Delirium (2 page)

             
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.

             
Did it really take the surrealists to discover Lautréamont? Poetry, no matter its limited printings, has a way of filtering through to the right hands. Would not Verlaine, with his penchant for the obscene, have known of
Les Chants de Maldoror
, and could not the book have come down to Rimbaud like that — he suppressing all mention of it because it ran contemporaneous with his own discovery of a tempestuously implosive inner cosmos? Rimbaud and Lautréamont had both broken through the spatio-temporal barrier to locate the catastrophic fragmentation and volcanic insurgence rooted in the collective unconscious, that laval wave which gathering momentum was to break over the twentieth century as an accelerative hurricane.

             
The poet is always two people. Those who saw Rimbaud with his matted hair and urchin’s clothes, kicking through the streets of Charleville or hanging out with the likes of Charles Bretagne at the Café Dutherme could know nothing of the imaginative vision that was informing his inner world. Everything there seethed with perpetual fermentation. You can be speaking to someone about the fog outside, the local frontier guards, the contortionism of an adept prostitute, but all the time it is taking off inwards — the storm on which the poem rides. And there is a smell of singeing that accompanies it. Lines keep flashing up; they want the whole attention they demand, and not the poet’s dichotomized fade-in and fade-out of the picture. In the end there is nothing to do but run for empty space and unload the circuit.

             
In the same year that Lautréamont was to die, Rimbaud came to manifest his full poetic genius. During his last year at the College, and in part stimulated by his friendship with Izambard, Rimbaud was to put his fist through the teeth of conventional poetry. And although most English poetry has gone on pretending that Rimbaud never existed, European poetry was never to be the same again. It took a child to discover that the business of poetry is imaginative reality, the events of the inner world being hugely disproportionate in significance to those of social commentary. Most poetry which pertains to the latter is no more durable than the asterisks of rain beading the window after an abrupt shower. Rimbaud spat in the face of those who make a profession out of trivia. And today he would be playing a rakish guitar in a basement club in Berlin. He would blow the fuses on the joint and stub a cigarette into his bare shoulder. He would feed the crowd voltage and go back to his room and resume his real life, that of the subversive poet.

             
But that summer, the August of 1870, in the incandescent dog-days, the heat scorching the countryside around Charleville, Rimbaud struck out for Paris. It was the logical extension to poetry. The poem pushed him into exploring the physical. Its brute force had accumulated: the adrenalin banged him on to the road. The psychophysical came together as an explorative unity.

             
Izambard had left Rimbaud the key to his flat in the Cours d’Orleans, which meant the freedom to ransack his library; but not even this could succeed in distracting Rimbaud in a town so little conducive to his spiritual growth. He boarded a train without any money, probably not even knowing why or how he was on it, except that it was moving, and on his arrival in Paris he was arrested and taken to a police station. Locked up in the prison of Mazas, and terrified of his impending trial, he implored Izambard to help him. Interestingly he transforms his former teacher into a mother and father. ‘I hope in you as in a mother’, and later on in the letter he professes: ‘I shall love you as a father.’

             
This curious gender mutation and surrogate parenthood imposed on Izambard tells us much about Rimbaud’s sexual confusion. Perhaps in his imagination he regularly had Izambard change sex according to his need for him as feminine or masculine, unrealized lover or mentor. What is most fascinating about Rimbaud’s creative years, in terms of sexual orientation, is that they are unfocused. His interest in women is confined to smut and scatology, and his attraction to men is based on cruelty and brutality, and certainly not eroticism. Even Verlaine is a figure to be used in an experiment, and part of Rimbaud’s attraction to Verlaine centred upon wrecking the latter’s domestic stability and driving him towards a visionary liberation from which the lesser poet was unlikely to benefit. Verlaine’s perfect ear and the transparency of his lyric were the consummate gifts of a minor poet. No amount of forcing his sensibility or deranging his sensory perception was ever going to make him into a seer, a frenzied shaman. For Rimbaud hallucination was a way of seeing. So it is with all great imaginative poets. And while that particular faculty may be stimulated, it cannot be inherited. Rimbaud was disappointed by hashish. He saw a white moon chasing a black one across the sky. The image would have been too ordinary to have fitted into his poetry.

             
Rimbaud’s great battles were fought on the inner plane, the arena in which the poet contests with light and dark, truth and shadow, self and double. ‘Le combat spirituel est aussi brutal que la bataille d’hommes, mais la vision de la justice est le plaisir de Dieu seul’ (‘Spiritual battle is as brutal as man’s wars; but the vision of justice is God’s pleasure alone’), he asserts in
Une saison en enfer
. The cosmos lives in the poet’s interior. It is there that one is attentive to the roar of space. All the processional chimeras, black angels, psychopomps, archetypal tableaux, erotic possibilities, beauty, mutilation, visions of past and future worlds are contained within the geography of the unconscious. Rimbaud was in a quite different country to Verlaine, no matter that they both experienced kicks from being physically on the road.

             
Rimbaud’s first flight to Paris involved imprisonment. Punishment for being a poet was not new to him; his mother’s relentless severity had already impressed on him that impracticality was a luxury incompatible with her peasant blood. Her brothers were hard-drinking alcoholics. Brought up as she had been on a farm in Roche, whose meagre soil yielded indifferent harvests, and having assumed since her mother’s early death responsibility for her brothers and sister, Vitalie Cuif, the future Madame Rimbaud, was little disposed to have an itinerant son whose scholarly acumen was being visibly dissipated in the pursuit of poetry. ‘Work is further from me than my fingernail is from my eye. Shit for me,’ Rimbaud was to write to Verlaine. ‘When you see me positively eat shit, only then will you find how little it costs to feed me.’ To Vitalie Rimbaud her son’s defiant, truculent disobedience was to be viewed as an unpardonable aberration. But it was worse than that, for the resolution that he had set himself — to become a poet — was an inner conviction she was powerless to reach. Smacking his face, humiliating him, confining him to the house, treating him as a delinquent, none of these punitive measures could get inside him. Vitalie Rimbaud came face to face with the impenetrable existential wall that prevents one person having access to another’s inner life. It is no good shrieking ‘What are you thinking?’ or picking someone up by their hair, there is simply no way through. We are all solitaries situated somewhere in a space that we cannot locate. Where are we in relation to body space? Consciousness tells us nothing. It is what? The precondition to being. Wherever Rimbaud was, no one in his life seems ever to have come close to it. His psychic outback extended to Mars.

             
When Rimbaud took flight from Charleville for the second time, and in a country still at war, it was to set out on foot for Brussels. It was now October 1870 with its gold fall of autumn leaves, that month in which the light stays in the trees like filtered honey. The Franco-Prussian War had broken out in August, the month of his disastrous visit to Paris. Rimbaud must have felt poetry was an invincible protector, for his vulnerability on the road and lack of any financial provision were serious liabilities. But he was intoxicated by danger. Pushing himself to extremes, going without food, sleeping out in vermin-infested clothes were stages of induction towards his confrontation with visionary experience. His mind must have been massive with expectation. The roads were dust; but there was the exhilaration of sudden showers sparkling across the landscape. He would have heard the shrieking of ‘jays, busy collecting acorns, the branch-shaking gymnastics of squirrels. He was free. Somewhere along the road, half buried on the slope of a valley swollen with watercress, was the dead soldier who found his way into ‘Le Dormeur du val’. And Rimbaud was insatiably curious. Surely he would have dropped down into the valley to examine the corpse? He would have stolen whatever money, valuables or tobacco he could find in the man’s blood-soaked uniform. There had to be something he could sell to finance his journey. He went through Charleroi on his way to Brussels, where he begged shelter and food from an acquaintance of Izambard’s. Poems like ‘Les Effarés’, ‘Au Cabaret-Vert’, ‘Le Mal’, ‘Rages de Cesar’ and ‘Le Dormeur du val’ all owe their inspiration to this second truancy from home.