This is how I lost both the poems and the jacket of Baudelaire, and in doing so made my only installation work. Perhaps the armoire has never since been opened, and inside it, the jacket is now livid dust.
On the evening of June 12, 2019, a Wednesday, I find a tick on my nape. I am at my desk absorbed in my work when I feel a slight creeping sensation beneath my collar. My left hand rises automatically to my neck as my right hand continues correcting some long-overdue text. I bring something tiny and black to the lamp-lit paper, then recognize what the weirdly flattened thing is. It is not engorged; it had not yet attached itself. As swiftly and reflexively as I had grabbed it, my pen nib comes to skewer the tick on the white page. Its legs gradually cease squirming. A translucent black fluid oozes from the pinioned insect onto the paper. It is not blood; as I said, it had not yet bitten. It is not quite like ink either. All of this happens smoothly and instinctively; the words tick, nape, paper, translucence, pen, ink offer themselves just after the action, as it occurs to me that the dark liquid I am observing is melancholic bile.
This is what I recall of the humours as the tick dies. They are the fluids that circulate through the body, connecting the shifting moods to a cosmologically moistened circuitry. Their collective origin is the liver; their particularities arise with their circulation through various glands and organs. The sanguine person is linked to air in a responsive relationship by a bloodlike fluid originating in the heart, and so is expansive in both body and spirit. Cholerous yellow bile is exuded by the gall bladder, in the bitterness of anger. The phlegmatic humour seems to move with the sleepy coolness of water or lymph. It is stored in the lungs. Only black bile, the fluid of melancholy, whose source is the spleen, has no observable correlative among the various internal fluids of the human body. It is not like chyle or wax or semen or tears; black bile is purely imagined. It is a spurious fluid necessary to supplement and correct the asymmetry of the other three, and thence to connect the cosmical human body to the four worldly elements. The element of melancholy is earth. It is dry and cold. Each of our bodies comprises a unique combination of these four humours in always-shifting proportions; our complexions, dispositions, and health express our humoral balance or imbalance at any time. In my own humoral admixture, what is the exact proportion of melancholy to choler? It may have been a preponderousness of the darkest humour that brought me to this cold house, together with my dog, most melancholic of beasts, as Benjamin reminds in his work on the baroque.
A flea will occasionally cross from my dog’s body to mine, and so might have the tick. Or the tick could have fallen directly onto me from the branches of the cherry tree where my dog and I had sheltered from a bout of rain during our morning walk. If it had indeed arrived on me that morning, the tick had spent the long day making its way from my jacket or my loose hair to the bare skin of my nape. We had been eating cherries beneath the tree as it rained, my dog the rotting ones from the ground, me the low-hanging overripe ones that were splitting in the wet summer. I did think of Rousseau and his cherry idyll as my dog and I ate – that passage in the Confessions where a cherry orchard in full fruit serves as foil for a nascent flirtation. The young Rousseau, on his ladder or his bough, I can’t remember which, tosses down cherries for two girls to catch in their out-held skirts. The style then being décolletée, some cherries miss their marks and catch in the girls’ soft breasts. If only I were cherries, Rousseau thinks, looking down from his perch at this colourful vision. Or so he wrote. I believe the claim was the retrospective one of the middle-aged writer; it was too neat and humorous for adolescent lust, which could not have changed much between Rousseau’s time and ours. And enjoying my idle doubt I continued to eat the burst-open fruits, spitting pips into the wet grass, or sometimes leaving them clinging palely to their stems on the branch, these cherries are so ripe.
I lift my pen. The tick is now a smear. Near my desk, on the little couch I have abandoned to her use, my dog naps, groaning softly from time to time with deep satisfaction. I am familiar of course with Dürer’s etching of melancholia, but my image of it is vague, darker even than Dürer’s own chiaroscuro, and the only actual detail I can bring to mind from the famous image is the wrinkled or ruffled appearance of the sleeping dog’s ears, as if they were the crumpled inner leaves of Batavia lettuces, so unlike my own dog’s ears, which remain vigorously upward-pointing like tulip swards, even in sleep. I am curious to look closely again at Dürer’s image; I rise to search for the only book in my library I am certain will include it, a fairly recent collection of the translated writings of the mercurial art historian Aby Warburg. I had ordered this book a few years before, especially to read the great scholar’s essay on Saturn and melancholy; and so it was because of my arcane interest in the history of melancholia that I came to learn of Warburg’s library, his atlas of memory, and the astoundingly compelling mobility of his thought, all of it organized according to the feminized baroque gesture of the serpentine line. This line, moving from antiquity to the present, was called by the Hamburg scholar the ‘nympha.’
It is 10:35 p.m. and outside the solstice sky is just darkening. The occasional liquid trill of the season’s last nightingales deepens the evening. I hear my neighbours’ shutters close.
This is all wrong. It was not 10:35 pm, it was late morning, I was not correcting some unnamed manuscript, I was reading an essay by Benveniste, my dog was not sleeping, she was whining softly near the kitchen door, insisting upon her deferred walk. I was taking notes as I read. The essay was the infinitely gorgeous ‘The Notion of Rhythm in Its Linguistic Expression.’ Each time I attempt to summarize this essay it reconfigures itself sinuously just beyond my comprehension. I feel for it something like a lover’s rapture. Reader, I say this knowing how overblown the sentiment will seem, but when in the first paragraph Benveniste tidily demolishes the conventional etymology of the word rhythm, disproving with a precision bordering on arrogance the long-repeated belief that its Indo-European root is related to the natural-seeming alterations of temporality and the regular repeating movement of the waves, at each reading my excitement is physiological and fresh. I know I am about to enter something unimaginably nuanced. He frees rhythm from nature understood as an external, environmental limit and introduces me once again to the human abundance of form. But for Benveniste, following the atomist philosophers, form is not a limit either. Form is a gestural passage that we can witness upon a garment in movement, a face in living expression, or in the mobile marks of a written character as it is traced by the pen. Rhythm, an expression of form, is time, but it is time as the improvisation that moves each limited body in play with a world. Not necessarily metrical or regular, it’s the passing shapeliness that we inhabit. It both has a history and is the history that our thinking has made. As I achieved the apex of excitement in my rereading of this beautiful document, attempting to grasp anew how a concept becomes quite literally a landscape (for only much later in the history of this word had rhythm come to articulate and even make perceivable the repeating or cycling patterns we attribute now to nature), I felt the tick on my neck.
Now I wonder: had the tick begun to write with its bilious ink? What word or phrase was about to be spelled out blindly on the back of my neck? A tick is blind; it is also deaf and without even a sense of smell. I had once read that its only sensation is for heat. Dormant on some random foliage, where it exists only to await the hot sense trigger that we animals are, it drops towards the precise temperature of mammalian blood and nothing else. It lives and perceives only for the world our bodily warmth constitutes. Like a melancholic fixing on some abstruse and frail detail to worry it slowly to a psychic wound, once on the host’s body, whether dog or human, the tick roams towards the barest, most tender and heated site. I had thought then about the inchoate pleasure of the arrival I had prevented, the punctum, but now I guess at the phantom line I had forestalled, ‘only there where I am not,’ from Le Spleen de Paris, for instance, spelled out by the unculminated nape mark
s of the spurious black bile.
In Dürer’s Melencolia I, a winged female with loose hair wreathed in small leafed vegetation sits on a low step, the weight of her leaning head braced by a clenched hand in the clichéd pose of thinking. Her elbow rests on her knee. The folds of her full skirt suggest a slightly stiff fabric, perhaps linen, and where the garment falls over her seat or bench, the fine row of hem-stitching is just visible in faint relief where it slightly puckers the textile. The light is coming from her lower left side, from a source just outside the picture frame, and it reveals, resting against her hip, a chatelaine, the traditional belt worn at a woman’s waist, to which she would attach her household keys and purse. Melencolia’s heavy skeleton keys are numerous in the image, and below them, at the place where her feet are hidden by the crumpled folds of the gown, is a fabric purse. Its crimped-shut openings are secured by three round buttons wrapped round with dangling ribbons or drawstrings. Melencolia glances up towards the right and her brow is troubled. Many scholars have discussed the meanings of the tools and objects that surround her: the sphere, the hourglass, Saturn’s magic square, the scales and ruler and hammer, the long, serrated knife. They especially ruminate over the large, many-faceted geometrical mass to her right, the mysterious polyhedron, behind which a ladder rises diagonally, bisecting the picture plane. The comet-like light in the sky is mentioned, the rainbow, and the gargoylish wisp of cloud that holds aloft the titular word. Melencolia is an unsolved plenum. But I am unaware of any discussion or even notice of the tightly crimped folds of her purse. It’s an accessory detail. Yet in this composition each component carries equivalent semantic weight; the ribs of the sleeping dog are no less meaningful than the fine stream of sand in the hourglass, or the flames in the distant brazier, or the rooftops of the far-off village seen through the rungs of the ladder.
Or had the insect succeeded in slightly breaking my nape skin with its barbed, needle-like hypostome? Had it transferred to my bloodstream, mixed with a small quantity of its arachnid saliva, the virus-like paternity of the body of work that I had discovered within myself? It is likewise the contagion of a virus, I have heard, that causes the brindled beauty of the parrot tulip, the peculiar variegation so valuable and sought-after during the Dutch baroque, when tulip bulbs were first brought from Turkey to the Netherlands. In Europe a virus of the common potato – itself only recently introduced, from South America – caused a mutation in the Turkish flowers, expressed in the bizarre striated colouring and feathered form of the petals, now referred to as ‘broken.’ Now I must wonder whether I did not so much assume the paternity, nor receive it in the mystic transmission whose architecture I have sought so rangingly to comprehend in these pages, so much as I had been infected by it, so that at this very moment the Baudelairean authorship moves in my blood, lymph, chyle, saliva, tears, wax, cyprine, and other fluids.
My interest in humoral theory, begun in an attempt to understand my own splenetic nature, expanded with my move to this isolated hamlet. Here the humours, in their constant mutability, seem like site-specific descriptions of the body’s integration of or struggle with earthly time. The windows of my cottage face east and west; I watch the sun rise and set over large fields, and often the farmers are out working in their huge modern tractors with the glassed-in cabs, already as my day begins, or after it ends and I am in bed. I began to see that the landscape, like the sky, is at every point, at every minute, extremely active, never repeating. It is a form of intelligence. Insecticide is being sprayed, wheat is being threshed at midnight, one morning a white powder appears dusted over the plowed-up canola field, in early autumn the wheat will be planted, a premature frost on plowed earth will change the character of the light. The huge, yellow, cylindrical straw bales will be irregularly scattered as far as the horizon, like some giantesque game of chance or a lesson in constructive geometry. And the place of the sunrise will slowly swing from the dark massy smudge that is the oak forest in the mid-distance to, in mid-winter, the rusted roof of the agricultural shelter beside which grows the ancient and bare cherry tree.
When I walk my dog late mornings I discover fruits I have never heard of, on the trees bordering the fields. Pêche de vigne that shoots pungent scarlet juices as my teeth puncture the tough brownish skin; leathery medlars, which used to be called openarse, since their calyx end resembles a dark rectum, and which made for marmalade before the importation of citrus fruit to this continent; and the rowan fruit, which becomes sweet only once rotten, and which was used by the poorer people here to make a tannic wine. And the more familiar trees too, the walnuts and sweet chestnuts, and the haws of the eglantine, so that always I come home from our walks with my pockets stuffed, if I have not thought to bring along a little sack for my finds. And these fields and hedges that I walk among are the same ones I see depicted in the paintings I visit in the regional beaux-arts museum. Poussin’s fields and riverbanks seem to be precisely the ones I live among, and the same for the unknown and sometimes unnamed minor painters whose works are so interestingly copious in these small museums. In the village churches and funeral chapels, primitive Romanesque frescoes depict scenes from the Book of Revelations, or the woman’s temptation at the fruit tree, and the rudimentary yet subtle pigments were made from the local river clays and oxides. These clays too are often used for cures for small ailments – troubled digestion, rashes, rheumatic aches. Landscape is the same as painting, and it is the same as time, and cooking, and medicine, and the economy. I say the same, but that is not precise. What I mean is that all these things mesh to form a fabric, which, like a worn garment, moves, shifts, arranges itself in figures recalling the idiosyncracy and emotion of the face. The notion of a rhythmic cyclicity is an invented concept we deploy from a great distance to placate the intensity and vulnerability of time.
Benveniste, who had been born in Alep, and who spent his life since early childhood studying in Paris, in his last seven years suffered the effects of a stroke, including the loss of his speech, but not his presence of mind. He was forced to abandon his sprawling study of language in Baudelaire. In the years between 1969 and his death he was often visited at the hospital in Créteil by Julia Kristeva, who had been one of his students. Kristeva describes his still-joyous expression on receiving his guests; his face and his laboured ability to gesture with his fine hands were his only means of communication. She recalls specifically a strange incident one afternoon shortly before his death. His sister had contacted her with the message that Benveniste requested her visit. When his old student arrived, he beckoned her to approach him more closely, then with a mischievous smile he began to shakily trace, using his index finger, some letters on her chest. She was flustered and drew away with embarrassment, so he leaned forward and attempted a second time to spell out his undecipherable message on her blouse. Drawing back again, she offered him a pen and paper. With some difficulty he traced out the Greek letters THEO in majuscule. This was Benveniste’s last written word. What did god mean to the great linguist and mentor in his speechless final years, written enigmatically, inklessly, in Greek, upon his female student’s heart? Was this THEO the meeting between unspoken, interior languages and subjectivity itself, between the subject’s experienced ‘I’ and the ‘you’ who necessarily received the affective enunciation, between the general capacity towards such an utterance and the experience of the body’s limit, as Kristeva later thought? How can we imagine the involuntary seven-year silence and isolation of the linguist of co-subjectivity other than as a profoundly etched chiaroscuro? Was the writing of any word a permanent revolt against structural determination, a plunge into the infinite generosity of signification, the conversion of that generosity to a name?
That afternoon, pausing in my Benvenistean studies, I walked with my dog as usual through the court of a nearby farm. Where the narrow road cut through the middle of the assemblage of stone buildings and sheds, I admired the stacks of disused objects that encrusted the corners and edges of the barn, the orchard, the
chicken coop, the woodshed, the tractor hangar: rolls of rusted chicken wire being saved for a mysterious future, the skeletons of old green-painted rabbit hutches collapsed behind tractor tires, bright blue forty-five-gallon oil drums beneath a gnarled peach tree. Behind these barrels I suddenly noticed the farmer, a gentle man with whom I often spoke of the weather, the fruit trees, and the possible meanings of bird migrations. He was hiding a little. He was with his own dog, the sort of large spotted spaniel typically kept for hunting in this region. I saw that the farmer was holding a large wedge of yellow cake in one hand, while with the other he was tenderly and covertly feeding broken-off pieces to his dog. He glanced up and noticed me; we greeted one another. He said that his dog had become heartsick and would only eat cake.
Baudelaire could pronounce only one word in the final months of aphasic paralysis leading to his death – crénom, a mild curse that contracted the holy term sacré nom. The poet had suffered a stroke in the baroque church of Saint-Loup in Namur, Belgium, a church he had described as both ‘sinister and gallant,’ ‘the interior of a terrible and delicious catafalque, embroidered in black, rose, and silver.’ He fell, on March 5, 1866, in the company of his friends, before a carved wooden confessional, as he praised its impossibly detailed beauty to them. This sacral theatre of revelation and humility is supported by spiralling wooden pillars intertwined with fruiting grapevines all lividly undulating like forms of life. On its screening panels, decorative cartouches are held aloft by hybrid beings of innovative morphology. The result is a pantheistic intoxication, an ensemble of dreams, a disorienting multiplication of strangeness: a new antiquity.
After Saint-Loup, Baudelaire’s health declines rapidly. By March 22 he is paralytic. By March 30, he can no longer speak. He’s living moneyless in his Brussels hotel in the certitude of expulsion. By the second of July, his friends help him return to Paris by train. They install him in a nursing home, in the company of Manet’s portrait of Jeanne Duval. He dies on August 31, 1867, repeating again the curse crénom.
The Baudelaire Fractal Page 13