The Baudelaire Fractal

by Lisa Robertson

  The room was crowded at its edges with the written souls of strangers, and this was its particular comfort. I had no responsibilities towards those souls. I could fetch nothing for them. Neither their comfort nor their pleasure were my domain. They were there because I did not care for them perhaps. I did not need them to pay me anything.

  Unaware of the thoroughly comedic nature of the situation, I continued to cross into such rooms, this room, the room of my unexceptional dalliance. I say unaware, but that is not the just word. Comedy was present but latent. The ironic burlesque of the girl reading, the girl lying diagonally across the bed, across the picture plane, this was a genre I had witnessed in the museums of my travels, and also the burlesque of the female reader’s fingers inserted between the pages of the book as if to say here, only here, am I not. These gentle gestures, gestures that were barely actions – the fingers within the book, the pressure of my belly across the too-soft, bowing mattress, the dark fringe of my growing-out hair flopping repeatedly between my gaze and the book, the upward flex of my knees and the rhythmic movement of my bare foot as I turned a page – transformed me into an image of a reader. But far from limiting the possibilities of my inner experience, the little unthought movements made by my body, which from the point of view of an observer would designate me as image within a pictorial tradition, also brought me to the quiet certitude of this body, my odd body, as an image for thinking, an image for my own free use. Here sprung the comedy. Already my body was inside thought. The strangeness of the image, my body, the girl, her inescapable maladroitness – always leaking, bruising, stinking, lusting – originates the infraction that thought must be. For the girl is an infraction in thought. She simply needs to annotate the breach that she is as her reading destroys the purity of philosophy. The idea was hilarious, capacious, like the best burlesque. When in An American in Paris Gene Kelly wakes up in his shiplike room, a tiny space where every furnishing folds or unfolds to become something else, when he enters the elegantly improvised choreography of grooming and beginning his Parisian day, the habitual movements of his compact yet lanky frame unfolding for his own pleasure, like a philosopher’s quotidian thought, but unfolding also with the gentle artifice of the awareness of being perceived, the charm of his dance being his simultaneous refusal of and dalliance with this artifice – were the table, the bed, the basin his perceivers? This was my sensation when I read. It was funny and it was to become contractual. Insofar as I, or rather my body, was an image, an image of the comedy of the girl in thought, I discovered an image to be a composite inner stance or posture. It wasn’t a sign; its meaning was not fixed. The image was synthetic, made, and so mutating and potent. I was not a sign; therefore, I wasn’t a woman either. The image was a fecund entanglement, an infraction that acted within the person, and between persons, and between eras also, a complex of memory, minerals, sensation, and lust. Everything that happened to me then lingered within me, latent, to next spontaneously transform the image of what I’m now saying. The reading girl, the soft action of her fingers in the text, will become philosophy, will become poetry, in a passive but total infiltration.

  The glimpsed and evasive everythingness of Bonnard’s pictures, the crowded but silently unprepossessing borders of the room, the skewed belatedness of perceiving, my desire to slip away, my metamorphosis inside the room to the image of the girl in thought: these are strands of memory. Not all of the image would reveal itself in the present. It was the appearance of a large brown spider in my basin today that returned me to this earlier room and the spider that had materialized one morning in its stained porcelain bowl. I would then, as now, cruelly permit the creature to live for several days as a mascot or a pet, carefully avoiding rinsing it away, adjusting and minimizing my grooming procedures so that I could continue to observe it, and it me. Outside the basin this spider would perhaps be dangerous. Who was I to know. It could not escape the slant porcelain world it had accidently appeared within, perhaps from up the sour drain, perhaps from above on its invisible thread. I felt, I feel, accompanied by this spider. If part of the image is for the future or already with the future, the image being, as I was discovering in my rooms, a synthesis or recomposition of time as well as of all kinds of sensation, resurging suddenly to stay awhile like a brown spider, if part of comedy is cruelty, what of the parts of the image that were to be forgotten? Where do the forgotten parts stay? Fragments of my sensation sequestered themselves within books, or in cheap rooms. Here I uncover them again.

  Was this room in Avignon or was it in Marseilles? I am no longer certain. Any room near any fountain was paradise, so it hardly matters. The experience of time at the edges of rooms, at the edges of books, time disappearing or bending as I entered, this is my borderless image, the experience of the disappearance of the word at the appearance of the flower. I recall, for instance, an odd recent period when I forgot the word asphodel. The forgetting persisted for more than a week, the week in April, as it happened, when at the borders of the woods near my cottage the asphodel bloomed. I could both see and imagine the ranks of tall ghostly stalks, but the name was absent. And so I thought frequently about asphodels, systematically approaching the absence of the flower’s name from each vantage possible, thinking of the opening lines of the beautiful late poem by William Carlos Williams, yet subtracted of the name, remembering the asphodel meadows that would emerge before blackberry vines, where the woods had been cut down for heating wood. ‘A field made up of women / all silver-white.’ At the margin of each room I enter are asphodels, womanly, at the instant they lose their name. This is a form of self-knowledge, a philosophy. The long period of my life between learning the word asphodel when first reading the Williams poem in the London hotel room, or had it been in a bookshop, just before closing – a ghost of a pressed flower had slipped out of the second-hand book, it was 1984 – and seeing the living flower for the first time only recently, walking in April with my elderly dog, recognizing the flower in the midst of the flicker of linguistic forgetting, this space so active and evacuating at its limits, so welcoming at its empty core, the entanglement of the name’s absence with the striving and failing, the entanglement of gold chain and pearl, the fibs and embellishments and delusions and obfuscations: in the expanding work of forgetting the word asphodel, this flower so flagrantly inhabited the edge of every perception, every memory, that I thought perhaps I could know the name only when I did not know the flower, or only outside the brief season of its bloom, even outside the season of its black budding. I happened upon an emancipation from vocables into the substance of mortality. Slowly, obstinately, the room will be stripped of every conceptual dimension. Every word will be lost. Others will continue the kissing.

  I remember the room as being quite high up in the ancient building, the building itself near the top of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. We climbed what felt like endless flights of dark stairs to get there, his solid back sweating lightly through the gleaming white shirt just a step above me, his hand softly trailing back to touch my fingers. As we climbed, my tenderness for the nameless boy kept expanding, tenderness for the closely cropped dark hair on the nape of his neck, for his sweat-mottled shirt, his acrid scent mixed with sweet soap, the soft trailing plantlike insistence of his trailing-back hand, my tenderness for the darkness of the shabby, steep stair, for the green park bench where I had been sitting with my Nietzsche, for the unread paperback in my satchel, now bouncing softly against my hip, for my own ordinariness in my loose corduroys and cheap tailored jacket and brown sandals, an ordinary girl now extraordinarily climbing a strange stair in mid-afternoon: susceptibility expanded continuously in my chest as I climbed so that I mistook it for desire, though I did then believe that it was desire that I felt. Internally, to myself, I said words like passion, and I believed in that gravitas. What was desire then and what is it now? A kind of poetry maybe. A body of poetry. The opposite of identity. What I wanted ardently was poetry, and to me this expansive afternoon felt like poetry ought
to feel. The entire world, everything it would be possible for me to experience in my life, the anticipation of each kiss and its singularity and rhythm, each angular, difficult, sparkling philosophy, each impersonal room, rooms that would structure my thought and my ambitions, opened into our shadowy and eager ascent. Reader, I am still in that stairwell as I write this. I will never leave it. The splendid freedom of climbing the dark stair that curved above into unknowing, the light scent of dust and sweat and soap, my sensation of internal expansion, expectation mixed with strangeness, the receptivity of my skin augmented as if by a mystic cosmetic: I was then the expanse of what I felt in the limitless afternoon. There was no sadness attached to the anonymity of it, and no fear either. Since I couldn’t then write the poems I wanted to write, I would be the poet of the anonymous fuck. This was not so much a substitution as a technique of self-invention, an experimental method for the grandness of becoming. Other poets, I would later learn, had mentors, whatever mentors were. I had fucking, and it was my own blind affirmation, my autonomy, my own urgent need to fully know the grand world. I felt possessive about it, not fearful. Not the boy himself, but the full world and his part of it. Tenderness, the internal detailed question opened by this desire to know everything. Poetry, its livid shape. It didn’t need to be written yet. Maybe it was a bad poem, a bad fuck, but if that was so, it was very bad, gratingly, oppressively bad: there was nothing mediocre about it, nothing partial, nothing lacking.

  We reached the top of the stair. Inside his door the abrupt light was shocking and I felt even more certain in my seeking tenderness. I still feel it so I slicken. He offered me whisky and I accepted. He was a kind, provincial boy with a bottle of Johnnie Walker in an unpretentious room. This room was clean and bare and had been recently painted a glossy pale yellow. It was small; the one window faced the very large inner court. I saw the tops of trees. The table, where we sat to drink, was pushed up beneath it in sunlight. There was a makeshift toilet cabin enclosed by a shower curtain, constructed in such a way that it awkwardly divided the space. Later I would shower there, at his invitation. Over the narrow bed in the back corner, two posters – one, Warhol’s Marilyn; the other, a glittering skyline of New York by night. The boy had New World ambitions, but for the time being it wasn’t clear to me what he was. Each month his father would laboriously climb these steps, bringing a large suitcase of clean laundry from the country and returning home on the train with the soiled in the same suitcase. I was willing to go to such rooms. But what can be known.

  We had met in the Luxembourg Gardens at 3 p.m.; I had been sitting on a bench reading near the Fontaine de Médicis. ‘Would you care to converse?’ he had asked with such real tentativeness and gentleness that I closed my book. New life would not be found in a Penguin Classic, not that fall afternoon. We spoke a little, then kissed, lightly first, then deeply; this was our conversation on the shaded bench near the fountain. The discovery of our shared urgency, the boy’s and mine, had perhaps caused the climb to his room to seem longer than it was, since now when I return to this quarter to look for the building, the houses are all similarly tall, which is to say only slightly, and I no longer recognize my own past. It had been a convent, he said, by which he meant monastery, and the street was extremely old, as old as the Roman city Lutèce. Maybe the idea of a monastery had enlarged the building in my recollection, or maybe it was simply the thought of its ancientness that had performed the transformation. When Jeanne Duval lived in this neighbourhood, in the late 1830s, it was home to several popular theatres frequented by students, and it was already ancient. This is where Abelard had lived and conducted his famous sad studies with Heloise, and it had been the site of the university ever since. My idealism was capacious; I was not immune to such mythologies. They accented the suffused desire that seemed to spread from my afternoon encounter over the architecture and the streets.

  Jeanne Duval’s second-floor apartment, fashionably and unsparingly decorated with Persian chintz, had been near by on the rue Saint-Georges, said Félix Nadar in his little book on Baudelaire, close to the Pantheon Theatre, where she often played at that time. This theatre was installed in a long-desanctified church, Church of the Cordeliers, where, during the Revolution, a Jacobin club had met. The church is now gone, but Nadar describes the unique charm of the theatrical installation, the way the stage and backdrop and wings were set up in the boarded-up choir, the curtain attached to the carved overhead mouldings, with the spectators seated in the nave. He describes Jeanne’s tallness and her slender waist and the beautiful coppery colour of her skin, her magnificent hair, her deep voice, her reserve, her remarkable carriage, and given this stature and elegance, her incongruous role of housemaid, the first time he saw her play.

  Duval was just one of the names Jeanne went by; her birth name was perhaps her mother’s, Lemaire. Much later she changed the spelling to Lemer. Perhaps her stage name was Berthe. Nadar may have photographed her under this name. Or the photograph of the actress taken by Nadar was not Jeanne Duval, but another younger women, also of mixed family background, but otherwise not similar. For a time she was named Prosper. Perhaps she was evading creditors; perhaps it was a way of inventing herself continuously; maybe she just didn’t care for the fixity of names. In her way she was a philosopher, said Baudelaire. She was born around 1820, it is agreed, or perhaps it was later, on an island, perhaps Haiti, perhaps Réunion, of African and French parentage, and came to France as young as fifteen. Nadar said she was very tall. Her walk was famous. Baudelaire compared her to a ship at sail. She powdered her face to lighten it, but not her hands, said Nadar. Was she fifteen when she met Baudelaire? Some say so. Perhaps she was one quarter black, it was said, with all the obscenity of such a measuring. Her identification papers were lost in a fire. Perhaps her mother accompanied her; perhaps Mme. Lemaire had been born in Nantes in a brothel and died in Paris in 1852. Perhaps her mother’s funeral expenses were provided by Baudelaire. Perhaps Jeanne had a stroke in Honfleur in 1859 when she was living there with Baudelaire; perhaps Baudelaire found a hospice for her recovery in Paris, near the Porte Saint-Denis. Perhaps she remained paralyzed on one side. By the time Manet painted her in 1862, reclining with a fan and almost overpowered by the glorious white crinolined dress, her finely shod feet and slender ankles emerging in the foreground from beneath the belling skirt, her face very small and far-off as a result of the foreshortened perspective, perhaps she was suffering, or her vision was failing, or she was consumptive. Her hollow eyes are very dark. Perhaps she had syphilis; so perhaps did Baudelaire. Perhaps he continued to rent her an apartment, cover her expenses, and pay for her housemaid until the time of his own stroke in 1866. He kept Manet’s portrait of his mistress in the clinic until he died, said his friends. It is certain that all her letters to him were burned by his mother, who refused his sincere request to provide for Jeanne after his death. His family had hated Jeanne Duval because she wasn’t white and because she was an actress. Perhaps she was seen by Nadar on the boulevards, hobbling with crutches, as late at 1869. Baudelaire called her Mistress of Mistresses, She-Beast, Black Venus, Giantess, Féline, Angel, Vampire, Wife, Witch, Philosopher, Nymph. They were together, loving and fighting and talking, for twenty-one years.

  Théodore de Banville said that Jeanne Duval was the only woman Baudelaire ever loved, ‘this Jeanne who he always and so magnificently sung.’ Banville and Jeanne had met at the home of friends before he made Baudelaire’s acquaintance, she dressed in a ravishing velvet cap, her heavy dark blue wool dress trimmed with gold piping. She spoke to Banville of Monsieur Baudelaire – always she was to call her lover Monsieur, ironically, I would think – and his beautiful furniture, his collections, his obsessions. He buffed his fingernails and composed a sonnet, she said to Banville, with the same fastidiousness. They were all then about twenty years old. Banville says, as a strange proof of the poet’s love, that Baudelaire would place Jeanne in a low armchair before him in the sunlight, simply to passively adore her at l
ength, occasionally reading her some verse, although she did not much like his poems.

  There transpired in the glossy yellow room a heaviness, not violence but an immaterial forcefulness, a sort of spiritual smothering – smothering was the analogy I used in my diary for the metaphysical sensation – which I felt embarrassed to perceive as pleasure, even though there was a scrim of physical satisfaction in the act. Ambivalently I perceived my attraction to my own weakness. The sliding from desire to the heaviness was swift, and had its own power of enticement, an inarguable velocity. Briefly the feeling of being possessed was my inner decoration. The boy said that women were meant to be loved and perfumed and dressed, and I, so shabbily groomed, so conscious of my partial dispossession of the female ideal, did not wish to immediately disagree, although I did not concur with the sentiment. It was maybe an Old World thing to say. He said that he liked my Nordic skin; Nordic was what he called my type. And he whispered to me phrases about the regard and the heartbeat. He seemed to speak in song lyrics, pop songs I myself then sang along to.