by Luke Briner (’26)
Abstract:
These five pieces are explorations of the creative act, and, particularly, the manners in which that act both emerges from and determines the form of selfhood responsible for it. “Creative act” is meant here both in the sense of specific, intentional artistic effort and in the sense of the historical process by which a basically indigent living thing, manifesting itself in, through, and above the world, may develop in virtue of the conditions produced by that manifestation.
“ὁ ποιητής” depicts the inherent difficulty and disappointment involved in the creative act with respect to the end toward which that act is always oriented. “Determinations” aims to think through the way in which the self strains, through determinate, limited, and consequently always insufficient ideas and actions, toward the Good. “ἡ τοῦ κόσμου ψυχή” and “Ur,” subsequently and on the other hand, focus in distinct but closely connected ways on the overarching procession of life at once from and toward the Good. Baudelaire’s poem “Élévation” is relatedly centered around the spiritual reinvention of the self and the salvific role that such reinvention may ultimately play for it.
ὁ ποιητής1
This brimming host of opalescent white,
serenely pliant to a queenly wind,
then sweeps across the early-blushing sky—
you sit and watch in your small, useless height,
naïvely straining to unearth the It
in every passing image of the world.
Determinations
A hundred little heaven-imaged worlds
Unravel, flush with promise, over you
Like lumps of clay attempting to attain
The figure of the fire whose breath they hold.
You are the witness of
—you are yourself
The constant-fevered measure of their dance.
Bestarring, drunkenly, a starving eye,
They promulgate themselves
—then pass you by.
How can one live
—how can one bear to live
By these vain-flickering felicities,
Entantaltused beneath a nameless fruit?
You walk along the water’s edge and think
—And, fixing on one half-envisioned light,
Hew ribbons through the vast and fitful wind.
ἡ τοῦ κόσμου ψυχή2
The day of burning: walking with you then,
Enlimpided, together, underneath
A sprawling noontide, too huge, almost, in
The raiment of her molten ambers, fixed,
Condemned to progress through the Anima
That burgeoned, naked, crooning, by the wide
Of zephyr-lifted green just overtop
The creekshore we set out for, but, I think,
Had never reached. Yes. I remember how
I turned to you then, as we walked and talked
And made our way, chryselephantine scales
Inlaid with a chaste despotism on
My eyes, and wondered if you knew yourself
What I knew, suddenly, the world has been.
“Just—look,” I said, or maybe only longed
To say, “—look at the everything that we’re
Surrounded by: the sky—the grass—the leaves!
And—aren’t we one thing with all of it?
—All of us, cast and casting, dice-like, through
The seething vectors of a History
Too grand, too terrible for us to know,
Yet, somehow, are ourselves—all flowerings
From one primeval and unchanging stem,
Irradii of one God-languished star?
Look—look—is that not true?—is that not true?—”
And I don’t think you gave an answer then,
Half-truant to the tremor of a dream,
As desperate as I was to hear it: crushed
Beneath the sky’s omnific weightlessness
And aching, with a violence that I still
Can’t fully understand, to know, with you,
The vastness of the All in every thing,
The Miserere in the swaying leaves.
Ur
Self-knower of the You before I was,
first wisdom, νόμος3 πρὸ4 the orphan clay,
begotten and begetter of the Light
that speaks itself into the pining spheres—
entempled to an opal’s history,
aspiring to become what cannot be,
she makes the world her poem, forming and
unforming to the One for Whom she is.
There is, before the animal, a Love
so high and so incomprehensible
that Everything is nothing but its trace.
I know that we will find that Love again—
and find ourselves, together, in the End,
as little children
playing in the sun.
Translation of Baudelaire’s “Élévation”
Original.
Des montagnes, des bois, des nuages, des mers,
Par delà le soleil, par delà les éthers,
Par delà les confins des sphères étoilées,
Mon esprit, tu te meus avec agilité,
Et, comme un bon nageur qui se pâme dans l’onde,
Tu sillonnes gaiement l’immensité profonde
Avec une indicible et mâle volupté.
Envole-toi bien loin de ces miasmes morbides;
Va te purifier dans l’air supérieur,
Et bois, comme une pure et divine liqueur,
Le feu clair qui remplit les espaces limpides.
Derrière les ennuis et les vastes chagrins
Qui chargent de leur poids l’existence brumeuse,
Heureux celui qui peut d’une aile vigoureuse
S’élancer vers les champs lumineux et sereins;
Celui dont les pensers, comme des alouettes,
Vers les cieux le matin prennent un libre essor,
— Qui plane sur la vie, et comprend sans effort
Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes!
Translation.5
Above the languid ponds, above the vale-etched plains,
Above the mountains, forests, seas, and swirling clouds,
Beyond the sun, beyond the fine-aetheric shrouds,
Beyond the confines of the Spheres’ celestial trains,
Move you, my Soul, with consummate celerity,
And, like a swimmer who glides underneath each wave,
Upon the Vastitude you eagerly engrave
Yourself with a sublime and virile ecstasy.
Make quick your exodus from these miasmic banes—
Go—sanctify yourself amid the air divine,
And there do you imbibe, as an ambrosial wine,
The halcyon fire that flows throughout the limpid planes.
Behind the hugeness of our troubles and our Spleen
That set themselves upon a pale life ever-bent,
Beatified is she who by a swift Ascent
Soars to those golden fields supernal and serene;
She whose own Contemplation, like the songbird’s wings,
Takes free and cheerful flight unto the morning skies
—Who hovers over life, and effortless descries
The language of the flowers and of silent things!
Endnotes:
1Meaning here both “the poet” in particular and “the agent of creative activity” in general.
2“The Soul of the World.”
3Meaning here both “law” and “song.”
4Meaning here “before” in both a temporal and a spatial sense.
5I’ve chosen to organize the dodecasyllabic value of the original’s alexandrine meter into iambic hexameter for my own translation. The ABBA rhyme scheme of each quatrain has been preserved.
Bio:
Luke Briner is a current master’s student at the University of Chicago studying philosophy and classical languages. His poems have been featured in a number of local publications in New York and Maryland. He was also the first-prize winner of St. John’s College, Annapolis’ official contest for the finest original English poem of the academic year of 2023-2024.