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preoccupies us night and day:
the next war
. We have unsettled everything; no one knows how or where to reach for the control. The brakes are still there, but will they work? We know they won’t. No, the demon has broken loose. The age of electricity is as far behind us as the Stone Age. This is the Age of Power, power pare and simple. Now it is either heaven or hell, no in between is possible any longer. And by all indications we will choose hell. When the poet lives his hell, it is no longer possible for the common man to escape it. Did I call Rimbaud a renegade?
We are all renegades
. We have been reneging since the dawn of time. Fate at last is catching up with us. We are going to have our Season in Hell, every man, woman and child identified with this civilization. This is what we have been begging for, and now it is here. Aden will seem like a comfortable place. In Rimbaud’s time it was still possible to leave Aden for Harar, but fifty years from now the earth itself will be one vast crater. Despite the denials of the men of science, the power we now have in our hands is radioactive, is permanently destructive. We have never thought of power in terms of good, only in terms of evil. There is nothing mysterious about the energies of the atom; the mystery is in men’s hearts. The discovery of atomic energy is synchronous with the discovery that we can never trust one another again. There lies the fatality—in this hydra-headed fear which no bomb can destroy. The real renegade is the man who has lost faith in his fellowman. Today the loss of faith is universal. Here God himself is powerless. We have put our faith in the bomb, and it is the bomb which will answer our prayers.
     
     
    What a shock it is for the poet to discover that Rimbaud renounced his calling! It is like saying that he renounced Love. Whatever the motive, certainly the paramount drive was loss of faith. The consternation of the poet, his feeling of betrayal and deception, is paralleled by the reaction of the scientist when he discovers the use to which his inventions are put. One is tempted to compare Rimbaud’s act of renunciation with the release of the atomic bomb. The repercussions, though more wide-spread in the latter case, are not more profound. The heart registers a shock before the rest of the body. It takes time for doom to spread throughout the corpus of civilization. But when Rimbaud walked out the back door, doom had already announced itself.
    How right I was to put off the true discovery of Rimbaud! If I draw entirely different conclusions from other poets about his appearance and manifestations on earth, it is in the same spirit that the saints drew extraordinary conclusions about the coming of Christ. Either such things are signal events in the history of man or the art of interpretation is a bogus one. That we shall all live one day as did Christ I have not the slightest doubt. That we shall all deny our individuality first, I have no doubt about either. We have reached the ultimate point of egotism, the atomic state of being. There we go to smash. We are preparing now for the death of the little self in order that the real self may emerge. Unwittingly and unconsciously we have made the world one, but one in nullity. We must go through a collective death in order to emerge as genuine individuals. If it is true, as Lautréamont said, that “poetry must be made by all,” then we must find a new language in which one heart will speak to another without intermediation. Our appeal to one another must be as direct and instantaneous as is the man of God’s to God. The poet today is obliged to surrender his calling because he has already evinced his despair, because he has already acknowledged his inability to communicate. To be a poet was once the highest calling; today it is the most futile one. It is so not because the world is immune to the poet’s pleading, but because the poet himself no longer believes in his divine mission. He