George Byron
Il Corsaro

In an era of mediocre media personalities, among whom at least the flesh and backsides of top model soubrettes, showgirls, and escorts take center stage, if ours had access to modern means of communication, a cataclysmic leap in quality would occur (for the creation of the ideal talk-show with the elite of communicators, I seek help from the Debaserian community).

Lord Byron (1788 - 1824) is already present in two centuries of literature, in Balzac, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Melville, Conrad, Pushkin, Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, W.H. Auden, not to mention his epochal influence and reverberations in other arts: undeniably, his Byronism continues to flow like an inexhaustible underground sap. His life blends rockstar celebrity (10,000 copies sold of “The Corsair,” a narrative poem, on the first day of publication and seven editions sold out in a month, making him probably the poet, of all time, who earned the most from his art) with being an antagonist (from defending the frame-breakers, the Luddites, in the House of Lords to sympathizing with the Italian and Greek "nationalists" against Austrian and Turkish powers) while being part of the establishment, which, lacking critical tools to oppose his mighty cultural engine, could only be horrified by his passions, extravagances, and "perversions". “They looked at him as if His Satanic Majesty had appeared among them”, as if to say like a member of the Rolling Stones...

As the progenitor of the dark and handsome figure (what Byron was live from the depths of the unconscious), he lived the "dark" feeling lucidly, without spiraling into self-referential negativity. He was an extroverted soul, hungry for experiences, a man of value. “I wish men to be free from both the mob and despots, as much from you as from me.” It is his different sensitivity that renders him timeless, not a mere 19th century saintly picture; it is his real captivating sex appeal, under the guise of poetic revolutionary, that recovers him as victorious in a world of virtual avatars: Byron lives while (many) others simulate.

Camille Paglia, in “Sexual Personae - Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson,” Einaudi 1993 (out of print), finds common elements between Byron and Elvis Presley: possessed of a beauty in an unwithering complexion, the white neck stretching like a free dove in the sky (remember the nouveaux philosophes B.H. Levy, A. Glucksmann, immaculate on the barricades), both prone to corpulence and perpetually battling with food & surroundings, the Lord cloaked in princely Albanian ceremonial garments or (Pelvis) in airy tunics of redundant Indian/Hindu deity. They certainly are the archetypes for future rock stars, and precisely in becoming a feast for the bacchant crowds the paths of the two diverge once again: Elvis was soon chewed up, digested, and metabolized by the voracious system, rendered harmless; he duets with Sinatra, croons in the US Army, becomes a weakling in rough Texan shirts, exhausts his primal fury in capricious teenage rebellions - running away from home but only to the first drive-in - in short, he turns into a totem stuffed with psychotropic drugs.

Byron maintained his irreducibility towards power and its biological capacity to corrupt (like rust with metals), living in a deliberately eccentric way (to be understood as an orbit) until imposing exile on himself. “Don't laugh at me. I know you will. But I swear I am serious, if only it proves possible. I want nothing to do with war projects; it will suffice to live there as a cultivator and a good citizen...”.

And in doing so, becoming rhetorically a citizen of the world, our hero is sublimely remembered by an extra-luxury hotel in Rome, reduced to little more than a perverse necromancer in Ken Russell's Gothic, he is dedicated (before the end credits) Mad Max II... it went worse for T.S. Eliot, whom Duran Duran claimed as an inspiration.

For those who wish to tackle “The Corsair” in an accessible translation: http://www.rodoni.ch/busoni/bibliotechina/byron/corsaro.html