The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud (6 page)

“Légendes ni figures
Ne me désaltèrent.”

No, nothing could quench his thirst. The fever was in his vitals where the secret gnawed and gnawed. His spirit reveals itself from the amniotic depths, where, like a drunken boat, he tosses on the sea of his poems. Wherever the light penetrates it wounds. Each message from the bright world of spirit creates a fissure in the wall of the tomb. He lives in an ancestral refuge which crumbles with exposure to the light of day. With all that was elemental he was at home; he was a throwback, an archaic figure, more French than any Frenchman yet an alien in their midst. Everything that had been reared in the light of common effort he rejected. His memory, which embraces the time of the Cathedrals, the time of the Crusades, is a race memory. It is almost as though birth had failed to individualize him. He comes into the world equipped like a Saracen. He has another code, another principle of action, another world view. He is a primitive endowed with all the noblesse of ancient lineage. He is super in every way, the better to conceal his minus side. He is that differentiated being, the prodigy, born of human flesh and blood but suckled by the wolves. No analytic jargon will ever explain the monster. We know what he failed to do, but what he should have done, in order to be true to his being, who can say? We have to revise the laws of understanding in order to grapple with such an enigma.

Men are being thrown up now who will force us to alter our methods of perception. That ancient refuge in which Rimbaud lived with his secret is fast crumbling. Every discordant figure will soon be forced into the open; there are no hiding places left any more. In the common plight the bizarre figure with his mysterious malady will be routed from his unique trench. The entire world of men and women is being rounded up, brought before the bars of justice. What matter if some rare spirits were ill at ease, maladjusted, distilling perfume from their sufferings? Now the race as a whole is preparing to suffer the great ordeal. With the great event almost upon us the reading of the glyphs becomes more than ever important, more than ever exciting. Soon, and most abruptly, we shall all be swimming breast to breast, the seer as well as the common man. A world totally new, a world awesome and forbidding, is at our door. We shall awaken one day to look out upon a scene beyond all comprehending. The poets and seers have been announcing that new world for generations, but we have refused to believe them. We of the fixed stars have rejected the message of the wanderers in the sky. We have regarded them as dead planets, as fugitive ghosts, as the survivors of long forgotten catastrophes.

How like the wanderers of the heavens are the poets! Do they not, like the planets, seem to be in communication with other worlds? Do they not tell us of things to come as well as of things long past, buried in the racial memory of man? What better significance can we give to their fugitive stay on earth than that of emissaries from another world? We live amidst dead fact whereas they live in signs and symbols. Their longings coincide with ours only when we approach perihelion. They are trying to detach us from our moorings; they urge us to fly with them on the wings of the spirit. They are always announcing the advent of things to come and we crucify them because we live in dread of the unknown. In the poet the springs of action are hidden. A more highly evolved type than the rest of the species—and here by “poet” I mean all those who dwell in the spirit and the imagination—he is allowed only the same period of gestation as other men. He has to continue his gestation after birth. The world he will inhabit is not the same as ours; it resembles ours only insofar as our world may be said to resemble that of the Cro-Magnon man. His apprehension of things is similar to that of a man from a fourth-dimensional world living in one of three dimensions. He is in our world but not of it; his allegiance is elsewhere. It is his mission to seduce us, to render intolerable this limited world which bounds us. But only those are capable of following the call who have lived through their three-dimensional world, have lived out its possibilities.

The signs and symbols which the poet employs are one of the surest proofs that language is a means of dealing with the unutterable and the inscrutable. As soon as the symbols become communicable on every level they lose their validity and effectiveness. To ask the poet to speak the language of the man in the street is like expecting the prophet to make clear his predictions. That which speaks to us from higher, more distant, realms comes clothed in secrecy and mystery. That which is being constantly expanded and elaborated through explication—in short, the conceptual world—is at the same time being compressed, tightened up, through the use of the stenographic calligraphy of symbols. We can never explain except in terms of new conundrums. What belongs to the realm of spirit, or the eternal, evades all explanation. The language of the poet is asymptotic; it runs parallel to the inner voice when the latter approaches the infinitude of spirit. It is through this inner register that the man without language, so to speak, is in communication with the poet. There is no question of verbal education involved but one of spiritual development. The purity of Rimbaud is nowhere more apparent than in this uncompromising pitch which he maintained throughout his work. He is understood by the most diverse types, as well as misunderstood by the most diverse types. His imitators can be detected immediately. He has nothing in common with the school of symbolists. Nor has he anything in common with the surrealists, as far as I can see. He is the father of many schools and the parent of none. It is his unique use of the symbol which is the warrant of his genius. This symbology was forged in blood and anguish. It was at once a protest and a circumvention of the dismal spread of knowledge which threatened to stifle the source of the spirit. It was also a window opening upon a world of vastly more complex relations for which the old sign language no longer served. Here he is closer to the mathematician and the scientist than to the poet of our time. Unlike our latter-day poets, be it noted, he did
not
make use of the symbols used by the mathematician and the scientists. His language is the language of the spirit, not of weights, measures and abstract relations. In this alone he revealed how absolutely “modern” he was.

Here I should like to amplify a point I touched on earlier, the matter of communication between poet and audience. In applauding Rimbaud’s use of the symbol I mean to emphasize that in this direction lies the true trend of the poet. There is a vast difference, in my mind, between the use of a more symbolic script and the use of a more highly personal jargon which I referred to as “gibberish.” The modern poet seems to turn his back on his audience, as if he held it in contempt. In self-defense he will sometimes liken himself to the mathematician or the physicist who has now come to employ a sign language wholly beyond the comprehension of most educated people, an esoteric language understandable only to the members of his own cult. He seems to forget that he has a totally different function than these men who deal with the physical or the abstract world. His medium is the spirit and his relation to the world of men and women is a vital one. His language is not for the laboratory but for the recesses of the heart. If he renounces the power to move us his medium becomes worthless. The place of renewal is the heart, and there the poet must anchor himself. The scientist, on the other hand, is utterly concerned with the world of illusion, the physical world in which things are
made to happen
. He is already a victim of the powers he once hoped to exploit. His day is coming to a close. The poet will never quite find himself in this position. He would not be a poet in the first place if his instinct for life were as perverted as the scientist’s. But the danger which menaces him is the abrogation of his powers; by betraying his trust he is surrendering the destinies of countless human beings to the control of worldly individuals whose sole aim is their own personal aggrandizement. The abdication of Rimbaud is of another caliber from the self-liquidation of the contemporary poet. Rimbaud refused to become something other than he was, in his office as poet, in order to survive. Our poets are jealous of the name but show no disposition to accept the responsibility of their office. They have not
proved
themselves poets; they are content simply to call themselves such. They are writing not for a world which hangs on their every word but for one another. They justify their impotence by deliberately making themselves unintelligible. They are locked in their glorified little egos; they hold themselves aloof from the world for fear of being shattered at the first contact. They are not even personal, when one gets right down to it, for if they were we might understand their torment and delirium, such as it is. They have made themselves as abstract as the problems of the physicist. Theirs is a womblike yearning for a world of pure poetry in which the effort to communicate is reduced to zero.
*

When I think of those other great spirits who were contemporaneous with Rimbaud—men like Nietzsche, Strindberg, Dostoievsky—when I think of the anguish they suffered, an ordeal beyond anything our men of genius have had to endure, I begin to think that the latter half of the nineteenth century was one of the most accursed periods in history. Of that band of martyrs, all of them filled with premonitions of the future, the one whose tragedy most closely approaches Rimbaud’s is Van Gogh. Born a year ahead of Rimbaud he dies by his own hand at almost the same age. Like Rimbaud, he too had an adamant will, an almost superhuman courage, an extraordinary energy and perseverance, all of which enabled him to fight against insuperable odds. But as with Rimbaud, the struggle exhausts him in the prime of life; he is laid low at the height of his powers.

The wanderings, the changes of occupation, the vicissitudes, the frustrations and humiliations, the cloud of unknowingness which surrounded them, all these factors common to both their lives, make them stand out like ill-fated twins. Their lives are among the very saddest we have record of in modern times. No man can read Van Gogh’s letters without breaking down time and again. The great difference between them, however, is in the fact that Van Gogh’s life inspires. Shortly after Van Gogh’s death Dr. Gachet, who understood his patient profoundly, wrote to Vincent’s brother, Theo: “The word love of art is not exact, one must call it
faith
, a faith to which Vincent fell a martyr!” This is the element which seems to be entirely missing in Rimbaud—faith, whether in God, man or art. It is the absence of this which makes his life seem gray and at times pure black. Nevertheless, the similarities of temperament between the two men are most numerous and striking. The greatest bond between them is the purity of their art. The measure of this purity is given in terms of suffering. With the turn of the century this sort of anguish seems no longer possible. We enter a new climate, not a better one necessarily, but one in which the artist becomes more callous, more indifferent. Whoever now experiences anything approaching that sort of agony, and registers it, is branded as “an incurable romantic.” One is not expected to
feel
that way any longer.

In July 1880, Van Gogh wrote to his brother one of those letters which goes to the heart of things, a letter that draws blood. In reading it one is reminded of Rimbaud. Often in their letters there is an identity of utterance which is striking. Never are they more united than when they are defending themselves against unjust accusations. In this particular letter Van Gogh is defending himself against the aspersion of idleness. He describes in detail two kinds of idleness, the evil sort and the profitable sort. It is a veritable sermon on the subject, and worth returning to again and again. In one part of this letter we hear the echo of Rimbaud’s very words … “So you must not think that I disavow things,” he writes. “I am rather faithful in my unfaithfulness, and though changed, I am the same, and my only anxiety is: how can I be of use in the world, cannot I serve some purpose and be of any good, how can I learn more and study profoundly certain subjects? You see, that is what preoccupies me constantly, and then I feel myself imprisoned by poverty, excluded from participating in certain work, and certain necessary things are beyond my reach. That is one reason for not being without melancholy, and then one feels an emptiness where there might be friendship and strong and serious affections, and one feels a terrible discouragement gnawing at one’s very moral energy, and fate seems to put a barrier to the instincts of affection, and a flood of disgust rises to choke one. And one exclaims: ‘How long, my God!’”

Then he goes on to differentiate between the man who is idle from laziness, from lack of character, from the baseness of his nature, and the other sort of idle man who is idle in spite of himself, who is inwardly consumed by a great longing for action, who does nothing because it is impossible for him to do anything, and so on. He draws a picture of the bird in the gilded cage. And then he adds—pathetic, heart-rending, fateful words—: “And men are often prevented by circumstances from doing things, a prisoner in I do not know what horrible, horrible, most horrible cage. There is also, I know it, the deliverance, the tardy deliverance. A just or unjustly ruined reputation, poverty, fatal circumstances, adversity, that is what it is that keeps us shut in, confines us, seems to bury us, but, however, one feels certain barriers, certain gates, certain walls. Is all this imagination, fantasy? I do not think so. And then one asks: ‘My God! is it for long, is it for ever, is it for eternity?’ Do you know what frees one from this captivity? It is every deep, serious affection. Being friends, being brothers, love, that is what opens the prison by supreme power, by some magic force. But without this one remains in prison. There where sympathy is renewed, life is restored.”