The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud (10 page)

He was born a seed and he remains a seed. That is the meaning of the night which surrounds him. In him there was light, a wondrous light, but it was not to shed its rays until he had perished. He came from beyond the grave, of a distant race, bringing a new spirit and a new consciousness. Does he not say—“it is wrong to say je pense; one should say
on me pense
”? And is it not he who says—“genius is love and the future”? Everything he says in connection with the I of the genius is illuminating and revelatory. This one I find most significant … “His body is the release of which we have dreamed; the shattering of a grace thwarted by a new violence.”

Let me not be accused of reading too deeply. Rimbaud meant everything he wrote “literally and in all senses,” as he once explained to his mother or sister. True, he was referring then to
A Season in Hell
. Nevertheless…. It was with him as it was with Blake and Jacob Boehme: everything they uttered was true, literal, and inspired. They dwelt in the Imagination; their dreams were realities, realities which
we
have yet to experience. “If I read myself,” says Boehme, “I read God’s book, and you my brothers are the alphabet which I read in myself, for my mind and will find you within me. I wish from my heart you would also find me.” That last utterance voices the silent prayer which Rimbaud is constantly sending forth from the wilderness which he created for himself. The “benevolent” pride of the genius lies in his will which must be broken. The secret of deliverance lies in the practice of charity. Charity is the key, and Rimbaud
was
dreaming when he realized it, but the dream was reality and this reality only makes itself felt again when he is on his deathbed, when charity becomes the sweet sister which escorts him to the beyond, broken but redeemed.

During the “Night in Hell,” when he realizes that he is the slave of his baptism, he cries: “O Parents, you contrived my misfortune, and your own.” In the dark night of the soul, during which he proclaims himself a master in phantasmagoria and boasts that he is going to unveil every mystery, he renounces everything which would link him with the age or the land he was born in. “I am ready for perfection,” he states. And he was, in a sense. He had prepared his own initiation, survived the terrible ordeal, and then relapsed into the night in which he was born. He had perceived that there was a step beyond art, he had put his foot over the threshold, and then in terror or in fear of madness he had retreated. His preparations for a new life were either insufficient or of the wrong order. Most commentators think the latter, though both are possibly true. So much emphasis has been laid upon that phrase—“long, immense, logical derangement of all the senses.” So much has been said about his early debauches, about his “Bohemian” life. One forgets how utterly normal that was for a precocious youth bursting with ideas who has run away from an intolerable home atmosphere in the provinces. Rare creature that he was, he would have been abnormal had he not succumbed to the potent appeals of a city like Paris. If he was excessive in his indulgence it is only to say that the vaccination took with a vengeance. It was not such a long time he spent either in Paris or in London. Not enough to ruin a healthy lad of peasant stock. For one who was in revolt against everything it was in fact a salutary experience. The road to heaven leads through hell, does it not? To earn salvation one has to become inoculated with sin. One has to savor them all, the capital as well as the trivial sins. One has to earn death with all one’s appetites, refuse no poison, reject no experience however degrading or sordid. One has to come to the end of one’s forces, learn that one is a slave—in whatever realm—in order to desire emancipation. The perverse, negative will fostered by one’s parents has to be made submissive before it can become positive and integrated with the heart and mind. The Father (in all his guises) has to be dethroned so that the Son may reign. The Father is Saturnian in every phase of his being. He is the stern taskmaster, the dead letter of the Law, the
Verboten
sign. One kicks the traces over, goes berserk, filled with a false power and a foolish pride. And then one breaks, and the I that is not the I surrenders.
But Rimbaud did not break
. He does not dethrone the Father, he identifies himself with him. He does it as much through his godlike assumption of authority as through his excesses, his ramblings, his irresponsibility. He goes over into the opposite, becomes the very enemy whom he hated. In short, he abdicates, becomes a vagabond god in search of his true kingdom. “To emasculate oneself, is not that a sure way of damning yourself?” (This is one of the many questions he poses during his agony.) And that is precisely what he does. He emasculates himself by abdicating the role for which he was chosen … Is it possible that in Rimbaud the sense of guilt was atrophied?

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.