by Jeremy Reed
Delirium
An Interpretation of Arthur Rimbaud
Jeremy Reed
Delirium – An Interpretation of Arthur Rimbaud
by Jeremy Reed
Copyright © Jeremy Reed 1991, 2014
First published in 1994
This new revised edition published in 2014
Copyright © Jeremy Reed 2014
All Rights Reserved
The right of Jeremy Reed to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Reed, Jeremy
Delirium
1. Title
823 914
ISBN: 0-87286-296-8
For David Gascoyne
and
Fanchon Fröhlich
That with which the public reproaches you, cultivate it: it is you.
Jean Cocteau
Contents
Chapters
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Post-Delirium
Poems
Rimbaud and the Sand Leopard — Jeremy Reed
The Drunken Boat
Vowels
The Sleeper in the Valley
Seven-year-old Poets
Faun’s Head
Saarebrück
The Lice Hunters
On the Road
At the Green Inn
Hunger
Stupra: Three Scatological Sonnets
The only book published by Rimbaud, Brussels 1873
Chapter One
In an hour it will rain. Swallows keep flickering almost at ground level in a tenacious pre-migrational grab for insects. When the rain comes the writing tension will be less acute, and some of the obsessive images which have remained with me all summer may stream off into the image forest and break up into different forms. Who and what are they? There have been red lions on my road. They sit at the entrance to the little Café at which I write each afternoon. They are heat-drugged, implacably lethargic; but they have been watching me. There is this third hand, too, that comes between my right and left when I am working. And vertigo. The feeling that I am sitting on one of the revolving rings of a whirlpool, looking into its maelstromic centre. How long will it be before I get to the interior? And there are calmer images: a mountain overgrown with huge red roses, an elephant walking on a spider’s-thread bridge spanning a ravine, a bay turned topaz with massed turtle shells, a blonde woman tented in a mauve towel, looking out to sea, who on turning round finds her frontal is transformed into a man’s.
These image contents can be held within a visual time-frame. They are autonomous. They are personalized by my individual inner space, and belong universally to what Jung called the collective unconscious. Poets are the map-makers of the continent we call the imagination. Many have crossed it in various states of questionable repair or disrepair. Novalis in his Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night), Hölderlin in the electrifying serenity of his imagined Graeco-Mediterranean cosmos, Blake in his taking it by storm, the English Romantics Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, Baudelaire in his imaginary voyages, Lautréamont in the detonative turbulence of Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror), Nerval in the hallucinated landscape of his Aurélia, and in the poetry of the schoolboy Arthur Rimbaud.
Rimbaud is my focus here. No matter how long our planet persists, Rimbaud will always be the last poet. And he is that by virtue of his flight from poetry. Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud, the contemptuous adolescent who failed to find in poetry the physical realization of his hallucinated delirium, kicked up a dust-storm over his poetic trail. Critics are still rubbing the grit from their eyes, hoping the red blur between them and their subject will prove to be an erasable illusion. Can anyone have cared for his poetry so little? On the rough draft of ‘Alchimie du verbe’ Rimbaud wrote: ‘Maintenant je puis dire que l’art est une sottise.’ (Now I can say that art is folly.) Art or poetry was too transparent. Once he had found a way of effortlessly achieving visionary expression, that is of grounding his aspiration, discovering that words can localize the infinite, poetry lost its fascination for a youth attracted to risk, to the ultimate danger of pushing the mind to the limits of its trajectory. Most of us believe that there is a limit to perception. It is when you cross it that you realize the barrier was imposed by fear. In the years between 1869 and 1873, the period in which Rimbaud believed in poetry, he seems to have been fearless in its pursuit. Youth treats the body clock with a degree of unreality. The option is open to one to believe that one may never die, or at least to think of death as an abstract notion consigned to the future. And the feeling of unlimited time and space allows one to assassinate the present. Rimbaud was briefly tyrannical because he inherited the future.
At that age I was reckless, manic, and I stole. I courted defiance because my adrenalin fed on the impulse to deconstruct that in which I believed. And the sense of violating imaginative input is made the more exciting by the fact that inspiration does not recede. It comes back the more powerful for having been abused. It is like lighting a fire and partially covering it with sand. The flame soon licks through and crackles with a wick of smoke. The poet has to maintain a suitable respect and a corresponding disrespect for the source that provides him with poetry. Rimbaud’s brief years of poetic creativity are the perfect example of compliant defiance. And he was after all bored. His mother appears to have been redoubtable, draconian, narrow-minded and overcompensating for the absence of the boy’s father. And that father, Frédéric Rimbaud, Captain of Infantry, cleared out when the poet was six years old, leaving behind three other children: the two girls, Vitalie and Isabelle, and Arthur’s brother Frédéric. He probably left for the reasons that later prompted Rimbaud to do so: the severity of Madame Rimbaud, and the pull towards the open road. Captain Rimbaud interestingly spent some of his military career in Algeria and provided a translation into French of the Koran. And where did Rimbaud go? As a child he escaped into the imagination; he advanced along a trajectory that swings out over the abyss. But at least there is freedom in inner space. Mooning around the house, inhaling the scent of the latrine, bored with Charleville’s provincial square, sickened by those Sundays which smell of dread, and on which, holding a blue cotton umbrella, he would have to join the family’s regimental procession to the eleven o’clock mass, he dreamt of freedom: anywhere but somewhere else.
Rimbaud’s ‘Les Poëtes de sept ans’, with its presentiment of sails and voyaging into the unknown, powerfully portrays the child’s sense of disgust at the asphyxiating characteristics of his home life. Maternal domination squats on the poem like a toad sitting in its own shadow. Today Rimbaud would have fed his nerves with loud music (he is in every way the prototypical punk, right to the seminal spiky hair), taken whatever drugs were available, and would have coaxed his poems towards an equally subversive millennial ethos. He would have dressed in a leather jacket and slashed denims. And there would be as much to fight against as there was in his day. Effete literary cliques, an establishment that turns epileptic whenever the imagination scalds it with current, the distillation of political poison, the conformity of the masses to material worship. A poet takes what he wants from his age; he leaves the rest to circulate like the blue-green algae which are suffocating our seas.
But what of ‘Les Poëtes de sept ans’? Seven-year-old poets. One might safely posit that if you are not writing poetry by the age of seven, you never will. Rimbaud’s title carries an ironic backlash. André Breton might have lined up a procession of seven-year-old poets and had them walk through the streets of Paris to an asylum. ‘Gisant au pied d’un mur, enterre dans la marne/ Et pour des visions
écrasant son œil darne’ (Lying at the foot of a wall, buried in marl,/and for visions fiercely rubbing his dazzled eyes’). Rimbaud early on had realized that impacting one’s fists into shut eyes generates a stream of hypnagogic imagery. It is the moment when big tropical fish nose past with such suspended fluency that one looks through a red eye into an interior in which a tiny naked girl is preoccupied with reading a poem by Rimbaud. It might be ‘Le Bateau ivre’, except there is no time to prolong focus, for a flotilla of chimerical shapes has entered the current. Instead of sniffing glue or a line of coke, which Rimbaud would not have been able to afford, he learnt the simple expedient of monitoring the unconscious. Rimbaud used his psychophysical body as grounds for sensory experimentation. Olfaction ‘dans la fraîcheur des latrines’ was one way of getting high, and later as part of Rimbaud’s belief in the systematic derangement of the senses, there were to be other more sophisticated means of stimulus: starvation, drugs, alcohol and the most combustible heightener of all — the chemical components of the imagination. Rimbaud’s childhood temerity instinctively sensed ways of effecting hallucination. Thrown in upon himself, pre-tending to read the cabbage-green edged Bible he portrays in ‘Les Poëtes de sept ans’, he had to devise ways of achieving a dichotomized being. Attentive on a cold December Sunday, and frozen into a spotlit exhibit by Madame Rimbaud’s intrusive voyeurism, the boy had to be somewhere else, somewhere inaccessible. He had to double on himself and so the process was begun. ‘Je est un autre’ — ‘I is an other.’
And did he actually do the things he described in the poem, or were these imaginary outrages? Rimbaud lays claim to aberrations, abnormalities. He speaks of obscene gesture. He would stick out his tongue and place his two fists in his groin. He liked to converse with deformed, backward children, whose fingers were yellow and black with mud, and whose clothes stank of excrement. Olfaction seems to have been one of Rimbaud’s most heightened senses; it comprised an early form of sexual gratification. And in the same poem he tells us of an encounter with an eight-year-old girl next door, who, acting rough, jumped on him, tenting him beneath her skirt. But this time the poet stringently recoils. What he experiences is not erotic fascination; his response is to bite her bottom, for she is without panties: ‘... Et qu’il était sous elle, il lui mordait les fesses,/ Car elle ne portait jamais de pantalons’. Rimbaud makes himself sound canine in this incident. If the experience was physical and not hallucinated, it suggests both the poet’s savagery and his disdain for the female sex. Perhaps the pleasure for him was that she subsequently beat him black and blue. But smell is still the predominant sense, for when he returns to his bedroom he can still taste her skin: ‘les saveurs de sa peau’.
Rimbaud was sixteen at the time of writing ‘Les Poëtes de sept ans’; a volatile tornado of frustration and ambition was already smashing through his overstretched nerves. When there is little or nothing of the outer world to which one wishes to make claim, the inner cosmos expands. Who Rimbaud was to himself during this time is probably something so enormous, so expansively redoubtable that he was forced to restrain the imposition it made on his schizoid character. In states of extreme stress we project the opposite. The other or simulacrum is a psychopath, a twistedly malign perversion of the self. The hands confronting one may be blood-stained; the mouth open on that agonized shriek which Munch committed for all time to the history of psycho-pathology. Rimbaud’s inner world was combustibly violent; universes were shot down into that implacable rage. And he was unremittingly hard on himself. ‘I’ was his experiment for the other’s sadistic pleasure.
In the same month as Rimbaud wrote ‘Les Poëtes de sept ans’, May 1871, he wrote to his teacher Georges Izambard in tones of contemptuous familiarity:
I am cynically getting myself kept. I dig up old idiots from our school: the stupidest, dirtiest, nastiest things I can think of, is what I serve them: one is paid in beer and flesh. Stat mater dolorosa, dum pendet filius...
Right now I am depraving myself as much as possible. Why? I want to be a poet, and I am working at making myself a visionary: you won’t understand this at all, and I hardly know how to explain it to you. The problem is to arrive at the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. The suffering is enormous, but one has to be strong to be born a poet, and I have realized that I am a poet. It is not my fault. It is wrong to say: I think. Better to say: one is thought. Excuse the pun.
I is an other. Too bad if a piece of wood discovers it is a violin, and to hell with those who lack this understanding and argue over something of which they are ignorant!
What interests us here is Rimbaud’s concern with ‘le dereglement de tous les sens’, and his notion of ‘Je est un autre’. Rimbaud’s theories castrate potential criticism because they are so flagrantly uncompromising. And they are inexpungeably individual in that they do not allow for disciples. Minor poets who are invariably distinguished by gregariousness, the need to hang out for mutual support in institutions, are not encouraged to take up with the ways of solitary genius.
And what would all this have meant to Georges Izambard? The latter had arrived in Charleville in January 1870, and at the age of twenty-one found himself in charge of the most senior literature course at the College. An intimate friendship based on a mutual concern for modern French poetry came about between master and pupil, and Rimbaud must have seen in Izambard the surrogate father who conformed to his homo-erotic imaginings. Denied the love and companionship of a father, Rimbaud inevitably projected the father-image on to a fortuitously chosen surrogate. Rimbaud’s mother had already proved to be a disagreeable man. Her inflexible rectitude must have had the boy see her as the asexual embodiment of the punitive instinct. Could he have imagined her naked, submissive in his father’s bed? Was it necessary for a woman from the Ardennes to show passion as a concomitant to sex? Did Rimbaud think he owed his origins to parthenogenesis? Adolescents can usually associate sex with most people other than their parents. In Rimbaud’s case the dissociation from speculating about parental conjugation must have been extreme. His mother’s bed was a solitary one. A white-sheeted sarcophagus. His father at this instant might have been saddling a boy or girl in the desert. Perhaps he thought of his mother as having given birth to snakes. Four black serpents basking on the threshold, and by some slow chemical transmogrification changing into children. Arthur still had scales when he lay in the grass and dreamt of adventure.
In ‘Les Poëtes de sept ans’ he tells us that faisait des romans sur la vie/Du grand désert, oü luit la Liberté ravie,/Forêts, soleils, rives, savanes!’ Rimbaud invented fictions, novels about life in the great desert, which for him represented liberty. And there was escape into forests, suns, shores and savannahs. Small wonder that Rimbaud ended up in Harrar: his inner momentum had already placed him in a mental desert. The severance with poetry that so baffles his critics had already taken place years before Rimbaud was to abandon poetry. The perversity which is manifest in his work, and which was twisted into the fibre of his sensibility, allows for no safe conclusions about anything to do with his life or art. For months I had a recurring dream in which I saw a figure, outlined against a fireball sunrise, dig a hole in the sand and set fire to a sheaf of papers. The action was done with obdurate tenacity. To renounce poetry would not have appeased Rimbaud. To destroy his creation probably would have satisfied the self-punitive disgust he attributed to almost everything he did well. It would have been his ultimate vengeance on a society he loathed. The crackle of flame; bits of ash spotting off into the air. His servant and companion, the boy Djami, could not have known the consequences of such an action. And knowing this would have heightened Rimbaud’s sense of pleasure. He had changed his skin for a black one; gun-runner, slave-trader, a man preoccupied with dirty money — his ash could represent poetry to no one but himself. And yet, for all that, Djami probably knew him better than anyone. Better than Izambard, Delahaye or even Verlaine. And fittingly and thankfully Djami left no record of their love or friendship
. The desert contains secrets. Rimbaud’s inner life there was one of them. May the wind continue to speak of it.
And Izambard? He too knew of Baudelaire’s poetry with its accent on extravagant eroticism, an existentially filtered spiritual pessimism, its morbid orchestration of a syphilitic’s micro-phobia. It was he who introduced Rimbaud to the Parnassians, to the work of Banville, Hugo, and to Verlaine’s first little books: Les Poemes saturniens and Les Fetes galantes. Before them were Lamartine, Nerval and the more effete Vigny. And unknown to Rimbaud, and almost contemporaneous with his own period of creativity, Isidore Ducasse, better known as Lautréamont, had already published in Les Chants de Maldoror a work that anticipates Une saison en enfer. Lautréamont’s achievement is possibly the greater, for its originality and unrelenting detonation of the unconscious make it the work which more than any other precedes Freud/Jung and surrealism.
We know less of Lautréamont than we do of Rimbaud — he died in 1870 at the age of twenty-four in circumstances which have never been properly elucidated. The savagery of Maldoror, the brilliance of its imagery, its hallucinated bestiary which run rampant across the pages, and the vehemence with which it attacks almost every plank in the bridge on which nineteenth-century man had supposed himself secure, make it the more incendiary of the two works. Reading a line by Lautréamont is to imagine his throwing a petrol bomb at the page and racing from the scene with his clothes burning. Lautréamont assassinates both himself and his subject: unconsciously Rimbaud’s time of the assassins speaks of the weird symbiosis that brought two conflagratory works into being which were to anticipate the imaginative and military holocausts of the twentieth century. Rimbaud at seventeen and Lautréamont at twenty had each put his ear to the nuclear pulse. Our potential white winter to come was for each of them a burning summer. And if they had coincided, there would have been no familiarity, no fraternity. It is possible that Rimbaud plagiarized Lautréamont: the earliest complete edition of Les Chants de Maldoror had been published by Lacroix, Verboeckhoven, in Brussels in 1869 Lautréamont was dead a year later. His body was found on 24 November 1870 in his hotel room at 7 Faubourg Montmartre, and no cause of death was entered on his certificate (sans autres renseignements). It was the winter of the Prussian siege of Paris: Lautréamont may have died from starvation, disease, suicide, or he may have been murdered. He left behind him almost no papers. Maldoror and Poésies are the two works that he bequeathed us. And like Rimbaud, Lautréamont was a refugee in inner space. Born in Montevideo, victimized by a diplomat father (it seems likely his mother committed suicide), he was sent to be educated in Tarbes, before making his way to Paris. The first chant of Maldoror had appeared as early as 1868 and made a second appearance the following year in Evariste Carrance’s anthology Parfums de l’âme. Far more than Baudelaire’s poetry, Les Chants de Maldoror would have excited Rimbaud to delirium. Here was a sensibility more outrageous than his own, and a poetry that knew no imposition on shock. And if Rimbaud’s poetry has been the one more readily assimilated by literary taste, it is because of the two it is less savagely unorthodox.