Late again to Starbucks today.  Restless night, waking at 2AM and lying still, waiting for sleep to return.

Another session, looking at this screen wondering what to write.  Sometimes there is a theme that bears more words, thought and development. But is anything possibly a start over? According to Parmenides everything is apriori inscribed, precursor to the present “real.” Every single thing which came to pass yesterday, – resulted in this exact moment. Counterfactual history is an idle pastime. Nothing at all could have been otherwise. Here and now, I am writing what I must. Shall I laugh or shall I weep? I’d rather laugh, – the joke is on me.

Baudelaire. Something I read prompted my curiosity about a poem which Charles Baudelaire writes to introduce The Flowers of Evil.  Evil is a compelling topic.  The best songs are the sad songs, a memorial to the failed relationship. Somehow the ritual of song makes the pain easier to endure. (Don’t Think Twice by Johnny Cash) Endure we must.  Nothing saves us from what cannot be foreseen. Human purposes in particular are concealed. I have to ask myself often, “What do you want?” If I ask, sometimes what I desire becomes clear. How much of my life have I lived without bothering to ask?

Regarding Baudelaire’s poem addressed to the reader the last three verses in particular spoke to me.  To read the entire poem for yourself CLICK HERE.

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)

The poet is unmatched in honesty, the will to say-out-loud that all manner of vices, behaviors which we are loathe to confess are attractive, are of interest to us.  No one excluded.  You, whoever you are, reading The Fowers of Evil are a mammal that finds “vice” (evil) attractive.  Could the same be said of any other mammal?

My second point, the deadliest of the menagerie is the most subtle: boredom.  You know that state of mind/heart when you are at a loss with what to do with yourself.  Without necessarily making a grand gesture, perhaps just a small decision pulls the entire house down!  Relaxing but bored, with luxury convenient, jaded, never satiated, this refined monster is…

Reading this poem, it seems as if the poet standing at stage right, rips back the curtain and shows what has been behind the veil all along.  Not America the beautiful, not a sweet land of liberty, not freedom ringing from every mountainside, but scaffolds that we conjured up in our indolent dreams.

Scaffolds.