----
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1. 'Arthur Rimbaud dreamed even in youth of escape from tedium -- the anonymity and tedium of an age in which everything was reduced to statistics. Escape from his home town of Charleville to Paris, from Paris to the Orient, from the Orient to Nothingness. At the very start of his quest he called for revolt in the name of art and defined creation as the profanation of all the modern age holds sacred. "One must be absolutely modern," he wrote in the collection of prose-poems entitled Une Saison en Enfer.
'The problem of modernity is thus revealed: it paralyzes itself with its own complacency. All too often are we reminded, as though his youthful flashes of genius had been nothing but a kind of bolt from the blue, that Rimbaud was terribly afflicted by the evil genius of time. But by choosing flight and renouncing art, was he not simply, in an all-too-human fashion, running away from the vast abyss his vision had opened up before him?
'For even as a youth, already in flight "from every moral law", he grasped with disconcerting lucidity the poetic revolution he bore within himself. In his famous letter to Paul Demeny in May 1871, he wrote: 'I say you have to be a visionary, make yourself a visionary.' He wants to go further: to set aside standards and conventions in order to perceive the Unknown. To penetrate the Unknown is to become Wise, to discover the duality of Being, the principle of Good and Evil, of their felicitous and infinite combination.
'The poet, then, is on the other side of Time. He is not within Time, he is ahead of it. Rimbaud attacks the surfeit oozing from every pore of society. He is on the side of a "ferocious philosophy" which says "let the rest of the world go to hell".' -- Samir Nair, Rimbaud's Quest
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'Rimbaud at 17' by Ralph Haselmann (detail)
________________________
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2. 'When Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) abandoned poetry altogether in 1873, at the age of 19 or 20, he reinvented himself. The problem for posterity has been that with this reinvention, Rimbaud discarded his marvelous ability to spin words in the stars. When, some years later, Pierre Bardey's brother Alfred happened to learn that Rimbaud had written poetry and was revered in certain small circles in Paris, he confronted Rimbaud with this. Rimbaud seemed aghast: "Absurd! Ridiculous! Disgusting!" he said to Bardey. The Rimbaud who had written "The Drunken Boat" and "A Season in Hell" was dead and buried. The new Rimbaud wanted to make money. And, perhaps, to do some exploring and a bit of photography. This was the Arthur Rimbaud who arrived in Harar, Ethiopia in August of 1880: a different person entirely.
'It is hard to imagine the world into which Arthur Rimbaud entered. Harar, a city of some 20,000 inhabitants, was still primitive. The sanitary system consisted of throwing refuse—including dead bodies—over the town walls after dark to expectant hyenas. Just five years earlier, in 1875, the city had been conquered by the Egyptians, and a garrison of Egyptian soldiers was stationed there when Rimbaud arrived. In Harar, Rimbaud is believed to have designed and built a house for himself, employing local workers to help him. While there are no records to prove Rimbaud's involvement in the designing and building of the house, there is enough certainty that the Ethiopian government has designated the house as Rimbaud's work and home, and the building's restoration in the 1990s was funded by the French government. The building currently houses a Rimbaud museum that has hosted international seminars on the writer. Some scholars believe that while Rimbaud lived in the house, he did not design it. Others believe the building was not a private residence, but rather housed a French school at which Rimbaud was employed as a teacher.
'Almost immediately upon settling in Harar, Rimbaud grew bored. It's not hard to see why. Even if he had forsaken his literary self, he remained a highly intelligent, keenly observant and very emotional man. He needed intellectual stimulation, and he did not find it in Harar. This is the man who, ten years earlier, had enthusiastically written to the poet Théodore de Banville, "I will be a Parnassian! I swear, cher Maître, I will always worship the two goddesses, the Muse and Liberty." Now, his hopes—and, increasingly, his despairs—were more bourgeois. "What good is this coming and going," he wrote to Charleville, "this hard work and these upheavals among strange peoples, these languages I stuff my head with and these nameless tortures, if I can't someday, in a few years, take my ease in a place that suits me pretty well, and have a family—or have, at least, a son whom I can spend the rest of my life bringing up the way I think he should be, whom I can adorn and arm with the most complete education it’s possible to get in this age, and whom I can see, become a renowned engineer, a man whose knowledge makes him rich and powerful. But who knows the length of my days in these mountains? I may simply disappear among the population, and never be heard of again...."
'Partly to alleviate his pressing boredom, Rimbaud took up photography. He had a camera shipped to him from France and began taking pictures. To this we owe the last of the rare photographs we have of Arthur Rimbaud. They are self-portraits. In a simple statement filled with great poignancy, he sent them home to his family so that they "would remember my face." Looking at the photograph of the man in white cotton tropical garb standing in front of a coffee bush, it's difficult to believe he was 29 when it was taken: He looks 50.' -- from Richard Goodman 'Arthur Rimbaud, Coffee Trader'
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'If you think that I’m living like a prince, I am quite certain that I’m living in a very stupid and irritating fashion. Anyway let’ hope we can enjoy a few years of true repose in this life; and it’s a good thing that this life is the only one and that it’s obvious it is, since it’s impossible to imagine another life more tedious than this! ... What could I say about the things I’ve attempted with such extraordinary exertions and which have brought me nothing but fever. But it can’t be helped. I’m used to everything now. I fear nothing...’-- from a letter written by Rimbaud in Harar
Rimbaud's house pre-restoration as seen on an old postcard
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Rimbaud's restored house and museum, 2007
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----
*
p.s. Hey. I should be in Kyoto and/or its immediate vicinity now. You're in the company of Rimbaud as you read this. I hope the convergence results in a happy occasion for each and every one of you.
1. 'Arthur Rimbaud dreamed even in youth of escape from tedium -- the anonymity and tedium of an age in which everything was reduced to statistics. Escape from his home town of Charleville to Paris, from Paris to the Orient, from the Orient to Nothingness. At the very start of his quest he called for revolt in the name of art and defined creation as the profanation of all the modern age holds sacred. "One must be absolutely modern," he wrote in the collection of prose-poems entitled Une Saison en Enfer.
'The problem of modernity is thus revealed: it paralyzes itself with its own complacency. All too often are we reminded, as though his youthful flashes of genius had been nothing but a kind of bolt from the blue, that Rimbaud was terribly afflicted by the evil genius of time. But by choosing flight and renouncing art, was he not simply, in an all-too-human fashion, running away from the vast abyss his vision had opened up before him?
'For even as a youth, already in flight "from every moral law", he grasped with disconcerting lucidity the poetic revolution he bore within himself. In his famous letter to Paul Demeny in May 1871, he wrote: 'I say you have to be a visionary, make yourself a visionary.' He wants to go further: to set aside standards and conventions in order to perceive the Unknown. To penetrate the Unknown is to become Wise, to discover the duality of Being, the principle of Good and Evil, of their felicitous and infinite combination.
'The poet, then, is on the other side of Time. He is not within Time, he is ahead of it. Rimbaud attacks the surfeit oozing from every pore of society. He is on the side of a "ferocious philosophy" which says "let the rest of the world go to hell".' -- Samir Nair, Rimbaud's Quest
________________________
'Rimbaud at 17' by Ralph Haselmann (detail)
To Paul Demeny
Charleville, 15 May 1871
I have decided to give you an hour of new literature. I begin at once with a song of today:
Parisian War Song
Spring is evident, for...
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
A. Rimbaud
--Here is some prose on the future of poetry:--
-------All ancient poetry ended in Greek poetry, harmonious life. -- From Greece to the romantic movement--Middle Ages--there are writers and versifiers. From Ennius to Theroldus, from Theroldus to Casimir Delavigne, it is all rhymed prose, a game, degradation and glory of countless idiotic generations: Racine is pure, strong and great. -- If his rhymes had been blown out and his hemistichs mixed up, the Divine Fool would today be as unknown as any old author of Origins. -- After Racine, the game get moldy. It lasted two thousand years!
-------Neither joke nor paradox. Reason inspires me with more enthusiasm on the subject than a Young France would have with rage. Moreover, newcomers are free to condemn the ancestors. We are at home and we have the time.
-------Romanticism has never been carefully judged. Who would have judged it? The critics! The Romantics? who prove so obviously that a song is so seldom a work, that is to say, a thought sung and understood by the singer.
-------For I is someone else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault. This is obvious to me: I am present at this birth of my thought: I watch it and listen to it: I draw a stroke of the bow: the symphony makes its stir in the depths, or comes on to the stage in a leap.
-------If old imbeciles had not discovered only the false meaning of the Ego, we would not have to sweep away those millions of skeletons which, for times immemorial, have accumulated the results of their one-eyed intellects by claiming to be the authors!
-------In Greece, as I have said, verses and lyres give rhythm to Action. After that, music and rhymes are games and pastimes. The study of this past delights the curious: several rejoice in reviving those antiquities--it is for them. Universal intelligence has always thrown out its ideas naturally; men picked up a part of these fruits of the mind: people acted through them and wrote books about them. Things continued thus: man not working on himself, not yet being awake, or not yet in the fullness of the great dream. Civil servants, writers: author, creator, poet, that man never existed!
-------The first study of the man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, complete. He looks for his soul, inspects it, tests it, learns it. As soon as he knows it, he must cultivate it! It seems simple: in every mind a natural development takes place; so many egoists call themselves authors, there are many others who attribute their intellectual progress to themselves! -- But the soul must be made monstrous: in the fashion of the comprachicos [kidnappers of children who mutilate them in order to exhibit them as monsters], if you will! Imagine a man implanting and cultivating warts on his face.
-------I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer.
-------The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences. Unspeakable torture where he needs all his faith, all his super-human strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the one accursed--and the supreme Scholar!--Because he reaches the unknown! Since he cultivated his soul, rich already, more than any man! He reaches the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends by losing the intelligence of his visions, he has seen them. Let him die as he leaps through unheard of and unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where the other collapsed!
-- To be continued in six minutes --
-------Here I interpolate a second psalm to accompany the text: please lend a friendly ear--and everyone will be delighted. -- The bow is in my hand and I begin:
MY LITTLE MISTRESSES
A tincture of tears washed...
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A.R.
-------That's that. And note carefully that if I were not afraid of making you spend more than sixty centimes on postage--I poor terrified one who for seven months have not had a single copper! -- I would also give you my Lovers of Paris, one hundred hexameters, sir, and my Death of Paris, two hundred hexameters!
--------- I continue:
-------Therefore the poet is truly the thief of fire.
-------He is responsible for humanity, even for the animals; he will have to have his own inventions smelt, felt, and heard; if what he brings back from down there has form; if it is formless, he gives formlessness. A language must be found. Moreover, every word being an idea, the time of a universal language will come! One has to be an academician--deader than a fossil--to complete a dictionary in any language whatsoever. Weak people would begin to think about the first letter of the alphabet, and they would soon rush into madness!
-------This language will be of the soul for the soul, containing everything, smells, sounds, colors, thought holding on to thought and pulling. The poet would define the amount of the unknown awakening in his time the universal soul: he would give more--than the formulation of his thought, than the annotation of his march toward Progress! Enormity becoming normal, absorbed by all, he would really be a multiplier of progress!
-------This future will be materialistic, as you see. -- Always filled with Number and Harmony, these poems will be made to endure. -- Fundamentally, it would be Greek poetry again in a new way.
-------Eternal art would have its functions, since poets are citizens. Poetry will not lend its rhythm to action, it will be in advance.
-------These poets will exist. When the endless servitude of woman is broken, when she lives for and by herself, man--heretofore abominable--having given her her release, she too will be a poet! Woman will find some of the unknown! Will her world of ideas differ from ours? -- She will find strange, unfathomable, repulsive, delicious things; we will take them, we will understand them.
-------Meanwhile, let us ask the poet for the new--ideas and forms. All the clever ones will soon believe they have satisfied the demand--it is not so!
-------The first romantics were seers without wholly realizing it: the cultivation of their souls which began accidentally: abandoned locomotives, their fires still on, which the rails carry for some time. -- Lamartine is at times a seer, but strangled by the old form. -- Hugo, too ham, has vision in his last volumes: Les Misérables is a real poem. I have Les Châtiments with me; Stella gives approximately the extent of Hugo's vision. Too many Belmontets and Lamennais, Jehovahs and columns, old broken enormities.
-------Musset is fourteen times loathsome to us, suffering generations obsessed by visions--insulted by his angelic sloth! O! the insipid tales and proverbs! O the Nuits! O Rolla, O Namouna, O La Coupe! it is all French, namely detestable to the highest degree; French, not Parisian! One more work of that odious genius who inspired who inspired M. Taine's commentary! Springlike, Musset's wit! Charming, his love! There you have enamel painting and solid poetry! French poetry will be enjoyed for a long time, but in France. Every grocer's boy is able to reel off a Rollaesque speech, every seminarian carries the five hundred rhymes written in his notebook. At fifteen, these bursts of passion make boys horny; at sixteen, they are satisfied to recite them with feeling; at eighteen, even at seventeen, every schoolboy who has the ability makes a Rolla, writes a Rolla! Some still die from this perhaps. Musset could do nothing: there were visions behind the gauze of the curtains: he closed his eyes. French, sloppy, dragged from tavern to schoolroom desk, the fine cadaver is dead, and, henceforth let's not even bother to wake him up with out abominations.
-------The second Romantics are very much seers: Théophile, Gautier, Leconte de Lisle. Théodore de Banville. But since inspecting the invisible and hearing the unheard of is different from recovering the spirit of the dead things, Baudelaire is the first seer, king of poets, a real god! And yet he lived in too artistic a world; and the form so highly praised in him is trivial. Inventions of the unknown call for new forms.
-------Broken-in to old forms, among the innocent, A. Renaud--has written his Rolla; L. Grandet has written his Rolla; the Gauls and the Mussets, G. Lafenestre, Coran, Cl. Popelin, Soulary, L. Salles; the pupils Marc, Aicard, Theuriet; the dead and the imbeciles, Autran, Barbier, L. Pichat, Lemoyne, the Deschamps, the Des Essarts; the journalists, L. Cladel, Robert Luzarches, X. de Ricard; the fantasists, C. Mendès; les bohemians; the women; the talents; Léon Dierx and Sully-Prudhomme, Coppée; the new school, called Parnassian, has two seers: Albert Mérat and Paul Verlaine, a real poet. There you are.
-------So, I work to make myself into a seer. -- And let's close with a pious hymn.
Squattings
Very late, when he feels his stomach sick,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
-------You would be loathsome not to answer: quickly, because in a week, I will be in Paris, perhaps.
------------Goodbye,
--------------A. Rimbaud----
Charleville, 15 May 1871
I have decided to give you an hour of new literature. I begin at once with a song of today:
Parisian War Song
Spring is evident, for...
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
A. Rimbaud
--Here is some prose on the future of poetry:--
-------All ancient poetry ended in Greek poetry, harmonious life. -- From Greece to the romantic movement--Middle Ages--there are writers and versifiers. From Ennius to Theroldus, from Theroldus to Casimir Delavigne, it is all rhymed prose, a game, degradation and glory of countless idiotic generations: Racine is pure, strong and great. -- If his rhymes had been blown out and his hemistichs mixed up, the Divine Fool would today be as unknown as any old author of Origins. -- After Racine, the game get moldy. It lasted two thousand years!
-------Neither joke nor paradox. Reason inspires me with more enthusiasm on the subject than a Young France would have with rage. Moreover, newcomers are free to condemn the ancestors. We are at home and we have the time.
-------Romanticism has never been carefully judged. Who would have judged it? The critics! The Romantics? who prove so obviously that a song is so seldom a work, that is to say, a thought sung and understood by the singer.
-------For I is someone else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault. This is obvious to me: I am present at this birth of my thought: I watch it and listen to it: I draw a stroke of the bow: the symphony makes its stir in the depths, or comes on to the stage in a leap.
-------If old imbeciles had not discovered only the false meaning of the Ego, we would not have to sweep away those millions of skeletons which, for times immemorial, have accumulated the results of their one-eyed intellects by claiming to be the authors!
-------In Greece, as I have said, verses and lyres give rhythm to Action. After that, music and rhymes are games and pastimes. The study of this past delights the curious: several rejoice in reviving those antiquities--it is for them. Universal intelligence has always thrown out its ideas naturally; men picked up a part of these fruits of the mind: people acted through them and wrote books about them. Things continued thus: man not working on himself, not yet being awake, or not yet in the fullness of the great dream. Civil servants, writers: author, creator, poet, that man never existed!
-------The first study of the man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, complete. He looks for his soul, inspects it, tests it, learns it. As soon as he knows it, he must cultivate it! It seems simple: in every mind a natural development takes place; so many egoists call themselves authors, there are many others who attribute their intellectual progress to themselves! -- But the soul must be made monstrous: in the fashion of the comprachicos [kidnappers of children who mutilate them in order to exhibit them as monsters], if you will! Imagine a man implanting and cultivating warts on his face.
-------I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer.
-------The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences. Unspeakable torture where he needs all his faith, all his super-human strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the one accursed--and the supreme Scholar!--Because he reaches the unknown! Since he cultivated his soul, rich already, more than any man! He reaches the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends by losing the intelligence of his visions, he has seen them. Let him die as he leaps through unheard of and unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where the other collapsed!
-- To be continued in six minutes --
-------Here I interpolate a second psalm to accompany the text: please lend a friendly ear--and everyone will be delighted. -- The bow is in my hand and I begin:
MY LITTLE MISTRESSES
A tincture of tears washed...
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A.R.
-------That's that. And note carefully that if I were not afraid of making you spend more than sixty centimes on postage--I poor terrified one who for seven months have not had a single copper! -- I would also give you my Lovers of Paris, one hundred hexameters, sir, and my Death of Paris, two hundred hexameters!
--------- I continue:
-------Therefore the poet is truly the thief of fire.
-------He is responsible for humanity, even for the animals; he will have to have his own inventions smelt, felt, and heard; if what he brings back from down there has form; if it is formless, he gives formlessness. A language must be found. Moreover, every word being an idea, the time of a universal language will come! One has to be an academician--deader than a fossil--to complete a dictionary in any language whatsoever. Weak people would begin to think about the first letter of the alphabet, and they would soon rush into madness!
-------This language will be of the soul for the soul, containing everything, smells, sounds, colors, thought holding on to thought and pulling. The poet would define the amount of the unknown awakening in his time the universal soul: he would give more--than the formulation of his thought, than the annotation of his march toward Progress! Enormity becoming normal, absorbed by all, he would really be a multiplier of progress!
-------This future will be materialistic, as you see. -- Always filled with Number and Harmony, these poems will be made to endure. -- Fundamentally, it would be Greek poetry again in a new way.
-------Eternal art would have its functions, since poets are citizens. Poetry will not lend its rhythm to action, it will be in advance.
-------These poets will exist. When the endless servitude of woman is broken, when she lives for and by herself, man--heretofore abominable--having given her her release, she too will be a poet! Woman will find some of the unknown! Will her world of ideas differ from ours? -- She will find strange, unfathomable, repulsive, delicious things; we will take them, we will understand them.
-------Meanwhile, let us ask the poet for the new--ideas and forms. All the clever ones will soon believe they have satisfied the demand--it is not so!
-------The first romantics were seers without wholly realizing it: the cultivation of their souls which began accidentally: abandoned locomotives, their fires still on, which the rails carry for some time. -- Lamartine is at times a seer, but strangled by the old form. -- Hugo, too ham, has vision in his last volumes: Les Misérables is a real poem. I have Les Châtiments with me; Stella gives approximately the extent of Hugo's vision. Too many Belmontets and Lamennais, Jehovahs and columns, old broken enormities.
-------Musset is fourteen times loathsome to us, suffering generations obsessed by visions--insulted by his angelic sloth! O! the insipid tales and proverbs! O the Nuits! O Rolla, O Namouna, O La Coupe! it is all French, namely detestable to the highest degree; French, not Parisian! One more work of that odious genius who inspired who inspired M. Taine's commentary! Springlike, Musset's wit! Charming, his love! There you have enamel painting and solid poetry! French poetry will be enjoyed for a long time, but in France. Every grocer's boy is able to reel off a Rollaesque speech, every seminarian carries the five hundred rhymes written in his notebook. At fifteen, these bursts of passion make boys horny; at sixteen, they are satisfied to recite them with feeling; at eighteen, even at seventeen, every schoolboy who has the ability makes a Rolla, writes a Rolla! Some still die from this perhaps. Musset could do nothing: there were visions behind the gauze of the curtains: he closed his eyes. French, sloppy, dragged from tavern to schoolroom desk, the fine cadaver is dead, and, henceforth let's not even bother to wake him up with out abominations.
-------The second Romantics are very much seers: Théophile, Gautier, Leconte de Lisle. Théodore de Banville. But since inspecting the invisible and hearing the unheard of is different from recovering the spirit of the dead things, Baudelaire is the first seer, king of poets, a real god! And yet he lived in too artistic a world; and the form so highly praised in him is trivial. Inventions of the unknown call for new forms.
-------Broken-in to old forms, among the innocent, A. Renaud--has written his Rolla; L. Grandet has written his Rolla; the Gauls and the Mussets, G. Lafenestre, Coran, Cl. Popelin, Soulary, L. Salles; the pupils Marc, Aicard, Theuriet; the dead and the imbeciles, Autran, Barbier, L. Pichat, Lemoyne, the Deschamps, the Des Essarts; the journalists, L. Cladel, Robert Luzarches, X. de Ricard; the fantasists, C. Mendès; les bohemians; the women; the talents; Léon Dierx and Sully-Prudhomme, Coppée; the new school, called Parnassian, has two seers: Albert Mérat and Paul Verlaine, a real poet. There you are.
-------So, I work to make myself into a seer. -- And let's close with a pious hymn.
Squattings
Very late, when he feels his stomach sick,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
-------You would be loathsome not to answer: quickly, because in a week, I will be in Paris, perhaps.
------------Goodbye,
--------------A. Rimbaud
translated by Wallace Fowlie
________________________
2. 'When Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) abandoned poetry altogether in 1873, at the age of 19 or 20, he reinvented himself. The problem for posterity has been that with this reinvention, Rimbaud discarded his marvelous ability to spin words in the stars. When, some years later, Pierre Bardey's brother Alfred happened to learn that Rimbaud had written poetry and was revered in certain small circles in Paris, he confronted Rimbaud with this. Rimbaud seemed aghast: "Absurd! Ridiculous! Disgusting!" he said to Bardey. The Rimbaud who had written "The Drunken Boat" and "A Season in Hell" was dead and buried. The new Rimbaud wanted to make money. And, perhaps, to do some exploring and a bit of photography. This was the Arthur Rimbaud who arrived in Harar, Ethiopia in August of 1880: a different person entirely.
'It is hard to imagine the world into which Arthur Rimbaud entered. Harar, a city of some 20,000 inhabitants, was still primitive. The sanitary system consisted of throwing refuse—including dead bodies—over the town walls after dark to expectant hyenas. Just five years earlier, in 1875, the city had been conquered by the Egyptians, and a garrison of Egyptian soldiers was stationed there when Rimbaud arrived. In Harar, Rimbaud is believed to have designed and built a house for himself, employing local workers to help him. While there are no records to prove Rimbaud's involvement in the designing and building of the house, there is enough certainty that the Ethiopian government has designated the house as Rimbaud's work and home, and the building's restoration in the 1990s was funded by the French government. The building currently houses a Rimbaud museum that has hosted international seminars on the writer. Some scholars believe that while Rimbaud lived in the house, he did not design it. Others believe the building was not a private residence, but rather housed a French school at which Rimbaud was employed as a teacher.
'Almost immediately upon settling in Harar, Rimbaud grew bored. It's not hard to see why. Even if he had forsaken his literary self, he remained a highly intelligent, keenly observant and very emotional man. He needed intellectual stimulation, and he did not find it in Harar. This is the man who, ten years earlier, had enthusiastically written to the poet Théodore de Banville, "I will be a Parnassian! I swear, cher Maître, I will always worship the two goddesses, the Muse and Liberty." Now, his hopes—and, increasingly, his despairs—were more bourgeois. "What good is this coming and going," he wrote to Charleville, "this hard work and these upheavals among strange peoples, these languages I stuff my head with and these nameless tortures, if I can't someday, in a few years, take my ease in a place that suits me pretty well, and have a family—or have, at least, a son whom I can spend the rest of my life bringing up the way I think he should be, whom I can adorn and arm with the most complete education it’s possible to get in this age, and whom I can see, become a renowned engineer, a man whose knowledge makes him rich and powerful. But who knows the length of my days in these mountains? I may simply disappear among the population, and never be heard of again...."
'Partly to alleviate his pressing boredom, Rimbaud took up photography. He had a camera shipped to him from France and began taking pictures. To this we owe the last of the rare photographs we have of Arthur Rimbaud. They are self-portraits. In a simple statement filled with great poignancy, he sent them home to his family so that they "would remember my face." Looking at the photograph of the man in white cotton tropical garb standing in front of a coffee bush, it's difficult to believe he was 29 when it was taken: He looks 50.' -- from Richard Goodman 'Arthur Rimbaud, Coffee Trader'
'If you think that I’m living like a prince, I am quite certain that I’m living in a very stupid and irritating fashion. Anyway let’ hope we can enjoy a few years of true repose in this life; and it’s a good thing that this life is the only one and that it’s obvious it is, since it’s impossible to imagine another life more tedious than this! ... What could I say about the things I’ve attempted with such extraordinary exertions and which have brought me nothing but fever. But it can’t be helped. I’m used to everything now. I fear nothing...’-- from a letter written by Rimbaud in Harar
Rimbaud's house pre-restoration as seen on an old postcard
Rimbaud's restored house and museum, 2007
----
*
p.s. Hey. I should be in Kyoto and/or its immediate vicinity now. You're in the company of Rimbaud as you read this. I hope the convergence results in a happy occasion for each and every one of you.