Swarming City, City of Dreams
Kind of a Charles Baudelaire book review
Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,
Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant!
Ever since my early twenties, I have found my mind regularly introspecting on these lines from Charles Baudelaire’s Les Septs Vieillards, made famous by T.S. Eliot in his epic poem The Waste Land.
Just what is this “spectre” that arrests the gaze of the passer-by, in broad daylight even? What did he mean? There seems for me to be some significance here that I can grasp at but not yet reach.
I can picture Charles staggering through 1850s Paris in a laudanum haze, well-to-do mothers pulling their children away from him as they stroll the boulevards.
For Baudelaire, nowadays regarded as the father of modernism, the city was a sacred meeting place of heaven and hell. Such a notion wasn’t for him merely symbolic. He meant an actual place where the currents of good and evil converged. A place that lured us in with whispered promises of who we might become, if we just left our raggedy little village and joined the masses in the newly-emerged cities of the industrial age.
Was his “spectre” this vision of possibility - the siren voice of some maleficent spirit? Drop your shovel and your hoe and get a job in a factory. Think who you could become. Forget your body and become your mind.
Was Baudelaire, like Eliot some generations later, condemned to see where it would all lead? Condemned to be the visionary nay-sayer trampled over in the fervour of the masses to try and attain their dreams? Could Baudelaire, even in the middle of the nineteenth century, see Zuck’s Metaverse waiting for us many decades down the line?
I always seem to get into these conversations , forgive me if the response is not always linear , I am a female after all . First of all , my mother says that dreams are intractable , they are ghosts walking the earth , waiting to find someone to influence to allow actuation of the desire that spawned them . So for me the idea of the spectre is not a necessarily negative one , but it is a powerful one . Sometimes , when I feel empty and devoid of desire , I reach into the story of another person , and take on that ghost , for example , recently a few of my poems came out a little bit like Emily Dickenson , and I am not ashamed to sign her name to them -" Emily Dickenson , from beyond the grave " which then makes me laugh . So the spectre , depending on the reader , could mean many things , to many people . On facebook , someone wrote that the small sustainable farm was a living hell for so many who wanted to escape it , but , they wrote " it sure is really photogenic in facebook postings " -- a friend who wants to leave Cuba for the USA sent me photos of what looked like the Garden of Edenn . I said " You wish to leave , and my wish is that I could get you to fall in love with where you are ." I wrote to him the POWER of the dream , and the dream IS the spectre that Baudelaire is writing about , and this is what I wrote -- ( just as I am not ashamed to sign Emily Dickenson to a poem , I am also not ashamed to quote myself , as to me , I watch my heart speak through my typing fingers and again , I LAUGH ) - the quote " And slowly , I am seeing that
the picture of the heart is so much more seriously powerful than our minds ability to try to change the trajectory of that flaming arrow once released ." -- But now , I will copy paste YOUR thought , " Forget your body and become your mind " - Said in contrarian sarcasm , because it says it all . This is the great drama of our times , and something that we must learn about and teach to the generations . As always , enjoy bouncing off of your thoughts . J