BARON Jacques Lot n° 21

JOURNAL. AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT. About forty large in-4 pages in ink. 1972-1981, spiral-covered notebook. Remarkable diary by Jacques Baron, tinged with literary memories: I think about what could have been and what was not. Always the past. Between 1920 and 1939, there was a category of men of spirit who were made to meet, that is, to work together to put their ideas into action, to forbid fascism, like the old radical socialist catchphrases, to speak. But all I saw was discord: Breton at odds with Artaud, Aragon with Drieu - could it have been otherwise? An enormous loss of thoughts. But isn't it always like that throughout history? Intellectuals don't have a say. Poets come too soon... I think a lot about this end, which I don't know how to describe either sublime or tragic, it's the end that IS. A boy who had everything to please, as Rigaut, Crevel, Drieu and others say. I don't know Duprey... ... What strikes me is the dissociation of physical and sentimental love. These were Catherine's words in Ottawa. There's sublime love on the one hand, and physical love on the other. I explain to her very clearly that they're inseparable. Contemporary eroticism doesn't help matters. Cinema, for example, offers an obscene, degrading view of sex. Nothing is reserved for sublimation... Poetry is only worthwhile as a means of liberation from the established order. I feel like I'm plastered in the French language, and civilization is likewise plastered in the West! It was Rimbaud who shattered his world of classical plaster. He saw the terror of a world dreadful to behold. Nothing but plaster. He left to make his fortune. He didn't make his fortune