Delirium

Recently, reading an early essay by Virginia Woolf about street musicians, I gained some insight into a matter that has obsessed me for 58 years: why did Arthur Rimbaud stop writing poetry? Woolf's essay - entitled "Street Music" - extends far beyond the purviews of busking. It telescopes into a discussion of art in general. How powerful it is. How mysterious. How baffling. How audacious. “Street musicians are counted a nuisance,” she begins, “by the candid dwellers in most London squares.” Interesting, that she would begin by drawing attention to the tension that has always existed between artists and the society in which they abide. Why is this, and what has it to do with Arthur Rimbaud quitting poetry?

“Artists of all kinds,” says Woolf, “have invariably been looked on with disfavor, especially by English people, not solely because of the eccentricities of the artistic temperament, but because we have trained ourselves to such perfection of civilization that expression of any kind has something indecent – certainly irreticent – about it. Few parents, we observe, are willing that their sons should become painters or poets or musicians, not only for worldly reasons, but because in their own hearts they consider that it is unmanly to give expression to the thoughts and emotions which the arts express and which it should be the endeavour of the good citizen to repress. Art in this way is certainly not encouraged; and it is probably easier for an artist than for a member of any other profession to descend to the pavement.”

Hence, the danger of such a choice. But also its allure. Art is a powerful drug. It plays on our perversities, and stokes our instincts. It goads relentlessly to go against the grain, particularly if that grain is oppressive and boring. Just as certain people have a greater craving for risky adventures and cheap thrills than others, certain people are more susceptible to the filigrees of risk. If the appetite for the extraordinary, for the anomalous and weird is powerful enough, it will seduce the most serious-minded. They’ll surrender financial security - or having a family - or just enjoying a serene and decent existence - to the captivating indecencies of art. There’s no rationale for it, and certainly no confetti. It’s an allure without a lure, a goal without a score. The excitement creating creates often leads to exaltations, the kind of inner richness that deludes us into thinking the squalor surrounding our worldly existence is a scintillating lobby in paradise.

There is, of course, much more to it than just that: art is a power. It has the ability to conjure the sublime and ornament our anguish with exquisite subtleties. It has the capacity to destroy oppressive narratives. It stirs the nerves. It beats the heart. “The artist,” says Woolf, “is not only looked upon with contempt but with a suspicion that has not a little fear in it. He is possessed by a spirit which the ordinary person cannot understand, but which is clearly very potent, and exercises so great a sway over him that when he hears its voice he must always rise and follow.”

Woolf was twenty-three when she wrote those words. I’m 77. I have nothing to add to what she said, or qualifiers or manifestos. It’s all true. I’ve been treated like a weirdo by most people. The normies. The stable. The well-adjusted. The financially comfortable. But this still doesn’t get to the heart of what made Rimbaud quit poetry.

Woolf raises music to the highest level of phenomena that is valued – often with reverence - despite being void of any pragmatic worth. Aesthetic phenomena whose contributions to brute survival are null, but whose qualities are essential to the health of the soul. “Certainly I should be inclined to ascribe some such divine origin to musicians at any rate,” Woolf further elaborates, “and it is probably some suspicion of this kind that drives us to persecute them as we do. For if the stringing together of words which nevertheless may convey some useful information to the mind, or the laying on of colours which may represent some tangible object, are employments which can be tolerated at best, how are we to regard the man who spends his time in making tunes? Is not his occupation the least respectable – the least useful and necessary – of the three? It is certain that you can carry away nothing that can be of service to you in your day’s work from listening to music; but a musician is not merely a useful creature, to many, I believe he is the most dangerous of the whole tribe of artists. He is the minister of the wildest of all the gods, who has not yet learnt to speak with human voice, or to convey to the mind the likeness of human things. It is because music incites within us something that is wild and inhuman like itself – a spirit that we would willingly stamp out and forget – that we are distrustful of musicians and loath to put ourselves under their power.”

And there it is: the genie out of the bottle that terrified Rimbaud into quitting poetry for good, “because music incites within us something that is wild and inhuman like itself.”

Rimbaud wasn’t a musician, but the essence of what Woolf is elaborating here is a spirit, not a career choice. It’s no wonder that Rimbaud held such a fascination for the musicians of the 1960s; their spirits were remarkably similar. Take that photo of Bob Dylan, Michael McClure, Robbie Robertson and Allen Ginsberg taken by Dave Smith in the alleyway of City Lights Bookstore in December, 1965, at Allen Ginsberg's behest, and which was intended for the cover of Dylan's Blonde on Blonde album. The photograph, although not used for the Blonde on Blonde cover, testifies to the blending of the two cultures, literary and musical. Music and poetry had fused, and these guys were the epitome of that.

Mallarmé encountered Rimbaud once, at a literary banquet in 1872 – “The Dinner of Naughty Goodfellows” - which was rendered in oil by French artist Henri Fantin-Latour and titled Coin de table (“Corner of the Table”) - and today is part of the collection of the Musée d’Orsay. It’s a scene of serenity and decorum – strangely out of character for Rimbaud, who sits gazing at his intimate friend, Paul Verlaine – and consists of five men seated at the table – Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Léon Valade, Ernest d’Hervilly, Camille Pelletan – and three men standing, Pierre Elzéar, Émile Blémont, and Jean Aicard. In the foreground, a vase of camelias just off to the right balances Verlaine’s solemn gaze off to the far left. The camelias were put there to honor the absence of poet Albert Mérat, who refused to attend the banquet because Rimbaud had heckled him while reading his poetry. There’s no conversation going on at the table; none of the men are talking. Camile Pelletan, a politician, historian and journalist, looks questioningly at the painter, possibly out of intrigue, possibly out of affection. It’s an intriguing expression, and the only one who is looking out of the canvas. The others appear fully immersed in the sanctity of the occasion. I wonder how long they had to pose like this. Rimbaud looks almost angelic, and lost in a dream.

Mallarmé doesn’t mention why, in such close proximity, he didn’t bother to introduce himself to Rimbaud. He doesn’t describe the dinner at all. He quotes Verlaine’s description of Rimbaud, in Les Poètes Maudits: “He was tall, well built, almost athletic, with the perfectly oval face of an exiled angel, with disorderly brown hair and pale blue eyes that were disturbing.” The one thing he was struck by was Rimbaud’s hands. He thought they were enormous, and noticed they were “reddened with chilblains resulting from rapid changes of temperature, which might have indicated even more terrible jobs, since they belonged to a boy.” I suspect the chilblains were from sleeping in the cold. Mallarmé was struck by the contrast between the extremity of Rimbaud’s wildness and sleeping in the open and the uncanny innovations of his work, and remarks: “I later learned that they had signed some beautiful poems, unpublished; in any case his sardonic mouth, with its pouting and mocking expression, had never recited one.” Actually, though, he had: it’s said that he gave his first public reading of Le Bateau ivre at a bistro on Rue Férou, where today a giant mural of the poem has been inscribed on a high masonry wall. I’ve seen it. I passed it every morning I went running in Le Jardin du Luxembourg.

Mallarmé quotes five stanzas from Le Bateau ivre. Clearly, he was quite impressed with Rimbaud’s poetry. The impression he gives is how electrifying Rimbaud’s poetry was at the time. He dismissed the rumors, such as they existed at the time, concerning Rimbaud’s flippancies and ramblings and substance abuse, and remarks: “These are small, miscellaneous details, quite suited, in fact, to one who was violently ravaged by literature; the worst of all perturbations after his having spent many long, slow, studious hours on benches or in libraries, now master of a style that was perhaps premature but sure of itself, intense and exciting, spurring him to tackle unprecedented subjects – in search of ‘new sensations,’ he insisted, ‘not known,’ and he flattered himself that they could be found in the bazaar of illusions vulgarly known as big cities; in which the demon adolescent did discover, one evening, a grandiose vision, prolonged by drunkenness alone.”

Already, there is a sense of doom in these words. Something ominous, something uncanny, something demonic and cataclysmic. Rimbaud, this kid from a farm in the Ardennes who’d just participated in the Paris Commune - the revolutionary government that seized power in Paris, March 18^th, 1871, and controlled certain sectors of the city until May, 1871 - mesmerized the literary community in Paris and sent tremors of excitement through its corridors. This youth with chilblained hands possessed shamanic powers. I can easily imagine the exaltations he must’ve experienced when he composed his poetry, poetry that would shake the literary scene like a 9.1 quake on the Richter scale. The effect his poetry would have on his private life would be equally catastrophic. This is where, I believe, something went very, very wrong in Rimbaud’s psyche. The turbulent affair he would have with Verlaine, which led them to share a flat in London for a period of some months before exploding into what he termed “A Season in Hell,” and devoted a book to it. A Season in Hell begins: “Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.” That sounds so sweet. And totally belies the nightmarish scenes that ensue: “I am slave to the infernal Bridegroom, the one who was the undoing of the foolish virgins. His really that very demon. He is not a ghost, he is not a phantom. But I who have lost all reason, who am damned and dead to the world…”

The turbulence of Rimbaud’s relationship with Verlaine – an excellent poet in his own right, and revered for the refinements of his musical qualities – was, no doubt, fused in Rimbaud’s mind with the demonic force of poetry. Demonic in the original Greek sense, a supernatural being or spirit. “His mysterious delicacies had seduced me. I forgot all my duty to society, to follow him. What a life! Real life is absent. We are not in the world. I go where he goes, I have to. And often he flies into a rage at me, me, the poor soul. The Demon! His is a demon, you know, he is not a man.” Is Rimbaud talking about Verlaine here, or the genie that led him to write such extraordinary poetry? A poetry of extremes whose alchemical energy would uncage the genius in anyone who became enamored of its powers, and assume a mystical presence in their world. And in some instances, penetrate even further into the moral fiber of someone’s being, percolate like an elixir through layers of western society’s Calvinistic principles and persistent inculcations and alienate them to the fruits of an industrialized society. “Life is the farce we all have to lead.”

Mallarmé makes a strong suggestion, which many others have corroborated, that Rimbaud’s dromomania and hikes over Europe and his voyage to Java with the Dutch navy and jumping ship and returning to the farm in the Ardennes long enough to say hello to his mother and get back on the road, to Germany, to Norway, to Cyprus, and eventually to Aden and the Hotel Universe, served as a substitute for the intellectual excitements of poetry. By December, 1880, Rimbaud would make his way to Harar, Ethiopia, as an employee of the export company Viannay, Bardey et Cie. He would organize caravans across the Danakil Desert, a highly risky and dangerous enterprise. One imagines the sounds of these operations, the muffled grown of camels snuffing and huffing as they lifted themselves into walkability for caravaning during the night to avoid the scathing rays of the sun. The crackle of a fire and the chatter of Somali, or Afar, or Amharic, or Tigrinya, or a blend of all of these, which prick Rimbaud’s ears, and which arouse old instincts, which he nervously contemplates, then pushes back down into the crevices of his soul. He has a load of 2,000 antique percussion rifles to get to King Menelik. He has no time for nonsense. And his leg hurts. And his soul hurts. And there’s a small stone pressing into his back.