My weekend was dedicated to reading Fernando Pessoa
and Charles Baudelaire. I often pick up a book (or searched online) without a
topic in mind. Just to be curious about what I had not yet discovered. This
weekend was different – while walking my dog I kept on thinking about how poets
have transformed pain and suffering into their own unmaking. Into beatitude.
Even celebration.
With each step during the mile long walk in the
darkness of dawn, the line from Rumi kept repeating in my mind:
"The wound is the place where the light
enters you"
When I came back, the Sufi asceticism in seeing a
wound as a portal to becoming and celebrating lead me to the “Les Fleurs du Mal” (The Flowers of
Evil) of Baudelaire published a century before I was born. Somehow, this
masterpiece keeps me going back to re-reading it every time I think about the
power of poetry and the human condition.
Indeed, few poets have distilled the human condition
through only two words – that we are able to grow flowers through evil. Perhaps
because of evil. That Rumi’s wound is not just an opening but a fertile
experience to transcend and transform our human-centered boredom into the
vastness of our curiosity.
And that was a central message by Baudelaire. He
even gave it a pseudo scientific definition in “L’Alchimie de la Douleur” (The Alchemy of Pain), proposing that
pain can be transformed, as if by alchemy, into joy along a spectrum of
non-pain. As a poet, that made him an
alchemist. Or a druid, using words to show the transformation of evil and pain
into that state of unmaking, serenity and even fulfillment. It was the genius
of the alchemist that transformed lead into gold, while it is possible to turn
gold into lead, and chain the weight of sorrow to our ankle and live a life of
boredom and misery.
Alas, Baudelaire was not the great alchemist. While
Rumi learned to celebrate the light that came through his wounds, Baudelaire
cut his own wounds hoping that light will come through. It did not. But he is
considered a forerunner of the Symbolism movement by transforming disgust into
art.
Pessoa tackled the same issues, differently. For
him, pain and existential boredom (tédio)
allowed human consciousness to realise that suffering came from our awareness
of pain not by the burden of pain itself.
Pessoa intellectualised the presence of pain through
observation of our reason for existence. He was an analyst who did not allow
the feeling of pain obscure the beauty of what was around and in him.
As such, Pessoa was a chemist, not an alchemist.
And Pessoa was not alone as a poet who explored the harmonious
co-existence of analytic, scientific consciousness with poetry. Indeed, Humphrey
Davy, a British chemist who discovered sodium and potassium in 1807, was a well
known poet and his works celebrated by Coleridge and Wordsworth. More recently,
Roald Hoffman, a Nobel Prize winner chemist wrote poetry to re-interpret what
science could not explain.
Other scientists, like the immunologist Miroslav
Holup demonstrated the usefulness of integrating rational/analytic explorations
along poetry.
And perhaps my favorite on this subject is from
Albert Einstein
“I often think in music. I live my daydreams
in music.”
… It was time for another long walk with my dog, this time under the afternoon warm sunshine of Arizona’s High Desert. On our way out, I recalled my father’s frequent advice to his kids:
“We start dying the moment we are born. It is how you manage the journey that counts”
PS/ I took this photo in Santa Cruz, California. I always think about this frame to represent the "unmaking" of dark rocks amidst swirling waves.
March 3, 2026
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2026
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