The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud Read online

  Yes, what a malediction! I think of my own return to New York, an enforced return also, after ten years abroad. I had left America with ten dollars which I borrowed at the last moment before catching the boat; I returned without a cent, borrowing the money for the cabman from the hotel clerk who, seeing my trunk and valises, assumed I would have the money to pay for my hotel bill. The first thing I have to do, on arriving “home,” is to telephone some one for a little money. Unlike Rimbaud, I have no belt full of gold hidden under the bed; but I still have two good legs, and in the morning, if help does not arrive during the night, I shall begin walking uptown in search of a friendly face again. In those ten years abroad I too had worked like a demon; I had earned the right to live comfortably for a year or so. But the war intervened, smashed everything, just as the intrigues of the European powers had blighted Rimbaud’s chances in Somaliland. How familiar sounds a passage from a letter dated Aden, January 1888 … “Tous les gouvernements sont venus engloutir des millions (et même en somme quelques milliards) sur toutes ces côtes maudites, désolées, où les indigènes errent des mois sans vivres et sans eau, sous le climat le plus effroyable du globe; et tous ces millions qu’on a jetés dans le ventre des bédouins n’ont rien rapporté que les guerres, les désastres de tous genres!”

  What a faithful picture this is of our dear governments! Always seeking to gain a foothold in some ungodly place, always suppressing or exterminating the natives, always clinging to their ill-gotten gains, defending their possessions, their colonies, with army and navy. For the biggest ones the world is not big enough. For the little ones who need room, pious words and veiled threats. The earth belongs to the strong, to those with the biggest armies and navies, to those who wield the economic big stick. How ironical that the solitary poet who ran to the end of the world in order to eke out a miserable living should have to sit with hands folded and watch the big powers make a mess of things in his own garden.

  “Yes, the end of the world … Advance, advance always! Now begins the great adventure …” But as fast as you advance, the government is there ahead of you, with restrictions, with shackles and manacles, with poison gases, tanks and stink bombs. Rimbaud the poet sets himself to teaching the Harari boys and girls the Koran in their own language. The governments would sell them in slavery. “There is some destruction that is necessary,” he wrote once, and what a fuss has been made over that simple statement! He was speaking then of the destruction incidental to creation. But governments destroy without the slightest excuse, and certainly with never a thought of creation. What Rimbaud the poet desired was to see the old forms go, in life as well as in literature. What governments desire is to preserve the status quo, no matter how much slaughter and destruction it entails. Some of his biographers, in describing his behavior as a youth, make him out to be a very bad boy; he did such nasty things, don’t you know. But when it comes to appraising the activities of their dear governments, particularly with regard to those shady intrigues which Rimbaud inveighed against, they are all honey and whitewash. When they want to castigate him as the adventurer, they speak of what a great poet he was; when they want to subjugate him as a poet they speak of his chaos and rebelliousness. They are aghast when the poet imitates their plunderers and exploiters, and they are horrified when he shows no concern for money or for the monotonous, irksome life of the ordinary citizen. As a Bohemian he is too Bohemian, as a poet too poetical, as a pioneer too pioneering, as a man of affairs too much the man of affairs, as a gunrunner too clever a gunrunner, and so on and so forth. Whatever he did, he did too well, that seems to be the complaint against him. The pity is that he didn’t become a politician. He would have done the job so well that Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, to say nothing of Churchill and Roosevelt, would seem like mountebanks today. I don’t think he would have brought about quite the destruction which these estimable leaders visited upon the world. He would have kept something up his sleeve for a rainy day, so to speak. He would not have shot his bolt. He would not have lost track of the goal, as our brilliant leaders seem to have done. No matter what a fiasco he made of his own life, oddly enough I believe that if he had been given the chance he would have made the world a better place to live in. I believe that the dreamer, no matter how impractical he may appear to the man in the street, is a thousand times more capable, more efficient, than the so-called statesman. All those incredible projects which Rimbaud envisaged putting into effect, and which were frustrated for one reason or another, have since been realized in some degree. He thought of them too soon, that was all. He saw far beyond the hopes and dreams of ordinary men and statesmen alike. He lacked the support of those very people who delight in accusing him of being the dreamer, the people who dream only when they fall asleep, never with eyes wide-open. For the dreamer who stands in the very midst of reality all proceeds too slowly, too lumberingly—even destruction.

  “He will never be satisfied,” writes one biographer. “Under his weary glance all flowers fade, all stars pale.” Yes, there is a grain of truth in this. I know became I suffer from the same disease. But, if one has dreamed an empire, the empire of man, and if one dares to reflect at what a snail’s pace men are advancing toward the realization of this dream, it is quite possible that what are called the activities of man pale to insignificance. I don’t believe for a minute that the flowers ever faded or the stars were ever dimmed in Rimbaud’s eyes. I think that with these the core of his being always maintained a direct and fervid communication. It was in the world of men that his weary glance saw things pale and fade. He began by wanting to “see all, feel all, exhaust everything, explore everything, say everything.” It was not long before he felt the bit in his mouth, the spurs in his flanks, the lash on his back. Let a man but dress differently from his fellow creatures and he becomes an object of scorn and ridicule. The only law which is really lived up to whole-heartedly and with a vengeance is the law of conformity. No wonder that as a mere lad he ended “by finding the disorder of his mind sacred.” At this point he had really made himself a seer. He found, however, that he was regarded as a clown and a mountebank. He had the choice of fighting for the rest of his life to hold the ground he had gained or to renounce the struggle utterly. Why could he not have compromised? Because compromise was not in his vocabulary. He was a fanatic from childhood, a person who had to go the whole hog or die. In this lies his purity, his innocence.

  In all this I rediscover my own plight. I have never relinquished the struggle. But what a price I have paid! I have had to wage guerilla warfare, that hopeless struggle which is born only of desperation. The work I set out to write has not yet been written, or only partially. Just to raise my voice, to speak in my own fashion, I have had to fight every inch of the way. The song has almost been forgotten for the fight. Talk of the weary glance under which flowers fade and stars pale! My glance has become positively corrosive: it is only a miracle that under my pitiless gaze they are not blasted away. So much for the core of my being. As for the superficies, well, the outward man has gradually learned to accommodate himself to the ways of the world. He can be in it without being of it. He can be kind, gentle, charitable, hospitable. Why not? “The real problem,” as Rimbaud pointed out, “is to make the soul monstrous.” That is to say, not hideous but prodigious! What is the meaning of monstrous? According to the dictionary, “any organized form of life greatly malformed either by the lack, excess, misplacement or distortion of parts or organs; hence, anything hideous or abnormal, or made up of inconsistent parts or characters, whether repulsive or not.” The root is from the Latin verb moneo, to warn. In mythology we recognize the monstrous under the form of the harpy, the gorgon, the sphinx, the centaur, the dryad, the mermaid. They are all prodigies, which is the essential meaning of the word. They have upset the norm, the balance. What does this signify if not the fear of the little man. Timid souls always see monsters in their path, whether these be called hippogriffs or Hitlerians. Man’s greatest dread is the expansion of consciousness. Al
l the fearsome, gruesome part of mythology stems from this fear. “Let us live in peace and harmony!” begs the little man. But the law of the universe dictates that peace and harmony can only be won by inner struggle. The little man does not want to pay the price for that kind of peace and harmony; he wants it ready-made, like a suit of manufactured clothes.

  There are obsessive, repetitive words which a writer uses which are more revealing than all the facts which are amassed by patient biographers. Here are a few that we come across in Rimbaud’s work: éternité, infini, charité, solitude, angoisse, lumière, aube, soleil, amour, beauté, inouï, pitié, démon, ange, ivresse, paradis, enfer, ennui….

  These are the warp and woof of his inner pattern; they tell us of his innocence, his hunger, his restlessness, his fanaticism, his intolerance, his absolutism. His god was Baudelaire who had plumbed the depths of evil. I have remarked before, and it is worth repeating, that the whole nineteenth century was tormented with the question of God. Outwardly it seems like a century given up to material progress, a century of discoveries and inventions, all pertaining to the physical world. At the core, however, where the artists and thinkers are always anchored, we observe a profound disturbance. Rimbaud epitomizes the conflict in a few pages. And, as if that were not enough, he impresses on his whole life the same enigmatic cast which characterizes the epoch. He is more truly the man of his time than were Goethe, Shelley, Blake, Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, Dostoievsky. He is split from top to toe in every realm of his being. He faces two ways always. He is torn apart, racked by the wheel of time. He is the victim and the executioner: when you speak his name you have the time, the place and the event. Now that we have succeeded in breaking down the atom the cosmos is split wide open. Now we face in every direction at once. We have arrived, possessed of a power which even the gods of old could not wield. We are there, before the gates of hell. Will we storm the gates, burst hell itself wide open? I believe we will. I think that the task of the future is to explore the domain of evil until not a shred of mystery is left. We shall discover the bitter roots of beauty, accept root and flower, leaf and bud. We can no longer resist evil: we must accept.

  When he was writing his “nigger book” (Une Saison en Enfer), Rimbaud is said to have declared: “My fate depends on this book!” How profoundly true that statement was not even Rimbaud himself knew. As we begin to realize our own tragic fate, we begin to perceive what he meant. He had identified his fate with that of the most crucial epoch known to man. Either, like him, we are going to renounce all that our civilization has stood for thus far, and attempt to build afresh, or we are going to destroy it with our own hands. When the poet stands at nadir the world must indeed be upside down. If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch. On the poetic corpse of Rimbaud we have begun erecting a tower of Babel. It means nothing that we still have poets, or that some of them are still intelligible, still able to communicate with the mob. What is the trend of poetry and where is the link between poet and audience? What is the message? Let us ask that above all. Whose voice is it that now makes itself heard, the poet’s or the scientist’s? Are we thinking of Beauty, however bitter, or are we thinking of atomic energy? And what is the chief emotion which our great discoveries now inspire? Dread! We have knowledge without wisdom, comfort without security, belief without faith. The poetry of life is expressed only in terms of the mathematical, the physical, the chemical. The poet is a pariah, an anomaly. He is on the way to extinction. Who cares now how monstrous he makes himself? The monster is at large, roaming the world. He has escaped from the laboratory; he is at the service of any one who has the courage to employ him. The world has indeed become number. The moral dichotomy, like all dichotomies, has broken down. This is the period of flux and hazard; the great drift has set in.

  And fools are talking about reparations, inquisitions, retribution, about alignments and coalitions, about free trade and economic stabilization and rehabilitation. No one believes in his heart that the world situation can be righted. Everyone is waiting for the great event, the only event which preoccupies us night and day: the next war. We have unsettled everything; no one knows how or where to reach for the control. The brakes are still there, but will they work? We know they won’t. No, the demon has broken loose. The age of electricity is as far behind us as the Stone Age. This is the Age of Power, power pare and simple. Now it is either heaven or hell, no in between is possible any longer. And by all indications we will choose hell. When the poet lives his hell, it is no longer possible for the common man to escape it. Did I call Rimbaud a renegade? We are all renegades. We have been reneging since the dawn of time. Fate at last is catching up with us. We are going to have our Season in Hell, every man, woman and child identified with this civilization. This is what we have been begging for, and now it is here. Aden will seem like a comfortable place. In Rimbaud’s time it was still possible to leave Aden for Harar, but fifty years from now the earth itself will be one vast crater. Despite the denials of the men of science, the power we now have in our hands is radioactive, is permanently destructive. We have never thought of power in terms of good, only in terms of evil. There is nothing mysterious about the energies of the atom; the mystery is in men’s hearts. The discovery of atomic energy is synchronous with the discovery that we can never trust one another again. There lies the fatality—in this hydra-headed fear which no bomb can destroy. The real renegade is the man who has lost faith in his fellowman. Today the loss of faith is universal. Here God himself is powerless. We have put our faith in the bomb, and it is the bomb which will answer our prayers.

  What a shock it is for the poet to discover that Rimbaud renounced his calling! It is like saying that he renounced Love. Whatever the motive, certainly the paramount drive was loss of faith. The consternation of the poet, his feeling of betrayal and deception, is paralleled by the reaction of the scientist when he discovers the use to which his inventions are put. One is tempted to compare Rimbaud’s act of renunciation with the release of the atomic bomb. The repercussions, though more wide-spread in the latter case, are not more profound. The heart registers a shock before the rest of the body. It takes time for doom to spread throughout the corpus of civilization. But when Rimbaud walked out the back door, doom had already announced itself.

  How right I was to put off the true discovery of Rimbaud! If I draw entirely different conclusions from other poets about his appearance and manifestations on earth, it is in the same spirit that the saints drew extraordinary conclusions about the coming of Christ. Either such things are signal events in the history of man or the art of interpretation is a bogus one. That we shall all live one day as did Christ I have not the slightest doubt. That we shall all deny our individuality first, I have no doubt about either. We have reached the ultimate point of egotism, the atomic state of being. There we go to smash. We are preparing now for the death of the little self in order that the real self may emerge. Unwittingly and unconsciously we have made the world one, but one in nullity. We must go through a collective death in order to emerge as genuine individuals. If it is true, as Lautréamont said, that “poetry must be made by all,” then we must find a new language in which one heart will speak to another without intermediation. Our appeal to one another must be as direct and instantaneous as is the man of God’s to God. The poet today is obliged to surrender his calling because he has already evinced his despair, because he has already acknowledged his inability to communicate. To be a poet was once the highest calling; today it is the most futile one. It is so not because the world is immune to the poet’s pleading, but because the poet himself no longer believes in his divine mission. He has been singing off-key now for a century or more; at last we can no longer tune in. The screech of the bomb still makes sense to us, but the ravings of the poet seem like gibberish. And it is gibberish if, out of two billion people who make up the world, only a few thousand pretend to understand what the individual poet is saying. The cult of art reac
hes its end when it exists only for a precious handful of men and women. Then it is no longer art but the cipher language of a secret society for the propagation of meaningless individuality. Art is something which stirs men’s passions, which gives vision, lucidity, courage and faith. Has any artist in words of recent years stirred the world as did Hitler? Has any poem shocked the world as did the atomic bomb recently? Not since the coming of Christ have we seen such vistas unfolding, multiplying daily. What weapons has the poet compared to these? Or what dreams? Where now is his vaunted imagination? Reality is here before our very eyes, stark naked, but where is the song to announce it? Is there a poet of even the fifth magnitude visible? I see none. I do not call poets those who make verses, rhymed or unrhymed. I call that man poet who is capable of profoundly altering the world. If there be such a poet living in our midst, let him declare himself. Let him raise his voice! But it will have to be a voice which can drown the roar of the bomb. He will have to use a language which melts men’s hearts, which makes the blood bubble.

  If the mission of poetry is to awaken, we ought to have been awakened long ago. Some have been awakened, there is no denying that. But now all men have to be awakened—and immediately—or we perish. But man will never perish, depend on that. It is a culture, a civilization, a way of life which will perish. When these dead awaken, as they will, poetry will be the very stuff of life. We can afford to lose the poet if we are to preserve poetry itself. It does not require paper and ink to create poetry or to disseminate it. Primitive peoples on the whole are poets of action, poets of life. They are still making poetry, though it moves us not. Were we alive to the poetic, we would not be immune to their way of life: we would have incorporated their poetry in ours, we would have infused our lives with the beauty which permeates theirs. The poetry of the civilized man has always been exclusive, esoteric. It has brought about its own demise.