Remembrances
text published on C3 Magazine, n.310
Metaphors
Nature is a temple in which living pillars
Sometimes give voice to confused words;
Man passes there through forests of symbols
Which look at him with understanding eyes.
[…]
Charles Baudelaire, Correspondences, The Flowers Of Evil, 1857
When, in 1857, Baudelaire talks about correspondences, he describes a fictional universe that takes us into a well-known world that is yet new and mysterious. He does so by using rhetorical devices – metaphors – that somehow organize a sort of unedited remembrance for the reader. The power of metaphor, in fact, comes from the imaginary constructed in the mind of the reader, from its own personal feelings and its own personal memories. The world described by the writer doesn’t exist, but one who reads the poem probably has the feeling of being there, of having lived in the narrated place. From this point of view, perhaps, the rhetorical device used by Baudelaire defines itself through a life, a past, whose relationship with the text permits one to reconstruct the image provided by the poet, the other meanings that words alone cannot tell. A renewed past, therefore, links text and metaphor, and it matters little that the past exists or not.
