Excerpts from "Artificial Paradises"

on hashish and wine as means of expanding individuality

by Charles Baudelaire

At first, a certain absurd, irresistible hilarity overcomes you. The most ordinary words, the simplest ideas assume a new and bizzare aspect. This mirth is intolerable to you; but it is useless to resist. The demon has invaded you...

It sometimes happens that people completely unsuited for word-play will improvise an endless
string of puns and wholly improbable idea relationships fit to outdo the ablest masters of this
preposterous craft. But after a few minutes, the relation between ideas becomes so vague, and the thread of your thoughts grows so tenuous, that only your cohorts... can understand you.

Next your senses become extraordinarily keen and acute. Your sight is infinite. Your ear can discern the slightest perceptible sound, even through the shrillest of noises.

The slightest ambiguities, the most inexplicable transpositions of ideas take place. In sounds there is color; in colors there is a music... You are sitting and smoking; you believe that you are sitting in your pipe, and that your pipe is smoking you; you are exhaling yourself in bluish clouds.

This fantasy goes on for an eternity. A lucid interval, and a great expenditure of effort, permit you to look at the clock. The eternity turns out to have been only a minute.

The third phase... is something beyond description. It is what the Orientals call kef; it is complete happiness. There is nothing whirling and tumultuous about it. It is a calm and placid beatitude. Every philosophical problem is resolved. Every difficult question that presents a point of contention for theologians, and brings despair to thoughtful men, becomes clear and transparent. Every contradiction is reconciled. Man has surpassed the gods.

"To The Reader"

Stupidity, delusion, selfishness and lust
torment our bodies and possess our minds,
and we sustain our affable remorse
the way a beggar nourishes his lice
Our sins are stubborn, our contrition lame;
we want our scruples to be worth our while-
how cheerfully we crawl back to the mire:
with few cheap tears washing our stains away!
Satan Trismegistus subtly rocks
our ravished spirits on his wicked bed
until the precious metal of our will
is leached out by this cunning alchemist:
the Devil's's hand directs our every move-
the things we loathed become the things we love:
day by day we drop though stinking shades
quite undeterred on our descent to Hell!
Like a poor profligate who sucks and bites
the withered breasts of some well-seasoned trull,
we snatch in passing at clandestine joys
and squeeze the oldest orange harder yet.
Wriggling in our brains like a million worms,
a demon demos holds its revels there,
and when we breathe, the Lethe in our lungs
trickles sighing on its secret course.
If rape and arson, poison and the knife
have not yet stitched their ludicrous designs
onto the banal buckram of our fates,
it is because our souls lack enterprise!
But here among the scorpions and the hounds,
the jackals, apes and vultures, snakes and wolves,
monsters that howl and growl and squeal and crawl,
in all the squalid zoo of vices,
one is even uglier and fouler than the rest,
althoug the least flamboyant of the lot;
this beast would gladly undermine the earth.

"EVEN WHEN SHE WALKS. . ."

Even when she walks she seems to dance!
Her garments writhe and glisten like long snakes
obedient to the rhythm of the wands
by which a fakir wakens them to grace.

Like both the desert and the desert sky
insensible to human suffering,
and like the ocean's endless labyrinth
she shows her body with indifference.

Precious minerals are her polished eyes,
and in her strange symbolic nature
angel and sphinx unite,
where diamonds, gold, and steel dissolve into one light,
shining forever, useless as a star,
the sterile woman's icy majesty.

"Spleen"

I am like the king of a rainy country
Rich, and yet powerless, young and yet most old
Who, distrustful of the bows his tutors make
Sits bored among his dogs as with his other beasts
Nothing can lift his spirits, neither hawk nor game
The dying subjects gathered to his balcony.
The grotesque ballad of his best-loved fool
No more distracts him in this sickness cruel.
His lilied bed is changed into a tomb;
The ladies of his court all lords might love
And yet they can no longer find shameless attire
To draw a smile from their young, wasted sire.
The alchemist who made him gold could not
Purge from his soul this corrupt element
And in a blood bath, as in ancient Rome,
Remembered by the mighty in their latter days
Knew not to warm this dazzled corpse
Where flows not blood but Lethe's waters green.

"Cats"

Fevered lovers and austere thinkers
Love equally, in their ripe season
Cats powerful and gentle, pride of the house
Like them they feel the cold, like them are sedentary

Friends of science and sensuality
They seek the silence and the horror of the shadows
Erebus had taken them for its funeral coursers
Could they to servitude incline their pride.

Dreaming, they take on noble postures
Great sphinxes stretched out in the depths of emptiness
Seeming to fall asleep into an endless dream.

Their fertile loins are full of magic sparks
And nuggets of gold like fine sand
Vaguely bestar their mystic pupils.

"Afternoon Song"

Though your wicked eyebrows call
Your nature into question
(Unangelic's their suggestion,
Witch whose eyes enthrall)>

I adore you still -
O foolish terrible emotion -
Kneeling in devotion
As a priest to his idol will.

Your undone braids conceal
Desert, forest scents:
In your exotic countenance
Lie secrets unrevealed.

Over your flesh perfume drifts
Like incense 'round a censor:
Tantalizing dispenser
Of evening's ardent gifts.

No Philtres could compete
With your potent idleness:
You've mastered the caress
That raises dead me to their feet.

Your hips themselves are romanced
By your back and by your breasts:
By your languid dalliance.

Now and then, your appetite's
Uncontrolled, unassuaged:
Mysteriously enraged,
You kiss me and you bite.

Dark one, I am torn
By your savage ways,
Then, soft as the moon, your gaze
Sees my tortured heart reborn.

Beneath your satin shoe,
Beneath your charming silken foot.
My greatest joy I put
My genius and destiny, too.

You bring my spirit back,
Bringer of the light.
Exploding color in the night
Of my Siberia so black.

(From " Lust"
ISBN - 0-8118-0691-X (hc)
Chronicle boks
275 Fifth Stree
San Franscisco, CA
--Translated by Randall Koral and Ruth Marshall)