In the hidden shadows of the mind, do there lie… les fleurs du Mal?

I recently picked up Les fleurs du Mal (flowers of Evil) – a book of incredibly beautiful sensual and melancholic poems by 19^th century symbolist, Baudelaire.

I am fairly simplistic to be reading Baudelaire. Apart from the fact that my French is pretty rusty, the content is probably way more intense than I am. It probably always was. But even as a teenager wide-eyed and sufficiently shocked by his words, I had felt their hypnotic effect.  

“Dans ce livre atroce j’ai mis tout mon coeur, toute ma tendresses, toute ma religion, toute ma haine…”
(my tacky translation): In this atrocious book, I’ve poured all my heart, all my tenderness, all my religion, all my hate/hatred…”

Baudelaire seems obsessed by the universal power of unhappiness, and renders it sensual, seductive, powerful, and even noble. To my simplistic mind, it feels like he got stuck in a deep dark cave of unhappiness; started noticing truth and beauty in every little crevice and wrote about it to make the cave a mysterious, magical, yet universal place.

I have to admit, his cave is sheer magic - in a breath-stopping, almost scary, visceral, “are we capable of thinking this?”, “are we capable of feeling this?” to “you got to be kidding me” kind of way. The cave is filled with cobwebs that Baudelaire spins in sheer silk and beauty. But no matter how silken and sensuous and stunning, they are all cobwebs and they are all in a dark cave. And there is a world outside the cave – that is real and sunny and which contains beauty as well.

This is not a book critic of Les fleurs du Mal. I don’t plan to write one. For with or without my rusty French, I am not sure that I am even capable of understanding the complete depth of his words.

I simply want to explore if pain and suffering yield a seductive power? If so, can this power keep you stuck to the suffering? And I want to question if my writing this blog is my succumbing to this power.

When I started the blog, I felt I needed to let go. I felt I had bottled my feelings about being ill and felt tensed and stiffened by it. I was trying to be who I was not, who I could not be, and yet I was surprised so many people were surprised to learn I was ill. “I would have never imagined”, “But you look so well”…  So I decided to face the dragon affront. It has been uncomfortable, it has been totally out of character, but I have continued with the insanity, and blamed it on the insanity.

But I still wonder about this whole experiment. It feels therapeutic. But I wonder if I’m doing a Baudelaire here by giving pain and illness a certain identity. For that is not my goal.

I am comparing neither my life, nor my writing to Baudelaire’s. My life is in certainly not sordidly sad as Baudelaire’s. It is a fairly normal, boring life with a few bumps on the road that have dampened my spirit. As for my writing, I would not even dare utter any words of comparison...

All I want to say is that my objective is not to glorify the sadness (not to say Baudelaire’s was. I would love to know how it worked out for him. If emptying his heart out in those sad, sensuous and vivid lines and imagery, made his heart lighter, or did it keep him further embroiled in suffering).

For I don’t want to stay stuck in suffering. I want to soar, even if I feel somewhat chained. I want to be free despite not being truly free. And I hope this will be that experiment.