Author: DC (Page 29 of 1085)

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Tom Friedman Untitled (toilet paper), 1990
‘A roll of toilet paper, rerolled by hand without its cardboard core.’

 

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Yuuki Yuki For your own good, 2019–2020
‘For your own good has a multilayered structure in which a huge stuffed figure holds a public toilet. Made by Yu-ki, it has its roots in the artist’s own beloved doll, which her mother named “Sanko-chan my 3rd Daughter.” The toilet’s interior is covered with BL imagery (“boys’ love,” manga depicting adolescent male same-sex romance primarily targeted at women).’

 

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Claes Oldenburg Toilet – Hard Model, 1966
Oil, varnish and felt pen on corrugated cardboard and wooden construction, wooden plate.

 

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EOOS The Toilet That Dreams of Saving the World, 2019
‘EOOS aimed to build a toilet that could perform urine-feces separation, sending the liquid waste into its own storage and treatment system. The solution was a radically simple one—a urine trap, wherein urine hits a gently-angled pan at the front of the toilet, then trickles into a small opening inside the base. Urine—and only urine—enters the trap thanks to the Teapot Effect: Faster-moving flush water (which might contain feces) cascades over the trap and into the regular drain below. (The Teapot Effect is so named because when tea is poured slowly, the liquid tends to dribble down the spout, but a fast pour forms an arcing stream.) The only catch is that all urine must first hit the pan—meaning men must always sit down to use the toilet.’

 

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Joe Josephs Dead Boys Rule, 2013
‘Re-creation of a filthy restroom of CBGB, the Bowery club that was one of the birthplaces of punk.’

 

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Lai Yu Tong Objects Taking Sides, 2019
‘On the night of 21 July 2019, a group of armed men dressed in white stormed the train station in Yuen Long, Hong Kong, and started intimidating and beating people up indiscriminately. They mostly targetted protesters dressed in black and on their way home from the pro-democracy protests that were happening regularly then but members of the public were also not spared. Two policemen were seen walking away from the scene of the violence as it was happening. Law enforcement only arrived 38 minutes later despite the nearest police station being just a 5 minutes walk away from the station. I visited Hong Kong with no luggage and little belongings in September 2019. The first things that I bought were toiletries and cigarettes. I made this work after I had returned, as I was unpacking my belongings from that trip.’

 

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Ai Weiwei Marble Toilet Paper, 2020

 

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Dash Snow UNTITLED (TABLE DRUGS, TOILET, GUN/MONEY), 2008
Digital c-print

 

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David Attwood Two Harpic Lemon Toilet Rim Blocks, 2017
‘In September of 2016 during a studio residency I placed a number of lemon-themed cleaning products in the public bathroom of the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. Things like lemon hand wash, a lemon-yellow hand towel and matching bath mat, lemon Domestos and a pair of Harpic Lemon Toilet Rim Blocks. The toilet rim blocks are sold in a convenient pack of two, and so I thought that their placement at 3 and 9, across from each other – kind of bisecting the porcelain rim horizontally – might invite a double-take for the unsuspecting occupant, something akin to a glitch, like in The Matrix when Neo sees the black cat walk past twice.’

 

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Pallavi Sharma Beyond Rituals, 2010
‘As the paper scrolls down into the lotas, it resembles flowing water; intends to start a discourse on interrelationship of cultural practices and its impact on ecology and consciously think about our lifestyle choices and habits.’

 

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Tetsuya Ishida A man running away to the lavatory, 1996
‘In his short ten year career, Tetsuya Ishida captured the anxieties and trauma he shared with countless young Japanese people who reached adulthood in the 1990s, the country’s ‘Lost Decade’ that followed the burst of its bubble economy.’

 

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Jo Nakashima Toilet Paper Rose, 2019

 

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Nicola Bolla Saluzzo, 1963
aluminum sculpture and Swarovski crystals, defects

 

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Jeremy Bentham Don’t Miss A Sec, 2004
‘An art exhibit of a usable toilet enclosed in a cube of one-way glass is seen across the road from London’s Tate Britain Museum. The person inside the outhouse can see passersby while remaining invisible to them.’

 

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Jason Rhoades Portable Toilet and Bamboo Stick/Pencil Set, 1993
plastic bucket, lid, bamboo stick, two polaroid photographs and paper instructions

 

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Gerhard Richter Toilet Paper, 1965
oil painting

 

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Qiu Anxiong The Doubter, 2010

 

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Gregor Schneider WHITE TORTURE, 2005
room within a room, chipboards on a wooden construction, 1 lamp, 1 stainless-steel toilet, 1 door, 1 mattress, gray linoleum floor, walls and ceiling high-gloss white, detached

 

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Joseph Beuys Contemplating Joyce’s scrotum-tightening Sea, Sandycove, 1974
‘Beuys stands in a urinal at the 40 foot bathing area in 1974. He had come to visit The James Joyce Tower around the corner. The James Joyce Tower is one of a series of Martello towers that now holds a museum devoted to the life and works of James Joyce. Joyce made the tower the setting for the first chapter of his masterpiece, Ulysses.’

 

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Anastassia Elias Various, 2010-2017
‘Yes, it is a real toilet paper roll. This is just a cardboard roll, nothing else. Because it contains the word «toilet» in its name, it becomes impressive for some people. I just found that a cardboard tube was an interesting setting for a paper sculpture. And I didn’t need to make them myself, I found them ready to use. But I enjoy and understand the surprise that people have to see artworks made using toilet paper rolls.’

 

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Martha Alf Opposites and Contradictions, 1972-1975
‘Alf placed her subject center stage and perfected her treatment of light and shadow, essentially transforming each toilet paper roll into a monolithic altar set against a backdrop resembling an Ellsworth Kelly geometric abstraction. In the earlier examples, the rolls are rendered in intensified shades of actual toilet paper, such as blue and salmon. By 1974, she was painting the rolls in the improbable color black, giving her cylindrical altars funerary overtones. She created her ultimate parody of male-dominated high art with “Black” (1974), in which she satirizes Ad Reinhardt by centering a black toilet paper roll within a monochromatic black field. Although this may seem a critique on the surface, both artists viewed their images as iconic.’

 

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Frederick Wood Youth throwing up in toilet, 2002
bathroom, paint, faux-vomit

 

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Ilya Kabakov The Toilet, 1992
‘In 1992 Kabakov constructed an exact replica of provincial Soviet toilet – the kind that one encounters in bus and train stations – for the Documenta show in Kassel, Germany. The installation struck the visitors as at once affectionate and and repulsive, confessional and conceptual. It is after the execution of the toilets that Kabakov made the final decision not to return to Russia.

‘The toilets were placed behind the main building of the exhibition, Friedrizeanum, just the right place for such an establishment. Kabakov describes them as “sad structures with walls of white lime turned dirty and shabby, covered by obscene graffiti that one cannot look at without being overcome with nausea and despair.” The original toilets did not have stall doors. Everyone could see everyone else “answering the call of nature” in what in Russian was called “the eagle position,” perched over “the black hole.” Toilets were communal, as were ordinary people’s residences. Voyeurism became nearly obsolete; one developed, rather, the opposite tendency, that of retention of sight. One was less tempted to steal glances than to close one’s eyes. Every toilet-goer accepted the conditions of total visibility.

‘To go to the toilet, visitors had to stand in a long line. Expecting to find a functional place to take care of one’s bodily needs, or an artfully profane exhibit where one could flash a black outfit, visitors were inevitably surprised by the toilet’s interior design. Inside, there was an ordinary, Soviet two-room apartment inhabited by “some respectable and quiet people.” Here, side by side with the “black hole,” everydaylife continues uninterrupted. There is a table with a tablecloth, a glass cabinet, bookshelves, a sofa with a pillow, and even a reproduction of an anonymous Dutch painting, the ultimate in homey art. There is a sense of a captured presence, of an arrested moment: the dishes have not yet been cleared, a jacket has been dropped on a chair. Children’s toys frame the black hole of the toilet, which has lost its smell with the passage of time.’

 

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Walter Marchetti Piano del Papel Higiénico, 1990
toilet paper

 

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‘Taiwan’s Modern Toilet, self-described as a “scatological fantasyland”, is where the idea of toilet-themed restaurants first began with its initial concept dating all the way back to 2004. Once upstairs, the server sits you onto a toilet seat at a 💩-filled basin, hands you a menu in the shape of a toilet seat and brings out your food in little toilet/urinal-shaped bowls. I ordered the Toilet Chicken Nuggets and the Toilet #1 Ice Shavings (chocolate ice made to look like diarrhea and served in a mini squat toilet), as well as a drink with the grotesque name of bleeding haemorrhoid strawberry milk. The servings were large and they were well-presented.’

 

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Robert Gober Urinal, 1985
plaster, wire lath, wood, semi-gloss enamel paint

 

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Sarah Lucas I SCREAM DADDIO, 2012
photograph

 

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Emmett Ramstad Watching You Watching Me Watching You (Hunting Season), 2017
hunting stand, ladder, bathroom stall wall, toilet paper cache, smoke alarms, near dead batteries

 

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Josephine Pryde The Flight That Moved Them, 2021
‘Portrait-format photographs depicting a small, pink-brown octopus draped around a soap dispenser, trash unit and counter in an airplane bathroom, its tentacles dangling down into the oval-shaped metal sink. The ends of its tentacles appear like worms in a puddle near the drain. The photo is lit by a flash, in a style reminiscent of fashion or street photography. A sticker with text under the wall mirror, in German and then English, asks users of the bathroom to be courteous to the next user.’

 

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Erwin Wurm Urinal, 2010
Acrylic, paint

 

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Lou Masduraud Selfportrait as a fountain of you, 2024
oxidized copper, casted bronze, aluminium, brass, bucket, basin, drain, pipes, pant, cristal pearls, pickel jar lid, chewing gum, pumping systems, water

 

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Bjarne Melgaard Bathroom, 2021
‘On one wall of Luxembourg & Dayan’s fourth-floor bathroom, where he built his latest installation, Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard hung a letter that he wrote late last year to murderer Teodoro Baez, who is serving a life sentence in Pontiac, Illinois, for killing two people with a samurai sword after a dispute about drugs. Baez’s had been sentenced to die, but he was spared last year when Illinois abolished the death penalty. In his letter to Baez, Melgaard introduces himself as “a contemporary artist” and explains that he is working on a show at a New York gallery. “I own several letters and drawings of yours,” he explains, adding that he included those works in a group show he curated at Maccarone last year, “The Social Failure,” a one-week addendum of sorts to his well reviewed exhibition “After Shelley Duval ’72 (Frogs on the High Line),” whose artist list included more than two dozen murderers, including Ted Bundy, Phillip Jablonski, and John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer who is believed to have killed more than 33 young boys and who took up painting after his arrest. He goes on to tell Baez that he is “interested in establishing a correspondence,” and asks if he is willing to “collaborate to the extent you are able” on an upcoming exhibition. It’s Pay for Your Pleasure the sequel, apparently, in which the artist throws himself into even more twisted, abject ethical and moral situations. It sounds like a pretty horrendous idea—the artist taking Jerry Magoo’s comparison of him to Slipknot to some horrific extreme—but we’ll see how it all pans out. (Melgaard, for the record, has an installation opening at Karma on January 19.) The piece at Luxembourg & Dayan, though, was pure Melgaard, the overload of ideas and form that everyone has been swooning over for the past few years all shoved into a tiny bathroom: chalkboard walls scrawled with messages, pictures of Baez, a sink filled with Diet Coke cans, empty prescription bottles (labeled for Melgaard, no less) and pills, obscene drawings, a photograph of a ferocious-looking jaguar.’

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Steeqhen, Hi, S. Driving oneself mad is the cure everything, I think? Travel anxiety is a drag, but it melts to nothing as soon as you arrive, and maybe even when you sit down in the plane seat if you’re lucky. The Paris metro is easy. And see you pretty soon. ** James Bennett, Hi, James. Yes, I can only type with one finger so I type everything with one finger. I would say it’s impractical, but it’s always gotten the job done, it seems. Oh, you’re there! I hope it isn’t (too) flooded and you’re not having to stomp around in thigh high rubber boots. Envy, even so. Mutual cheering for sure, sir. Have an insane blast. ** James, The gray extends to here with considerable moisture at the moment. You’re swift. As a reader, and, well, probably in general. Trivia: Zac and I shot a music video for Xiu Xiu, but the record company hated it, and it never got released. Probably not as much debauchery as you’re imagining. Adulthood also comes with this sense of practicality that makes reality a compromise. If I’m anything to go by, all the super cool, popular guys at my high school all disappeared into the ether of the world without a trace, and me, former unpopular weirdo, have a Wikipedia page. How was your first college day. I sent luck if you felt any trace of it. ** jay, Ah, you’re an Infinity Land dude. Oh, okay, subcutaneous infusion, gotcha. I hope that’s too much of a drag for you. ‘Hannibal’, right, I remember when people were really into that, I guess when it was a newbie. I don’t do TV, so I only know about TV things based on if they’re a ‘thing’ or not and for how long. Sounds fun enough. Nice. Mario is still wending through the obstacle course that King Olly has made of Peach’s Castle by turning it into an origami. But he’ll get there. Thank you. You still in that tropical sounding game? ** Steve, That did sound terrifying, and I’m glad it reached some kind of doability. So sorry, Steve. Snow, nice, or, well, nice from afar. Very true: your assessment of the film availability issue. Sadly, the kinds of films I’m most interested by haven’t been made accessible to all but the most extremely diligent and adventurous punters since the late 70s, if even then. It’s not so bad in Paris, of course, relatively speaking, assuming you’re free on the one day every ten years when those kinds of films get shown somewhere. ** Diesel Clementine, That sounds fun indeed. My birthday is on Friday, but luckily I don’t have any local friends who drink more than a glass of wine or two, or, if they do, I don’t think they would see my birthday as an occasion win which to blow themselves out. First footing sounds to be very pleasant tradition. You Scots do know how to charm. Mm, the only French thing like that that I know of is you’re supposed to eat a ‘Galettes des rois’ on or near New Years. In the US, my mom made us eat Black Eyed Peas on NYE, but I think that’s just a Southern tradition. She was from Texas. Happy anniversary a day late! Best back to you in high volume. ** Tyler Ookami, Baudelaire is pretty great. My favorite is ‘Paris Spleen’ if you ever want a place to start. Oh, boy, the Liturgy hatred is or was something else. Maybe his transitioning kind of quieted everyone down? I used to want to see or hear everything that was heavily and successfully hyped so I could understand it and what people at that current time found exciting, but I’ve gotten pretty picky. Now I just want to understand the effect of a successful hype but not so much the thing at the center of it. For better or worse. ** Dominik, Hi!!! IFP’s books are beauties, and they’re also very good at making charismatic ‘welcome’ posts. A million percent agreed on the mania for remade things. Like that new ‘American Psycho’ film. Why? Everyone seems to want to see something familiar wearing a new outfit. It’s not a good thing, I also don’t think. Can’t beat a weekend of reading. I did my Biweekly Zoom Club thing — topics: poems by Elaine Equi and the film ‘Shock Corridor’ — and I saw the new Herzog film ‘The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft’, which was very good. And I made a bunch of plans to see people, including the Infinity Land Press people who are visiting, and … not a ton else. Love on a schoolboy’s wages, G. ** Justin D, Ah, okay, TikTok mind numbing as your brain’s bedtime desert, that seems plausible. I’ll see what’s left of SSJ’s stuff out there to use. At one point I checked, and there wasn’t much left. I … think he got nuked first? My weekend, as described just above, was perfectly even keeled and maybe sort of revved up my week, we’ll see. What’s your favorite form of eating pasta? ** Florian S. Fauna, Hi, Florian! Good to see you, maestro. I do know ‘Maldoror’, yes, you are correct. I’m mostly just getting Zac’s and my new film ready to begin its life in a few months and writing the next film. Oh, sure, great, write to me by email or even FB messenger, and I’ll give you my mailing address. Thank you, pal. That would be great! ** HaRpEr, Hi. Infinity Land can put notches in your bank account. Yes, the lemon simulating bottles I collected were topographical with realistic texture and all that stuff. Without that, what’s the point? My roommate Yury watches this YouTube channel where a woman uses every episode to explain exactly what procedures certain plasticised celebrities have had done and how much their new faces cost them, and I’m always actually surprised by how weirdly affordable the operations are. It’s like buying really fancy furniture. Yeah, Hesse is really good. I’m excited to see what they do next. I asked them when they read here, and something is in the works, but I can’t remember what. A novel maybe? How was your first day off enforced normalcy? ** Uday, It’s totally fine to pop in and out, no problem. I’m sure I said before that where I grew up there were wild peacocks all over the place, wandering the streets. I sort of miss mistakenly thinking there were women outside my house wailing in pain and loneliness when I was stoned. I most look forward to getting Zac’s and my new film finally out into the world after so long. Otherwise, I want to go to Japan. And to Epic Universe. You? No, I tend to try to pretend my birthdays aren’t happening, and I think I’m going to an electronic music festival that night which should pretty much erase the occasion. I’m not against cards. I’m not, like, neurotic about birthdays. If people want to use that day to be nice to me, I’m all for it. Happy week ahead. ** Okay. Today you get the no doubt long awaited sequel to ‘Toilet’, lucky you. See you tomorrow.

 

…I would ask you whether this earthly spectacle suffices. Have you never felt the urge to make your exit, if only for a change of scenery? I have very serious reasons for pitying the person who is not in love with Death…
— Baudelaire, draft of an unsent letter

In the summer of 1845, a young, wayward, and disaffected Charles Baudelaire made a suicide attempt, writing letters that were to constitute his last will and testament. It was to be one of several suicidal crises which would punctuate Baudelaire’s life over the next twenty years, acutely documented in his correspondence, where the themes of depression, debt, and death come together to delineate a life that was lived, in almost every way, against life.

Horror of Life: The Suicide Letters of Charles Baudelaire brings together a selection of Baudelaire’s letters that spans his life as a writer, from the scandal and notoriety of The Flowers of Evil, to the images of urban decay depicted in Paris Spleen, to his dossier on the ‘artificial paradises’ of hallucinogens, to the essays on the mal du siècle of 19th century modernity, to his late fragments of misanthropic autofiction, and his final days as a convalescent, disease slowly eroding both body and mind.

A delirious mixture of confession, indictment, and abdication, these letters document Baudelaire’s own dark night of the soul, a spiritual itinerary saturated with the hues of catatonic depression, a pervasive existential dysphoria, and the always-looming allure of death.​​

Artworks by Martin Bladh
Photographs by Karolina Urbaniak

Hardcover, 180 pages, 190 x 148mm
Order here: https://www.infinitylandpress.com/horroroflife-thesuicidelettersofcharlesbaudelaire

 

 

***

From the introduction by Eugene Thacker.

Melodramatic though it may seem, Baudelaire’s last years were in fact the culmination of a life lived at odds with life, at almost every level. This is evidenced not only in Baudelaire’s wide-ranging output – essays, criticism, theater, a novel, aphorisms, translations, and of course poetry – but it is particularly acute in Baudelaire’s letters. The letters Baudelaire wrote to friends, family, lovers, editors, and debtors form a sizeable correspondence that also spans the different phases of his life as a writer. It is here we find Baudelaire as a patient anatomist of ‘spleen’ and ennui, a diagnostician of structural breakdown, a wayward astrologer reading the atmosphere of negative affects that pervade both his fractured interiority as well as the somber exteriority of the nocturnal skies, rain-swept streets, and insomniac nights that form the terrain of works like Les Fleurs du mal.
—- What Baudelaire’s letters reveal is that his final years were in fact preceded by a series of crises, crises that correspond to either actual or planned suicide attempts. The first crisis takes place in the summer of 1845, when a twenty-four-year-old Baudelaire finds himself prey to circumstances beyond his control: ongoing disputes with his widowed mother concerning his bohemian lifestyle; mounting debts that necessitate his accounts be taken over by a Conseil Judiciaire (a kind of financial gate-keeper), resulting in a life-long sense of humiliation and resentment; Baudelaire also begins what would be a decade-long, turbulent affair with Jeanne Duval, a Haitian-born actress and dancer; and, in spite of his ambitions as an upstart writer, Baudelaire was perpetually beset by idleness, procrastination, and an inertial fear of failure. The crisis reaches its pitch sometime in June of 1845, where Baudelaire writes several letters – one to his mother, the other to Narcisse Ancelle, the Conseil Judiciaire – that serve as his last will and testament, indicating that a suicide attempt had taken place. It is in these letters that Baudelaire writes repeatedly of a pervasive sense of sorrow (douleur) and tedium (oisiveté) that that he can’t seem to shake. ‘I’m killing myself,’ he writes, ‘because the weariness of falling asleep and the weariness of waking up are unbearable to me.’ Desperate and helpless, death seems the only release.

 

***

A double life began to emerge, fractured from the inside. On the one hand, Baudelaire’s writing seemed to flourish. His editions of Poe translations continued to sell, he continued to write about modern art and aesthetics (including ‘The Salon of 1859’ and later, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’), and a few years after the publication of Les Fleurs du mal Baudelaire published his now-classic book on drugs and hallucination, Les Paradis artificiels (a book deeply informed by his reading of Thomas De Quincey). On the other hand, the scandal surrounding Les Fleurs du mal only made Baudelaire’s personal life worse, straining already conflicted relations with his mother, who was both his confidant but also his guilty conscience; debts continued to mount, made worse by advances paid on unwritten articles; and the first bout of seizures served as a worrying indicator to Baudelaire that the syphilis he had managed since his twenties was becoming worse. A letter from this period details the depressive cycle: ‘[W]hen my nerves are worn thin by a horde of worries and suffering, the Devil, despite all efforts to the contrary, slips into my brain each morning in the form of this thought: “Why not take the day off and forget about all your worries?”’ But then, he continues, ‘night arrives, and the mind is appalled at the multitude of things still left undone.’ Anxiety, defeatism, futility all follow, and ‘a crushing sense of sorrow renders you helpless, and the next day the whole drama begins again.’
—- The polarities of this double life peak sometime in the fall of 1860, when another suicide attempt had possibly taken place. In letters to his mother Baudelaire confesses that ‘for several months I’ve fallen into a frightful despair that has interrupted everything.’ A sense of inertial heaviness sets in: ‘I pass the time reflecting on the brevity of life; nothing more; and my will power continues to wither away.’ A diagnosis emerges from the depths: ‘Every minute reveals to me that I’ve lost the taste for living.’ Baudelaire glimpses a moment of clarity, like an omen: ‘I have the acute sense that some fine morning a crisis could engulf me…’

 

***

In the winter of 1861, he writes to his mother: ‘The perpetual conflict within me is exhausting; my melancholy drains all my faculties; and added to that, the sense that everything is arbitrary, and that all effort is wasted.’ In another letter: ‘I’ve again fallen into a lethargic sickness, a sickness of horror and fear. – I was physically ill two or three times; but one of the things that’s particularly unbearable is when I fall asleep, and even while asleep, I hear voices…’ In 1862, Baudelaire provides a prognosis: ‘…none of my infirmities are gone; neither the rheumatism, nor the nightmares, nor the anxiety, nor this unbearable capacity to feel every loud noise strike me in the stomach; – and fear, above all; the fear of suddenly dying – the fear of living too long…’ Again, a solution whispers itself to him: ‘And before me, I see suicide as the singular and the easiest solution to all these horrible complications with which I’ve been condemned to live year after year…’
—- The bouts of depressive catatonia and inertial resignation take their toll, now inseparable from the slowly deteriorating physical condition, and the old sense of a curse hovering over him now returns to Baudelaire with an almost hallucinatory fervor. The letters are longer, more rambling, more disoriented. There are earnest appeals to make amends with his mother, their letters wavering in and out of mutual understanding and performative subterfuge. At some point, between February and April of 1861, there is possibly another suicide attempt. And this, too, fails.

 

***

There is a sense that each crisis is not the first, nor will it be the last. Its periodicity follows the ebb and flow of an existential dysphoria that is both personal and impersonal, revealing a rift within the core of oneself that ambivalently arcs towards death, and the promise of oblivion. What remains are, in fact, remains: remnants, fragments, and the desiderata of living, enduring a chronic withering at once physical and metaphysical. Drafts for unrealized projects, notebooks scrawled in futility, stray utterances in hurried letters, bewildered confessions turned into embers in an all-consuming indictment – a hatred of humanity, an abdication of life.

 

***

Baudelaire’s letters reveal a task specific to the poet: the struggle to discover a language of melancholy and depression that would not simply be reducible to medicine, but that would also depart from the legacy of Romanticism, imagining as it often did a beatific and harmonious union of self and world. Not so for the poet who wrote repeatedly of the gulf separating the human self from the nonhuman world around it; or who described in such dense language the withering and decline of all things. This is encapsulated in the idiosyncratic vocabulary of Baudelaire’s letters, which displays a remarkable consistency from his earliest angst-ridden days as an upstart writer to his final days in the sickroom: ennui, douleur, désespoir, langueur, oisiveté, spleen, tristesse, as well as the always-looming abyss (gouffre) that seems to inhabit even his most detached art criticism. In a draft manuscript of Les Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire would even describe his writing as a ‘miserable dictionary of melancholy,’ and his letters are a part of this lexicon. For Baudelaire, the letter becomes more than a convenience of communication. Even the practical urgency of appeals for loans or requests for medication are folded back into the larger project of documenting the tenebrous moods that seem to periodically invade his psyche.

 

***

‘Something terrifying says to me: never, and yet something else says to me: keep trying.’ It is no accident that Baudelaire chose Limbes (‘Limbo’) as an early title for Les Fleurs du mal, as it aptly describes the sense of a dual repudiation: no longer being alive, and yet unable to die. What remains is the futile appeal towards an impersonal cosmos (a sentiment echoed in his late poem ‘Le Gouffre,’ or ‘The Abyss’). Reading through his letters, a singular portrait emerges of Baudelaire as a writer deeply engaged with the affective dimensions of systemic breakdown and a poetics of entropy – be it in the body, the mind, the natural world, or even existence itself. As a deepening sense of futility begins to preoccupy his last years, Baudelaire seems aware that the genre of the letter provides a unique space for expressing a range of negative affects that transport him from the highest to the lowest of states.

 

***

These and other formulas are so many attempts to arrive at a vocabulary for describing the irrevocable limbo in which Baudelaire so often found himself. Baudelaire is drawn into the marble-like impassivity of depressive states, engulfed in the chthonic-like ‘black bile’ of negative affects – ennui, désespoir, douleur, spleen. Then – as now – the precise relationship between suicide and depression remains diffuse and opaque. The allure of death, the impassivity of life, and between them, an abyss. When all is told, Baudelaire’s suicide letters reveal something much less melodramatic than suicide (a gesture that requires decisiveness, assertion, and a generally proactive disposition). For the suicide has something definitive about it, a euphoric sense of solution, even as it remains a deeply-felt enigma for those left behind. But Baudelaire’s almost miasmatic ennui eclipses even the will to suicide. It’s as if his depression strangely mitigates against his suicide. It is the sense of being too tired for suicide. The convention of thinking about suicide as a sudden event gives way to a different notion, of suicide as drawn out over the course of an entire life, where resignation, futility, and dead time spread themselves out like the slow diffusion of night. The short suicide gives way to the long suicide; the quickening of the act receding behind something as diffuse yet palpable as depressive states themselves: the slow suicide.
—- For Baudelaire, ‘depression’ names neither a subjective disposition nor a clinical condition, but the diffuse non-existence where the personal and the impersonal bleed into each other, resulting in an affective collapse in which the aesthetic is also anesthetic, affect turned inside out – catatonia, oblivion, a zero-degree of being. In an entry from his late notebooks, Baudelaire notes: ‘Physically as well as morally, I’ve always felt a sense of an abyss, not only the abyss of sleep, but the abyss of action, of dreams, of memory, of desire, of regret, of remorse, of beauty and number, and so on…’ Perhaps this is why Baudelaire so often described ‘beauty’ in such oblique terms – the impassivity of death, the impersonal process of decay, the gravity of rain, the indifference of the stars.
—- If Baudelaire is still with us today, it is not just because he challenges religious morality, nor is it because he is an acute observer of urban modernity, nor because he is a chronicler of existential alienation – it is because he delineates the contours of the ‘slow suicide’ of living, a ‘negative aesthetics’ that gives voice to both the catatonia and the loquaciousness of depressive states, resulting in a poetics that is inseparable from the dysphoria that it fails to comprehend.

Extracts from the letters by Charles Baudelaire.

To Narcisse Ancelle
30 June 1845

I am killing myself – without any sorrow. – I feel none of the perturbations people call sorrow. – My debts have never been a cause of sorrow. It’s easy to get over things like that. I’m killing myself because I can no longer go on living, because the weariness of falling asleep and the weariness of waking up are unbearable to me. I’m killing myself because I’m useless to others – and a danger to myself. – I’m killing myself because I believe I’m immortal, and because I hope. – At the time of writing these lines I’ve been blessed with such lucidity that I’m still writing out a few editorial notes for Mr Théodore de Banville and have all the strength necessary to busy myself with my manuscripts.

 

***

To Madame Aupick
Saturday 4 December 1847 [Paris]

I’ve never dared to complain so melodramatically before. I hope you’ll attribute my excited state to the suffering I’m experiencing of which you know nothing. The pervasive listlessness of my outward life, contrasted with the relentless activity of my mind, throws me into devastating fits of rage. I blame myself for my faults, and I blame you for not believing in the sincerity of my intentions. The fact is that for several months I’ve been living in a supernatural state. Now – to return to the evidence I’d like to present to you, my absurd existence can be generally explained thus: careless spending of money that was supposed to be devoted to work. Time flies, but the necessities of life persist.

 

***

 

To Madame Aupick
30 Dec[ember] 1857 [Paris]

Certainly, when it comes to myself I have plenty to complain about, and I’m both alarmed and stunned by this fact. Do I need new surroundings? I don’t know. Is it physical illness that diminishes my spirit and will, or is it spiritual cowardice that wears away the body? I don’t know. But what I feel is immense discouragement, an intolerable sense of isolation, the perpetual fear of a vague misfortune, the utter depletion of all my strength, a total absence of desires, the impossibility of finding any meaningful distraction whatsoever. The bizarre success of my book and the hatred it stirred up was intriguing for a while, but after that I relapsed. You see, my dear mother, here is a situation of the spirit serious for someone whose profession it is to produce fictions and dress the part. – I ask myself incessantly: What good is this? What good is that? That is essence of spleen. – To be sure, in remembering that I’ve been subjected to similar states before and have recovered, I’m inclined not to be too alarmed; but I also can’t recall having sunk so low and having dragged myself for so long in such despair. Add to that the ongoing anxiety of my poverty, the struggles and interruptions of my work caused by old debts (keep calm, this isn’t an appeal to your weakness. It isn’t yet time, FOR VARIOUS REASONS, though the source of this weakness and laziness I freely admit myself), the offensive, repugnant contrast between my spiritual reverence and this precarious and miserable life, and finally, with these strange bouts of suffocation and these intestinal and stomach troubles that have been going on for over a month. Everything I eat chokes me or gives me ulcers. If morality could cure the body, then continuous hard work would cure me, but one must want it, and with a weakened will – a vicious circle.

 

***

To Madame Aupick
Friday 19 February 1858 [Paris]

Next, think of the horrible life I lead, which leaves me such little time for writing; of the multitude of issues I’d have to resolve before I leave (for instance, at the beginning of the month, I lost six days of work because I had to go into hiding for fear of being arrested. And I’d left my books and manuscripts at home. This is only one of a thousand details of my daily life.)
—- To have happiness so close, almost within reach, and then to have it snatched away! And to know that I will not only be happy, but that I’ll be bringing happiness to someone who so deserves it!
—- Add to this suffering something you’ll perhaps not understand: when one’s nerves are worn thin by a horde of worries and suffering, the Devil, despite all efforts to the contrary, slips into the brain each morning in the form of this thought: ‘Why not take the day off and forget about all your worries? Tonight, in a single burst of activity, I’ll do everything that needs to be done.’ – And then night arrives, and the mind is appalled at the multitude of things still left undone; a crushing sense of sorrow renders you helpless, and the next day the whole drama begins again, as if it was the first time, with the same false assurances, the same conscientiousness.

 

***

 

To Madame Aupick
11 October 1860 [Paris]

Now I’m going to speak seriously, without exaggeration, of some truly somber thoughts. I may die before you, despite this diabolical fortitude that so often maintains my state of mind. What has held me back for the past eighteen months is Jeanne. (How will she live after my death, given that you’d have to pay all my debts from whatever money remains?) There are other reasons too: leaving you alone! and leaving you in the horrible predicament of having to manage a chaos that only I can understand!
—- The mere thought of all the work I’d have to do to facilitate an understanding of my affairs is enough to make me definitively renounce carrying out an act that I consider to be the most reasonable thing in life. To be honest, it’s my pride that sustains me, that and a savage hatred of all human beings. I’m constantly striving to dominate my circumstances, to take my vengeance, to persist with defiance and impunity – and other such juvenile fantasies. – Finally, though I neither want to scare you, nor sadden you, nor make you feel remorse, I do have the acute sense that some fine morning a crisis could engulf me – me, who is truly weary, and who’s never known joy or stability. After your death, one thing is for sure; while you’re still alive, my fear of hurting you would prevent me from carrying out the act; but with your passing, nothing would stop me; to be honest, and to state what’s really important, in the end there are two devastating thoughts that hold me back: the idea of hurting you and hurting Jeanne. At least you wouldn’t be able to say that I lived a completely selfish life. I’m getting to my point. Whatever be the destiny in store for me, if, after having assembled a list of my debts, I was to suddenly disappear, if you are still alive it’s important to do something to support that aged beauty who has now become an invalid.

 

***

To Madame Aupick
[February or March 1861, Paris]

I think back on the years that have passed, horrible years, and I pass the time reflecting on the brevity of life; nothing more; and my will to live continues to wither away. If ever anyone has known, since their youth, spleen and melancholia, that person is me. And yet, I do want to live, and I’d like to know, however briefly, some degree of stability, respectability, and contentment within myself. Something terrifying says to me: never, and yet something else says to me: keep trying.

 

1 April 1861

The preceding page was written a month ago, six weeks, two months, I no longer know when. I’ve fallen into a sort of perpetual nervous terror; sleeping is dreadful, waking up is dreadful; all action impossible. My author’s copies sat on my desk for a month before I summoned the courage to put them in packages. I haven’t written to Jeanne and haven’t seen her for close to three months; and since it was impossible to do so, I haven’t sent her a penny. (She came to see me yesterday; she’s left the clinic, and her brother, who I think is supporting her, sold some of her furniture while she was away. She sold the rest to pay off her debts.) In this horrible state of mind, this helplessness and depression, the thought of suicide returned; I can now say that it’s passed; but at every hour of the day this thought consumed me. I saw in it absolute deliverance, deliverance from everything. At the same time, over a period of three months, and by an extraordinary contradiction, I prayed! every hour (to whom? to what kind of being? I have absolutely no idea) to obtain two things: for me, the strength to live; and for you, a long, long life. I should say in passing that your desire to die is quite absurd and uncharitable, since for me your death would be the final blow, and signal the absolute impossibility of finding any contentment whatsoever.

 

 

***

Above all, what saved me from suicide was two ideas that will seem juvenile to you. The first is that it’s my duty to provide detailed notes for you concerning the payment of all my debts, and that meant first going to Honfleur, where all my documents are stored, legible only to me. The second, shall I confess it? is that it would be hard for me to go through with it before having published at least all my critical works, even if I leave aside the plays (there is another project in the works), the novels, and lastly a big book that I’ve been working on over the past two years: My Heart Laid Bare, in which I’ve stockpiled all my wrath. Ah! if that ever sees the light of day, the Confessions of J-J will pale in comparison. You see I’m dreaming once again.
—- Unfortunately, for the cultivation of this exceptional work, it would’ve been necessary to keep masses of letters from everyone, letters which, over the past twenty years, I’ve given away or burned.
—-– Finally, as I already mentioned, a feverish task tore me out of my lethargy and sickness for three twenty-four hour stretches. But the sickness will return.

 

***

To Auguste Poulet-Malassis
[around 20 March 1861, Paris]

I also want to say a few words, words that I dare not say to anyone but you. For a long time I’ve been on the brink of suicide, and what’s held me back is a reasoning that has nothing to do with cowardice or even regret. It’s the pride of not wanting to leave my affairs in a bewildered mess. I would leave enough to pay off everything; but I still need to make detailed notes so the executor can manage it all. I’m not, as you know, a whiner or a liar. During the past two months, I had fallen into an alarming state of depressive catatonia and despair. I felt myself invaded by a sickness akin to that of Gérard, and I understood the fear of no longer being able to think or write a single line. It’s only in the last four or five days I’ve been able to verify that I wasn’t already dead. That’s a breakthrough.

 

***

 

To Madame Aupick
Saturday 23 [December 1865]

As for the curse that I complain about (and against which I’ll have my revenge, if I can), I cannot, my dear little mother, share your opinion, despite the deference I feel towards you. I know my vices, I know my errors, my weaknesses, just as well as you do; I could exaggerate all my mistakes, and even then I maintain that Paris has never been just towards me – that I’ve never been paid, in esteem or in money, WHAT IS DUE TO ME. And the proof that there is a kind of curse hanging over me, is that my own mother has, in many instances, turned against me. – In three and a half months, I’ll be forty-five years old. It’s too late for me to make even a small fortune, especially given my unpleasant and irritable disposition. Is it perhaps too late for me even to pay my debts, to salvage enough to live with decency into old age? If I can ever recapture the freshness and vitality I once knew, I’d vent all my hostility in books that would inspire appalling terror. I’d like to pit the entire human race against me. In that, there would be an ecstasy that would compensate for everything.
—- Meanwhile, my books lie dormant, lost income for the time being. And then, I will be forgotten.

***

Facsimile

19 February 1858 (BNP NAF19797)

11 October 1860 (BNP NAF19797)

***

Bios

Charles Baudelaire was a French poet, critic, and translator. Born in 1821, he was a lifelong inhabitant of bohemian Paris, where he came into contact with a number of artists and writers of his day. His 1857 poetry collection The Flowers of Evil caused a sensation when it was tried for obscenity by the French government. He wrote numerous essays on modern art, literature, urbanism, drug use, and the culture of modernity, in addition to translating the works of Edgar Allan Poe. He died in 1867, having suffered from aphasia and partial paralysis.

Eugene Thacker is an author, editor, and translator. His books include Infinite Resignation and In the Dust of This Planet. He teaches at The New School in New York City.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. This weekend the blog is acquiescing re: its occasional fetish of backpedaling itself into a red carpet (without the red) to help facilitate the birth of a new book of note, in this case the latest tome from Infinity Land Press, in its case housing previously untranslated writings from the unimpeachable poet/dude/god Mr. Charles Baudelaire. I have this book in my very apartment, and, as is always the case with ILP products, it is a banquet for the brain and eyeballs. So please welcome it accordingly and consider transporting it into your reality. Thank you, ILP crew! ** Misanthrope, Seriously, all the luck imaginable. We have the temperature for snow and even the thick gray skies for snow, but not even a flake. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Thanks, pal. Yes, all it takes to be a daring film these days is a color grader with a heavy hand and a sound track by a post-inspired Industrial rock star, it would seem. Any weekend excitement or bits and pieces of inordinate pleasure? Ever fallen in love with someone ever fallen in love in love with someone ever fallen in love in love with someone you shouldn’t have fallen in love with, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Haha, nice. The opposite of fingernails on a chalkboard. Happy weekend, Ben. ** Steeqhen, Hi. Oh, I accidentally pulled Real Housewives into the blog. I had no idea. RIP. Email, cool, I’ll go find it. Thanks! ** jay, Thank you kindly, sir. Wow, you and your catheters. I imagine there’s an interesting story there, but I daren’t ask. Point is, cool. No, it’s true, what you say about ‘Suicide’, which makes the whole thing even more mysterious if one insists on going the personal -> literary route. Sadly, and I guess interestingly in a grim way, Edouard’s books were very little known and written about until he died, and then he became a critic’s darling and cult figure. Before then he was only really known for his photographs. It’s very strange. I knew him somewhat well, and I had never read his written work as it hadn’t been translated into English, so I didn’t fully take advantage of the honor of being his acquaintance until it was too late. I just thought he was an intense guy who took fetish-y photos. A show you love? As in … ? I hope to have freed Princess Peach, returned her to a non-origami form, and be switching off the end credits by weekend’s end, assuming the big boss isn’t a total ballbreaker. ** Darbz.⛄️, Good morning to you. Yes, you in the morning, that’s a rare treat. I’m drinking a cup of coffee with my left hand as I type this with my right hand. I never learned how to type so I only type with one finger, but I’m pretty fast. Two hours of writing is excellent! Kudos! It’s true being tall and sneaky is very tough. Your cats are so great! Please do work on the Wain post if it suits your time and mood. I don’t really know the turf between and Philadelphia. I don’t even know what’s there because my geography skills are minimal. Mutter is a fine destination. Helmet too, obvs. ** Corey, And me, I never have enough plastic wrap in my house. Use your teeth. That makes it exciting. No, memory tells me that isn’t Mr. Robinson, but I don’t know, honestly. I have absolutely no talent for flirting. I’ve never been able to do it, and I gave up even thinking about trying to flirt years ago. You’re on your own, but you sound pretty canny in theory. ** Steve, Grr indeed. I don’t think I’ve heard of ‘Woods are Wet’, which is very strange considering your description. Well, gosh, I think I have to watch that, don’t I? Thanks, pal. ** James, I think that corpse in a body bag was Laura Palmer, but don’t quote me. Just wait: when you get older your nose and ears start erupting with fast growing hairs. It’s a hassle. I couldn’t tell that about your father until you mentioned it, but I can pick up on the signage now that you have. Yes, re: experimentation in youth, and the sad thing is that most of the young experimenters not only stop experimenting in adulthood but get crabby about other adults who don’t stop experimenting. Sort of like your un-edgy friends, perhaps, although I’m guessing they’re still young and have already stopped self-challenging. Sad. But whatever works, I guess. Escorts charge money for it, and slaves don’t. No, I never need quotas. I’m pretty obsessive. When I’m writing, I write all the time, and, when I’m not writing, I figure there’s a good reason. Inspiration is a moody, schizo master. ** Tyler Ookami, Nice. I’ll go watch and hear how Carcass tackle the theme of plasticity once I’m finished up here. Thank you. Agreed with you about being more pulled into that crossover space than into the realm of traditionalist crunch merchants. I’m close friends with Stephen O’Malley of Sunn0))), and he says the hate mail they get from metalheads — ‘my 3 year old brother could do what you talentless morons are doing’, etc. — is voluminous. That’s kind of a superb read on ‘Nosferatu’, admittedly not having seen it, but it speaks to the wherewithal of a popular brand of current daringly posed films in general as well. There’s so much bet-hedging going on. And so much ‘better than nothing’ defending going on. I don’t know. Excellent and exciting thoughts, and thank you. ** Bill, What do you want to bet that biodegradable bubble wrap has a shitty sounding pop. Cool, glad you got the hoot of ‘Sex Goblin’. Awesome. ** HaRpEr, Well, so he says. It’s more fun to believe him than not. Wow, I was very fetish-y about those plastic lemons with lemon juice inside. Do they still make them? I used to collect them. Wow. You were an admirably discerning thief. I don’t have a problem with plastic surgery either, but there is something very uncomfortable about the people who think they’ve convincingly de-aged and beautified themselves when everyone around them barring the Donald Trump set sees them as a bunch of people who look like siblings from some scary family. There’s a delusion there, a kind of inadvertent conformity, that freaks me out. If that makes any sense. I’m really happy you like ‘Disquiet Drive’. I think it’s really special. There’s a beautiful kind of essay in there about Hesse’s relating to Acker and Chris Kraus that’s pretty brilliant, I think. ** Arla, That sounds super interesting. Maybe the chore aspect is well worth it? From over here, at least. But it’s easier to be hungry than to feed the hungry, I guess. Hungry mentally, I mean. Have a swell weekend? Any giddy-making plans, realised or not? ** Justin D, Phew, so it is a word. My Spellcheck is very annoying. For some reasons it assumes I’m British, and it keeps correcting my Americanisms — color into colour, favor into favour, etc. — and I refuse to be Anglicised by a bot, so it’s a hassle. That’s interesting: I would have thought trying to solve puzzles at bedtime would just adrenalise you and make sleep harder to come by. Shaye Saint John … aw, much missed. I should restore my old SSJ post, come to think of it. Thank you for ‘Nothing is punk anymore …’. I’m there, or will be. Weekend of utter excellence to you! ** Right. Make your way around Baudelaire’s suicidal tendencies and Infinity Land Press’s life affirming packaging if you so choose. See you on Monday.