When, in his extreme youth, Rimbaud chalked up on the doors of the churches “Death to God!” he proved himself to be closer to God than the powers who rule the Church. His arrogance and defiance were never directed against the poor, the unfortunate, the truly devout; he was fighting the usurpers and pretenders, fighting all that was false, vain, hypocritical and life-destroying. He wanted the earth to re-become the Paradise which it was, which it still is beneath the veil of illusion and delusion. He was utterly uninterested in a ghostly Paradise situated in a mythical beyond. Here and now, in the flesh, as members of one great community fired with life—that was how he envisaged Christmas on Earth.
“On meurt pour cela dont on peut vivre.” These are not his words, but the meaning is his. Death lies in separation, in living apart. It does not mean simply to cease being. A life which has no significance here below will have none in the hereafter. Rimbaud, I believe, understood this clearly. He gave up the struggle on one level to resume it on another. His renunciation was in this sense an affirmation. He realized that only in silence and darkness could the ingredients of art be restored. He followed the laws of his being to the end, shattering all forms, his own included. At the very beginning of his career he understood what others only understand at the end, if at all, that the sacred word no longer has validity. He realized that the poison of culture had transformed beauty and truth into artifice and deception. He takes Beauty on his knee and he finds her bitter. He abandons her. It is the only way he can still honor her. What is it again that he says in the depths of hell? “Des erreurs qu’on me souffle: magies, faux parfums, musique puérile.” (For me this is the most haunting, baffling line in the Season.) When he boasted that he possessed all talents, he meant—on this phony level! Or—with this “lying cultural mask.” In this realm he was, of course, a master. But this is the realm of confusion, the Mamser world. Here everything is of equal value and therefore of no value. Do you want me to whistle? Do you want a danse du ventre? Okay! Anything you wish. Just name it!
Everything that Rimbaud voiced in his writings proclaimed this truth, that “we live not in the midst of facts, but of profundities and symbols.” The mystery which inheres in his writing permeates his life. We cannot explain his actions, we can only permit them to reveal what we long to know. He was as much a mystery to himself as to others, as much mystified by his own utterances as by his subsequent life in the world. He sought the outside world as a refuge. A refuge from what? Perhaps from the terrors of lucidity. He is like a saint in reverse. With him the light comes first, then the knowledge and experience of sin. Sin is a mystery to him; he has to put it on, as the penitents of old adopted the hair shirt.
He ran away, we say. But perhaps he ran toward something. It is obvious that he avoided one kind of madness only to become the victim of another. He squeezes out of exits like a man struggling with a strait jacket. No sooner has one tragedy been averted than another besets him. He is a marked man. “They” are after him. His poetic flights, which are like progressive stages in an interrupted trance, had their parallel in the senseless flights which rushed him headlong from one corner of the world to another. How often he is brought back crushed and defeated! He rests just long enough to be repaired—like a cruiser or a long range bomber. Ready for action again. Zoom! He is off, flying toward the sun. It is light he seeks—and human warmth. His illuminations seem to have drained him of all natural warmth; in his blood is a glacial thaw. But the farther he flies the darker it gets. The earth is enveloped in blood and darkness. The ice caps move in toward the center.
It was his destiny, it seems, to have wings and to be chained to the earth. He strains as if to make the outermost stars, only to find himself wallowing in the mud. Indeed, the more he flaps his wings, the deeper he finds himself imprisoned in the earth. In him fire and air war with water and earth. He is an eagle chained to a rock. The little birds are the ones which eat his heart out.
His time was not yet. Too soon, this vision of Christmas on Earth! Too early, the hope of abolishing false gods, crude superstitions, cheap panaceas. The race of this earth has a long period of travail ahead before emerging into the white light of dawn. Dawn is a pregnant word with him … In his heart Rimbaud seems to have understood. We should never interpret his tremendous desire for liberty—it is the desire of a doomed man!—as a wish for his own personal salvation.* He speaks for the race of Adam which knew eternal life but exchanged it for the knowledge which is death. His pagan zeal is the fervor of a soul which remembers its origins. He is not seeking a return to Nature, à la Rousseau. Far from it. He is seeking grace. Had he been able to believe, he would have surrendered his soul long ago. It was his heart which was paralyzed. Those duologues which he held with his sister at the hospital resume not only the question which held him in suspense all his life but the quest. She believes so sincerely and implicitly, why can’t he? Are they not of the same blood? He no longer asks why she believes, only—do you? This is the final leap for which he has to muster all his strength. It is the leap out of himself, the bursting of the bonds. It is no longer important now what he believes in, only—to believe. In one of those alternations of mood which characterize the Season in Hell, after an exalted outburst in which he maintains that reason is born in him again, that he sees the world is good, blesses life, loves his fellowman, he adds: “Ce ne sont plus des promesses d’enfance. Ni l’espoir d’échapper à la vieillesse et à la mort. Dieu fait ma force et je loue Dieu.” This God who is man’s strength is neither a Christian god nor a pagan god. He is simply God. He is accessible to all men of whatever race, breed or culture. He may be found in any place at any time, without benefit of mediation. He is Creation itself and will continue to exist whether man believes or not.
But the more creative a man is, the more certain he is to recognize his Maker. Those who resist most stoutly merely testify the more to His existence. The struggle against is as valiant as the struggle for; the difference lies in the fact that the one who struggles against has his back to the light. He is fighting his own shadow. It is only when this shadow play exhausts him, when finally he falls prostrate, that the light which sweeps over him can reveal to him the splendors which he had mistaken for phantoms. This is the surrender of pride and egotism which is demanded of all, great or small.
An artist earns the right to call himself a creator only when he admits to himself that he is but an instrument. “Author, creator, poet! That man has not yet existed.” Thus spake Rimbaud in the arrogance of youth. But he was voicing a profound truth. Man creates nothing of and by himself. All is created, all has been foreseen … and yet there is freedom. Freedom to sing God’s praises. This is the highest performance man can enact; when he acts thus he takes his place by the side of his Creator. This is his liberty and salvation, since it is the only way to say Yea to life. God wrote the score, God conducts the orchestra. Man’s role is to make music with his own body. Heavenly music, bien entendu, for all else is cacophony.
No sooner had the cadaver been shipped home than Rimbaud’s mother slipped off to arrange the funeral obsequies. His withered, mutilated body riddled with the marks of his agonies is shovelled under in jig time. It was as though she were ridding herself of the pest. She probably fumigated the house on her return from the cemetery whither she and his sister Isabelle had followed the hearse: these two, no more, composed the cortège. Rid of the “genius” at last, Madame Rimbaud could now devote herself in peace to the animals and the crops, to the petty rounds of her petty provincial life.
What a mother! The very incarnation of stupidity, bigotry, pride and stubbornness. Whenever the harassed genius threatened to accommodate himself to his hell, whenever his tormented spirit flagged, she was there to jab him with the pitchfork or pour a bit of burning oil on his wounds. It was she who thrust him out into the world, she who denied him, betrayed him, persecuted him. She even robbed him of that privilege which every Frenchman craves—the pleasure of having a good funeral.
The
body finally delivered up to the worms, Rimbaud returns to the dark kingdom, there to search for his true mother. In life he knew only this witch, this harridan from whose loins he sprang like the missing wheel of a clock. His revolt from her tyranny and stupidity converted him into a solitary. His affective nature completely maimed, he was forever incapable of giving or receiving love. He knew only how to oppose will to will. At best he knew pity, never love.
In his youth we see him as a zealot, a fanatic. No compromise. Only the volte-face. As the revolutionary, he seeks desperately for an ideal society in which he can staunch the wound of separation. This is the mortal wound from which he never recovers. He becomes an absolutist, since nothing can bridge the void between the actual and the ideal but a perfection in which all error and falsity are swallowed up. Only perfection can blot out the memory of a wound which runs deeper than the river of life.
Incapable of adapting or of integrating, he seeks endlessly—only to discover that it is not here, not there, not this, not that. He learns the not-ness of everything. His defiance remains the one positive thing in the void of negation in which he flounders. But defiance is unfruitful; it saps all inner strength.
This negation begins and ends with the creature world, with those experiences sans suite which teach nothing. No matter how vast his experience of life, it never goes deep enough for him to give it meaning. The rudder is gone, and the anchor too. He is condemned to drift. And so the vessel which goes aground on every shoal and reef, which submits helplessly to the bufferings of every storm, must go to pieces finally, become mere flotsam and jetsam. He who would sail the sea of life must become a navigator; he must learn to reckon with wind and tide, with laws and limits. A Columbus does not flout the laws, he extends them. Nor does he set sail for an imaginary world. He discovers a new world accidentally. But such accidents are the legitimate fruits of daring. This daring is not recklessness but the product of inner certitude.
The world which Rimbaud sought as a youth was an impossible world. He made it full, rich, vibrant, mysterious—to compensate for the lack of these qualities in the world he was born into. The impossible world is a world which even the gods never inhabited; it is the Land of Nod which the infant seeks when it has been denied the breast. (It is here the zebus dream probably, and all those other strange animals which dot the shores of the Dead Sea.) Awake, the impossible can only be gained by assault, and the name for this is madness. It may be, as some aver, that it was at the barricades, during the bloody Commune, that Rimbaud swerved from this fatal course. All we know is that suddenly, at the edge of the precipice, he shies away. Definitely not that! He behaves as one who has seen through the lies and the delusions. He is not going to be a dupe, a cat’s paw. The revolution is as empty and revolting as the everyday life of conformance and submission. Society is nothing but an aggregation of hopeless dolts, scoundrels and fiends. Henceforth he will have faith in nothing but himself. If necessary, he will eat his own dirt. Soon now begins the flight, the aimless wandering, the rudderless drift. All those sordid, despicable realities which he would have none of now become his everyday fare. It is the beginning of the descent, and no thread to guide him out of the dark labyrinth.
The only salvation he recognizes is liberty. And liberty for him is death, as he will discover.
No one has better illustrated the truth than Rimbaud, that the freedom of the isolated individual is a mirage. Only the emancipated individual knows freedom. This freedom is earned. It is a gradual liberation, a slow and laborious fight in which the chimeras are exorcised. The chimeras are never slain, for phantoms are only as real as the fears which call them forth. To know oneself, as Rimbaud once counselled in that famous Letter of the Seer, is to rid oneself of the demons which possess one. The Church did not invent these terrors of the mind and soul, nor does society create the restrictions which irk and plague one. One church is overthrown and another is set up; one form of society is abolished and another springs up. The powers and emanations persist. Rebels create only |new forms of tyranny. Whatever man suffers as an individual all men suffer as members of society. (Abelard came to see that even in the death of a rabbit God also suffers.)
“Everything we are taught is false,” Rimbaud protested in his youth. He was right, utterly right. But it is our mission on earth to combat false teaching by manifesting the truth which is in us. Even singlehanded we can accomplish miracles. But the great miracle is to unite all men in the way of understanding. The key is Charity. The lies, the falsities, the deceptions, cruel as they are, must be lived through and overcome through integration. The process goes by the hard name of sacrifice.
When Rimbaud denied the inner reality for the outer he put himself in the hands of the dark powers which rule the earth. By refusing to transcend the conditions he was born into he surrendered himself to the stagnant flux. For him the clock did really stop. From then on “he killed time,” as we say with unthinking accuracy. No matter how active, the barometer can only register boredom. His activity merely emphasizes his unrelatedness. He is part of the void which he once tried to span with the unsubstantial rainbow of perfection. The Jacob’s Ladder of his dreams, once peopled with heralds and messengers from the other world, dissolves. The phantoms take on substance. They become altogether too real, in fact. They are now no longer figments of the imagination but materialized forces of hallucinating reality. He has invoked the aid of powers which refuse to be relegated to the misty deep from which they sprang. Everything is borrowed, everything is vicarious. He is no longer an actor but an agent, or a reagent. In the world of the imagination he had boundless freedom; in the creature world he has empty power, empty possessions. Now he sits neither in the Councils of the Lord nor in the Councils of the Lords: he is in the web of the Powers and Principalities. There is no peace, no surcease from toil. Loneliness and enslavement are his lot. Does an army need rifles? He will supply them—at a profit. It doesn’t matter which army, whose army—he will sell to any one who wishes to kill. Kill and be killed, it’s all one to him. Is there a market in slaves? He has dealt in coffee, spices, gums, ostrich feathers, muskets … why not slaves too? He never ordered men to kill one another, nor did he command them to be slaves. But since it is so, he will make the most of it. With a nice, clean profit he may possibly retire one day and marry an orphan.
There is nothing too unclean, too unsavory, for him to traffick in. What does it matter? It is no longer his world. No, definitely not. It is the world he walked out on—only to enter by the back door. How familiar everything looks now! And that odor of pourriture, why, it’s positively nostalgic! Even that peculiar smell of burnt horse flesh—or is it his own hide?—is familiar to his nostrils. Thus, as in a mirror darkly, the phantom denizens of his once profound disgust parade before his eyes. He has never injured a soul. No, not he. He even tried to do a little good when he could. Perfectly so. All his life he got nothing but the dirty end of the stick … is he to be censured now if he tries to get something for himself, a little of the gravy which is running over but which is always out of reach? So he soliloquizes in the depths of Abyssinia. It is the human giraffe talking to himself in the tall grass of the open veldt. Well may he ask now: “Qu’est mon néant, auprès de la stupeur qui vous attend?” What made him superior is that he had no heart. Is it surprising that a man “sans cœur” as he used to sign himself, can spend eighteen years of his life eating his heart out? Baudelaire merely laid his heart bare; Rimbaud plucks his out and devours it slowly.
And so the world gradually comes to resemble the time of the curse. The birds drop from the air, dead before they arrive. The wild beasts gallop to the sea and plunge. The grass withers, the seed rots. Nature takes on the barren, deformed look of a miser, and the heavens mirror the emptiness of the earth. The poet, jaundiced from riding the wild mare over lakes of steaming asphalt, slits its throat. In vain he flaps his rudimentary wings. The fabulous opera collapses and a howling wind rends the props. Save for the furious and most ancient wi
tches, the heath is deserted. Like harpies, armed each and every one with grappling hooks, they fall upon him. Theirs is a more earnest greeting than that visionary brush with his Satanic Majesty. Nothing lacks now to complete the concert of hells he once begged for.
Est-ce la vie encore? Qui sait? On est là enfin, c’est tout ce qu’on peut dire. On va où l’on pèse. Oui. On y va, on y arrive. Et le bateau coule à pic….
In attempting to conquer his demon (the angel in disguise), Rimbaud lived a life such as his worst enemy might have decreed as penalty for attempted evasion from the ranks. It was both the shadow and the substance of his imaginary life, which was rooted in innocence. It was the virgin quality of his soul which made him unadaptable and which, characteristically, led him to a new form of madness—the desire for total adaptation, total conformity. It is the same old absolutism erupting through the shell of negation. The angel-demon duality, which he finds impossible to resolve, becomes fixed. The only solution is dissolution through number. Unable to be himself, he can become an infinitude of personalities. Jacob Boehme expressed it long ago when he said: “Who dies not before he dies is ruined when he dies.” This is the fate which confronts the modern man: rooted in the flux, he does not die but crumbles like a statue, dissolves, passes away into nothingness.
But there is another aspect to Rimbaud’s exaggerated worldliness. His desire to possess the truth in body and soul is the longing for that nether Paradise which Blake called Beulah. It represents the state of grace of the fully conscious man who, by accepting his Hell unconditionally, discovers a Paradise of his own creation. This is resurrection in the flesh. It means that man at last becomes responsible for his fate. Rimbaud tried to re-situate man on the earth, this earth, and completely. He refused to recognize an eternity of the spirit created out of dead bodies. Similarly, he refused to recognize an ideal society composed of soul-less bodies manipulated from their political or economic centers. That terrifying energy which he manifested throughout his career was the creative spirit working through him. If he denies Father and Son he does not deny the Holy Ghost. It is creation he worships, creation he exalts. Out of this fever comes the “need for destruction” sometimes alluded to. It is not a wanton, vengeful destruction that Rimbaud urged, but a clearing of the ground so that fresh shoots may spring up. His whole aim is to give the spirit free rein. Again, by refusing to name, define or delimit the true God, he was endeavoring to create what might be called a plenary vacuum in which the imagination of God could take root. He has not the vulgarity or familiarity of the priest who knows God and talks to Him every day. Rimbaud knew that there was a higher communion of spirit with spirit. He knew that communion is an ineffable duologue which takes place in utter silence, reverence and humility. He is in this respect much nearer to adoration than to blasphemy. His was the enlightenment of those who demand that salvation make sense. The “rational song of the angels”—is it not the persuasion to immediate effort? Postponement is the devil’s tune, and with it is always administered the drug of effortlessness.