Stream 16 - Lethe and beyond.

Response to a girl’s translation of Baudelaire’s poem about ‘Lethe’ and her conclusion that
‘I don't even have any lethe right now... oh well, I shall look at the world with bored poet's eyes and not care, for nothing can affect me anymore’

3:06pm Feb 9th ‘08 -->
everyone must cross the lethe in the end.
really good poem - it's very like that 'laissez moi respirer longtemps longtemps l'odeur de tes cheveux etc' one.
---
8:17pm 9th Feb ‘08
oh and the bored icy melancholia is the symptom of being free by dint of having nothing to lose - it is an attainment of total self mastery, having nothing to care about - some people try to be like icarus, (or stephen dedalus in joyce's portrait of the artsit as a young man), aesthetically free and dwell in the rarefied atmospheres of their own mind without being moved by any exterior essences, but gravity always wins (in the words of thom yorke) just like reality always wins and people's mind will always plunge down into the sea, and that sensory storm called life, and be moved, so i suppose enjoy your flight while you can, everyone's wings melt, and waxing lyrical you will plunge into reality and, if you can, which is the tricky business of real life, you will do it well and be happy and find something to care about, which tenders us towards the other end of the scale from freedom to surrender - for like religious faith or total love, these are the opposites of freedom, where you give yourself up and choose to be moved by the forces of the world, by your own emotions or by those of another, rather than to move freely in spite of the actualities of existence, and to work an icy mastery over yourself. There you have the ideals to which people tend, either freedom or surrender, both are unattainable, because in between those to polar ends is that little thing, which will always reassert itself, reassuringly, frustratingly, called reality.
of course that probably doesn't help but that's what i think about stuff at the moment...of course it's only a philosophical model which can never be true, it can only help us to trick ourselves into thinking that we can understand, but of course the world will always exceed the embrace of the words we use to comprehend it.
drink up, i say.
x