Life-and-Destruction Page 26
Charles Baudelaire suggested and explored the power of imagination and
creative language to bring into a unity the human spirit (person) with the spirit
of creation, as one indivisible whole:
Earth and heaven "correspond" with themselves and with the self’s
plenitude, as in "The Artist's Confiteor, " "The Fool and the Venus"
and the famous poems "Elevation" and "Correspondences" . The
dreamer's inner and outer worlds meld into each other and flow into his
"soul": "Vulgar passions, such as hatred and worldly love, now felt as
distant as the clouds parading deeply in the abysses beneath my feet; my
soul seemed as vast and as pure as the sky's dome which enveloped
me." But the analyst within him senses danger: "And I remember that
this rare and solemn sensation, caused by a grand and perfectly silent
movement, filled me with a joy mingled with fear." 26
In "The Artist's Confiteor”, after a descriptive passage celebrating his sense of
oneness with creation, Baudelaire adds,
all these things think through me, or I think through them (for in the
grandeur of reverie, the self is quickly lost!). They think, I say, but
musically and pictorially, without quibblings, without syllogisms
without deductions.27
Quibblings, syllogisms and deductions have a place in rational processes but if
the heart and mind, instincts and imagination are subjected always to them, the
"soul" could easily die. In the experience Baudelaire describes, thought is still
there but it is musical and pictorial, as in poetry. "Joy mingled with fear" does
not mean that joy is lost. Letting the two merge or "meld" may be a way
towards the vision burned clear of "The Maker" or towards the "simple sight"
of "Night".
26 Edward K. Kaplan, Baudelaire‘s Prose Poems (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press,1990) p.78
27 Kaplan p.21
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