Poems
Isidore Ducasse
1
The poetic whines of this century are nothing but sophisms.
The first principles must be beyond dispute.
I accept Euripides and Sophocles; but I do not accept Aeschylus.
Do not show bad taste and lack of the most elementary decency towards the Creator.
Abandon incredulity: that will please me.
There are not two kinds of poetry: there is only one.
There is a far from tacit convention between author and reader by which the former says he is sick and takes the latter as his nurse. The poet consoles mankind! The roles have been arbitrarily reversed.
I do not wish to be decried as a poseur.
I shall leave no memoirs.
Poetry is not the tempest, nor is it the tornado. It is a majestic and fertile river.
Only by accepting the physical presence of the night have we come to accept it morally. O Night Thoughts of Young, many is the headache you have caused me!
One only dreams when one is asleep. It is only words such as a dream, the futility of life, the earthly journey, the preposition perhaps, the misshapen tripod, which have infiltrated this dank languorous poetry like the corruption into your souls. There is only one step from the words to the ideas.
Upheavals, anxieties, deprivation, death, exceptions in the physical and moral order, the spirit of negation, brutishness, hallucinations willfully induced, torture, destruction, sudden reversals of fortune, tears, insatiability, servitude, wildly burrowing imaginations, novels, the unexpected, the forbidden, the mysterious, vulture-like chemical peculiarities which watch over the carrion of some dead illusion, precocious and abortive experiments, bug-like obscurities, the terrible monomania of pride, the inoculation of profound stupors, funeral orations, jealousies, betrayals, tyrannies, impieties, irritations, acrimonies, aggressive outbursts, dementia, spleen, reasoned terrors, strange anxieties which the reader would prefer to be spared, grimaces, neuroses, the bloody screw-plates by which logic is forced to retreat, exaggerations, lack of sincerity, catch-words, platitudes, the sombre, the lugubrious, creations worse than murders, passions, the clan of assize-court novelists, tragedies, odes, melodramas, extremes perpetually present, reason howled down with impunity, odours of milksops, mawkishness, frogs octopi, sharks, the simoun of the deserts, all that is somnambulous, shady, nocturnal, somniferous, noctambulous, viscous, speaking seals, the ambiguous, the consumptive, the spasmodic, the aphrodisiac, the anaemic, the one-eyed, hermaphrodite, bastard, albino, pederast, abortions from the aquarium, bearded women, the drunken hours of silent depression, fantasies, sourness, monsters, demoralizing syllogisms, excrement, those who do not think with the innocence of a child, desolation, that intellectual manchineel, perfumed chancres, thighs covered with camellias, the culpability of the writer who rolls down the slope of the abyss, despising himself with cries of joy, remorse, hypocrisy, vague perspectives which crush you in their imperceptible works, spitting on sacred axioms, vermin and their insinuating titillations, extravagant prefaces, such as those to Cromwell, those by Mlle Daupin and Dumas the younger, decay, impotence, blasphemy, asphyxia, suffocation, fits of rage--it is time to react against these repulsive charnel-houses which I blush to name, to react against everything which is supremely shocking and oppressive.
Your mind is perpetually unhinged, lured into, and trapped inside the darkness created by the crude art of egoism and amour-propre.
Taste is the fundamental quality which epitomizes all others. It is the nec plus ultra of the understanding. By virtue of this faculty alone can genius maintain the health and balance of all the other faculties. Villemain is thirty-four times more intelligent than Eugene Sue and Frederic Soulie. His preface to the Dictionary of the Academy will outlive the novels of Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper, and all the novels conceivable and imaginable. The novel is a false genre, because it describes the passions for their own sake: the moral conclusion is absent. To describe the passions is nothing: it is enough to have been born with something of the nature of a jackal, a vulture, a panther. It is a task we do not care for. But to describe them and then subject them to a high moral concept, as Corneille did, is another thing. He who refrains from doing the former but remains capable of admiring and understanding those who do the second surpasses him who writes the former by as much as virtue surpasses vice.
A sixth-form teacher, simply by saying: 'Not for all the treasures in the universe would I wish to have written novels such as those of Balzac and Alexander Dumas’ proves himself to be more intelligent than Alexander Dumas and Balzac. Simply by realizing that one should not write of moral and physical deformity, by this alone, a fifth-year pupil shows that he is stronger, more able, and more intelligent than Victor Hugo, if he had only written novels, dramas, and letters.
Alexander Dumas the younger will never, absolutely never, make a speech at a school-prize day. He does not know what morality is. It makes no compromises. If he did, he would have to cross out, in a single stroke, every word he has written up to now, starting with absurd prefaces. Find me a jury of competent men and let them decide: I maintain that a good sixth-former is better than Dumas in anything you care to mention, including the filthy question of courtesans.
The chefs d’oeuvre of the French language are school prize-day speeches, and academic speeches. In fact, the instruction of youth is perhaps the finest practical expression of duty, and a good appreciation of Voltaire’s works (I stress the word appreciation) is preferable to those works themselves. Naturally!
The best novelists and dramatists would eventually distort the famous idea of good, if the teaching profession, that conservatory of clarity and precision, did not keep the younger and the older generations of the path of honest and hard work.
In his own name and in spite of it, I have come to disown, with implacable will and the tenacity of iron, the hideous past of whining humanity. Yes: I wish to proclaim the Beautiful on my golden lyre, having eliminated the goitral sadness and the stupid outbursts of pride which corrupt the swampy poetry of this century! I will crush underfoot the bitter stanzas of scepticism which have no right to exist. Judgment, in the full bloom of its strength, imperious and resolute, without for a second hesitating in the derisory uncertainties of misplaced pity, condemns them, fatidically, like an Attorney General. We must relentlessly be on our guard against the purulent insomnia and atrabilious nightmares. I despise and execrate pride and the indecent delights of that extinguishing irony which disjoints the precision of our thought.
Some excessively intelligent characters--there is no reason to dispute it with palinodes of doubtful taste--flung themselves headlong into the arms of evil. It is the absinthe (savorous? no, I don’t think so, but noxious) which morally destroyed the author of Rolla. Woe to its connoisseurs! Scarcely has the English aristocrat reached maturity than his harp is shattered beneath the walls of Missolonghi, having gathered on his way only the flowers which brood on the opium of gloomy disasters.
Though he was more gifted than ordinary geniuses, if there had been at his time another poet, gifted as he was, with the same measure of exceptional intelligence, and capable of rivaling him, he would have to have been the first to admit the futility of his efforts to produce incongruous multitudes of maledictions; and to acknowledge that the sole and exclusive good worthy of being striven for is, by unanimous agreement, to win our esteem. The fact is that there was no one who could successfully compete with him. And this is a point that no one has ever made. Strange to say, even perusing the miscellanies and books of his age, no critic ever thought of mentioning the rigorous syllogism of the preceding sentence. And I, who surpass him in this, cannot have been the first to think of this. So full were they of stupor and apprehension, rather than reflective admiration, in the face of works written by a perfidious hand which nevertheless revealed imposing aspects of a soul which did not belong to the common mass, which was freely able to face the last consequence
s of one of the two least obscure problems which interest non-solitary minds: good and evil. It is granted only to a few to approach this problem, either in the one direction, or in the other. That is why, while praising without reservation the marvelous intelligence which he, one of the four or five beacons of humanity, shows at every moment, one must have numerous silent reservations about the unjustifiable application and use which he made of that intelligence. He should not have passed through the satanic realms.
The fierce revolt of the Troppmanns, the Napoleon, the firsts, the Papvoines, the Victors Noirs, and the Charlotte Cordays will be kept a good distance from my cold and severe look. In one quick movement I push aside all these major criminals with their different titles. Who do they think they are fooling here? I ask, I slowly interpose. Hobby-horses of penal colonies! Soap-bubbles! Ridiculous dancing-jacks! Worn-out strings! Let them approach, the Conrads, the Manfreds, the Laras, the sailors who resemble the Corsair, the Mephistopheles, the Werthers, the Don Juans, the Fausts, the Iagos, the Rodins, the Caligulas, the Cains, he Iridions, the megaerae a la Columba, the Ahrimanes, the manichean manitous, bespattered with human brains, who ferment the blood of their victims in the sacred pagodas of Hindustan, the serpent, the toad and the crocodile, divinities, now considered abnormal, of ancient Egypt, the sorcerers and the demoniac powers of the Middle Ages, the Prometheuses, the mythological Titans thunderstruck by Jupiter, the evil gods vomited up by the primitive imagination of barbarian peoples--the whole noisy stack of paper devils. Certain of overcoming them, I grasp the whip of indignation and concentration, and, feeling its weight in my hand, I stand my ground and await these monsters as their preordained tamer.
There are a number of degraded writers, dangerous buffoons, jokers and clowns, sombre hoaxers, genuine lunatics, who deserve to be locked up in Bedlam. Their cretinizing heads, which have a screw loose somewhere, create gigantic phantoms which go down instead of going up. A scabrous exercise, a specious form of gymnastics. Away with the grotesque nonsense, quick as can be. Please withdraw from my presence, fabricators by the dozen of forbidden enigmas, in which I could not previously, as I can today, find the trivial solution at the first glance. A pathological case of dreadful egotism. Fantastic automata: point out to each other, my children, the epithet which puts them in their place.
If, beneath the plastic reality, they existed somewhere, they would be, in spite of their undoubted, but false, intelligence, the disgrace, the opprobrium and the shame of the planets where they lived. Imagine them all gathered together with beings of their own kind. There would be an uninterrupted succession of combats, such as bulldogs, forbidden in France, sharks, and hammer-headed whales cannot dream of. There would be torrents of blood in those chaotic regions full of hydras and minotaurs, from which the dove, terrified beyond all hope, flees as fast as its wings will carry it...They are a bunch of apocalyptic beasts, who know quite well what they are doing. There are the conflicts of the passions, mortal enmities, ambition, and through it all the howlings of a pride which it is impossible to read, which restrains itself, and of which nobody can even approximately sound out the reefs and the shallows.
But they will no longer impress me. Suffering is a weakness, when one doesn't need to do so, when one can find something better to do. But, suffocating in the marshes of perversity, to exhale sufferings of deranged splendour, is to show even less resistance and less courage! With the voice and with all the solemnity of my great days, I call you to my hearth, glorious hope. Wrapped in the cloak of illusions, come and sit beside me on the reasonable tripod of appeasement. With a whip of scorpions I chased you, like an unwanted piece of furniture from my abode. If you wish me to believe that, in returning, you have forgotten all the grief which my short-lived repentance caused you in the past, well, then bring along with you the sublime procession--hold me up, I am fainting!--of the virtues which I offended, and their everlasting atonements.
With bitterness I have to state that there are only a few drops of blood left in the arteries of our phthisic age. Ever since the bizarre and odious whinings of the Jean-Jacques Rosseaus, the Chateaubriands, and the Obermanns, wet nurses of chubby babies, and all the other poets who have wallowed in the filthy slime, up to the dreams of Jean-Paul the suicide of Dolores de Veintemilla, Allan's Raven, the Pole's Infernal Comedy, the bloody eyes of Zorilla, and the immortal cancer, a carrion, lovingly painted once by the morbid lover of the Hottentot Venus, the incredible sorrows which this century has created for itself, in their deliberate and disgusting monotony, have made it consumptive. Wet through with tears in their intolerable torpor!
And so on, the same old story.
Yes, good people, I order you to burn, on a spade red-hot from the fire, and with a little yellow sugar for good measure, the duck of doubt with its vermouth lips, which, in the melancholy struggle between good and evil, shedding tears which are not heartfelt, creates everywhere, without the aid of a pneumatic machine, universal emptiness. It is the best thing you can do.
Maldoror and Poems Page 22