Delirium (4 page)

             
Something of Rimbaud’s necessary heartlessness at this time is recounted by his friend Ernest Delahaye. When the two young men were walking past the stud-farms at Mezieres, which had been converted into a hospital camp for victims of the Franco-Prussian War, they caught sight of casualties who were missing arms and legs. Rimbaud, who was little disposed to his friend’s compassion for the maimed, declared: ‘Those loonies were simply the instruments of the defunct regime. As long as they were thought to be the stronger, they were praised. Look at them now. They wear cotton caps and are half dead — what do you expect to be done with them?’

             
Presumably Rimbaud thought the same of most living poets. They were and are in most cases debris left behind by the old century rather than innovators reaching forward to the new one. Rimbaud lit a forest fire around them. His poetry singularly extinguished an entire century’s poetics, with the exception of Baudelaire, Nerval, Lautréamont and a little of Verlaine. Progress demands this sort of corrosive fury. Invention is contingent on disrespect. Rimbaud sensed with an unerringly sanguine instinct that literary movements owe their success to playing safe. The public want to be assured of their own psychological limitations; they want art to endorse a sense data that corresponds to the ordinary. Rimbaud knew he had the measure of such stupidity, even if the detonation rang true long after he had disowned an interest in poetry.

             
Rimbaud’s two letters,
Lettres du voyant
, no doubt written quickly and under pressure of immediate inspiration, are the beginnings of a new dawn of poetry. He announces the arrival of the assassins. These two letters, the second enlarging and expanding on the theories developed in the first, are of such profound significance that they could have altered both the course of poetry and the future of the race, if they had issued from the pen of someone other than an insignificant provincial schoolboy.

             
The first of the
Lettres du voyant
was written by Rimbaud to his former teacher, Georges Izambard, and is dated 13 May 1871. I have already quoted the parts which deal with the self-induced derangement of the senses as an initiatory rite to vision. But as important to this letter is the snarling contempt that Rimbaud reveals for his teacher’s concern that he should conform both in his poetry and in his professional life to the social dictates of respectability. Rimbaud launches his theory in opposition to Izambard’s bias towards safety. His tone is insolent, his manner menacing; he is already quite sure that the recipient of his letter will never take to the visionary impulse.

... Basically, all you see in your principle is subjective poetry: your obstinacy in going back to the university trough — excuse me — proves it. But you will always end up self-satisfied without ever having done anything, because that was your wish. Not to mention that your subjective poetry will always be disgustingly insipid. One day, I hope — as many others do — I shall see objective poetry in your principle, and see it more sincerely than you! — I shall be a worker: that is the idea which constrains me when mad rage drives me towards the battle of Paris — where so many workers are dying as I write to you! Work now, never, never; I am on strike.

              Rimbaud’s impatience with insipid poetry, his attack on the self-indulgent sentimentality or subjectivity of Izambard’s verse, becomes in the second letter a fulmination against ‘countless idiotic generations’. The ‘mad rage’ that Rimbaud describes as subverting his passion to become involved in the battle of Paris, was the furnacing chaos within him cooling to visionary lucidity. He is a ‘worker’ in the name of poetic vision. To have arrived at where one is in poetry entails mental aeons of unconscious activity. The atemporal functionings of the imagination, inheriting as it does archetypes, myth, reincarnational experience, and delivered in intermittent and blinding flashes, injected into Rimbaud at this time a visionary cosmogony quite disproportionate to his age and worldly knowledge. Poets who rely wholly on the acquisition of empirical data are those whose impetus dries up in a middle-age drought. Visionary poetry is inexhaustible, for it picks up on the rhythm of the cosmos. Meteors chase through the poet’s head.

             
It is in the second of the
Lettres du voyant
that Rimbaud offers his fullest and most impassioned commitment to an uncompromising poetic delirium. Written two days after the first letter, the beliefs he expresses have ignited in his nerves.

             
Rimbaud begins his letter — dated 15 May 1871 and addressed to Paul Demeny — by cutting history down to size, reducing the redoubtable forest to firewood. With a smack of justifiably imperious condescension he announces:

... All ancient poetry culminated in the Greek, harmonious Life. — From Greece to the romantic movement — in the Middle Ages — there are writers, and versifiers. From Ennius to Theroldus, from Theroldus to Casimir Delavigne, it is all rhymed prose, a game, degradation and glory of countless idiotic generations. Racine alone is pure, strong, great. — If his rhymes had been liquidated, and his hemistiches mixed up, today the Divine Fool would be as little known as any old author of Origins. — After Racine, the game gets rusty. It has been going on for two thousand years!

Whether or not Rimbaud had read the authors he quotes, his assumptions ring vitally true. Dead poetry, fossil poetry, Racine’ s mechanical couplets, Rimbaud saw that all these things remained an impediment to poetic progress. Lacking inner dynamism and a conflict worked out through the opposition of irreconcilables, most poetry by the mid-nineteenth century had devolved into ‘rhymed prose’, in the manner that most of the bad poetry written today goes under the banner of free verse, while it is in fact prose arbitrarily truncated to make the line lengths appear to conform to poetic structure. Rimbaud is not only intent on shocking, but he is deadly serious in his aim to invent a new poetics, something he was to achieve in the prose poems of
Les Illuminations
, and in much of the writing that makes up
Une saison en enfer.

             
One can imagine Rimbaud spitting in the process of writing this last letter. His thoughts raced too fast. It was hot, and he was probably uncomfortable in his dirty clothes. What could his mother have to do with this? She wouldn’t have understood a line. His potential was suddenly before him; it moved jerkily like a series of film stills not yet edited into a sequence. The part of his mind not concentrating on the page was probably devising ways of getting drinks in the local Cafés. His friend Bretagne would see to that later. When he takes the letter up again it is to attack those for whom writing is an ego-dominated experience:

‘If those old idiots had not discovered only the false meaning of the Ego, we shouldn’t have to sweep away the millions of skeletons which, since time immemorial, have accumulated the results of their one-eyed intelligence, by claiming to be the authors!’

              Before arriving at the inspired prescriptions necessary for the poet to become a visionary, an inhabitant of the great dream, Rimbaud cleans the past like a fish. Men are still awaiting the arrival of a poet. ‘Pen-pushers, civil servants: author, creator, poet, that man never existed!’ Even Baudelaire, whom Rimbaud called ‘king of poets’, had advanced and withdrawn from the edge. Rimbaud, like an astrophysicist in the twentieth century, was about to release the blueprints for ecstatic mental flight. The dervish, the shaman, the assassin intoxicated by hashish, would have understood his demands. It is right to be ‘monstrous’ he asserts: ‘Think of a man implanting and cultivating warts on his face.’ His assertions are unequivocal.

The Poet makes himself a
seer
by a long, prodigious and systematized
derangement
of
all the senses
. All forms of love, suffering, and madness; he searches himself, he consumes all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessence. Unspeakable torture in which he needs self-conviction and super-human strength, where he becomes among all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great outlaw — and the Wise Man! — Because he attains the
unknown!
Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He reaches the unknown, and even if, demented, he ends up losing the meaning of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die as he forces through unheard of, unnameable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one collapsed!

              Rimbaud’s imperatives are unprecedentedly revolutionary. They demand a commitment to the work and a willingness to explore all facets of human experience, such as few poets have ever dared contemplate. If you need a fix of heroin, and Rimbaud’s demands are no less extreme, you may have to sell your body to pay for your habit. If you are a poet, you may have to steal to live. You become ‘the great criminal’, not only in the sense of aspiring to occult knowledge but in the context of living outside society. At the time that Rimbaud was formulating his belief in poetic dementia, and the fearless journeying to the interior where man must alchemically distil his emotions, extracting only what is of use to the experiment, poetry was comfortably in the hands of the safe. Banville, Hugo, Tennyson and Arnold, not to mention Longfellow, were all busy writing poetry that conformed to public sentiment. Rimbaud’s discoveries would have appeared an act of madness to their retrograde conformism.

             
Rimbaud strikes like a wolf aiming for the throat. Only Nietzsche would have understood his ecstatic celebration of evil as an objective contributory to creative vision. And the poet must be willing to accept death as the outcome of his Promethean raid on the inarticulate. The latter is a small price to pay for the incandescent immediacy of having seen and known the high points of visionary crystallization.

             
Rimbaud swallowed fire. He was a magician who used his psychophysical responses as a bridge across the universe. He was at this time an ecstatic savant. He was Prometheus inciting the retribution that comes from stealing fire.

             
At the time of writing this second May letter, ‘we found him too gloomy, too irascible; his movements were jerky, his manners crude. His mother was desperate about him: at one point, he seemed so strange that she thought he was mad’, writes Paterne Berrichon.

             
Rimbaud continues the letter to Demeny with growing excitement and a sense of corresponding intolerance.

             
Therefore the poet is really the thief of fire.

             
He is responsible for humanity, even for the animals; he will have to have his visions smelt, felt and heard; if what he brings back from
down there
has form, he gives it form; if it is formless, he leaves it like that. A language must be found; — Besides, all speech is idea, the time of a universal language will come! One has to be an academic — more dead than a fossil — to compile a dictionary, no matter the language. Weak-minded people, beginning
by thinking
about the first letter of the alphabet, would quickly go mad! This language will be of the soul for the soul, containing everything, smells, sounds, colours, thought contesting thought. The poet would define the amount of the unknown awakening in his time in the universal soul: he would provide more — than the formulation of his thought, than the record
of his march towards Progress!
Enormity becoming normal, absorbed by everyone, he would really be
a multiplier of progress!

              Rimbaud’s Promethean assertions which adhere to the romantic credo that creation is synonymous with death, and that one involves the other, are here translated into a context of total artistic revolution. Vision demands new sensory responses; its existence in poetry asks that it appeals to all the senses: smell, touch, hearing and so forth. These synaesthetic qualities, which will afford poetry a universal language, are achieved by a journey undertaken
là-bas
— down there. And Rimbaud had already spent a lot of time staring into the void. The poet carries the pit inside him; all manner of violent disturbance has to be encountered in the exploration of the shadow, and what is retrieved may have form or not. What is important is that it is not discounted from poetry on any moral pretext. And the poet’s discoveries will require the new language, of which Rimbaud warns that madness will ensue should it be encountered by the unprepared. Rimbaud’s notion of language is cabalistic, orphic, alchemical; it pivots on the individual symbolism contained by words through their component letter and number valencies. Language is breath: and poetry is the occult manifestation of that rhythm. The poet, says Rimbaud, is ‘responsible for humanity, even for the animals’. His words should animate the universe. He should be able to interpret the communication of all creatures. The poet is the one through whom the universe vibrates. In Rimbaud, the distinction between self and world, individual and differentiated objects is broken down. Most poetry is written with the notion that the subjective responds to objective phenomena. Rimbaud hastens to rectify this misconception.