#roberto calasso

Baudelaire was a lover of depth, understood in the strictly spatial sense. He waited, like some marvel always ready to flare into being, for certain moments in which space eluded its customary flatness and began to reveal itself in a potentially inexhaustible succession of stage wings. Then things – every single negligible object – suddenly took on an unexpected significance. In those moments, he wrote, ‘the exterior world offers itself with a powerful emphasis, a clearness of outline, a wealth of exquisite colors.’ As if to say that thought was possible only when the world presented itself in this way. These were also ‘the moments of existence in which time and extension are more profound, and the sentiment of existence has grown enormously.’ So, in Western terms, Baudelaire was getting close to describing what for Vedic seers, and later for Buddha, was bodhi, the ‘awakening.’ And in an equally literal Western spirit, he made this coincide with physiological awakening, with the moment in which ‘the eyelids have just been unburdened of the sleep that sealed them.’ This is what drugs are for: opium makes space deep (‘Space is deepened by opium’), while hashish ‘spreads over the whole of life like a magic varnish’ (perhaps similar to Vauvenargues’s comment ‘clarity is the vernis des maîtres’?). Yet Baudelaire also pointed out that drugs are only a surrogate for physiology, since ‘every man carries within himself the right dose of natural opium, which he unceasingly secretes and renews.’

German romanticism marks the reawakening of sacrifice. The dark, the impure, the uncontrolled; the landscape; the incongruous, the somnambulistic, the sentimental, the foreboding, the passionate: whatever might, with some awkward speculation, be called Negative was its terrain, where the intoxication of double meanings is once more to be found, each time invigorating and destructive, just as it had been a long time ago around the sacrificial post. But no one can now assume the role of officiant, or of sacrificer: in the absence of a ritual, of an order, the only role left is that of the victim, who wanders the forest, prey to Rudra, waiting for his fatal arrows. This is the consumption that kills Novalis and Keats. For Hölderlin, Rudra is Apollo, who strikes him down in Bordeaux. When, with Rimbaud, the writer becomes officially maudit, it is already time for a change, time to go selling weapons in Harar. The victim discovers sadly that the world has already prepared an archaic niche for him. He must now return to the forest. In the city, he will be anonymous, barely visible, he will write business letters in English, he will sit in a café after office hours: the forest is Pessoa's trunk, crammed full of names.

It wasn't in his nature to weep. [...] But now Dionysus was crying for Ampelos. It was a sign that something had happened that would change his nature, and the nature of the world. At that moment the Hours were hurrying toward the house of Helios, the sun. There was a sense that something was about to take place on the celestial wheel. It was time to consult the tablets of Harmony, where Phanes' primordial hand had inscribed the events of this world in their order. Helios pointed to them where they hung on a wall in his house. The Hours looked at the fourth tablet: it showed the Lion and the Virgin, and Ganymede holding a cup. They interpreted the image: Ampelos would become the vine. He who had brought tears to the god who never wept would also bring delight to the world. Upon hearing which, Dionysus recovered. When the grapes born from Ampelos's body were mature, he picked the first bunches and, with a gesture he seemed to know of old, he squeezed them gently in his hands. He watched as a red stain spread across his fingers. Then he licked them. He thought, Ampelos your end demonstrates the splendors of your body. Even in death you haven't lost your rosy color. No other god, let alone Athena with her sober olive, or Demeter with her nourishing bread, had ever had anything that could vie with that liquor. It was exactly what had been missing from life, what life had been waiting for: intoxication.