The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud (12 page)

In the section of
Clowns and Angels
called “The Poet’s Creation,” Wallace Fowlie puts his finger on that superlative aspect of Rimbaud’s being which sets him apart, which marks, in my opinion, the heroism of the poet. “The genius,” he writes, “is both the master of silence and its slave. The poet exists not only in the words to which he signs his name, but he is also in the whiteness which remains on the page. His honesty is his intactness, and Rimbaud gloriously lived intact.”

It is curious to note how Rimbaud himself employs this word “intact.”
“Les criminels dégoutent comme des chatrés; moi, je suis intact, et ça m’est égal.”
He sees the master and the slave, the judge and the criminal, the rebel and the conformer held by the same yoke: this is their Hell, to be yoked to one another under the delusion that they differ one from the other. The poet is in the same predicament, he implies. He too is bound; his spirit is not free, his imagination cannot soar unfettered. Rimbaud therefore refuses to revolt, he renounces. Though he had not intended it, it was the surest way to make his influence felt. By maintaining a resolute silence he makes his presence felt. This comes close to resembling the technique of the sage.
*
It is more effective than cannonades. Instead of becoming another voice, the poet thus becomes the voice—
the
voice of the silence.

While you are in the world and part of it, say your say, then shut your trap forever more! But don’t capitulate, don’t bend! The penalty? Ejection. Self-ejection, since one has already rejected the world. Is it such a terrible fate? Only if one aspires to the light of fame. There must be those, too, who reign in silence and in darkness. The world is composed of dualities, in the spiritual as well as the physical realm. Evil has just as great a place as good, darkness as light. Shadow and substance always. To the man of God it is the twilight world which is uninhabitable, for this is the realm of confusion. It was in this zone that Nietzsche situated the fallen gods. In this realm neither God nor Satan is recognizable. This is the valley of death which the spirit traverses, the dark interval during which man loses his relation with the cosmos. It is also “the time of the Assassins.” Men no longer vibrate with exaltation; they writhe and squirm with envy and hate. Having no armature they know nothing of ascension; acknowledging no tension, they merely react. The medieval man recognized the Prince of Darkness and paid just homage to the powers of evil, as is evident from the testimony of stone and script. But the man of the Middle Ages also recognized and acknowledged God. His life therefore was keen and rich, it sounded the full gamut. By contrast, the life of the modern man is pale and empty. The terrors he knows exceed any known to the men of previous ages, for he lives in the world of the unreal, surrounded by phantoms. He has not even the possibilities of joy or deliverance which were open to the slaves of the ancient world. He has become the victim of his own inner emptiness; his torments are the torments of sterility. Amiel, who knew the age so well and who was also a “victim” of it, has given us an account of “the sterility of genius.” This is one of the most alarming phrases that man can utter. It means the end is in sight …

Speaking of the end, I cannot help recalling Amiel’s words when referring to the repugnance which Taine’s style aroused in him. “It excites no feeling whatever; it is simply a means of information. I imagine this kind of thing will be the literature of the future—a literature
à l’américaine
, as different as possible from Greek art, giving us algebra instead of life, the formula instead of the image, the exhalations of the crucible instead of the divine madness of Apollo. Cold vision will replace the joys of thought, and we shall see the death of poetry, flayed and dissected by science.”

In the case of a suicide we do not concern ourselves with whether he died a quick or a lingering death, whether his agony was great or little. It is the
act
which has importance for us, for suddenly we are made to realize that to be and not to be are acts—not intransitive verbs!—which make existence and death synonymous. The act of the suicide always has a detonating effect; it shocks us for a moment into awareness. It makes us realize that
we
are blind and dead. How typical of our sick-ridden world that the law should view such attempts with hypocritical severity! We don’t want to be reminded of what we have left undone; we cower at the thought that from beyond the grave the finger of the escaped one will be forever pointed at us.

Rimbaud was a
living
suicide. All the more unbearable for us! In decency he might have ended it at nineteen, but no, he dragged it out, he made us witness, through the folly of a wasted life, the living death which we are all inflicting upon ourselves. He caricatured his own grandeur, so that we might revile our puny efforts the more. He toiled like a nigger, so that we might revel in the life of slavery which we have adopted. All the qualities which he displayed in the eighteen year struggle with life were qualities which make, as we say today, “for success.” That he should have made of success such a bitter failure was his triumph. It required diabolical courage (even if it was unwitting) to make that proof demonstrable. When we pity the suicide we pity ourselves, really, for lacking the courage to follow his example. We cannot abide too many defections from the ranks—we would be demoralized. What we want are victims of life to keep us company in our misery. We know each other so well, too well; we disgust one another. But we continue to observe the conventional politeness of worms. We try to do it even when we are exterminating one another … Familar words, these, are they not? They will be repeated to us by Lawrence, by Céline, by Malaquais—and by others. And those who use these words will be reviled as renegades, as escapists, as rats who desert the sinking ship. (As if the rats did not show supreme intelligence!) But the ship is sinking, there are no two ways about that. Lawrence tells about it in his war letters, and again in writing of
Moby Dick … On va où l’on pèse
, declares St. Exupéry in the exalted pages of his
Pilote de Guerre
.

We’re on the way, no doubt about that. But where is the Ark which will carry us through the Flood? And of what materials will it be made? As for the chosen ones, they will unquestionably have to be made of different fiber than the men who made
this
world. We are coming to the end, and it is a catastrophic end which we face. Warnings communicated by word have long ceased to move us. Acts are demanded, suicidal acts perhaps, but acts fraught with meaning.

Rimbaud’s gesture of renunciation was such an act. It leavened literature. Will it leaven life? I doubt it. I doubt if anything will stem the tide which threatens to engulf us. But there is one thing his coming did achieve—it transformed those of us who are still sentient, still alive to the future, into “arrows of longing for the other shore.”

The important thing about death, for man, is that he is able to distinguish it from dissolution. Man dies
for
something, if he dies at all. The order and harmony which sprang from primordial chaos, as the myths tell us, infuse our lives with a purpose which is beyond us, a purpose to which we sacrifice ourselves when we achieve awareness. This sacrifice is made on the altar of creation. What we create with hand and tongue is nothing; it is what we create with our lives that counts. It is only when we make ourselves a part of creation that we begin to live.

It is not death which challenges us at every step but life. We have honored the death-eaters
ad nauseam
, but what of those who accept the challenge of life? In what way do we honor these? From Lucifer to Anti-Christ there runs a flame of passion which man will always honor as long as he is mere man; it is against this passion, which is the flame of life, that we must oppose the serene acceptance of the enlightened ones. One must pass through the flame in order to know death and embrace it. The strength of the rebel, who is the Evil One, lies in his inflexibility, but true strength lies in submission which permits one to dedicate his life, through devotion, to something beyond himself. The strength of the one leads to isolation, which is castration, while the strength of the other leads to unification, which is lasting fertility.

But passion always has its
raison d’être
, and the passion of the creator, which makes his life on earth a Calvary, has its higher octave in the passion of a Christ who incarnates all human suffering. The poet’s passion is the result of his vision, of his ability to see life in its essence and its wholeness. Once this vision is shattered or deranged, passion dribbles away. In the realm of art we are definitely approaching the end of passion. Though we still turn out productive giants, their works lie like fallen tombstones amidst the still intact, still upright splendors of ancient times. Despite all its powers, society can not sustain the artist if it is impervious to the
vision
of the artist. For a long time now our society has been thoroughly uninterested in the message of the artist. The voice which goes unheeded eventually becomes silent. For the anarchy of society the artist answers with anaudia. Rimbaud was the first to make the gesture. His example has cast a spell on us. Let us not look for his disciples among the literary figures of our time, let us seek them rather in the obscure, eclipsed ones, among the young who are forced to stifle their genius. Let us look first of all to our own country, America, where the toll is heaviest. In this new form of protest we assist at the destruction of the egg. This is the surest way to undermine the tottering edifice of a rotten society. Its effects are more swift and lasting than the havoc wrought by Super-fortresses. If the poet is to have no place, no share, in the birth of a new order then he will blast it at the very core. This threat is not imaginary, it is actual. It is the prelude to a dance of death more terrible far than that of the Middle Ages.

The only creative spirits in modern times were the demonic beings; in them was focussed the passion which is dribbling away. They had rediscovered the source of life, that banquet of old at which Rimbaud sought to restore his appetite, but their means of communication were cut off.
Men no longer communicate
, that is the tragedy of modern times. Society has long since ceased to be a community; it has broken up into aggregations of helpless atoms. That which alone can unite it—the presence and worship of God—is missing.

When, in his extreme youth, Rimbaud chalked up on the doors of the churches
“Death to God!”
he proved himself to be closer to God than the powers who rule the Church. His arrogance and defiance were never directed against the poor, the unfortunate, the truly devout; he was fighting the usurpers and pretenders, fighting all that was false, vain, hypocritical and life-destroying. He wanted the earth to re-become the Paradise which it was, which it still is beneath the veil of illusion and delusion. He was utterly uninterested in a ghostly Paradise situated in a mythical beyond. Here and now, in the flesh, as members of one great community fired with life—that was how he envisaged Christmas on Earth.

“On meurt pour cela dont on peut vivre.”
These are not his words, but the meaning is his. Death lies in separation, in living apart. It does not mean simply to cease being. A life which has no significance here below will have none in the hereafter. Rimbaud, I believe, understood this clearly. He gave up the struggle on one level to resume it on another. His renunciation was in this sense an affirmation. He realized that only in silence and darkness could the ingredients of art be restored. He followed the laws of his being to the end, shattering all forms, his own included. At the very beginning of his career he understood what others only understand at the end, if at all, that the sacred word no longer has validity. He realized that the poison of culture had transformed beauty and truth into artifice and deception. He takes Beauty on his knee and he finds her bitter. He abandons her. It is the only way he can still honor her. What is it again that he says in the depths of hell?
“Des erreurs qu’on me souffle: magies, faux parfums, musique puérile.”
(For me this is the most haunting, baffling line in the
Season
.) When he boasted that he possessed all talents, he meant—
on this phony level!
Or—with this “lying cultural mask.” In this realm he was, of course, a master. But this is the realm of confusion, the
Mamser
world. Here everything is of equal value and therefore of no value. Do you want me to whistle? Do you want a
danse du ventre?
Okay! Anything you wish. Just name it!

Everything that Rimbaud voiced in his writings proclaimed this truth, that “we live not in the midst of facts, but of profundities and symbols.” The mystery which inheres in his writing permeates his life. We cannot
explain
his actions, we can only permit them to reveal what we long to know. He was as much a mystery to himself as to others, as much mystified by his own utterances as by his subsequent life in the world. He sought the outside world as a refuge. A refuge from what? Perhaps from the terrors of lucidity. He is like a saint in reverse. With him the light comes first, then the knowledge and experience of sin. Sin is a mystery to him; he has to put it on, as the penitents of old adopted the hair shirt.

He ran away, we say. But perhaps he ran
toward
something. It is obvious that he avoided one kind of madness only to become the victim of another. He squeezes out of exits like a man struggling with a strait jacket. No sooner has one tragedy been averted than another besets him. He is a marked man. “They” are after him. His poetic flights, which are like progressive stages in an interrupted trance, had their parallel in the senseless flights which rushed him headlong from one corner of the world to another. How often he is brought back crushed and defeated! He rests just long enough to be repaired—like a cruiser or a long range bomber. Ready for action again. Zoom! He is off, flying toward the sun. It is light he seeks—and human warmth. His illuminations seem to have drained him of all natural warmth; in his blood is a glacial thaw. But the farther he flies the darker it gets. The earth is enveloped in blood and darkness. The ice caps move in toward the center.