Be Drunken

 
"Be always drunken.
Nothing else matters:
that is the only question.

If you would not feel
the horrible burden of Time
weighing on your shoulders
and crushing you to the earth,
be drunken continually.

Drunken with what?
With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.
But be drunken."

Charles Baudelaire - Paris Spleen 

Yes, be drunk(en). Find the passion to inebriate you, the passion of your choice. And drain it. Make sure you have a good supply at all times. Be drunken, no matter the drug: Art, poetry, work, knowledge, travel, people. Otherwise you will feel the horrible burden of Time. Which may (will) crush you. 

It has made me better loving you

"It has made me better loving you...it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter. I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I did not have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied. I flattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid sterile hateful fits of hunger, of desire. 

Now I really am satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better. It’s just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight, and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life, and finding nothing to reward me for my pains; but now that I can read it properly I see that it’s a delightful story"

Henry James - Portrait of a Lady 

James was not an actor of life, not an actor within life, I mean, he did not truly live. His life was socially exhausting, true, even if it only developed in the surfaces. The "intangibility of his life", as one critic once defined it.  But he was a splendid spectator of life, the most subtle of its commentators. Usually, James encapsulates his deepest knowledge of existence (a knowledge he acquired through observation, that is) with a very personal somewhat languid language, highly intellectual. Most times this makes his brilliance: his powers of penetration expressed in a beautiful literary way. A few times it could be irritating (what does this mean exactly, really it cannot be expressed in a simpler way?). 

And quite a few times more, he is simply crystal-clear, his intelligence being most transparent. His psychological skill exploding before the reader without exigence. As if the world unexpectedly, all of a sudden freely revealed its well-kept mysteries.

                                     

St. John of The Cross / Dark Night of the Soul

St. John of the Cross, born in Fontiveros (Ávila, near Madrid), in 1542, is perhaps, along with Quevedo, the best Spanish poet of the Golden Age (probably also of all ages), the poet who achieved the most sophisticated and elevated heights in the Spanish verse. St John of the Cross has been considered throughout the centuries the ultimate mystical and religious (catholic) poet, and this has perhaps led some to refrain from reading and enjoying his poetry. One of his most known poems, Dark Night of the Soul, is also among his best. It is a mystical poem telling us about one journey: that of the Soul towards her Beloved (God or Jesus); here the Lover (the Soul) and the Beloved (Jesus, God) consummate their union among the lilies. And that, to the author and his devout 16th century audience, is a burning moment of communion.

But as it has been noted more than once, Dark Night of the Soul could also be read not only in this traditional mystic sense, but also in a new torrid, erotic sense. Physical rather than Mystical. The Lover (not the "Soul" in this case, but, say, a female, any female, a young woman) leaves her home now at rest, to greet her Beloved, waiting for her outside. She will walk the night which guides her, a night more lovely than the dawn, and she will recline her face on him, abandoning herself and leaving her cares forgotten among the lilies. With such a suggestive re-framing, the poem opens up to new sensual dimensions, and a richer reality.

Canadian Celtic singer and composer Loreena McKennit in her 1994 album The Mask and The Mirror, recreated St John of the Cross´s poem and as she herself explained, this erotic retelling was precisely the basis of her version.

Con a dark night, Kindled un love with yearnings

--oh, happy chance!--
I went forth without being observed, 
My house being now at rest. 
(...)
Oh, night that guided me, 
Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,
Oh, night that joined 
Beloved with lover, 
Lover transformed in the Beloved!
(...)
I remained, lost in oblivion; 
My face I reclined on the Beloved.
All ceased and I abandoned myself, 
Leaving my cares 
forgotten among the lilies."

Borges, drawing the world

"A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face."

Yes, we built up our reality, and we do so with all objects, physical or spiritual, we come across and which we personally process. Borges is truly a literature of thoughts, smart speculations with an aesthetic taste and a flavor of truth, unconceivably more than in any other writer. The amount of insights that we can find in any single borgesian page is simply astonishing. He famously stated that 

"Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary."

In a material sense, Borges did not write much, he was not a very "prolific" author. The number of pages he left behind was not huge. He did not manage to write a novel, assuming he ever attempted to. Only short stories and essays (with the line between the two blurred). But if we consider his richness, the complex fascinating ideas with which he constantly filled his texts (to such an extent that full volumes could be forged out of many a single of his ideas!), then Borges is among the most "prolific" authors to ever have existed. A spiritual giant. A vast author, where it is possible to dissolve oneself in a sea of infinitude. 

He also reinvented a language, reverting a literary tradition. The language of Castile which one would have told only valid for an arid realism, was after him turned into a splendid key to a great intellectual universe. And those colorful supernatural realms of contemporary Latin American literature would be unthinkable without Borges. In some way, they all sprang out of him.

Whitman: Full of Life Now

"Full of life now, compact, visible,
I, forty years old the eighty-third year of the States,
To one a century hence or any number of centuries hence,
To you yet unborn these, seeking you.

When you read these I that was visible am become invisible,
Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems, seeking me,

Fancying how happy you were if I could be with you and become your comrade;

Be it as if I were with you. (Be not too certain but I am now with you.)"

Walt Whitman (1859)

A favorite Whitman poem. In  the year of 1859 (83rd of the States) Whitman, then a physical presence, a man in Time, addresses someone still non existent, but who will be, in the course of one century, or two centuries, as living and sentient as he, the poet, is now.

Whitman speaks from a distant past, one century and a half away from the reader. Whitman speaks to a ghost, as if the ghost were with him in the room. And now, in the present, when his word finally reaches us, he is the ghost, talking to a tangible reader, now taking their place in time. That place Whitman left so long ago.

Sometimes a poem can make the perception of reality tremble. Sometimes a poem, a simple poem, can truly make you understand your essential condition: that you, thinking yourself so tangible, are just a dream, a mere image in the fabric of Time. A vague presence in a quick process of vanishing, in the very same way as that voice now talking to you also vanished.

Montaigne: So it is with minds...

"So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination... And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do not bring forth in the agitation."

Michel de Montaigne

Harold Bloom is his extraordinary The Western Canon (1994), claimed that Freud was our Montaigne, that is, the Montaigne of our chaotic contemporary Time.

True. Freud, once a scientific figure, has become Literature. In the good sense, of course. In the best sense. We now read his texts as great artistic (and of course tremendously clever) pieces. A kind of aesthetic intelligence, which is the highest form of intelligence. A reborn Montaigne, for our (ir)rational Time.

That said, how about reading the original? Montaigne is less structured than Freud, as the Frenchman did not have "scientific" pretensions. But he may well be even bigger, reaching even more distant horizons. Which means that he is some sort of giant, an immense field full of gems. Like this one preceding this note.

Retiring to these deserts...

Retiring to these deserts now in peace,
with few but learned volumes to be read,
I live in conversation with the dead,
and listen with my eyes to those deceased.


Though sometimes impenetrable they seem,
they mend or they enrich all that I own;
and they, in quiet counterpointed tonesawake, address this life which is a dream.

Francisco de Quevedo 

Quevedo, perhaps the greatest poet in the Spanish language, is also the author of a most beautiful praise of literature and books. Those dead ones that you live in conversation with and whom you listen to with the eyes.