“Repose and vertigo, in diluvial light, In terrible evenings of study.”
"Come, dear great soul. We summon you, we await you." The French poet Paul Verlaine wrote these tempting words in response to Arthur Rimbaud's (October 20, 1854 – November 10, 1891) poetry.
What began as a promise for Rimbaud to join an existence of art and art creation turned into a tumultuous affair between these two men that lasted until Rimbaud's premature death.
Arthur Rimbaud in New York," by David Wojnarowicz, 1978–79. Their tension was professional and personal.
When American photographer and artist Robert Mapplethorpe confessed to Patti Smith he was gay, her immediate reaction was to invoke a superficial understanding built by her reading of Rimbaud, "who regretted to the end of his life that he could not find a woman with whom he could share his full being, both physically and intellectually."
The most acute agony of existence is captured in Rimbaud's Illuminations, where he claims an existence in "repose and vertigo" simultaneously.
Motion
The swaying motion on the bank above the falls,
The chasm behind the stern,
The abruptness of the slope,
The huge leapfrogging of the current
Guide with hitherto unknown lights
And advances in chemistry
The travelers are surrounded by waterspouts of the valley
And the maelstrom.
These are the world's conquerors
Seeking their own chemical fortunes;
Sport and comfort travel with them;
They bring education
of the races, classes, and animals, aboard this Vessel
Repose and vertigo
In diluvial light,
In terrible evenings of study.
In 1875, after Verlaine was released from his two-year incarceration for shooting Rimbaud in the wrist, Rimbaud gave him a collection of essays to be published, and they were published in 1886 as Illuminations.
However, do not let its book form mislead you into assuming chronology or ordering principles. Rimbaud wrote these illuminations notes over many years, leaving them untitled and unordered. It is not entirely clear if Rimbaud even knew Illuminations had been published; by 1886, he had renounced the artist's life to work aboard commodity-trading ships.
But his agony is nevertheless calcified in these pages. In her introduction to Rimbaud's other poetic masterpiece, A Season in Hell, Patti Smith wrote that Rimbaud was “ignited by the fireworks of his despair, he exhausts us with beauty.”
Ruts
On the right, the summer dawn wakens the leaves and vapors and sounds of this corner of the park, and the embankments on the left hold within their purple shadows the thousand rapid ruts of the damp road. Parade of enchantments. Indeed: parade floats covered with gilded wooden animals, masts and multicolored canvas backdrops, drawn by twenty dappled circus horses at full gallop, and children and men on the most amazing beasts; twenty vehicles, embossed, flag-draped and decked with flowers like old-fashioned or fairy-tale coaches, filled with children costumed for a suburban pastoral. Even coffins under their canopy of night brandishing ebony plumes, fleeing to the sound of huge blue and black mares' hooves.
Exhaustion indeed. As well as the overwhelming power embodied in the words and the metaphor of Rimbaud's ingenious work.
"Arthur Rimbaud in New York," by David Wojnarowicz, 1978–79. Rimbaud's work must be viewed within the context of modern poetry because it influenced the latter tremendously. But it must also be seen as a work written by a young man who regretted - even hated - his homosexuality and drifted without anchorage his entire life.
The first illumination, "After the Flood," shows a world of peace, prosperity, and unanswered questions. While the "Flood regained its composure..." did the earth? Did the affected souls?
After the Flood
No sooner had the notion of the Flood regained its composure,
Then, a hare paused amid the gorse and trembling bellflowers and said its prayer to the rainbow through the spider's web.
Oh, the precious stones hiding, the flowers already peeking out.
Stalls were erected in the dirty main street, and boats were towed toward the sea, which rose in layers above as in old engravings.
Blood flowed in Bluebeard's house, in the slaughterhouses, in the amphitheaters, where God's seal turned the windows livid. Blood and milk flowed.
The beavers built. Tumblers of coffee steamed in the public houses.
In the vast, still-streaming house of windows, children
in mourning looked at marvelous pictures.
Rimbaud's Illuminations are a mind trying to make sense of itself. Between a postdiluvian salvation to the grave, Rimbaud rises and falls and never seems to stop his spiritual and psychological gyration.
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst,
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand."
Joan Didion used Yeats’ infinitely powerful poem “The Second Coming” as her starting point for Slouching Towards Bethlehem,a collection of essays on the wayward lurch of American culture in the 1960s.
Let someone finally rent me this tomb, whited with quicklime, with lines of cement in relief-very far below the earth.
I rest my elbows on the table, the lamp illuminates these newspapers that I'm a fool for rereading, these books of no interest.
At a vast distance above my underground salon, houses take root, mists assemble. The mud is red or black. Monstrous city, endless night!
Further down, the sewers. At their sides, nothing more than the thickness of the globe. Maybe gulfs of azure,
wells of fire. Perhaps at those levels moons and comets,
seas and fables meet.
In hours of bitterness I imagine sapphire balls, metal balls. I am the lord of silence. Why would a spectral cellar window turn livid in one corner of the vault?
From "Childhood"
The illumination called "Drifters" captures the idea of being extraordinarily needy and restless in both body and soul.
"Photography give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people take possession of space in which they are insecure. Thus, photography develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism."
Drifters
Pathetic brother! How many horrible evenings I owed him! "I wasn't sufficiently involved in this enterprise. I made light of his infirmity. Because of me, we would revert to exile, to slavery." He attributed to me both bad luck and innocence, each highly bizarre, and he produced disturbing reasons for this.
I would respond by sneering at this satanic doctor, and finally going over to the window. I was creating, beyond the countryside crossed by bands playing rare music, phantoms of future nocturnal luxury.
After this vaguely hygienic amusement, I would lie down on a straw mattress. And, almost every night, no sooner was I asleep than the poor brother would get up, his mouth rotten, his eyes gouged out, that was how he dreamed of himself! and drag me into the room, howling his dream of stupid sorrow.
I had in fact, and in all spiritual sincerity, taken on the mission of returning him to his original state of child of the sun, and we wandered, nourished with the wine of the caverns and the hard tack of the highway, with me determined to find the location and the recipe.
This illumination echoes what others have written about the absolute annihilation of hunger and what David Wojnarowicz wrote about inescapable poverty.
I can almost see my own breath, see my internal organs functioning pump pumping. These days I see the edge of mortality. The edge of death and dying is around everything like a warm halo of light, sometimes dim, and sometimes irradiated. I see myself seeing death. It's like a transparent celluloid image of myself is accompanying me everywhere I go. I see my friends and I see myself and I see breath coming from my lips and the plants are drinking it and I see breath coming from my chest and everything is fading, becoming a shadow that may disappear as the sun goes down.
From David Wojnarowicz' "LIVING CLOSE TO THE KNIVES"
Early in his career as an artist pushing against the repressive forces of the 1980s, Wojnarowicz explored the concept of Rimbaud's drifter when he asked his friends to wear a Rimbaud mask and appear throughout New York. The photographic series became "Rimbaud in New York."
"Arthur Rimbaud in New York," by David Wojnarowicz, 1978–79. In her own questioning of self, Smith asks the purpose of a life spent creating: "Why commit to art? For self-realization, or for itself? It seemed indulgent to add to the glut unless one offered illumination." Would each artist who lives to create argue that illumination is their trade, means, and end? Rimbaud thought so and indeed existed only for such—an incandescent human.
It is difficult to avoid star metaphors when imaging and communicating Rimbaud: the burning, the expansiveness, and self-collapse are all present. What I hadn't considered, however, is the trail of stardust left over from his luminosity and immolation. From Eliot's modern-molding poetry of emptiness to Allen Ginsberg's howl of being, from Smith's gathered thoughts and Joy Harjo's agony and poetic self-expression. Rimbaud is in the words we use today to express the inexpressible.