Delirium

by Jeremy Reed

  Rimbaud’s alchemical journey through hell, entering by the unconscious or nigredo and living within the fermenting fragmentation of his psyche, is couched in terms of the irreconcilable conflict between good and evil. Light and dark. Rimbaud’s individuation rejects the circumscribed imposition of monotheism. His torment demanded search, an ongoing journey involving the excavation of inner space. He was terrified; but he had still to affirm the poet’s vision as the ultimate realization of imaginative truth. And at mealtimes he remained silent. What could he say to anyone about his discoveries? His mind was still full of Verlaine, who was now undergoing the deprivation of prison life.

  He, Rimbaud, had been driven into hiding like an animal. Humiliated by the court and the police, he had to lie low. He was marked for what they considered to be a sexual aberration. Might they not come for him at any time, raise up the farm at night and march him off handcuffed? There was a price to pay for originality. Society seeks retribution from those who differ.

  Full of contradictions and antinomies, Une saison en enfer is a sounding-board for all those caught up by the tide of modernity, the questioning, the scattered, the lost and above all those whose human urgency searches for a psychological meaning to life. Rimbaud attempts to break the closed circuit of life and death; he is concerned with attaining the impossible. He is both willing and reluctant to let go his hold on life and poetry. In `L’Eclair’ he writes:

  What can I do? I know what work entails; and science moves too slowly. I see clearly that prayer gallops and light thunders... I see it clearly. It is too simple, and too unbearably hot; they will do without me. I have my duty, and I shall be proud of it in the way of several others, by putting it aside.

  My life is worn out. Come! let’s pretend, let’s be idle, o pity! And we shall exist by amusing ourselves, by dreaming of monstrous loves and fantastic universes, complaining and quarrelling with the world’s appearances, clown, vagrant, artist, bandit — priest! On my hospital bed, the smell of incense came back to me so strong; keeper of the sacred aromatics, confessor, martyr...

  In that I recognize my filthy upbringing. But what of it!... I’ll let go my twenty years, if the others do likewise...

  No! no! at present I revolt against death. Work seems too slight to my pride: my betrayal to the world would be too brief a torment. At the last moment I would attack right and left...

  The contradictions are never resolved, and the poem represents the experience of living out the conflict between belief and disbelief in the validity of poetic expression. Rimbaud’s poem has no subject in the sense of preconceiving a condition about which he will write. Its involvement is with immediacy and not detachment. The poem progresses according to the dictates of his psyche. It is a poem about an inner wound, and that wound is the realization that the poet has no place on earth. Capitalist ethics and nations concerned with the belligerent dominance of empires have no room for prophetic speech, oneiric journeys, the celebration of shamanism. Rimbaud’s poem discovers the unrestrainable terror that has become translated into massive wars and racial persecution in the twentieth century.

  It took an eighteen-year-old to do this, in a region so backward they might have stoned him for his discoveries. Rimbaud, and before him Lautréamont, was preparing the way for Freud and Jung. Together they detonated what has come to be the fall-out of the unconscious. Their powerful images remained constellated in inner space, awaiting the more clinical vocabulary that psychology was to give to the inner narrative.

  Just another day. Heat. Boredom. Unaccountable mania. And although his wound had healed, a sort of shadow blood remained prominent in Rimbaud’s mind. The orgasmic heat of his love for Verlaine had turned into an unalchemized, scalding reminder of his mortality — the red streamers chasing down his wrist and forming dark stars on the hotel floor. ‘Hard night! The dried blood smokes on my face, and I have nothing behind me but that twisted tree!... Spiritual combat is as brutal as the battle of men; but the vision of justice is God’s pleasure alone.’

  Rimbaud’s greatness lies in the fact that he went unprotected. He had nothing between him and madness but a sheet of paper. And who would understand? He knew that he was writing for future generations, sacrificing his ego for its dispersal into the collective unconscious. His work would arrive one day, but who would he be then and where would he be? Not here but over there in the ambiguity of whatever death means. Une saison en enfer is not only a farewell to poetry but a valediction to life.

  Rimbaud never made concessions; the idealism of his youth — and he had believed absolutely in the redemptive faculty of poetry — had met with formidable opposition. At an age of expansive trust he had met with betrayal. It had started with his mother, at school even Izambard had expressed incomprehension, the poetic consensus in Paris had rejected him, and now the law had interposed between him and Verlaine.

  And how has it changed? Poets may have scuttled into adopting the role of respectable bureaucrats or academics, thereby diluting their art, but the committed poet has ranged wide of these capitulations to the State and still faces the same vulnerability, the same risk, the same angular profile presented to a society seeking the round-shouldered figure of conformity.

  Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer generates black gold. He is suspicious of the substance he has delivered. Alchemical birth involves psychophysical convulsions: delirium. The inner heat and the outer. The athanor and the golden lions of the sun. Rimbaud’s pains were burns, scald-marks on his cells.

  And in ‘Nuit de l’enfer’ Rimbaud pronounces the physical torture involved in his mystic discoveries. He has to transmute the poison within him to potable gold.

  I have swallowed a terrific mouthful of poison. — Three times blessed be the idea that came to me! — My entrails are burning. The poison’s violence racks my limbs, deforms me, throws me to the ground. I am dying of thirst, I am choking, I cannot cry out. This is hell, the eternal torment! Look how the fire rises! I am burning as I should. Come on, demon!

  Rimbaud’s encounter is that of a dervish or epileptic; one who is transported by violent physical contortion to extreme states of altered consciousness. And Rimbaud is describing a condition known and suffered. There is never exaggeration in his writing, only the realization of truth. And the getting there is always by way of the volatile present. The past is valuable to him only in so much as it intensifies the immediate. Otherwise it is dead. His is a new poetics, one that ruthlessly comments on mental and physical pain as a subject-matter which finds corroboration in the external world.

  But he was writing with the awareness that he might never return to poetry. What was there to take him back? In three adolescent years he had achieved what no other poet had man-aged to do before him, and that is to make a poetry out of experience which might have been considered deranged or a subject for psychopathology. Neither Tasso, Hölderlin, Nerval, Baudelaire nor any of the English Romantics had dared translate madness into poetry. If they wrote about breakdown, or mental estrangement as in the case of Clare and Smart, it was with the detachment of perceiving an imbalance objectively. Rimbaud differs in that he creates a poetry out of a deranged state of mind without any such qualification. He is the least compromising poet in the history of poetry.

  The hallucinations are innumerable. In truth it has always been the matter with me: no faith in history, a blank drawn over principles. I shall not enumerate on this: poets and visionaries would be jealous. I am a thousand times the richer, let me be as avaricious as the sea.

  ...I shall now unveil all mysteries: religious or natural mysteries, death, birth, the future, the past, cosmogony, void. I am a master of hallucinations.

  Listen!...

  I possess every talent! — There is no one here and there is someone. I do not wish to compromise my riches. — Shall it be negro songs, houri dances? Shall I disappear diving in search of the ring? Shall I? I shall make gold, remedies.

  It is interesting to note here how Rimbaud maintains the theme of `Je
est un autre’ by a reaffirmation of duality. ‘There is no one here and there is someone.’ It comes back to the primary assertion of imaginative inquiry: ‘Who am I: Who are we?’ There is no answer to the polarized question of self-identity, so poetry exists as the ongoing dialogue with the unknowable. There are no answers and in time the questions become translated into lyric tangents and create the fictions we take for truth.

  At the time of writing Une saison en enfer Rimbaud was physically exhausted and nervously delirious. Above all he was utterly alone. There was no one and nothing between him and his subject. His exposure was total. If there were any solace, it was in the physical relief of masturbation and in the realization that the big open spaces were calling to him again.

  In ‘Matin’ Rimbaud looks back on a childhood like no other, but one which in its insatiable quest for experience encountered a precipitate halt in its confrontation with the world of social values. Rimbaud typifies the form of poetic idealism that is rebuffed by the impositions of bureaucracy, the unmediated jolt of insisting that disciplined employment should follow on directly from school, the attempt to collectivize rather than individualize, in short, all the deleterious principles governing manipulative ideologies, in the West or East. What the system induces in a young poet is FEAR. How can one gifted with the imagination stand out against the conglomerate? The individual is threatened with poverty, ill health and ostracism as a consequence of pursuing a vocation.

  Did I not have once upon a time a delightful childhood, heroic, fabulous, to be written on sheets of gold — too lucky! Through what crime, through what error, have I deserved my present weakness? You who say that animals sob from grief, that the sick despair, that the dead have bad dreams, try to relate my fall and my sleep. I can explain myself no better than the vagrant with his incessant Pater and Ave Maria. I do not know how to speak!

  Rimbaud speaks of a ‘fall’, a displacement, a discontinuity. He is like someone who has run out of light. The symptoms of drug withdrawal are prominent here; he tells of exhaustion and his ‘sleep’. The dispiriting lethargy that comes from what must have been a drastic break with hashish and opium. There were no substitutes: no methadone, no valium. He had to live through paranoia, physical convulsion, the solitary suffering of a mind intent on a radical break with the past.

  ...When shall we journey beyond the beaches and the mountains, to salute the birth of the new work, the new wisdom, the flight of tyrants and demons, the end of superstition — the first! — to worship — Christmas on earth!

  It is the impassioned question of the visionary poet who aspires to see the instatement of imaginative reality. If the poet could awake from a dream to find it materialized, he would have recreated the universe. And it is this hope which is at the heart of romanticism. This is the morning that Rimbaud would have known. It is the ‘Matin’ of his poem. The dawn that comes after the long watches of the night; the alchemical transmutation of black into red and gold, night into day. The completion of the work. But here it is not that at all: the longed-for morning remains a vision.

  And Rimbaud awoke to a dawn without faith. Having summarily dismissed ‘the bastard wisdom of the Koran’, he is no more disposed to thinking that Christianity offers a way of truth. Rimbaud’s nature revolted against comfort, his innate restiveness, his need to use himself as a source of experimentation and discovery, rather than rely on formulated doctrine to implant a faith inside him, made him the great uncompromising rebel that he carried into his poetry. And how do we greet the morning? We assume the ordinary of what could be imagined as the advent of the true day — the manifestation of heaven or the imagination on earth.

  And it is always there as a possibility. We have come to think of the dawn as confirmation of our own and the world’s continuity. Drugged by coffee, insensible to the dawn — the bringer of light — we take our orientation on trust. Yet for Rimbaud the true morning involves radical transformation. It involves a break with the old day and the celebration of the new. It is like waking up to find no separation between one’s dream and reality. We have at last arrived. But where does one go after that? One has stepped into a space that others do not occupy. Everything blazes, a dewdrop is an emerald with a foetus inside, the air opens out like pages of an atlas that have never been seen before, the ordinary house and shop on the corner are transformed into components of the new city, breath releases blossom and words are incantation, but what to do with the place and how to describe it? It should be visible to everyone, but it isn’t. One has walked out of one’s self and entered a new dimension. The change-over is bewildering but true. The poet always knew it would happen; but the materialists will call the actuality of vision madness.

  There is in all visionary poetry from Blake onwards, through the Romantics and in particular Shelley, right up to the futuristic worlds envisaged in the novels of J.G. Ballard, an acceptance that imaginative reality is truth. There is no question of the elaboration of a fiction to support a theory. On the contrary it is material reality that is made to look dubious and inhibitive. But such a literature is still viewed with hostile suspicion by those who see the imagination as a subversive faculty more aligned with sensory disturbance than the discovery of the lost kingdom.

  We go there in rags and we are transformed into gold. The way is open to those who have ditched the credential of reason. And the realization of having made the journey comes from the notion of suffering. The men in big cars are heading for their ordinary day, the one in which money is considered to represent advancement. If they see the likes of a Rimbaud on the road to somewhere else, their response is one of condescending contempt for drop-outs. Poets do not work, so what of them?

  But Rimbaud’s morning lives in a parallel universe. It belongs to a dimension we reach by a leap into the unknown, in the same way as we are startled on making contact with an animal. The experience has taken us somewhere else. In the latter case it is a reversion to the primal that activates the connection; man realizes his animalistic origins. In the former state, the awareness that the kingdom has been located is an ecstatic realization which desperately needs to be communicated to the world, but very often isn’t. The poet’s frustration is that the imaginative province he has discovered with such generative excitement remains uninhabited by readers.

  Rimbaud might have ridden down the road on a lion’s back, his eyes fixed on the future, but no one would have seen him. As it was, he gave voice to ‘The song of heaven, the marching of nations’. And above all he waged war on all systems; he revolted against his youthful ideals — his belief in beauty and poetry had brought him nothing but rejection and suffering. The writing of Une saison en enfer effectively scorched everything that remained of his youth. It was as if Rimbaud had to set fire to the surrounding countryside. Fire was his retribution: he must have hoped to incinerate his past and begin again. Only there was a deficit, and it was one of time and experience. He could not undo what he had known. He was marked. An alchemical pact made with poetry leaves an ineradicable scar. If Rimbaud had pursued his fanaticism, he might have ended up like that other sun worshipper, Harry Crosby, who had black suns tattooed on the soles of his feet.

  In ‘Adieu’ his valediction is not only to poetry but to the alchemical sun. It is a leave-taking that involves the creation of a new poetic cosmos and not the invocation of one the poet is prepared dramatically to disown.

  Autumn already! — But why regret an eternal sun, if we are committed to the discovery of divine light — far from those who die according to the seasons.

  Autumn. Our ship hanging in motionless fog turns towards the port of poverty, the huge city under a sky flecked with fire and mud. Ah! the rotten rags, the rain-soaked bread, the drunkenness, the thousand loves which crucified me! She will never have done, that ghoul queen of millions of souls and dead bodies and who will be judged! I see myself again, my skin ravaged by mud and plague, my hair and my armpits alive with worms, and still bigger worms in my heart, lying stretched out among str
angers without age, without feeling... I could have died there... It is an insufferable memory! I detest poverty.

  And I fear winter because it is the season of comfort!

  Rimbaud affirms with invincible courage the power of the inner light. Autumn cannot reach those ‘committed to the discovery of divine light’. The poet lives in a condition of timelessness; illumination centres itself in the word. Had he not already invented colours for the vowels? The alchemical transmutation was affecting itself now in his spiritual autumn which was full of the red and gold permutations of the work. He had used his body as the alchemical vessel. Out of his long night in hell — his occupation of the nigredo — had come a ferocious light guarded by lions that lay down around the furnace.

  The imaginary city, one of poverty and disease which Rim-baud evokes, is still another of the inner cities that belong to his visionary itinerary. One could draw up a Rimbaud cosmography, a map as fabulous and original as those used by the Venetian sea-kings in their voyage into the speculative unknown. Rimbaud provides a city for an inner state. Where did he see it? Was it in London in his months of derelict suffering, or now in his delirious confrontation with mania. It is a place of disease and squalor, Rimbaud is imposing reality — his own rotten clothes and rain-sodden bread and cheap wine — on hallucination, the masturbatory fantasy of ‘the thousand loves which crucified me!’ An image powerful for its disturbing sado-masochistic overtones, its suggestion of anonymous sex and its concomitant register of disease which has come to characterize the condition of our world ravaged by AIDS as we approach the millennium. Rimbaud sees himself in a form of necrotic decay; there are worms in his hair, his armpits, but, worse than that, they have taken to tunnelling through his heart. In his orgiastic exposure he finds himself amongst strangers who appear to have neither age nor feeling. ‘I could have died there... In Rimbaud the inter-change between inner and outer is indivisible; what is imagined and what has been experienced is inseparable from immediacy.