The aesthetic
transformation of perception is closely linked to the purification and
transmutation of language: the alchimie
du verbe of which Rimbaud and the Surrealists spoke.
The transformation of
perception arises from the disclosure of the Essential, the revelation of the
Quintessence, and from the elimination of all inessentials, all deadly serious
prosaic elements.
Cautionary tales? Not today, thank you. Weighty Issues? Oh yeah? Huge Challenges? You must be joking. The revolution? Oh, I say! The People? Oh ha ha. Devotional tracts? Give us a break.
It is this ‘alchemical’ or Hermetic theory of poetic language and aesthetic image, to which Mallarme was alluding when he referred to the task of giving ‘a purer meaning to the words of the tribe’ and which lay behind Baju’s desire to re-designate the Decadents as the ‘Quintessents’. In this sense the poet can become a shamanistic custodian of the modern – or the traditions which comprise the modern, for traditions enshrine ways of seeing the world and, contrary to popular belief, are never static, mutating in response to deep-running, impersonal, evolutionary currents. In this sense the ‘visionary’ role of the poet, uniquely attuned to these mutations, is not metaphorical – he, or she, may become the instrument of change – change, through transformation of perception.
In his seminal Lettres du Voyant Rimbaud defined the
visionary role of the poet of the future as ‘the supreme savant’, the initiator
of universal transmutation, the harbinger of a new era in human evolution, un multiplicateur de progres.
The poet would define the amount of
the unknown awakening in the universal soul in his own time. He would produce
more than the formulation of his thought or the measurement of his march
towards progress.
Poetry, like all art,
should be founded on a special vision of the world, a different way of seeing,
even a new reality principle. To a degree any artist will transgress accepted
ideas of normality, if only by presenting familiar objects and situations in an
unusual way. Poetry is bound to conflict with consensus opinion because the
special vision will incorporate the negative as well as the positive; it will
be an indictment as well as an affirmation. As Sartre once said ‘literature is,
in essence, heresy’. When an artist – a poet, a novelist, a composer, or an artist
in any medium – adopts a different way of seeing the world he or she has taken
the first step towards total idiosyncratic vision attained through various stages
of initiation. This ‘initiation’ or rite of passage will involve a state known
as ‘the dark night of the soul’ in which enhanced awareness of ‘supernal’
perfection, the Ideal, or, to use Mallarme’s phrase, ‘the dream in its ideal
nakedness’, leads to a similarly enhanced awareness of human, existential
imperfection and a breakdown of the mystified and petrified realities of the
everyday social world. For Baudelaire awareness of human or worldly
imperfection was called spleen, for
the alchemists it was the Nigredo or ‘blackening’. Celine used the term noircissement to identify the same state
of mind – a night-world of horror, viciousness, pain and dread. It is this
‘core of horror’ which, since the eighteenth century, has given rise to a
current of militant pessimism in modern art and literature, represented by the
works of Sade , Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Nietzsche, Jarry, Artaud, Genet,
Burroughs and Beckett, among others. Here one may think of that ‘nocturnal
language’ of which Anais Nin once spoke regarding the writings of Anna Kavan – that
lexicon of dreams and alienation.
It is of some historical
significance that this nihilistic vision is closely linked to the emergence of
new stylistic trends. Most of the authors and poets in this current of
development contributed to a revolution in syntax and to the deconstruction of
traditional conventions. Barriers between fact and fiction, between spoken and
written language, between poetry and prose, have been dismantled in order to
express a vision of transmutation – in order to effect a transmutation. This disruption of syntax, literary form,
musical tonality and pictorial representation is symptomatic of the
dissociation and psychic dislocation brought about by the first stage of
initiation. For many it has become a metaphor of cultural collapse, of the
rejection of the telos, of the
atomization of the world – a break-down, not a break-through.
In addition to the
ultra-nhilist vision there is a second way of seeing which, like the first, was
derived mainly from Baudelaire: modernity.
Many of Baudelaire’s
followers regarded themselves as more modern than their contemporaries, despite
their frequent denunciations of modern beliefs. Although they loathed modern
society, they admired modern technology because they regarded the artificial
as superior to the natural. This was reinforced by an adherence to Naturalism,
a concentration on the depiction of ‘slices’ of modern (urban) life, a
challenge to the taboo of ‘morality’. This Naturalism complemented a need to
cultivate intensity despite all social limitations: indulgence in perversity
could be masked as Naturalistic research or ‘field work’. For Huysmans, the
most powerful of the Naturalist writers, such methods offered some way of
coming to terms with the otherwise banal exigencies of everyday life. His
transition from Naturalism to Decadence, from Downstream to Against Nature,
represented a need to augment dry Naturalistic description with some ‘deeper’
more acute vision, even though his subsequent transition from Decadence to
Catholicism, from Against Nature to La Cathedrale, represented a retreat
into a comfort zone of ‘faith’. The traumatic identity crisis caused by the
arrival of modernity; the erosion of hitherto established cultural norms, the
feelings of isolation, of powerlessness and meaningless self-estrangement, can
often lead to a resurgence of, or relapse into, religion (the ‘flight into
faith’). This is a circumstance which can apply to both the individual (such as
Huysmans in this case) and to the collectivity as a whole.
In most of his critical
writings from 1845 Baudelaire, inspired by Poe and Gautier, advocated the
theory of ‘the heroism of modern life’. He argued that the artist must oppose
the false charm of nostalgia by extracting the essence of beauty from the
everyday world – to look for the ‘classic’ in the remote was an error. In her
discussion of his aesthetics in her biography of Baudelaire Enid Starkie wrote:
‘Thus all forms of modernity were capable and worthy of becoming classic, and
if they did not do so the fault lay with the artist and not with his age.’ The
implication of this view, its implicit relativism, and the doubt it casts on
orthodox definitions of the real, renders ‘the heroism of modern life’ a
disruptive, perhaps magical, idea.
From the alchemical
perspective, if the essential beauty of the everyday is equated with the
philosopher’s stone, Baudelaire’s theory corresponds to the ancient Hermetic
doctrine that the ultimate substance must be distilled from a despised and
neglected prima materia. Thus,
Rimbaud and Verlaine, in London in 1873, sought the marvelous and the fantastic
in immediate urban images, in ‘modern-Babylonian’ architecture, in The City, in
station hotels, in the docks and great iron railway bridges.
This potent urban
psycho-geography prefigures the Surrealist poet Aragon, who in 1924, wrote of
those other places, ‘sites... not yet inhabited by a divinity’, but where a
‘profound religion is very gradually taking shape’ as though surreality
precipitates ‘like acid-gnawed metal at the bottom of a glass’. For the
Surrealists these privileged locations were in Paris: the Pont des Suicides at
the Buttes-Chaumont, the Porte Saint-Denis, the Tour Saint-Jacques, or the
vanished Passage de l’Opera. For us London may take the aspect of a modern
Babylon, of a ‘concrete jungle’, redolent with psychic portents and hermetic
symbols. Like St Giles High Street, Hungerford Bridge has always possessed
features associated with Gateways to Otherness, where – to use Questing jargon
– the ‘veil between this world and the next is particularly thin’.
As the filmmaker Georges
Franju once remarked ‘Doesn’t this mean that poetry is in reality… and that it
is less a question of expressing it than of not preventing it from showing
itself?’ And so the poet becomes a shaman of multiple dimensions, creating the
classic from the mundane, distilling the essential from the inessential,
revealing ‘heroic’, interpenetrating parallel realities, or, to use Franju’s
terminology, to allow the insolite (unusual)
to emerge beside or in-between the interstices of the accepted Real.
But, in order to
experience, or even portray the ‘heroism’ of modernity the poet must unlearn
preconditioned responses and engage in a critical, initiatory process of
dissociation. August Weidmann has shown how this process of ‘dissociation of
sensibility’ was a key tenet of Romanticism and fundamental to modern
conceptions of art. The Romantics however, tried to gain access to a
‘primordial vision’, whereas it can now be understood that deviation from
conventional perceptual norms is, in fact, a way of transmuting the world
around us.
In his struggle to
apprehend Poe’s ‘supernal beauty’ filtering fitfully through profane sensory
mechanisms, the poet uses his or her art to deconstruct, or dismantle, a
preconditioned worldview. Understanding
of ecstasy, or The Ideal, generates a blackening, or noircissement, as the horror of existence overwhelms the subject
with disgust, inducing a hellish night-world experience. However, this dissociation
brings a more fantastic, if not more positive, vision – the everyday world
loses its narrow, constricted frame of limitation and becomes, thankfully,
bizarre.
The artist-poet, through
an aloofness or detachment, fleetingly attained in reaction to the disgust
provoked by the Nigredo or unregenerate night-world state, perceives that,
divorced from everyday functions or associations, ordinary situations,
objects, even people, may take on a surreal perspective as words and images function
as ‘so many springboards for the mind’ (Andre Breton). They acquire an
ephemeral, but nevertheless quintessential, glamour, or enchantment of
absolute Beauty. But, it will be seen that this ‘absolute’ Beauty, this
‘threshold aestheticism’, is a coniunctio
oppositorum, a union of opposites in the Hermetic sense. It contains not
only the essential ‘gold’ of supernal beauty, but also a fearful purity of
supernal horror – it is not only Naturalistic, but anti-Naturalistic – it is
not only soothing but a force which consumes with a unique intensity: it is
‘subversive of perception and understanding’. It is not only sublime; it is
also of The Abyss. It is not some transcendental enlightenment, but more a much
sought-for diversion from the banality of the mundane or even ‘the appearance
of the image of liberation’ to cite Marcuse.
It partakes of both
elegance and the grotesque. “If I am not grotesque,” said Aubrey Beardsley,
that most perfect example of the aesthetic sensibility, “I am nothing”.
Beauty, said Baudelaire,
is always bizarre.
Hermetic Art Gnostic Alchemy of The Imagination (1985) on The Alchemy Website
Illustration: Aethyr of Le Voyant, 1979
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