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

  “We must be absolutely modern,” said Rimbaud, meaning that chimeras are out of date, and superstitions and fetiches and creeds and dogmas and all the cherished drivel and inanity of which our vaunted civilization is composed. We must bring light, not artificial illumination. “Money is depreciating everywhere,” he wrote in one of his letters. That was back in the ’80’s. Today in Europe it has practically no value whatever. What men want is food, shelter, clothing—basic things—not money. The rotten edifice has crumbled before our very eyes, but we are reluctant to believe our eyes. We still hope to be able to do business as usual. We neither realize the damage that has been done nor the possibilities of rebirth. We are using the language of the Old Stone Age. If men cannot grasp the enormity of the present how will they ever be able to think in terms of the future? We have been thinking in terms of the past for several thousand years. Now, at one stroke, that whole mysterious past has been obliterated. There is only the future staring us in the face. It yawns like a gulf. It is terrifying, everyone concedes, even to begin to think what the future holds in store for us. Far more terrifying than the past ever was. In the past the monsters were of human proportions; one could cope with them, if one were heroic enough. Now the monster is invisible; there are billions of them in a grain of dust. I am still using the language of the Old Stone Age, you will notice. I speak as though the atom itself were the monster, as though it exercised the power and not us. This is the sort of deception we have practised on ourselves ever since man began to think. And this, too, is a delusion—to pretend that at some distant point in the past man began to think. Man has not even begun to think. Mentally, he is still on all fours. He is groping about in the mist, his eyes closed, his heart hammering with fear. And what he fears most—God pity him!—is his own image.

  If a single atom contains so much energy, what about man himself in whom there are universes of atoms? If it is energy he worships, why does he not look at himself? If he can conceive, and demonstrate to his own satisfaction, the boundless energy imprisoned in an infinitesimal atom, what then of those Niagaras within him? And what of the earth’s energy, to speak of but another infinitesimal conglomeration of matter? If we are looking for demons to harness, then there is such an infinitude of them that the thought is paralyzing. Or—it is so exalting that men should be running breathlessly from door to door spreading delirium and pandemonium. Only now perhaps can one possibly appreciate the fervor which was Satan’s when he unleashed the forces of evil. Historical man has known nothing of the truly demonic. He has inhabited a shadow world filled with faint reverberations only. The issue between good and evil was decided long ago. Evil belongs to the phantom world, the world of make-believe. Death to the chimeras! Aye, but they were slain long ago. Man was given second sight that he might see through and beyond the world of phantasmagoria. The only effort demanded of him is that he open the eyes of his soul, that he gaze into the heart of reality and not flounder about in the realm of illusion and delusion.

  There is one subtle change I feel compelled to make, in connection with the interpretation of Rimbaud’s life, and this concerns the element of fate. It was his destiny to be the electrifying poet of our age, the symbol of the disruptive forces which are now making themselves manifest. It was his fate, I used to think, to be ensnared into a life of action in which he would end ingloriously. When he said that his fate depended on the “Saison,” he meant, I assume, that it would decide the course of his future actions, and, as now seems clear, it most certainly did. We may think, if we like, that in writing it he stood so clearly revealed to himself that he no longer had need for expression on the level of art. As poet he had said all he possibly could say. We imagine that he was aware of this and consequently turned his back on art deliberately. Some men have referred to the second half of his life as a sort of Rip Van Winkle sleep; it is not the first time that an artist has gone to sleep on the world. Paul Valéry, who leaps to mind immediately, did something of the sort when he deserted the realm of poetry for mathematics for a period of twenty years or so. Usually there has been a return, or an awakening. In Rimbaud’s case the awakening was in death. The little light which flickered out with his demise grew in power and intensity as the fact of his death became more largely known. He has lived more wondrously and vividly since he departed this earth than he ever did in life. One wonders, had he come back in this life, what sort of poetry he would have written, what his message would have been. It was as though, cut off in the prime of manhood, he was cheated of that final phase of development which permits a man to harmonize his warring selves. Operating under a curse for the major part of his life, fighting with all his powers to find egress into the clear, open spaces of his being, he is beaten to earth for the last time just when one feels that the clouds were lifting. The feverishness of his activity bespeaks the consciousness of a short life, as in the case of D. H. Lawrence and others. If one asks whether such men realized themselves to the fullest one is inclined to reply in the affirmative. Yet they were not permitted to run full cycle; if we are to be fair to them, this unlived future must be taken into consideration. I have said it of Lawrence, and I will say it of Rimbaud, that had they been granted another thirty years of life, they would have sung a different tune entirely. They were at one with their destiny always; it was their fate which betrayed them and which is apt to deceive us in examining their deeds and motives.

  Rimbaud, as I see him, was par excellence an evolving type. The evolution he went through in the first half of his life is no more amazing than the evolution of the second half. It is we, perhaps, who are unaware of the glorious phase he was preparing to enter. He sinks below our horizon on the eve of another great change, at the beginning of a fruitful period when the poet and the man of action were about to fuse. We see him expiring as a defeated man; we have no perception of the rewards which his years of worldly experience were storing up for him. We see two opposite types of being united in one man; we see the conflict but not the potential harmony or resolution. Only those who are interested in the significance of his life will permit themselves to dally with such speculations. Yet the only purpose in going to the life of a great personality, of studying it in conjunction with his work, is to bring forth what is hidden and obscure, what was uncompleted, as it were. To speak of the real Lawrence or the real Rimbaud is to make cognizant the fact that there is an unknown Lawrence, an unknown Rimbaud. There would be no controversy about such figures had they been able to reveal themselves utterly. It is curious to note in this connection that it is precisely the men who deal in revelations—self-revelations—about whom there is the greatest mystery. Such individuals seem to be born into the world struggling to express what is most secret in their nature. That there is a secret which gnaws them is hardly a matter of doubt. One need not be “occult” to be aware of the difference between their problems and other eminent men’s, as well as their approach to these problems. These men are deeply allied to the spirit of the times, to those underlying problems which beset the age and give it its character and tone. They are always dual, apparently, and for a good reason, since they incarnate the old and the new together. It is for this reason that more time, more detachment, is required to appreciate and evaluate them than their contemporaries however illustrious. These men have their roots in that very future which disturbs us so profoundly. They have two rhythms, two faces, two interpretations. They are integrated to transition, to flux. Wise in a new way, their language seems cryptic to us, if not foolish or contradictory.

  In one of the poems Rimbaud makes mention of that gnawing secret I refer to:

  “Hydre intime, sans gueules,

  Qui mine et désole.”

  It was an affliction which poisoned him both at the zenith and the nadir of his being. In him sun and moon were both strong, and both eclipsed. (“Toute lune est atroce et tout soleil amer.”) The very core of his being was corroded; it spread, like the cancer which attacked his knee. His life as a poet, which was the lunar
phase of his evolution, reveals the same quality of eclipse as his later life of adventurer and man of action, which was the solar phase. Narrowly escaping madness in his youth, he escaped it once again upon his death. The only solution possible for him, had he not been cut off by death, was the contemplative life, the mystic way. It is my belief that his thirty-seven years were a preparation for such a way of life.

  Why do I permit myself to speak of this unfinished part of his life with such certitude? Because once again I see analogies to my own life, my own development. Had I died at the age Rimbaud died, what would be known of my purpose, my efforts? Nothing. I would have been regarded as a rank failure. I had to wait until my forty-third year to see my first book published. It is a fateful event for me, comparable in every way to the publication of the “Saison.” With its advent a long cycle of frustration and defeat comes to an end. For me it might also be styled “my nigger book.” It is the last word in despair, revolt and malediction. It is also prophetic and healing, not only for my readers but for me too. It has that saving quality of art which so often distinguishes those books which break with the past. It enabled me to close the door on the past and re-enter it by the back door. The gnawing secret continues to eat me away, but now it is “the open secret,” and I can cope with it.

  And what is the nature of this secret? I can only say that it has to do with the mothers. I feel that it was the same with Lawrence and with Rimbaud. All the rebelliousness which I share with them derives from this problem which, as nearly as I can express it, means the search for one’s true link with humanity. One finds it neither in the personal life nor in the collective life, if one is of this type. One is unadaptable to the point of madness. One longs to find his peer, but one is surrounded by vast empty spaces. One needs a teacher, but one lacks the humility, the flexibility, the patience which is demanded. One is not even at home or at ease with the great in spirit; even the highest are defective or suspect. And yet one has affinities only with these highest types. It is a dilemma of the first magnitude, a dilemma fraught with the highest significance. One has to establish the ultimate difference of his own peculiar being and doing so discover his kinship with all humanity, even the very lowest. Acceptance is the key word. But acceptance is precisely the great stumbling block. It has to be total acceptance and not conformity.

  What makes it so difficult for this type to accept the world? The fact, as I see it now, that in early life the whole dark side of life, and of one’s own being, of course, had been suppressed, so thoroughly repressed as to be unrecognizable. Not to have rejected this dark side of being would have meant, so one unconsciously reasons with himself, a loss of individuality, loss of freedom even more. Freedom is bound up with differentiation. Salvation here means only the preservation of one’s unique identity in a world tending to make every one and every thing alike. This is the root of the fear. Rimbaud stressed the fact that he wanted liberty in salvation. But one is saved only by surrendering this illusory freedom. The liberty he demanded was freedom for his ego to assert itself unrestrained. That is not freedom. Under this illusion one can, if one lives long enough, play out every facet of one’s being and still find cause to complain, ground to rebel. It is a kind of liberty which grants one the right to object, to secede if necessary. It does not take into account other people’s differences, only one’s own. It will never aid one to find one’s link, one’s communion, with all mankind. One remains forever separate, forever isolate.

  All this has but one meaning for me—that one is still bound to the mother. All one’s rebellion was but dust in the eye, the frantic attempt to conceal this bondage. Men of this stamp are always against their native land—impossible to be otherwise. Enslavement is the great bugaboo, whether it be to country, church or society. Their lives are spent in breaking fetters, but the secret bondage gnaws at their vitals and gives them no rest. They must come to terms with the mother before they can rid themselves of the obsession of fetters. “Outside! Forever outside! Sitting on the doorstep of the mother’s womb.” I believe those are my own words, in Black Spring, a golden period when I was almost in possession of the secret. No wonder one is alienated from the mother. One does not notice her, except as an obstacle. One wants the comfort and security of her womb, that darkness and ease which for the unborn is the equivalent of illumination and acceptance for the truly born. Society is made up of closed doors, of taboos, laws, repressions and suppressions. One has no way of getting to grips with those elements which make up society and through which one must work if one is ever to establish a true society. It is a perpetual dance on the edge of the crater. One may be acclaimed as a great rebel, but one will never be loved. And for the rebel above all men it is necessary to know love, to give it even more than to receive it, and to be it even more than to give it.

  Once I wrote an essay called “The Enormous Womb.” In this essay I conceived the world itself as a womb, as the place of creation. This was a valiant and a valid effort toward acceptance. It was a harbinger of a more genuine acceptance which was shortly to follow, an acceptance which I realized with my whole being. But this attitude, of regarding the world itself as womb and creation, was not a pleasant one to other rebels. It only alienated me still more. When the rebel falls out with the rebel, as he usually does, it is like the ground giving way beneath one’s feet. Rimbaud experienced that sinking feeling during the Commune. The professional rebel finds it difficult to swallow such an attitude. He has an ugly name for it: treason. But it is just this treasonable nature in the rebel which differentiates him from the herd. He is treasonable and sacrilegious always, if not in the letter then in the spirit. He is a traitor at heart because he fears the humanity in him which would unite him with his fellow man; he is an iconoclast because, revering the image too greatly, he comes to fear it. What he wants above all is his common humanity, his powers of adoration and reverence. He is sick of standing alone; he does not want to be forever a fish out of water. He cannot live with his ideals unless these ideals are shared, but how can he communicate his ideas and ideals if he does not speak the same language as his fellow man? How can he win them if he does not know love? How can he persuade them to build if his whole life is spent in destroying?

  Upon what foundation is unrest built? The “hydre intime” eats away until even the core of one’s being becomes sawdust and the whole body, one’s own and the world’s, is like unto a temple of desolation. “Rien de rien ne m’illusionne!” cried Rimbaud. Yet his whole life was nothing but a grand illusion. The true reality of his being he never uncovered, never came to grips with. Reality was the mask which he struggled with fierce claws to rip away. In him was a thirst unquenchable.

  “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 grapp
le 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.