Delirium Read Online Free

were serious liabilities. But he was intoxicated by danger. Pushing himself to extremes, going without food, sleeping out in vermin-infested clothes were stages of induction towards his confrontation with visionary experience. His mind must have been massive with expectation. The roads were dust; but there was the exhilaration of sudden showers sparkling across the landscape. He would have heard the shrieking of ‘jays, busy collecting acorns, the branch-shaking gymnastics of squirrels. He was free. Somewhere along the road, half buried on the slope of a valley swollen with watercress, was the dead soldier who found his way into ‘Le Dormeur du val’. And Rimbaud was insatiably curious. Surely he would have dropped down into the valley to examine the corpse? He would have stolen whatever money, valuables or tobacco he could find in the man’s blood-soaked uniform. There had to be something he could sell to finance his journey. He went through Charleroi on his way to Brussels, where he begged shelter and food from an acquaintance of Izambard’s. Poems like ‘Les Effarés’, ‘Au Cabaret-Vert’, ‘Le Mal’, ‘Rages de Cesar’ and ‘Le Dormeur du val’ all owe their inspiration to this second truancy from home.
                  Did he sell his body on the way? Probably not. On his next flight to Paris he was raped, or more to the point gang-banged by the military. This time the elated pantheism he was near to experiencing in 1870 provided him, despite his close proximity to starvation, with an adrenalized dynamic of energy. He was nervously charged like a thief before he steals. And isn’t there in Rimbaud’s childhood behaviour the premonition of the young vagrant, Jean Genet, who was likewise to adopt a psychology of wilful self-debasement in the pursuit of imaginative truth? Rimbaud was looking for something he could not locate or yet express in the visionary language which so eloquently informs ‘Le Bateau ivre’, Les Illuminations and his ‘Negro Book’ — Une saison en enfer . The alchemical process had begun. He knew he was marked. Something he could not properly apprehend was growing in him. He must have wondered why he, the child of undistinguished parents and a provincial schoolboy, should be the messenger to what he hoped would be a future race. What could that mean to those from whom he had to beg? How do you declare yourself as an evolutive visionary? The dirt on his face, his straggly hair, his broad, red fingers must have had people assume he was bad blood on the run from home. All he knew was that the tempestuous momentum of his poetic vision forced him out into the open. What is in most young men a prompting sanctioned by sexual curiosity, so that instinctively one strays into alleys and places where sex may be realized, was in Rimbaud the desire to find the physical location that corresponded to his psychic locus. And in the process the ordinary is transformed into the marvellous. You can be looking at a door-frame from which the paint is flaking, the windowless, dead side of a building — any building — and quite suddenly it is there. A line of poetry has intersected with an incongruous external. The two are not related, but the juxtaposition was necessary to generate the tension needed for the writing of a poem.
                  Rimbaud picked up things with his eye on this journey. Seeing is not only a continuous visual retrieval but a form of unmonitored theft. You can raid both things and people. One can appropriate whatever catches the eye, and on a sexual plane masturbation is the means of making love to an involuntary image. Poetry is close to the latter in its function. One can internalize any woman or man of one’s choice, in Rimbaud’s case it was probably both, and it is the same with poetry. One sensitizes the idea of a thing, frictionalizes it with one’s nerves and transforms it into something else. Poetry is the most sophisticated form of