The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud

by Henry Miller

  What a struggle for power, possessions, security he wages during the “active” period of his life! Did he not realize what a treasure he possessed, what power he wielded, what unimpeachable security he knew when he was simply the poet? (I wish I could say that he also revealed himself to be the poet of action, but the accidents which stud the latter half of his life never develop into those incidents which profit the man of action.) No, there is a blindness which it is impossible to fathom, and Rimbaud’s is that sort. A curse has been laid on him. He not only loses his sense of direction, but he loses his touch. Everything goes wrong. He changes identity so thoroughly that if he were to pass himself on the road he would not recognize himself. This is perhaps the last desperate way of tricking madness—to become so utterly sane that one does not know one is insane. Rimbaud never lost contact with reality; on the contrary, he embraced it like a fiend. What he did was to forsake the true reality of his being. No wonder that he was bored to death. He could not possibly live with himself, since that self was in forfeit. In this respect one is reminded of Lautréamont’s words: “I go on existing, like basalt! In the middle, as in the beginning of life, angels resemble themselves: how long it has been since I ceased to resemble myself!”

  One has the feeling that in Abyssinia he even tried to amputate the organ of memory. But toward the end, when he has become “the great invalid,” when to the accompaniment of a hand organ he takes up the thread of his stifled dreams, the memories of the past well up. What a pity we have no record of the strange language he indulged in on the hospital bed, his leg gone, a huge tumor blossoming on his thigh, the insidious cancer germs roving through his body like plundering marauders. Dreams and hallucinations vie with one another in an endless fugue—and no audience but the devout sister who is praying for his soul. Now the dreams he dreamed and the dreams he lived interfuse; the spirit, at last freed of its fetters, makes music again.

  His sister has attempted to give us an inkling of these unrecorded melodies. She remarks, if I remember rightly, upon their supernal quality. They were not, we are led to believe, like either the poems or the illuminations. They were all that plus something else, plus that something, perhaps, which Beethoven gave us in the last quartets. He had not lost the master’s touch; with the approach of death he was even more the genius than he was in his youth. They are fugues now not of clashing, discordant phrases however illuminated, but of essences and quintessences garnered through the struggle with the sternest demon of all, Life. Experience and imagination now blend to form a chant which is a gift and not a curse or a malediction. It is no longer his music, his magistry. The ego has been routed, the song and the instrument become one. It is his oblation on the altar of dethroned pride. It is the Apocatastasis. Creation is no longer arrogance, defiance, or vanity, but play. He can play now on his deathbed as he can pray, for his work as a sufferer is ended. The keel of his ship has at last burst asunder, he is going to the sea. Perhaps in these last hours he understands the true purpose of human toil, that it is slavery when linked to blind or selfish ends and joy when it is performed in the service of mankind.

  There is no joy like the joy of the creator, for creation has no other end than creation. “Let us refine our fingers, that is, all our points of contact with the external world,” he once urged. In the same sense God refines His fingers—when he elevates man to the level of creation. The thrill of creation is felt throughout all creation. All forms, all orders of being from the angels to the worms, are struggling to communicate with those above and below. No efforts are lost, no music goes unheard. But in every misuse of power not only is God wounded but Creation itself is halted and Christmas on Earth postponed that much longer.

  “Ah! je n’aurai plus d’envie:

  Il s’est chargé de ma vie.

  Salut à lui chaque fois

  Que chante le coq gaulois.”

  I transpose these couplets deliberately in the same spirit that I once mistakenly translated “il” as Dieu. I cannot help but believe that the fatal attraction to le bonheur which Rimbaud spoke of means the joy of finding God. Alors—“Salut à Lui chaque fois que …”

  Why is it, I ask myself, that I adore Rimbaud above all other writers? I am no worshipper of adolescence, neither do I pretend to myself that he is as great as other writers I might mention. But there is something in him that touches me as the work of no other man does. And I come to him through the fogs of a language I have never mastered! Indeed, it was not until I foolishly tried to translate him that I began to properly estimate the strength and the beauty of his utterances. In Rimbaud I see myself as in a mirror. Nothing he says is alien to me, however wild, absurd or difficult to understand. To understand one has to surrender, and I remember distinctly making that surrender the first day I glanced at his work. I read only a few lines that day, a little over ten years ago, and trembling like a leaf I put the book away. I had the feeling then, and I have it still, that he had said all for our time. It was as though he had put a tent over the void. He is the only writer whom I have read and reread with undiminished joy and excitement, always discovering something new in him, always profoundly touched by his purity. Whatever I say of him will always be tentative, nothing more than an approach—at best an aperçu. He is the one writer whose genius I envy; all the others, no matter how great, never arouse my jealousy. And he was finished at nineteen! Had I read Rimbaud in my youth I doubt that I would ever have written a line. How fortunate sometimes is our ignorance!

  Until I ran across Rimbaud it was Dostoievsky who reigned supreme. In one sense he always will, just as Buddha will always be dearer to me than Christ. Dostoievsky went to the very bottom, remained there an immeasurable time, and emerged a whole man. I prefer the whole man. And if I must live only once on this earth, then I prefer to know it as Hell, Purgatory and Paradise all in one. Rimbaud experienced a Paradise, but it was premature. Still, because of that experience, he was able to give us a more vivid picture of Hell. His life as a man, though he was never a mature man, was a Purgatory. But that is the lot of most artists. What interests me extremely in Rimbaud is his vision of Paradise regained, Paradise earned. This, of course, is something apart from the splendor and the magic of his words, which I consider incomparable. What defeats me is his life, which is at such utter variance with his vision. Whenever I read his life I feel that I too have failed, that all of us fail. And then I go back to his words—and they never fail.

  Why is it then that I now adore him above all other writers? Is it because his failure is so instructive? Is it because he resisted until the very last? I admit it, I love all those men who are called rebels and failures. I love them because they are so human, so “human—all-too-human.” We know that God too loves them above all others. Why? Is it because they are the proving ground of the spirit? Is it because they are the sacrificed ones? How Heaven rejoices when the prodigal son returns! Is this an invention of man’s or of God’s? I believe that here man and God see eye to eye. Man reaches upward, God reaches downward; sometimes their fingers touch.

  When I am in doubt as to whom I love more, those who resist or those who surrender, I know that they are one and the same. One thing is certain, God does not want us to come to Him in innocence. We are to know sin and evil, we are to stray from the path, to get lost, to become defiant and desperate: we are to resist as long as we have the strength to resist, in order that the surrender be complete and abject. It is our privilege as free spirits to elect for God with eyes wide-open, with hearts brimming over, with a desire that outweighs all desires. The innocent one! God has no use for him. He is the one who “plays at Paradise for eternity.” To become ever more conscious, ever more gravid with knowledge, to become more and more burdened with guilt—that is man’s privilege. No man is free of guilt; to whatever level one attains one is beset with new responsibilities, new sins. In destroying man’s innocence God converted man into a potential ally. Through reason and will He gave him the power of choice. And man in his wisdom always
chooses God.

  I spoke a while back of Rimbaud’s preparations for a new life, meaning of course the life of the spirit. I would like to say a little more about this, to add that not only were these preparations insufficient and of the wrong sort but that he was the victim of a grave misunderstanding as to the nature of his role. Had he known a different spiritual climate his life might well have taken a different course. Had he ever encountered a Master he would never have made a martyr of himself. He was ready for quite a different sort of adventure than the one he experienced. And in another sense he was not ready, because, as the saying goes, when the pupil is ready the Master is always there. The trouble was that he would acknowledge “ni Maître, ni Dieu.” He was in dire need of help, but his pride was inordinate. Rather than humble himself, rather than bend, he flings himself to the dogs. That he could only remain intact by renouncing his calling is a tribute to his purity but also a condemnation of the age. I think of Boehme, who was a cobbler, who did not have a language, we might say, but who forged one for himself and with it, baffling as it may be to the uninitiated, communicated his message to the world. It may be said of course that by abruptly silencing his voice Rimbaud also succeeded in communicating, but such was not his intention. He despised the world which wanted to acclaim him, he denied that his work had any value. But this has only one meaning—that he wanted to be taken at face value! If one wishes to read deeper into this act of renunciation, then one can compare it with Christ’s and say that he chose his martyrdom in order to give it everlasting significance. But Rimbaud chose unconsciously. It was those who had need of him, those whom he despised, who gave his work and his life meaning. Rimbaud simply threw up his hands. He was not prepared to accept responsibility for his utterances, knowing that he could not be accepted at face value.

  It is not strange that the Nineteenth Century is constellated with demonic figures. One has only to think of Blake, de Nerval, Kierkegaard, Lautréamont, Strindberg, Nietzsche, Dostoievsky—all tragic figures, and tragic in a new sense. All of them are concerned with the problem of the soul, with the expansion of consciousness and the creation of new moral values. At the hub of this wheel which sheds light on the void, Blake and Nietzsche reign like dazzling twin stars; their message is still so new that we think of them in terms of insanity.* Nietzsche rearranges all existent values; Blake fashions a new cosmogony. Rimbaud is close to both in many ways. He is like a nova which appears suddenly, grows to terrifying brilliance, then plunges to earth. (“Et je vécus, étincelle d’or de la lumière nature.”) In the darkness of the womb, which he sought with the same ferocity as he did the light of heaven, he transforms into radium. His is a substance which it is dangerous to handle; his is a light which annihilates when it does not exalt or illumine. As a star he hovered too close to the earth’s orbit. Not content to shed his brilliance over the earth, he was fatally attracted by the reflection of his own image in the dead mirror of life. He wanted to transform his light into radiant power; this could only be accomplished by a fall. This delusion, which Orientals call ignorance rather than sin, emphasizes the confusion between the domains of art and of life which gripped the men of the Nineteenth Century. All the great spirits of the modern age have struggled to demagnetize themselves, as it were. All were annihilated by Jovian bolts. They were like inventors who, having discovered electricity, knew nothing about insulation. They were attuned to a new power which was breaking through, but their experiments led to disaster.

  All these men, and Rimbaud was one of them, were inventors, lawgivers, warriors, prophets. They happened to be poets. The superabundance of their talents, coupled with the fact that the age was not ripe for their coming, combined to create an ambiance of defeat and frustration. In a profound sense they were usurpers, and the fate meted out to them reminds us of the suffering of the protagonists in the ancient Greek dramas. They were pursued and laid low by the Furies which, in modern parlance, are the insanities. Such is the price man pays when he attempts to elevate the magical level of his gods, when he attempts to live in accordance with the new code before the new gods are securely entrenched. These gods, of course, are always the projection of man’s exalted inner powers. They represent the magical element in creation; they blind and intoxicate because they rend the darkness from which they spring. Baudelaire expressed it out of the depths of his own bitter experience when he said: “En effet il est défendu à l’homme, sous peine de déchéance et de mort intellectuelle, de déranger les conditions primordiales de son existence et de rompre l’équilibre de ses facultés avec les milieux où elles sont destinées à se mouvoir, de déranger son destin pour y substituer une fatalité d’un genre nouveau …”

  In brief, the dreamer should be content to dream, confident that “imagination makes substance.” This is the poet’s function, the highest because it brings him to the unknown—to the limits of creation. The masters are beyond the spell of creation; they function in the pure white light of being. They are done with becoming; they have incorporated themselves in the heart of creation, fully realized as men and luminous with the glow of the divine essence. They have transfigured themselves to the point where they have only to radiate their divinity.

  The elect, being adepts, are at home anywhere. They know the meaning of hell but they do not localize it, not even as earthly existence. They are devachanees; they enjoy the intervals between one state of existence and another. But the free spirits, who are the tormented ones—born out of time and out of rhythm—can only interpret their intermediary states as hell itself. Rimbaud was such a one. The excruciating boredom from which he suffered was the reflection of the vacuum in which he existed—whether he created it or not is immaterial. One thing seems clear, in this connection: he could put his powers to no use. This is a partial truth, to be sure, but it is this aspect of truth which the man of culture is concerned with. It is the truth of history, so to speak. And history tends more and more to be identified as man’s fate.

  Now and then, from the deep, hidden river of life, great spirits in human form are thrown up; like semaphores in the night they warn of danger ahead. But their appeal is in vain to those “abandoned but still burning locomotives” (the false spirits of the age) “who hold to the rails for a time.” The culture of these souls, said Rimbaud, whose image I use, began with accidents. It is this atmosphere of accident and catastrophe which permeates the historical level of interpretation. The demonic figures, possessed because they are imbued with a passion beyond them, are the sentinels who appear from nowhere in the darkest hours of night. Theirs is the voice which goes unheeded.

  The bogs of Western culture which await the derailed trains de luxe in which our pompous spirits sit blithely bombinating their stale aphorisms Rimbaud described vividly. “I see that my discomforts come from my failure to understand soon enough that we are of the Western World. The marshes of the West!” Then quickly he adds: “Non que je croie la lumière alterée, la forme extenuée, le mouvement égaré …” (He is not the dupe of history, one observes.) In the next breath, as if he knew his fate from eternity, he is saying: “L’esprit est autorité, il veut que je sois en Occident.”

  Now and then, during his sojourn in the lower depths, he remarks, quite as though he were stirring in his sleep—“C’est la vie encore!” Yes, life it is, no mistake about it. Only it is the other side of that double-faced coin. And he who, however mockingly he phrases it, is nevertheless in possession of the truth, must put up with it, must see it through. There will be no other life for him … he chose it from beyond the grave. All the elements of his character were laid down at birth; they will lend to his destiny the unique character of his agony. He will suffer not only because his parents willed it, not only because the age demanded that he suffer, he will suffer because of the whole evolution through which the spirit of man has gone. He will suffer precisely because it is the spirit of man which is in travail. He will suffer as only the seed suffers when it falls upon barren ground.