Charles Baudelaire, "The Pipe"

Hi all –

As I'm preparing for the semester, I am haunted by the questions I approach theoretically. It's not enough to make the notes or write the paper. If the ideas matter, they must show up in other ways, including how I teach. To wit: I keep saying I would like people to be more authentic. Not only does authenticity fill a gap which our consumerism exacerbates, but it doesn't let us pretend that negative notions of liberty were ever going to be enough to strengthen individuals or preserve rights.

So okay. Those sorts of statements are nice for fighting imaginary intellectual interlocutors. What does authenticity look like in the world right in front of me? In this desert city flooded with light and frying in the heat? I'm not shy about throwing my resources into the arts: yeah, authenticity looks like poetry readings, like being able to take over a stage and then cheer on everyone else after you. (Authenticity so conceived may remind you of Aristotle's definition of political rule: knowing how to rule and be ruled in turn). But what else does it look like?

I'm not entirely sure, but I know what it is not. E.g. sitting around, doing nothing, being toxic, and then saying "this is who I am." You may believe I am indulging a trivial example–laziness, fear, and anger are clearly more important to such a person than authenticity–but trivial or not, the excuse that being real means no self-improvement is necessary dominates our age. It links to our willingness to excuse and defend corruption, even when we know we wouldn't file petty grievances against our subordinates or steal from the government we were tasked with running. If you don't hold yourself to any serious standards, it is hard to hold others to those standards. This has become a problem which is breaking society, because we can't protect each other from those eager to do harm. We've got millions of people who believe that if others have to hurt children for a paycheck, then they should hurt children.

Authenticity, by definition, cannot be abuse. It must entail being yourself in a way which minimizes harm. The proof of this is simple: if you define authenticity, say, as perpetually being at war, all you've done is reduce the idea to an excuse to hurt others. (Of course, thinking through war metaphorically may be useful, and I myself could certainly learn how to fight.)

Some years back I tried to learn French. This never happened–I didn't finish the classes I paid for–but I did try reading in French and translating what I could. Back then, this poem by Baudelaire struck me as having a certain richness. "The pipe of an author" doesn't just get that much more use when its owner is sad. It creates a cloudy, fiery web which entangles and nourishes his soul. The pipe is not simply an accessory which can be put aside or never smoked at all. The outstanding question is whether our more noble efforts must consume us. What price authenticity?

The Pipe
Charles Baudelaire (trans. Joshua Rocks and Ashok Karra)

I am the pipe of an author;
One sees, in contemplating my mien
Of Abyssinian or Kaffir,
Whether my master is a great smoker.

When he is filled with sorrow,
I smoke like a cottage
Where they prepare supper
For the return of the laborer.

I entangle and I nourish his soul
Within the web mobile and blue
That rises from my mouth in fire,

And I roll a calming cloud
That charms his heart and heals
His mind of its fatigue.

Back in graduate school, I would be inclined to circle back to Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, where he imagines himself an impressive fire extinguishing its own fuel. The self as a big fire resolves a problem for Shakespeare: what other image could he use to justify his life and efforts? He holds that if you can see him in his attempts to achieve, then something has been accomplished. I think something similar occurs in this poem of Baudelaire's. In a world without proof that smoking causes cancer, I am reasonably sure no one sees the attendant wheezing and coughing and believes it healthy.

Still, Baudelaire has his doubts about justifying one's life this way. The pipe speaks, not the author, and it says that a look at its type will show you the degree of the owner's addiction. The exact labors of the creative are questionable. In the second stanza, Baudelaire likens the overuse of a pipe in sadness to the amount of cooking done for someone exhausting themselves for their family. At this point, the challenge is directly posed to me. If I want us to be more authentic and devoted to creative endeavors, how do I reconcile that with the labors needed to survive? What about the problems native to trying to create? I myself have spent years writing fruitlessly, sometimes making no sense because it is hard to know how you're being heard.

Obviously I think a society that makes sure its citizens have food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, and other necessities is the only acceptable society. Capitalism, not just socialism, requires a basic standard of living for all people, otherwise it allows tyrants control over what people need. So advocating for authenticity goes hand-in-hand with meeting needs. All of us work a little bit so all of us get the leisure we deserve.

But what about someone who completely collapses into their reverie or nightmare? What if everyone has a pipe which will "entangle and nourish [their] soul," "roll[ing] a calming cloud" that charms the heart and heals fatigue? Am I asking society to embrace uselessness instead of productivity and necessity? Baudelaire does not have easy answers for himself as an artist. He lauds the pipe even as he documents his dependence on it.

I know this. The orientation of "everyone should work" comes from a strange but foundational moment in the history of political thought. It comes from Plato's Republic, where Socrates argues with noble youths who have the sorts of "jobs" Donald Trump, Jr. has. One of the premises of the city Socrates establishes in dialogue with those youths is that each man (they mean men) will be expert in one art and their employment will reflect that. The noble youths are thrilled with this arrangement, as they have been bred to believe they are better. Now of course the city they craft is completely unworkable, but you wouldn't be wrong to reflect on how this proposition plays out in the history of thought, especially with regard to capitalism.

"Everyone should work," just like "one man/one art," is too crude to actually explain civic life. The truth is that people do what they're supposed to do and then some. That's not because they've been brainwashed by capitalism or think everything will collapse if they don't work. A little bit of awareness and you can see how society does and doesn't function. You can see yourself as necessary. The propaganda that people don't work and are always stealing is endless. It has to be because in truth, people put in the effort.

That effort should be understood through self-justification, through authentic living. I'm not saying society should have no standards. But a free society has to try to tie its standards to how people build and express themselves. Right now, we are obsessed with telling people what to do in order to make them fuel for the fires we create. Fires that establish our data centers and AI agents and literally cook the planet. You need authenticity in order to make sure the voices of actual humans are heard.