Spleen

All the most negative existing in the world, that is what Baudelaire calls “Spleen” (literally spleen which was considered by the ancient greeks the source of the body’s sickness). A feeling’s universe, sentiments, fears, whatever is referred to a world of negativity, sadness, angst, contained in one word, just a concept that can be shown in thousands of ways and aspects.
A very important figure in Baudelaire’s production is that one connected to the poet’s illness status.
He is superior spirit capable of rising up men and perceiving with his natural sensibility the secret correspondences among the items, fragrances and nature’s elements.
Though, just because of his capability, the poet is cursed by the society, which consider him useless and so a parassite who lives on the shoulders if those who work to earn moneys, becoming mockery for common men.
To symbolize this conditio, Baudelaire compares the poet to the albatros, a sea bird extremely elegant while it flies but terribly clumsy when it tries moving on earth. Indeed it rises up on the highest perception’s and sensibility’s levels but once on the land it cannot move due to its ability, being set aside and insulted by so called “normal people”, if not humiliated and considered a useless burden.
This existential anguish, deep and hopeless, projects the poet in an everlasting distress and sufferance status which is contained inside the Spleen.
When even the evanescent pleasures consumes their illusory hope of having confort, the poet could only deny God and invoke Satan who however is not useful for his escape.
The last handhold for the poet’s desperate soul is death, which doesn’t mean the passage to a new life but like the destruction and decomposition whom the poet rely on, in the desperate try to find inside the unknown something new and different from the ever-present anguish.
You are staying in front of a sculpture where there’s the essence of what I’ve just told. The Spleen in this artwork is shaped on a dying man who is removing from himself the only thing capable to keep him alive: the heart.
He’s kneeled on earth, despairing himself and he strips his arteries which ones had color and sprinkled his magnificent body.
His look is verging down, defeated by something which led him to nullify himself.
This special person has been convinced right now that the art, in all its forms and expressions, is an amusement which produces nothing real, who deserves to be abolished to get focused on the production to live or survive following the life’s boring routine that forces us to become beasts. Working, eating, sleeping and start over again, all the rest is superficial and useless.
The emotions, the living joy, tasting every action: nothing matters in a world where the money God rules.
Before this certainty, our intellectual person, defeated by a world different from the one he would have desired, relays on the unknown giving up with his life.
The wings that decorate this man symbolize those of the albatros open out on his powerful back like a divine light which now is weak and frivolous incapable of being perceived anymore.
The man, now exhausted, leaves the light behind himself and he sees only the darkness of the normal human beings who don’t know how appreciate the art and they are happy to live in the mediocrity because they have fear to open their souls to the emotions and joy; human beings who can’t break off from that boring reality, which gives them security.
Therefore this individual choose death as escape from a rational reality and so, before the impotence to show all his “ego” ’s glory, knowledge and beauty, he let the heart leading his last beat inside the Spleen.

Read more