“One day,” Baudelaire once confessed, “I was influenced by Bertrand—Bertrand, who is incomparable.” Let us call this admission a small historical paradox of nineteenth-century French literary creation. How could someone inimitable exert influence, when we know that whoever receives an influence must have imitated—at least to some degree? Imitation, after all, is already a form of acknowledging comparison.
Which is why we should be careful before casually bragging about our influences. If we slip, we risk being mocked as the Second Volume of Baudelaire—Baudelaire Jilid II versi grup WA keluarga.
Baudelaire can afford such paradoxes; we, meanwhile, are not exactly known for paradoxical brilliance.
I once defended Baudelaire by saying: Come on, that’s not imitation in the way that professor-wannabe’s articles imitate each other—those that migrate effortlessly from one surface to another—or the way an accreditation document for the Mathematics Department magically transforms into the Biology Department’s by mere recycling. Baudelaire absorbed Bertrand with the virtuosity of an artist, which is why similarity checkers cannot detect anything, nor can accreditation assessors pretend they don’t see the obvious traces of copy-paste when confronted with recycled text. A virtuoso’s work is intangible; therefore, it escapes such crude machinery.
But what does that intangible quality look like? It begins, perhaps, with a state of waking-dream and with the question that Baudelaire loved to ask: “Is it possible…?” Is it possible for something to feel musical without rhyme, without rhythm? Critics tend to speak from established convention, and the public simply follows. If poets like Willy Fahmi Agiska from Bandung or Irwan Sofwan from Serang wrote unrhymed poems, they wouldn’t make it into any “advanced-level” textbook, nor even the intermediate ones. Early-level readers would reject them outright; many prefer books with audio features because they are too lazy to lie down alone with the quiet company of a printed page (“Mama sleeps in Papa’s room”).
Why, then, did Baudelaire insist on posing such an improbable question? How does one create something musical yet free from both rhyme and meter? According to Baudelaire, the musical quality must correspond to the wandering waves of contemplation—the lyrical impulses of the soul—and must also incorporate the inner mockery of conscience. Yes, I enjoy this part! For me, this is the doorway into humorous literature, humorous essays—so that I may become a writer, not a stand-up comedian whose only task is to make people laugh. Humor, after all, is not merely laughter.
There is, says Baudelaire, a current that cannot be measured nor touched, yet it is this very current that forms our reading experience and eventually shapes us into better writers, or at least better beings. Surely you have read something you did not understand, yet somehow felt it stir your spirit in ways you couldn’t articulate. That is the Musical—regardless of whether the text rhymes or marches to a steady beat. Reading moves inward; writing emerges outward from the depths.
The sign that we have read “from within,” Baudelaire continues, is when we find ourselves unable to deploy our vocabulary—however vast—to deliver a neat, formal evaluation of the text. I once felt this when my high-school Indonesian teacher read the poems of Sutardji Calzoum Bachri aloud. Today, however, I realize that those poems are intensely rhythmic—almost incantatory—so perhaps what captivated me was their mantric pulse. What does this imply? Maybe Baudelaire’s point is not about rhyme or rhythm per se, but about the Musical element—something that silences us the way instrumental music does when it carries no lyrics, no clichés, no predictable themes.
So, who among us has truly fallen under the spell of the Musical—the thing that speaks without saying anything obvious yet still moves us? In reality, we more often buy books because someone tells us, “This one’s exciting, the story is like this, like that.” If a book can be fully recounted, why bother purchasing it? Just listen to the summary and be done with it.
“Read, Muhammad!” commanded Gabriel. And the Prophet replied, “I cannot read” (ma ana bi qari). Yet is it not paradoxical that the Qur’an descended with astounding rhyme and rhythm? Perhaps if the All-Musical were to speak in a language without music—without cadence beloved by human ears—we would be plunged into absolute darkness, trying to read in a room without a single ray of light.
We have already been pulled from darkness into luminous clarity by R.A. Kartini; what remains is our own willingness to think at 2000 watts instead of 20. And we must resist the lure of any “Sheikh of Angels” who claims to dictate instructions to Gabriel, who boasts of chatting fluently with ants, and who promises to deliver the people of Indonesia from the scorching blackness of the inferno. []
