Be Drunk by Charles Baudelaire


You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is 
to it — it’s the only way. So as not to feel the 
horrible burden of time that breaks your back 
and bends you to the earth, you have to be 
continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. 
But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the 
green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of 
your room, you wake again, drunkenness already 
diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, 
the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, 
everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, 
everything that is singing, everything that is speaking 
. . . ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, 
clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! 
So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, 
be drunk, be continually drunk! 

On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”

Greg Girard , Neon and Black Jaguar, Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong , 1974

Carlos Schwabe, Spleen et Ideal (from Les Fleurs du mal), 1900

Ernst Fuchs, Sphinx sculptures, 1970s

TO THE LOVER WHO LEFT ME FLOWERS IN A PEPSI BOTTLE, APOLOGIZING FOR
HAVING NO VASE by Joseph Fasano

If this is the truth, I want it.

Listen: I have wasted 
my little life-
on spectacle, on golden lies, 
on dust.

I know now
what your hands knew
when you
did this:

Love
is the daily
bread, the make-it-work.

Touch me till this world is world enough.

Giovanni Baglione, The Divine Eros Defeats the Earthly Eros, 1602

Henri-Paul Motte, Richelieu on the Sea Wall of La Rochelle, 1881

Kurt Seligmann , The Dance , 1940

Jackson Pollock , Lucifer , 1947

"Only the man who strives to fail deserves our trust: if he succeeds in this he will have killed the monster, the monster he was as long as he was concerned to act, to triumph. We progress only to the detriment of our purity, that summa of our setbacks. Sustained, traversed by an impulse toward corruption, our actions preclude us from paradise, fortify our failure, our fidelity to the world: no movement forward which does not excite and consolidate in us the old perversion of existence." ~ Emil Cioran

Edward Hopper, Automat , 1927

"This is fucked up"

Thom Yorke Black Swan

Remedios Varo, Insomnio I , 1947

Francis Picabia , The Two Friends , 1941

“Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.” ~ Denis Diderot

Tell me, Atlas. What is heavier:
The world or its people's hearts? ~ Darshana Suresh

Edgar Degas, L'Absinthe, 1876