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How many times had Baudelaire put us in horror, or in ecstasy, with his vivid recollections of Africa—the crimson continent, as he called it, for the sake of the bloody sunsets and the perennial overcast of the red-leaved trees in Mauritius, as if he had examined all that was before him through the thin skin of a wound.

Under shadows so black that they are violet, thin men of dust collapse, giant eyes cast to the horizon, where the light will eventually escape them. But during the day there is no thought of this abandonment, only thought of the sun itself, huge and disproportioned, dispensing a vulvar vapor over everything, where desires and regrets condensed in the limitless afternoons. Their love of the aimless, their contentedness, stand out as sovereign in this atmosphere. As though in a painting of Eugene Fromintin, the contemplative and the violent are conjoined; the barbaric parades and travesties of justice that pass daily under foreign eyes in those extraordinary climes are but dissolute pages torn from some gigantic child’s album of nightmares. The dervish and the slave-trader, the stun of colors impastoed upon the retinal nerve, all whirl and wound the senses like knives and feathers.
Also, there was an incident of bravery; the ship was scraping the Cape, winds—intemperate with Indian prayers—bore a confused language from the graves of sailors.

The sea, it seems, had meditated upon their destruction. For long after the midnight pipes were pocketed, the rum toddies swallowed with a final, harsh gratitude in roughened throats, the passengers long abed and dreaming of missing their steps on familiar stairs, and the nightwatch had joked itself to silence, the only two men aboard who stood awake was the man at the helm, and the bowman looking for rocks with his nose extended into the dark. It was then that the sea began to uncurl its watery parchment and whisper into the solemn sails the story it had concocted, not above, but within the star-obscuring clouds: the dismasting of the Croesseus had begun.

“Ho, Francois!” cried the bowman. “A foggy patch is being blown clear.”

“Kurt,” replied the helmsman. “I see it not. Whereabouts?”

“Port ahead! Squinney, ye blind bastard.”

Francois squinnied; strange shapes, like those sculptors see in an uncut marble mass appeared to him—the blank potential of all shapes, all figures, all portents blew cold before him.

“Ay, I see it. ‘Tis like a beard blown sidewise without a face to hang upon.”

“The wind’s turned about and coming from a bad place.”

“Get the others up here! It’ll be the Devil’s own squall.”

“All? All the new bait as well?”

“Hurry, damn your eyes. There’s treachery in the air.”

Baudelaire was roused with a head-punch, and thinking himself under fraternal attack again, withdrew a sinister knife he had procured since his last attack, and sliced open the palm of the mate who’d summoned him. Kurt gripped his hand shut hard, but refused to cry out.

“I’ll settle with you later. There’s a squall out like to blow us to Kingdom Come.” Kurt shouted into the unlit hold: “All hands on deck!”
His first storm at sea! The boat moaned like a whore in labor. The night poured its mysteries and anguished vengeance on these poor representatives of hubris-haughty humanity who could discern nothing beyond the weak stabs and rays of their wildly swinging lanterns. And Charles leapt into that night! With a scrap of verse in his trim waistcoat, and the knife kept ready up his sleeve, and the sailor who would need but a single second in the upended dark to shove our young friend into oblivion, and no witnesses and nothing ever to be said!

Yet he scrabbled along the unfamiliar rigging, and threw his curses into the black void of creation as the crew furled every scrap of canvas that still hung its ass into the arriving gale.

“Ho, matey! Off the cross-tree! Nay, let it go! The wind’s too injurious for any man!”

“Down ye come, Charlie-boy! This one’s lost; there’s a crack i’ the grain!”

And Baudelaire shimmied, limber as a chimp, to the deck. They were to lose the mainmast, which meant hard sailing ahead, but the winds were pushing the ship nearly sideways just then—and if that canvas but once filled with water, the whole ramshackle show would capsize.

“Grab that sway of ropes, you three. We need to break her off this way, and not that, otherwise the other mast’ll go too!”

An amputation at the thigh, and nothing less than that, is what it was, with Baudelaire taking a lead among the men that hauled the dark corpse of the tree overboard, free and clear and carefully into what wicked seas! A wrong judging of the tide or impinging wind, and all that bolt of lumber would come back into the ship like a needle whittled by Satan to take ’em all straight down to Hell. But it was managed; it was managed by Baudelaire, and with no mean skill!

An ocean voyage! Improbable and frantic as any carnival. Hard men and the hard air of the docks swarm for a confrontation with the watery element of the wily ocean. My damned step-dad, General Aupick, has pulled off a miracle as surprising as any bouquet fluoresced from an old clown’s sleeve. He has pulled the world out from under me and replaced it with mystic waters as salt as my blood. My troubles have edged me from the earth onto this splintery deck swiveling drunkenly under my feet.

Debts beset me. On every side I hear the cry of my creditors as persistent as seagulls. My inspiration has fled me after Jeanne (that damned prostitute–pinched in the face and vain as a queen) dismissed me from the cathouse steps with a pale finger. And now I go to my wounded drowning in the ocean. Perhaps… perhaps I will be transformed in the blue element. Perhaps, when I rear into the air and return to land someone will say of my yattering corpse ‘those are pearls that were his eyes.’

So, a change of venue for my insanity and insouciance, as the General says; new stars for my ruined eyes. My first good turn from that quarter! Enough perhaps to balance out the rest of his nitpicky betrayals. Two days ago, I slung a gunny sack across my back, packed my finest cigars, and called for a stylish hansom to deliver me to the docks. On the S.S. Croesseus I put to sea, embarking as, of all things, a pilot’s apprentice. But my periplum begins and ends in the spine, casting its vigor through the ribs perhaps, taking in the exotica of the splayed pelvis, and the rank pursuits of the hand and head. Those are the inner journeys that I endure and that pull all oceans into a single tear from my eye.

At the docks I met Capt. Souz, to whom I am ‘apprenticed.’ –Oh, a vile man, as full of tough talk as the sailors with their Spanish mustachios and idiot cynicism. None of them have read a literary journal out of Paris in their lives, and any talk of poetry or the sublime crimes of the heart come through an awkward discoursing on sea chanties, the Lay of Lillian and her Wagging Sea Beastie, or that sad masterpiece, whose pathos they could not parse to save their souls, Reginald, Reginald.

The commercial passengers are worse, for one comes to expect nothing at all from the seadogs, mere hooligans of the waterways, but the passengers seem like men on a Paris street, just misplaced–by the plucking of a puppet string–onto a jumping deck, the slick soles of their shoes causing them to slide into each other in a type of random hazard, a shuffleboard effect where the pucks are people.

They think their cheap perfumes and political opinions out of Le Monde make them gentlemen of consequence. Any idea that cuts against their piggy prejudices–inculcated in childhood–causes an expression to surface to their faces that I can only imagine describing as hideous.

The sailors, with whom I sling my hammock in a darkness clotted with the rank rot of a stable, are all about my age. I attempted on a few occasions to get some of them to unpuzzle a poem with me, but they merely used the occasion to mock by smallness, my delicate nature, and what they kept calling, in a sing-song dismissive way, ‘the insanity of poetry.’

The abuses! Confined in my cloth coffin last evening, I lay inflamed by half wakeful dreams of Jeanne, the triumphant terror of her hair, the deranged insistence with which her clear cuticles kept thrusting themselves into my mind without a moment’s respite! The constant loudness of the sea performed an unpitying act of mesmerization on me.

The ceiling swung back and forth in the gap of the hammock above me; then six strong and hairy hands leapt across the canvas and pinched the hammock closed, until I was shut in tight as the proverbial pea. Between my legs, the canvas thumped and bulged, once. I had no idea what was going on.

In the next moment, everything became deliriously clear, as blow after blow landed on the hammock, and was transmitted to my body and skull like a cascade of rocks. If I had rolled blind down a steep desert slope, my injuries could not have been more complete. My every inch suffered insult and assault.

The next instant, as I retched on myself in a shameful nausea of relief, the beating of the virgin sailor, his shrieking initiation–for that is indeed what it was–was over. I crawled like a sick dog onto the deck, unable to bear breathing the same cabin air as my persecutors. I stared at eternity from a lifeboat hanging to port until the sky herself shaded from its immense nightblue into a recognizable shade–of bruise.

There are rare moments, fugitive instants, that glitter with a recollected condensation when our span is wished up upon us again in sullen reverie, and time collapses like a circus tent down an unshakable centerpole, the radiant nodule of a nodding minute or sparked millisecond, reducing rounded shadows of events to mere flats, bringing us flush with the twilit distant past, erasing accreted differences between our current selves (a treacherous fiction) and the doomed, slavish selves that we were, which, although they seemed complete at the time, intense, capable, undecided, they must now repeat our ruinous picture flipbook upon command, decisionless ghosts dissolving halfway up the same stairs forever, kicking out the stilts that keep our feet dry and separate us from the marmoreal, miasmic, mammalian mire of memory, reducing a vibrant now to a sanded then, collapsing space. Or, actually, I suppose, such magnetic moments enlarge us from our vague potentials and unrealized wholes into exact fractions, infinite in their compactness as failed stars–as opposed to the puny view which history with its crooked stack of flashcards affords. Well, however it is, one such zinging instant was about to descend upon me then, twenty-nine years old and in a boat, watching clouds deform and defoam above me, my tingling hand grounded in the live currents.

But what if this sacred event is merely baptized in tired bathwater and bad champagne? So what! In my mind the constellation of differing blues takes on the fixed geometry of a premonition, a blue five of hearts licked to fate’s crinkled forehead: pale sky, robust blue trunks warmly pasted against me, neutral blue bench plank before me, hopeless blue cloud-shadow diffusing and re-fusing all around Nattering Nate’s lightly flecked, heavily targeted, heavenly blur-blue eye. I can see now that I was ready then for the unknown next. There was a faint wrinkle-wrinkle sound in the water. Coeur-hearted Kurt, I think, snorted, while stately Curtis (twin Belgians in exile for pro-Catholic agitation activities in the homeland) squinted with sleek regality at the horizon from his pose on the prow. A few other surly and muscular louts pulled at mis-matched sets of oars (like socks), as if our rowboat, sent to rescue Nate or find him floating, were roused half-asleep for its quick task. I still had my bright eye on the everlasting. And then, out of nowhere, out of an illusionist’s hidden hat, out of the invisible ocean, it came.

Having no taste, or, at most, a fading aftertaste, or burp’s hint, for the bilious and overblown, I suppose that I should simply present my phenomenon, have done with it, and flip to the next engraving in the book. Very well. Enough ghoulish suspense. Dimensions: twenty-four feet if an inch from blunt front to whiplike stern, side to side another shadowy twenty perhaps. General shape: flapping diamond. Skin: slick, oiled oil in dank shade, rough under magnification. Mouth: a surreptitious incision invisible when not gaping wide enough to swallow in one convulsive gulp a pumpkin the size of a human head. Gills (for it was, indeed, a creature of the sea I met): a terraced series of similar incisions, following the graceful flow of line of the calculate-in-the-direction-of-infinity sign in calculus (a lower-case italicized f minus its horizontal stripe). Have you got these disparate parts firmly in hand, or in mind, rather? Very well. Toss them and think gestalt, gestalt. Has the monster materialized from your foam, or is the puzzle still jumbled? Oh, all right, all right, quit tugging my sleeve, I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you.

Like Botticelli’s Aphrodite, flying from the hysterical slalom of the sleeping sea-soma, this awful shadow emerged, breaking the cursive crest of its sheltering wave, and sledded, an awesome twenty-four-by twenty feet of sea-beast, no more than four feet above our rickety deck. I recognized it instantly as the sweaty, living version of several smaller miniatures (all fearsomely detailed) I had seen printed dinkily in my well-thumbed Field Guide to Sea Lore. There it was called, in the all-caps title to its own article, THE MANTA-RAY OR DEVILFISH, by Wally Stevedore. The poor, lost fellow, out of his supportive element, seemed to sag and waggle a bit at his skinny tips as he loomed for that brief, hovering moment above the boat. Was there terror and fire? White cowardice in our young hearts and rubbery limbs? There was shade and sky, a shuttle of bright and dark that I now replay, a dripping instrument of the miraculous followed, in its pop-up appearance, by clinging tendrils of stage-smoke.

And then, poof! and it was gone. The apparition dissolved that, probably, the tuna sandwich on Curtis’ breath combined with our raw man-smells had called at a stroke from the zeus-azure depths. The placated boat, still sluggishly full, wobbled like a robin’s egg cradled in the inquisitive palm of a girl with glasses; this palm was attached, I am sure, to my ghost half-sister who never quite managed to get born, but of whom I have always had, in my head, the most stubbornly glowing image of (nimbused or coronaed by a lucky sunset touching her hair with its radiant bubble). My heart, wrecked and wronged by twenty-nine years of wear and tear and care, seemed, for the moment, drained and spacious, a tapped swamp relieved of its dreams. One could still see the awkward shapes of clouds going divinely by.

The men sat silently astonished; and Nate’s fate had, no doubt, been banished from their thoughts as completely as if he had never been born. For myself, I must confess that Nate had achieve that status after our introductory handshake when he smiled at making my acquaintance with genuine pleasure.

Here, the hesitant gesture offered by the dissipating trunk of a swollen elephant-cloud uncurling towards a shy mouse- or grouse-cloud retreating into a misty skidmark. There, the missed clasps and forgotten hugs of busy vapors, demonstrating as in a classroom nature’s purposeless stridency and demand for estrangement. But closer to me than even those immaculate splotches, closer, and nearer and dearer, was the monstrous darkness that had hovered for its soaked moment over my soul, sea-musty and heavenly, silent and wet. And there it still hovered over my sunken poet’s chest, skin intact, unlike the one I had gaped at later, less willingly spread-eagled, and in which I had taken an dreader, grotesque interest in, as if peering at myself in a queer mirror, dead and vivisected on a dock in Marseilles. Huddled together as we were under that cauled shadow, my monster and me, I myself having been almost bundled off into sleep by the sea’s queasiness, I felt, or think that I remember having felt, some gelatinous tentacle of the thing’s being reach down towards me out of that black diamond, and something slippery in me leap up.

Also, and this I have concealed until the penultimate minute, I had spotted, in that torpid solstice, folded in our communal awning of shadow, up in the instantaneous blackness that had come whispering out of the sea to bury us, or save us–and in the backward abyss of memory still spot–the slow, maddened revolution of the great creature’s moist sustaining eye.

She has that voluptuous selfness of a cat.

Hautiness and rigor battle at her brown brows; her mulatto lips, thick as a split caterpillar, are bloodied by her incessant nibbling on betel nuts. Her talk and manner of speech are indistinct and lazy-lovely; she pads about with the subtle self assurance of a calm Cleopatra. Never have I beheld any creature under the sun with her symmetry and sublime self-sufficiency. She never races anywhere, but always arrives at exactly the right time. Just when my crumple heart begins to gnaw after her elliptical absence, that is when she is bound to arrive, her hair wreathed in the perfumes of exotic trees. Half the time her arms are loaded with an offering of koko-l’taanga, the rich and subtle fruit heavy against her breasts, and graced with an astonishing pinkness when they are sliced and served, often with a dash of cayenne and brown sugar. Altogether, an experience that stimulates.

She is, I believe, one of the half-caste Muslims, descended from political prisoners brought hence a hundred years ago. I occasionally see her kneeling and touching her forehead to the dust, which smells of sheep, a fleecy affluence of the air. The quaking aqua of the water, peered at from every hill, makes one quite conscious of the embittered liveliness of the sea, as if God had but one huge eye, and it lay in the sea, and it watched you incessantly.

A soapstone kilned in limitless Hell–such is my heart. Once, soft to the touch, easily carved, a semi-porous compact of talc, with some serpentines, to be sure, mixed in. Now, hard and small as a thrown marble. What colors I have are fixed deeply within, and are not amenable to change.

Baudelaire, his lies as distinctly tinted as a fabulist’s list of imaginary beasts, barked the embroideries of his far travels on my then malleable heart. Riding elephants and writing poetry, daylong in the dust, brown faces with white smiles, the mysterious femme damne, who spoke her own indecipherable patois, and danced for her master in the campfire while he recited recondite sonnets on the sunlike nature of her hot skin. But what really happened, mon frere? Sick of ignorant India, philistine Africa? Was there nowhere for your soft talk and godless insinuations to roam, once you were out of the rancid aviary of Paris? You once laughed at a man who, ‘Looks for his sins away from home.’ Did you scan the skies, and miss the dirty laundry of your old back alley, crimped linens yellowed against the bricks?

To accept the General’s advice and sponsorship of your ‘cleansing’ sea voyage–that engineered a failure for the old fuck right enough! He can’t fix you, Baudelaire! To hell with his good intentions! His spic and span epaulets! Once out his sight again, and with his francs crumpled in your corduroys, you managed a quickie sin with a married Creole, and cut the bluster of his cause (your soul) with the saber of your sins. And a sonnet to celebrate! Oh, Baudelaire, I must love you….

Well, Baudelaire was always a liar; every true poet sees life in the light of such lies. It’s a kick against the nastiness of Nature’s necessities. Maybe, if we lash at Life with the acid of fictive alternatives long enough, a pear tree will bear a partridge, a rutabaga will blossom a rose, a tear will really ensnare a sigh, and love will, will really… love….

He came home ratty and burnt, and for once, I think, genuinely glad to see me, his teeth tight upon a whalebone pipe.

“Bonaventure.”

“Baudelaire! I just received your letter yesterday that you had crashed in Africa, ‘wave-born and wanton.’ How have you made it home so suddenly?

“On the wet tongue, on the dueling wings of anguish and sanity.”

I was too overcome, as they say, to talk, and held him in my arms for a moment–the last moments in which he was ever to tell me an uncut truth. He stiffened beneath me, creaking and a bit over-perfumed because of what I imagine must have been his relatively unclean accommodations aboard ship.

“Yes, well, my friend, I am afraid I am becoming something of a Mme. Guyon, and Paris is my wad of spittle,” he said softly, with something like a small laugh following this statement.

“As God appoints it,” I conceded, and thought of that Mme. Guyon who, ashamed that her own extreme cleanliness and abhorrence of slime was a rejection of the Creation, put a large gob of spit from the street into her mouth, and was transformed with the most joyous feelings of recorded Christendom since St Francis of Assisi licked a leper.

How opposite the aseptic impulses of the mass of men was every instinct and action of this charming and corrupting individual. General Aupick had sent him away to dissuade him from pursuing his vocation as a poet, to make him see the wide ways of the world at large, beyond the literary coffins of a few salons in Paris, or the habitudes of his sickly mistresses. Instead, what has occurred? The Albatross has been more surely cornered into his hunching identity as one familiar with ‘stars and skies and all high things,’ whom the rough sailors knock to the uneven deck to mock, and who ‘cannot fly, he has such large wings.’ But this albatross has been warned, and made more careful of his precious feathers, more sure in his imagination that flight is the only respite and the only reward. He has been irrefutably and eternally turned into both a saint and a liar at one stroke.

And still my mind runs hazards at the strange, dead man. My Baudelaire, what did you see, what did your senses register? The fluidity and strangeness of being at sea, on ship, the yaw and terror of the storm, the immense laxness of an inundating sun, thick scents of musk and lardy tar, the amazing demon of a woman’s ash-and-honey face, the whipping of a black man in a dry square, the tumble of unknown tongues, vistas that would forever shrink the past into the miniature luster of a pearl, all lost… lost in a field of stars.

Evil Interludes section heading.

The banality and absurdity of my life at first engaged, and then engulfed, me. Was it not enough for God to laugh at me from his sky-high catbird’s seat? No. He must also disembowel me with the eerie cognizance of His cosmic snicker. I, whose belief in the deity amounts to no more than Eve’s flight from irresponsibility and into the matronly mangle of sex and afterbirth. I would know what I am and what I do. Anything is acceptable, I proclaim. Anything, that is, except ignorance.

So these myths that cling to one, as clods of clouds trail the godhead from heaven to earth, are no more than a sonorous nuisance. I have prepared for death to accept me. Death is the lover who, however longed-for, however cursed, never fails to arrive. And so my Satanic insistence on the singleness of my sin is my gift to Death. I, my lover, am not a mere portion of the horde, the amorous mass who come to your fatal kisses. No, no. I am as far from my fellow mortals as flesh and errancy may stretch a man. If a spirit in this dungheap may do more than sleep and mate, then mine has done so. Once set on my track from imprisoning paradise, I have spurned the creator who set me in my sigil vigil. I know that none can regain their place as an innocuous parcel of that majesty. My feet were steaming to you, Death, who are not mere obliteration, mere reconsumption into the creases of God’s smile.  That must never be! History is an arrow that, once flown from the twanging hand, may never resume its bloodless innocence. Therefore, I hope without hope of holiness. I expect without expectation of heaven. Only Hell, only Death awaits. Those who cannot see this live in a pristine mockery of sin. Theirs are the hollow lives, the lies lived among the powdery clouds of amnesiacs. Their best hope is to forget that they were ever born. I, for one, will never forgive the fact.

As mythic or fictional as my meaning may be, never doubt that I am I. They would cover me in lies and guesses so that I would be but a sheep of their herd–a blackened and barbarous baa bleating from my opium-brown lips, perhaps–but a sheep nevertheless. But this is not to be. This cannot be. I cannot not be I. And, being myself, the one who will not gainsay the death of Death, nor long for the unloss of non-ness, I am the only one who can say anything at all. My silence alone would be God’s ending. If I for once shut-up, as if I had never begun to have been, that would be my uncreation. If uncreated, there would be no creator. So, dear Deity, when I chant my magpie charms to Satan, recall that it is by your grace alone that Satan is so praised. I will not praise You, for I do not so denigrate this bitching gift of life to wish myself to go unmade to my maker. No, instead, I flee from You, taking my life with me in my errant hands, my life–to give it up only, and uniquely, to Death.

           : : Finis : :