Free The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud by Henry Miller Page A

he will one day reach beyond himself, and on wings of gold.
    One creation matches another; in essence they are all alike. The brotherhood of man consists not in thinking alike, nor in acting alike, but in aspiring to praise creation. The song of creation springs from the ruins of earthly endeavor. The outer man dies away in order to reveal the golden bird which is winging its way toward divinity.

P A R T   II
     

When Do Angels Cease to Resemble Themselves?
     
    T here is a passage in
A Season in Hell
(the section called “The Impossible”) which seems to provide the clue to the nature of the harrowing tragedy which Rimbaud’s life describes. That this is his last work—at the age of eighteen!—has a certain importance. Here his life divides evenly in two, or to look at it another way, it completes itself. Like Lucifer, Rimbaud succeeds in getting himself ejected from Heaven, the Heaven of Youth. He is vanquished not by an Archangel but by his own mother, who for him personifies authority. It is a fate which he abetted from the very beginning. The brilliant youth who possesses all talents, and who despises them, abruptly breaks his life in two. It is an act at once magnificent and horrible. Satan himself could not have devised a more cruel punishment than Arthur Rimbaud meted out to himself in his invincible pride and egotism. At the very threshold of manhood he surrenders his treasure (the genius of the creator) to “that secret instinct and power of death in us” which Amiel has described so well. The
“hydre intime”
so deforms the image of love that only defiance and impotence are discernible finally. Abandoning all hope of recovering the key to his lost innocence, Rimbaud plunges into the black pit in which the human spirit touches nadir, there to parody Krishna’s words: “With this myself I establish the whole Universe, and remain for ever separate.”
    The passage which reveals his awareness of the issue and his choice, which is necessitous, runs as follows:
    “If my spirit were always wide-awake from this moment on, we would soon arrive at the truth, which perhaps even now surrounds us with her angels, weeping! … If it had been awake up until now, I would not have given in to degenerate instincts, to a forgotten epoch! … If it had always been wide-awake, I would be sailing in full wisdom! …”
    What it was that sealed his vision, and thereby brought about his doom, no one knows—and probably no one ever will know. His life, for all the facts at our disposal, remains as much a mystery as his genius. What we see clearly enough is that everything he prophesied about himself in the three years of illumination vouchsafed him is fulfilled in the years of wandering when he makes of himself a desert. How often in his writings appear the words desert, ennui, rage, toil! In the second half of his life these words attain a concrete significance which is devastating. He becomes everything that he predicted, everything that he was frightened of, everything that he raged against. The struggle to free himself of man-made fetters, to rise above human laws, codes, conventions, superstitions leads him nowhere. He becomes the slave of his own whims and caprices, a puppet who has nothing better to do than chalk up a few more trifling crimes to his credit in the log book of his own damnation.
    That he gives in at the end when his body is but “a motionless stump,” as he puts it, is not to be dismissed with the sceptic’s sneer. Rimbaud was the rebel incarnate. It required every known degradation and humiliation, every form of laceration, to break the stubborn will which had been perverted at the source. He was perverse, untractable, adamant—until the very last hour. Until there was no more hope. He was one of the most desperate souls that ever stalked the earth. True, he gave up from exhaustion—but not before he had traveled every wrong road. At the end, having nothing to sustain his pride any longer,