Confessions Of A Self-Ordained Monk

I used to describe myself as an urban Thoreau. The cheap studios and one-bedroom apartments I lived in were my cabin by Walden Pond. It was a Walden Pond of the imagination: a sanctuary of books and unbridled reflections unsullied by the noxious ambitions of money and power. I lived austerely, but comfortably. I did not choose austerity because I enjoyed asceticism. I didn’t. I don’t. The truth is, I lean toward the sybaritic. I lived that way because I had a passionate need to write. And the best way to solve the problem of eating and shelter while consuming hours bent over a desk writing prose and poetry with no commercial value was to work part time.

Since then, the urban Thoreau analogy has withered. Life has become more drastic. What little community still endured to support the intellectual life in mainstream contemporary culture is now so thinly marginalized as to be no more than a ghost, a stratospheric wraith of dissipating cirrus. Hardly a contrail. Even the dinosaurs left footprints. The legacies of Emerson and Dickinson and Thoreau have nothing whatever of value for the Hilary Clintons, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world. These people all crave power. Even their philanthropy smacks of power. The 70s, despite disco, were still imbued with the jubilant idealism of the 60s. The 60s now seem as historically distant as sepia tinted daguerreotypes of Civil War officers posing in front of their tents. So do the 70s. Today’s pestilent Zeitgeist begins in 1980. With Ronald Reagan.

The real Walden Pond still exists, thanks, largely, to Don Henley of the Eagles, who initiated the WaldenWoods Project to prevent the area around Walden Pond from being developed.

It was my imaginary Walden Pond that dried up.

In today’s world of capitalist predation, ignorance, illiteracy, and endless war, I think of myself as a monk. It is pertinent that the word monk, which comes from the Greek word monachos, means “single, solitary.” My solitude, however, is of a particular kind. We have all heard that expression about solitude in a crowd. That’s what I’m talking about. Solitude in a crowd.

Married, and living in a one-bedroom condo, collecting social security until the Republicans take it away, my quality of life has improved markedly. I never go hungry. I eat quite well, in fact. My wife is a terrific cook. My newly found status in monkhood has nothing to do with food, or shelter, or piety. It has everything to do with an audience. That is to say, the non-existence of an audience. There is something quintessentially monkish about devotion to an art for which there is no audience.

I feel a profound sense of fraternity with those robed, tonsured old men tending vineyards and making illuminated manuscripts in the drafty hermitages of the Dark Ages. Marriage dilutes the analogy, but my sense of affiliation with that group has more to do with intellectual isolation than celibacy. It also has a lot to do with the Dark Ages.

This sense of isolation pertains chiefly to the domain of poetry, and a very eccentric poetry, at that, though sometimes the writing (my writing), the writing that dribbles and oozes from my hand in sentences and subtleties designed to engage the eyes of a refined, non-existent reader, erupts into a shrill, opinionated rant, as now. Isn’t this really what the blog was invented for? To provoke? To engage? To jostle the sensibilities of people whose opinions differ sharply for yours? Or are in sync, but with critical shades of difference? Differences whose urgency, whose significance, whose interestedness, require a comment. That’s the beauty of the blog: comments. Readers who are so engaged, they chime in with writing of their own.

It’s a fabulous community, but unless your name is Ariana Huffington, or Julie Powell, you are not going to get paid for it, and it may take years before you attract a readership. The kind of readership that translates into a movie deal, like Julie and Julia.

Don’t knock anonymity. It may not be the kind of social currency that garners an audience, but think of the freedom. The broad, exhilarating margin you have to imagine, and write about, anything.

And what better place to find anonymity than a blog. If a writer, poet, or investigative journalist (another profession well on its way to extinction) lacks the cachet of a big mainstream publisher, the gloss of a magazine like the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly or Harper’s to fit one’s writing into their Elysian of the gatekeeper blessed, one needn’t perform fellatio, literal or metaphorical, in order to score publication. You’re on your own, bub.

I suspect the few people who consist of my “pageviews” are people who Googled their way here by accident. I doubt that they linger here. Why would they? Who reads other people’s poetry? Definitely not other poets. They’re far too occupied with writing their own work and finding a venue to publish it. Why should they be bothered by reading anyone else’s poetry?

Very few people read anymore to begin with. Unless, perhaps, the text is dished up in some spectacularly lush and high tech fashion, like Kindle, iPad, Smartphones, and Laptops. But even then I find it hard to believe that anyone consumes more than a paragraph before they begin rubbing their eyes and gazing out of the window. Or - who knows? - resting their eyes on the spines of a shelf-load of books put on display in a coffee house somewhere, relics from a bygone era when people took time to craft a well-written sentence.

And so my thoughts turn toward the fall of the Roman Empire, circa 411 or so, when that population took a turn for the worse and sought entertainment by feeding Christians to lions. Not a good time for monks. Let’s fast forward to, say, 800 A.D. Christians are doing a little better.

Am I a Christian? No. Not really. I attended a Unitarian Church when I was fifteen. My parents made me attend. When they relinquished me to my own volition, I ceased going. My feelings about religion remain relatively neutral. I am not an atheist. I find it hard to believe that there is a large, robustly muscled man in the sky with a long flowing beard who was responsible for putting this universe together (and if He is responsible for Infinity, how do you finish that? How do you begin a phenomenon that has no beginning? And what sort of being makes a platypus, or mosquito?), but I also find it hard to believe that we (all living creatures) are here merely to reproduce. That is a tautology, not a reason to exist. To go through all the hardship of living (finding a job, filling out tax forms, driving a car, finding a clean rest room in public, etc.), and the misery of dying, all for no reason other than joining your DNA with someone else and producing another sorry creature to go through the same shit is stark indeed. No comfort there. I may not believe in an afterlife, but I’m not ready to give up on the possibility of it.

But yes, I write, don’t know why, it’s a compulsion, a need. Got to do it. Putting words down on paper, or tapping them into pixels on a computer screen, is an eternal fascination.

Gertrude Stein said “I write for myself and strangers.” I feel that way. But I would amend that, a little, to say “I write for myself and myself.” I indulge in unabashed, intellectual masturbation. And I heartily recommend it. It’s good for the soul. Nobody gets pregnant, nobody gets jilted, and no books get sent back to the publisher from Barnes and Noble, or languish on the shelves of an independent bookstore teetering on bankruptcy.

It’s comforting to think of those monks in the dark ages bent over a desk making those beautiful illuminations. Beautiful calligraphy. Radiant artwork. Fabulous flora. Fabulous fauna. Saints and angels and a loving (though sometimes wrathful) benevolent God. For who? Hardly anyone was literate. It was a time quite similar to ours. The majority of people given to superstition, delusions, illiteracy. The times were brutal. People were brutish. Rape, pillage, plunder, oppression were daily occurrences. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

I have searched the internet trying to find writers who wrote during the Dark Ages. How did they cope with illiteracy? Imbecility? Infantile beliefs?

I wish I knew. I haven’t had much luck. Why would I? They don’t call it the Dark Ages the Dark Ages for nothing. If anyone bitched about their time, and wrote it down, the chances are they were driven out of their village, or burned at the stake.

No doubt they kept to themselves. That’s the smart thing to do. Whatever they wrote, they wrote for the joy of writing. Sometimes the best applause is your own silent satisfaction.

Ontology 101 Part Seven

What features are the essential, as opposed to merely accidental, attributes of a given object?

They’re rioting in Cairo. But this is Nebraska. A giant eyeball floats over the prairie. Sunlight dazzles the terrain. Arapahoe and Pawnee. Wounds and feathers. Perpetual change. This is, after all, a prairie. The prairie cannot be reduced to an essence. The prairie murmurs the breath of angels. Odors are proposals. There is hunger in the wind. Wolves and abandoned farmhouses. The sky floats on purpletop. A flower yells back at the sun.

Do you own a hibachi? A sawmill in Alabama? Fill yourself with the world.

If I dangle a piece of space, gravity squeezes it together into a glockenspiel, and flowers pop out of my mouth.

Sometimes a little propane goes a long way. You can push a thought through the loophole of a sentence, but a puddle of light forms on the wall, and the sky turns black.

Other things exemplify soup. The rants of a cynical wizard. Drugs on a hardwood floor.

If you can fill a paragraph with descriptions of raw sienna, you will be greeted by soft bare arms, golden women on a silver boat. And everything warm and gentle will counsel your heart.

Essence is insoluble. Life is insoluble. Life is an essence.

It is viscous and smooth. A formula for making hand lotion.

It is rough and convulsive. A Brahma bull chafing under a saddle.

Each thing has a presence. A thin yellow sun on a winter horizon. Everything implicit in blue. Everything revelatory in green. Onions. Ghosts. The art of translation. The heart of a lobster. The transcendence of eggs. Amber mounted on a copper ring. Clay and wood and chains and nails.

I have decided to shave. You can pull a language out of a thirst, but you cannot pull a thirst out of a fish. Sometimes you just have to accept the sawhorse as a demonstration of support. And the razor as a supplement of hygiene.

There is a dimension that eludes science. You can, for instance, bend a flashlight beam around a corner. But you can only do this on special holidays, or by further developing the autonomy of sleep, so that it resembles Portugal, and pulses with parables.

I have conducted experiments on language and discovered hysteria and ice cream. Brush your hair. Life is changeable. Write everything down. If a set of adjectives clash in a painting by Georges Braque, I ask you to consider the light and its full spectrum of colors. We express ourselves with napkins. There are bones buried beneath this sentence.

Try to find a little innocence. There are paths that lead deep into the forest. One is not required to be religious, but it helps to cultivate a sense of reverence. The process is blue, with nuances of red and white and green. There are almonds in the snow, and kumquat and milk. Boiling art. Auguries of spruce.

Marie Laurencin hides under the table, giving birth to strange ideas. Circles and waterfalls. Glens and neurons.

Sound waves create eyes in the air. What is visible is but the tip of the proverbial iceberg. A mouth moving on a canvas. Density, volume, weight. Color, design, texture.

Some things that are present to the mind do not have palpable form. Yet there is something essential about them. Intuition, premonition, perspicacity. A blowtorch made of thought. And blue flame. And metaphor and art.

A face falls out of a mirror, bitter and full of juice. Do not look at it, even as it tries to talk. Merely go on combing your hair. Listen to the sounds of the concertina someone is playing in the street. Assemble a sentence. Applaud vigorously when Polly Peachum finishes her song.

Since, therefore, of the things that are predicated some signify what a thing is, or quiddity, and others quality, and others quantity, and others relation, and others action or passion, and some the place where, and others the time when, to each of these the being of essence signifies the same thing. A shining incontrovertible whatness. A glowing. An aura. A saw blade gleaming in Alabama sunlight. The smell of sage. A Pawnee brave riding a roan stallion out onto the prairie.

Wrinkles tell stories. Realism is elementary. I remember the gunrack in my grandparent’s farmhouse in North Dakota. The beauty of those rifles made you want to fire them. Load them. Shoot them. Fill yourself with the world. Hit the wall if you must. Contradictions can sometimes be more than you can bear.

It is a delicate situation. Colors persist after the sun goes down. There are a dizzying number of stars. Diesel locomotives. The scream of a butterfly. The ghost of Jim Morrison.

And Buffalo Bill. And Sitting Bull. And Aristotle.

What is emotion? Describe gravity. Describe a jellyfish washed ashore. The gleam of the sand. The sound of the waves as they curl, tumble, hit the sand. Crash into rocks. How many adjectives do you need? There is a stepladder in the closet. Form is a form of definition. Apollinaire walks by eating a sandwich. Cubism, he says. I’d call it Cubism.

I call it the noise of a café in the afternoon. Heat, attitude, clouds. A sack of potatoes. A plane taking off at noon. Divinations. Conjectures. Black feathers. Salvation Army desk.

A giant eyeball floating over the prairie.

Carving Holes In Space

the whole of poetry is preposition, poetry by Claude Royet-Journoud, translated by Keith Waldrop
La Presse, 2011

“Between air and water, there must be the preposition,” Royet-Journod remarks on page 42 of the whole of poetry is preposition.

Why a preposition?

If preposition echoes proposition, the accident is a congelation, a commingling of word and world. What exists between subatomic particles? Space. Between modulations? Waves. Between spring and fall? Renewal. Between your legs? Temperature. Between knowledge and ignorance? Mystery. Between muscles? Arteries. Between words? Life.

And death.

Prepositions are dead serious. They are to space and time what nails are to the joining of wood. The world is prepositions. The world divides into prepositions.

Prepositions are propositions. They propose multiple interpretations of action and space.

A poetry of prepositions is a poetry of action and space. A theatre.

A poetry in which the words, as the stage directions of the theatre, point to places where the actors should stand, and make suggestions toward their attitude and dress.

A poetry in which a crime has been committed, for which there are clues, and signs of violence, but no body. No corpse.

A poetry in which syntactic associations and mercurial transitions lure, absorb, and elude our penetrations.

We are detectives. Detectives in a book. The totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.

Because there is no body. In order to the find the perpetrator, we must first find the victim. We must follow a set of clues. Of signs. Of objects. Of movements. The choreography of the situation. Or, in the words of Wittgenstein, “Objects are what is unalterable and substantial; their configuration is what is changing and unstable."

i.e., prepositions.

The proposal of poetry as an artifact of prepositions implies a level of abstraction consonant with Aristotle’s metaphysics and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations. It follows a previous collection of poetry with a similar title: Theory of Prepositions (La Presse, 2006), also translated from the French by Keith Waldrop, and to which it might aptly be said to function as an “aphoristic complement.” “The evocation of the preposition is not without its homage to Louis Zukofsky,” (I am gleaning this from the publisher’s blurb on the back of the book), “a poet central to Royet-Journoud’s work; they share a deep affinity for the particular, and beyond that, for the actual particulars that compose our days, and for the delicate tissue that binds them.”

This is true. “Felt deeply,” observed Zukofsky, “poems like all things have the possibilities of elements whose isotopes are yet to be found.”

If it is the Higgs boson that converts energy to matter, than it is prepositions that convert objects into theatre. What is changing and unstable is the medium - the display - of drama.

On the outside walls of the physics building at the University of Washington are 30 cartouches, each featuring an equation of pivotal importance to the understanding of the physical universe. There is Newton’s Law of Gravitation which describes the gravitational force, F, beween 2 masses, M1 and M2, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and the Hertzspring-Russell diagram which shows the relation between the stars and their absolute magnitude. They appear to be some form of mathematical haiku in which representations of the world as ascetical as possible, denuded of any metaphorical coloring or rhetorical flourish. Of course, the formulae deal in quantity and magnitude; they have nothing whatever to do with human perception, with the interphase between neuron and impulse, inner and outer, language and consciousness. Mathematics is a language of logic. Stark, blunt, consummate logic. And yet there is a beauty, an unmistakable eloquence to the nakedness of mathematical representations. It is this level of stark neutrality that I find in the work of Royet-Journod. A neutrality so neutral it becomes noumenal.

Unlike mathematical inquiry, Royet-Journod is very much alive to the quirks and vagaries of human perception. He deals in qualities, not quantities.

But the neutrality, the soberness is important. He does not like metaphor, assonance, and alliteration. Describing his writing process, he says “Later, when I already have a few pages of text, a sketch, I begin to work on the language, neutralising the text. How? By tracking down and suppressing metaphor, assonance, alliteration - to see what narrative emerges - what appears, embodying this language within a language.”

He quotes Jack Spicer: Metaphors are not for humans.

“The trick is to be literal (not metaphorical),” he remarks on page 15. “To weigh,” he further elaborates, “the language in its ‘minimal’ units of meaning. For me, Eluard’s line, The earth is blue like an orange, tires, dragged down by an overload of meaning. Whereas, for example, The wall behind is a wall of chalk, by Marcelin Pleynet stands, and continues to stand, I think, by its every exactitude and, taken of course in context, paradoxically, unfixed in meaning, thus holding for anyone an abiding fiction.”

For many years now I have had a deep fascination for Royet-Journoud’s work, beginning with The Notion Of Obstacle, which was initially published by Gallimard in 1978, followed by a translation by Keith Waldrop published by Awede in 1985. I find this strange, since my own proclivities are the opposite of his. I revel in metaphor, assonance, and alliteration. I get drunk on language. On verbal delirium. Hallucination.

But like anyone else, I get tired of my inclinations, and inclining elsewhere is always a tonic solution. A splash of cold water to the face opens our eyes.

An astute riddler, Royet-Journoud calls writing a craft of ignorance. And means it. He puts the phrase in italics: craft of ignorance.

What does he mean? I have always assumed writing to be the opposite: a craft of knowledge. We write about what we know. Knowledge is what you know, said Gertrude Stein.

“A writer’s immobility puts the world in motion,” remarks Royet-Journoud in the first section of this collection, “A Craft Of Ignorance (Notes and fragments from interviews).”

To the extent that we hold our gaze still, things move. Thought, as well, exists only with regard to a halt which is empty. Joë Bousquet wrote, this paralysis has carved a hole in space. To write is to carve that hole in space. Everything takes off from immobility, from the effort of attention that is also a corporeal effort. The tightrope walker has the same problem; he tries to bring together movement and rest, to find perfect equilibrium. The writer’s desk is in the mind, a matter of knowing when to stop, of starting out aware that there is no beginning. Writing is a craft of ignorance.

Perhaps one could also say “writing is a craft of attention.” And that the purest way to see anything is by way of an empty mind, the no-mind of Zen, wu-hsin, a quiet awareness of whatever happens to be here now. “Seeing into nothingness - this is true seeing and eternal seeing.” “Even if it is nothingness, it is seeing something.”

“Where does the poem begin?” he asks on page 12. “What is there before the first line?” This can be answered, in part, by the above paragraph: nothingness.

But this is glib. Each poet will have their own personal reasons for beginning a poem: a love of language, a captivating image, a passion for oysters, for psalmody or Bach, for propositions, for prepositions, for collective bargaining; the drone of a cello, the bark of a Chihuahau; a red-tailed hawk or compound eye. It may also be an acute sense of nothingness. Each can answer in their own way what was there before. It is clear, where Royet-Journod is concerned, that this may be answered by the generous number of poets and authors to which he alludes throughout this work: Anne-Marie Albiach, Emilio Araúxo, Saint Augustine, Paul Eluard, Aristotle, Wittgenstein, Marcel Jousse, Louis Zukofsky, Kierkegaard, Daniel Oster, Roger Lewinter, Claudine Cohen, Charles Bernstein, Jean Daive, Robert Bresson, William Carlos Williams, Nietzsche, Michèle Cohen-Halimi, Ezra Pound, Joë Bousquet, Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

“I borrow as much from Revelation,” he avers, “as from Bescherelle, from Simenon as much as from the Roman de la Rose, from Lola as from Saint Augustine or Hallâj, from an old lady jabbering in a café in Clichy as from Merleau-Ponty, from a guy walking along muttering to himself as from Geroges Gougenheim or Wittgenstein.”

As for the ending of a poem, “It exists when recognized, as we ‘recognize’ a body in the morgue. Something frightening and strange. It’s when that snaps off. You recognize something absent, withdrawn just at the moment the poem is anonymous enough for you to sign it.”

Cursed Poets

The Cursed Poets, edited by Paul Verlaine
Translated from the French by Chase Madar
Green Integer 91, 2003

Cursed poets: what a marvelous phrase.

What poet isn't cursed?

Cursed with the need to write. To invent. To make something bewildering and strange. With words.

With air. With breath.

With rejection slips and unpaid bills.

Cursed with a mind-numbing job when the need to write is desperate. Imperative. All consuming.

Cursed with lunkhead relatives who mock your efforts at something with absolutely no monetary value.

Cursed by the abrasions of an industrialized world hostile to the quest for beauty.

Cursed by the vulgarity of capitalism and vapidity and merchandising and Lady Gaga.

Cursed, most of all, by the seductions of the ineffable. The sublime. The mystic. The transcendental. The nebulous and vague.

The first time I heard the phrase “cursed poets” I was 18 and living in California, attending school at San José City College. It was 1966. I had been experimenting with amphetamines and LSD. Heavenly Blue Morning Glory Seeds. I was living on next to nothing, sharing a one-bedroom apartment with two friends, and the draft board was breathing down my back. I was infatuated with Rimbaud and Mallarmé and Baudelaire. French symbolism. Exquisite sensations. Hallucinations. Synesthesia.

I lived and breathed French symbolism for the next several years. It was a perfect fit. I despised the world. I immersed myself in the luxuries of the mind. The voluptuous billows of unbridled reverie. The exotic spices of the symbolist stratosphere. Baudelaire’s poem about the albatross who is mocked by the vulgarians of a frigate as it waddles awkwardly about on deck but assumes an awe-inspiring grace when it takes flight became my personal allegory.

My interests diverged into dada and surrealism, the New York School of poetry, the objectivists, the Black Mountain poets, the Beats, even Middle English lyrics and balladry for a time, and my singular devotion to French symbolist ideals diffused into capillaries and eddies of varying and often contradictory value. And on the worldly plane, alcoholism, depression, and menial jobs. Toilets, insomnia, and meager paychecks.

Thus it was that, some 45 years later, as happily adjusted to the world as I might ever be, I streamed France Culture’s Poème du jour avec la Comédie-Française which, for a week, was devoted to reading the work of the poets featured in Paul Verlaine’s anthology The Cursed Poets (Les poètes maudits).

Wait a minute, I thought. An anthology? Cursed poets? Paul Verlaine? I had never heard of such an anthology.

I googled it up. Lo and behold: The Cursed Poets, Paul Verlaine, Translated from the French by Chase Madar. Green Integer, 2003. I emailed John Marshall and Christine Deavel at Open Books instantly and ordered a copy.

The little book arrived within a few days. A heavily mustachioed Verlaine adorned the cover. Deep, soulful eyes looked out from a bald dome of a head. “Assembled from articles published in the journals Lutèce and La Vogue,” Madar remarks in the introduction, “the full version of Les Poètes maudits was first published in 1888. The little book helped build the reputations of the poets; it also helped fortify Verlaine’s own renown, and finances.”

Verlaine would have been 44. He had been desperately poor, living in slums and public hospitals, drinking absinthe in the cafés when he could afford it. Rimbaud, with whom Verlaine had long lost touch, was living in Harar, Ethiopia, trying to maintain an export enterprise, dealing in ivory, coffee, and guns. If asked about poetry, Rimbaud would sneer, spit, shrug his shoulders, evince utter disdain.

Verlaine includes six poets in his collection: Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Villiers De L’Isle-Adam, and Pauvre Lelian. Rimbaud and Mallarmé are well known. Corbière a little less known, perhaps best recognized as a pivotal influence on T.S. Eliot. Some may be familiar, too, with Villiers De L’Isle-Adam, who was the model for the central figure of Joris-Karl Huysman’s seminal novel, À rebours (Against the Grain or Against Nature), 1884, a gay, aristocratic aesthete named Jean Des Esseintes. The novel, which ran contrary to the conventions of naturalism, does not have a plot; it is mostly a catalogue of the tastes and inner life of Des Esseintes, whose refined tastes and unorthodox pleasures puts him in conflict with bourgeois society and causes him to retreat into an ideal world of his own creation. It is narcissism at its most brilliant and heroic, if narcissism may be considered heroic.

À rebours became the ultimate example of decadent literature. It reveled in values that were antithetical to commerce and industry: daydreaming, drug abuse, hermeticism, complexity, art for art’s sake non-utilitarianism, phantasmagoria, a curious blend of Thanatos and Eros (libido and death), and unabashed hedonism.

Villiers De L’Isle-Adam is also the subject of Edmund Wilson’s essay Axel and Rimbaud, the eighth and concluding essay in his collection Axel’s Castle: A Study In The Imaginative Literature Of 1870 - 1930. “Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s ‘Axel,’ which was published in 1890, is a sort of long dramatic poem in prose,” remarks Wilson, “which, as it was the last thing Villiers wrote, sums up and gives final expression to his peculiar idealism.”

Count Axel of Auersburg is a young man “of an admirable virile beauty,” with “a paleness almost radiant” and “an expression mysterious from thought.” He inhabits, in an atmosphere half-Wagnerian, half-romantic-Gothic, an ancient and isolated castle in the depths of the Black Forest, where he has given himself up the study of the hermetic philosophy of the alchemists and is being prepared by a Rosicrucian adept for the revelation of the ultimate mysteries.

It will be easily seen that this dreamer of Villier’s is the type of all the heroes of the Symbolists, of our day as well as his: Pater’s contemplative, inactive Marius, the exquisitely sensitive young men of his “Imaginary Portraits”; Laforgue’s Lohengrin, who, the night of wedding, shrinking from union with his Elsa, turns his back on her and embraces his pillow begging it to carry him away -- his Salome, “the victim of having tried, like all of us, to live in the factitious instead of in the honest everyday”; the Hamlet of Mallarmé’s posthumous drama, “Igitur,” who is the only character in the play and does nothing but soliloquize. And, above all, Huysman’s Des Esseintes, who set the fashion for so many other personalities, fictitious and real, of the end of the century: the neurotic nobleman who arranges for himself an existence which will completely insulate him from the world and facilitate the cultivation of refined and bizarre sensations; who sleeps by day and stays up at night and whose favorite reading is Silver Latin and the Symbolists.

André Breton included Villiers de L’Isle-Adam in his Anthologie de l’humour noir, a short story called “The Killer Of Swans” (“Le tueur de cynes”). In this story an old doctor named Tribulat Bonhomet learns that swans sing most beautifully just before they die. He decides to find out for himself, and goes to an old sacred pond amid the shadows of some ancient towering trees, a favorite haunt of a group of swans. During the day, he watches as twelve or fifteen of the birds glide languidly over the mirror-like water. Regarding, above all, the male black swan that watches over them, as he sleeps in the sunlight. At night, the black swan holds a small stone in his beak which, at the slightest alarm, he pitches forward with his long neck into the middle of the other swans as a warning.

One night, the doctor puts on some long rubber boots and a large impermeable coat and goes wading into the pond. He waits all night for the right moment to kill one of them and hear the coveted death song. At one point he has to scratch himself, and the sound causes alarm among the swans, but not hearing the signal of the stone, linger in exquisite anguish. When, at last, the light of the morning star glides over the tree branches and illumines the outline of the old doctor in the pond, the black swan hurls the stone. But it is too late. The doctor manages to kill two or three of the swans, strangling them with iron-gloved hands. The doctor hears their death song and clambers to the shore where he lies until sunrise in a voluptuous torpor.

The symbolists had a special romance for death. Death was not only a final exit out of this world of banality and materialism, but it was itself inherently beautiful. People turned pale, languished in a crepuscular somnolence before releasing their final breath. Dying had a certain majesty to it, whatever the actual condition, old or young, rich or poor, anonymous or renowned, of the person dying. We all ascend to a throne of sorts before we leave this world. Heaven veils us with an aura of sublime nobility.

Verlaine included one woman in his collection, Marceline Desbord-Valmore, who, Verlaine remarks, “is worthy of figuring among our Cursed Poets because of her apparent but absolute obscurity, and it is our imperious obligation to speak of her at length and in as great detail as possible.”

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore was born in Douai, a sub-prefecture in the Nord department in northern France, June 20^th, 1786. This makes her a precursor to the French Symbolist school. She published her first work, Élégies et Romances, in 1819. John Keats was still writing. The spirit of romanticism was strong. “Religion Christless, Godless -- a book sealed; / A Senate, -- Time’s worst statute unrepealed -- / Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may / Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day,” wrote Shelley in his sonnet “England in 1819,” underscoring the mood of change and inflammation, yearning and agitation that imbued the air of Western Europe at the early part of the nineteenth century. If “religion Christless, Godless” has modern resonances, it goes to show how the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Marceline was also an actress, playing Rosine in Beaumarchais’s Le Barbier de Séville and the Opéra-Comique in Paris. She retired from the stage in 1823 and later became friends with Honoré de Balzac. He once wrote that she was the inspiration for the title character of La Cousine Bette.

Her poetry is remarkably romantic, full of religious yearning and contemplations about death and the afterlife. There is a feeling of pantheistic beauty, of the world of nature being permeated with divinity, although the mood of her poems is quite often sad. The greater one’s sense of the sublime, she seems to suggest, the more painfully aware does one become of the shortcomings of everyday reality. The world of commerce is, by contrast, noxious in the extreme.

Here, for example, is her poem “Fileuse,” which is sandwiched between two short extracts from Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder based on the poems of Friedrich Rükert. Here, also, is a link to a reading on YouTube.

un will die Sonn' so hell aufgehn,
Als sei kein Unglück die Nacht geschehn

La fileuse file en versant des larmes
Sur son lin choisi s’inclinent ses charmes.
Le fil oublié glisse de ses doigts,
Et ses chants d’oiseaux tremblent dans sa voix.

Sa quenouille est là toute négligée…
Oh! d’un jour à l’autre on est si changée!
Quoi! plus une rose à son front rêveur!
Qu’est-ce donc qu’elle a? Je crois qu’elle a peur...

Elle était hier au banc de l’enfance
Avec ses fuseaux pour toute défense;
Mais le soir l’enfant ne les avait pas
Quand quelqu’un dans l’ombre a suivi ses pas.

Personne aujourd’hui ne la voit plus rire.
En si peu d’instants qu’a-t-on pu lui dire?
Ah! pour qu’elle file en versant des pleurs,
Il faut que dans l’ombre on ait pris ses fleurs.

Ein Lämplein verlosch in meinem Zelt!
Heil sei dem Freudenlicht der Welt!

* * * * * * * * * * * *

And now, the bright sun rises
As if nothing happened during this night!

The spinner spins while pouring tears;
She impresses her charms upon her flax.
The forgotten thread slides through her fingers,
And the songs of birds tremble in her voice.

Her distaff is utterly neglected…
Oh! One is so changed from one day to the next!
What! No more rosy bloom on brow of this dreamer?
What, then, does she have? I believe she has a fear…

It was yesterday upon the bank of her childhood
With only her spindle for defense;
But one evening the child had nothing
When someone in the shadows followed her steps.

No one today sees her laugh anymore.
In those fleeting instants what might one have told her?
Ah! In order that she spin while pouring forth tears
It is necessary to take some flowers.

A little lamp is extinguished in my tent.
Hello, oh joyous light of this world.