Free Delirium by Jeremy Reed

garret. At five o’clock I went downstairs to buy bread; it was the time. Workmen were up and about. For me, it was time to get drunk in the bars. I returned to my room to eat, and went to bed at seven in the morning, when the sun makes the wood-lice crawl out from under the tiles. What has always delighted me here is the early morning in summer and the December evenings.
     
                  We know this room was in the Hôtel de Cluny, Place de la Sorbonne. It was in that stifling hole that Rimbaud pursued his stages towards attaining poetic madness. He longed for the cool rivers of the Ardennes and for the countryside around Charleville. The torrid summer scorched him: he referred to Paris as Parshit. And how many times did he and Verlaine make love in that attic, soured by the reek of sweat, peppered by termites, foul with the acidic stench of urine rising from the courtyard. Rimbaud wanted everything and nothing. Absolute material power and starving asceticism. Neither would have made him happy. And at least in Verlaine he had a lover who understood the poverty attendant on being a poet. With his stinking body, ragged clothes and lack of money, Rimbaud could not have embarked on a relationship with anyone else even if he had tried.
                  Rimbaud’s letter to Delahaye tells us things about Rimbaud which the latter may have been realizing for the first time when writing the letter. Very often you do not keep pace with what you are doing until you crystallize it through words. In this letter Rimbaud is in the process of recollecting himself. Drugs can take you so far out that you live independent of who you are. You can go on doing things without ever knowing that it is ‘you’ who are really involved. The journey back is one of dissociation. You have been sitting up five days and you thought it was only five hours. What a gain and what a waste!
                  For Rimbaud it was night. He was in passage. `Maintenant, c’est la nuit que je travaince.’ He is in crossing. The journey from dark to light is one of work. The adept celebrates the dawn only after his work has reached a temporary conclusion. In June the light comes at three. Rimbaud notices it only by the diminution of candlelight. He experiences the drug user’s sense of too much light, the rush that burns. Suddenly the window is white. Birds are in confabulation. Day has broken on another reality. It is not his, but the drug wearing off means he is a part of it. There is nothing to do but smoke, listen to the dawn traffic and then go down to the street, half starved, strung out, looking first of all for the appeasement of wine, bewildered by the workaday world — the men already travelling across the city to their various jobs. The poet takes a baguette back to his room. What else can he afford? His pockets are in tatters.
                  We are privileged to have Rimbaud’s intimate portrayal of a typical working night during his Paris stay. He seems to have acquired a drug dependency during the years 1872-3, for, when Rimbaud returned to Roche in the spring of 1873, Paterne Berrichon, relying on information given to him by Rimbaud’s sister Isabelle, tells us that his skin was grey, his pupils contracted, his body suffering from malnutrition. He would lie on his bed for hours, shut up in the dark, raving. The ‘Mauvais sang’ (Bad Blood) from Une saison en enfer , was his own bad blood, the cells craving for narcotics. What he took was hashish and opium; he may well have had access to morphine. He must have stolen to get the money to score.
                  When Rimbaud left Paris in July 1872, a month after writing to Delahaye about his nocturnal life there, it was without his having achieved the literary fame that he had thought so easily within his reach. The next six months were to be a time of psychic and physical upheaval. With Verlaine he visited Brussels, and in September of