in praise of minor insomnia

"If I were a psychiatrist, I should advise my patients
who suffer from 'anguish' to read this poem of Baudelaire
whenever an attack seems imminent."

-Gaston Bachelard

I woke not long after 4am this morning. This has been happening, more or less, for the past week, and I typically consider these minor insomnias as unexpected gifts. There is a special pleasure that comes with being alone in the middle of the night. One is able to take comfort in the precocious knowledge that he is alone with his imagination while the rest of the world is sleeping. When this occurs, I'm able to read, journal, and meditate all before sunrise, promoting a sense of industrious that would make proud Poor Richard himself.

Benjamin Franklin, America's most respected home economist and nudist

But this is beside the point.

The point is that this morning's insomnia was not the productive restlessness of the preceding days, but rather marked by anxious impotence. Sometime in the night I must have crossed over the invisible line that separates motivation from neurosis, the boundary that each of us must navigate each day in order to balance the uncertainty of the creative process with our need for the security of routine. If we veer too far in one direction, we find ourselves in the insufferable company of Pollyannaists and Franklin-eyed entrepreneurs; too far in the other, the tragicomedy of failed poets and lesser intellectuals. This is the same line that separates Woody Allen (the director) from Woody Allen (the self-caricature that populate his films).

So, it was with these things in mind that I stumbled upon the quote that opened this missive. Unfortunately, Bachelard isn't particularly clear with regard to which poem he is prescribing, and my copy of Fleurs du mal is already packed. (How could one not bring Baudelaire on his honeymoon?) Nonetheless, I hope this prose poem from Paris Spleen will serve a homeopathic function, balancing out the pre-dawn solitude with Baudelaire's resplendent celebration of:

"Crowds"

It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude; enjoying a crowd is an art; and only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming.

Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet. The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd.

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself or some one else, as he chooses. Like those wandering souls who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each man's personality. For him alone everything is vacant; and of certain places seem closed to him, it is only because in his eyes they are not worth visiting.

The solitary and the thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and sorrows that chance offers.

What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.

It is a good thing sometimes to teach the fortunate of this world, if only to humble for an instant their foolish pride, that there are higher joys than theirs, finer and more uncircumscribed. The founders of colonies, shepherds of peoples, missionary priests exiled to the ends of the earth, doubtlessly know something of this mysterious drunkenness; and in the midst of the vast family created by their genius, they must often laugh at those who pity them because of their troubled fortunes and chaste lives.

(translation by Louise Varèse)