Knowing and Known
An Original Meditation on a Baudelaire Poem (English version)
Knowing and Known
Meditation on a Poem by Baudelaire
Dr. Daniel Dal Monte
Echoes
Charles Baudelaire
In Nature’s temple, living columns rise,
Which oftentimes give tongue to words subdued,
And Man traverses this symbolic wood,
Which looks at him with half familiar eyes,
Like lingering echoes, which afar confound
Themselves in deep and sombre unity,
As vast as Night, and like transplendency,
The scents and colours to each other respond.
And scents there are, like infant’s flesh as chaste,
As sweet as oboes, and as meadows fair,
And others, proud, corrupted, rich and vast,
Which have the expansion of infinity,
Like amber, musk and frankincense and myrrh,
That sing the soul’s and senses’ ecstasy.
Translated by Cyril Scott
The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Mounts Towards Infinity, Odilon Redon
Do natural things echo our human attempts to communicate? We have eyes taking in experience and tongues that reflect that experience in words, but natural things seem self-enclosed in perpetual darkness. In Baudelaire’s poem Correspondances, he presents a forest as a living temple. The forest is animated, with a mysterious capacity for knowing, and a conduit to what is sacred. There is a rejection here of a conception of nature as merely a dead machine. There is a rejection, in other words, of a dualism that separate mind from nature. The private world of the mind looks out on an absurd world that has no mind. Instead of rupture, this poem shows correspondences, in which mind embraces both the interior and the exterior world.
Have you ever walked through a silent forest, and felt mysteriously known by the still, pulsing life around you? The constant stimuli in our modern world want to hide this eloquent silence from you. Baudelaire’s poem is a meditation on the symbolism in nature. Nature is not just literal things, but a kind of language.
The materialist reduces nature to mute stuff. Materialism is the position that matter is the fundamental reality, rather than mind. For the materialist, raw physical stuff is the first reality, which later gives rise to mind.
The opposite view is that mind generates matter. This is the kind of view we find in major religions. If matter emerges from mind, it is a kind of language. Matter is an emanation of mind, and so follows a deliberate logic. This is the underlying theme of this great poem by Baudelaire. The forest knows the poet, because the ultimate ontological roots of the forest is a mind. Just as the human mind uses words to communicate its thoughts, the original mind of the universe generates matter from its thoughts.
If, on the contrary, matter is ultimate, it speaks no language. Mind emerges from it accidentally, since matter by itself can plan nothing. Matter is simply stuff whirling around according to natural forces. For the materialist, deliberate and intelligent language is an aberration. Language is of the mind and separate from nature, which is mindless organic machinery. Materialism has roots in ancient Greek atomism which views reality as just complex arrangements of randomly colliding atoms. In this materialist outlook, mind is a freakish aberration. Out of purposeless mindless particles, we get a sensitive consciousness capable of organized experience. There is a massive rupture between raw stuff and the linguistically acute mind. Humanity is a lonely absurdity in a world that cannot possibly understand humanity.
Baudelaire’s poem, Correspondances, rejects this rupture between consciousness and raw stuff. Nature, instead of being mute, expresses a kind of language. Nature is a temple, an opening to what is sacred. Nature emits confuses paroles, i.e. indistinct utterances. No one maintains that nature communicates like a human being. We do not approach a tree or an animal and have conversation, like characters in a fairy tale. We do not text God on our phones. The speech of nature is mysterious and obscure. It requires deep interior work to hear it. Most people are deaf to it. To hear the fitful speech of nature requires a silencing of human chatter.
Baudelaire views natural things as symbols (symboles). A tree is not just a tree, but communicates multiple levels of reality. We use natural objects to communicate interior realities all the time. Trees represent stability and calm strength as well as vibrancy. Water represents change. Nature is not just raw stuff separate from mind but an expressive palate intermingled with our interior lives.
The speech of nature unites the mind with matter. People’s bodies are not just crude matter but communicate interior reality. Body expresses mind. Faces and bodies represent interior beauty and depravity alternately. Baudelaire senses a cosmic oneness in the second stanza, a profonde únite that unites both mind and matter. This worldview is very different from the radical dualism we get in figures like Descartes, who considers the material world to be merely mechanical, consisting in operations devoid of thought.
Poetry, I think, relies on a unity of the material and the interior reality of the spirit. What is that separates poetry from prose? Prose tries to be as clear and literal as possible. When I use prose to describe a tree, I want you to have as clear of an idea of that tree, in all its concrete literal particularity, as possible. But, poetry elevates the concrete by intermingling it with the abstract. The tree is no longer just a tree, but part of an interaction between body, mind, the external world, and the soul.
Metaphor comes originally from the Greek word, μεταφορά (metaphorá). Meta is not just a tech company, but also means “beyond.” Metaphors point beyond the surface level reality, by connecting a concrete reality to interior significance. A tree is a metaphor for continual stability. The mother is as strong as a tree. There are correspondences, as this poem points out, connecting the surfaces of things and the depths of human interior lives.
In the third stanza, Baudelaire uses the rhetorical figure of synesthesia. This is a combination of independent senses. We typically do not associate, for instance, a color and a sound, but we can do so in sensible ways. A scream can be yellow—this makes sense in a weird way. In Baudelaire’s poem, perfumes are sweet, like the sound of an oboe. Perfumes are green, like a prairie. Here, we combine scent, sound, and vision.
Again, the message has to do with the metaphor. There is a unity instead of rupture, that transfers or carries beyond (meta) one sense into another. Reality is multi-valent rather than literal, united rather than divided.
The narrowly quantitative and discriminating mind needs to separate one sense from another, and cannot tolerate metaphor that connects layers of meaning. Someone considering a plot of land for its potential productivity cannot tolerate the ambiguity of metaphor. Land for purchase cannot also have an interior significance. The modern materialist is transactional. A tree is good for what it can yield, and it reduces to numbers, in a calculation of profit.
Why is the modern materialist so jaded? People find life boring. But, Baudelaire in this poem speaks of transports de l’esprit. That is, there is a kind of ecstatic movement out of oneself, in contemplating nature. We on the contrary are bored, because we view everything as literal. Literalness is needed for transactions in the workaday economy. In buying something, I need to know exactly what I am getting, not its metaphorical associations.
The literal-minded person fails to see correspondences, between his own ideas and things in the world. This generates a solipsistic boredom. What is meaningful takes place only in the mind. The mind gives meaning to what is in itself meaningless.
Baudelaire’s poem, Correspondences, rejects this dry mentality. Meaning is both inside and outside the mind. Meaning beats in the heart of nature, which points beyond itself to a higher reality. The senses are not windows into a soulless mechanical domain of atoms in flux. Instead, the senses are windows into a higher soul.