hontes, ô Vainqueurs!
O filthy hearts, stinking mouths,
Work up a rhythm, breathing stench
Pour wine, for these depraved tables...
Your bellies melt with shame, o Conquerors!
There is worse to come. One can feel how Rimbaud whips himself into a state of dementia.
Parce que vous fouillez le ventre de la Femme,
Vous craignez d’elle encore une convulsion
Qui crie, asphyxiant votre nichée infamé
Sur sa poitrine, en une horrible pression.
Because you rummage through a woman’s guts,
You fear from her another convulsion
Her crying out, that stifles your lewd perch
Asserting perverse pressure on her breasts.
For Rimbaud ‘L’Orgie parisienne’ was a form of counter-rape. Humiliated, and too poor to combat the injustices meted out to him in the capital, he turns the city into an intestinal metaphor. This was his power. Poetry was a method of lashing his enemies with Sadean thongs. Even if the welts were visible only to posterity, he would still lay deep cuts. And at this stage of his adolescent career he had not yet extinguished the notion of literary ambition. If his age seemed a detriment to his aspirations, his inner conviction that he was a true poet and that the older generation of living poets were to be vilified as expendable fossils, served as an additional obstacle. All of Rimbaud’s creative life is like this. The wave on which he surfs is invariably opposed by a counter-momentum, so that he throws himself board and all at the beach in a state of exalted surprise, only to run up the face of the outgoing wave. Rimbaud’s progress creates an equal valency of obstruction. It is this process of counterbalancing tensions which gives a Rimbaud poem the force of a fire started by an arsonist, engulfing the building as well as himself. Rimbaud smashes up poetic furniture in the way that a drunk, twined violent, takes the bottom out of a chair on a man’s head.
Rimbaud’s psychic discoveries, his attunement to the brutally objective power that the poet turns on his subjectivity, was building to delirium in the spring and summer months of 1871. He had succeeded on several occasions in putting Charleville behind him in terms of physical space; but the place sat on his back like the shell of a turtle. In his need he returned to it; a pattern that he was to follow for the rest of his life. It was after all home, no matter that he despised it. The incongruity for him must have lain in the improbable likelihood that a great poet could originate from a provincial backwater. He adopted arrogance as a cover for excessive anxiety. He was building towards ‘Le bateau ivre’, his great navigable journey across imaginary seas.
Something of Rimbaud’s necessary heartlessness at this time is recounted by his friend Ernest Delahaye. When the two young men were walking past the stud-farms at Mezieres, which had been converted into a hospital camp for victims of the Franco-Prussian War, they caught sight of casualties who were missing arms and legs. Rimbaud, who was little disposed to his friend’s compassion for the maimed, declared: ‘Those loonies were simply the instruments of the defunct regime. As long as they were thought to be the stronger, they were praised. Look at them now. They wear cotton caps and are half dead — what do you expect to be done with them?’
Presumably Rimbaud thought the same of most living poets. They were and are in most cases debris left behind by the old century rather than innovators reaching forward to the new
O filthy hearts, stinking mouths,
Work up a rhythm, breathing stench
Pour wine, for these depraved tables...
Your bellies melt with shame, o Conquerors!
There is worse to come. One can feel how Rimbaud whips himself into a state of dementia.
Parce que vous fouillez le ventre de la Femme,
Vous craignez d’elle encore une convulsion
Qui crie, asphyxiant votre nichée infamé
Sur sa poitrine, en une horrible pression.
Because you rummage through a woman’s guts,
You fear from her another convulsion
Her crying out, that stifles your lewd perch
Asserting perverse pressure on her breasts.
For Rimbaud ‘L’Orgie parisienne’ was a form of counter-rape. Humiliated, and too poor to combat the injustices meted out to him in the capital, he turns the city into an intestinal metaphor. This was his power. Poetry was a method of lashing his enemies with Sadean thongs. Even if the welts were visible only to posterity, he would still lay deep cuts. And at this stage of his adolescent career he had not yet extinguished the notion of literary ambition. If his age seemed a detriment to his aspirations, his inner conviction that he was a true poet and that the older generation of living poets were to be vilified as expendable fossils, served as an additional obstacle. All of Rimbaud’s creative life is like this. The wave on which he surfs is invariably opposed by a counter-momentum, so that he throws himself board and all at the beach in a state of exalted surprise, only to run up the face of the outgoing wave. Rimbaud’s progress creates an equal valency of obstruction. It is this process of counterbalancing tensions which gives a Rimbaud poem the force of a fire started by an arsonist, engulfing the building as well as himself. Rimbaud smashes up poetic furniture in the way that a drunk, twined violent, takes the bottom out of a chair on a man’s head.
Rimbaud’s psychic discoveries, his attunement to the brutally objective power that the poet turns on his subjectivity, was building to delirium in the spring and summer months of 1871. He had succeeded on several occasions in putting Charleville behind him in terms of physical space; but the place sat on his back like the shell of a turtle. In his need he returned to it; a pattern that he was to follow for the rest of his life. It was after all home, no matter that he despised it. The incongruity for him must have lain in the improbable likelihood that a great poet could originate from a provincial backwater. He adopted arrogance as a cover for excessive anxiety. He was building towards ‘Le bateau ivre’, his great navigable journey across imaginary seas.
Something of Rimbaud’s necessary heartlessness at this time is recounted by his friend Ernest Delahaye. When the two young men were walking past the stud-farms at Mezieres, which had been converted into a hospital camp for victims of the Franco-Prussian War, they caught sight of casualties who were missing arms and legs. Rimbaud, who was little disposed to his friend’s compassion for the maimed, declared: ‘Those loonies were simply the instruments of the defunct regime. As long as they were thought to be the stronger, they were praised. Look at them now. They wear cotton caps and are half dead — what do you expect to be done with them?’
Presumably Rimbaud thought the same of most living poets. They were and are in most cases debris left behind by the old century rather than innovators reaching forward to the new
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