Cartel of Defiance

cartel of defiance (noun): 1. In medieval combat, a formal declaration, delivered by herald, of a combatant's intention to fight and refusal to submit. 2. An electronic assemblage of engaged and enraged citizens. 3. An intertextual mode of reading, writing, and thinking that puts the current political, cultural, and personal moment in dialogue with text/art from the past in counterargument to the ahistorical Memory Hole into which America seems to have slipped.

Saturday, March 18, 2006

Obsession


Forests, you scare me like cathedrals do;
You roar like an organ, and in our despicable hearts,
Chambers of tireless mourning where old gasps haw,
The echoes of your sacred chants reverberate.

I hate you, Ocean. Your bounding and your tumults,
My spirit rediscovers itself in them; that bitter laugh
of the vanquished man, full of sobs and insults,
Is what I hear in the enormous laugh of the sea.

How you would please me, O Night! Without your stars
whose light speaks an unknown tongue-
For I seek the empty, the black, the bare.

And the darkness is itself like a canvas
where-pouring from my eyes by the thousands
live the familiar faces of my lost and my dead.


Charles Baudelaire, les Fleurs du Mal
English adaptation © 2006 Paul Delehanty

1 Comments:

Blogger awol said...

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

WH Auden, "The More Loving One"

11:59 PM  

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