by Jeremy Reed
There was no one to live up to now, other than himself. Verlaine was stuck in prison, Delahaye was working in Charleville, Paris was light years ago; his family were rustics preoccupied with the harvest. Probably he lacked even a mirror in which to check his face. He was who? A fist raised against the sky. Someone who had lost track of himself. He had thrown himself against the barriers of infinity. He had adopted madness; he had shouted in the streets, vomited the drug into gutters which blazed back at him, sapphire and emerald. He had left a trail of wanderings. It was all connected to his umbilical like a spider’s silk threads. Each road, each field, each alley, each room he had lived in. When he breathed in under stress, his whole past punched him in the solar plexus. Withdrawal is like that. But there was vision, and his poetry rises to salute the unknown, to embrace the future.
— Sometimes I see in the sky endless beaches covered with white celebratory nations. A huge golden vessel, above me, waves its multicoloured flags in the morning breeze. I have created all festivities, all triumphs, all dramas. I have tried to invent new flowers, new stars, new flesh, new tongues. I believed I had acquired supernatural powers. Well! I have to bury my imagination and my memories! A fine reputation as an artist and story-teller swept away!
I! I who called myself magus or angel, exempt from all morality, am thrown back to the earth, with a task to pursue, and hard reality to embrace! Peasant!
A whole new poetry begins with passages like these from Une saison en enfer. Rimbaud’s vision of a future world is in the sky. It is there he sees the endless beaches of which voyagers had gone in search across the seas. The ship likewise is in the sky. The imagination defies gravity: we are on the threshold of surrealism, which is a word for the natural order of things as they are encountered by the imagination. And there is no abatement to Rimbaud’s originality. Even in describing his past achievements he is inventing a new poetry. And it was not that he tried to create new flowers, stars, flesh, tongues: he actually succeeded in doing so. Most poets readily look for limitations, a defined order they can either describe or to which they can apply a metaphysics. Rimbaud’s way is to eliminate the preconceived and try for the impossible. A poet must be bored in order to create, and by that I mean at odds with the accepted nature of the appearance of things. The limitless must replace the circumscribed. Visual retrieval must go beyond seeing and activate irreconcilables in a manner that leads to a continuous recreation of the universe. Close your eyes for five minutes and the world you took on trust should start to disappear, until you are left only with ideas about things. Then the ideas should recede and the imagination take over. The poet begins with the latter premise as the basis for reality.
Rimbaud has chosen to bury his imagination like treasure. It is an action devoid of all self-pity, and it is one of the great moments of self-abnegation in the history of poetry. At eighteen he can look back on his achievements as a thing of the past. His creative life has been so intense that three years seem like a millennium. Little wonder he could spit over his shoulder at those who knew nothing of this initiatory rite into the psychological hells of the underworld. Rimbaud is the shaman born into industrialism. He is in his own words ‘the great criminal’, because he trafficks between worlds. He despises poverty, but his gifts are inconvertible into anything but poetry. ‘Weeping I stared at gold and could not drink’ he tells us in ‘Alchimie du verbe’. His correspondence is with magic. He would have agreed with Aleister Crowley that the imaginative presences are of a higher order than their human counterparts. They comprise aliens, extraterrestrials, daimons, whatever term best fits their physically unrealizable state. ‘My observation of the Universe’, writes Crowley in Magick without Tears, ‘convinces me that there are beings of intelligence and power of a far higher quality than anything we can conceive of as human; that they are not necessarily based on the cerebral and nervous structure that we know; and that the one and only chance for mankind to advance as a whole is for individuals to make contact with such Beings.’
Rimbaud’s contact with the informing agents of the imagination is the subject of Une saison en enfer, as it is of much of Les Illuminations. In this, his revocation of poetry, he prepares to let them go. He is seen exorcizing his childhood ideals, and in doing so he projects them on the future. They are there for the enlightened in the twentieth century to use. One might say that every true poet is possessed by one of the psychic presences that Rimbaud disowned. He left them in the air as potentiated fall-out.
Yes, the new hour is redoubtable.
For I can say that victory is mine: the gnashing of teeth, the hissing of fire, the voice of disease abates. All filthy memories are erased. My last regrets take to their heels — envy of beggars, scoundrels, friends of death, all sorts of backward creatures. Damned, if I avenged myself!
We must be absolutely modern.
No hymns: I must hold on to my gain. A hard night! Dried blood smokes on my face, and I have nothing behind me, except that twisted tree!... Spiritual battle is as brutal as the battle of men; but the vision of justice is God’s pleasure alone.
However, it is the eve. Let us welcome all influxes of strength and real tenderness. And at dawn, armed with burning patience, we shall enter magnificent cities.
What was I saying about a friendly hand! One advantage is that I can laugh at old lying loves and strike shame into those couples — I have seen the women’s hell down there; — and I shall be free to possess truth in one body and soul.
What makes for the tension here is that the poet is writing from the same source as he is renouncing. Rimbaud has never been more volatile or rich with his gift. It is an act of cataclysmic vengeance on his part to leave massive reserves of poetry unrealized. By the nature of creativity, one work leads directly to another, and where the barriers between the two exist they are largely arbitrary. A poem or a novel is brought to conclusion only so that the withheld energies may be redirected into another work. But for Rimbaud this is not the case. The constrained momentum is not to be redistributed. It is to be left unlocalized. And what happens when poetry is deprived of an outlet? It becomes a source of disturbance and psychosomatic illness. Negating his creative impetus, Rimbaud was to end up as a pariah, an unsuccessful trader burnt and disfigured by the hardships of his desert life until he was another Rimbaud. The unrecognizable simulacrum of the poet.
Rimbaud’s ‘victory’ as he describes it seems to be one of having survived withdrawal symptoms. He has come through. The inner torment and cacophony of shrieks has abated. His identification with criminals, vagrants, mental and physical drop-outs, which had begun with ‘Les Poëtes de sept ans’, has been replaced by the credo: ‘We must be absolutely modern.’ His night has been a long one. Who can say when it was begun? Poetry messes up one’s conception of time, it involves one in a series of distorted flash-backs and flash-forwards. Was it in Paris, Brussels or last night sleeping out in the barn that Rimbaud had acquired dried blood on his face? His inner battle had raged in torment for so long that he knew now only exhaustion, the certainty that a phase in his life had reached completion. And the cities of which he had dreamt were awaiting him somewhere in the dawn.
Rimbaud’s family had turned to the fruit harvest, but still he refused to help. Autumn was here with dead leaves crackling underfoot on the parched soil, nothing and no one for miles. He had undertaken a work of solitary genius; but his suffering was nothing to the blank that would greet his book. Perhaps out of pity for his ruined condition, and in the hope that the book would lend some financial security to her itinerant son, Madame Rimbaud advanced Arthur the money necessary to have the poem printed as a plaquette in Brussels by Jacques Poot, 37 Rue Aux-Choux. Five hundred copies were to be printed, of which Rimbaud was to receive ten complimentaries. A white cover with simple black typography. No ostentation. No detraction from the seriousness of the text. The work was dated April-August 1873. Rimbaud was still eighteen.
*
Post-Delirium
That Ri
mbaud went to Brussels in the last week of October 1873 to collect his author’s copies of Une saison en enfer from the printer, and that the entire edition with the exception of ten or twelve copies was impounded owing to his failure to meet the printer’s bill, does not concern us here. It is part of literary history. What happened beyond this point has become the subject of speculative biography. Rimbaud managed to leave a copy for Verlaine at the prison of the Petits Carmes, and the copies he circulated in Paris went unnoticed. He had already alienated himself from the Parnassians, and the hysterical nature of his affair with Verlaine, leading to the latter’s imprisonment, was the subject of moral turpitude among those who saw Rimbaud as an impostor, a youth intent on ruining his older friend.
But delirium: hallucinated consciousness, schizoid dissociation, manic overreach — call it what one will, Rimbaud is the celebrant of modern consciousness: It is in the likes of Hart Crane, Antonin Artaud, Robert Desnos, André Breton, Aimé Cesaire, Federico Garcia Lorca in his New York poems, and in the visual art of Munch, Soutine, Ernst, Bacon and Pollock that Rimbaud resurfaces. The chaos out of which all these artists create is an inherited delirium. Rimbaud’s unfinished work lives on as a current. It is centred in the permanent storm that hangs over the twentieth century. And his legacy will go on being part of the creative future for as long as there is a world in which poetry functions.
What does it mean to be dead? We cannot ask Rimbaud. His life is the story of someone who overtook himself at each critical juncture in his development. He refused to outstay himself. His unrealized past is always the potential future.
Being hooked on poetry is a terrible thing. If the need is complicated by drugs, we have a powerful double addiction. Rimbaud, the poet, choked on himself. He wanted to bite so deeply into inner experience that he became the snake asphyxiating on its tail.
Sometimes I imagine Rimbaud as a naked figure running from wall to wall of an empty house. The building is white and has no windows. The interior walls are black, bare except for the obscene slogans he has written on them in blood and excrement. When he came across this house in the wasteland, he crawled into it hoping it would offer shelter. The night he intended to stay lengthened to infinity. Time had ceased to exist; his clock was mania. It is like that when you are in extreme states of altered consciousness. It is easier to be stretched out the wrong way than it is to return. And sometimes it seems easier to crawl out of your skin, only there is nowhere to go after that.
Rimbaud feared containment. Going into the desert was a means of avoiding the threat of institutionalized madness. It is time at last to hear the voice of Artaud:
And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who has elected to go mad, in the sense in which society understands the term, rather than compromise for a certain superior idea of human honour. That is why society has had all those of whom it wanted to rid itself, against whom it wanted to defend itself, because they had refused to become its accomplices in certain acts of debasement, condemned to be strangled in its asylums. For a madman is primarily someone to whom society did not want to listen and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering unbearable truths. (Le Théâtre et son Double)
Delirium is not so much a state as a means of attempting to overtake it. The central theme of Une saison en enfer is announced in Délires I and II: the autobiographical inferno of his relation-ship with Verlaine and `L’histoire d’une de mes folies’ — the alchemical nature of his poetic experiments. Both pieces of writing are extraordinary for their attempt to overtake the immediacy of their subject.
If there is a pulse-beat in paper, it will be heard in Une saison en enfer. The poem is a paper cell. Rimbaud’s délire resists imprisonment by words. His acceleration is manic. Mad he wants to be beyond madness.
And that is the direction of fearlessness, the poetic equivalent of running towards the heat-flash. The experience is beyond language. It is post-somatic. If it has a voice, it is in the expression of an Artaudian shriek. In ‘Mauvais sang’ Rimbaud reached the stage whereby music, the frenzied rhythm of primitive dance — ‘Hunger, thirst, shrieks, dance, dance, dance, dance!’ — had come to replace words. He had left poetry behind him. When he operated, it was right on the frontier between language and the incomprehensible. Between implosion and hallucination.
If he stood still long enough on the road, looking at his shadow, he could project the one who would come after him. A stock-still noon. The sun black. No one around. The wind trapped in poplars. Letting something go means constructing a future without it. His was sand. Who was the poet coming on the road? No one. There would be echoes. Rimbaud returning in another’s imbalance. His voice is always there. It says: ‘Go to the edge or don’t begin.’ It says: ‘The ego is a sickness. Poetry lives independent of coteries and publication.’ It says: ‘Burn. There is no other way.’
Rimbaud spent the money his mother gave him for the publication of Une saison en enfer. He needed to. He had spent his life in rags, in deprivation. He had sold everything, including his body. And he despised poverty. He had been humiliated in his travels, his clothes stank. He had turned his acute sensitivity to his very real suffering into an intransigent arrogance. He had believed that collective materialism was no more than a sugar carnival skull. He had broken his fist on the misrepresentation. The mob had reviled him as they would an epileptic.
There is a screen between poetry and its conversion into money, and no relationship between the two. Creativity responds to an autonomous inner drive. The opposite to which it is attracted is its likeness — TRUTH. But poets need money, for their vulnerability asks protection. From the nineteenth century onwards that help which should have been directed towards the committed has been appropriated by the popular, the journalistic, the mafia attached to vested literary interests whose representatives are intent on the subversion of truth.
Paranoia is a term invested with pejoratively pathological undertones. In the Rimbaudian sense, it means a healthy ap-prehension of the individual shadowed by a hostile collective. What else can the poet do but shriek? Rimbaud asked nothing more than that his vision of the world be encountered as a reality. Jung says:
...If a world-wide consciousness could arise that all division and all antagonism are due to the splitting of opposites in the psyche, then one could really know where to attack. But if even the smallest and most personal stirrings of the individual soul — so insignificant in themselves — remain as unconscious and unrecognized as they have hitherto, they will go on accumulating and produce mass groupings and mass movements which cannot be subjected to reasonable control or manipulated to a good end. All direct efforts to do so are no more than shadow boxing, the most infatuated by illusion being the gladiators themselves. (The Undiscovered Self)
And Jung like Freud is a product of Rimbaud. Both men are the psychological interpreters of the psychic cataclysm experienced by Lautréamont and Rimbaud. Not madness, but the realization that the psyche is an unmapped continent. Rimbaud’s deep soundings in the interior had revealed states in which the primal was still predominant. Areas locatable to the poetic imagination where reason, gravity, predictability were all subservient to a highly organized disorder. In `Soir historique’ from Les Illuminations Rimbaud had written of the domestic and universal in revolt in a confrontation no less strange than Lautréamont’s meeting of an umbrella and sewing-machine.
And some evening, for instance, the simple tourist, retiring from our economic horrors, finds the hands of the master have brought to life the harpsichord of the fields; they play cards at the bottom of the pond, a mirror evocative of queens and of favourites; there are saints, sails, threads of harmony, and chromatic legends, in the sunset.
...No! The moment of the bath-house, of seas boiling to foam, of underground conflagrations, of the planet carried off, of subsequent exterminations, certainties indicated with so little malice by the Bible and the Norns and which are signs for the serious man to watch. — Though the entire effect will be hardly a legend!
So much happens here that had never before occurred in poetry. Playing cards at the bottom of a pond, a harpsichord strung by the wind in the fields, the planet getting blown off — great events of the imagination such as these are treated with a spontaneity that transforms hallucination into reality. Les Illuminations is the Book of Reality. No apology is needed for the true nature of things.
Rimbaud is a cosmographer. He reinvents the universe. Seeing has become so much a condition of preconception (we take on trust the idea of the thing we see) that we all long for a flaw, a rift in the seam, a divide through which we may apprehend an altered state of the universe.
I am so accustomed to hallucination, that watching a tree break into fire in a scarlet field under an emerald sky is one of a thousand visual metamorphoses I may encounter before and during the writing of a poem. While still a schoolboy I grew bored with the limitations of colour perceived by the human eye and so imagined the world as I might paint it. Mid-afternoon. I could sit on black sands under a violent cerise sky. If I wanted the sea to be white with the odd red and blue sail pricking up a cat’s ear on the skyline, so it turned out according to that composition. And eventually what begins as self-induced, asserts an autonomous function. The poet lives through the creation of a private mythology which becomes in time the way that others learn to see an alternative or parallel universe. Hallucinogens like LSD are not necessary to the discovery of a visually heightened universe. If they are used, it is for no more than tincturing, adding tone to a palette already vitalized and set by the imagination.