18

Some would regard Villon as the greatest of French poets, others of a more bohemian nature would claim Verlaine as their man, while still others would insist, with a certain patrician disdain, on the pre-eminence of Mallarmé, as though referencing some kind of Delius-like musician in sublime disguise. I, being different, would probably opt for Baudelaire, whose fleurs were not as mal as might be thought. As a youth, however, my enthusiasm for French poetry was sparked by that most youthful and uncynical of poets, Rimbaud, whose penchant for the exotic, for drugs and all things mystical, was to lead me, in due course, to poets (and writers) like de Nerval and Baudelaire, the de Quincy and Coleridge, as it were, of French poetry, both of whom made journeys, one way or another, to the Orient.

But if there's one poet, really a prose poet and poet in prose, whom I was destined to fall for in no uncertain terms it must be Lautréamont, who was really no more prolific than Rimbaud, but whose influence on French writing and on devotees of French poetry was immense, principally through the medium of his best-known work, Maldoror or, more correctly, Les Chants de Maldoror, a narrative poem which was to blow through the clichés and cobwebs of belles lettres with the storm of its black humour and almost boundless irony.

After Lautréamont, the most controversially 'obscene' writer in French since de Sade, the unnatural nature of whose writings owed not a little to the fact of his lengthy spells of solitary confinement, there was only one direction one could go, and that, albeit with more than a passing salute to Huysmans, that mentor of the cultured hypochondriac, was into the twentieth century with the likes of Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau, André Breton, and with novels like Notre Dame des Fleurs, Jean Genet, who took poetic licence to an entirely new level that even earned the respect of so determined a philosopher as Sartre, who for a time in the early 'fifties was not entirely above poetic leanings himself, especially in plays like Altona and Nakrassov, despite his conviction that the bitter experiences of the Second World War had rendered poetry and lyrical endeavour in general redundant.

Eventually, like Sartre, I too would abandon poetic leanings or, at any rate, an overt commitment to poetry, becoming, in an intellectual sense, the Sartre of my day. But I still feel a certain nostalgia, from time to time, for the French poets of my youth who, whether as youths or adults, were to dominate my approach to French letters and, indeed, to literature in general for years to come, making me sensitive to the poetic element even in such realistic authors as Gide and Malraux, not to mention the rather more down-to-earth if lyrically-inclined Albert Camus.

Even now, long after I've lost my taste for French literature, it is Baudelaire more than any other French writer, with the possible exception of Sartre (one should mention, in passing, the strong cultural connection between these two men which Sartre's psychologically-orientated biographical portrait of Baudelaire would seem to confirm), who commands my greatest respect, since he knew, more than anyone, that for literary endeavour of a personal and/or universal nature to survive you had to be able to overcome the resistance and even opposition of 'ordinary' people and just get on with it willy-nilly.

For common people, beset with children and relatives, are the epitome of all that is most anti-intellectual and therefore anti-literary, opposing from a largely breeding if not ethnically alien standpoint the perceived intellectuality of the exceptional man, be he poet, philosopher, or even prose writer. Therefore our victory over mediocrity or barbarity or whatever you prefer to call it is all the sweeter whenever we succeed in producing work that satisfies our literary conscience and makes us proud to have done what we did in spite of whatever opposition, usually born of envy and resentment, may have come our way from those whom we feel obliged, by circumstances, to identify with the common herd of semi-literate if not illiterate proletarians.

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The free mind at play is preferable, from a male standpoint, to the free body at work. For in the latter instance there is likely to be a pseudo-bound mind enslavement on the part of pseudo-males to free females, who will be metachemically or chemically hegemonic over them, whereas the free male is likely to enslave the pseudo-female to bodily pseudo-binding, the subordinate gender corollary of his particular type of mental freedom, be it metaphysical or physical. One gender's freedom is the opposite gender's binding, rather like the adage about meat and poison.

Frank Zappa was, in a sense, the Salvador Dali of rock music, stretching time and space way beyond their usual musical bounds with a creative mind that was musically freer than the great majority of his contemporaries. Zappa remains one of the few real or, more correctly, surreal geniuses of our time, a musician who was far more than a mere anti-classical cynic or blues-slavering parodist, but an intensely original musician with a prolific output that defied the norms of commercial production.

What I want to know about a musician is whether his music is a cultural manifestation of free mind, and thus contributes to expanded consciousness, or whether, on the contrary, it is just a reflection of bodily freedom which any fool – and not a few bitches – can dance to. No small distinction! In fact, all the difference between classicism and populism, with a fundamental gender distinction between male and female criteria that will always have pseudo-female and pseudo-male corollaries respectively.

Most of the best rock music, especially in the context of progressive rock, tends to exemplify free mind, whereas the bulk of pop music, orientated towards dance, exemplifies bodily freedom, the very thing that any form of classicism, whether ancient or modern, acoustic or electric, tends to fight shy of, whether from the standpoints of ego or soul.

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The higher and truer your ideas, the more flak will you receive from persons who are both envious of you and humiliated by the fact that they hadn't thought of them or, for reasons best known to themselves, were unable to think like that in the first place.

To claim that you were encouraged to think in a society or milieu dominated by females (and their kids) would be a contradiction in terms. On the contrary, all outgoing creatures do their utmost to discourage you, since life for them is about looking, not reflecting.

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