Modern Literature and Esotericism: Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Poe & others to fancy

Goya's Hasta su Abuelo, photographed with great candor and modesty by A/Z at the MNBA, Delacroix's Chasse aux lions (esquisse) & Odilon Redon autoportrait, photographed out of his own proper monies by A/Z at the Orsay; 

Paul Feyerabend (person of no small note and consequence) interviewed by Rüdiger Safranski (1993);

Le Dieu de Baudelaire (Pierre Emmanuel, Stanislas Fumet, Max Pol Fouchet et Max Milne/France Culture, 1967);

Françoise Bonardel: La parole insurgée d'Antonin Artaud (Cercle Aristote/Youtube 2017); 

Victor Hugo pour Henri Guillemin [the video isn't available at Youtube anymore];

Paracelse ("La vie des grands mystiques", Dominique Debray/Youtube, émission française de 1984 [?]);

Jeanne d'Arc la Gauchiste (Pacôme Thiellement/Blast); 

Cathares: Le vraie raison derrière leur extermination (Pacôme Thiellement/Bast);

Giacinto Scelsi's Four illustrations: IV, Krishna-Avatara;

Giacinto Scelsi's Okanagon (1968, Youtube);  

Code Morel & One Hundred Forty Nine Inches [I took this video out of Youtube, because I wanted to change it];

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Vestibule &/or Foundation (with the whole of it): 

"Even a farting becomes important if only it is multiplied by a few hundreds."

Silvanus P. Thompson (Calculus Made Easy)

"... for that wit and judgement in this world go together... so are farting and hickuping, say I."

"How it came to pass, that our men of least wit are reported to be men of most judgement?"

Tristram Shandy

"... ce qui fait que des géomètres ne sont pas fins, c'est qu'ils ne voient pas ce qui est devant eux et qu'étant accoutumés aux principes nets et grossiers de géométrie, et à ne raisonner qu'après avoir bien vu et manié leurs principes, ils se perdent dans les choses de finesse où les principes ne se laissent pas ainsi manier... Les géomètres qui ne sont que géomètres ont donc l'esprit droit, mais pourvu qu'on leurs explique bien toutes choses par définition et principes; autrement ils sont faux et insupportables..."

Pascal (Différence entre l'esprit de géométrie et l'esprit de finesse)

"I mean, we didn't go to church or anything, but Patti Smith would read stuff from the Bible. People talk about Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine, but to me she was always Christian... I mean, I love the rituals of Catholicism. I hate the fucking politics, and the pope and shit, but the rituals of it are magic. I mean, the mass is a magic ritual for God's sake, it's a transubstantiation, and the stations of the cross—I mean a crown of thorns? Getting whipped? It's punk rock. I remember saying that on the Ton Snyder show one night and he said, 'Some people would—not me, but some people might think that's a blasphemous statement...'"

Jim Carroll (Please Kill Me)

"En 1559, l'Inquisition met à l'Index de nombreux livres spirituels et des romans de chevalerie en castillan dont sa mère lui avait transmis le goût..."

Sylvia Leclercq

"Encore inconnu, sauf de quelques poètes très symbolistes, il s'appelle Stéphane..."
Sophie Chauveau (Manet Le secret)
"Or c'est un homme de foi, Mallarmé. Frigide, mais de foi."
Dan (Les Samouraïs)

"... la poesia es, por naturaleza, extemporánea..."

Octavio Paz (Las trampas de la fé)

"On ne peut pas dire que le sentiment religieux soutenait la figuration dans la peinture ancienne: au contraire il rendait possible une libération des Figures, un surgissement des Figures hors de toute figuration [about El Greco and others]."

Deleuze (Logique de la sensation)

"...  et je dirai même que leur grandeur poétique, leur efficacité concrète sur nous, vient de ce qu'elles sont métaphysiques, et que leur profondeur spirituelle est inséparable de l'harmonie formelle et extérieure du tableau."
"... la vraie poésie est métaphysique... et c'est même, dirai-je, sa portée métaphysique, son degré d'efficacité métaphysique qui en fait tout le véritable prix."
A. Artaud

"L'art, cependant, devrait permettre de regarder au-delà des choses et le visible n'être que le support de l'invisible, l'émanation du secret  divin. Clément d'Alexandrie pensait que le diable instillait lui-même  la beauté dans les sculptures païennes..."

Anselm Kiefer (L'art survivra à ses ruines)

"... nous nous différencions de nos aînés, qui, même fréquentant les meilleurs poëtes de leur génération avaient une peur folle d'être traités par la critique de 'peintres littéraires'... La critique française à nos débuts, sauf rares exceptions, leur verdict était celui-ci: 'Ce ne sont pas de peintres mais des poëtes ratés', quand nous n'étions pas aimablement conseillés d'aller nous faire soigner. Notre intérêt proclamé pour l'art des fous et des médiums n'était pas fait pour arranger les choses!"

André Masson (A Joan Mirò pour son anniversaire/Écrits, anthologie établie par Françoise Levaillant)

"L'important dans ce propos de Matisse c'est qu'à l'origine ce tableau 'd'après nature' passe à un second mouvement de l'esprit, vire vers la métaphore. Disons la poésie, tout court."

André Masson (Conversations avec Henri Matisse/Écrits, anthologie établie par Françoise Levaillant) 

"Avec Titien... Delacroix est conscient... l'exigence de concevoir l'homme et les objets de référence comme points de condensation des forces mouvantes du Cosmos. Le 'détail historique', plaie de la peinture ancienne, est comme aboli par une vision panique. Le résultat fait penser à une sorte d'impressionnisme grandiose. Un impressionnisme magique."

André Masson (Le peintre et la culture/Écrits, anthologie établie par Françoise Levaillant)

"Il y  avait un sens de l'espace neuf et imprévu dans l'oeuvre de Redon, des rapports de couleurs intéressants, une fantaisie biologique des plus personnelles. Nous pourrions au moins reconnaître ces mérites."

André Masson (Odilon Redon/Écrits, anthologie établie par Françoise Levaillant) 

"Je disais un jour à Pierre Klossowski: votre oeuvre graphique est inclassable — comme celle de Füssli — elle ne peut se réclamer d'aucun pavillon. Le rapport est d'abord de l'ordre des profondeurs, chez tous deux, visionnaires, la pensée est à l'origine de l'image — des phantasmes... Lumière spectrale et irradiante."

André Masson (Pierre Klossowski/Écrits, anthologie établie par Françoise Levaillant) 

"La littérature est-elle ce pardon demandé pour la désacralisation, d'autres diraient religieusement la sécularisation d'une sainte révélation?"

"... et qui niera que la littérature reste un reste de religion, un lien et un relais de sacro-sainteté dans une société sans Dieu?"

Jacques Derrida (Donner la mort)

"Pour y arriver, il faudrait... quoi? Personne ne sait, pas même moi. Des missionnaires? Des croyants? Des éducateurs? Des hommes et des femmes qui fondent des espaces de lecture et d'écriture?"

"Le christianisme s'achevant en religion esthétique? Au contraire..."

Sylvia Leclercq

"Dans le cas des figures, au contraire, le pré-philosophique montre que le plan d'immanence lui-même  n'avait pas pour destination inévitable une création de concept ou une formation philosophique, mais pouvait se déployer dans des sagesses et des religions suivant une bifurcation qui conjurait d'avance la philosophie du point de vue de sa possibilité même."

Deleuze & Guattari (Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?)

"What's all this talk about Ulysses? Finnegans Wake is the important book."

Nora Barnacle J.

"Ce n’est qu’après le temps de Planck de 10−43 sec que les lois de la physique commencèrent à se créer. Les quatre forces fondamentales (éléctromagnetisme, force faible, force forte, gravitation) se  'condensèrent' après 10−12 sec. Un milliard d’années après surgirent les galaxies, et ensuite les éléments chimiques lourds tel que le fer. Notre terre naquit il y a seulement 4,6 milliards d’années, suivie par les protistes 800 millions d’années plus tard. Malgré le succès dû à sa puissance explicatrice et prédicative des phénomènes de la nature inanimée, la physique ne concerne qu’un segment limité de la réalité. L’ontologie de la physique ne pourrait se libérer de celle des mathématiques, c’est-à-dire d’une ontologie de nature parfaitement spirituelle. Ce fait prend une portée dramatique en particulier au moment planckien de la naissance des lois de la physique: c’est un processus qui ne peut exister qu’au sein de la réalité des mathématiques, non humaines, mais bien 'divines', si l’on y tient. Le lieu de naissance des lois de la physique touche à une réalité non physique. Ce type de recours inevitable à la base mathématique est d’ailleurs une des obstructions les plus dures à la réduction de l’activité intelligente de l’esprit humain aux purs processus neuronaux de la substance cérébrale dont les neuro-scientifiques voudraient nous persuader. En particulier, ce plaidoyer est une mise en relief des autres strates de la réalité: de la biologie et de la culture, de la logique du vivant et surtout de la dynamique mentale qui nous élèvent au-dessus de la matière animée ou non. Le succès de la physique s’avère être le succès de son immersion fondamentale au sein de la réalité spirituelle des mathématiques."

"Le Big Bang biologique créa des lois de l’évolution biologique dont la logique est loin d’être comprise. Elles semblent se situer loin au-delà des lois de la physique, qui elle ne sait rien de la vie, de sa dynamique selective, des jeux chaotiques et catastrophiques dont la téléologie de la survie échappe à la causalité, même brisée par les lois de la mécanique quantique, et dont l’organisation circulaire requiert des mathématiques fort différentes de celles de la physique, par exemple les fractales, les réseaux neuronaux, la théorie du chaos, des catastrophes, des automates cellulaires, ou alors des ensembles non bien fondés. Mais encore, comme en physique, la réalité biologique ne pourrait fonctionner comme base réductrice pour la réalité spirituelle, car toute description précise de ses phénomènes recourt aux mathématiques et aucune mathématique ne pourrait être expliquée en termes purement biologiques. C’est ici un point bien délicat qui semble échapper à quelques représentants des sciences cognitives: l’analyse cognitive reste totalement impuissante si l’on en exclut la contribution des mathématiques dont elle fait usage."

Guerino Mazzola (La vérité du beau dans la musique) 

"Mais l'expérience est là qui désigne en Dieu le moyen d'échapper à ce délire qu'atteint rarement l'amour de Dieu, qui désigne en Dieu le 'Bon Dieu', le garant de l'ordre social et de la vie discontinue. Ce qu'atteint au sommet l'amour de Dieu est en vérité la mort de Dieu. Mais nous ne pouvons de ce côté rien connaître, sinon la limite de la connaissance. Cela ne signifie pas que l'expérience de l'amour de Dieu ne nous donne pas les indications les plus vraies. Nous ne devons pas nous étonner que les données théoriques ne faussent pas l'expérience possible. La recherche est toujours celle de la continuité, qu'atteint l'état theopathique. Jamais les voies de cette recherche ne sont droites."

Georges Bataille ("La Béauté", L'Érotisme)

"Quoi qu'il en soit (et je reconnais volontiers que sur un point assez obscur, il est possible d'hésiter), il apparaît qu'au moins en partie Hegel tira de ses connaissances théologiques, de même que de la connaissance de maître Eckart et de Jacob Noehme, le mouvement de dialectique qui lui est propre. Mais si j'ai parlé maintenant de Hegel, ce n'est pas avec l'intention d'insister sur la valeur de sa philosophie."

"Il me semble même que la réaction contre cet aspect glacé de la philosophie caractérise la philosophie moderne dans son ensemble, mettons, sans parler de Kierkegaard, de Nietzsche à Heidegger. Naturellement la philosophie, me semble-t-il, est profondément malade. Elle est inconciliable avec une possibilité bohême, une possibilité débraillée de la pensée, que je représente peut-être aux yeux de certains d'entre vous."

"Si nous suivons la voie indiquée par le christianisme, il est vrai, nous pouvons non seulement sortir de la solitude, mais accéder à une sorte d'équilibre, qui échappe au déséquilibre premier, dont je pars, qui nous empêche de concilier la discipline et le travail avec l'expérience de l'extrême."

Georges Bataille ("La Sainteté", L'Érotisme)

"On peut dire sans doute de la critique protestante des oeuvres saintes qu'elle abandonna le monde aux oeuvres profanes, que l'exigence de la pureté divine ne sut qu'exiler le divin, et achever d'en séparer l'homme. On peut dire enfin qu'à partir de là, la chose a dominé l'homme, dans la mesure où il vécut pour l'entreprise et de moins en moins dans le temps présent. Mais la domination de la chose n'est jamais entière, et n'est au sens profond qu'une comédie: elle n'abuse jamais qu'à moitié tandis que, dans l'obscurité propice, une vérité nouvelle tourne à l'orage."

"... la science limite la conscience aux objets, elle ne mène pas à la conscience de soi (elle ne peut connaître le sujet qu'en le prenant pour un objet, pour une chose); mais elle contribue à l'éveil en habituant à la précision et en décevant: car elle admet elle-même ses limites, elle avoue l'impuissance où elle est de parvenir à la conscience de soi."

Georges Bataille (La Part maudite)

"Les normes mêmes de la démonologie non seulement décrivent l'existence d'un point de vue différent de celui de la croyance en général; elles forment de surcroît une méthode, telle qu'elle est conçue à l'origine par les néo-platoniciens, en dernier lieu par l'herméneutique scolastique — prônant une traduction spectaculaire des puissances avec lesquelles on compose — en fin de compte analysant jusqu'aux procédures de la pensée même —, et qui concourt, contre toute 'pathogénie' critique, à figurer plutôt une 'pathophanie': soit à considérer en nous l'insidieuse présence des esprits, mais aussi toute façon de penser et de sentir comme une expression indissociable de leur dissimulation. De là vient, dirai-je à la suite de Varron, le caractère théâtrique de la théologie, dont le théâtre occidental, strindbergien et shakespearien, à son tour dérive indirectement."

"Parce que l'affabulation, dans La Vocation suspendue, est en réalité plus autobiographique que l'autobiographie n'eût semblé le permettre, même si en fin de compte cette affabulation se retourne contre elle-même — et de fait aujourd'hui à vos yeux, je me comporterais comme un athée, quoique je ne cache point mon non-athéisme. Kierkegaard indique bien que tous les chrétiens ne peuvent que se comporter comme des athées. D'avoir abandonné l'habit ne me rend pas moins sensibles aux motifs particuliers dont s'est servi mon propre mouvement ver la foi. Bien au contraire — et ainsi que, lors de mon expérience conventuelle, je découvris que de fuir les 'ténèbre'au-dehors, celles-ci n'en paraissaient que plus présentes à l'esprit sou la persécution des âmes où le Vatican menait une parti de l'Eglise, — de même, j'ai voulu prouver à l'inverse, dans le style de cette confession, que la réduction à l'état laïc fasait encore dépendre cet état d'une conception religieuse de la vie profane."

Pierre Klossowski (entretiens avec Jean-Maurice Monnoyer)

"C'est là ce dont témoignent les forces supra-historiques par excellence, l'art et la religion qui, détournant le regard du devenir, le portent sur tout ce qui confère à l'existence le caractère de éternel et d'une signification identique. La science, qui ne voit nulle part de l'éternel ni de l'existant, mais rien que du devenu, de l'historique, ne peut que détester ces forces éternisantes..."

"La Gaya Scienza, fruit de la plus grande solitude imaginable, parle essentiellement à des esprits qui, eux, sauront retrouver cette solitude, donc à ces natures qu'un fond de noblesse dispose à refuser autant la distraction à tout prix que le travail à tout prix, donc à supporter l'ennui: nous touchons là aux ressources de la solitude, lesquelles, en dépit de son extrême isolement, lui donnaient le sentiment d'être toujours 'entre nous'... Quant aux états d'élévation, il lui semble, dit-il, que la plupart des gens ne croient guère à la réalité de pareils états d'âme, excepté ceux qui connaissent par expérience un état d'elévation de longue durée."

"... la doctrine de l'éternel retour se conçoit encore une fois comme un simulacre de doctrine dont le caractère parodique même rend compte de l'hilarité comme attribut de l'existence se suffisant à elle-même lorsque le rire éclate au fond de l'entière vérité, soit que la vérité explose dans le rire des dieux, soit que les dieux eux-mêmes meurent de fou rire..." 

"... car si les dieux meurent de ce rire, c'est aussi de ce rire qui éclate du fond de l'entière vérité que les dieux renaissent."

''Zarathoutra, dès lors qu'il a voulu l'éternel retour de toutes choses, a d'avance choisi de voir tourner en dérision sa propre doctrine... Quel autre sens, si ce n'est celui-là, attribuerait-on à l'extraordinaire parodie de la Cène où le meurtrier de Dieu est aussi celui qui offre le calice à l'âne — figure sacrilège du Dieu chrétien du temps de la réaction païenne, mais plus spécifiquement animal sacré des mystères antiques, l'âne d'or de l'initiation isiaque, animal digne par son infatigable Ia (ita est!) — son infatigable oui donné au retour de toutes choses — digne de représenter la longanimité divine, digne donc aussi d'incarner une antique divinité, Dionysos, le dieu de la vigne, ressuscité dans l'ivresse générale. Et en effet, comme Voyageur le déclare à Zarathoustra: la mort, chez les dieux, n'est jamais qu'un préjugé."

Pierre Klossowski (Un si funeste désir)

"Indem nämlich die Vielheit unverbundener Einzeltriebe sich in zwei einander gleichsam gegenüber stehende Wesenheiten zerspaltet, von denen die Eine herrscht, die Andere dient, — wird es dem Menschen ermöglicht, zu sich selber nicht nur wie zu einem anderen, sondern auch wie zu einem höhern Wesen zu empfinden. Indem er einen Theil seiner selbst sich selber zum Opfer bringt, ist er einer religiösen Exaltation nahe gekommen. In den Erschütterungen seines Geistes, in denen er das heroische Ideal eigener Preisgebung und Hingebung zu verwirklichen wähnt, bringt er an sich selbst einen religiösen Affect zum Ausbruch." 

"Von allen grossen Geistesanlagen Nietzsches gibt es keine, die tiefer und unerbittlicher mit seinem geistigen Gesammtorganismus verbunden gewesen wäre, als sein religiöses Genie. Zu einer anderen Zeit, in einer andern Culturperiode würde dasselbe diesem Predigerssohn sicherlich nicht gestattet haben, zum Denker zu werden. Unter den Einflüssen unserer Zeit erhielt jedoch sein religiöser Geist die Richtung aufs Erkennen und vermochte dasjenige, wonach es ihn instinctiv am drängendsten verlangte, wie nach dem natürlichen Ausdruck seiner Gesundheit, nur in krankhafter Weise zu befriedigen, — das heisst, er vermochte es nur vermittelst einer Rückbeziehung auf sich selbst anstatt auf eine ihn mit umfassende, ausser ihm liegende Lebensmacht."

"So erreichte er das gerade Gegentheil des Angestrebten: nicht eine höhere Einheit seines Wesens, sondern dessen innerste Zweitheilung, nicht den Zusammenschluss aller Regungen und Triebe zu einem einheitlichen Individuum, sondern ihre Spaltung zum »Dividuum«. Es war immerhin eine Gesundheit erreicht, — doch mit den Mitteln der Krankheit; eine wirkliche Anbetung, doch mit den Mitteln der Täuschung; eine wirkliche Selbstbehauptung und Selbsterhebung, doch mit den Mitteln der Selbstverwundung."

Lous Salomé

"Von allem Wunderbaren — so erzählte mir Paracelsus — was ich je sah und hörte, ist Eins das Erstaunlichste, und ich muß nicht nur ein muthiges Herz wie ein Löwe, sondern auch die unschuldige Geduld eines Lammes dazu haben, es gerade so zu berichten, wie es sich zugetragen hat. Denn gesetzt, es wäre das Blendwerk eines mir übel wollenden Geistes gewesen, so gab es nie für mich eine ärgere Versuchung: und sprach das, was mir erschien, die Wahrheit..."

Nietzsche (Nachgelassene Fragmente, 1881)

"Sie unterrichtet weiter darüber, was unter diesen Massen eigentlich zu denken ist. Von keiner Klasse, von keinem irgendwie strukturierten Kollektivum kann die Rede sein. Es handelt sich um nichts anderes als um die amorphe Menge der Passanten, um Straßenpublikum... Dieser Menge eine Seele zu leihen, ist das eigenste Anliegen des Flaneurs. Die Begegnungen mit ihr sind ihm das Erlebnis, das er unermüdlich zum Besten gibt. Au. Baudelaires Werk sind gewisse Reflexe dieser Illusion nicht hinwegzudenken."

Walter Benjamin (Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire)

"Salvo che, in questa ultima epifania del modo simbolico, il testo come simbolo non viene piú letto per cercare una verità che stia altrove: la verità sta nel gioco stesso della decostruzione, nel riconoscere il testo come tessuto di differenze e di varchi. 'Ma le cose stanno cosí, che anche il bianco, gli spazi vuoti nel rotolo della Torah sono costituiti di lettere, solo che noi non siamo capaci di leggerle allo stesso modo che leggiamo il nero. Ma nell'età messianica Dio rivelerà anche le parti bianche della Torah, quelle lettere che per noi, ora, sono diventate invisibili, ed è questo che s'intende quando si parla della nuova Torah' [rabbi Lewi Yishaq/Scholem]... Il riconoscimento lacaniano dell'ordine simbolico come catena significante, ispirando le nuove pratiche di decostruzione e di deriva, ha portato le piú recenti ermeneutiche secolari a riscrivere di continuo, in ogni lettura, la Nuova Torah."

Umberto Eco (Semiotica e filosofia del lenguaggio)

"Le devoir et la tâche d'un écrivain sont ceux d'un traducteur."

Marcel Proust (le narrateur, Le Temps retrouvé)

"Cette beauté nouvelle et terrible d'une maison, cette beauté nouvelle et mixte d'un visage de femme, voilà ce que Dostoïevski a apporté d'unique au monde, et les rapprochements que des critiques littéraires peuvent faire entre lui et Gogol, ou entre lui et Paul de Kock, n'ont aucun intérêt, étant extérieurs à cette beauté secrète... Il est arrivé que Mme de Sévigné, comme Elstir, comme Dostoïevski, au lieu de présenter les choses dans l'ordre logique, c'est-à-dire en commençant par la cause, nous montre d'abord l'effet, l'illusion qui nous frappe. C'est ainsi que Dostoïevski présente ses personnages. Leurs actions nous apparaissent aussi trompeuses que ces effets d'Elstir où la mer a l'air d'être dans le ciel."

Marcel Proust (le narrateur, La Prisonnière)

"Das Schöne in seinem Verhältnis zur Natur kann als das bestimmt werden, was wesenhaft sich selbst gleich nur unter der Verhüllung bleibt. Die correspondances geben Auskunft darüber, was unter solcher Verhüllung zu denken sei. Man darf diese letztere, mit einer freilich gewagten Abbreviatur als das Abbildende am Kunstwerk ansprechen. Die correspondances stellen die Instanz dar, vor der der Gegenstand der Kunst als ein treulich abzubildender, dadurch allerdings durch und durch aporetischer, vorgefunden wird."

Walter Benjamin (Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire)

"... analysis is itself a form in its own right, like translation, criticism and commentary, as one of those media through which the very work unfolds. Works need analysis for their true content to be revealed... also of the momentum which pushes beyond the individual work... hidden relationships... analysis has not yet really begun to grapple with its own problems..."

Adorno ("On the Problems of Music Analysis", translated by Max Paddison)

"Or,  la littérature, nous le savons, existe précisément en tant qu'effort de dire ce que le langage ordinaire ne dit pas et ne peut pas dire. Pour cette raison, la critique (la meilleure) tend toujours à devenir elle-même littérature: on ne peut parler de ce que fait la littérature qu'en faisant de la littérature."

Tzvetan Todorov (Introduction à la littérature fantastique)

"... tu purpurejas uma palavra..."

Haroldo de Campos (A Palavra Vermelha de Hoelderlin)

"This very faculty for amalgamation is a part of their [major poets] genius, and it is, in a way, a sort of modesty, a sort of unselfishness. They have not wished for property..."

"We might come to believe that the thing that matters in art is a sort of energy, something more or less like electricity or radioactivity, a force transfusing, welding, and unifying. A force rather like water when it spurts up through  very  bright sand and sets in swift motion."

Ezra Pound (The Serious Artist)

"The vorticist maintains that the 'organising' or creative-inventive faculty is the thing that matters." 

Ezra Pound (Affirmations)

"China has produced just as many bad poets as England, just as many dull and plodding moralizers, just as many flaccid and over-ornate versifiers. By fairly general consent, their greatest poet is Rihaku or 'Li Po,' who flourished in the eighth century A.D. He was the head of the court office of poetry, and a great 'compiler.' But this last title must not mislead you. In China a 'compiler' is a very different person from a commentator. A compiler does not merely gather together, his chief honour consists in weeding out, and even in revising."

Ezra Pound (Chinese Poetry)

"Ou você quer fazer uma coisa bem-feitinha pra ser lançada com salgadinhos e uísque suspeito numa  tarde amena na Cultura, com todo mundo conhecido fazendo a maior festa? Eu acho que não."

Caio Fernando Abreu (carta a José Márcio Penido/Zézim)

"Na verdade, o que diferencia o artista moderno do acadêmico é, simplesmente, o fato de ele ser ou não inofensivo."

Rogério Sganzerla (Encontros/Roberta Canuto Org.)
"Goethe und Leopardi solche Erscheinungen sind. Hinter ihnen pflügen die reinen Philologen-Gelehrten nach."
Nietzsche (Nachgelassene Fragmente Frühling–Sommer 1875)

"A life passed among pictures makes not a painter."

"If Art be rare today, it was seldom heretofore.

It is false, this teaching of decay."

James Whistler

"Pour le Chinois, ou son émule japonais — pour Mou-ki comme pour Sesshû — il s'agit d'une manière d'exister — au sens profond — et non comme pour nous d'une manière de faire."

André Masson (Une peinture de l'essentiel/Écrits, anthologie établie par Françoise Levaillant)

"Je fermai donc le journal des Goncourt. Prestige de la littérature!"

"... ils n'avaient pas, ou plus, de génie, c'est-à-dire d'instinct."

Marcel Proust (le narrateur, Le Temps retrouvé)

"... somebody here said of me 'They call him a poet. He appears to be interested chiefly in mattresses.'"

Herr Satan/Dear Cuckold (letter to Miss Weaver, June 24, 1921)

"Numa época de superespecialização,  em que os críticos literários tendem, cada vez mais, a emitir seus atos de inteligência para outros críticos-receptores, em circuito fechado, os poetas se tornaram críticos, eles próprios. E nesse sentido, a melhor crítica de poesia que se fez no século XX não foi feita por críticos, mas por poetas..."

Augusto de Campos (Da Antiode à Antilira)

"J'ai, quant à moi, si peu de goût pour le monde vivant, que, pareil à ces femmes sensibles et désoeuvrées qui envoient, dit-on, par la poste leurs confidences à des amis imaginaires, volontiers je n'écrirais que pour les morts."

Charles Baudelaire (Les Paradis Artificiels)

"I came to London with £3 knowing no one... I wanted to meet certain  men whose work I admired. I have done this... Besides knowing living artists I have come in touch with the tradition of the dead."

"I was resolved that... I would know what part of poetry was 'indestructible,' what part could not be lost by translation, and,—scarcely  less important what effects were obtainable in one language only and were utterly incapable of being translated. In this search I learned more or less of nine foreign languages, I read Oriental stuff in translations, I fought every University regulation and every professor who tried to make me learn anything except this, or who bothered me with 'requirements for degrees.'"

Ezra Pound (How I Began)

"The only really vicious criticism is the  academic criticism of those who make the grand abnegation, who refuse to say what they  think, if they do think, and who quote accepted opinion; these men are the vermin, their treachery to the great work of the  past is as great as that of the false artist to the present... Every critic should give indication of the sources and limits of his knowledge. The criticism of English poetry  by men who knew no language but English, or who knew little but English and school-classics, has been a marasmus."

"The stupid or provincial judgment of art bases itself on the  belief that great art must be lieke the art that it has been reared to respect."

Ezra Pound (The Serious Artist)

"... la indiferencia. Es una censura más efectiva que la del índice eclesiástico."
Octavio Paz (Las trampas de la fé)

"The people, high and low alike, read books, but they  do not strictly observe their conduct; both noble and humble say 'yes,' but their intentions and behaviour are unlike their words... Various high government officials occupy offices despite the fact that they are, as it were, living corpses, yet their greediness is utterly enormous; they receive their stipends for nothing and disgrace their offices."

Kukai (The Precious Key to the Secret Treasury, Yoshito Hakeda's translation)

"When people do not stand in awe of the awesome then great terror will soon come to pass."

Daodejing/72 (Edmund Ryden's translation)

"Ja, man giebt zu, Philister zu sein, aber Barbar! Um keinen Preis. Der arme Hölderlin hat leider nicht so fein unterscheiden können. Wenn man freilich bei dem Worte Barbarei an den Gegensatz der Civilisation und vielleicht gar an Seeräuberei und Menschenfresser denkt, so ist jene Unterscheidung mit Recht gemacht: aber ersichtlich will der Aesthetiker uns sagen: man kann Philister sein und doch Kulturmensch — darin liegt der Humor, der dem armen Hölderlin fehlte, an dessen Mangel er zu Grunde ging." 

Nietzsche (David Strauss)

"Die Barbaren um uns her zerreissen unsre besten Kräfte, ehe sie zur Bildung kommen können, und nur die feste tiefe Einsicht dieses Schicksals kann uns retten, dass wir wenigstens nicht in Unwürdigkeit vergehen. Wir müssen das Treffliche aufsuchen, zusammenhalten mit ihm, so viel wir können, uns im Gefühle desselben stärken und heilen und so Kraft gewinnen; das Rohe, Schiefe, Ungestalte nicht nur im Schmerz, sondern als das, was es ist, was seinen Character, seinen eigenthümlichen Mangel ausmacht, zu erkennen."

Hölderlin (as quoted by Nietzsche in his Nachgelassene Fragmente, 1873)

************************************************************

Main Hall (upon the continent, to hit upon):

The following text is an excerpt from my thesis on the Luso-Brazilian Encounters of the Sixteenth-Century (later published as a book by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), which deals too manifestly, besides the misleading (in times of 5G!) stringency of the topic, but still in the accredited confined context (closely pent up in the social chimney corner), with many all heart munificent issues related to écriture, fictional writing & "mystical-" or esoteric-literary traditions typical of the (post-tremendous-bigbang) Renaissance (I'm positive). 

The excerpt extrapolates some of the thesis main arguments to a more contemporary panorama. It puzzled very much the national epic committee (as I call it), from which a hereafter Heideggerian radical feminist (person of great deportment, not to any man's rule), in the first transport of a presumed honest impatience, had already frantically dropped (she deserted Dalhousie itself in the same flair, not unfitly), calling (in that soft and irresistible piano of a voice) the whole matter "unintelligible" (which otherwise was preposterously unfair, which the following section puts beyond all possibility of doubt). Ouch! As world-widely known (and now made public, which I own), what enabled the miraculous defense and approval of the rumbling (together with all its rights, members, and appurtenances), was mad Ian Hacking's unequivocal & providential support, although he himself had already also many finally in particular unexpurgated qualms with the fateful excerpt (I sustained), considered by him (celebrated Canadian inheritor of Feyerabend's ominous legacy), a "rapid tour" (a blurb, not to say an obnoxious FART, perhaps too literally in the face of the academy—royalties & signories, advowson, rectory & parsonage included) on the "inevitable masters" (hateful literary nuisances too much flattered by persistent no matter how pestered packs)—which was probably just as totally unfair and freaked-out as the aforesaid lady's otherwise thereof specified seizure and his own chronicled hostile reactive report on Lyotard's La condition postmoderne ("I was wrong: of course the book needed to be published in English," Why is There Philosophy of Mathematics at all, p. 259).

In spite of all gentlemen reviewers in Great Britain (& the Continent), my excerpt has been published in the Fairleigh Dickinson's book, but in a somewhat more "resumed" version. Part of it has also been published (after another set of misadventures and cross accidents, scrapes & difficulties) in a paper I for good and all wrote now also in Portuguese, for the Brazilian Association of Comparative Literature/ABRALIC (there is such a body still in the world). But who other than the malignant spirit sang Te Deum?

The Fateful Excerpt (persuasion hung upon his lips):

Indeed, many authors have as well remarked that literature is a modern enterprise in which are reenacted several of the strange elements typical of certain discourses of the sixteenth century. This is a common idea to French literary criticism of the twentieth century... Michel Foucault asserted the existence of a decisive similarity between modern literature and a sixteenth-century conception of language in terms of analogical signs, both being opposed to an understanding of language in terms of conventional and representational signs (Les mots et les choses: 58-59). In his monumental study of the theory of the four senses of the Scripture, Henry de Lubac gives a quotation from Charles Baudelaire in order to explain the sense of Scotus Eriugena’s symbolical understanding of the world (Éxegèse Médiévale: 124). And in a famous essay about Les Chants de Maldoror of Isidore Lucien Ducasse, the nineteenth-century French poet born in South America (Uruguay), the celebrated literary critic Maurice Blanchot connected pictorial elements in literature to domains traditionally put also under the competency of religion and myth. He says that the Ducasse’s imagination “ne semble passer par les livres que pour rejoindre les grandes constellations dont les oeuvres gardent l’influence, faisceaux d’imagination impersonnelle que nul volume d’auteur ne peut immobiliser ni confisquer à son profit... les rêves vagues des religions et des mythologies sans mémoire” (Lautréamont et Sade: 261).

At least in the case of the French symbolists, or immediately previous authors, such as Charles Baudelaire, Stephanie Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud, there is considerable evidence of their concern, for instance, with works and figures of the revival of esotericism in the Europe of the end of the nineteenth century, what would historically connect them with early-modern traditions (Mercier, Les Sources Ésotériques et Occultes de la Poésie Symboliste: 26, 29-30, 123-45, 156-172; Surette, The Birth of Modernism: 79; Petitfils, Rimbaud: 114-19). In the English literature of around the same period, the two most outstanding examples who actually outshine the French symbolists in terms of a commitment to mysticism and esotericism are Willian Blake and the Irish William Butler Yeats. What is at issue here is not, however, the direct involvement of these authors with esotericism and mysticism per se, but how they concretely recreated in their literary practices strategies that were typical of esoteric and mystical traditions. An engagement with esotericism, and especially with the manifestation of the so-called psychic phenomena, was peculiar not only to literary but to scientific figures of the period as well: John Tyndall, William Fletcher Barrett, Willian Crookes, for instance. But the physicist Barrett eventually concluded that psychic phenomena demanded a kind of “sympathetic” conditions that made them unsuitable for physical investigation (Noakes, "The Bridge which is between Physical and Psychical Research...": 420, 450-55). It is remarkable, on the other hand, that in the concrete process of writing of certain modern literary authors, one finds an employment of discursive techniques through which one is believed to be made visionary in a genuine sense, and which directly recalls much older traditions. According to Alain Mercier, in Rimbaud’s Illuminations, for instance, “le principe d’analogie y est appliqué par une imagination libérée jusqu’à romper les cadres habituels du langage… l’écriture des Illuminations rappelle, par-là, celle du Zohar — L’univers des correspondances entrevu par Baudelaire est conçu ici de manière radicale et absolue” (Mercier: 172).

In an author such as Edgar Allan Poe, who also influenced both Baudelaire and Mallarmé, one finds a theory about poetry that helps one to understand a necessarily transcendental dimension of the aesthetic conceptions of these authors independently of their commitment to any specific religious system (Delfel, L’esthétique de Stéphane Mallarmé: 23-4). According to the critic Wilbur S. Scott, for Poe, a good poem must cast “a spell, and through the artist’s manipulation of echo and rhythm, becomes an incantation which will transport the reader to an ideal realm” (Introduction to Poe's Complete Tales & Poems, Castle Books: vii). [1] It should be noted, on the other hand, that, in his famous essay “The Philosophy of Composition”, Poe polemically derided the idea that it is by means of intuition, in a state of “frenzy”, that good poems are produced (Selection from the Critical Writings: 151). The essay shows, however, that this conception, remindful of Plato’s Phaedrus, was still very alive in the literary circles at the time, for him to engage in a criticism the polemical character of which is so exaggerated that his later admirers (for instance, Baudelaire and T. S. Elliot) have considered it to be satirical. And in the lecture written in the end of his life, “The Poetic principle”, Poe overtly defends the idea of an inspiration by the “Beauty from above”, the “supernatural Beauty”, in terms of “ecstatic prescience” (Polonsky, "Poe's Aesthetic Theory": 43-46; cf. Poe, Selection from the Critical Writings: 235-37). In such analyses Poe is certainly engaging with ideas he inherited from English Romanticism, and he refers both to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley. These authors were themselves influenced by the Italian Renaissance humanists, such as Boccaccio, Ficino and Tasso, whom they read and studied extensively (Zuccato, Coleridge in Italy: 5-6, 20, 98-100, 118-9; Weinberg, Shelley's Italian Experience: 167-8). A more contemporary main figure of literature in English language who also expressed an almost transcendental conception of beauty was James Joyce. Both in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in his notes about aesthetic, he says that the feelings excited by proper works of art are “static”, they “hold us in rest, as it were, by fascination”. “… this rest is necessary for the apprehension of the beautiful” (Joyce, Occasional, Critic and Political Writing, Oxford: 102-103). The source of Joyce here is Thomas Aquinas, to whom he directly refers in order to defend the idea that both “the true and the beautiful are spiritually possessed” (105; cf. Joyce, A Portrait, Penguin  [2000]: 222-233). 

Joyce was directly influenced also both by the French symbolists and by William Blake, about whom he wrote an essay, acknowledging that “elementary beings and the spirits of deceased great men would often enter [Blake]’s room at night to speak to him about art and the imagination” (Occasional, Critic and Political Writing: 177). He then asks, not without the irony that is recognized as peculiar to the writer of Ulysses: “Ought we to be amazed that the symbolic beings Los, Urizen, Vala, Tiriel, and Enitharmon, and the shades of Homer and Milton should come from their ideal world into a poor room in London, or that the incense that greeted their coming was the smell of Indian tea and eggs fried in lard?” (179). Ulysses itself retains much of the literary practices of visionary authors such as Blake and the French symbolists, although Joyce is believed to justify these practices in that work in terms of philosophical relativism and perspectivism “rather than on the esoteric grounds of ineffability” (Surette, The Birth of Modernism: 81). His “mythical method” would be “an adaptation and secularization of the mystical symbolism” of the French symbolists (217). Another landmark of the literature of the twentieth century that has been characterized in terms of the same kind of secularized perspectivism is Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. As says the celebrated dramatist Samuel Beckett, Proust’s masterpiece exposes how reality stabilizes to different individuals in “a constant process of decantation, decantation from the vessel containing the fluid of future time, sluggish, pale and monochrome, to the vessel containing the fluid of past time, agitated and multicoloured by the phenomena of its hours” (Beckett, Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism, Grove: 513-514). In this process, individuals would loose contact with a more essential and ideal dimension of things, which gets hidden in the mechanical way ordinary experience is structured by habit (517). A way out of this boredom is granted by “involuntary memory”, triggered by unexpected associations (522-523, 543-45). 

A single passage of the second tome of Proust’s A la Recherche (A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs) could in fact be taken as the model of engagement in the kind of discursive strategies that would be common to the sixteenth-century Portuguese colonizers and modern avant-garde writers. While in the restaurant Riverbelle, Proust’s narrator dabbles in a culinary kind of “histoire naturelle” that would not be entirely out of keeping with the corpus analyzed in this thesis. The natural history in question is nothing but an exercise of imagination through the use of unexpected (not to say strange and bordering a bad taste) analogies, stimulated by some over drinking of Porto (!) wine. Proust’s narrator compares, for instance, the restaurant glass gallery frequented by elegant ladies to a “réservoir, une nasse où le pêcheur a entassé les éclatants poissons qu’il a pris” (Proust, A l'Ombre, Gallimard [1919]: 68-69). More to the matter discussed here are the following daydreams: 

"Je regardais les tables rondes, dont l’assemblée innombrable emplissait le restaurant, comme autant de planètes, telles que celles-ci sont figurées dans les tableaux allégoriques d’autre-fois... Assises derrière un massif de fleurs, deux horribles caissières, occupées à des calculs sans fins semblaient deux magiciennes occupées à prévoir par des calculs astrologiques les bouleversements qui pouvaient parfois se produire dans cette voûte céleste conçue selon la science du moyen âge./ Et je plaignais un peu tous les dîneurs parce que je sentais que pour eux les tables rondes n’étaient pas des planètes et qu’ils n’avaient pas pratiqué dans les choses un sectionnement qui nous débarasse de leur apparence coutumière et nous permet d’appercevoir des analogies" (65-66).

A few pages forward, the narrator describes the paintings of the character Elstir as consisting of “une sorte de métamorphose des choses représentées, analogue à celle qu’en poésie on nomme métaphore” (98). And the same character will himself make enthusiastic praise of a “gigantesque poème théologique et symbolique” represented in the (fictioned) porch of Proust’s medieval church of Balbec. Proust will make use as well of books such as the Orphic Hymns in important passages of his novel, such as in a paragraph giving a characterization of the desires of the narrator in terms of perfumes (Sodome et Gomorrhe, Gallimard [1989]: 233-4).

Not only literature, but aesthetic experience in general has been characterized in more or less visionary terms, as “negation of automatic understanding”, by authors such as Henri Bergson and the author who is perhaps the most important aesthete of the twentieth century, the Jewish-German Theodor Adorno (Menke, The Sovereign of Art: 31, 65). Adorno was not unaware of the existence of fundamental connections between modern art and early-modern conceptions of nature and language. In discussing the pertinence of the concept of natural beauty in modern art, he wrote the following: “The more that art is thoroughly organized as an object by the subject and divested of the subject’s intentions, the more articulately does it speak according to the model of a nonconceptual, nonrigidified significative language; this would perhaps be the same language that is inscribed in what the sentimental age gave the beautiful if threadbare name, ‘The Book of Nature’” (Aesthetic Theory, Univ. of Minnesota: 67). That is, the more art (rationally) works towards a deconstruction of language as a system that would represent more or less stably the world (and consequently the more it subjectively works towards the disappearing of the very subject who produces it), the better it repays its old alliance with non-conceptual, that is, for Adorno, non-mediated and even irrational forms of thought, such as magic. In this sense, as much as art is for him something that emancipated from magic, it preserves magic in itself somewhat more than any other enlightened human activity (because it is the most mimetic of them; 110-111), and magic can thus returns with revenge when the dialectic of art is developed to the most, that is, in modern art. The idea of a book of nature is a residue of magical traditions as they survived in Renaissance and early-modern period, and it is to harass modern art since its emancipation (with modern science) from these traditions.

Adorno is here engaging with old traditional issues recurrent in European modern culture as a whole, distinguishable not only in the literary trends already mentioned here, but also, for instance, in the music of Richard Wagner, with its colossal mythological works recovering medieval motives. Wagner was actually rather another direct influence over Baudelaire and Mallarmé (Surette, The Birth of the Modern: 199; Mercier, Les Sources Ésotériques: 82, 89; Delfel, L'éstetique: 25, 125). Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (to the elaboration of which Adorno directly contributed) is a twenty-century German amalgamation of all these influences. The hero (or antihero) of the novel, Thomas Leverkühn, can be viewed as a complex allegory of multiple faces: he is, among other things, Germany, German provincialism, Nietzsche, Schoenberg, and ultimately Faustus (a sixteenth-century legend). He is, moreover, paradoxically presented to the reader by another character who would apparently be his intellectual antithesis, the humanist that assumes the function of the narrator of the book, Serenus Zeitblom, also a representative of Latin, Italian culture. As the story goes on, the antithesis between the two characters is sustained in the utmost tension, sometimes inverted and even deconstructed, for Serenus, notwithstanding his alleged bashfulness, reveals himself as perfectly capable of writing down to the reader the most horrifying revelations concerning the life of the sublime Leverkühn. In many passages of the book, dichotomies are continually proposed, sustained, inverted and dismantled, as between “animate” and “inanimate nature” (Doktor Faustus, translation by John E Woods: 21), “subjectivity” and “objectivity” (in Beethoven’s late compositional period) (57), “abstraction” and “genitalia” (76), “rigor” and “laughter” (94), “the offensively blasphemous” and the “divine” (109), “faith” and “apostasy” (140), “love” and “sensuality” (201), “chastity” and “impurity” (236), “finite” and “infinite” (288), “tragedy” and “comedy” (322), “health” and “illness” (374). Leverkühn is a composer, and music for him is “ambiguity as a system” (51). It is also connected to “the dogged pursuit and laboratory work of the alchemist and sorcerer of ages past, which likewise stood under the sign of theology” (140). Leverkühn’s ideal music would “be a matter of developing all dimensions simultaneously and of generating them separately so that they then converge… it would mean the abrogation of the antitheses between the style of the polyphonic fugue and the essence of the homophonic sonata” (205). It would “resolve reason into magic” (208), and have an eschatological dimension (376-7) — in the end, it is “transfiguration” (398). All these features are, at the same time, ironical, since much of Leverkühn’s music is presented as well as artificial and a parody. [2]

The literature of the twentieth century in Portuguese language, produced both in Portugal and Brazil, has among its key figures authors who appropriate and transform with the utmost virtuosity many of the literary techniques that date back at least to the French symbolists, and were radicalized by modern writers. The works of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa are said to imply an extreme kind of abstraction and despersonalization. Fernando Pessoa wrote and signed his books through a peculiar heteronomy of other authors, what demanded the concrete creation of ideally different mentalities, personalities and sensibilities. His works have, accordingly, a unity and a plurality, being written by himself through the mask of his fictional authors: Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, Bernardo Soares. Parallel to these authors, there is the poetry that is attributed to Pessoa himself, which should be considered part of the heteronomical chain (Ordoñez, Um Místico Sem Fé: 5). Andrés Ordoñes connects Pessoa’s heteronomy to the twelfth-century Portuguese poetry of feminine love, actually written by male bards, as well as to Rimbaud’s famous dictum Je c’est un autre (6, 21). Independently of heteronomy, inside each of Pessoa’s works there is a constant mix between fiction and sincerity, which produces an irony that has an esoteric and Gnostic flavor (7). Reality would exist through literature and the act of feigning would provide access to what is beyond merely empirical experiences (25, 87). Oxymoron is a figure of speech conspicuous in Pessoa’s poetry, which Ordoñez compares to Medieval negative theology (43, 65-68). 

Clarice Lispector and João Guimarães Rosa are twentieth-century Brazilian writers whose literary radicalism would put them side by side with authors such as Joyce. In her romance A Cidade Sitiada [The Besieged City], Lispector creates, between Lucrecia Neves (the main character) and her town, a world that is not a world, presented and deconstructed, shown and hidden at the same time. Lispector boldly blurs many ordinary distinctions, such as between subject and object, in a writing that reveals the singular moment when persons and things are reciprocally constituted independently of their own understanding: “the [town’s] square was nude. So unrecognizable under the moonlight that the girl did not recognize herself” (A Cidade Sitiada, Editora A Noite [1949]: 9); “this was São Geraldo’s [that is, the town’s] night: the flanks of a horse traversed in quick contraction” (24); “without being aware the girl took the form that the man perceived in her” (46); “Lucrécia Neves looked at it, and made with her face, imperceptibly, the expression of the chair” (102). Infinite time explodes the limits of space, as in the following passage: “during the initial silences, a mare crazed its eyes as if surrounded by eternity” (24). Animate and inanimate states conflate in what would be an ante-room of life itself: “the girl shivered with a fear of being alive” (10, my emphasis) — that is, she is not yet alive, but already shivers. An empty room has eyes and calmly watch: “the room, getting ready for the long night, remained with tranquil, open eyes” (80). This is perhaps because “in nights without wind… silver flowers are cruel and murderers” (162). Many things might assume, suddenly, a dreadful aspect, which defies categorization and even imagination: “dreadful and delicate things lied in the floor: the perfect screw” (52); “she feared seeing in a singular look a train and a bird” (61); “and at her side, the porcelain boy playing a flute: something sober, dead, as fortunately we could never imagine” (68); “oh! the infinite positions in the room… one could suffer a vertigo at the edge of a bibelot” (100). Even the words with which the book itself is written, instigated in their own materiality, independently of their meaning, might unexpectedly jump out into the eyes of the reader, as sorcery: “Then the lad said what was lustrous as a beetle: ‘Pelagic beings reproduce in extraordinary profusion’” (30); “and suddenly, there were the bibelots — almost the word: bibelots” (101).

João Guimarães Rosa almost recreated the Portuguese language itself in the process of writing his master piece, Grande Sertão: Veredas. As says the scholar Jon S. Vincent, in his introduction of the works of Rosa for the English-speaking public, “the Portuguese in which they are written is so dense and convoluted that the prose presents serious problems of comprehension even to many Brazilians” (João Guimarães Rosa: 9). Because of this feature, the book has been compared to Joyce’s Ulysses, and both novels are believed to stay in the same position in relation to their respective original language-speaking worlds (64). In both cases there is a radically critical and peculiarly original engagement with previous mythical and epic topics. Besides, traditional narrative techniques are appropriated and transformed in a way to enable a maze of possible readings and interpretations. Grande Sertão: Veredas is a long massive flux of text, which could be characterized only equivocally as a monologue, since it has implicit but decisive dialogical features (67). It is written as if uttered (orally) by the main character, an ex-gunslinger, who tells the story of his adventures to a mysterious interlocutor. Only in the course of the narrative, the main character is named “Riobaldo”, but also “Tatarana” [Fire Caterpillar], and “Urutu Branco” [White Rattlesnake] — all names to which might be given different connotations, related, for instance, to watercourses (in the case of the first) and to the character’s celebrated skills with fire arms. This complexity and richness in the process of naming is a distinguishing quality in respect to all the other characters and elements in the story. The devil, for instance, is referred, in a single paragraph, by twenty-five different names, such as “o Tal” [the That-One], “o Indivíduo” [the Person], “o Pé-de-Pato” [the Webbed-Feet], “o Coisa-Ruim” [the Bad-Stuff], “o Pé-Preto” [the Black-Foot], “o Não-sei-que-diga” [the I-Don’t-Know-What], “o Outro” [the Other], etc. (Rosa, Grande Sertão Veredas, Nova Fronteira [1988]: 29-30). 

In the process of reading the book, it is impossible, even for a Brazilian, to know whether words and expressions are genuine regionalisms of the Brazilian central backlands in which the action is set, or inventions. The same is true concerning the conspicuous syntactic inversions, and morphological deformations grounded on analogical extrapolations of Portuguese inflections. The way Riobaldo speaks does not correspond to the way of speaking of any actual Brazilian. It has nonetheless a coherency, and emerges as an autonomous language in its apparent illogicalness and the unreality of the diction (Vincent, João Guimarães Rosa: 67-70). On the other hand, the very subjects conveyed in this language, Riobaldo’s adventures, the world in which he lived, the sertão, are things that permanently oscillate. As the past is recovered to the present, Riobaldo is always questioning not only its meaning, but its real occurrence, and even its possibility. Oxymoron here is determinant, as when Riobaldo asks: “The devil exists and does not exist?” And he answers evasively: “I take as they say. Exorcism. These melancholies” (Rosa, Grande Sertão: 3). In other passage, after giving to his interlocutor the name of a crossroad, Veredas Tortas [Crooked Paths], he says: “I said, and you did not hear. Neither you talk about this name again, no. This is what I ask you. A place in the not there” (81). More to the end of the narrative, there are the following reflections: “fear my this is, sir: then, the soul, we sell it, alone, without any buyer…” (428); “for to-learn-to-live is what is to live, indeed. The backland produces me, then it swallowed me, then it spitted me from the warmth of the mouth… Do you believe [in] my story?” (518).

These and the other examples analyzed here suggest that modern literature, including the one produced in Brazil, might remain in vital relation with pre-modern ontological and metaphysical issues such as the ones this thesis identified in the corpus of the sixteenth-century Portuguese. These issues and the styles of thinking capable of articulating them, such as the one identified in this thesis, might, accordingly, still be alive to a certain extent. This is true no matter the amount of secularism and relativism that has been more and more embedded in literary works towards the twentieth century and later. The most radical literary works of the modernism of the twentieth century take up, develop and transform discursive techniques inherited from movements such as French Symbolism, which had an undeniable connection with older visionary-mystical traditions, the same traditions that helps one to understand the strange elements in the sixteenth-century corpus of the Portuguese colonizers about Brazil. Independently of the personal interests of authors such as James Joyce and José Guimarães Rosa, and even if it were impossible to attribute to them any kind of the religious concerns that are still explicit in the works of authors such as William Blake and William Butler Yeats, it remains that their works preserve in the very way they are produced, in their texture, old ontological and metaphysical yearnings, if in a critical and even skeptical perspective. [3] This fact suggests the existence of a genuine connection between the early-modern style of thinking investigated in this thesis and certain modern undertakings, being itself perhaps the main reason why one can still make sense of certain elements of the corpus of the Portuguese in the very outlandishness for which they are famous.

[1] The poet would have a duty “to dream, to provide a place, a verbal habitat, for the goddesses, the dryads, the naiads, the Elfin, and thereby to conduct the reader to a realm of Beauty… For Poe, this was, one might say, a religion: he felt that there is a realm of being beyond the worldly domain in which we prosaically live; and that poetry is the means by which we can momentarily reach it” (Scott, Introduction: xiii).

[2] This transfigured convergence between parody and eschatology reminds of another main figure who wrote literature in the German language: Franz Kafka, whose work has been characterized in terms of “the well-balanced coexistence of detached humor and deep-seated horror” (see the introductory note by Stanley Appelbaum in Kafka, Best Short Stories: iii). Adorno considered that in Kafka’s fables “the animal realm is the human world as it would appear from the standpoint of redemption” (Claussen, One Last Genius: 258). 

[3] One should not forget another key twenty-century figure who wrote literature in English language: Virginia Woolf. The celebrated Orlando is frequently compared to Ulysses (Orlando, Annotated and with an introduction by Maria DiBattista Harcourt: xxxv). But the work which is considered to have pushed Woolf’s literary innovations to its limits is The Waves, whose mystical implications have also been widely acknowledged (Orlando, Annotated and with an introduction by Maria DiBattista, xvi; Woolf, The Waves, Kate Flint [2006]: xii, xvi). In this novel, the five main characters, whose permanent fluidity and essential incompleteness challenge to the core ordinary conceptions of identity, group together around a mythical Percival, a namesake of the central figure in Arthurian legend, explicitly referred by Woolf in earlier drafts as a “pagan knight” and “Crusader” (The Waves: 88-110, 230 n.7). In her unpublished autobiographical writings, Woolf admits receiving, as a writer, “sudden shocks” and “blows” that “will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances”. There would be a “hidden pattern” behind the “cotton wool” of daily life, that the writer is compelled to reveal (Moments of Being, Harcourt [1976]: 72).

**************************************************************

Selection from Baudelaire's essays & Les Fleurs du Mal:

Being now much suffered to go on quietly, I propose the translations below as illustrations of the arguments defended in the excerpt above—that is, accounts to reconcile, inscriptions to make out, traditions to sift. An interesting paper that refers more generally to some of the texts translated below, whose author also defends the importance for Baudelaire of certain esoteric traditions (besides Christian classical notions such as that of original sin) was written by professor Reginald McGinnis (University of Arizona) and published in 2007 by the journal Alea: Estudos Neolatinos, "Modernité et sorcellerie: Baudelaire lecteur du XVIIIe siècle", which I once pop upon and stand indebted for.

"In works that are outcomes of unfathomable personalities, there is something which is reminiscent of these periodic, chronic dreams that assail systematically our sleep... In Goya, the sewing thread, the stitch conjoining the real and the phantasmagorical is undecipherable; it is a nebulous frontier that even the most subtle analyst will never be able to draw, so much is his art, at the same time, transcendent and natural."
"In the incredible works of Brueghel The Elder, hallucination is sovereign. How an artist could produce such monstrously paradoxical works if not under the influence of some unknown force? Our century, to which nothing is difficult to explain, thanks to its double character made of incredulity and ignorance, dismisses as fantasy and whim what in Brueghel I find mysterious. The late works of certain physicians who at last recognised the urgency of explaining an horde of historic and miraculous facts without the handy expedients of the Voltarian school (whose blindness reduces everything to the craftiness of imposture), have not as yet unravel all psychical arcana. I thus defy anyone to explain the diabolic and peculiar shambles of Brueghel The Elder without invoking some special and satanic kind of grace."
[Quelques caricaturistes étrangers]

"To paint is to evoque, it is a magical operation, we should learn that from the soul of children! Ask any French good citizen what he understands by progress. The answer will be steam, electricity, and gas lighting... The poor one is so americanised by those zoocratic and industrial philosophers, that he has lost even the most basic notion that there are differences between the material and the moral, the natural and the supernatural world..."
"We feel inclined to say that, like a witch or a magnetiser, by painting, Delacroix projects his thought in the distance. This singular phenomenon comes from his ability as a colourist... Edgar Allan Poe says that the effect of opium upon the senses is to invest nature with a supernatural interest, deepening the meaning of every object, increasing the  object's autonomy and sovereignty... As nature perceived by ultra-sensible nerves, Delacroix's paintings unveils the supernatural."
[Exposition universelle]

"Yesterday night, after sending the last pages of the letter in which I wrote, with a certain diffidence, 'as the imagination creates the world, it rules it,' I leafed through Catherine Crowe's The Night Side of Nature, or Ghost and Ghost Seers and stumbled across the following lines: 'By imagination, I do not simply mean to convey the common notion implied by that much abused word, which is only fancy, but the constructive imagination, which is a much higher function, and which, in as much as man is made in the likeness of God, bears a distant relation to that sublime power by which the Creator projects, creates, and upholds his universe.' I'm in no way ashamed, on the contrary, I'm quite thrilled that I've met this excellent woman, Miss Crowe, whose assurance I admired and envied, since it is so much developed in her as mistrust is in others."
"What an imagination! Delacroix was never afraid of climbing to the difficult heights of religion; heaven belongs to him, as much as hell, war, the Olympus, voluptuousness. He is truly a painter-poet!   Among the rare true callings, the domain of his spirit extends towards religion. His imagination, burning as burning chapels, shines with all flames and purples. All the pain there is in the Passion passionates him; all the splendour there is in the Church illuminates him."

[Salon 1859]

"The rich, idle man, who even if blasé has no other occupation than to run on the track of elation; the man brought up in luxury and familiar, since youth, with the acquiescence of others—in a word: the man whose specialty is nothing but elegance, he will always, at all times, be blessed with unmistakable, unique features. Dandyism is a vague institution, no less bizarre than duelling; age-old, since Cesar, Catilina, Alcibiades are staggering specimens of it; very disseminated, since Chateaubriand was able to find it in the forests and lakes of the New World... Those creatures own time and money to their liking and abundantly, without which their fantasy, degraded into the state of fleeting reveries, cannot be turned into action... I referred to money because it is indispensable to people worshiping their own passions; but a dandy does not seek money as something essential; an unspecific amount of credit might be enough to him; he surrenders the rude passion for money to the vulgar mortals. Dandyism is not even what many unadvised people seems to think of it, some immoderate craze for dressing and material elegance. For the consummate dandy, those things are nothing but symbols of the aristocratic superiority of his spirit. Moreover, to his eyes, charmed by distinction rather than by anything else, perfection in dressing consists in absolute simplicity, which is, certainly, the best road to distinctiveness. What is then this passion that, turned into a doctrine, has won such a commanding enthusiasts, this unwritten institution that fostered such a lofty caste? It is above all the passionate urgency of being original within the limits of conventions... We see that, in some respects, dandyism border on spiritualism and stoicism. This earnestness in frivolity should not give way to scandal. The reader must recall that there is greatness in every madness, strength in every excess. What a fantastic kind of spiritualism! To those that are at the same time the priests and the victims, all the intricate material conditions with which they comply (from the impeccable dressing at every hour of day and night to the dangerous sports), are nothing but gymnastics likely to strengthen the will and to improve the soul. I was not on the wrong when I thought that dandyism is a kind of religion."
"Fashion must accordingly be considered a symptom of the taste for the ideal floating over all that is coarse, earthly and filthy, and which is accumulated in the human brain by natural life. It is a sublime distortion of nature, or rather a permanent and ongoing endeavour to reform nature... all fashions are charming, that is, relatively charming, each one being a new, more or less fortunate effort towards the beautiful, the approximation to an ideal whose yearning titillates endlessly the unfulfilled human soul... A woman has a right, it is even her duty, to struggle to look bewitching and supernatural; she must astound, enthral; idole, she must shine like gold. She must borrow from every art the means to rise over nature so as to subjugate the hearts and strike the souls."

[Le Peintre de la vie moderne]

"No musician excels Wagner in the painting of material and spiritual space, material and spiritual deepness. Several souls, the best of them, had to admit that in several occasions. Wagner knows how to translate through the means of subtle gradations all that is excessive, immense, ambitious in spiritual and natural men. It seems as if, by hearing this passionate and despotic music, one is put into contact with opium's vertiginous visions—painted over a background of darkness, teared up by reveries... I was obsessed with the idea of exploring the intelligence of these singular works. I felt like I was under some spiritual operation, witnessing a revelation."

"From the first measures of Tannhäuser on, our nerves felt in unison the melody; all flesh trembles in recollection. Every well-shaped brain carries in itself two infinites, heaven and hell, and in each image of one of these infinites the brain recognises immediately its own half..."
"... myth is like a tree that grows everywhere, in every climate, under whatever sun, spontaneously and without cutting. The religion and poetry of the four corners of the earth provide us with abundant proof of this. As sin is everywhere, redemption is everywhere, myth is everywhere."
"I love these excesses of health, these overflowings of the will, which inscribe themselves in artistic works as ignited bitumen in the ground of a volcano, and which, in ordinary life, usually sign the blissful period following a great moral or physical crisis."
[Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris]

"The poet has no party, otherwise it would be a mere mortal... it is more difficult to love God than to believe in him. Differently, for people in this century it is more difficult to believe in the Devil than to love him."

[Projets de Préface pour Les Fleurs du Mal, I]

"No human respect, no false modesty, no coalition, no universal suffrage shall contrive me neither to speak the dreadful patois of this century nor to confound the ink with virtue."

[Projets de Préface pour Les Fleurs du Mal, II]

"Poetry touches music through a prosody whose roots in the human soul extend much further than any classic theory could ever convey." 

[Projets de Préface pour Les Fleurs du Mal, III]

"Chaste as a paper, sober as water, inclined to devotion as a communicant, harmless as a victim, why should I bother to look like a debauchee, an alcoholic, an impious person and a murderer? Are we to explain to the public how, in the work's amalgam, much instinct and sincerity are mixed with stereotypes and the unavoidable charlatanism? I have my nerves, my vapors. I yearn for absolute rest and uninterrupted night. I sing religiously the mad voluptuousness of wine and opium, I'm thirsty of nothing but a liqueur unknown on earth and not available even from the celestial pharmacy... Nevertheless, since versed in superior sensibility we fear not our own contradictions, I gathered, at the end of this abominable book, favourable testimonies of, on my account, honourable men, so that the dispassionate reader might infer by himself I'm in no way worthy of excommunication..."

[Projets de Préface pour Les Fleurs du Mal, IV]

"—Blessed be the God, who provides torment
As a divine medicine to our impurities
As the very best and the purest element
Which strengthens all for the saintly lecheries!

I know you hold a place for the Poet
In the blissful ranks of saintly Legions,
And that you invite him for the eternal banquet
Of Thrones, Virtues and Dominations."
[Benediction]

"ASCENDING [III]

Above the ponds, above the gorges,
Oceans, clouds, woods, forests
Beyond the sun, beyond the ethers
Beyond the starry spheres' fringes,

My spirit, you move with the swiftness
Of a good swimmer, swooning in the swell,
The epic immensity with zest criss-crossing,
Lustful, ineffable, and virile.

Fly faraway from these morbid miasmas;
Purifying yourself in the air superior,
And drink, as a pure and divine liqueur
The clear fire that fills the limpid spaces.

Behind the boredoms and grief overwhelming
That heavily load the hazy existence,
Happy is the one who could with vigorous wing
Dash towards the luminous and peaceful fields;

He whose thoughts, as do the larks,
Fly off freely towards the morning heavens,
—who planes over life, and easily discerns
The language of flowers and benumbed things."

"CORRESPONDENCES [IV]

Nature is a temple where living pillars
Let once escape words indistinct—,
Man goes through it, among forests of symbols
Which observe him with eyes familiar.

As lingering echoes blending in the distance
In deep and obscure unity,
Vast as night and clarity,
Parfums, colors and sounds converse.

There are parfums as fresh as the flesh of infants,
Sweet as the oboe, green as meadows,
—And other, rotten, rich and triumphant,

Expanding as things infinite,
As the amber, the musk, benzoin and incense
Which sing the transports of the spirit and senses."


"THE SICK MUSE [VII]

My poor Muse, alas! what caught you this morning?
Your empty eyes are crowded with nocturnal visions
And I see reflected upon your eddy complexion,
Madness and horror, as cold as aloof.

Have the greeny succubus and the rose evil cherub
Poured over you the love and fear of their urns?
Have nightmare's mischievous and despotic fist
Drowned you in the depths of a fabulous Minturno?

I wish that your breast, exhaling a healthy odor,
Was, by strong thoughts, always visited,
And your Christian blood flew streaming

As the numerous sounds of ancient syllables
Where reign in turn the father of songs,
Phoebus, and the great Pan, lord of the harvest."

"HYMN TO BEAUTY [XXI]

Do you, Beauty, come from the heaven profound
Or out of the abysm? Charity and crime,
Your divine and infernal eye pours indistinctly,
For which we can compare you to wine.

You hold in your sight the sunset and daybreak;
As a stormy night, you shed perfumes;
Your kisses are a filter, your mouth, an amphora
That make the hero weary and audacious the child.

Come you out of the black gulf, or down from the stars?
Enchanted, destiny follows your petticoats as a dog;
As haphazardly you sow happiness and disasters,
Governing everything and answering for no one.

You march over the dead: Beauty, why should you care?
Horror, of your jewels is not the less charming,
And murder, among your dearest fetishes,
Alluringly—on your noble belly button dances!

The dazzled ephemeral moth flies off to you, candle,
Crackles, blazes up and says: blessed be this flame!
The panting lover inclined over his dearest
Looks like a terminal caressing his terminal tomb.

If you come from heaven or hell, whatever
Oh, Beauty! Colossal monster, dreadful, guileless!
If your eye, your smile, your feet, open to me the way
Through an infinite that I love and have never gain?

Of Satan and God, whatever? Angel or Siren,
Whatever, if you render—fair of velvet eyes,
Rhythm, parfum, moonshine, oh matchless queen!—
The universe less hideous and less tedious the moments."

"THE VAMPIRE [XXXI]

You who, as a knife's blow,
In my sorrowful heart has entered;
You who, tenacious as a herd of demons
Came, mad and adorned,

To make your bed and domain,
Of my humiliated spirit;
—Infamous to whom I'm attached
as to the fetters a convict,

As to the gamble a gamester,
As to the bottle a drunkard,
As to the maggots a carcass
—Damned, damned be you!

I prayed to the expeditious sword
So that to win my liberty,
And I already said to the treacherous poison
So that to help my cowardice.

Alas! the poison and the sword
Despised me saying:
'You are not worthy of being extricated
from your shameful bondage,

Moron!—if of his yoke
We acquitted you by our efforts,
Your own kisses should resurrect

Of your vampire, the corpse!'"

"THE CAT [XXXIV]

Come, beautiful cat, over my passionate heart;
The claws of your paw hold back,
And let me sink in your eyes delightful,
Infused with metal and agate.

As soon as my fingertips freely caress
Your head and elastic spine,
And my hand is enraptured,
By feeling your electric body,

I see the spirit of my wife. Her glance,
Like yours, dear beast,
Profound and cold, cut and split like a stinger,

And from head to tail,
An exquisite atmosphere, a dangerous parfum,
That around her dark body swims."


"THE POSSESSED [XXXVII]

The sun is covered up in crêpe. As him,
Oh, Moon of my life! Wrap yourself in shadows;
Sleep or smoke as it pleases you; be dumb, be shady,
And sink thoroughly in the boredom's abyss;

I love you that way! If you want, however, today,
As an eclipsed star coming out of the darkness,
Swagger to the places overloaded by Madness,
It is alright! Alluring dagger, flood out of your sheath!

Light your pupil with the chandelier's flame!
Light your desire in the eyes of the boors!
I enjoy in anything yours, morbid or sassy;

Be whatever you like, black night, flaming aurora;
There is no fiber in all my trembling body
That won't screech, oh dear, beloved: Beel-ze-bub!"

"SEMPER EADEM [XL]

'From where does it come? This strange sadness,
Rising like the ocean over the dark, naked rock?'
—Once the grapes of our heart have been harvested,
To live is evil. A secret known to all,

A neat and simple pain, enfolding no enigma,
And, like your joy, to everyone astonishing.
Stop thus searching, inquisitive beauty!
And, sweet as is your voice, do shut up!

Shut up, ignorant! Always radiant soul!
Childish smiling mouth! Even more than Life,
Through ingenious ties, Death often holds us.

Let, let my heart be entranced by a lie,
To sink in your dazzling eyes as in a dazzling dream
And to doze indefinitely under the shadow of your lashes!"

"THE LIVING TORCH [XLIII]

They march in front of me, those Eyes full of light,
That an artful Angel, no doubt, magnetized;
They march, those divine brothers who are my brothers,
Shaking up in my eyes their diamond fires.

Saving me from every trap and every grave sin,
They guide my steps through the path of the Beautiful;
They are my servants and I'm their captive;
All my being obeys to this living torch.

Charming Eyes, you shine the mystical clarity
Of candles burning in daylight—fantastic flames
That the sun reddens without extinguishing;

Celebrating Death, as you celebrate Awakening;
The awakening of my soul, which you march singing
—Stars whose flame no sun can wither!"

"HARMONY OF THE NIGHT [XLVII]

Here is the time when vibrating on its stem
Each flower evaporates as if in a censer;
Sounds and perfumes revolve in the nightly air;
Waltz melancholic and languorous vertigo!

Each flower evaporates as if in a censer;
The violin shivers as a tormented heart;
Waltz melancholic and languorous vertigo!
The sky is stern and splendid as an altar of repose.

The violin shivers as a tormented heart,
A tender heart that hates vast and dark nothingness!
The sky is stern and splendid as an altar of repose;
The sun drowned in its blood that freezes.

A tender heart that hates vast and dark nothingness,
Of the luminous past collects all traces!
The sun drowned in his blood that freezes...
Your memory in me shimmers as an altar of repose!"


"THE FLASK [XLVIII]

There are strong perfumes for which all matter
Is porous. It seems they would through glass pass.
As while opening a casket, coming from the Orient
Whose seal creaks and balks, screeching,

Or in a deserted home, some cupboard
Dusty and dark, full of the acrid odor of times,
Sometimes we find an old bottle with memories,
From which bursts out alive a revenant soul.

A thousand thoughts slumber, funeral chrysalides,
Quivering sweetly in the heavy darkness,
—they release their wings and fly off,
Tinged of blue, glazed of rose, plated of gold.

Fluttering about, in the troubled air, here it is
The intoxicating memory, eyes closed: Vertigo
That seizes the defeated soul, pushing her with both hands
Towards the abyss darkened by human miasmas;

It lies her down on the edge of a secular abyss,
Where, while odorous Lazarus tears up his shroud,
The spectral corpse of an old, rancid, charming
And sepulchral love, moves waking up.

Thus, when I become erased from the memory
Of men, in the corner of a sinister cupboard,
When they throw me away, old, desolate, decrepit,
Dusty, dirty, abject, viscous, cracked bottle,

I will be your coffin, dear pestilence!
The witness of your strength and virulence,
Dear poison concocted by angels! Liqueur
That gnaw me, oh life and death of my heart!"

"THE POISON [XLIX]

Wine knows how to cover the most sordid dive
With a miraculous opulence,
And it makes appear more than one fabulous portico
In the gold of its red vapours,
Like a sun setting in a cloudy sky.

Opium expands what has no boarders,
It enlarges the unlimited.
It deepens time, hollows out voluptuousness,
And of obscure and dismal pleasures
Overfills the soul beyond its capacity.

Nothing of this is worthy the poison coming
From your eyes, from your green eyes,
Lakes where my soul trembles and sees itself capsized...
My dreams show up in hordes
To quench these bitter gulfs.

Nothing of this is worthy the dreadful wonder
Of your biting saliva,
That sinks unwavering my soul in oblivion,
And, pulling along with vertigo,
Rolls it fainting through the rivers of death!"

"THE CAT [LI]

I
Walks through my brain,
As though in its apartment,
A beautiful, strong, sweet and charming cat.
When he meows, we hardly hear him,

So gentle and discrete is his timbre;
But whether his voice calms down or he growls,
It is always rich and profound.
There lies his spell, his secret.

This voice, filters and oozes,
In my most dreadful background,
It fills me with sumptuous verses
And pleases me like a love potion.

It deadens the cruelest torments
And contains all ecstasies;
To utter the longest phrases,
It needs no words.

No, there is no bow that bites
On my heart, perfect instrument,
And makes more royally
Its most vibrant chord to sing,

Than your voice, mysterious cat,
Seraphic cat, strange cat,
In which everything is, as in an angel,
As much subtle as concordant!

II
His golden and dark fur
Emanates a parfum so sweet,
That one night, I was embalmed,
For caressing it just once.

He is the familiar spirit of the place;
He judges, inspires, presides over
All things in its empire;
Maybe he is a fairy, is he a god?

When, drawn to this cat
That I love, as to a magnet,
My eyes turn sweetly, so
That I look at myself,

Then I see, how amazing!
The fire of his pale pupils
Bright lanterns, lively opals,
That contemplate me fixedly."

"THE REVENANT [LXIII]

As angels with fawn eyes,
I shall come back to your alcove
And towards you I shall silently glide
With the shadows of the night;

And I shall give you, my brunette
Kisses as cold as the moon
And serpent-like caresses
Around a creeping catacomb.

Soon as the livid morning be broken,
My place you shall find vacant,
Just where until night shall chill.

Over your life and over your youth,
—As others do by tenderness,
It is through dread I wish to reign."


"SADNESS OF THE MOON [LXV]

Tonight, the moon slumbers more lazily;
Like a beauty, over countless cushions,
Caressing with an airy and oblivious hand
The contour of her breasts, prior to dreaming.

Over the satiny back of soft avalanches,
Dying, she swoons deeply,
And, over white visions, strolls her sight
That rise to the blue just as flowers burgeoning.

When sometimes over this globe, in her idle languor
She allows a furtive tear to trickle,
A pious poet, enemy of sleep,

Takes, in the hollow of his hand, this pale tear,
With iridescent reflexes like a fragment of opal,
Hiding it in his heart, away from the sun."


"CATS [LXVI]

Passionate lovers and scholars stern,
Treasure equally, in their mature season,
Cats, mighty and sweet, pride of the house,
Who, just like them, fear the cold and are idle.

Friends of science and voluptuousness,
They search the silence and darkness horrific;
Erebus would've taken them as burial steeds,
Could they bow to serfdom their lofty pride.

Dreaming they assume the noble demeanor,
Of great sphinxes, behind solitudes stretched,
Who seem to slumber a bondless bubble.

Of magic sparks, their rich kingdoms are full,
And grains of gold as much as dainty sand,
Scatter their mystic pupils vaguely as stars."

"THE OWLS [LXVII]

Under the black yews' shelter
Stand the owls aligned,
Darting, like foreign gods,
Their red eyes. Meditating.

Without moving, they keep quiet
Till the melancholic hour
When, pushing the sun askew,
The darkness settles down.

Their attitude teaches the wise
What in this world to worry:
—Commotion and movement;

For by a passing shadow intoxicated,
Men bear, always, the punishment
For wishing to change places."


"SEPULTURE [LXX]

If through a heavy and shadowy night
A good, charitable Christian,
Behind some old rubble
Buries your flattered body,

At the time when chaste stars
Close their weighty eyes,
The spider there shall lay its webbing
And the viper its progeny;

And you, all over the year,
Over your doomed head, shall hear
The appalling wailing of the loups

And of emaciated witches,
The frolicking of lecherous old men
And, of black swindlers, the hoaxes."

"A FANTASTIC ENGRAVING [LXXI]

This singular specter has for outfit,
Grotesquely installed over his skeletal front,
Nothing but a dreadful carnivalian coronet.
A horse he exhausts, without spur, no whip,
Apocalyptic nag, like him a phantom,
That dribbles from the nose as an epileptic.
Breaking with him through open space,
Trading in the infinite venturesome.
The rider carries a sabre that blazes up
Over the nameless crowd that his mount crushes,
And runs, like a prince inspecting his house,
Where ancient and modern people all stretch out,
— Vast and cold, boundless cemetery."


"THE HAPPY DEATH [LXXII]

In a fat ground, full of escargots
I want to dig myself a deep pit,
Where I could stretch my old bones leisurely
And, like a shark in the wave, sleep.

I hate the wills and I hate the tombs,
And rather than beg the world a tear,
Alive, I'd prefer the crows invite
To bleed, of my filthy carcass, all ends.

Oh, worms: dark companions, eyes & ears lacking!
Welcome the arrival of a free and festive defunct;
Epicurean philosophers, fruits of decay,

Wander through my ruin with no remorse,
And tell me if there isn't still some torture
For this old soulless body, dead among the dead!"

"SPLEEN [LXXV]

Rainy, annoyed against the entire town,
Out of its urn, in floods, a dreadful cold
Pours over the pale dwellers of the cemetery nearby,
As mortality upon the hazy suburbs.

My cat over the tile, searching a blanket,
Shakes boisterously its thin and mangy corpse;
The soul of an old poet wanders through the gutter,
With the bereaved voice of a shivering ghost.

The bumblebee moans, and the smoky pinelog
Accompanies, in falsetto, the runny pendulum,
While in a tournament full of filthy parfums,

The fatal inheritance of a hydropic granny,
Handsome jack of hearts and queen of spades
Blather sinisterly about their dearests defunct."


"SPLEEN [LXXVI]

More than a thousand-year memories I have.

A large cabinet cluttered with proceedings,
Balance-sheets, love letters, romances, verses,
With heavy hairs rolled up in receipts,
Hides less secretes than my bitter brain.
It is a pyramid, an immense vault,
Containing more corpses than a common grave.
—I am a cemetery by the moon abhorred,
Along which long worms, like remorses, drag,
Furiously assailing my most dear dead.
I am an old boudoir full of faded roses,
Where lies a mayhem of obsolete vogues,
Where plaintive pastels and pales Bouchers,
Lonely, breath the odor of an uncorked flask.

Nothing is longer than the shaky daytimes,
When under the heavy flakes of the snowy years
Boredom, fruit of dismal incuriosity,
Assumes the proportions of immortality.
—From now on, living matter, you are no more!
Than a granite surrounded by a vague terror,
Dozing in the bottom of a hazy Sahara;
An old sphinx forgotten by the impassive world,
A location in the map no one knows, and whose wild
Temper, only, at the rays of the setting sun, sings."

"DESTRUCTION [CIX]

Tirelessly by my side, the Demon tosses and turns;
He swims around me like an intangible air;
I swallow and sense it burning my lungs,
Filling it with a desire eternal and contrite.

Sometimes, knowing how much I love art,
He assumes the form of the most seductive woman,
And under specious pretexts of a hypocrite,
Initiates my lips to infamous philters.

He maneuvers me so, away from God's eye,
Panting and shattered, in the middle of
The plains of boredom, bottomless and barren,

While into my bewildered eyes he hurls
Muddied garments, lacerated wounds,
And the bleeding machinery of Destruction!"

"ALLEGORY [CXIV]

It is a stylish woman with a stately neck,
Who lets her hair tresses trail into her wine.
The claws of love, the poisons of the gambling den,
Everything glide and get dull on the granite of her skin.
She laughs at Death and taunts Debauchery,
These monsters whose hand, always scrapping and mowing
In their destructive games, even so respected,
Of this firm and straight body, the rude majesty.
She parades like a goddess and reposes like a sultana;
In pleasure she believes with a Mohammedan faith,
And in her open arms that fill up her breasts,
She captivates with her eyes the race of the humans.
She believes and knows, this infertile virgin,
Necessary though to the turning of the world,
That the beauty of a body is a sublime gift
That from all infamies forgiveness pulls out.
She ignores Hell as much as Purgatory,
And when the hour to enter the dark Night comes,
She will glance at the face of Death,
As a newborn baby—with neither hatred nor remorse."

"THE LOVERS DEATH [CXXI]

We shall have beds full of faint fragrances,
Divans as deep as deep-seated tombs.
Terraces with unfamiliar flowers,
Under splendid heavens, open to us.

Vying with their utmost heats,
Our hearts shall be vast torches
In both of our spirits reflecting
Their double mirrored, twin lights.

In a night made of rose and mystic azure,
We shall exchange, as a long sob,
A singular flash, overwhelmed with farewell;

And later on, opening the doors ajar,
A faithful and joyous angel shall reanimate
The dulled mirrors and the dead, extinct torches."


"THE DREAM OF A CURIOUS FELLOW [CXXV]

To Félix Nadar
Do you know, as I know, the tasty pain,
And willingly hear of yourself: 'Oh! Singular one!'
—I'm going to die. It was to my lovely soul,
Desire mixed up with horror, a peculiar evil;

Anguish and lively hope, with no agitator temper.
The emptier the hourglass fatally became,
More sour and delicious became my torture;
My whole heart pulled out from the familiar world.

I was like a child eager to see the show,
Hating the curtain as we hate an obstacle...
Finally, the icy truth revealed:

I was boringly dead, and the dreadful aurora
Shrouded me. —Then what! Is this all?
The curtain raised, I waited still."

"THE SETTING OF THE ROMANTIC SUN [Les Épaves, I]

That the sun is beautiful when it rises all fresh
Throwing us its good day, as an explosion!
—Happy the one who can, with love,
Greet its setting more glorious than a dream!

I remember!... Flower, spring, furrow, I saw everything
Swooning under its eye, as a palpitating heart...
—Let's run towards the horizon, its late, let's run fast,
So that to catch, at last, an oblique ray!

But it is in vain that the retiring God I pursue;
Night irresistible, its dark, humid and fateful,
full of shivers empire—establishes;

An odor of tomb bathes in the darkness,
And my fearful foot bruises, on the edge of the swamp,
Toads unforeseen, and chilly snails."

"THE METAMORPHOSES OF THE VAMPIRE [VII]

The female, however, from her strawberry mouth,
Twisting like a serpent over the embers,
And kneading her breasts against the iron of her corset,
Let run the following words all saturated with musk:
—'I have humid lips, and I know the science
Of losing at the bottom of a bed the calcified conscience.
I wipe all tears over my triumphant breasts,
And make the old to smile with the smile of infants.
I replace, for whomever sees me naked and without veils,
Sun, heaven and the stars, the moon!
I am, my dear doctor, so well-versed in voluptuousness
When I drown a man in my dreaded arms,
Or when I abandon my breasts to bites,
Timorous and libertine, fragile and robust,
That over these mattresses that swoon in agitation,
Helpless angels would damn themselves for me!'

As soon as from my bones she sucked the marrow all out,
And, to kiss her back in love,
Towards her I turned languidly,
The sticky sides of another, all covered up with pus!
Was the only thing I saw—eyes both closed cold, in terror.
And when them I reopened to the living clarity,
Around me, instead of a mighty dummy
That seemed to have stocked blood,
Trembled confusedly the debris of a skeleton,
That themselves gave back the cry of a weathercock,
Or of a sign on the top of an iron rusty triangle,
That swings with the wind in winter windy nights."

"THE HYMN [X]

To the very dear, and very beautiful
Who fills my heart with the utmost clarity,
To the angel, to the immortal idol,
A toast in immortality!

She spreads through my life
Like an air suffused with salt,
And in my unfulfilled soul
Pours the taste of the eternal.

An always fresh sachet that parfums,
Of a dear recess, the atmosphere,
Forgotten censer that smokes
Secretly, through the night.

How, incorruptible love,
Could one truly express you?
Grain of musk that is lying, invisible,
In eternity's hollow back!

To the very good, to the very beautiful,
Who makes my joy and so my health,
To the angel, to the immortal idol,
A toast in immortality!"


"THE RANSON [XIX]

To pay his ransom, man has
Two fields of deep and rich tuff,
That he must stir and clear
With the iron of reason;

To obtain a small rose
To extort some wheat ears,
With salted tears from his grey brow
Tirelessly, he shall them water.

One is Art, the other Love.
—To make the judge favorable,
When severe justice
Shows up the dreadful day,

One shall have to show him the barns
Full of cropping, and flowers
Whose forms and colors
Earn the esteem of angels."

"LAMENTS OF AN ICARUS [Troisième édition, XII]

Lovers of prostitutes
Are happy, sprightly and appeased;
As for me, my arms are worn out
For having embraced the clouds.

It is thanks to singular stars
That blaze behind heaven
That my consumed eyes don't see
But solar reminiscences.

In vain I wanted of space
To find the end and the middle;
Under whatsoever eye of fire
I feel my broken wrecked wing;

And burned by the love of beauty,
I won't have the sublime honor
Of giving my name to the abysm
That shall provide me a tomb."

"MEDITATION [XIII]

Be wise, Woe of mine, and hold yourself together.
For smoothly descends the Night, which you claimed,
And it is here: an obscure air that the town encloses,
To ones bringing peace, care to others.

While the vile multitude of the mortals
Under the whip of Pleasure, this pitiless executioner,
Gathers to assemble remorse in the servile celebration,

Woe of mine, give me your hand; come this way, faraway
From them. See the stretching out of deceased years,
Over the balconies of heaven, clad in outmoded robes;
The rising of smiling Regret from the bottom of the sea;

The moribund sun slumbering over an arc,
And, as a long shroud dragging towards the Orient,
Hear, my dear, hear the sweet Night that silently strolls."

**************************************************************

As you and I are in a manner perfect strangers to each other, see also: 

- Entre Vida Ativa e Experiência Literária; 

- Allan Ginsberg, Burroughs & Ney Matogrosso sobre Ayahuasca; 

- two sentences, the dogma of semantic uniformity & alchemy; 

- view from Berthe Trépat's Apartment;

- Land of the Southern Lapwing;

- Joyce in a Toadstool; 

- Concretos &/ou Brazilian Inteligentsia;

- Umberto Eco about Nietzsche & Deconstruction;

- List of painters and other visual artists avec des blackboards pédagogiques; 

And also, at certain intervals and changes of the Moon:

- Tributo a Baudelaire. Revista Triplov de Artes Religiões e Ciências, Série Viridae 3;

- "Modernité et sorcellerie: Baudelaire lecteur du XVIIIe siècle" (Reginald McGinnis); 

- "Reimagining Luso-Brazilian encounters: a new venue for an old discussion" (Confluencia);

- O Spleen de Paris (traduction de Le Spleen de Paris en portugais by A/Z);

- FleursDuMal.org; 

- "Balzacian Mysticism, Palindromic Design, and Heavenly Time in Berg's Music" (John Covach);

- "The Sources of Schoenberg's Aesthetic Theology" (John Covach, 19th-Century Music);

- "The Essay as Form" (Theodor Adorno, translated by Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will); 

- "Der Morgenlandfahrer und der tonale Abenteurer Neues über Scelsi und Tosatti" (Johannes Menke, 2015);

- Dante and the 3-Sphere (Mark Peterson, American Journal of Physics, Dec. 1979);