The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud

  In the light of these reflections, why should the second half of his life appear more mysterious and enigmatic than the first? Is a man’s destiny not determined by his character? We become what we are, else all is the play of hazard. The fortuitous rencontres, the strange accidents of fortune, make sublime sense. A man is always consistent with himself, even when at some unforeseen moment in an otherwise commendable life he suddenly commits a horrible crime. It is so often, is it not, the man of exemplary character who commits the nauseating crime.

  Rimbaud repeatedly calls attention to his bad traits. He underscores them, in fact. When I spoke earlier of the latter half of his life being a Calvary, I meant it in the sense that he gave his impulses free rein. He is crucified not because of his exceptional qualities, for they would have borne him through any ordeal, but because he surrenders to his instincts. For Rimbaud this surrender spells abdication: the ungovernable steeds take over the reins. What work it is now to find the right track! Endless work. Sometimes it would seem that he is not so much a different man as a man at loose ends. The poet will still manifest himself, if only in the bizarre pattern of his erratic tracks. Look at the places he allows himself to be dragged to! He is in and out of almost every European port, headed now this way, now that—Cyprus, Norway, Egypt, Java, Arabia, Abyssinia. Think of his pursuits, his studies, his speculations! All marked “exotic.” His exploits are as daring and unchartered as his poetic flights. His life is never prosaic, however dull or painful it may appear to him … He was in the midst of life, thinks the clerk in his office. Yes, many a solid citizen, to say nothing of the poets, would give an arm or a leg could they but imitate Rimbaud’s adventurous life. The pathologist may call it “ambulatory paranoia,” but to the stay-at-home it seems like bliss. To the Frenchman cultivating his garden it must, of course, have seemed like sheer dementia. It must have been terrifying, this tour du monde on an empty stomach. It must have seemed even more crazy, more terrifying, when they learned that he was getting dysentery from constantly carrying in his belt 40,000 francs in gold. Whatever he did was bizarre, fantastic, inouï. His itinerary is one uninterrupted phantasmagoria. Yes, there are the passionate and imaginative elements in it which we admire in his writing, no question about that. But there is also a coldness about his acts, just as there was in his behavior as a poet. Even in his poetry there is this cold fire, this light without warmth. This is an element which his mother donated and which she aggravates by her attitude toward him. To her he is always unpredictable, the dismal sport of a loveless marriage. No matter how he struggles to remove himself from the parental orbit, she is there like a lodestone pulling him back. He can free himself from the claims of the literary world but never from the mother. She is the black star which attracts him fatally. Why did he not forget about her utterly, as he did all the others? Evidently she is the link with the past which he cannot relinquish. She becomes, in fact, the past. His father had the wanderlust too, it seems, and finally, just after Rimbaud was born, he wandered away forever. But the son, no matter how far he wanders, cannot make this break; he takes the father’s place, and like the father whom he identifies himself with, he continues to add to his mother’s misery. And so he wanders. He wanders and wanders until he reaches the land of the shepherds “where the zebus dream, buried in grass up to the dew-laps.” There he too dreams, I am certain, but whether they are glorious or bitter dreams we do not know. He no longer puts them down; he gives us only the marginal notes—instructions, requests, demands, complaints. Had he reached the point where it was no longer necessary to record his dreams? Was action the substitute? These questions will be asked eternally. One thing alone is evident—he knew no joy. He was still possessed, still driven. He does not abandon the creator’s task in order to bask in the light. He is all energy, but it is not the energy of a being “whose center is at rest.”*

  Wherein lies the enigma, then? Not in his outward behavior, certainly, for even as a freak he is consistent with himself. Even when he dreams of one day having a son, a son who might become an engineer (sic), we can follow him. To be sure, the idea is a bit bouleversante, but we can swallow it. Has he not prepared us to expect anything of him? Is he not human too? Has he not a right to play with notions of marriage, fatherhood and the like? The poet who can go elephant hunting, who can write home for a “Theoretical and Practical Manual of Exploration,” who can dream of submitting a paper on the Gallas to the Geographical Society, what is so startling if he also craves a white wife and a child after his own heart? People wonder that he treated his Abyssinian mistress so decently. And why not, pray? Is it so strange that he should be civil, polite, even considerate … that he should now and then do a little good, as he puts it? Let us remember Shylock’s speech!

  No, what is difficult to swallow, what sticks like a lump in the throat, is his renunciation of Signed “The Crucified One.” art. This is where Monsieur Tout-le-monde comes in. This is his crime, as we like to say. All his faults, his vices, his excesses we can pardon—but not this. This is the unforgivable affront, n’est-ce pas? How we betray ourselves here! We would all like to run out sometimes, wouldn’t we? We are fed up, sick of the whole works, but we stick. We stick because we lack the courage, the imagination to follow suit. We don’t stick it out of a sense of solidarity. Ah no! Solidarity is a myth—in this age, at least. Solidarity is for slaves who wait until the world becomes one huge wolf pack … then they will pounce all at once, all together, and rip and rend like envious beasts. Rimbaud was a lone wolf. He did not, however, slink out by the back door with his tail between his legs. No, nothing of the sort. He thumbed his nose at Parnassus—and at the judges, priests, schoolmasters, critics, slave drivers, moneybags and mountebanks who make up our distinguished cultural society. (Don’t flatter yourself that his age was any worse than ours! Don’t think for a moment that these misers, maniacs and hyenas, these phony ones on every level, are now extinct! This is your problem as well as his!) No, as I say, he wasn’t worried about not being accepted … he despised the petty satisfactions which most of us crave. He saw that it was all a stinking mess, that being another historical cipher would get him nowhere. He wanted to live, he wanted more room, more freedom: he wanted to express himself, no matter how. And so he said, “Fuck you, Jack! Fuck you one and all!” Whereupon he opened his fly and pissed on the works—and from a considerable height, as Céline once put it. And that, dear slaves of life, is really unpardonable, is it not? That is the crime, isn’t it? Very well, let us pronounce the verdict. “Rimbaud, you have been judged guilty. You will have your head neatly cut off in a public place in the name of the discontented artists of the civilized world.” At this moment, when I think of the glee with which the mob always rushes to the guillotine, especially when there is a “choice” victim, I recall the words of “The Stranger” in Albert Camus’ novel—and I know what it is to be an alien soul. The procureur has just put to the audience attending the trial of this “monster” the rhetorical question: “A-t-il seulement exprimé des regrets? Jamais, messieurs. Pas une seule fois au cours de l’instruction cet homme n’a paru ému de son abominable forfait.” (This is always the real crime, notice … never the crime itself.) And so, at this point, the victim continues his interior monologue…. “A ce moment, il s’est tourné vers moi et m’a désigné du doigt en continuant à m’accabler sans qu’en réalité je comprenne bien pourquoi. Sans doute je ne pouvais pas m’empêcher de reconnaître qu’il avait raison. Je ne regrettais pas beaucoup mon acte. Mais tant d’acharnement m’étonnait. J’aurais voulu essayer de lui expliquer cordialement, presque avec affection, que je n’avais jamais pu regretter vraiment quelque chose. J’étais toujours pris par ce qui allait arriver, par aujourd’hui ou par demain. Mais naturellement, dans l’état où l’on m’avait mis, je ne pouvais parler à personne sur ce ton. Je n’avais pas le droit de me montrer affectueux, d’avoir de la bonne volonté. Et j’ai essayé d’écouter encore parce que le procureur s’est mis à parler de mon âme.”
/>
  In the section of Clowns and Angels called “The Poet’s Creation,” Wallace Fowlie puts his finger on that superlative aspect of Rimbaud’s being which sets him apart, which marks, in my opinion, the heroism of the poet. “The genius,” he writes, “is both the master of silence and its slave. The poet exists not only in the words to which he signs his name, but he is also in the whiteness which remains on the page. His honesty is his intactness, and Rimbaud gloriously lived intact.”

  It is curious to note how Rimbaud himself employs this word “intact.” “Les criminels dégoutent comme des chatrés; moi, je suis intact, et ça m’est égal.” He sees the master and the slave, the judge and the criminal, the rebel and the conformer held by the same yoke: this is their Hell, to be yoked to one another under the delusion that they differ one from the other. The poet is in the same predicament, he implies. He too is bound; his spirit is not free, his imagination cannot soar unfettered. Rimbaud therefore refuses to revolt, he renounces. Though he had not intended it, it was the surest way to make his influence felt. By maintaining a resolute silence he makes his presence felt. This comes close to resembling the technique of the sage.* It is more effective than cannonades. Instead of becoming another voice, the poet thus becomes the voice—the voice of the silence.

  While you are in the world and part of it, say your say, then shut your trap forever more! But don’t capitulate, don’t bend! The penalty? Ejection. Self-ejection, since one has already rejected the world. Is it such a terrible fate? Only if one aspires to the light of fame. There must be those, too, who reign in silence and in darkness. The world is composed of dualities, in the spiritual as well as the physical realm. Evil has just as great a place as good, darkness as light. Shadow and substance always. To the man of God it is the twilight world which is uninhabitable, for this is the realm of confusion. It was in this zone that Nietzsche situated the fallen gods. In this realm neither God nor Satan is recognizable. This is the valley of death which the spirit traverses, the dark interval during which man loses his relation with the cosmos. It is also “the time of the Assassins.” Men no longer vibrate with exaltation; they writhe and squirm with envy and hate. Having no armature they know nothing of ascension; acknowledging no tension, they merely react. The medieval man recognized the Prince of Darkness and paid just homage to the powers of evil, as is evident from the testimony of stone and script. But the man of the Middle Ages also recognized and acknowledged God. His life therefore was keen and rich, it sounded the full gamut. By contrast, the life of the modern man is pale and empty. The terrors he knows exceed any known to the men of previous ages, for he lives in the world of the unreal, surrounded by phantoms. He has not even the possibilities of joy or deliverance which were open to the slaves of the ancient world. He has become the victim of his own inner emptiness; his torments are the torments of sterility. Amiel, who knew the age so well and who was also a “victim” of it, has given us an account of “the sterility of genius.” This is one of the most alarming phrases that man can utter. It means the end is in sight …

  Speaking of the end, I cannot help recalling Amiel’s words when referring to the repugnance which Taine’s style aroused in him. “It excites no feeling whatever; it is simply a means of information. I imagine this kind of thing will be the literature of the future—a literature à l’américaine, as different as possible from Greek art, giving us algebra instead of life, the formula instead of the image, the exhalations of the crucible instead of the divine madness of Apollo. Cold vision will replace the joys of thought, and we shall see the death of poetry, flayed and dissected by science.”

  In the case of a suicide we do not concern ourselves with whether he died a quick or a lingering death, whether his agony was great or little. It is the act which has importance for us, for suddenly we are made to realize that to be and not to be are acts—not intransitive verbs!—which make existence and death synonymous. The act of the suicide always has a detonating effect; it shocks us for a moment into awareness. It makes us realize that we are blind and dead. How typical of our sick-ridden world that the law should view such attempts with hypocritical severity! We don’t want to be reminded of what we have left undone; we cower at the thought that from beyond the grave the finger of the escaped one will be forever pointed at us.

  Rimbaud was a living suicide. All the more unbearable for us! In decency he might have ended it at nineteen, but no, he dragged it out, he made us witness, through the folly of a wasted life, the living death which we are all inflicting upon ourselves. He caricatured his own grandeur, so that we might revile our puny efforts the more. He toiled like a nigger, so that we might revel in the life of slavery which we have adopted. All the qualities which he displayed in the eighteen year struggle with life were qualities which make, as we say today, “for success.” That he should have made of success such a bitter failure was his triumph. It required diabolical courage (even if it was unwitting) to make that proof demonstrable. When we pity the suicide we pity ourselves, really, for lacking the courage to follow his example. We cannot abide too many defections from the ranks—we would be demoralized. What we want are victims of life to keep us company in our misery. We know each other so well, too well; we disgust one another. But we continue to observe the conventional politeness of worms. We try to do it even when we are exterminating one another … Familar words, these, are they not? They will be repeated to us by Lawrence, by Céline, by Malaquais—and by others. And those who use these words will be reviled as renegades, as escapists, as rats who desert the sinking ship. (As if the rats did not show supreme intelligence!) But the ship is sinking, there are no two ways about that. Lawrence tells about it in his war letters, and again in writing of Moby Dick … On va où l’on pèse, declares St. Exupéry in the exalted pages of his Pilote de Guerre.

  We’re on the way, no doubt about that. But where is the Ark which will carry us through the Flood? And of what materials will it be made? As for the chosen ones, they will unquestionably have to be made of different fiber than the men who made this world. We are coming to the end, and it is a catastrophic end which we face. Warnings communicated by word have long ceased to move us. Acts are demanded, suicidal acts perhaps, but acts fraught with meaning.

  Rimbaud’s gesture of renunciation was such an act. It leavened literature. Will it leaven life? I doubt it. I doubt if anything will stem the tide which threatens to engulf us. But there is one thing his coming did achieve—it transformed those of us who are still sentient, still alive to the future, into “arrows of longing for the other shore.”

  The important thing about death, for man, is that he is able to distinguish it from dissolution. Man dies for something, if he dies at all. The order and harmony which sprang from primordial chaos, as the myths tell us, infuse our lives with a purpose which is beyond us, a purpose to which we sacrifice ourselves when we achieve awareness. This sacrifice is made on the altar of creation. What we create with hand and tongue is nothing; it is what we create with our lives that counts. It is only when we make ourselves a part of creation that we begin to live.

  It is not death which challenges us at every step but life. We have honored the death-eaters ad nauseam, but what of those who accept the challenge of life? In what way do we honor these? From Lucifer to Anti-Christ there runs a flame of passion which man will always honor as long as he is mere man; it is against this passion, which is the flame of life, that we must oppose the serene acceptance of the enlightened ones. One must pass through the flame in order to know death and embrace it. The strength of the rebel, who is the Evil One, lies in his inflexibility, but true strength lies in submission which permits one to dedicate his life, through devotion, to something beyond himself. The strength of the one leads to isolation, which is castration, while the strength of the other leads to unification, which is lasting fertility.

  But passion always has its raison d’être, and the passion of the creator, which makes his life on earth a Calvary, has its higher octave in the pass
ion of a Christ who incarnates all human suffering. The poet’s passion is the result of his vision, of his ability to see life in its essence and its wholeness. Once this vision is shattered or deranged, passion dribbles away. In the realm of art we are definitely approaching the end of passion. Though we still turn out productive giants, their works lie like fallen tombstones amidst the still intact, still upright splendors of ancient times. Despite all its powers, society can not sustain the artist if it is impervious to the vision of the artist. For a long time now our society has been thoroughly uninterested in the message of the artist. The voice which goes unheeded eventually becomes silent. For the anarchy of society the artist answers with anaudia. Rimbaud was the first to make the gesture. His example has cast a spell on us. Let us not look for his disciples among the literary figures of our time, let us seek them rather in the obscure, eclipsed ones, among the young who are forced to stifle their genius. Let us look first of all to our own country, America, where the toll is heaviest. In this new form of protest we assist at the destruction of the egg. This is the surest way to undermine the tottering edifice of a rotten society. Its effects are more swift and lasting than the havoc wrought by Super-fortresses. If the poet is to have no place, no share, in the birth of a new order then he will blast it at the very core. This threat is not imaginary, it is actual. It is the prelude to a dance of death more terrible far than that of the Middle Ages.

  The only creative spirits in modern times were the demonic beings; in them was focussed the passion which is dribbling away. They had rediscovered the source of life, that banquet of old at which Rimbaud sought to restore his appetite, but their means of communication were cut off. Men no longer communicate, that is the tragedy of modern times. Society has long since ceased to be a community; it has broken up into aggregations of helpless atoms. That which alone can unite it—the presence and worship of God—is missing.