Delirium

by Jeremy Reed

  But the journey was worth it for the poems and the sense of spiritual liberation that Rimbaud experienced whenever he was on the road. In poems like ‘Le Mal’ and l’Eclatante Victoire de Sarrebrück’, the latter inspired by a brilliantly coloured Belgian print, Rimbaud picks up on the spirit of war raging in the French countryside. In le Mal’ his outrage at authoritarian institutions — the Army and the Church — and his compassion for those butchered in the name of territorial avarice, finds powerful expression. `Tandis qu’une folie épouvantable broie/En fait de cent milliers d’hommes un tas fumant;/ — Pauvres morts! dans l’ete, dans l’herbe, dans ta joie,/ Nature! ô toi qui fis ces hommes saintement! . . (‘While a ravening madness triturates/ And heaps a hundred thousand men into a pyre;/ Poor victims! in summer, in the grass,/ As nature’s own, weren’t these intended joy. . . .’)

  But it is in ‘Le Dormeur du val’ that we both see and feel the poet’s presence. The poem operates on a taut thread, and if it comes out on the side of compassion, it is because the dead soldier is young. It is almost as if Rimbaud is looking for the last time at the child he has to relinquish in order to become the embodiment of the suprahuman voyant, and that valediction is symbolized by the open-mouthed, bloodied corpse that lies sprawled in the blue watercress. The imagination at work here is not hallucinated, but it is heightened. It is one of Rimbaud’s early poems in which one feels the subject has an external existence.

  In the green hollow in which the poem exists, a clear stream crazily reproduces itself in silver tatters through the grasses. The valley bubbles with light. Rimbaud is filthy. He needs to wash his dirt-encrusted hands and he desperately needs money. It is not theft to steal from yourself. And this boy-soldier dead in the floating cresses is suddenly Rimbaud’s other. He can believe it in the frenzy of rolling down the slope to meet up with the stream, his fall broken with his customary exclamation of multiple Shits! ‘... la lumière pleut,’ he tells us. The light rains. The green, liquid refraction of the valley makes the light suggest that it is fluid. The soldier has his feet stuck in gladioli. At first, Rimbaud starts, thinking the person is asleep. He probably pulled up short of the dead body. But the angle of his mouth, which resembles that of a sick child’s, is unmistakably the loose-jawed expression which comes with death. Rimbaud is terse. ‘He is cold.’

  Life and death are big issues to a schoolboy alone in a valley in which shots have been exchanged. And with his obsessive olfactory command, Rimbaud notes: ‘Les parfums ne font pas frissonner sa narine’ (‘There is no odour which can make the dead man’s nostrils quiver’). And if the soldier simulates sleep, one hand placed on his chest, there are still ‘two red holes in his right side’.

  When Rimbaud made it back up the slope, still panting with shock and excitement, he had effectively buried the child in him. Who knows if, looking back in the course of his expansively undisciplined itineraries, he didn’t identify with this place? See it again in the diffused white light? But it is always later. He was soon to be someone else. He had lived and known the experience. It was time to clear off in the direction of madness.

  *

  Chapter Two

  And madness is an actual place. It is a state of mind; but it is also a location. What goes on happens at a different speed, in a dislocated sequence, and is detached from time. Most poets visit that house. It may be a square, black building in the middle of the desert. A woman with her hair in flames and a sunflower between her legs reclines on the roof-top. Her hair will never stop burning. When a cloud drifts over, it is square like a building block. Two eyes stare from it as in the portrait of a rectangular face.

  In less than a year after he was taken back to Charleville in October 1870, Rimbaud was to make further, more extensive flights to Paris. He was to be raped, he was to participate in the Commune, write ‘Le Bateau ivre’ and his extraordinary Lettres du voyant, and finally, in the late summer of 1871, to end up on Verlaine’s doorstep.

  Poetic madness demands a cyclonic inner revolution. Poets who accept the external world as the singular premise for descriptive creation, live without ever generating the momentum necessary to take off into inner space. Poetry is like ballistics. The poem is a missile pointing from its launching-pad to the intergalactic archipelagos of inner space. And in the manner of a shaman Rimbaud used to slash his body with knives. Cuts into his chest both stimulated his senses and invited his usual curiosity as to how far he could go. Later on he was to have German-style knife duels with Verlaine, in which each would wrap a sharp blade in a towel with only the tip showing and aim at the other’s face or throat. A police report dated 1 August 1873 states: ‘These two individuals fought and tore at one another like wild beasts, just for the pleasure of making it up afterwards.’ One can imagine Verlaine drunk, hysterical, vituperative, and Rimbaud cool, obscene, lacerating — the more likely of the two to have inflicted incisions.

  Most people fear madness: they do not know what it com-prises, but something within instinctively warns them against any encounter with the ecliptic chimera. They have a premonition of what madness could be: an involuntary loss of control, driving with no hands on the wheel; a blank space in which no coherent thought leads to another.

  Nerval’s journeys to the Orient and Baudelaire’s metaphysical voyages were starting-points to reach the other shore. The physical world was too readily exhaustible. Remonstrating against ennui, Baudelaire had proclaimed: ‘Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel qu’importe?/ Au fond de l’inconnu trouver du nouveau.’ (all now left to do/ is dive through the depths of either heaven or hell,/ and on through the unknown to find the new.) The emphasis here on finding the new — and Rimbaud would have construed this place as a psychologically constellated state — had for Rimbaud the effect of shooting up on speed. He would take heaven by storm; and if he failed, he would gladly turn to the dark. Interestingly, it is Novalis in his Hymen an die Nacht who anticipates the mystic expectation of the new world to which Rimbaud aspired. Novalis writes:

  Now I know when the last morning will be — when the light will no longer intrude on night and love — and when sleep will always become one uninterrupted dream. My pilgrimage to the holy grave was exhausting; the cross unmanageable. The crystal wave, inaudible to lesser senses, wells up in the hill’s dark hollow, at the foot of which the terrestrial tide ebbs, and whoever tastes it, whoever has stood on the world’s threshold and looked over into the promised land into the night’s dwelling, truly that person will not return to the ways of the world, and to the place where light is in a state of perpetual unrest.

  Rimbaud had already renounced the ways of the world. As he kicked around that winter in the Charleville woods, smoking his short pipe with the bowl turned downwards, chalking Death to God on walls or park benches, or hiding out in an abandoned quarry shaft in a wood near Romeny and Le Theux, his mind was beginning to fire with the visionary impulse. The over-stimulus of adrenalin in his body — and it is physiologically arguable that a poet is characterized by adrenal debris not assimilated by the kidneys — took on in Rimbaud the nature of an excitable obscenity. He spoke of screwing dogs — whatever bitch strayed into his territory — and no doubt made similar boasts about fellatio. With his mind already flexing for new worlds, the body must have appeared as limited to him in its sexual functions as it did to de Sade.

  If Rimbaud was formulating a literary theory at this time, and he gives the impression that systematic thought and mental schemas were of little interest to him (like Hart Crane he read for sensation and not knowledge), it was to evolve in the letters sent to Georges Izambard on 13 May 1871 and two days later on 15 May to Paul Demeny. Rimbaud had travelled a long way through mental space to arrive at his beliefs, and if he picked up snatches of alchemy and magic from the likes of Michelet and Eliphas Levi, and if his imagination was coloured by the works of Baudelaire, Hugo, Poe, Jules Verne and the contemporaries in whom he expressed interest, Banville, Demeny, Verlaine, Armand Renaud and Louis Veuillot, then his visio
nary quest is all the more original, for it is inspired not by a synthesis of literary study but by a rejection of everything that had come before him.

  Poets of Rimbaud’s nature do not have time to read books in the meticulous way that scholars do. A poet makes a raid on the imagery, reads for sense stimulus and for whatever characteristics in the work that can be of help to him. This method of intuitive reading means that a book can be quintessentially evaluated by random lines, random pages. A poem that appears to owe its root origins to a particular book, may in fact be indebted to little more than one haphazardly encountered image. One perception leads directly to another. In the winter of 1870/1 Rimbaud was not reading to acquire knowledge; he was looking to fan the excited nebulae that had grown up in his unconscious with associations which might help to spark off poems.

  Moreover, some time in the spring of 1871, on one of his audacious flights to Paris, he had been raped. Wanting to enlist in the army of the Communards, and at the same time curious about sex, he may have invited the violation by hanging around one of the Paris barracks. He may have been mistaken for a street-boy looking to sell his body. The experience gave rise to the poem ‘Le Cœur volé’, and the psychological scar inflicted by rape clearly increased the poet’s intention to avenge himself on society through writing that would carry the occult potency of ritual magic.

  ‘Le Cœur volé’ is explicit in terms of somatic revulsion. The poem anticipates Artaud’s obsession with turning the body inside out as the sounding-board for a pain transmitted to the poetic line. ‘Mon triste Cœur bave à la poupe,/ Mon cœur couvert de caporal:/ Ils y lancent des jets de soupe’ (‘My poor heart dribbles at the poop,/ My heart soiled with cigarette-spit:/ They spatter it with jets of soup’). And in the second stanza he describes the coarsely erect soldiers. They are ithyphallic, obscene, they jeer as he is buggered. There is no respite when you are impaled. Not even the childlike invention of the magic word ‘abracadabratic’, in relation to the waves which he hopes will wash over and purify his defiled body, can be of any assistance. He tells us that the aftermath will be stomach retchings — ‘J’aurai des sursauts stomachiques’ — for the men have clearly used him violently. He was probably booted back on the street, alone, where he was unable to find any consolation for this degrading experience amidst the anonymous lives pouring through the city. Paris was in a state of insurrection; the sodomizing of a young tramp up from the provinces would have been the subject of ridicule and not investigation. What else could a boy expect if he hung around soldiers?

  Whether Rimbaud actually participated in the Commune, fighting with the insurgent army against the Versaillais, who represented the elected government, we do not know. His wild rage was being directed inwardly. To the external world he was nothing; a schoolboy turned ruffian, a subversive idler to those who recognized him in Charleville. But he was preparing a lycanthropic attack. The poetry that Rimbaud was writing at the time of his Lettres du voyant is often obscene and violently denigratory of women. Rimbaud’s mother petrified him: she was Medusa? Were they all like that? Sympathetic women had not entered into Rimbaud’s life, and one senses that throughout his youthfully vehement poetic rebellion he partly blames women for his inverted sexuality and for the vulnerability to which he is exposed. And hadn’t he been raped? Why was one given no protection? The soldiers had used him as a substitute for a girl. His sixteen-year-old world was upside-down. His method was to lash out; he would reduce sex to scatology, to canine bestiality.

  In ‘L’Orgie parisienne’ written in the early summer of 1871, Rimbaud envisaged Paris as a sprawling, scabrous whore. His fury mounts attack after attack on the image of copulation.

  O cœurs de saleté, bouches épouvantables,

  Fonctionnez plus fort, bouches de puanteurs!

  Un vin pour ces torpeurs ignobles, sur ces tables...

  Vos ventres sont fondus de hontes, ô Vainqueurs!

  O filthy hearts, stinking mouths,

  Work up a rhythm, breathing stench

  Pour wine, for these depraved tables...

  Your bellies melt with shame, o Conquerors!

  There is worse to come. One can feel how Rimbaud whips himself into a state of dementia.

  Parce que vous fouillez le ventre de la Femme,

  Vous craignez d’elle encore une convulsion

  Qui crie, asphyxiant votre nichée infamé

  Sur sa poitrine, en une horrible pression.

  Because you rummage through a woman’s guts,

  You fear from her another convulsion

  Her crying out, that stifles your lewd perch

  Asserting perverse pressure on her breasts.

  For Rimbaud ‘L’Orgie parisienne’ was a form of counter-rape. Humiliated, and too poor to combat the injustices meted out to him in the capital, he turns the city into an intestinal metaphor. This was his power. Poetry was a method of lashing his enemies with Sadean thongs. Even if the welts were visible only to posterity, he would still lay deep cuts. And at this stage of his adolescent career he had not yet extinguished the notion of literary ambition. If his age seemed a detriment to his aspirations, his inner conviction that he was a true poet and that the older generation of living poets were to be vilified as expendable fossils, served as an additional obstacle. All of Rimbaud’s creative life is like this. The wave on which he surfs is invariably opposed by a counter-momentum, so that he throws himself board and all at the beach in a state of exalted surprise, only to run up the face of the outgoing wave. Rimbaud’s progress creates an equal valency of obstruction. It is this process of counterbalancing tensions which gives a Rimbaud poem the force of a fire started by an arsonist, engulfing the building as well as himself. Rimbaud smashes up poetic furniture in the way that a drunk, twined violent, takes the bottom out of a chair on a man’s head.

  Rimbaud’s psychic discoveries, his attunement to the brutally objective power that the poet turns on his subjectivity, was building to delirium in the spring and summer months of 1871. He had succeeded on several occasions in putting Charleville behind him in terms of physical space; but the place sat on his back like the shell of a turtle. In his need he returned to it; a pattern that he was to follow for the rest of his life. It was after all home, no matter that he despised it. The incongruity for him must have lain in the improbable likelihood that a great poet could originate from a provincial backwater. He adopted arrogance as a cover for excessive anxiety. He was building towards ‘Le bateau ivre’, his great navigable journey across imaginary seas.

  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 inspirati
on, 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.