From the comment column: "Intoxicating - very beautifully told. I am affected by your equally insightful and enlightening deviations from the standard brands of the genre."
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In Antonio Skármeta's novel "With Burning Patience", a friendship develops between Pablo Neruda and a letter carrier. At some point, the man sends a poem by Neruda to his beloved, passing it off as his own. Neruda gets wind of this and complains: "That's my poem," he says.
The letter carrier replies: "No, poems belong to those who need them."
Paths of Devastation
Didier Eribon teaches that all campaigns are “battles over the perception of the world.”
Legions of the traditionally unheard assemble on social media. The intensity of their appearances springs from an unpracticed will to assert themselves. It leads to a lowering of standards. The actors overestimate their importance, but above all their originality as slingers of filth.
To continue elsewhere: the worldly naïve man invites the world with a “configuration of purity and egoism.” Adorno treats this through the fictional figure of Lucien de Rubempré, alias Lucien Chardon—created by Honoré de Balzac—born rejected yet loved for his beauty. In Lucien, the philosopher sees the embodiment of a fallen Angelus Novus: at heart an indolent windbag whose agreeable nature grants him social opportunities. A new type emerges in Lucien—the flâneur-columnist, living precariously and writing with elegance. Journalistic extravagance meets a lack of bourgeois gravitation. Lucien squanders himself. At first he appears to the world as witty as he is subtle. He refuses the “bourgeois oath.” As a result, he is pushed beneath the bourgeoisie and “degraded to a rogue.”
Adorno sees Lucien only as an “interchangeable figure,” for whom nothing happens that one would need to take personally. Whoever does not respect the customs of the world perishes in the style of the opium eater. “Lucien refuses to separate happiness from work.” “Anyone who wants to make it socially,” Adorno says, “must enter into a pact with what Lucien does not wish to sully.”
“The market distinguishes very precisely between what it abhors as the intellectual’s spiritual self-gratification and what is socially useful—though the latter profoundly disgusts the spirit that performs it; its sacrifice, however, is rewarded.”
Adorno notes a swath of devastation along the path of the ascending bourgeoisie. He calls Balzac a herald of the destruction of idyllic-feudal ways of life, a producer of dystopian prospects. In his novels, the author “prophesies” a bleak future, since the injustice inherited by the young class from the (overthrown) ancien régime is passed on. The simultaneity of progressive and reactionary forces within an avant-garde kept La Comédie humaine vital. Adorno speaks of the work’s “symphonic breath.”
Symphonic Breath
I loved your lectures, their symphonic breath. Your will toward the elevated, the sovereign. You never made yourself common. That, once again, ennobled me. I forgave you your affairs, and you overlooked my entanglements. One day you held out Africa to me as a promise, and then, at last, you were the one I was allowed to address in reverent letters.
The everyday sundown ecstasy—the rush of happiness and the feeling of being allowed to experience the world’s vibrations in an African register—still resisted the ready-made phrases of enthusiasm. I tried to put into words that gold-glowing threshold moment, when sky and earth dissolve into one another and the light pours itself over everything like liquid honey. Tree canopies that seemed to be on fire … all the sensations and calculated excesses of a grandiose nature.
I smelled smoldering ash from a fire beyond the lodge. The mixture of aroused sweat and desert dust I had last noticed on you that afternoon. I almost withered at the thought that you might want to let it be enough for today—exhausted by the day, love-sated by our embraces.
The night was a breathing organism with its own pulse. Namibia struck something primeval in me. This immediate grounding, as if the body suddenly knew where it belonged. Dust, sky, animals—everything spoke and was exhausted in sheer presence.
I felt as if I were in the lap of creation. The dividing lines between inside and outside lost their sharpness. My gratitude was physical, a balm.
It was true what travelers had whispered to me: Africa changes the inner frequency.
Night & Sea - Mozambique
“Come,” you whispered, “let’s make the stars dance on the sea.”
We slipped into the water as into a baptism—a new religion, our love. For us, the sea painted itself in the deep blues of night against the muted white of the shore. Beneath the cool surface it was warm.
Then a glow. Bioluminescence. Our movements drew trails of stars. The sky poured itself into the ocean.
You touched me tentatively, as if it were not a given that I was still the same as on land. I was not, not entirely.
“Now we belong to the sea,” you said.
I knew exactly what you meant. Then a fin cut through the mirror—no more than ten meters away. Maybe a shark. Maybe a ray.
Panic. Silence. Breath suddenly too loud. We were trespassers in the Garden of Eden. Paradise had teeth.
We retreated to the beach and made love in the sand. I had seen your fear, and you had seen mine.
“Maybe that’s exactly what love is,” I said, “not being afraid of being known.” Of course I was playing with the biblical connotation of to know. And he knew her. And you knew me—with all your patriarchal certainties.
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