Perfumes, sounds and colors.

I wanted to briefly catch readers and subscribers up on my latest activities. I’ve been spending less time on blogging articles to Midnight Oil and more time on a larger, project called the FreeNation Directory. The directory is complete for now but there are other names and groups that could be added to it. The actual directory was assembled in a few days and I’m now working on completing the Introduction to the FreeNation Directory.

What started as an Introduction has become one of the better applications of symbolism to politics I’ve yet written. Sometimes, one cannot know when these special periods of time come when things seem to fall together. It’s not related to some regular schedule or plan. The muse just comes and goes as she pleases.

It is largely an investigation of the correspondence of a various groups to the modern symbol of Freedom. The idea of correspondence is a belief in the study of symbolism that there are  relationships between levels of existence. The term was coined by the 18th-century theologian Emanuel Swedenborg and is an essential but little known area of symbolism. In the famous poem “Correspondences,” French poet Charles Baudelaire observes “perfumes, sounds and colors correspond.”

I didn’t plan the Introduction to the directory to be what it has become and might publish it separately. It’s at 8,300 words now and still growing. A Preface follows the Introduction suggesting uses for the directory. Total words in the FreeNation Directory at the present time is 64,000. I think it’s complete … for now.

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Correspondences by Charles Baudelaire

 

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.

Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance
In a deep and tenebrous unity,
Vast as the dark of night and as the light of day,
Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.

There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children,
Sweet as oboes, green as meadows
— And others are corrupt, and rich, triumphant,

With power to expand into infinity,
Like amber and incense, musk, benzoin,
That sing the ecstasy of the soul and senses.