Way back, all of a month ago, I re-read Baudelaire because I was thinking of the idea of spleen. We don't recognize it as a psychic constellation anymore--no, get with the therapeutic progam, here's your zoloft. I was thinking about how I am a grump, whether there is any value to be dredged from that, and it would seem important to salvage some value from the glower and the curmudgeonly mood, or else why harbor it, even nurture it, as I do? Being pissed off all the time is a distraction, granted. But I would rather hang around with Dorothy Parker than...uh...well... someone too willfully cheerful, like Andy Warhol.
So that brought me to Baudelaire, who wrote a batch of poems on the subject. Nowadays his poetry doesn't play well to our sensibilities, because it is a bit too darkly romantic, sort of like the mood of a bad vampire movie. But he wrote a few poems we should remember. Here is Richard Howard's version of "The Happy Corpse," whose sentiments I heartily endorse, and I don't think I'm a cynic for saying that:
The Happy Corpse
Wherever the soil is rich and full of snails
I want to dig myself a nice deep grave--
deep enough to stretch out these old bones
and sleep in peace, like a shark in the cradling wave.
Testaments and tombstones always lie!
Before collecting such official grief.
I'd rather ask the crows, while I'm alive,
to pick my carcass clean from end to end.
They may be deaf and blind, my friends the worms,
yet surely they will welcome a happy corpse,
feasting philosophers, scions of decay,
eat your way through me without a second thought
and let me know if one last twinge is left
for a soulless body deader than the dead!
I like the bit about the crows. I think often of the Tibetan notion of "sky funeral"--for lack of burial ground, the body is ground up and fed to the birds. Flight is a nice part of the imagining. Plus the speed of the circling seems efficient. Why flush all the nutrients down the sewer? Surely there is a lean crow, or a lean worm, out there somewhere waiting for a meal.
