Cassandra Voices

Tag: Peter O’Neill Cassandra Voics

  • L’Homme et … la Merde!

    For the purpose of perspective, I should like to carry out a short comparative study of two poems treating the subject of the sea. The first poem I should like to focus on is the great sonnet by Charles Baudelaire L’Homme et la Mer, whose composition dates back to 1852. The second poem is a poem I wrote sometime last year, L’Homme et la Merde, in which I use the poem by Baudelaire, as an obvious starting point, in order to attempt to underline the epic social and ecological shifts which have occurred in the time frame of the composition of both poems.

    So, to be absolutely clear, the period of time that separates both poems is one-hundred-sixty-three years. Without further ado, here is the poem by Buadelaire, followed by my transversion into English of his great poem; ….[1]

    XIV. – L’HOMME ET LA MER

    Homme libre toujours tu chériras la mer !
    La me rest ton mirroir; tu contemples ton âme
    Dans le déroulement infini de sa lame,
    Et ton esprit n’est pas un gouffre moins amer.

    Tu te plais à plonger au sein de ton image;
    Tu l’embrasses des yeux et des bras, et ton cœur
    Se distrait quelque fois des sa propre rumeur
    Au bruit de cette plainte indomitable et sauvage.

    Vous êtes tous les deux ténébreux et discretes;
    Homme, nul n’a sonde le fond de tes abîmes ;
    O mer, nul ne connaît tes richesses intimes,
    Tant vous êtes jaloux de garder vos secrets!

    Et cependent voila des siècles innombrables
    Que vous vous combattez sans pitié ni remord,
    Tellement vous aimez le carnage et la mort,
    O lutteurs éternels, ô frères implacables!

    XIV. –  Man and the Sea

    Man, free, you will always cherish the sea!
    The sea is your mirror; when you stand before it
    And contemplate your fate, before its infinite movement,
    Your poor mind, brine wracked, couldn’t be more bitter.

    Yet, you enjoy plunging into the heart of yourself;
    Distracted by the immensity before you, and which
    Makes you forget, momentarily mesmerised by such
    Sheer force, your own apocalypse riding before you, wave bound.

    You are both just as dark and fathomless;
    Man, like the sea, nobody has reached your depths, yet;
    Both of you guard jealously your great secrets,
    Which you both refuse to give up, without some savage consequence.

    For innumerable millennia you have both now been struggling
    With one another for survival, both just as pitiless,
    Both of you loving, as you do, carnage and violence.
    O you two blood brothers, eternally vying…

    Baudelaire’s poem has all of the hallmarks of late nineteenth century romanticism, written as it was just one year after the publication of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), and just forty-eight years after Beethoven’s composition of the Pastoral (1804) , his symphony number six. All three works are primarily concerned with man and his extremely precarious place in nature.

    Ahab’s apocalyptic fate in Melville’s epic account of the hunt for the great white whale has become emblematic of humanity itself, in our own relentless pursuit to harness nature for our own ends, without thinking about the consequences. Beethoven’s storm in the sixth taking on a very ominous nature when listened to today, as our own climate continually shifts into  extremes as a consequence of the impact of our society on the planet, and particularly so within the time frame of the last fifty or so years.

    Image: Daniele Idini.

    Indeed, today we are aware of the extremely negative impact our collective behaviour is having on the planet; be it as a direct or indirect consequence of global deforestation, industrial waste (atomic or other) or the continuing emissions from fossil fuels. We are now all collectively responsible for the state of both the immediate world in which we find ourselves living in today, in other words our own particular microcosm, as well as the greater macro-environment which we communally share, for as long as we humanly can. And, of course, this is the huge question looming over us all today:

    If we continue living as we are without each of us making dramatic changes to our lifestyles in terms of how we eat, spend etc. these so – choices we make every second of each day – how much longer will the Earth be able to support us before we are all completely annihilated?

    In order to frame the question better, I should like to introduce the second poem now L’Homme et la Merde, which I wrote shortly after having been diagnosed with chronic ulcerative colitis early last year.

    For the purpose of clarity, the medical condition known as colitis is a terrible affliction caused to the intestine and the bowels, in which the sufferer loses all control of their system, causing unimaginable horror and distress. It is classified as a disease and it is on the increase in countries all around the Western hemisphere; interestingly in Asia, where people have a radically different type of diet, and lifestyle, people suffer from it far less. In my own case, the elimination of gluten is what stopped, eventually, the horrendous impact that this sickness was causing to me and my family.

    I wrote a lot of poems of a very scatological nature, while suffering from colitis, although the poem L’Homme et la Merde is, without doubt, the most troubling of them. This poem reflects an apocalyptic vision of the future of our seas, if we do not do something now to change the way in which we are living.

    This can be indicated quite simply. For example, one June weekend, here in Skerries, north county Dublin, the front beach had to be closed to swimmers due to a possible leakage of effluents into the sea. It was a terrible thing to experience, as the sun was out that June weekend, and people had come from all parts of Dublin, and possibly beyond, to enjoy a day by the sea. Instead, they had to be informed by the lifeguards that if they wished to swim in the sea, they would be putting themselves at risk of getting very sick due to the effluent which was now polluting our once beautiful coast.

    In fact, in Skerries it is a well- known thing – the risk of contamination – as for a couple of years now the town has lost its blue flag due to such incidents related above. But this is just one story, and on a local level. Now add to it every coastal town in the inhabited world, as you can be sure that we are not alone. Imagine the collective damage that is being done?

    Why, during the twenty first century, are we still allowing sewage, and other toxic matter, to be pumped into our seas? This is just a basic question, yet which needs an immediate response. Particularly when one considers how the harnessing of bacteria, found in faeces, can create biofuels potentially saving billions; plans are already afoot in Washington D.C. in an attempt to create alternative ways of making energy in order to generate electricity in the city, using faecal matter![2]

    And that is besides poisoning ourselves: our bodies are not designed to tolerate enormous quantities of gluten. What hope do we possibly have of saving the planet around us if we cannot preserve our own health?

    Ignorance, it would appear, is our greatest enemy. And, here is the hope, as this is something we can all start changing, immediately. All we need is the desire.

    L’Homme et la Mer-de 

    Sheep, a ghastly consommé, to the swirling form of cupcakes.
    These vertiginous constellations, floating like malignant nebula
    In the solid throne at the end of your hall… Shit, excrement, stools,
    Call them what you will. Yet, these grotesque floaters

    Will be the very last trace of you. How apt, being a member
    Of a species which would appear to be shit-infected.
    Le mot de Cambrone; MERDE
    Le merde qui est partout.

    The shitty structures which we maintain and perpetuate.
    Up to our necks in it. Won’t be happy till we’re literally
    Drowning in it.

    “Now man,” through these sweetened dumplings
    Nature seems to be whispering to you, “Embrace
    The imperium of your turbulent, khaki -coloured oceans.”

     

    [1] O’ Neill, Peter: The Enemy, Transversions from Charles Baudelaire, Lapwing, Belfast, 2015.

    [2] Shaver, Katherine ( 2015-10-07 ). “ D.C. Water begins harnessing electricity from every flush”. The Washington Post.

  • Love Denied: Baudelaire’s Une Charogne

    Une Charogne (1859) is among the most important poems of the 19th century, containing all of its author’s ground-breaking aesthetic. Our own aesthetically challenged century could learn a lot from it, in terms of the aesthetic of rupture, spleen and discord.

    It is Baudelaire’s response, in a sense, to the early Romantics, such as John Keats for example, and particularly concerning notions of beauty. Baudelaire, like Mary Shelley and Shakespeare before her, found more engagement in what could be described as the dark horror of existence, which had always existed in literature, particularly in writers such as Dante Alighieri, in whose work Dame Francis Yates saw the keys, or genesis, of the Gothic novel: in particular in the last Canto of the Inferno when Count Ugolino is forced by starvation to eat his sons locked away in a tower. However, Baudelaire’s genius was to take such an aesthetic into the everyday. In this this way he was a true revolutionary and visionary.

    Count Ugolino and his sons in their cell, as painted by William Blake circa 1826.

    Une Charogne is the perfect example of his aesthetic. The poet starts off describing a carcass which he has seen rotting on his way home, and which he associates with a former love which he felt for his girlfriend. The reader, however, is only made aware of this in the very last verse of the poem. The remarkable contrast of topics is so unexpected that even one-hundred-and-sixty-years on the poem continues to shock.

    The poem, typically, follows the genre of memento mori, Baudelaire’s originality lies, however, in applying what were rather banal motifs associated with death – such as skulls placed alongside everyday fare like fruit and flowers – and then to insert affairs of the flesh, and, of course, the heart.

    Only readers who have experienced real heartbreak themselves, what the Ancient Greeks described as the Orphic mysteries, will have any real appreciation of the fantastical act of catharsis that is taking place, how the poet wonderfully evokes his former passion for a beloved, and then inverts Love with its counterpart Hate; thus upturning the apple cart of feelings for the beloved which have been transformed into their opposite; diabolical hatred and disgust; perhaps more so for himself, for being duped by such feelings in the first place!

    As indicated, anyone who has been in Love and who has then lost – inevitably harbouring a sense of betrayal – will recognise, and feel, the powerful emotions driving the poem forward. The poet’s dedication and craft at the description of the whole process continue to inspire awe.

    Three Studies for a Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, by Francis Bacon,1963.

    Francis Bacon Interviews

    Regarding my transversion, I was helped enormously by using the interviews conducted by David Sylvester with the twentieth century British painter Francis Bacon. Bacon was a keen reader of Baudelaire, and one who followed the French poet’s dramatic overhaul of the Romantic spirit. One only has to consider Bacon’s entire corpus of imagery, the violent palette of colour, the decomposing matter of flesh, and the ‘smoky bacon’ of decomposing Love!

    I find that this unique aesthetic contradicts directly the flimsy narrative of many contemporary literary journals which are marred by politically correct censorship; the overwhelming and ever-present narrative of all-inclusivity and sensitivity to Others that has now reached idiotic proportions.

    What do I mean by that? Take for example the narrative of Une Charogne below. Anybody reading the poem with a half a brain will understand there is a very definite mask wearing taking place on the part of the poet. The diabolical humour is just that, a very nasty joke. But one which is very human.

    When one has been jilted the immediate response is to seek revenge. Exact some hate! This is simply being human, and to deny the presence of this impulse is simply perverse. All is fair in love and war. A person who has betrayed you with another having vowed to love you forever is now in the arms of another.

    Portrait of Charles Baudelaire by Gustave Courbet (1848).

    Fail Again

    There is, I would say, no greater pain on this Earth than the agony of abandonment. It is the hardest possible task for any human being to accept graciously that loss, and then to move on. It reflects the instruction of Samuel Beckett in Worstward-Ho: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

    Life onwards will be mere monochrome. A travesty in a sense. This is the exact sentiment that lies behind Baudelaire’s Une Charogne. The poet is damned, damned by the Other. And so he will exact his revenge. The poet finds it in the poem, alone, in its very composition.

    I would liken this Art to extracting puss. It is an act of catharsis. Again, a very Greek notion. Francis Bacon was also a great fan of the Ancient Greeks, like Baudelaire before him.

    I have made the point repeatedly: if there is not a little poison in the well there is no sweetness to the water. I have met all too many high-minded moralists who plead constantly for whatever Other is currently in fashion.

    These latter-day saints among the chattering classes are hypocrites, who sanctimoniously bottle up their resentments. I have been a witness to a deformed humanity spurting out in the most toxic manner imaginable. Believe me, it is not a pretty sight! — Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère! (— Hypocritish reader, — my fellow, — my brother!)

    The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

    Broken Word

    On the philosophical plane the poet has completely sublimated Friedrich Hegel’s (1871-1831) dialectic of the Master and Servant. To speak in the terms of Baudelaire’s countryman Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) – of a different generation but observing an unaltered humanity – he is killing symbolically the Other in the world of the Real. This for Lacan, as for the poet, is entirely symbolic.

    Baudrillard – perhaps the most Baudelairean of late twentieth century French thinkers – was to make of this his unique discourse point. He believed that we had lost our capacity for creating metaphor, so enamoured were we by the hyperreal; that is to say the literality of living we now observe in a mediated age where news is constant, and so ever-present. The Hegelian Now repeated ad infinitum is a poet’s nightmare. This explains why we are living in a period of atrocious, purely confessional poetry. The so- called ‘Spoken Word’ where the Now is Ever Present!

    I AM

    The spoken word speaks – BEING poetry itself! Such is the utter fallacy.

    This is the poetry of idiots.

    If you do not kill your enemy symbolically, you will never kill him. Such is the Real. Not reality, but the symbolically Real, which for a poet IS the only reality.

    Have you ever considered where Populist monsters spring from?

    Take a leaf out of Baudelaire’s black book, write your words in Hate, as much as Love. Be the totality that is You. And you will be a better artist, and Human, for it.

     

    XXIX.- UNE CHAROGNE

    Rappelez -vous l’objet que nous vîmes, mon âme,
    Ce beau matin d’été si doux :
    Au detour d’un sentier une charogne infâme
    Sur un lit semé de cailloux,

    Les jambes en l’air, comme une femme lubrique,
    Brûlante et suant les poisons,
    Ouvrant d’une façon nonchalante et cynique
    Son ventre plein d’exhalaisons.

    Le soleil rayonnait sur cette pourriture,
    Comme afin de la cuire à point,
    Et de rendre au centuple à la grande Nature
    Tout ce qu’ensemble elle avait joint ;

    Et le ciel regardait la carcasse superbe
    Comme une fleur s’épanouir.
    La puanteur était si forte, que sur l’herbe
    Vous crûtes vous évanouir.

    Les mouches bourdonnaient sur se ventre putride,
    D’où sortaient de noirs bataillons
    Des larves, qui coulaient comme un épais liquide
    Le long de ce vivants haillons.

    Tout cela descendait, montait comme un vague,
    Ou s’élançait en pétillant;
    On eût dit que le corps, enflé d’un souffle vague,
    Vivait en se multipliant.

    Et ce monde rendait une étrange musique,
    Comme l’eau courante et le vent,
    Ou le grain qu’un vanneur d’un mouvement rythmique
    Agite et tourne dans son van.

    Les formes s’effaçaient et n’étaient plus qu’un rêve,
    Une ébauche lente à venir,
    Sur la toile oubliée, et que l’artiste achève
    Seulement par le souvenir.

    Derrière les rochers une chienne inquiète
    Nous regardait d’un oeil fâché,
    Épiant le moment de reprendre au squelette
    Le morceau qu’elle avait lâché.

    Et pourtant vous serez semblabe à cette ordure,
    A cette horrible infection,
    Etoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature,
    Vous, mon ange et ma passion !

    Oui ! telle vous serez, ô la reine des graces,
    Après les derniers sacrements,
    Quand vous irez, sous l’herbe et les floraisons grasses,
    Moisir parmi les ossements.

    Alors, ô ma beauté ! dites à la vermine
    Qui vous mangera de baisers,
    Que j’ai gardé la forme et l’essence divine
    Des mes amours décomposés !

     

    XXXIX. – The Exquisite Cadaver

    Remember the ideal object which you discovered~
    That beautiful summer morning, Dear soul:
    By way of the path where you found that exquisite
    Cadaver lying on a bed of pebbles,

    Her legs in the air, like some old tart,
    Burning and stewing in poisons,
    Her belly slit, almost nonchalantly,
    Pouring forth all manner of noxious gasses.

    The sun burns down on the decomposing
    Body, as if searing a steak,
    Rendering back a hundred- fold to Mother Nature,
    What she herself had first conjoined.

    And the sky looks upon the superb carcass
    As it would upon a flower of Evil,
    The rigor mortis encroaching to such a point
    That the very earth around it has been scorched.

    Great Blue Bottles swarm in convoys,
    Buzzing out of the gaping cave, Cyclopean…
    While a treacle of feasting larvae thickly drip,
    Making of the stain a macabre Persian carpet.

    The process of decomposition rose before me,
    Falling in waves, and which I perceived in a kind of
    Pointillism, so that, wave-borne,
    The corpse seemed to come alive and multiply before me!

    This alternate universe was announced in atonal chords,
    And hit me with all the fever of a jungle humidity,
    Or, like the sporadic grains, scattered by a winnower,
    Whose rhythmic movements spun me in a dervish.

    The effaced shapes and forms were as if but a dream
    From a preliminary sketch, slow to arrive,
    And which the artist, not being able to rely on memory,
    Had then to resort to the magnetism of specific photographs.

    Behind the rocks an unnerved dog
    Looked at us both with a ravenous eye,
    Trying to deduce the auspicious minute
    When he could rip apart some rotting flesh from the bones.

    And yet, You now would appear to be not so dissimilar to this horror,
    This putrid infection,
    At one time Star de mes yeux,
    You my one time, all consuming passion!

    Yes! After the last rites have long ago been pronounced upon us,
    O You, my once graceful Queen,
    When will you now, in your own time,
    Wallow with these bones upon the grass?

    So, my great Beauty! Whisper then to the vermin
    How you will cherish their kisses,
    While I guard for eternity this sublime image,
    Of all of our decomposing Love.

    Feature Image: Charles Baudelaire by Étienne Carjat, 1863