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endless metamorphosis of its market values. In this economy, anything
goes if it pays, and no human possibility is ever wiped off the books;
culture becomes an enormous warehouse in which everything is kept
in stock on the chance that someday, somewhere, it might sell. Thus
the halo that the modern poet lets go (or throws off) as obsolete may, by
virtue of its very obsolescence, metaphorphose into an icon, an object
of nostalgic veneration for those who, like the "bad poets" X and Z, are
trying to escape from modernity. But alas, the antimodern artist-or
thinker or politician-finds himself on the same streets, in the same
mire, as the modernist one. This modern environment serves as both a
physical and a spiritual lifeline-a primary source of material and
energy-for both. The differences between the modernist and antimod–
ernist, so far as they are concerned, is that the modernist makes himself
at home here, while the antimodern searches the streets for a way out.
So far as the traffic is concerned, however, there is no difference
between them at all: both alike are hindrances and hazards to the horses
and vehicles whose paths they cross, whose free movement they
impede. Then, too, no matter how closely the antimodernist may cling
to
his aura of spiritual purity, he is bound to lose it, more likely sooner
than later, for the same reason that the modernist lost it: he will be
forced to discard balance and measure and decorum, and to learn the
grace of brusque moves, in order to survive. Once again, however
opposed the modernist and the antimodernist may think they are, in
the mire of the macadam, from the viewpoint of the endlessly moving
traffic, the two are one.
There are further ironies. Baudelaire's poet hurls himself into a
confrontation with the "moving chaos" of the traffic and strives not
only to survive but to assert his dignity in its midst. But his mode of
action seems self-defeating, because it adds yet another unpredictable
variable to an already unstable totality. The horses and their riders, the
vehicles and their drivers, are trying at once to outpace each other and
to avoid crashing into each other.
If,
in the midst of all this, they are
also forced to dodge pedestrians who may at any instant dart out into
the road, their movements will become even more uncertain, and hence
more dangerous than ever. Thus, by contending with the moving
chaos, the individual only aggravates the chaos.
But this very formulation suggests a way that might lead beyond
Baudelaire's irony and out of the moving chaos itself. What if the
multitudes of men and women who are terrorized by modern traffic
could learn to confront it
together?
This will happen just six years after
"Loss of a Halo" (and three years after Baudelaire's death), in the days
of the Commune-in Paris in 1871-and again in Petersburg in 1905
