Based on jotted ideas recorded while out walking on a winter’s day
December 20th, 2016
I’ve been thinking all week about hate, without feeling any hate myself. And also about slogans—how they brainwash us, not into believing what they want us to believe, but by reducing the subtlety of our ideas, preventing us from listening to ideas which might otherwise form freely within us, without censorship. I wonder if the Web encourages “slogan-think”. Chat rooms such as Facebook and Twitter set up cliques wherein dialects develop, thus creating a new kind of literature.
I’ve also pondered this: if the object of your love is finite, in that place where we mostly dwell, you may feel some form of hatred when it’s taken from you: jealousy, anger etc., which translate into pain or even depression, if chronic.
You could accept it as “This is how life is, get over it.” Such was the way of the Stoics, such as the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. Thus you could stay buoyant in this uncertain world.
There were mystical cults in the same era, some involving spiritual exercises, in which you could break the barrier of ego and enter into a sense of oneness.
In actual life, everything is mixed with everything else. I navigate my path by wearing blinkers (blinders in American English), especially as much of my waking hours is spent pursuing an objective, no matter how trivial, such as finding a pair of warm socks to put on.
To get things done in more serious matters, I must keep myself aloof from the raw energy which connects me with everything else. Yes, have a guiding principle, sure, but don’t distance myself from the inner spirit.
If I find I have an enemy I shall say to him “mon semblable, — mon frère!” as in Baudelaire’s first poem in Les fleurs du mal.*
I think of myself as being in a good place. I imagine that somehow a path was followed that led me to it. There are blessings that I want to share but I don’t know how; for it’s amazing how many people do seem to dwell in that place, more securely than me.
Now I think of Ramana Maharshi, who was so exceptional—it’s as if he just naturally fell in to his state of “enlightenment”. So how could he tell anyone else how to do it? The only advice he offered to the thousands of visitors who came to his ashram over the years was “Who am I?”
* Au Lecteur
La sottise, l’erreur, le péché, la lésine,
Occupent nos esprits et travaillent nos corps,
Et nous alimentons nos aimables remords,
Comme les mendiants nourrissent leur vermine.
Nos péchés sont têtus, nos repentirs sont lâches;
Nous nous faisons payer grassement nos aveux,
Et nous rentrons gaiement dans le chemin bourbeux,
Croyant par de vils pleurs laver toutes nos taches.
Sur l’oreiller du mal c’est Satan Trismégiste
Qui berce longuement notre esprit enchanté,
Et le riche métal de notre volonté
Est tout vaporisé par ce savant chimiste.
C’est le Diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent!
Aux objets répugnants nous trouvons des appas;
Chaque jour vers l’Enfer nous descendons d’un pas,
Sans horreur, à travers des ténèbres qui puent.
Ainsi qu’un débauché pauvre qui baise et mange
Le sein martyrisé d’une antique catin,
Nous volons au passage un plaisir clandestin
Que nous pressons bien fort comme une vieille orange.
Serré, fourmillant, comme un million d’helminthes,
Dans nos cerveaux ribote un peuple de Démons,
Et, quand nous respirons, la Mort dans nos poumons
Descend, fleuve invisible, avec de sourdes plaintes.
Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, l’incendie,
N’ont pas encor brodé de leurs plaisants dessins
Le canevas banal de nos piteux destins,
C’est que notre âme, hélas! n’est pas assez hardie.
Mais parmi les chacals, les panthères, les lices,
Les singes, les scorpions, les vautours, les serpents,
Les monstres glapissants, hurlants, grognants, rampants,
Dans la ménagerie infâme de nos vices,
II en est un plus laid, plus méchant, plus immonde!
Quoiqu’il ne pousse ni grands gestes ni grands cris,
Il ferait volontiers de la terre un débris
Et dans un bâillement avalerait le monde;
C’est l’Ennui! L’oeil chargé d’un pleur involontaire,
II rêve d’échafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!
— Charles Baudelaire
which has been translated thus:
To the Reader
Folly, error, sin, avarice
Occupy our minds and labor our bodies,
And we feed our pleasant remorse
As beggars nourish their vermin.
Our sins are obstinate, our repentance is faint;
We exact a high price for our confessions,
And we gaily return to the miry path,
Believing that base tears wash away all our stains.
On the pillow of evil Satan, Trismegist,
Incessantly lulls our enchanted minds,
And the noble metal of our will
Is wholly vaporized by this wise alchemist.
The Devil holds the strings which move us!
In repugnant things we discover charms;
Every day we descend a step further toward Hell,
Without horror, through gloom that stinks.
Like a penniless rake who with kisses and bites
Tortures the breast of an old prostitute,
We steal as we pass by a clandestine pleasure
That we squeeze very hard like a dried up orange.
Serried, swarming, like a million maggots,
A legion of Demons carouses in our brains,
And when we breathe, Death, that unseen river,
Descends into our lungs with muffled wails.
If rape, poison, daggers, arson
Have not yet embroidered with their pleasing designs
The banal canvas of our pitiable lives,
It is because our souls have not enough boldness.
But among the jackals, the panthers, the bitch hounds,
The apes, the scorpions, the vultures, the serpents,
The yelping, howling, growling, crawling monsters,
In the filthy menagerie of our vices,
There is one more ugly, more wicked, more filthy!
Although he makes neither great gestures nor great cries,
He would willingly make of the earth a shambles
And, in a yawn, swallow the world;
He is Ennui! — His eye watery as though with tears,
He dreams of scaffolds as he smokes his hookah pipe.
You know him reader, that refined monster,
— Hypocritish reader, — my fellow, — my brother!
— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)
a wayfarer’s notes 