The Baudelaire Fractal

by Lisa Robertson

  Shall we ever live?

  What happened was this: I smashed up against a violent and completely formed recognition that entered through my sleepy hands. The poems were my poems. The words as I read them were words I knew deeply because they were my own, the way my skin was physiologically my own. I’d muttered these words as I walked. I’d crossed them out after several years to replace them with other words and then changed them back. I was completely inside the poem I was reading, and also within its gradual, discontinuous making, which was both skin and breath, and too, sheer wit – no, I must try to be precise, it was in fact not a poem, but Baudelaire’s preface to the poems, written as a letter to his editor, Arsène Houssaye – for I was starting once again at the beginning:

  My dear friend, I am sending you a modest work of mine, of which nobody can say without injustice that it has neither beginning nor end, as everything in it is both head and tail, one or the other or both at once, each way.

  I was starting again at the beginning, which was an ending, which was the middle of my life. I was not inside the meaning, I was inside the words. I’d done nothing to merit this interiority that was at the same time a superb exteriority, in just the way that a word is at once both inside and outside, a consciousness and a history, an urgent desire and a concept originated by somebody else, if any concept could really be said to have an origin – though I suspect that concepts are collective habits in mentality. Furthermore, this doubled picture is not enough. The mutability of the word as an action, both emanating and absorptive, both willed and dreamt, must be included. Any word I could think of was on the cusp of a metamorphosis inaugurated by a single speaker’s mouth. In my unprecedented reception of the Baudelairean authorship, that female mouth was both his and mine.

  Weren’t all of my desires originated by an elsewhere? Isn’t this the structural experience of modern life? Such is the Baudelairean proposition. The intoxication of newness is a muted repetition. And we will lose sight of this elsewhere, and then we will re-embellish it in the form of a personal myth. This myth becomes anyone’s character, which is to say that composition presented to one’s companions and bosses as one’s being, out of the compulsion to entertain, or to be pitied, or to seduce. So thoroughly have we absorbed the truth of this proposition of the work of the elsewhere within modern desire that it has achieved invisibility. It is part of the language of the advertisers and the artists as well as the colonizers. The binary structure is theoretically convenient. Every city and every dream is erotically charged by an outside: a voyage, an ocean, a dalliance in a cabin, in a dim provincial hotel. Swiftly the voyage recedes. We forget who we were then in the haste to succeed at anything. We forget who we loved and who we fucked over. The forgetting comes to animate our experience of what we next call art. There is simultaneity within forgetting. Every line of memory twists back on itself, branches off, contracts and expands and reproduces like a form of life. Now waking to the blue cloth book in my hand, the space of this potent recognition of a Baudelairean infinity was electric in me. I was not in possession of anything. Even though I say that his authorship became mine, the possessive pronouns remain imprecise. There persisted between the two a gentle, even tender space. How can I describe it?

  I recall a long afternoon kiss on the narrow cot in the maid’s room on rue du Cherche-Midi. The shutters were half-closed and the light was vaguely green. My silk scarf covered the mirror. The boy wore a necklace, it was silver, I was naked, the room was cool and so was his amulet. He kissed me slowly up and down. Perhaps the little trinket was an ankh, a decorative sign some young men still affected in 1985, to signal sensitivity, I guess. This trinket, as he kissed me, trailed after his warm kiss over the surface of my body like a second cool kiss on its fine chain. Precise was the space between the kiss and the trinket. I felt the two simultaneously, although the warm kiss was the support for the cool kiss. Warm and then cool, though simultaneously warm and cool, I was only and ever the precise space between these two kisses, lust become artifice. The hospitality of the moving pause between the kiss and the necklace, pause where nothing happened other than the activation of my skin, the event of that caesura, the caesura that made of the afternoon kiss an augmentation I’ve carried continuously within me, as if on a fine continuous chain with no clasp, trinket forgotten for years, then recalled with the shock of an artifice that explains everything. Sometimes I did not like the love that I freely offered and received, and sometimes I liked it very much, as in the instance of this kiss.

  This caesura inserted its livid pause in my thinking of words. Here I’ll call it writing. But I wish to exorcise from this domain any assumption of authority. It is perhaps a false provenance, but I recall reading somewhere that the medieval Latin root of the word author was auctore – to augment. Not caring much for the scholarship of origins, I’ve since held fast to this etymology as a truth, and not least as a method, without ever verifying it. To augment would be my work – to add the life of a girl without subtracting anything else from the composition, and then to watch the centre dissolve. It is exactly this sense of augmentation, which is to say, not necessarily an expansion or enlargement, but a timely complexification, sometimes an argumentation, at others a dissolution or the invention of a new form of refusal, that makes of the poem a possible space. The augmenter is the one who inserts extra folds into the woven substance of language. Extra to what? Certainly extra to the compact of the sign as the dual bearer of meaning. Each augmentation reveals that the theoretical model of the signifier and the signified will always leave something out of the description of language’s dark work. The augmenter includes the displaced parts, because they are pleasurable, because they are moody, lazy, slutty, mannered, frivolous, unprincipled, because they are necessary, because they are monstrous, because they are angry, because history needs them without knowing it yet, because without them, the world gets grindingly thinner and more cruel, becomes a parody of the sign.

  I have not taken this authorship and there has been no tiresome striving after it on my part: it has become me, as one becomes the finely drawn kiss one hospitably receives in a cool room, where the becoming is perceptible only because of the artifice of the pause between the kiss and the trinket, the pause’s expansive, cosmetic generosity. I have said of my reception of the kiss that I was hospitable, because that is a habit of thought I bring to my consideration of femininity, and also to authorship, or to augmentation, as I prefer to call it, and I have said also that the kiss itself was hospitable, in that projection of reciprocity that temporarily annuls or disarms the strangeness and even the danger of sex, but now it is the cosmetic generosity of the doubled kiss, the infinitely unfolding generosity of artifice, which was not the boy’s own generosity, as kind and as tender as he undoubtedly was in his boyish way, but the inherent and even unintended generosity of the structure of the kiss itself with its second trailing cooler silver kiss, which I must address. To have been thus doubly kissed, to have been drawn by a kiss, was a form of becoming. This kiss transcribed me. And yet for a very long time the double kiss had had to ripen upon me in its cool way, until in the morning hotel bed it awoke a second time within me, or indeed upon my skin, meaning also the skin of my tongue, as the artifice of my authorship of the works of Baudelaire. Between the wide bed of the hotel and the narrow bed of the maid’s room on rue du Cherche-Midi, beds like two poles of a battery, the one with a book, the other with a boy, all of my life crowded, every part of the language that figured the pause that permitted me to enter poetry. Reader, I am sad to think of all the years that passed during which that kiss was forgotten.

  The truth is, I only recalled the kiss because I had transcribed it. Even – or, I suppose, especially – the most delicately human truths can disappear. I had made a place for it then in the diary I have often mentioned in these pages, the heavy hard-bound diary with the brown leather spine, which weighed as much as a sturdy pair of leather boots. In black ink on blank cream-coloured laid paper, I had fou
nd a few phrases for the boy’s kiss, for his silver necklace, for the soft light that afternoon, which was caught glinting in the necklace, in the midst of pages of lists and awkward drawings of coffee cups, park benches, and sculptures at the Louvre. This diary was a character in the drama I was constructing, the drama of my life, or at least my imagination of a possible and necessary life. It was my dirty and smudged receiver. Obediently it harboured the augmented kiss of the green afternoon.

  I had begun the diary shortly before my first exodus to Paris, under the influence of my grandmother’s death. While she was dying in a Toronto hospital I stayed in her apartment, a sparse place, since she had sold many possessions in order to get by. I took the bus to visit her every day, bringing her little puddings and treats to tempt her to eat, and a tape deck, so she could listen to music. I brought late Beethoven quartets on cassette. I applied lotion to her dry face and hands. I combed her hair. I helped her change her nightie. But what she wanted most from me, what she was hungry for, was description. She wanted me to describe everything to her and so I did: the route the bus had taken, the interiors of the various shops I visited, what trees were flowering and where, what I ate and where I bought it, how I had rinsed my blouses in the bathroom sink and hung them to drip dry over the tub. The vintage stay-up grid-patterned stockings I’d found in a vintage shop in Kensington Market. Nothing was too trivial. For my grandmother, in the last days of her living, description was a second life, a way of being in the world. It was what I could offer her, and it was what she could receive. Description soothed her. It was mortality’s cosmetic. It enlarged the possible. And then, yellow with cancer, she died. I inherited the valise she had carried with her to the hospice. It contained an ocelot stole carefully preserved against moths in a cellophane wrapping, a stained mustard-coloured Schiaparelli raincoat, whose large cream-and-red-satin label with scribbled signature I have kept ever since, the prized raincoat itself long ago worn to tatters, and a pair of ebony cigarette holders. These items were the key to a dream of a different life. So I described for her. In this way writing became a magical procedure: describing the world in its smallest details was a work of love for the dead.

  Now in this cottage in the middle of my life again I have been reading the rue du Cherche-Midi diary, and also the black one whose textured board covers are now fraying and detaching, as well as the smallish volume with better-quality taupe embossed linen binding and glossy cool white paper, mostly written in the summer of my servitude in the family summer house by the Norman coast, that house where the widow had told me that I was well-raised but not very clean. Elle est bien-elevée mais pas très propre. Well, she did not say it to me, she said it of me to a person on the telephone in a conversation that I overheard as I passed by the hallway telephone table during my morning tasks. That, too, I recorded in the diary. In this other diary, the leather diary of the rue du Cherche-Midi, I reread the kiss, and then in order to understand artifice, I inflate the kiss, I transform it to artifice, because I believe now that artifice is the soul, just as ardently as I once performed the quest for sincerity on the blank pages of the bound volumes. I’m rereading with an exemplary absence of system, a loose absence of thoroughness, in thready inversion of the method I had long ago brought to those pages. I used to want to describe everything, as I said, which necessarily caused imprecision. Yet the effort and striving, so legible to me now as I reread, yielded a kind of freedom, precisely in my inevitable failure to get it all down – the patterns of concrete floor tiles in 5 p.m. winter train stations lit by yellow incandescent light, the pink feather counterpane on the hotel bed in my room in Rheims when I went to see the twelve tapestries of the life of Mary in the cathedral and left with the image of bombed-out stained-glass windows incongruously pouring morning light into Gothic space, the riveting astonishment of the Cassavetes film Love Streams that I’d seen at a matinée on the boulevard Saint-Michel and left indelibly altered: Gena Rowlands as the questing and numinous medieval philosopher of the expansion of love, her face like a bright planet across jittering chiaroscuro. Distant love, divorced love, mother-daughter love, rejected love, father-daughter love, sister-brother love, father-son love, human-animal love, polyamorous love, earth love, holy love, ludic love, experimental love, all splintered, imploded, swirled, marbled, leaked, knit in limitless kaleidoscope; the tenderness of the boy’s gaze before he kissed me. Always there would be gaps in the description. In this way something indeterminate could flood in. I was looking for new life. I wanted to be as stupid as kissing, as dirty as a servant, as ripe as a blown-open diary, and I was.

  Everything will fall short of the lucidity of this stain and its proliferation of vanishing points.

  Also I reread to live doubly. I do now enjoy receiving the shock of audacity at the stain that I was. It is not possible that I was that girl, splintered, imploded, swirled, leaking, yet I hold here in my unmanicured hands her junky documents. Under their influence, I learn afresh the nobility of infidelity and artifice. Writing this now, or rather augmenting, for that is the action the doubleness incites, I feel a faintly obscene devotion to my own ridiculousness, as if I were a perverted naturalist describing a curious form of invasive vegetation. To everything I read in the diaries I now give the name novel, I give the name knock-off. Yet I am completely disgusted by literature. That’s why this is erotic comedy.

  A brief afternoon tempest; one petal slides under the door. The time of this cottage is kept in flowers. As a dandy fingers his lapels, I finger my book.

  My dirty rooms, and my slightly dirty hair – for in 1985 I went to the public showers only weekly when I could not clandestinely bathe at my place of work – the musty or stale scent of my vintage woollen coat, which I covered over with the bittersweet religiosity of Youth-Dew perfume, these were marks of honour. The kind of writing I wanted to be would never smell like a literature of clean laundry, swept floors, and bars of white soap. My pens would burst in my bedsheets. My hair would perennially carry the sour odour of sleep. I believed that the poem must stink. Even reading the diary now I seem to detect the long sillage of acrid barks and herbs unctuously covered by vanilla, so that I am unsure whether years ago some amber drops of the viscous liquid actually penetrated the paper or whether my imagination produces this perfume as an insistent and elaborately feminine base note of reading.

  Nadar said of the young Baudelaire that he poured drops of musk oil from a small glass vial onto his red carpets when he entertained his friends in his baroque apartment at the Hotel Pimodan. I had entered the musky sillage. The deepening life of reading was now the transmission of an atmosphere, a physiology of pleasure and its refusal or its augmentation by the several ghost-senses that moved between the phrases of a text. Some parts of this transmission would occur outside perception, but even the more overtly material aspects of the compact, the parts of meaning that filled the mind with grand glidings and swoopings and sudden small curls and dark retorts that were simultaneous, overlapping, and yet following one another in a sequence, like the completely absorbing and impossibly inventive movements of starling flocks across fields at dusk, even these parts would never find their completion in description. Always one part of the pattern would break off, glide towards a dispersal, sharply change direction, so that within a single murmuration several separate but superimposed fragments of the image were interweaving to briefly paint a density in the shape of a boot, a sickle, a leaf, a semicolon. Or, also like a semicolon, the curve of his necklace following the point of the boy’s kiss slowly down the length of my body on the narrow cot in the maid’s room on the rue du Cherche-Midi.

  When later that afternoon he left my room, I reached for my diary and wrote: The dear boy was nude, except for his speaking necklace.

  I left the selected poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne beneath the bed at what Paris hotel? Was it at the Quai Voltaire? I was there only briefly – a few nights at most. It was 1994. I had returned to my spiritual city, the city of my stain. I had reluctantly
left seven years previously, intending to construct a less subservient livelihood. I applied myself earnestly to several callings, always bookish: copy editor, bookseller, research assistant, always as the general economy supporting the activity was in the course of being dismantled. So over time each experiment in practicality had foundered: there was nothing left for me to do but write. And so, this being my fate, I wrote ceaselessly. I went as far as I could into impossibility. Now at the age of thirty-four, with a plastic wallet of crisp traveller’s cheques in my satchel beside the copy of Swinburne, I came back to look at Watteau and Boucher and to visit Rousseau’s tomb. I had become obsessed with the eighteenth century, by way of a map that included nineteenth-century decadence, Virgil, Kate Moss, and Frank O’Hara. I had learned to use the word research to dignify such obsessions; sometimes I even said lyric research. What it meant was that I could continue drifting, learning how to describe the histories of surfaces and sentiments. I could return to the city that first received my fantastical project of becoming.

  The tunnel beneath the English Channel had opened. It was the period of grunge and Comme des Garçons perfume, which I wore with fierce sincerity with my thrift-shop clothes, my Chanel Rouge-Noir nail lacquer, heavy boots, and very short hair. I recall that the room was very narrow, as was the bed, and that the wallpaper was covered in lugubrious yellow roses. Things left in hotel rooms: Swinburne, the moth-ridden morning jacket, a polished black teardrop-shaped pebble I had carried since childhood for luck, my Vivitar camera, my Canadian passport, my best brassiere, of magenta silk brocade trimmed in orange piping. Each of these items is now framed in my memory by the room where I left it behind, as if forgetting the object conceptually fixed the place and its decoration, in a perverse inversion of the often-mentioned technique of ancient memory. Here the object, the Swinburne Faber paperback, purple, absent, recalls the room, street sound and river light coming through the tall open window, and the heavy rosy Goth pulse of the amber scent in its odd flat transparent bottle. I had become an essayist. This meant that, rather than cruising the gardens, I directed my research towards the composition of highly decorative prose. What I had learned about borrowed rooms, wandering, and the receptivity of strangeness now shaped my sentences. Often I started out not knowing where I would arrive. How could I have anticipated, in 1985, sailing into the eighteenth century as if it were a harbour, as if I were the belated prosodist disembarking in a rowboat, clasping my little parcel of Vauvenargues and Sterne?