BAUDELAIRE AND THE ABYSS
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tiny is different, his poetic destiny is at the opposite pole from
Baudelaire's. Shall we say that a captain who was never ship–
wrecked does not know the art of navigation? that a mariner
who dies in his bed must be depised? Yet he who has been
shipwrecked, who has felt th6 attraction of the disaster,
who
perhaps even provoked
'it,
has so many more things to tell us!
At the very moment that Eternity changes him into himself he
discovers nothingness-the nothingness of precisely this "him–
self"-and of this Eternity. It is well to be able to flee such a
discovery!
I wish it to no one; for what is in question here is
not an external catastrophe but a
mental
shipwreck. What
solace in the quest for the Absolute, the Eternal! Even its
anguish and madness are sweet. We desire this state of peace
(or at least we think we do) , and yet how hungry we are to
know more about the ship wrecked on the reefs, particularly
if
it is one of the beautiful ships of the world, one that floated
in Eternity, a ship named Baudelaire, Titanic, France or Civili–
zation. This is not because we like the absurd; if it appears, if
it conquers, we cry with Whitman:
Is only matter triumphant?
But we cannot endure an Eternity, we do not believe in it, if its
skin is not marred with the scars of battle, its forehead with
the gashes of shock. Mallarme climbs up his tower and we
follow him with stupefaction, but Baudelaire vainly tries to
ascend his tower and turn his back to life: life runs after him,
sits beside him at his desk, wrenches the pen from his hand and
throws him into a revery, a .daze verging on nothingness. This
Here-Below for him is not stupidity, mediocrity, dirt, ugliness
and disorder-sordid passengers of Nothing. It is not even
the creditor or the boy from the newspaper waiting for his copy:
it is all the entangled text of the contingent and the Eternal:
disease, nightmare, remorse, hatred, anger, insomnia, the irre–
trievable, death:
Sur the fond de mes nuits, Dieu de son doigt savant
Dessine un cauchemar multiforme
et
sans treve...
How could he escape the immense army of ghosts he
••
On the background of
my
nights, God with cunning finger,
Without respite draws a many-shaped nishtTTI4Te.
