Eyes to the sky but noses ground down
Right coming up soon another year 2020
Visibility is poor it’s not getting any clearer
Skies are overcast the deluge is approaching
The water is rising temperature climbing
We can dream of a Third Summer of Love
But it will be just another Festival of Hate
Ah well fuck it anything to release energy
A force field of unruly total abandon
In time we will have to beat a hasty retreat
Escape and fortify the cave in the cliff-face
Welcome to my world girl you’re in my hut now
Grunt grunt a little louder I can’t hear you
Jump jump a little higher how low can you go
Down on your knees but please don’t pray
Though I would like to be in your thoughts
As much as you pollute my dreams phantasies
There is no salvation up above only submission
But we can strike on thru to the other side
Storm paradise and lay siege to pleasure
It is impossible to overestimate the influence of Charles Baudelaire upon modernity. The entire Symbolism/Decadent movement that so dominated the 19th Century fin-de-siecle in Europe owed its very existence to Baudelaire.
Baudelaire’s importance extends far deeper that the creation of one transitory artistic school however. Although he didn’t invent the concept of dandyism (that honour belongs to Beau Brummel), his example gave it a wider cultural currency that eventually resulted in the carefully constructed persona of the ultimate aesthete and wit, Oscar Wilde. His wanderings around the Parisian streets led to Walter Benjamin formulating a new type of man, the flaneur. The figure of the flaneur recurs frequently in Benjamin’s massive, unfinished magnum opus The Arcades Project. The spirit of the Baudelairean flaneur guided the Surrealists in their impromptu flea-market jaunts and nocturnal adventuring. The Situationist International (see Moving Images) took the flaneur a step further and the central tenets of the SI, Unitary Urbanism and psycho-geography are based upon the needs of this recently evolved city-dweller.
Beyond shaping some of the major artistic and intellectual currents of the 19th and 20th Century, Baudelaire presence can be felt in Punk (with his dried green hair and urgent provocations) and dominated Goth (Dreams of Desire 5 (That Look).
His influential art criticism (and the inspiration he provided to visual artists, see The Sleepers) and his re-definition of the poet as cultural agitator and arbitrator paved the way for Guillaume Apollinaire (In The Zone) and Andre Breton (The Pope of Surrealism).
Baudelaire’s fame largely rests upon his volume of poetry, Le Fleurs Du Mal.First published in 1857 it immediately caused a scandal. Baudelaire’s originality lay not in the versification (which is traditional) but in the explicit, morbid subject matter.
Below is a translation of one of his finest love poems, Le Balcon, inspired by his muse and mistress of twenty years, the ‘Venus Noire’, Jeanne Duval (she was a Creole of Haitian-French heritage).
The Balcony
Mother of memories, mistress of mistresses,
you who are all my pleasures and all my duties,
you will remember the beauty of our caresses,
the sweetness of the hearth, the charm of the evenings,
mother of memories, mistress of mistresses.
On evenings lit by the glowing coal-fire
and evenings on the balcony, veiled with pink mist,
how soft your breast was,
how kind to me was your heart!
Often we said imperishable things
on evenings lit by the glowing coal-fire.
How beautiful the sun is on warm evenings!
How deep is space! How powerful the human heart!
As I leant over you, oh queen of all adored ones,
I thought I was breathing the fragrance of your blood.
How beautiful the sun is on warm evenings!
The night would thicken like a wall around us,
and in the dark my eyes would make out yours,
and I would drink your breath, oh sweetness, oh poison!
And your feet would fall asleep in my brotherly hands.
The night would thicken like a wall around us.
I know how to evoke the moments of happiness,
I relive my past, nestling my head on your lap.
For why would I seek your languid beauties anywhere
except in your dear body and your oh-so-gentle heart?
I know how to evoke the moments of happiness!
Will those sweet words, those perfumes, those infinite kisses
be reborn from a chasm deeper than we may fathom
like suns that rise rejuvenated into the sky
after cleansing themselves in the oceans’ depths?
Oh sweet words, oh perfumes, oh infinite kisses!
Because this is all a game to you
I’m willing to play along this once
Who knows it might be twice
As nice as ever before or since
Yeah wouldn’t that be fair
Wouldn’t that be right tonight
As the weather is heating up
Something fierce something wild
Time to lose that dress stop allow me
Now now isn’t that better I want to
Look at you for a while drink you in
Pour me a measure fill the glass
Let me take a sip savour it slowly
Lets luxuriate in the anticipation
Of our joint venture this enterprise
A combination of hands mouths
The amalgamation of limbs flesh
Are you bored with symmetry
Time to take a different tack
Approach from an acute angle
Map out all the possible routes
Trace the outline of an imagined
Country outside the constricting
Confides of defining destroying
Memories and emotions those
Dead weights of ego and id
I am sick of making sense
Together we can regress
Wouldn’t that be sheer idiot bliss
Reduce everything to the now
Wait serenely for the inevitable
Exhilarating disintegration
Come here you, closer still,
I want you to be the first to know
That gold is all around this town
Beneath the streets & sewers,
Scattered haphazardly here there
Everywhere, enough to dazzle,
Blind the unwary with the glitter,
Shimmering dissolving glamour
When the sun shines again:
Do you have it within to dare?
To serve this magistery right?
To make the mad dream real,
Turn this place into Tenochtitlán,
Render into actuality El Dorado:
Do you possess the strength to will
Into existence all the power & glory
Of this metallic inhuman purity
The cold coalescence of stars?
After you have known, dared,
Willed these forces into being,
Now that you are experienced,
Initiated & illuminated can you
Keep a secret, will you remain silent?
Where have you been?
I lost you for so long.
Are you leaving already?
Must your destination
Always remain a mystery?
Are you to be forever
An unknown quantity?
All these questions
Make life a dull dream
If only I could wake up
I might regress to relive
Our assignation in deep time,
A day and age aeons ago.
The clocks run slow there,
Erasing the crime of identity:
Your hands shaped my body
Smoothing, contouring,
Annealing the raw material
Bringing forth the potential
Defining me in relation to you:
An enigma that makes no concessions.
