De Profundis in Your Pocket

Etsy.com, "your place to buy & sell all things handmade" (and support hard-working artisans instead of corporations), offers an Oscar Wilde De Profundis Pocket Mirror.

Artist Tiffini Elektra X makes other mirrors, as well, featuring collages based on themes ranging from Buddha to Alice in Wonderland to Shakespeare to the Muses. At her own site, tartx.com, you'll find a range of her other handmade items that include jewelry, magnets, and bookmarks.

Oscar Wilde's De Profundis

I recently saw the film Wilde, about Oscar Wilde, a man whose wit will be forever quoted. I was a little disappointed that the film was more about Wilde's homosexuality than his writing, but that seems to be the trend these days.

Oscar Wilde's De Profundis is a long and sappy letter he wrote to his lover while imprisoned for their 'transgressions'. (Yes, I'm obviously obsessed with all things de profundis.)

I've included here some of the more notable quotes from the text:

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain.

*

Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things. There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation.

*

The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a misfortune, a casuality, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is 'in trouble' simply. It is the phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of love in it.

*

Nothing seems to me of the smallest value except what one gets out of oneself. My nature is seeking a fresh mode of self-realisation. That is all I am concerned with. And the first thing that I have got to do is to free myself from any possible bitterness of feeling against the world.

*

I am completely penniless, and absolutely homeless. Yet there are worse things in the world than that.

*

I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes.

*

Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at[...] Every thing to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith. It has sown its martyrs, it should reap its saints, and praise God daily for having hidden Himself from man.

*

Reason does not help me. It tells me that the laws under which I am convicted are wrong and unjust laws, and the system under which I have suffered a wrong and unjust system.

*

The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.

*

I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art. What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals.

*

We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, and fire purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all. As a consequence our art is of the moon and plays with shadows, while Greek art is of the sun and deals directly with things. I feel sure that in elemental forces there is purification, and I want to go back to them and live in their presence.

*

I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things. The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature this is what I am looking for.

A Magical Fluke

It's not often that I pay attention to news stories, and less often that I'll recommend one to my regular readers, but the following Reuters story popped up at the top of my gmail inbox, and I'm moved to bring it to your attention.

Reuters story

Original website where the man posted his description

What blows my mind about this is the number of NY city inhabitants (8 million) -- and that the internet made it possible for this guy to find one (1) person with a basic cartoon sketch. There really is magic in the world if you look for it.

Goth Poetry Generator

In an earlier post I provided a link to the Post-Modernism Essay Generator, which creates the kind of schlock written by many unfortunately aimless academics.

Well, here is a parallel machine geared for many of the black-clad hipster students who worship these sad professors... It's called the Goth-O-Matic Poetry Generator, and a few moments with it yields the kind of poetry many overworked editors must reject daily (in order to maintain some semblance of esteem in the literary landscape).

Types of goth poetry you can generate include:
Supernatural Violence & Horror
The Feeling Very Sorry For Yourself
The Fear of Religious Persecution
The Eternal Love of Vampires
The Black Abyss of Righteous Hatred

Po-Mo Essay Generator

Behold! the Post-Modernism Essay Generator, the secret tool used by thousands of professors working in publish-or-perish institutions.

More than once while doing time at Pepsi State University I realized the 'critical' texts I was reading were absolute schlock... structurally coherent, yes, but that was where it ended. And now I know how those texts were written.

Charles Baudelaire: Two De Profundis Poems

DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI

O my sole love, I pray thee pity me
From out this dark gulf where my poor heart lies,
A barren world hemmed in by leaden skies
Where horror flies at night, and blasphemy.

For half the year the sickly sun is seen,
The other half thick night lies on the land,
A country bleaker than the polar strand;
No beasts, no brooks, nor any shred of green.

There never was a horror which surpassed
This icy sun's cold cruelty, and this vast
Night like primaeval Chaos; would I were

Like the dumb brutes, who in a secret lair
Lie wrapt in stupid slumber for a space...
Time creeps at so burdensome a pace.

(translation by Sir John Squire)


OBSESSION

You forests, like cathedrals, are my dread :
You roar like organs. Our curst hearts, like cells
Where death forever rattles on the bed,
Echo your de Profundis as it swells.

My spirit hates you, Ocean ! sees and loathes
Its tumults in your own. Of men defeated
The bitter laugh, that's full of sobs and oaths,
Is in your own tremendously repeated.

How you would please me, Night ! without your stars
Which speak a foreign dialect, that jars
On one who seeks the void, the black, the bare.

Yet even your darkest shade a canvas forms
Whereron my eye must multiply in swarms
Familiar looks of shapes no longer there.

(translation by Roy Campbell)

T-Shirt Haiku

Saw this on a t-shirt @ www.threadless.com and loved it!

Haikus are easy
But sometimes they don't make sense
Refridgerator