes, yes!)

“Oui. What year is the vintage?”

…[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, after seeing Mme. Sabatier at the opera]

 Evil Interludes
Aug 192011
 

The pitiful whistlers of the world have all gone to bed. Manet to his mistress, the others to their snores. I am left alone to complain to the moon of my solitude, my alienation from my newly-viewed muse.

“O for a muse of fire,” says the Bard of the Brits. But I would have my mistress made of ice cream and licorice drops. Creamy, cool to the touch, endlessly lickable, and with two good scoops on view. And then, at times, dark and chewy, with a maudlin aftertaste. But Mme. Sabatier, she is more than I can imagine–perfection! That remote whiteness of a mountain mist, a profile to define the very clouds. Why hadn’t that mopey Manet painted her in profile? No doubt, it defeated him; his hungry gesturing with his camel’s-hair stick would have defiled her infinite finesse.

O muse of ice, I’ll pull from your pure swansdown the arrow of my ichorous quill. Female cupid, enchantress! Were ever the rules and roles of courtship so reversed, that a dog such as I should have this dream?

To her I would cry out from the exquisite pain in my heart: The suffering of the unwitting wanton is as real as the starvling martyr’s!

…[Bonaventure, drinking with Gautier and Baudelaire at L’Ill Chateau]

 Evil Interludes
Aug 192011
 

“I am the superior degenerate of a race of defectives!”

“Do not mind, Theophile, it is the absinthe that has dashed the reason out of his mouth.” I felt compelled to keep the ears of Baudelaire’s listeners open to his tirades and philosophical expeditions, howevermuch I may have felt my own soul being dragged, heels first, to Hell.

“My father,” Charles continued, “was three and a half decades my mother’s senior, forcing upon her hothouse maidenhood the obscenity of his sex. Her innocence defended her from desire, even while inciting his own to madness! The combination of depravity and tenderness–does not the eye rebel from looking? I avert my face from the past, as from a perfect body scissored open upon the surgeon’s steel table. I am a man in love with what wounds him, my persecutors are the only ones who would dare touch me….”

“Charles,” protested Gautier, “this self-pity is monstrous. I am the last man to censure anything you say, since I have profited by it so many times in the past, but really!”

“Monstrous? Yes, well what do you expect from a monster?” His shotglass rang against the bar. Gautier poured him another.

“Is there nothing for us to do besides talk? We’ve been three hours at this scab-picking,” I said. It was my part to express any unspoken irritation in the air, so that it might be addressed–and thus soothed–and so that Charles could then continue on his verbal voyage.

“But if the blood is golden, let them bleed! Isn’t it worth everything to tell a truth on God, that grand street monte player?” And then, turning to Gautier: “Theophile, ‘beauty’ rhymes with more than ‘duty,’ you know.”

“And ‘soul’ with more than ‘foul,’ Charles.”

“The complexities of the starry sky are not defined by the dreams of the starlings who lose their way in it.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means, my dear Theophile, that I cannot be blamed for the obtuseness of the friends I choose; no more than for my own obtuseness.”

Baudelaire lifted his eyes toward the ceiling.

“Ah, Mother, what strong and secret solace you have given me for my exile among males!” And, saying this somewhat in the manner of a salute to one absent, Baudelaire turned on his triumphant heel and fled the establishment. Gautier and I were dumbfounded and, although I did not then know Madame Baudelaire as I was to come to know, or think I knew, her, I must still confess that this outburst on Baudelaire’s part resembles in my memory nothing so much as a surprise.

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