But what can eternity of damnation matter to someone
who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?
who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?
Charles Baudelaire.
I
am fascinated with the person and poetry of Charles Baudelaire [pictured right and below].
I am sure that says more about me than I would like to know or share.
Expelled
from school, and extremely morbid and tortured, Baudelaire lived a life of
excess and ruined his health by overindulgence in alcohol and addiction to
opium. He attacked bourgeois complacency and one finds a ruthless honesty in
all his writing. His poems are very much about evil and corruption, decadence
and debauchery, depravity and damnation, physical and moral dissolution, and
sin and redemption, the latter, at least in Christian terms, seemingly impossible
in Baudelaire’s view. Still, the ideal can at times be perceived to shine
through the transient, the ugly and even the sordid. Even the infinite can at
times be dimly perceived – a wonderful solace – even if it remains unattainable
except in death with which he appeared to have a special fascination. Take, for
instance, these lines from Baudelaire’s poem ‘The Living Flame’:
Beautiful
Eyes that gleam with mystic light
As
candles lighted at full noon; the sun
Dims not
your flame phantastical and bright.
… and these two quatrains from ‘Hymn to Beauty’:
What matter, if thou comest from the Heavens or Hell,
O Beauty, frightful ghoul, ingenuous and obscure!
So long thine eyes, thy smile, to me the way can tell
Towards that Infinite I love, but never saw.
From God or Satan? Angel, Mermaid, Proserpine?
What matter if thou makest—blithe, voluptuous sprite—
With rhythms, perfumes, visions—O mine only queen!—
The universe less hideous and the hours less trite.
O Beauty, frightful ghoul, ingenuous and obscure!
So long thine eyes, thy smile, to me the way can tell
Towards that Infinite I love, but never saw.
From God or Satan? Angel, Mermaid, Proserpine?
What matter if thou makest—blithe, voluptuous sprite—
With rhythms, perfumes, visions—O mine only queen!—
The universe less hideous and the hours less trite.
It’s
not that I like Baudelaire’s poetry all that much, although one must admit that
although his vision of life is for the most part bleak, he wrote so very well
and with passionate imagination. He could see the beauty even in ugliness and
degradation. No wonder Paul Valéry called
Baudelaire the most important poet of the 19th century. He certainly was the
greatest lyric poet of his age. Having said that, after reading several of his
poems in one sitting you can end up quite depressed. At the very least, you
feel like you need a good, long bath or shower. Take, for instance, these lines
from his poem ‘Spleen’:
I’m like some king in
whose corrupted veins
Flows agèd blood; who
rules a land of rains;
Who, young in years,
is old in all distress …
Then there’s these lines from ‘Heauton Timoroumenos’:
I am the vampire at my own veins,
one of the great lost horde
Doomed for the rest of time, and beyond,
‘to laugh – but smile no more.’
…
and these from ‘Beyond Redemption’:
A
damned soul descending endless stairs
Without banisters, without light,
On the edge of a gulf of which
The odor reveals the humid depth ...
Without banisters, without light,
On the edge of a gulf of which
The odor reveals the humid depth ...
Of
course, there are some quite uplifting, even lyrical, poems. Here’s a quatrain
from ‘Exotic Perfume’:
When, with closed eyes, on a hot afternoon,
The scent of thine ardent breast I inhale,
Celestial vistas my spirit assail;
Caressed by the flames of an endless sun[.]
The scent of thine ardent breast I inhale,
Celestial vistas my spirit assail;
Caressed by the flames of an endless sun[.]
However,
the mood of foreboding, torpor and gloom is never far away. Take, for instance,
this quatrain from ‘Autumn Song’:
The whole of winter enters in my Being--pain,
Hate, honor, labour hard and forced--and dread,
And like the northern sun upon its polar plane
My heart will soon be but a stone, iced and red.
Hate, honor, labour hard and forced--and dread,
And like the northern sun upon its polar plane
My heart will soon be but a stone, iced and red.
Now,
we can learn a lot about mindfulness from reading the poems of Baudelaire. You
see, mindfulness is seeing things-as-they-really-are in a non-reflexive way.
Choiceless awareness, to use a phrase often used by the Indian spiritual
philosopher J. Krishnamurti. Here are some lines from Krishnamurti:
When
you look at a flower, when you just see it, at that moment is there an entity
who sees? Or is there only seeing? Seeing the flower makes you say, ‘How nice
it is! I want it.’ So the ‘I’ comes into being through desire, fear, ambition
[all thought], which follow in the wake of seeing. It is these that create the ‘I’
and the ‘I’ is non-existent without them. (J. Krishnamurti, The Krishnamurti Reader, ed by Mary
Lutyens (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), p 245.)
Mindfulness
is choiceless – that is,
non-judgmental – awareness. You look, you see, you observe. You touch, you
feel. You hear. You smell. You taste. There is no reflexive thought about these
experiences. You, the observer, are one
with the observed. You are one with
the experience and the thing or occurrence experienced … as it happens … as it
unfolds. Awareness without choice,
judgment, condemnation, interpretation, comparison or analysis. The French
philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre [pictured below] astutely understood
Baudelaire:
‘Baudelaire’s fundamental attitude was of a man bending over
himself—bending over his own reflection like Narcissus. With Baudelaire there
was no immediate consciousness which was not pierced by his steely gaze. For the
rest of us it is enough to see the tree or the house; we forget ourselves,
completely absorbed in contemplation of them. Baudelaire was the man who never
forgot himself. He watched himself see; he watched in order to see himself
watch; it was his own consciousness of the tree and the house that he
contemplated. He only saw things through this consciousness …’ (Jean-Paul
Sartre, Baudelaire, trans from the
French by Martin Turnell (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1950), p 22.)
Yes,
Baudelaire sees things through his consciousness of—himself. Here are some more
lines from ‘Heauton Timoroumenos’:
I hear it in my voice - that shrillness,
that poison in my blood!
I am the sinister glass in which
the Fury sees herself!
that poison in my blood!
I am the sinister glass in which
the Fury sees herself!
Baudelaire
is not alone. If we are truly honest with ourselves, most of us bend over
ourselves much of the day. We bend over our own reflection like Narcissus who,
according to the Greek version of the myth, saw
his own reflection in the water and was so entranced by the reflection of
himself that he died at the banks of the lake. Why? Because he was unable to
obtain the object of his desire. You see, the object of his desire was nothing
more than an image. A self-image. It’s the same with us. We have lots of images
of ourselves in our mind but they are just that—images. They are not the person
that we really are. When we experience reality as it unfolds from one moment to
the next we tend to experience and interpret that reality through our various
self-images. The result? An indirect, non-immediate, distorted experience.
Reflexive consciousness as opposed to mindfulness.
So, what exactly can we learn from Baudelaire about
mindfulness? Well, this. Don’t let your ‘watching self’ distort your experience
of life as it unfolds moment by moment. Learn to see things-as-they-really-are
by merely observing them. Resist the temptation to compare, contrast, analyse
and judge. Just enjoy the experience of watching and observing. In other words,
be choicelessly aware. Be ever mindful of the intrusive ‘watching self’. Once
you become aware of its presence, it ceases to be a problem. It disappears. Let
it go. You don’t need it at all.
Practise mindfulness at every moment of the day. Stop
watching yourself watch. Just watch, look and see. That, my friends, is the art and science
of living mindfully.
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