Modernity and nerves find their definitive voice in Baudelaire’s notes (even though the Goncourt brothers would later write, with defiant vanity: “We were the first to write about nerves”). The German romantics were still talking about ideas, but here a theological aside mingles with the smells of the streets, the nausea of manifestos, the incidents of city life, a summary of debts, a recipe for Icelandic lichen. A dreary personal sideshow, while the same old performance continues onstage. An obsession about the names of newspaper editors, a “list of villains” (“liste de canailles”). Burke’s sublimity, the “delights of chaos and immensity,” are now camped at the crossroads, appearing at every step are the gaping chasms that people went to see in Switzerland and belonged then to memories of the Grand Tour. One walks beneath “the square sky of solitudes,” in the savanna of the mind. At times “the voice of the adjective pierced me to the bone.”
Nerves first emerge as a historical subject with Baudelaire’s generation. As if, indeed, nerves had not run through the body, had not given those shudders, those shocks that are now felt with dismay, with delight. It is the first sign of the final fixation of the Spirit—first sonorous, then luminous, then all-embracing, then aural, then vaporous, and finally simply nervous—in the network of the Body. And this passage to the Body inevitably goes with an urge to experiment on the Body. For this, the Spirit has to be fixed in a certain place in order to have an effect on it. This is the crossroads, the meeting place for all praxes, all kinds of aestheticism (which are projects of great industrial enterprises, the first seeds of the whole impressive apparatus of the media, from the salon of Des Esseintes to the palace courtyards of Cecil B. De Mille), all positive sciences, all organizations, all systems of education. The new thought of the age is all assembled in one point: no longer to have one thought, but to act on every thought—and from this action to consider the thought that emerges. The most convincing action, it is supposed, will be the most effective. And the most effective action, consequently, will be considered by the most appropriate thought.
The treacherous Sainte-Beuve advised Baudelaire (in December 1861) to write a formal letter presenting himself as a candidate for the Académie. It had to be addressed to the Secrétaire Perpétuel de l’Académie Française, who at that time was Abel Villemain, the man whom Baudelaire regarded, more than anyone else, as the natural embodiment of Stupidity—(“I have a passion for Stupidity”). The letter was written with much agitation and innuendo (“To be entirely honest, the main reason that leads me to solicit your votes at this very moment is that, if I decided to solicit them only when I felt myself worthy, I would never solicit them”—we note “the grammatical dance” in using solicit three times in four lines). When Baudelaire dutifully visited Alfred de Vigny, who was one of the forty academicians, Vigny shook his large noble head. It was a faux pas, unpardonable, he said. Too often he’d heard it whispered: “We’ll make that one bow and scrape, and in the end we shall not elect him.” And meanwhile he made a mental note: “It seems Baudelaire exists in literature only as a translator of this philosophical novelist [Poe]. Distinguished and suffering appearance of a studious and hardworking man.” But he still had to visit the enormous Villemain, “enormis loquacitas,” “the hatred of a mediocre man is always an immense hatred.” Baudelaire listened as Villemain lectured him “with indescribable solemnity” about Les Paradis artificiels: “Toxicology, Monsieur, is not Morality!” Baudelaire records the phrase in masterly style, introducing two sarcastic capital letters. Ever childish, Baudelaire notes to himself: “I’ll make him pay dearly for it.” They said good-bye as follows: “M. Villemain, with insistence: I’ve never had any originality myself, Monsieur. M. Baudelaire, ingratiating: Monsieur, how would you know?”
Uno Harva (Holmberg) |
Karl Meuli |
The act of pouring milk or sprinkling fermented horse milk over the back of the sacrificial animal recalls the custom practiced in the Volga region where it is established whether the sacrifice is appreciated by pouring water over the victim. The shudder of the animal indicates a positive response. This at least is what the Yellow Uighurs recount: they pour “white water” (ak su), namely water mixed with milk, over the back of the sacrificial lamb and the quiver that it causes is seen as evidence that the sacrifice is acceptable to the god. What is more, a word in the Mongol language, borrowed from Chinese, which describes the act of pouring acquavit or water into the ears of a sacrificial pig, shows us that a corresponding custom is also known here. |
Σείoυ σὺ ταχέως, “shake yourself immediately!” cries Aristophanes’s Trygaeus to his sacrificial lamb: by shaking its head it has to give its consent. The Delphic god had quite clearly told Episcopus: only a sheep that spontaneously agrees can be a proper sacrifice. In the time of Plutarch this rule was still scrupulously followed, and Daphnis, for example, pours milk and wine over the head of his sacrificial animals, as was done to obtain the necessary gesture of consent. Water could also be put into the ear. For a sacrifice at Delphi it was not enough for the animal to shake its head: the animal had to shudder in order for Pythia to pronounce the oracle. |
Baudelaire: “The sacrifice is complete only with the sponte sua of the victim.”
“[Baudelaire] was also proud of these words by a great poet: ‘You have endowed the sky of art with a sort of macabre ray: you create un frisson nouveau.’” Baudelaire was proud of these words not only because they were written by Victor Hugo (about whom he harbored no illusions: “he woos everyone and treats as a poet the first and the last to arrive”), but because they were those words: the “frisson nouveau” was the New, which, “au fond de l’Inconnu” (in the depth of the Unknown), encountered the shudder, the most ancient, the too familiar (and hence effaced) memory of the sacrifice. From that time, the encounter is repeated every day, like the sudden irruption of leopards into the temple: “in the end it can be foreseen and becomes a part of the ceremony.”