Petits Poèmes en Prose by Charles Baudelaire
(Translation of “La Chambre Double”)
A room resembling a place of dreams, a truly spiritual room, where the stagnant atmosphere is lightly tinted in pink and blue. The soul takes a lazy bath here, aromatised by regret and desire. — It’s rather crepuscular, bluish and pinkish; a voluptuous dream during an eclipse.
The furniture is stretched out, prostrate, languid, as if dreaming; vegetable and mineral, you could say, endowed with somnambulism. Its upholstery speaks a muted language, like flowers, like the heavens, like setting suns. There are no artistic abominations on the walls. Just like a pure dream, a definite art, a positive art which is unanalysed is blasphemy. Here, everything is sufficiently clear and harmoniously obscure in its delight. An admixture of the slightest scent of the most exquisite choice, and a very light humidity, swims about in this atmosphere, where the dormant spirit is hothouse soothed.
Muslin like snow cascades copiously down and billows before the windows and bed. The Idol is lying here, sovereign of dreams. But how did she get she here? Who has brought her? What magical power has installed her on this dreamy throne of desire? What does it matter? She’s here and I recognise her!
Here are her eyes I recognise, subtly terrible and malicious, whose flame within has spanned the dusk. They draw you in, they subjugate you, they devour any impudent look in their direction. I’ve often studied them, these black stars that command both admiration and curiosity. To what benevolent demon do I thus owe for being surrounded by mystery, silence, peace and perfumes? Oh, beatitude! What we generally call life, even when it’s expanded to its fullness, has nothing in common with this supreme life which I have come to know and which I savor minute by minute, second by second!
No, it’s not minutes, it’s not seconds! Time has disappeared — it’s Eternity which reigns, an eternity of delight!
But a loud and terrible knock has come at the door, and like in really bad dreams it’s as though I’ve been hit in the stomach with a pickaxe. And then a Ghost appears. He’s a bailiff come to torture me in the name of the law. Or, she’s an infamous concubine come to pour out her heart, adding trivialities of her life, when I’m the one suffering. Or, indeed, an office boy for the owner of a magazine who’s come for the follow-up of a manuscript.
The paradisiacal room and the Idol, queen of dreams, La Sylphide, as the great René called her, all this magic disappeared when the Ghost brutally knocked on the door. What horror! I remember now, I remember! Yes, this squalid room, this eternal stretch of boredom, is indeed mine. The stupid furniture all dusty and broken; the chimney with no fire in its grate, the fireplace dirty from its use as a spittoon; the sad windows where the rain has left streaks in the dust; the manuscripts, crossed out or incomplete; the desk diary with its deadly boring days marked out in pencil.
Alas, this other-worldly perfume, which had intoxicated me with its perfected sensibility, has been replaced with stale tobacco smell mixed in with who-knows-what other musty smells that just make you want to vomit. Now, it’s just rancid grief you breathe in. Only one thing in this narrow, disgusting world knows how to make me smile: a vial of laudanum, full of endearment and treachery. An old and terrible friend, like all my friends, alas!
Ah, yes! Time has reappeared; Time reigns supreme now. And with this hideous old man has come his whole devilish retinue of Memories, Regrets, Illness, Fear, Anxiety, Nightmares, Angers and Nerves. I assure you that the seconds are now stretched out, solemnly and substantially, and each one says as it flies off the clock: “I am Life, unbearable, implacable Life!”
There’s only one Moment in human life tasked with announcing good news, the kind of good news that causes you to have an inexplicable fear. Yes, Time reigns — he has taken back his cruel dictatorship. He is goading me with his double-pronged stick, as if I were a bovine. “Get off the stage, blockhead! Sweat the hard stuff, galley slave! Live, you damn bastard!”
(A Pataphysical interpretation of “La Chambre Double”)
Assemble chamber music to how many revs per second, a veritable Negro Spiritual, where it’s at, Daddyo, exquisite cadavers after After Léger’s Bar-man or Stein’s “rose is a rose”. Lame Ypres: the bang-bang of the Great War, atomised by trenches and delirium. It’s somethin’ else, Bluey, Rosie, revvin’ their Oldsmobile durin’ the Blitz.
Oh, anachronism! Mobilised phantom of the Ol’ Opry, stripped bare, tongue hangin’ out. Mobilised in the air, like guessin’ if it’s vegetable or mineral. The toffs speak like Tupac, flowers of Machu Picchu, like acrobats in Cirque du Soleil.
There’s nothin’ cruddy on the walls. Spoken like a true rapper: a life unrecorded ain’t worth nothin’. A positive result is a real blow to some. Here, too, an efficient claret can do the job. It’s a question of harmonies. A path to nowhere with smelly cabbages on all sides, pan alley cat smells, drizzle, creatin’ an atmosphere of The Show Must Go On.
Who cried at the top of his lungs on the balcony or in front of the bed? Neither Al Capone nor Posh Spice got the memo about how to behave durin’ the interregnum or Between the Wars. Billy Idol, on the other hand, is rex of the revs. (Or, is that “interrex”? It don’t matter, I’m no homewrecker!)
So, Miramax subtitled your fiery eyes and Mad Max was gunnin’ in the connin’-tower. Hell’s attire, hell’s sub Decca, hell’s devout rear-guard action laid waste temples of Twist and twirl! I’ve often studied the effects of fame on admirals and Kommandants.
Banish my Benesh — have you put “I Left My Heart in Ypres” through its paces? Oh, anachronism! Nomic circus clowns vyin’ for memes, a most heuristic and minute-by-minute expansionism ain’t nothin’ compared to The Supremes! Nah, it’s got nothin’ to do with The Seekers! Rat-rhymes belong to rap; Tammany Hell Roolz, OK!
But then a terrible cooption lures Cole Porter into his own net, and as if in a hellish ensemble, he sounded posh as he recited whole passages of Le Potomak.
And then Phil Specter arrived. I clutched the pearls I bought off the shoppin’ channel; a big turbine of a sound emanated from behind the blinds that made Avida Dollars seem trivial in comparison; in a fit of rage, he threw a sautéed rissole in the direction of my manuscript.
The posters of Che Guevara, La Sylphide and Cheech and Chong disappeared under Specter’s spell.
Spanish fly! Amadou! Rosé! Yes, this toady pacesetter with its white tyres belchin’ out a xylophonic jazz from New Jersey to Verdun, traces of boredom correspondin’ to incomplete or ruptured scripts, the kind Christian Marquand might have starred in.
And added to this, a flabby nude from the circus who was, however, the perfect guest tourin’ in a limited way in 1910, stood on the Oldsmobile’s runnin’ boards and shouted that an Oldsmobile was no getaway car. On the contrary, its maintenance alone was what Kerouac meant by desolation angels.
Doncha know ‘bout panic in Detroit? Laud the drug! Leave your heart in LA — Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills, Duchamp’s memory of bein’ in the Boy Scouts, “The Prince of Bel Air” (or, Machiavelli’s Prince — which is it?) and other treats.
Ah, yes, I’m pissin’ in Time Square, I’m pissin’ in Times Square and I’m happy again. Piano hideouts beat violin cases: Souvenirs, American Graffiti, Rhymes, the English, Django Reinhardt, the Jazz Age, Cars and Nickels in the jukebox.
Assyrian typewriters punch out La Phalange nouvelle while Leni Riefenstahl films it. Jackals, the Jackal jivin’ the pendulum, said: “I’m no lifer, I’m not goin’ to rot in no damn clink!”
An ill Siegried Sassoon (not to be confused with Vidal), who has been on an Egyptian mission not to walk like one, examines an inexplicable cicatrice on his right leg.
Okey-dokey! There’s no such thing as a temporary killer. You’ve gotta take back the streets. Savonarola the bully (not Siegfried, never!) pushes me like some pushover:
“Hue and cry all you like, Boustrophedon! Sue the pants offa me! You’re just a gangster wannabe!”
(Translation of “Chacun Sa Chimère”)
I met several men bent over as they walked beneath wide-open grey skies, in a wide dusty plain where there were no roads and no grass to be had, not even a thistle or a nettle. Each one was carrying an enormous chimaera on his back, as heavy as a sack of flour or coal, or a Roman infantryman’s gear. But these monstrous beasts weren’t just a dead weight. On the contrary, they enveloped the men and drained them of the power of their sinewy muscles; they dug their two giant claws into the men’s chests, and their fabulous heads overhung the men’s foreheads like those terrible helmets ancient warriors wore, hoping to put shock and awe into their enemy.
I questioned one of the men, asking him where they were going. He told me he didn’t know, nor did the others. But it was evident they were going somewhere, for it was as though they were impelled by an irresistible urge to put one foot in front of the other.
On a curious note: None of the travellers seemed bothered by the ferocious beast on his back collaring him. You could say they thought of them as an indispensable part of themselves. None of their tired, solemn faces betrayed any despair whatsoever. They walked under the splenetic cupola of the sky, their feet buried in the soil, dusty and as desolate as the sky above, their faces resigned like those condemned to an eternal hope.
They passed me and disappeared over the horizon, at the point of the earth’s curve.
I persisted for a few moments in trying to understand this mystery, but soon enough an irresistible feeling of Indifference came over me, weighing down on me more heavily than their back-breaking Chimaeras.
(A Pataphysical interpretation of “Chacun Sa Chimère”)
Susan Sarandon riding the plains near Grand Rapids, reading Gore Vidal’s Duluth, a one-joke novel near a one-horse town, dreaming of the Shard on the right bank of the Thames, in London, England. Susan Sarandon without an out. That’s right. It might have been raining men Gustave Courbet painted. Scots Greys and other men in uniform. The Jackal was wearing a tabard, an enormous chimer. Oh, Lourdes was ransacked by crusaders who, like René Char, were engaged in writing a fantasy novel.
Mailer alert! The monstrance beats the peace pipe any day! Au contraire, mon ami, it inveigles an invious lobster-pot and putrid molluscs. Nerval ringing my bells vanquished griffons on those fabulous mountains, teetering a temenos sacred to communist ormers, parlaying Les Liaisons dangereuses in Esperanto; an adjutant (Major Barbara) under the gruelling sun.
I sequestered one of these lobsters, as oleaginous as alley cats. Savage conchs swept upon me upon the rocks, where I knelt before Louis Quinze, who caved in on my demands for an Italian Mechanical Womb.
The curate’s shoelaces, not eggs, were knotted: banquets of tofu, lobster and other lyrical foods. The suspense was killing me! The honor killer in “Consider Your Verdict” was like one of Louis’s shooters from his pheasant parties. All these Fatimid viziers seemed cooped up; it was as though they were singing “Don’t Tie Me Down, Sport”, a kind of despair or parlor game, where Libido Means Lust if not business. Susan Sarandon, if not Billy Idol, yelling the rebel yell, plunging a knife into the merry widow’s soul as Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow” played in the background. It jiminy cricketed the physics off signed copies of a salt-damaged ayurvedic text (a turquoise Othello).
The heart parsed Lawrence of Arabia’s house, a demijohn of red wine atmospheric of Plastic Bertrand’s version of “Like a Virgin”.
Pound calqued The Odyssey in corridors of mystery (Marat/Sade); a quorum of these madhouse travellers led an Iranian production of Cocteau’s Belle et la Bête and produced Indie movies and a Black Sabbath documentary. The Jackal yelled “Lordy, Lordy!” as Lafargue’s taxi’s wheels came off.
(Translation of “Le Fou et la Vénus”)
What a glorious day! The vast park swoons under the burning eye of the sun, like youth under the domination of Love.
A silent and universal ecstasy of things; it’s as if the waters themselves are asleep. Unlike human occasions, there’s an orgy of silence here.
You could say an ever-increasing light is shining on everything; excited flowers are burning with desire, rivalling the azure of the sky in the ardor of its colors. The heat makes their perfume visible, sending their fumes up toward the heavens like smoke.
However, I noticed someone who seemed cursed somehow amid this universal splendor.
At the foot of a colossal Venus there was a court jester, one of those fools forced to make kings laugh when Remorse or Boredom takes hold of them, got up in an impossibly gaudy outfit, his hair twisted to look like horns or jester’s bells. He was all huddled up against the base of the statue, lifting his teary eyes up to the immortal Goddess.
And those eyes said: “I’m the last and loneliest of men, deprived of love and friendship, lower and more imperfect than any animal. However, even I am made to understand and feel how immortal Beauty is! Ah, Goddess, take pity on me for my sickness and sadness!
But Venus simply stared into the unfathomable distance with her implacable, marble eyes.
(A Pataphysical interpretation of “Le Fou et la Vénus”)
He’s a kind of admiral! Waste lands of spermatozoa brew Leonine ch-ch-changes in America.
The former stars of Universal Pictures say to their chauffeurs: No sex in prime time! Biedermeier furniture in the execs’ offices. “Ma’am, don’t touch the intercom!” Be they young and restless by day or fit by night, they all say Trinity College launched them into orgies.
Ondine’s cuneiform luminescence fades in extreme perfection. “Hey, come dance with me!” Curling staves existed to Dodonaean rivers, swooning Riviera types by the pool, a bundle of nerves, and hustlers proffering Visa cards for chandeliers or gold-tipped cigarettes. The Penguin edition says so!
Despondent, they dance in the university corridors, they speak in nasute affricates. They are the jetset.
“Oh, did you buy Colossus of Maroussi in a Penguin edition? I found a copy in one of those artificial foundations, one of those institutions where Rumor or Loot upsets the Establishment apple-cart, drunk on a strepitoso rendition of Bing Crosby and David Bowie’s “White Christmas”, too reminiscent of Count d’Orgel, I have to say, where desire’s plainchants are pitted versus the eternal Dice.”
And Thurston Howell III says: “ ‘I’ve got Georgia on my mind’.” He’s a kind of admiral, previewing the island’s demagogues and raising an effete finger against the slaughter of pigs. Heideggerian fame awaits poor principia. Ah, immortal Botox! Ah, throw of the Dice! Ah, Spin the Wheel!
But Oprah Winfrey tosses her Venetian cape with cool indifference. “Keep an eye on the canal, for Jenny’s sake! All the while singing “Yes, Jesus Loves Me”.
(Translation of “Le Chien et le Flacon”)
“Here, boy! Good dog! Here, doggie-doggie! Come and smell an excellent perfume I bought from the best perfumer in the city.”
And the dog, wagging its tail, which is, I believe, when it comes to such poor creatures, the sign for smiling or laughing, approaches and nudges its moist nose against the opened bottle. Then, suddenly recoiling in fright, it barks at me as if in reproach.
“Stupid dog! If I’d’ve offered you a bag of dog turds, you’d’ve smelled it with delight and possibly even eaten one. So, miserable friend in this miserable life of mine, you’re no different from the general public, in that you never present them with delicate perfumes, for they get agitated. Instead, any old rubbish chosen will do, so long as it’s exquisitely chosen.”
(A Pataphysical interpretation of “Le Chien et le Flacon”)
“Bon Jovi, “China Girl” (the Iggy Pop version), Cher, all names that will have to be asterisked for future generations, come and resplend in an excellent rendition of ‘Ashes to Ashes’ paranymous with ‘Rock Me Amadeus’.”
And call me the Queen of Sheba as I fret in the queue for tickets that everything will be sold out. Semiotics will have to do. Sapperment, Sonny! It’s Falco posing curiously by the debauched wreck, bellowing to the effray: “You lot can stay!”. He then, as if reproached, sings “Der Kommissar”.
“Ah! Les Misérables is playing against that shitty film My Dinner with André. Flaired trousers and other atrocities from Tommy in the whiskey (or die), a key poll of the pajamaed fops in the public path (Swann’s Way). Father, give me the keys to the Lexus. May deaf ears not hear the swan song ‘Swanee River’ (Taliban).”
(Translation of “Le Mauvais Vitrier”)
There are those with purely contemplative natures and personalities that are entirely unfit for the job in hand, which however, due to some mysterious and unknown impulse, act with a rashness they thought themselves incapable of.
Those who, fearing they’d find something else to fear in the manager of their apartment building, wander about an hour beforehand until daring to enter, those who keep a letter a fortnight before opening it, or delay by six months steps that have needed to be taken for a year, sometimes feel thrown into an action as if by an irresistible force, like an arrow shot from its bow. Moralists and doctors, who claim to know everything, can’t explain how this sudden, crazy burst of energy comes to such indolent and comfort-loving souls, and how, incapable of accomplishing the simplest and most necessary of tasks, find in a single moment the courage to carry out the most absurd and even the most dangerous of acts.
One of my friends, the most harmless dreamer who would never hurt a fly, set a forest alight to see, he said, if the fire caught on so easily as they say. The experiment disappointed him ten times; on the eleventh, it was quite a different story, exceeding all expectations.
Another lit a cigar next to a barrel of gunpowder in order to see — to find out — what would happen, to tempt fate. Holding back from having to prove oneself, taking a gamble, knowing what it feels like to be anxious for no earthly reason — as a lark, for want of something better to do.
Still another, timid to the point that he lowers his eyes even before other men, where he has to summon every bit of courage to enter a café or pass by a theatre box-office, where it seems to him the ticket-sellers are invested with the majesty of Minos, Eachus and Rhadamanthus, will suddenly latch on to an old man passing him on the street and squeeze him tightly in a hug as an astonished crowd looks on.
Why? Because … because this old man was so irresistible? Perhaps. But it is more likely that he himself doesn’t know.
This is a kind of energy that sparks with boredom and dreaminess, and those who suddenly possess it are generally, like I said, dreamers and the most indolent of beings.
I have been victim more than once to these whims and crises myself, leading me to believe that Devils intent on doing us harm, enter us and make us perform, without our knowing it, their most absurd doings.
One morning, I got up feeling glum, sad, listless, but pushed, it seemed to me, to do something grand, to make a fuss of some sort; and I opened the window, no less! (Observe, please, that this force which, for some people, is not the result of a piece of work or a combination thereof, but of a fortuitous inspiration — hysterical, according to doctors; satanic, according to those who think a little better than doctors — takes part in pushing us passively toward loads of dangerous or improper actions.) The first person I saw in the street was a glazier whose call was piercing and discordant. He approached in the heavy and dirty Paris air. It would be impossible moreover for me to say why I was seized in regard to this poor man by a hatred as sudden as it was as all-consuming.
“Hey, hey!” I called, beckoning him to come up. I thought, however, not without some mirth, that, with my room being on the sixth floor and the stairs being very narrow, the man would have to expend quite a bit of effort getting up while holding on to his precious cargo.
Finally, he appeared. I examined with curiosity his glass and said:
“What? No colored glass? Pink, red, blue, magical glass, heavenly glass? How rude of you, roaming about in the streets of this poor area, and you don’t even have anything to resemble rose-colored glasses!” I pushed him toward the stairwell in a vigorous fashion, where, groaning, he tripped and fell.
I approached the balcony and grabbed hold of a little flowerpot, and when the man reappeared at the front doorway, I dropped my weapon on to the back edge of the hooks holding his glass together, making him turn around in shock. It managed to break the whole of the walking poverty on his back in a sound resembling a crystal palace shattered by thunder and lightning. And, drunk on my madness, I called out furiously:
“Rose-colored glasses, rose-colored glasses!”
These disturbing practical jokes are not without danger, for which one can pay dearly. But what of eternal damnation when one has found an infinity of pleasure in an instant?
(A Pataphysical interpretation of “Le Mauvais Vitrier”)
Ilya Kabakov, who contemplative of Santa Fé’s Kurt Cobain, despondent, sues a mysterious and air-conditioned ampoule, assisting cocaine foreigners with a rapper who’s laced serrated Incas with energy drinks.
Telcos, craning to Trubenise a sashaying concinnity, wore long lashes to garner support without the re-entry of the Space Shuttle, telcos garnishing quince jelly on lettuce sounds like day-traders, buying Oprah’s doona on raisins in a car-boot sale a day’s march from here, seesawing telco forests sprucing up the Cayman Islands with ittybitty verse lacking stream of deforestation, like the flesh on an arrow. As the removalist and the maid said, key witnesses to a murder in the Savoy Hotel (no perving on exes, please), they do fancy over-phallic seafood, ergo assaying alms by their asses and wolves, and how the Incas blew dark stars, laying shrews, laying a naysay pluteus. Elle tunes for a narrow tarn — Luke’s zucchini acts of God in an Anna Wintour (= Winter Year) essoin.
The Emmys’ demy octavo, The Pet Shop Boys takes offence if ravers have put all their quinoa eggs in one basket, misery bro: “The foyer of a forest equipped,” he quipped, with a few prenuptial sways. Oh, aunty, facilitate general conquistador conscience! Deep and sweet, his ex hunkered down, but after the fashion of ounces, and Elmer Fudd broke trophy beans.
An ulterior alumina, a seagull check of your pueblo waters, to provide, to savor, to stay in the tent, to sample the oil crisis even after being proud neritic, to play the field, the jockey, to Con Air the play seers of sprites, to laugh, to stream Capri live into your room; you deserve better.
Stay tuned to a species of iniquity: the Keystone Cops of Long Bay jailbait and of the bravery. Answer Led Zeppelin’s manifesto in a minor key in an operatic saltimbanco, the general comity of nations, India rubber and Russian beech.
An altar, a timbered cuttlefish keeps the bass player yearning for memes from the divine liar guarding Pink Floyd’s members, aspiring to rustle a keen Yoko Ono leaf-mould, to identifying sarafans, to volunteering on behalf of a Cape Malay or a theatrical donkey, with Ondine controlling their umbrellas infested with the maggots of media magnates, deacons and adamant Adams; Soldier Blue’s greatest hits weighed down by lard, keypadding the ambassador for the Riviera with pantomime miasms: how divine to find a fully equipped ebony cabinet!
Why? you ask. Why, indeed! Was his barstool wisdom so unrecognisably sandpaperish? Don’t forget saltpetre; but it’s vegetal plumes to Siouxsie and the Banshees who praise Nancy Sinatra.
J.Lo was in a once-a-week team of cherry Coke in these lands; key bumper-to-bumper days as the music died to save Greece (“Grease is the word!”). Who knew anew compromising fonts, Notre-Dame de Paris in flames, absurd volplanetor?
“Gain me tins, mayday me shins, me lov’ly, Tristan and Isolde!” Marvin Gaye cries or gay viziers cry (echoes of Prince), and the Penguin Café Affair pales in significance compared to Michael Jackson; alas, you have freed the offender!
(Oops, once the footprints are surveyed, the spree of misty-eyed fiction, which, say, camarons from Cameroon, are not the last rays of a sheer veil (see below) or a Combine Harvester, mdm rations for trout. The boomtown rats have left the ship toot-sweet, neither football nor podology for Mel Tormé in Medici salons: “Satiny salons, Sir,” said quiffs and pansies in Chinook ambling amid the myrrh.)
The première of Persona in white tie and black jacket was vitriolic, laced with Euonymus and Persian powder, mint julep mouth on a transverse flute, lords and ladies beyond Moe Senior’s (The Three Stooges) drapes. He’ll miss your FOO WAS HERE, a legal spadroon of a senior Australian spied in Home Depot in the Sudan.
“Hey, you!” went Pink Floyd in despondent, raffish, displays, not without a certain gay flavor, champagne in sixteenmo and escargots for you, lobster devolved applications of a crocheted, right-handed angel of the morn (French horn).
In a van, Ajax perused I Am Curious — Blue and Yellow; oysters before bed. “Is that all there is? No persons of color? No funky tattoos, Redskins, Bluestockings; no magicians, no parade in Oxford Street? José Feliciano on the promenade, Peggy Lee in a face-off with Edith Piaf?” And he postulated quia timet via snail-mail verse, where they thrashed a groyne.
He mapped the rocks of the malcontented seas, a small town (Peoria or Podunk?), and when Herbert Lom appeared in The Thirty-Nine Steps, set in the Port of Melbourne, tomb-robber perps, my angina hardly on the rebound, anonymous posteriors pushing up daisies, and drawing the burning bush on Arches paper, a breeze on the back of ambulance chasers, a Claude Lorrain glass, prawns by the foundry.
And Rimbaud was eager to fold, crying out, “ ‘La Vie en Rose’!”
You say you play the bugle nervously — and not without some Persil to mop the spit up with. May you camp it up with ortolans (discard the veil!): After all, who hasn’t fancied a bit of jouissance?
Javant Biarujia is the author of eight books, nine chapbooks and two plays. His work has appeared in Australia and abroad over many years. His latest book is Spelter to Pewter (Cordite Books, 2016). He is currently at work finishing off a 1000-page-plus dictionary of his private language, Taneraic, pages from which appeared in issue fifty-eight of Otoliths.
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