Thank you for letting me go

“The Devil holds the strings that move us, in repugnant things we discover charms.”

artwork by @whitingglenn

“In Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire love and sex are often linked to suffering and sin.”

I read this online on my phone before boarding a train to Charlottenburg. I’m going to see Evil Flowers, a new exhibition at the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg Galerie which explores Baudelaire’s poem of the same name through various artworks, from the early modernist period to contemporary installations and objects.

I have not read Baudelaire before now but I have eagerly awaited this exhibition. I'm fresh out of a relationship and feeling reflective.

Beyond that, I’ve always enjoyed open-ended curations which are broad in their references and collections. It allows opportunities to discover unknown works and ideas. In recent years gallery visits have become somewhat of an anchor for me in terms of a weekend well spent, I suppose I’ve always felt this way but never really understood its importance until now. The silence of a museum is similar to a church, the collections themselves as precious as relics. There's a sense of discovery, introspection; it’s a ritual of sorts. On top of that, looking at the finished product an artist has created, many years ago mounted on a wall, I feel impressed at their ability to have completed something, to have finished anything at all.

The last few months writing became almost impossible for me.

I returned to Berlin after a 2 week trip to California at the end of September and could not start or finish a thing.

The only activity I found myself doing easily was continuing to see Chris. However miserable, happy, exhausted or busy I was, I could always make time for that. Perhaps it’s another story altogether, however, I do believe that eros and creativity are connected.

Charles Baudelaire was a French 19th-century writer, translator, poet and art critic. He is most famous for his poem Les Fleurs du Mal which is cited as one of the most influential works of poetry in Europe, though he never received recognition for his work in his time. Behind the beguiling title are themes of eroticism and intoxication, ennui and distraction, lust, death and decay which challenged the principles of the day and denounced the typical values of the oneness of the beautiful and the good.

In the opening poem, Baudelaire warns the reader of the perils of ennui which he considers to be the most insidious state of all because it drives people to seek distractions from their boredom through vice, excess and sin;

“The Devil holds the strings that move us, in repugnant things we discover charms.”

The title of the poem, Les Fleurs du Mal which translates to Evil Flowers or Flowers of Evil, can be interpreted in many ways. I personally see it as a reminder that not everything that appears beautiful is inherently good (and vice versa) and though the poems themselves contain few literal mentions of flowers, their presence in the title serve as a metaphor for beauty, poetry and artistic creation growing out of pain and suffering.

In the introductory texts, the exhibition does not promise to illustrate Baudelaire’s poetry, rather “shed light on various aspects of Baudelaire’s aesthetics, as well as its after and side effects.” Furthermore it is stated that the curation, “is not systematic and offers no take-home life lessons.” A small print, that leaves me pleasantly intrigued.

The first canvas that catches my attention is a painting of flowers in a vase by Kees van Dongen from 1910, entitled Blumen. The shapes are undoubtedly organic and floral though they are not painstakingly defined. A dark background and surface gives the impression that the flowers are lit somewhat unnaturally or by flash if it were a photograph. In the middle of the foliage is a single human eye. The square 1:1 frame, the same format as a post on instagram in combination with the inquisitive eye at the centre makes me think of the SoMe world and brings up the questions; In creating something are we always looking for a reaction? In posting something online are we always hoping it has been seen?

Before I started publishing on Substack, the majority of my confessional writing remained hidden but I found a new source of joy in sharing it online. Mostly because of the conversations that arose from the strangers that read it but also in the process of dissecting each experience as it unfolded. Eventually, each essay became a kind of mirror.

Is this what Van Dongen was communicating by adding the eye? That through our artworks, we can see our own reflections?

If that’s the case, it would make sense that when I stopped writing, I found I could no longer see myself.

Next comes a quote by Baudelaire, which resonates; “I have found the definition of beauty. It is something ardent and sad, something a bit vague that gives free rein to conjecture.”

Standing alone in the gallery, gazing at these words, I am reminded of my relationship with Chris.

I call it a relationship now, rather than a situationship because in all my recent studies of modern dating and neurotic dating language I have begun to tire of it.

Ardent (passionate, enthusiastic) it was, vague and sad also.

I was the one that gave free rein to conjecture.

I like the word ardent.

It masks careless pain slightly and sounds more intelligent.

But pain is transparent just like longing and as Les Fleurs du Mal demonstrates, anything can be considered beautiful depending on how you look at it.

Evidence of this is displayed on the gallery walls; flowers that are oddly sexualised with pulsing stamens and gorging blooms.

In the piece Bodies that Blossom the artist Fatoş Irwen adds human limbs to fabric printed with purple flowers, drawing similarities between floral and human forms and highlighting the cyclical nature of plants and foliage, life and death and romantic relationships for that matter.

But traditional love was not really a key topic for Baudelaire who focussed his poetry instead on the darker aspects of relationships such as lust, sex and obsession.

“The power of pure lust is depicted as a self confident woman.” Reads the inscription accompanying Pornokrates, the painting by Félicien Rops which hangs before me in a gilded frame.

Against a starry sky, a woman walks naked but for frills and ribbons which expedite her nakedness; she is blindfolded, holding a string attached to a pig. She strides a marble ledge in black knee socks and high heels over carvings of male figurines. Is she the male dream? And do the three floating cherubs in front of her symbolise her own sensuality, which she cannot see since her eyes are covered?

I can't help but notice the similarities between Pornokrates and the depictions of women seen online today. Though, in modern times - through subscription based platforms like OnlyFans and even Instagram - women can take back some semblance of power and ownership of their sexuality they are still led somewhat blindly by the gaze of despondent male fantasies.

Scrolling through the hundreds of photos I have sent in varying states of undress in my Whatsapp chat with Chris I arrive at the message he sent when he broke up with me; “Don’t get me wrong, it’s the best sexual relationship I’ve had in my life,”

But what of the lover?

She is passionate and wanting; She is alive and breathing and giving.

Nothing like the way Rops portrays women in Pornokrates, the way I displayed myself in those selfies or the way Baudelaire describes his mistress- “a pitiless demon, a silent urn where sorrows ashes lie, celebrating the lust that burns in boorish leers as she strides through the city streets.”

Could she have been like me?

He was beguiled by her fragrance, her flowing black hair, enough to be obsessed by her for 20 years but never exclusively.

Perhaps she wasn't enough for him or, perhaps he just wasn’t capable of mutual love.

At this point in the gallery I am presented with a different example of intoxication; a striking piece by Gerd Rohling entitled Peggy's Party, depicting wafts of brightly coloured paint clouds which demonstrate the dizzy slide into inebriation after the artist drank Campari. The vibrant bursts remind me of the tipping point of falling into a drunken stupor. The gentle clouds of mist are soft in shape but the colours powerful as an explosion, reminding me that whether drunk or in lust, it can be a hard state to recover from either way.

One of my favourite objects in the exhibition is called Residual Risk by Peter Bux; a fire extinguisher dropped into the sea and later retrieved by the artist whereupon it had become embossed in delicate ocean matter, barnacled and beautified with clams settled on its surface like petals.

What is the residual risk of my relationship with Chris, I wonder. What are the after effects? Have I also become encrusted? If so, in what? Fear? Confidence? Doubt? Memories?

Looking at my reflection in the glass cabinet I can see that I still look the same - it’s only the things around me that have changed; While lost in my distraction with Chris, I stopped writing, let go of my focus and clarity with some of my closest friends.

I wouldn’t go so far as Baudelaire to say the charms with which Chris kept me were repugnant (in hindsight, its perhaps the perfect word) but I can admit in modern terms, they were unhealthy.

So, in the throes of heartache induced ennui I took myself to an exhibition in Charlottenburg and looked at artworks.

That in combination with the abrupt end of my year-long distraction and 4 month creative hiatus I finally found words to write and here are around 1800 of them; another mirror to myself and those who might read them, another “side effect” of Charles Baudelaire's poem Les Fleurs du Mal and another example of something creative growing out of pain.

Though Baudelaire was somewhat adverse or incapable of the traditional course of love, he was what they call a Romantic. His work filled with reflections on the complexities of lust, creativity and dangerous distractions; As I have discovered, the themes are omnipresent.

At the end of the exhibition is a film of a large, glittering horse fly teetering at the lips of a Venus flytrap. The insect pauses, turning to display its delicate wings before taking a few fatal steps upon which it is consumed, trapped behind the needle-like teeth of the deadly flora. Recorded in 1922 and screened at an exhibition in Berlin in 2025, it is perhaps an allegory for the risks of desire fuelled folly or indeed, like any work of art or personal experience, whatever you choose to make of it.