Rimbaud died when he was twenty. At twenty he stopped writing poetry. Then, at thirty-seven he had a physical death. Although the poet died at twenty the man died seventeen years later. That’s everything: destruction or transcendence. Silence or speech. Rimbaud or the nothingness. Sartre couldn’t say it better “existence precedes essence.” Essentially all the men are equal, forward us transcendence/destruction at one step. Both can be taken, it’s just matter of balance; the wine has the effect of this transcendence/destruction, Baudelaire knew it — a whole section of The Flowers of Evil is dedicated to the wine — and his damn son experienced it.
Rimbaud’s four-year life started at his first successful escape from home. The prodigal son, kept in a cage, condemned to study, escaped into the city of the classic poets; being a brilliant disaster, the familiar tragedy, just a genius with an intoxicated brain teeming with a race of Fiends. There he started to study the dark poets in the streets and the women, a voracious reader, a poor and rebellious poet, starving, running away from the law. Raped by soldiers during one of his voyages through France. Enemy of the state. Poet. What happened to you forged you. Weld with beer, literature, rebelliousness and Paris. How did he meet Verlaine? Verlaine was ten year older than Rimbaud. He was married. He had a normal Parisian life, a bourgeoisie. Then Rimbaud came. One year was enough. End of the relation with the wife. A controversial friendship. Drunkenness. The poet as a seer. That same year they moved to London. Next year, during a discussion in Brussels, Verlaine shot him in a gesture of disagreement. A wound in the wrist. Two years in prison for him —that used to be the maximum sentence— and a hospital for Rimbaud. What else? A Season in Hell: a small and demoniacal novel, perhaps just his life. Thereafter Illuminations, a book of such a poetic prose, a cataclysm of language, a cursed substance. Ink. Poetry. Rimbaud.
After a short period of his life with notoriety as a poet, although without Verlaine, Rimbaud kept writing. The next book Romances sans Paroles had a dedicatory to Verlaine, his friends convinced him to remove it. They sacrificed themselves. Both couldn’t live without the other and together. After this no more. Rimbaud decided return home. That was all. Four years of poetry melted with beer, wine, Paris, London, some bullets, Drunkenness, voyages and ink. Rimbaud, a seer.
Gospel
The drunken Boat (fragment)
Then I bathed in the Poem of the Sea,
Infused with stars, the milk-white spume blends,
Grazing green azures: where ravished, bleached
Flotsam, a drowned man in dream descends.
Where, staining the blue, sudden deliriums
And slow tremors under the gleams of fire,
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our rhythms,
Ferment the bitter reds of our desire!
I knew the skies split apart by lightning,
Waterspouts, breakers, tides: I knew the night,
The Dawn exalted like a crowd of doves,
I saw what men think they’ve seen in the light!
I saw the low sun, stained with mystic terrors,
Illuminate long violet coagulations,
Like actors in a play that’s very ancient
Waves rolling back their trembling of shutters!
I dreamt the green night of blinded snows,
A kiss lifted slowly to the eyes of seas,
The circulation of unheard-of flows,
Sung phosphorus’s blue-yellow awakenings!
