Edgar Allan Poe Part 2
Copyright 2008 by Joe E. Bandel
Protected under United States Copyright Law as a derivative work of a foreign Author originally published prior to 1923.
We admire the Tiger Orchid. Is the magnificent orchid less beautiful because it feeds on insects by slowly torturing them to death in the narrow way? We are joyed and amazed at the glorious lilies in the Park of Cintra. We have never seen any so large and so white! How does it happen that their exceptional beauty is owed to the clever gardener that fertilizes the ground not with pure water but with treatments of Guano, applied manure?
Sometimes a sympathetic smile comes at the wide country roads our art must travel by chance before it shines meagerly here and there like a lantern piercing the fog of intoxication. There are times when it only comes through the union of intoxication and art. Then it is the only way great inspiration can come out from within and make itself known. When this happens the highest place must be given to the scouts Hoffman, Baudelaire and Poe, who first worked consciously through intoxication to find their art.
Let's be honest! Is there an artist that can go without stimulation? No one can do without their little stimulants, tea, tobacco, coffee, beer or what ever. Do these things hinder our inspiration of art or help shape its spirit more clearly?
They often help shape it more clearly.
Art is contrary to nature. A man that lives in abstinence keeping body and mind pure and whose ancestors also lived in abstinence for long generations has poisoned blood and can never become an artist! Not even God's favor in life can awaken the ecstasy. Its spirit has been poisoned.
Nature and Art are the worst enemies. Where one exists the other is not possible.
In the best sense what precisely is an artist? A pioneer of culture in the new territory of the unconscious. In this holy sense how few deserve this proud name! Th. A. Hoffman deserves it and Jean Paul and Villiers and Baudelaire and most certainly Edgar Allan Poe. Griswold must admit to himself that this poet of the soul related in so many of his stories a secret land considered by no one before him and gave us a first glimpse of a new genre of literature.
This powerful land of the unconscious, the land of our eternal desire lies in gray hazy clouds. The beggar lies warm in the sun. The commoner crouches sated by the oven. But there are those whose desire is so immense that their inspiration must come bleeding out.
They must in triple protect their breast when they leave the land of consciousness and steer through the gray murderous flood back toward Avalon.
Many, many get dashed to ground without casting a single glimpse behind the clouds. Very few succeed at this journey. These discover new territory for the culture and the border of the unconscious is pushed back a little further.
The artists are these first great explorers. Then mankind may equip researchers to survey and investigate this new land. They send in officials and civil servants to organize and record-men of science.
It is certain that in addition to other ways the so-called poisons we call narcotics are capable of taking us across the threshold of consciousness. If anyone has success and gets solid footing on the "other side" they can metaphysically in a positive way create new works of art. They are in the finest sense an artist.
Maybe it is necessary to stress the truth that art can never converse naturally with self except while working through frenzy. Some form of stimulation is needed. Or another, that no intoxicant in the world can bring art out of a person that has none inside to begin with!
The Griswolds and Ingrams want less wine drinking, less opium smoking, less hashish eating. If they had their way no more art would be created!
But he who works through intoxication together with narcotics creates suitable conditions where ecstasy can be invoked. This highest level of ecstasy can be invoked in anyone according to his or her intelligence and capability.
Griswold was right. Edgar Allen Poe drank. And yes, he drank too much. His body reacted badly to alcohol. His addiction was hereditary, so he drank a lot. He drank too much. But his actions were deliberate. While in the intoxicated condition things came out in a frenzy that later, perhaps years later, were shaped into new works of valuable art. Such intoxication is no pleasure. It is a horrible agony where awareness is only of the yearning for the art blazing like the mark of Cain upon his brow.
It is a belittling lie of the narrow minded that artistic production is no work, that it is a joy. Those that say so and the large masses with their thankless thought chatter never have a hint or breath of the ecstasy that only the artistic condition produces. This frenzy is always an agony to experience even if the ecstasy at first brings delight.
It is said the mother cat has pleasure bringing her young into the world but they are only poor blind kittens. This may be the weekend chatter of the Buxtehuder Newspaper like the writer of "Berlin at Night" who with pleasure puts his lines on paper.
A work of art is never born without pain.
I am going out. Through the enormous palace of the Roman Emperor Charles that led the German Nation. Cross through the mighty columned courtyard and out through the long avenue of white blooming acacia. Through the meadow covered with thousands of blue Irises.
I unlock and let myself into the Tower of the Princesses. The sultan's daughters, Zayda, Zorayda and Zorahayda secretly listened at these windows to the songs of a captured knight during the time of the crusdades.
Over the valley on the hill I see the boundary where Boabdil gave his last sigh over the lost Granada. From the Generalife gardens I can clearly see the ancient cypress where the last Moorish king's wife, the beautiful Hamet, brought disaster through her tryst with Abenceragen deep in the shadows.
Every stone here tells a sad tragic legend.
Down at the bottom of the valley the road continues on the long way to the cemetery. A pair of black goats graze on the green slopes. In back, under the prison tower sits a ragged customs agent in front of his filthy den. Long eared rabbits graze close to him and nearby seven cocks battle, pecking the ground or flying after each other, combs and black feathers plucked.
Far in the east glows the snow on the purple-red Sierra Nevada.
A troop of ragged urchins moves slowly across the valley bottom. Two carry a small child's coffin on their shoulders open in the Spanish custom. Another shoulders the lid. The coffin is very simple, three yellow planks and two plain ones. But a small waxy face and dark hair appear out of the flowers, many flowers, red, yellow, white and blue flowers that have been placed inside.
No Priest, no relatives, no father or mother in the procession, only ragged urchins. Still, the dead child rests in such fresh blooming fragrance among so many colored flowers. How good they didn't close her eyes! They look around curious at the colored flowers, at the old Moorish Palace and then back to the splendor of her flowers, this small dead maiden, so contented and fortunate to never again be alive.
posted by alligator | 3:46 AM
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