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Literary Review
TRIBUTE
Thief of fire
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Rimbaud was a poet who pushed the envelope and remained an enigma to others. A profile by TISHANI DOSHI.
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But why regret an eternal sun if we are embarked on the discovery of divine light — far from the people who die with the changing seasons?
Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell)
IN 1871, Arthur Rimbaud put down some thoughts on the future of poetry in a letter to his friend Paul Demeny. "I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer," he wrote in his 16-year-old hand that was about to jolt the world of French poetry forever. "The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses." Rimbaud was talking about the ultimate quest — knowing the self and understanding the soul; he was talking about "exploring all forms of love, suffering and madness, exhausting the poisons and keeping only the quintessences." He believed that the poet was responsible for humanity, and to this end there needed to be a suspension in disbelief, a universal language. To my mind he was looking for rasa, that evanescent element which gives form to formless things, which allows a glimpse into the unknown and a small window of light through which to comprehend it.
Rimbaud then went on to write "Le Bateau Ivre" (The Drunken Boat), possibly the most influential French lyric poem of the 19th Century, which served as his introduction to the famous poet, Paul Verlaine, and his escape ticket from the dreary town of Charleville to the literary circles of Paris. It is fitting that the poem is ultimately about purification by dissolution, because this seems to have been the theme of Rimbaud's life. Rimbaud proceeded to have an affair with Verlaine, move into his house, wreck his marriage, and think of wild jaunts and schemes to quickly deplete the elder poet's source of funds. He wrote poetry that was completely unprecedented and unimaginable for his time, stopped abruptly at the age of 18, vowed never to write again, and ran off to become an explorer/trader in sub-Saharan Africa for the rest of his short life.
Graham Robb, in his excellent biography, Rimbaud, takes us through the poet's life in the manner of one great adventurer following in the footsteps of another. It's a world of western nomads, convicts, and exiles. It's the "time of the assassins" where drunkenness is an intellectual journey and the willingness to cross thresholds is the paramount goal. According to Robb, "The Rimbauldian human being ... is a monster in the shape of a philosophical question mark ... " Rimbaud himself was a highly unsavoury character — his idea of fun was to defecate on the table of his favourite café, the Dead Rat, and proceed to make art impasto out of the result. Equally, he enjoyed endangering the lives of his friends by pouring sulphuric acid into their drinks while they weren't looking, and a past-time that brought him particular delight involved wrapping knives with towels and stabbing Verlaine to near death. Blame it on the desertion of his father or his overbearing mother, but Rimbaud had little faith in family, who he believed were a "claustrophobic enclave of mismatched human beings, beset by stale sexual fantasies, racked with pointless guilt."
Arthur Rimbaud pushed the envelope. In euphemistic language we refer to those artists who tread the line between genius and madness, as people living "ahead of their time." I believe otherwise. I believe Rimbaud was a person from an earlier time, a poet akin to our original seers, the kavis of the Vedas, those prophets who expressed hidden truths through the perceptions of their senses and the movements of the world. Whose modes of seeing were associated with the experience of light, who connected the worlds of the Gods and the humans, and whose words had the power to enlighten because they were timeless and infinite. In Rimbaud's case, it was not merely the possession of an almost divine dhi, or "insight", which he might have spuriously spurred on with the abuse of absinthe, hashish, opium, or some other mind-altering soma. His was a case of questioning the ready-made code of morals that were handed down to him by society, questioning the definitions of obscenity, scraping away the pretensions and restoring purity.
This again, is reminiscent of Tantric sadhakas who follow the left-handed (Vamacara) path of spiritual fulfilment which involves undertaking the panca tattva ritual, partaking of the five forbidden things or "truths": meat, fish, wine, mudra (a particular type of grain that may have had hallucinogenic properties), and illicit sexual intercourse. The idea here is that the distinctions of the things that are pure/ polluting, sacred/ profane, clean/ unclean are artificial human constructs, and that to break bondage with this kind of world, one must confront their fears and release themselves from the inhibitions they create. And so the drunken boat weaves its way through the seas of the world seeing "what men have imagined they saw ... archipelagos of stars!/ and islands whose delirious skies are open to sailors."
This October, Rimbaud would have turned a historic 149-years-old. Unfortunately, he succumbed to a combination of syphilis and a tumour in his knee and died at the age of 37. Rimbaud made the long journey home from Harar to Charleville in order to die. Robb compares the circuitous nature of his travels to his poems, which seem to revolve around non-existent centres. Verlaine called him the man with "soles of wind", yet Rimbaud said, "My life isn't heavy enough, it flies away and floats far above action." For Rimbaud, who coined the phrase, "Je 'est un autre", or "I is somebody else", it was not only possible, but imperative to explore plurality, to accommodate different avatars. He discarded the traditional Western concept of the individual, where "I" was just a single lump of consciousness. "Every being seemed to me entitled to several other lives."
There are huge, undocumented tracts of Rimbaud's life. Most of his documents have been lost or destroyed. He himself did little in the manner of self-promotion, and in his lifetime saw the publication of only one book of verse, Une Saison en Enfer. He remains an enigma to critics and admirers who wonder why he abandoned poetry so completely to hole up in Africa, even as he was becoming something of a legend in the café circles of Paris, the same café circles who originally derided him for his experiments in sadism and depravity. Why did he stop writing? Had he over-indulged his senses, or was he simply too harsh a self-critic, who got tired of stripping down his work to the bare essentials, where images stood alone, without relation to each other, without bowing down to any higher authority. The best part of Robb's biography is that he doesn't separate Rimbaud the poet, from Rimbaud the explorer. He shows his work and life as complimentary parts of the "same dangerous experiment". In his lifetime, Rimbaud was child prodigy, poet, misanthrope, demystifier of bourgeois literature, capitalist trader, explorer, loner. The greatness of Rimbaud lies not in his actions, but in his words. "Large imaginations cannot find their way into small minds," he said of his detractors. The thing to ask ourselves today is what do we need to do in order to inspire new visions. What should we be exploring and how?
Rimbaud remains in my mind as that mystical "thief of fire", crossing physical landscapes of surreal proportions in times fraught with danger. I see him striving to detach his mind from the "mud of memory", oscillating between a touching sense of optimism and a general despair for the human condition. I see him on his pursuit to the "great unmasking of modernity", penning grown-up thoughts on the future of poetry to his friend. The future of poetry remains the same: perceiving the world, speaking the truth.
Tishani Doshi is a poet and dancer. She can be reached at t_doshi@hotmail.com.
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