Recursion

I believe in doing what you believe and allowing the force of curiosity, the force of inspiration to drive your motions. I believe in fate.

Some months have passed since, looking at a model's photo instead of doing my homework, my eyes interacted with a beautiful quote someone left on her picture. If I had not done this I never would have discovered Baudelaire, or probably I would have, but like Keira Knightley's character says in Last Night, "it's about the when of time", and each time my eyes ran over his words since was strengthened by that first time. It's like Milan Kundera's concept of the motif that he explores in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Baudelaire has become a motif in my life, and motifs must be evidence of the existence of fate, even if that fate is a construct of our need to find connections and parallels in attempt to make sense of the world.

Just now, looking up a quote from the Baudelaire text I am reading

("The child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk. Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which a child absorbs form and colour.")

 and I stumble upon more beauty to add to my collection:

"And the external world is reborn upon his paper, natural and more than natural, beautiful and more than beautiful, strange and endowed with an impulsive life like the soul of its creator. The phantasmagoria has been distilled from nature."

Fell in love with the words before realizing they too belonged to Baudelaire. This man knew my soul before it was born with my body.

The Ephemeral Quality

The motion which marks inspiration is like that of a firework. The explosion and the initial frenzy, followed by the scattering of sparks into dark corners of the night, literal in the case of the firework and figurative in the other, where dark corners signify the crevices of consciousness and thoughts are the sparks. The tragic feature of this metaphor is the identical manner in which the lights of both then dissipate into nothingness, never lingering.

Ghostly Attraction

"One day perhaps someone will put on a play in which we shall see a resurrection of those costumes in which our fathers found themselves every bit as fascinating as we do ourselves in our poor garments (which also have a grace of their own, it must be admitted, but rather of a moral and spiritual type). And then, if they are worn and given life by intelligent actors and actresses, we shall be astonished at ever having been able to mock them so stupidly. Without losing anything of its ghostly attraction, the past will recover the light and movement of life and will become present."

Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life


I love his ideas so much. Everything I read by him is touched by something timeless and magical and stirs something I have been thinking or wish to be thinking. His writings answer questions I hadn't realized I asked, with the added effect of setting off a million little thoughts to glitter like fireworks in my head and in my eyes, but unlike fireworks, these linger.

image source: jake weird

On Nature and Imagination

"Painters who are obedient to the imagination seek in their dictionary for which the whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform..."

-Charles Baudelaire

How I feel about writing. And how Hemingway felt about writing (proof).

"After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked--as I am surprisingly often--why I bother to get up in the mornings."

-Richard Dawkins

Substance Over Matter

"The Paris art scene is tame!" he tells me, looking up and down the candlelit tables at Comptoir de la Gastronomie. "Parisians are too busy dining and drinking and trying to seduce each other to pay serious attention to it."

A cliché, but a cliché with a scrap of truth to it. The French I see around me are not home funneling their vital energy into some artistic pursuit. Much as they may hope that their nation excels at such endeavors, what they reserve their real attention, ingenuity, and passion for is not the art of writing or composing, painting or philosophizing, but— quite simply —the art of living.

You need only pick up a French newspaper to discover that, while other papers in the West offer book reviews, the French offer book raves. Parisian reviewers have mistaken promotion for reflection, commerce for analysis, Serge Halimi, editor of the political journal Le Monde diplomatique, tells me as we wander down a bustling boulevard near his home. The art of criticism is defunct. So, too, is the art of philosophy. 

 Source: Conde Nast Traveler, http://www.cntraveler.com/features/2009/04/Paris-Isn-t-It-Romantic


This. (In the bold.) A touch of this is what's needed in the States and I'd be happy to oblige. 

Ode to Winter

Why should there be an end to velvet and lace and mesh and sparkles? To fairy lights and glitter lamps and tinsel garlands? The holidays may have expired on the calendar but there is no end to tiny tea bags swimming in tall mugs, and the promise of white frosting, in the form of snow outside and marshmallows on the surface of the hot chocolate nestled between your frosted palms, is fresh as the flush on your cheeks. Put there by the wind that, following three seasons of hibernation, has gotten its bite back, the rosy glow tells the tale of a beginning.

Let this be the season of tea party dresses, for winter's just begun.