By Simone Bandini
“Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui
Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d’aile ivre
Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas fui!”
Stephane Mallarmè, “Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui”, Poésies (1887)
We take our cue from the famous ‘Swan Sonnet’ by Stephane Mallarmè, the most aristocratic and tragic of the French decadent poets, to take a look at the human condition, in particular on the mysterious and archetypal welding between the aesthetic and ethical, ideal and material condition of every man every man.
The swan is a beautiful creature – which embodies the epiphanic power of beauty – whose vital impetus nevertheless remains trapped in the frozen lake, wanting to manifest the irreconcilability of ideality and material practice, essence and manifestation. The soul, the spiritual absolute, finds no representation in the phenomenal world of possibility: the swan will not take flight.
Well, what hinders and ‘prevents’ our charismatic creature? What is the diaphanous frozen lake allegory of?
We’ll explain it to you.
That transparent, shimmering ice is the paralyzing expanse of ‘material time’ – the paralysis of the human condition where ‘to pass’ is to ‘decay’.
That rectilinear time linked to the observation of ‘difference’, change, recombination and therefore to decay – that phenomenal time so trivially rational and human – is the cause of a mortal disease: the merely material, limited and finite condition – in total discrepancy with the absolute and infinite essence of the spirit, of ideas, of thought.
While leaving the eternity of the soul to the religion of the afterlife, let’s see how to escape in this world from the lethal trap to which we are ontologically subjected.
We will save ourselves by playing with time: calibrating the flutter of wings towards victory, climbing, conquest.
This flight of the swan will have to be practiced and embodied – and not just staged in a bourgeois sense – like a metaphysical and virtuous ‘hangover’, getting drunk on ourselves, fearfully and seriously. A state of grace, divinatory. In the thread of a pelagic metaphor: a ‘ride on the crest of a wave’.
Fullness sic et simpliciter, unconditional and unreasonable adherence.
Let’s break the ice with an inspired stroke of wing, in this life, like immortal demigods.
Recommended listening: “Indian Summer”, The Doors