HEAUTONTIMOROUMENOS DE BAUDELAIRE SELFFLAGELATION

 

I return to Baudelaire, to the pages of that book of poems with many marks and underlinings of words that he did not understand, bought in a bookstore on the Rive gauche sixty years ago. I also did not understand the message of this great poet. You should never read Baudelaire as an old man when you are twenty years old and do not know the meaning of our existence; the disappointments, the betrayals, the stab wounds, the failures, the collapse of everything, our beliefs and ideologies fell apart, the disappointments. The French vate prophesies it in advance in his poem Heautontimoroumenos (he who harms himself), every day we flagellate ourselves with the daily ration of poison that the sewers of information pour through their cybernetic maw. The Flowers of Evil 1834 was a book banned for being immoral, but in my opinion there has not been another more moral collection of poems in French literature since Villon. It stages the struggle of good against evil. now they are the litanies of Satan, now he puts us in a song to Jesus. It is a divine symphony and at the same time a strident cacophony. Baudelaire's verses sometimes sting like nettles, other times they are balm. Voluptuous aromas of benzoin and Indian hemp. Eutrapelia and disorder. An apology for the charms of women and the disgusting things of Pigalle's brothels. Always quintessences. Threshold was constantly mentioned in his articles and with the help of Sartre he became a reference for the existentialist movement of the Sixties, the prodigious decade. More than half a century has passed since I acquired that book when I lived in Paris and dreamed of being a writer! His pages are an abacus of nostalgia for me.

 

Wednesday, February 7, 2024