Notes on "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire"

Walter Benjamin on Marcel Proust on the Madeleine
I remember Walter Benjamin's writings on Marcel Proust's madeleine, the moment, in Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, when an avatar of Proust bites into the pastry, memories of his childhood flood into his brain, what Proust calls a memoire involuntaire; but, I never noticed before this statement Benjamin (writing about Proust) makes about the search for an object related to a lost memory:

"As for that object, it depends entirely on chance whether we come upon it before we die or whether we never encounter it" (Benjamin Illuminations 158).

Lacan's Objet Petit A
This comment reminds me of Lacan's objet petit a.

It's Lacan's psychological concept for the lost object. The object of desire responsible for obsession and deranged fantasy. It is that object of desire that drives the desirer mad in search of it.

The object of desire, in the symbol of the madeleine, is a marker for that object that we may chance upon, involuntarily, or may never have at all. I think about myself, here, and my desires. If there is a "madeleine" for me, I may taste it, or I may not; the memoire involuntaire is totally necessitated by chance; I happen upon the object, the memory comes flooding in like an impressionistic painting. But, I may never come upon this memory, locked forever in some lost object of desire.

Is the Job of the Poet to Hearken Back to Lost Memories?
If it is the poet's job to unlock these memories, then I applaud the poet. If it is a poet who can open up a madeleine of lost memories, let's laud him with a crown of laurel.

I am sure there is a poem hidden in a taste yet to be eaten.

Am I hedonistic to wish for such a bite?

Proust entrances his reader with the opportunity to invoke memories through the senses. It is the poet who puts these sense impressions into language. Cognitive science confirms Proust's intimation that the senses (e.g., smell and taste) trigger a memory. Proust is right.

Proust Via Benjamin Via Lacan Are Onto Something
The memory Proust, and I think Benjamin is onto something, is alluding to is not a factual memory stuck at a particular moment in time. The memory is much broader than a recollection. Baudelaire (via Benjamin) uses the term shock - an expression meant to suggest a memory linked to trauma. The shock is a sense impression outside of some romantic notion of memory, and instead of a memory of the crowd.

I put away silly notions of private memory. The artist does not pull from something deep inside of him to produce art. It is not a private string of emotions the artist must articulate so others can understand. The memory the artist exposes is already there, involuntary.

Works Cited: 

Benjamin, Walter. Eiland, Howard, et al. Gesammelte Schriften. United Kingdom, Belknap Press, 1996.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. United States, Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.

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Story From The Classroom: A Severe Whooshing Sound

The following is an excerpt from my book “Things I Probably Shouldn’t Have Said And Other Faux Pas”. Buy a copy on Amazon.

Catholic High School. Saint Charles Avenue. New Orleans. I'm a school teacher. Yesterday, while teaching a lesson and facing the chalkboard, the noise stops. As soon as I return to the board, the noise escalates.

I immediately become angry. "Shit," I mutter, reaching for the call button on the wall that connects directly to the disciplinarian's office. I turn to the class. It's spring. We're all fatigued. It's time to go home, to build castles in the sand, to grow tired of school, to dive into summer. I see that, I know that. But damn, the noise must have been intentional. Who made that noise? I’m not a happy teacher.

"Somebody better fess up before the office responds," I say. Almost immediately, a boy in the front row meekly raises his hand. "It was, ummmm, me." He looks mortified, as if I had just told him he has a few seconds to live.

But I know this student: he's not malicious. He may have a penchant for destruction, but he's certainly not hell-bent on making my life miserable. "So," I say, "Why are you making those whooshing noises?! I can't think straight."

I feel like Ludwig Wittgenstein, the world-class philosopher who would easily get angry in the classroom and bop ignorant children on the head. But he was teaching kindergarten, and I'm a ninth-grade English teacher. A flawed one at that. The student says, "I didn't realize." I want to be like Wittgenstein and bop him on the head, but I don’t.

The intercom blares, "Yes? May I help you?" "No," I say. "I'm good. Got it under control." The intercom clicks off. The class sighs. The student perks up a bit, "I thought you were going to kill me, for a second." The kid looks at me with a sheepish grin. He’s one of those kids who wants to be badass, but he is too sweet to be truly malevolent. I laugh. In a good way. The class laughs. As if it had been a huge practical joke. The joke’s on me.

"That noise felt like it was destroying my thoughts."

"I didn't know I was making any noise," he says. I’m slightly suspicious. The kid smiles as if he knows what he's saying. Nods. The class is chatting. A classroom loves drama. Any kind of drama. It’s the inner logic of kids in a group. Any distraction will disarm their learning neurons — is there a version of docere et delectare — to teach and to delight?

I’m slowly losing control of this class. I never wanted to be a teacher of children. It should have been obvious at the job interview when I said, “I dislike bratty adolescents.” Maybe the teacher who interviewed me didn’t hear me when I thought it out loud and didn’t say anything.

I say to the class as a way to recover, "OK. As I was saying." We go on with the lesson. I'm over it. But the class isn't. The kid can't help himself. "You need a hug?" he asks in a slightly insouciant manner that adolescent boys are wont to do.

"No, I'm good. Just take your pen out of your mouth. OK?"

After class, I feel bad. Silly, even. "I'm sorry," I say. He smiles, puts on my prop that I use for Of Mice and Men.

"You scared me for a second, Mr. Roselli. I thought I was going to get in trouble. Usually, when you're mad, you still have a smile on your face. Here, Mr. Roselli, have a hand sandwich." He shakes my hand like I shake theirs, with both hands like a sandwich.

Even if he did mean it, I realize I reacted swiftly. I scared the kid. Good thing he really didn't mean it.

Well, now I know where that whooshing sound has been coming from all year. Maybe he'll finally stop. He picks up his slugger stick — an affectionate term the boys’ baseball team has given to what I would call a bat. He exits. He comes back in, with masking tape and a sign, "Please do not touch." He puts it over the intercom.

"Funny," I say. "Now, go home."

Tomorrow will be another fiasco. In a nightmare, they crowd me in like the demon in Children of the Corn. But today is a good day. A student tells me she likes poetry, thinks about the meaning of the lyrics. One student wrote a poem about being adopted.

Jim left me a note on my desk. It read:

Dear Mr. Rosselli [sic],

I know you must be stressed. I feel stressed sometimes too, especially because of all the homework you give. I think it would be best for all of us if you were less stressed. My mom and I visited the humane society the other day and we saw the cutest dog ever. I think you need a dog to love you and you can love back. I think if you had a dog you would be less stressed and we wouldn't feel so stressed neither.

Sincerely your student,

Jim

He wanted me to have a dog. So simple. From the mouth of babes. One observation about ninth graders: they remember in spurts. Just like me bolting for the call button. I spurt. One girl pipes up, "I remember what a hyperbole is?!" Good, I think; I feel like one right now. The boy with the pen makes sure he puts away his pen.

"You'll miss us when you're gone?" I don't answer. Just smile. "You know you love us."

And I guess I do. Let someone else mind the gap, teach tone and imagery, gerunds, infinitives, and first-person point of view. Today I want peace of mind. A kid laughs when another kid talks about "reading for pleasure." As if he's coding for a dirty word. "Y'all are sick," I say, instead of saying, stop being immature. I scan the classroom before the bell rings. I sometimes wonder why I am here. Where will they be?

Have seeds been planted? But, who needs a mentor? We need a teacher. But, who wants to be taught? The apple-faced kids? I turn out the lights, take my tie off. I hate wearing this stuff.

The hallways become quiet. I'm leaving soon. On to something else. I decide to stay at school later than usual because I'm giving a workshop to the faculty on how to use Google Docs in the classroom.

I feel conflicted because I know my time at this school will soon end. It's time. I knew this even before I began. I have given my two years. A few more weeks left. Finals. Summer. "Yes," I say. As I finish up the last remaining details for the presentation, I begin to be in my feelings. I will miss them. I am the last teacher to leave for the day. The Toyota Echo that has been mine for the past two years sits alone in the parking lot. I notice the gates have been shut which is odd, because usually, they are open. I am locked out. Or locked in. I call a teacher. A few. No one is around to help me - no custodians. No administrators. No kids. Using my key, I go back into the building and then exit through the front door that leads out to Saint Charles Avenue where I take the olive-green streetcar home to my nest; it arrives on time as if out of a dream, out of the night, under oak trees and nighttime amblers, the streetcar is an obvious symbol of journey, made more noticeable by how I feel at that moment, standing with a brown messenger bag, and ungraded papers. I have left the Toyota behind, to be a watcher of a school without kids, without me, because in a way I will miss teaching, but, I long for New York more. I leave for the Big Apple at the end of the school year. I wonder if I'll see my students in the future? I wonder what we'll learn? Are we home?"

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Why I Listen to Rilke and Don't Write Love Poems

Rilke in "Letters to a Young Poet" —

Reading again the injunction Rilke gave to his younger protege not to write love poems because they are too “facile and ordinary,” I am reminded why I do not write love poems.
It’s an overwrought genre.
Look. Love poems are preferably saturated in the oeuvre: Shakespeare’s doting sonnets alone give us all we need:

The Nike of Samothrace

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Poetry: Gone with the Wind, among others — Leuven, Belgium

In this poem, which I wrote when I was a college student at the Catholic University of Leuven (K.U.L.), and living as a seminarian at the American College, I tap into feelings of aesthetic taste, sharing intimacy — and I used the phrase "stones of erasmus" for the first time! 

     Erasmus was a student in Leuven during the counter-reformation. One can still see the dormitory house where he supposedly lived and studied. There is a saying among students that only if the stones of Erasmus could speak! What would they say?  

photo credit: spirit of paris

After a film,
poster and reflections
neatly crisp

Intently, furtive glances, to the right, then gone …
left man passes, consume in a bite, then a girl
with glasses, lashes and a bic light
smokes.
Curly Q’s and then somberness of night.
But, still the poster glows … the Trocadero, a movie
de l’amour and Vertigo, a fright:
An image of a man, a stale lacuna, a ghost of film noir
gazing, not apart, partly connected.  Dreams and visions
speak aloud to wet, litter caked streets.

Rotted lemon luminaries haze a path,
dulling humid low land streets, scarcity curtains pulled upwards,
A Peugeot passes, the stones of erasmus clamor to get out.
The posters gleam yet; characters speak and a stomach,
somewhere thirsty growls — it is filled and then …
in upward windows aching, she dresses for a silent figure fantasy.

A flicker, then bed, holding a teapot, languidly.
Une regard to a postcard, to consume.
Speeches to please, to sugar, then the tongue licks,
alors, madame …
then laugh,
like a box of potpourri; charming
half-dead, withered, enchanting

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Alpha Christ Mural from Saint Joseph Abbey With Accompanying Poem

Artist credit: A mural by Gregory DeWit, St. Joseph Abbey Church, Saint Benedict, Louisiana

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Poem: Neutral Ground

photo credit: Trevor Logan, Jr.

Neutral Ground

On the corner of Carrollton and Willow,
waiting for a bus, the # 34,
to be exact,
I sat on the neutral ground grass,
translating ancient Greek,
oblivious to the hatred.

A red boy and his friends,
in a pick-up truck,
stopped at the traffic light;
he spewed something my way —
knocked on my skull and dropped
among a soggy tootsie roll wrapper,
a bottle cap —

Vroom, like a cartoon,
You fucking bitch
and I merely turned to acknowledge
with a grin
and a greeting.

Not to turn the other cheek,
but out of habit.

I smiled, caught a glance
and turned back to my paperback

                    Greig Roselli

                    New Orleans, Louisiana

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Fiction Excerpt: Copy of a Novel Theme

I can remember him simply. We were sitting in the sand pits near the river; it was hot that day. He had let his hands rest on a rotten log for too long and red ants had bitten him. I was lucky the neighbor had something to soothe the itch; still, a smiling satyr, although replete suburbanite, full of questions, insistent in his resolve to wrest from me the magnificent solutions, the impossible answers, the raison d’etre of a human life, because he heard me talking about the inexplicable haunting of a man found dead in his car — of asphyxiation; turned on the ignition and let the engine run, attached a pipe to the exhaust, went through the trunk and wrapped it around through the back seat. A jogger had found his corpse days later. No one had noticed him missing. They were used to his threats of death. Why did he do it? I don’t know; I guess he wanted to die in a peaceful place … It’s hard, I thought to myself, to talk to him about this, not because I know the facticity of death, but because I don’t want him — I turn to see him — to die;  so impossible for this stone smoothed boy pregnant with vim, with generosity and ardor, as if talking about decay will somehow mollify an already implacable course into the imaginary.

Pray for the dead man, I say; pray for his family and friends.  He didn’t want to die but he had no other way out.

Extracted from "A novel I have yet to write"

image credit: Greig Roselli

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