In my last post, and in earlier posts of mine, I’ve written about non-conceptual, non-intellectual relations, resemblances, affinities among “different” aspects of reality, spiritual “correspondences” perceived only by what I’ve called the higher function.  But of course, as so many others have, I bang into the difficulty (really, the near-futility) of trying to name the unnamable, describe what really can’t be described, but only experienced or suggested. That chance, however, that the attempt will spark someone else into a realization, not by explanation, but by clues or correspondences, is why the attempt isn’t wholly futile, and why it needs to be made sometimes as best we can.

And the difficulty of talking about all this, and even more of grasping these mysterious presences and numinous realities, is a big part of why Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondences” has been poorly translated, especially by academics. And it’s why commentaries pretending to “explain” the poem have invariably been wrong-headed and sadly misleading.

Because I wanted to present the poem to you in this post, I decided to translate it myself.  This isn’t a poem to be explicated.  Like other great works of art, it’s to be experienced, with full and open attentiveness, to be absorbed.  Even if someone doesn’t much recognize what it’s about, a willing and unprejudiced reading will provide clues, echoes of the kind that the poem names, stirrings beyond naturalism or philosophy.  Though I don’t say this by way of interpretation or reduction, this poem calls to mind for me, among many other things, the thought expressed in the Hebrew Kabbalah and other mystical books and poems:  that every earthly object corresponds to some counterpart in the heavenly realms, that every natural thing or event has a correspondence with supernatural reality — or maybe I should just say true reality, sensible only to that higher function of our selves.

That is what opens up, in immersive fashion, in mystical experience: a sense that one is experiencing not some kind of glorious hyper-illusion, but rather the universe as it really is, when the doors of our perception are opened.  And it’s that manner of vision that the greatest artists to try to evoke or manifest by their art, in works such as “Pepper No. 30” or Wynn Bullock’s “galactic” “Tidepool, Point Lobos” or Olivier Messiaen’s Lightning over the Beyond or Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  And it’s central to what I pursue in my own art, in photos like “The Window Is at Your Feet,” “Ritual,” “Grass of the Midnight Sea,” “The Tree of Unsleeping Surveillance,” “Uprooted,” the “Marion” images, most of the works throughout my portfolios.

Here’s my translation of Baudelaire’s poem, followed by a reproduction of a Julie Heffernan painting that I believe is at home with it:

CORRESPONDENCES

Charles Baudelaire

(translated by L. Russ)

Nature is a temple of vivid columns, living creatures  

Who sometimes murmur mystifying words;

Man wanders through those forests of symbols,

Followed by eyes familiar from his dreams.

*

Like long echoes arriving from far away, that merge

In a shadowy, unfathomed oneness,

Vast as the night, yet uncannily clear,

Fragrances, colors, and sounds all commune.

*

It’s fresh as the scent from a child’s cheek,

Soft as an oboe’s tone, green as the prairies,

With still other airs — corrupt, rich, glorious —

*

And an endless blooming of infinite things,

Of amber, and musk, and saffron, and incense

That sing to transport us, both spirit and sense.