Bipolarity in the Soul and Poems of Charles Baudelaire

The tension within the human soul between two opposing poles is expressed throughout Baudelaire's work, who emphasizes this biographical fact in the famous sentences from his diary, "My Heart in Its Nakedness":

Even as a child, I felt in my heart two conflicting feelings, a loathing and aversion to life, one, an ecstatic attachment to it, the other. In every person, at every moment, two aspirations exist simultaneously, one towards God, the other towards Satan. Turning to God or spirituality is the desire to ascend the ladder of ranks, turning to Satan or animality is the joy of descending it.

Less frequently quoted but no less significant are excerpts from Baudelaire's article on Wagner's "Tannhäuser" in the European Journal:

“The opera “Tannhäuser” represents a confrontation between two opponents, namely flesh and spirit, hell and heaven, Satan and God, who have chosen the human heart as the arena for their struggle. Every healthy mind contains two infinite beings, heaven and hell, and in every image of one of them it instantly recognizes half of itself.”

The poem “Ascension,” which is about spirit, heaven, and God, is the opposite of its twin “Sfelin,” which is about flesh, hell, and Satan. The ascension of the spirit to pure skies in “Ascension” is the opposite of the fall in “Sfelin,” where heavy skies drag the poet down to the pollution of the grave. In the struggle between the putrid stench of a murky, oppressive, and painful existence and the purity of the hanging gardens of paradise, this time the winner prevails.

In the poem “Saflin,” the blindness of Satan, the terror of the grave, and the blackness of the evening reign victorious. In the poem “Ascension,” the divine light, the heavens’ Rome, and the singing of the willow prevail. The arena of the struggle between the rivals is in the heart of man as well as in the form of words: Light duels blindness, willowness clashes with willow, Rome fights with Rome.

The Canals / Charles Baudelaire

Over lakes, over rivers,
Mountains, forests, thickets, seas,
Through the heat, through the heights of the ether,
Beyond the peaks of star-lit skies,

My spirit will wander, easy to move,
And like a drunk swimmer from the depths,
The sound of a lullaby will be heard forever.
How a man rejoices in pleasure is indescribable.

O my soul, keep your path far from the furnace of decay;
Purify yourself, and be glad in the heights of Shechem,
And also, as pure as the wines of God,
A fire burns in transparent flames.

After the sick and the sorrows of the dead,
Honored in their place over a barren existence,
Blessed is the man who has the wings of strength.
He will leap through fields of peaceful radiance;

Blessed is the man whose hair is like pencils,
He will lift it up and fly with the morning across the sky,
– Blessed is he who soars above the face of the earth, and understands without difficulty
A play of flowers and a play of silent words!

(From French: Orna Lieberman)

The poem “Ascension” describes a mystical vision in which the poet’s spirit separates from his body and soars toward high and distant realms. In these luminous fields, the visionary reaches a profound understanding of the meaning of the universe and existence.

Christianity

The title of the song, “The Ascension,” the ascension of the spirit, also contains an allusion to the Christian ceremony of the Mass. The original title of the song, Elevation, is also the name of the priest’s movement, which raises the consecrated bread and the chalice of wine to show them to all the worshippers after he has performed the transubstantiation of the bread into the body of Jesus and the transubstantiation of the wine into his blood. By eating the consecrated bread (offered to the entire congregation at the end of the Mass) and drinking the wine (which is usually reserved for the priest), the faithful assimilate in their hearts the death and resurrection of Jesus. This double meaning is maintained throughout the song, where the ascension can be interpreted as a mystical experience.

Greek mythology

The Christian allusion in the title of Baudelaire’s poem merges with a mythological allusion to the nectar of the gods that he sips as he ascends to heaven, an image of the bright fire that fills the clear expanses of the ether. The mention of the word ether in the poem reveals the influence of mythological sources on the poet. Ether is originally an ancient Greek god who personified the upper heavens and the source of light. The ancient Greek epic from the eighth century BC, Hesiod’s Theogony (Birth of the Gods), includes many details about ancient cosmology and Greek mythology that the poet collected and unified, according to the oral traditions that were familiar to him.

According to Hesiod's work, which is considered the oldest and most agreed-upon version in the Greek tradition, Chaos, the primordial abyss, gave birth to Erebus, the god of darkness, and Nyx, the goddess of night. Darkness is the source of darkness, while night is its manifestation. From the union of brother and sister, Ether and Day were born. Ether is the source of light, while day is its manifestation. Chaos, therefore, gave birth to darkness, and darkness gave birth to light. Ether embodies the upper part of the sky, whose heat nourishes and fertilizes the wider world. For Greek philosophers, it is linked to fire, constant movement, and the soul. Ether embodies the soul of the universe.

Roman mythology

It seems that Baudelaire was also influenced by Roman mythology when he wrote his poem “The Ascension.” According to the Metamorphoses by Ovid, a Roman poet from the first century AD, the ether is the abode of the gods where the stars shine. An unknown god separated the elements that made up chaos in a mixed and formless way. The earth was unstable, it was impossible to sail on the water, the air was devoid of light. Chaos was a state of constant struggle between opposites. Heat fought cold, moisture fought dryness, stiffness fought, and weight fought weightlessness.

The conflict came to an end when a peace-seeking god separated them and arranged them according to their weight. Ether, the lightest element, took its place at the top of the sky, above the other elements, below which was placed air, and below that earth and water. It should also be noted that Ovid, like many other ancient thinkers, distinguishes between two types of air: the compressed, thick air, the domain of clouds, winds, and birds, and above it, the light air, associated with fire – ether. The gods breathe ether, humans breathe air.

Emanuel Swedenborg

The poem also reflects the influence of the eighteenth-century Swedish philosopher and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, whose numerous volumes Baudelaire (like Balzac) diligently read. Swedenborg was a prolific and well-known thinker, a universal genius, a scientist, engineer, and inventor until, at the age of fifty-six, he abandoned a successful career to devote himself to theology and mysticism and to study Hebrew and Greek. The turning point in Swedenborg's life came after a vision in which, he said, God appeared to him and told him that from now on he would dictate to him the spiritual meaning of the Holy Scriptures so that he could spread it among mankind. Swedenborg recounted in his writings additional visions in which he spoke with angels and even continued to speak with God himself. According to Swedenborg, every person is in contact with angels or demons and is free to choose to listen to the voice of good or the voice of evil.

Neoplatonism

From Swedenborg, Baudelaire derived the idea of ​​the spirit's ascension until it reaches the source of the Zohar – an idea that Swedenborg himself derived, in addition to his visions and dreams, from the Bible and Neoplatonic philosophy, a school that developed Plato's teachings by adding a mystical dimension to them. Neoplatonic teachings are one of the pinnacles of Greek philosophical thought. They began in the third century AD, and their strong influence is evident until the sixth century. Their most prominent representative is Plotinus, and it is assumed that he was familiar to the various Kabbalists.

The Neoplatonic doctrine of the Supreme Being, which lists three entities (hypotheses) – the absolute, good “One,” from which the mind and soul emanate and dangle – is reminiscent of the ten Sefirot of Kabbalah. Neoplatonism apparently played a significant role in shaping the face of Kabbalah.
On the other hand, Neoplatonism had a decisive influence on the shaping of emerging Christian theology, and on its path to medieval Western philosophy. We should also note that the word with which Plotinus designates the three beings, namely hypostasis, which means a level, a degree, is also used to designate the three persons of the Holy Trinity in Christianity in which the Father confers upon himself the Son of God and the Holy Spirit.

Richard Wagner

And one last thing, in explaining the background to the song, it is impossible not to mention the musical evening given by Richard Wagner on January 25, 1860, atParis To which the fat and slim of Parisian society, its artists and statesmen, flocked. At the end of the performance, which included, among other things, excerpts from the opera “Tannhäuser,” the audience gave long applause, but the next day a mocking review appeared in the press. Baudelaire went against the flow and published a long and passionate article a year later in the European journal in which he notes, among other things, that already at the beginning of the performance, upon hearing the first notes, he felt free from the forces of gravity, as in a dream, and felt the special pleasure of someone moving and spinning in high places. The enchanted spectator closed his eyes and was delighted.

Then he felt like a lonely dreamer immersed in the ever-increasing light, in vast horizons that opened before him. Then he conceived the idea of ​​the soul sailing in a high and bright place, in an ecstasy made of pleasure and consciousness, floating above the natural world but far from it. The intense light caused pleasure to the eyes and the soul, to the point of fainting. No musician paints the depths of space, physical and spiritual, like Wagner, wrote Baudelaire. Reading these words, it can be assumed that the poem “The Ascension” was born mainly from hearing Wagner’s “Tannhäuser.”

Hovering from house to house

The poem begins with an ever-increasing upward movement, from the tangible and the low to the abstract and the high. The poet's spirit lifts a bird above the earth, above the clouds, above the sun, above the fields of the ether, above the dome of the sky. Over nine regions the spirit passes, a hint at a mystical vision of a prophet whose spirit transcends his body and goes to another place.

The first three stanzas are written in the first person. The poet tells of the journey of his spirit and addresses it with words. In the last two stanzas there is a change of tone and a transition to the third person. The journey is spiritual but is described in physical imagery, as if it were a real journey. The spirit flies in imaginary air, in the second stanza, to a swimmer, fainting with pleasure, who spouts water from the depths – a feminine element. An act of love takes place between the spirit and its environment. The erotic pleasure of the body is involved in the mystical experience of the spirit. Religious ecstasy is likened to sensual pleasure. Perfect harmony prevails between body and spirit in a protected environment free from any danger of falling or drowning. The swimmer, drunk with pleasure and victory, moves away from the land, as his heart desires, without difficulty, enjoying complete freedom and controlling his movements.

Flight allows the body to feel free from its physical-earthly bonds and from the fear of death – diseases that rot the body, which is hinted at in the third stanza: The mirror, my spirit, far away your path from a rotten furnace. The one who swims in the air as in water sips the bright fire that fills the space like wine filling a cup. The one who penetrates and permeates – breathes and drinks. The one who emerges from the clear water/fresh air also sips from it like divine nectar and is purified in a wonderful harmony between outside and inside. Mystical pleasure involves physical pleasure. The pure is the delightful. The image of the intoxication of heights with the intoxication of depths enhances the feeling of infinity that the expanses of the sky and the expanses of the sea provide.

Christian and mythological allusions come together in the image of drinking the divine drink, an image of the spiritual experience in which the poet both moistens his blood with the blood of Jesus and ascends and also sips from the nectar of the gods in the Garden of Eden on Mount Olympus. But first and foremost, the divine wine is a memory of the opening scene of Wagner's opera excerpts in which a group of angels advances toward God's chosen one, with the Holy Grail emitting a bright light in its midst, to deliver it to the destined knight whose pure heart trembles with holy awe. The Holy Grail is twice consecrated, once consecrated at the Last Supper of Jesus, and a second time consecrated when Joseph of Arimathea collected into it the blood of the wounds of the crucified. In the first three stanzas, the poet describes his soaring spirit, addressing him and encouraging him to continue his journeys, as in the way of the prophets.

In the last two stanzas, the personal point of view becomes general. The poet switches to the third person and uses the biblical expression: Blessed is the man who… It seems that here the poet is talking about all the artists, thinkers, intellectuals and mystics who experience the experience of rebirth in a time outside of time, in a space outside of space. These chosen ones, God’s messengers, are called to bear witness and tell about this experience of the change of essence in their works and writings in order to share it with other people and to elevate them as well.

The peaceful fields of radiance (fourth verse), to which the blessed one ascends, illustrate the intense light seen by the mystics, already spoken of in the combinations: the starry heavens (first verse) and the bright fire in the transparent expanses (second verse). The crossing of the nine regions on the way to the fields of radiance, the gradual purification, the breathing of the ether, and the drinking of the bright fire from the Holy Grail constitute ceremonial events in a religious ritual during which the seer ascends to the rank of a god.

The flight of the happy is both vertical and horizontal: both יֺגְבִּיַּהַ וּאָפ and יְרְאָחֵפ (fifth verse), combinations that echo the movement of the wind in the first part of the poem, where it both soars (third verse) and flies (second verse). The horizontality and verticality, indicating unfettered freedom and happiness, are also implied in the first verse, in the preposition מֵעל (floating) compared to the preposition מֵעבר (crossing a border).

The last stanza sharpens the gaze towards the art of poetry, whose goal is to translate the beauty of an ideal world into the language of words. The sense of eternity that originates in pristine nature must be expressed in orderly and expressive poetry, in its melody (its timbre and rhythm) and in its pictoriality (the choice of words and images). Baudelaire's artistic credo is steeped in religious mysticism.

The last stanza defines the role of the poet, according to Baudelaire, who sees things that an ordinary person does not see. The poet easily understands the language of flowers, the language of silent things (echo to the rhyme: My spirit that moves, easy to move, in the second stanza). As the interpreter of a secret language that is inaccessible to one person, as the possessor of this rare privilege, he must return from his journey beyond the light, mediate between heaven and earth, and grant other people, whose eyes are blinded by the turbidity of existence, his enlightenment and messages. If he closes himself in his world, he will sin against his destiny.

The dreamy image of the skylark flying with a crow is very significant in this context. The skylark excels in its sophisticated and graceful singing – an image particularly appropriate for Baudelaire's poetry. And more. On the one hand, the skylark is a land-dweller (a hint at the poet's role among and obligation to humans) but on the other hand, it flies quickly and nimbly upwards, vertically, while also being good at descending to the ground in the same way. It is interesting to note that skylarks are particularly attracted to light (French bird hunters of the 1950s even used a wooden trap made of small mirrors that reflected the sun's rays and shone on them to catch skylarks).

In the last two stanzas, it seems that the poet is no longer in dizzying and distant heights. But upon his return to the earthly world, above which he hovers, he no longer sees the sorrows and ailments of a murky existence, but rather sets as his goal, mission, and destiny to translate the language of flowers, a metaphor for his poetry, which in its meticulously crafted language – devotion and inspiration go hand in hand, expresses the inexpressible. The poet comes to terms with existence and even finds beauty and taste in it. The hope of achieving the ideal and overcoming the scepter has never been so strong as in this poem. And behold, the opposite:

Splane / Charles Baudelaire

When the skies are low and heavy, pressing down like a blanket
On a wind that groans under endless inebriation,
And from an all-encompassing perspective
They will pour upon us a black day, darker than night;

When the earth becomes a damp dungeon,
Where you will be, you will be a bat slayer,
A walker strikes the bushes with a groping wing.
Hitting a head on rotten ceilings;

When rain spreads its giant paths
The blood-stained bars of a prison of immense proportions,
And a group of brave, hard-working Achaeans
She weaves evil within our minds,

Angry, jumping, jumping, suddenly, suddenly, suddenly
Throwing a terrifying scream across the sky,
Like wandering spirits in my homeland
Bursts in the anus do not heal.

– And long funeral songs, without drums and musicians,
Walking slowly within my soul; hope,
Defeated, sobbing, and terrible, terrifying fear,
On my wretched Golgotha, a black flag is hoisted.
(From French: Orna Lieberman)

The “Spleen” as an Abysmal Existential Despair

The word “spleen,” in English, “black bile,” comes from the Greek word meaning “spleen,” an organ that, according to the phlegm theory of ancient medicine, secretes a black fluid that, in the case of overproduction, causes a bad mood, anger, depression, and sadness.

The word “splein” already existed in this form in the French language at the time of Baudelaire (since the seventeenth century), but it is he who gives it its full tragic meaning. It no longer refers to romantic melancholy but to a pathological physical and mental state rooted in a depressing sense of the boredom of existence and the threat of death. Baudelairean splein is characterized by a conflict whose fate is predetermined between hope-expectation-aspiration for the ideal and despair-distress-dive into the abyss.

Charles Baudelaire suffered from the symptoms of schizophrenia throughout his adult life. In a letter to his mother, from the year his famous collection of poems “Flowers of Evil” was published in 1857, he listed them as weakness of the hands, unbearable loneliness, constant fear of an uncertain disaster that is about to happen, lack of self-confidence, and an inability to find interest and pleasure in life. What is the point of doing this or that, the man asks himself incessantly.

House-to-house drop-off

In the first part of the collection “Flowers of Evil,” which consists of six parts, there are four poems called “Saflin,” the last of which is considered the most morbid, dramatic, and pessimistic of all. The first three stanzas constitute three sentences of time. The first stanza opens in the sky, the second in the earth, and the third in the water. The cloudy sky sheds a black light on the earth, a darkness that contradicts the expected order and therefore seems to the poet more gloomy than the darkness of night.

A gloomy rainy day, punctuated by dull thuds in endless monotony, is described in the first stanzas. The sky is heavy like a pot lid, like a rotten ceiling, and the drops connecting heaven and earth create prison bars. There is no possibility of escape. The space is infinite, but its monotony causes a feeling of suffocation that the low sky multiplies. There is no possibility of rising. The outside becomes the inside: in the space that has shrunk to a dank room, hope struggles against its walls and ceilings in the form of a weak bat that cannot fly, whose fate is predestined for failure. If she had not been blind, she would have seen from the beginning the futility of her hope. Hope is a synonym for illusion.

The humidity and rain bring with them an invasion of an army of spiders, an image of the evil, insane thoughts that infest and multiply in the mind of the spleen patient. The struggle of hope with despair is likened to the attack on the lonely bat by the legions of the hideous and cruel spiders, who are constantly weaving their web traps. A surprise attack by a silent, cunning, and skilled army against an opponent whose means are extremely meager.

The poem is indeed dominated by these two allegories that liken the two concepts – hope and anguish – to black, ugly, disgusting and monstrous animals, associated in the collective subconscious with the forces of darkness. One is deaf and the other blind, one is a predator and the other a victim. In English, a language that Baudelaire – friend and translator of Edgar Allan Poe, knew firsthand, there is the expression

to have bats in the belfry

Literally translated: “He has bats in the steeple,” which means “He is a little crazy, a possession has entered his head.” Let us recall that a steeple is a bell tower often found on the roof of a church, an image that we will encounter shortly in our poem.

In French, the equivalent expression, which was common among Parisian prostitutes, who were also Baudelaire's friends, is

avoir une araignée dans le plafond ou dans la tête ou dans le cerveau

Literally translated: “He has a spider in the ceiling or in his head or in his brain” (the ceiling is an image of the roof of the skull). The vision takes place not only in the external world, which is like a prison, but also within the image of the hallucinating poet, in the caverns of his mind and the caves of his soul. The correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm does not allow for escape routes. The circles shrink and shrink, each serving as a faithful image of the other. The violent attack comes from outside, from hostile nature, invades the house, and finally occupies the poet’s inner chambers, in order to enslave and devour it.

After the three sentences of time, the turn of the two main sentences comes in the last two stanzas. After the silence of the evil-stalking spiders, a startling and shrill cry of bells is heard, like the curse of an animal. Here the sufferer's response reaches its climax in a seemingly uncontrollable outburst. In a world devoid of compassion, the heavens do not answer his cry. The ringing of church bells heralds at the same time the end of the cryer's time and the final blow that will soon befall him. A visual hallucination causes the poet to see ghosts emerging from the cemetery next to the church. Both in life and after death, a person is likened to a ghost groaning, moving and wandering, not associated, neither here nor there. At the beginning of the poem, the poet's spirit groaned, while here, at the end, ghosts with whom he identifies groan.

The ghosts' emergence from their graves can perhaps be seen as an ironic response to the hysterical ringing of the bells of the spleen patient. The wailing leaves the heavens indifferent but terrifies the peace of the dead, who emerge from the repose of their graves to harass, terrify, and serve as a mirror image for the living.

A funeral procession full of coffins that the poet sees in his mind symbolizes his own funeral as well as the funeral of all the human race that he represents. It is not the body that is enclosed in the coffin, but rather the coffins that are enclosed, in a kind of reversal, in the spirit. The black bile poured on a man's head at the beginning of the poem becomes a black flag that is stuck in the poet's skull at the end. In the sky cover at the beginning of the poem, one can correspondingly see the door of the coffin closing on the living dead, prey to his delusions, in the final image.

The poet is as if being executed or taken captive by pirates whose flag symbols illustrate the terror of death that dominates his world, whether it is the drawing of the skull above the two bones or the two crossed swords or the drawing of the demon-like skeleton with one hand holding an hourglass and the other holding a pitchfork. In the last line of our poem, the flagpole pierces the victim's skull like a nail. The poet's wrecked soul, which has been rocked like a ship in a storm, runs aground. The poem ends in a state of prostration, kneeling, and paralysis.

Bibliographic list:

• Charles Baudelaire
  -Les Fleurs du mal, Mozambook, 2011, https://yo0ne.free.fr/LesFleursdumal.pdf
• -Mon cœur mis à nu, La Bibliothèque Municipale de Lisieux (04.III.1999), https://www.bmlisieux.com/archives/coeuranu.htm
• -Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris, article paru dans la Revue dans la Revue européenne le 1er avril 1861 et reprise étalierement dans L'Art romantique, https://www.vivre-musique-classique.fr/pensees/wagner-et-baudelaire-a-propos-de-tannhauser/

Did you like the article and want to read more about Baudelaire?

• If you would like to read a few more poems by Baudelaire, this time translated by Dori Manor, you are welcome. Enter here.
• Want to get to know the magnificent palace where Baudelaire lived for several years and where he wrote “The Flowers of Evil”? Enter To this article.