Free Delirium by Jeremy Reed Page A

that year the two of them took up residence in London. And it was probably there that he wrote most of the experimental prose poems that have come down to us as Les Illuminations. Both he and Verlaine were deeply disturbed, and no matter the consolidation that their relationship appeared to afford, the combined leakage of Verlaine’s self-pity and Rimbaud’s resolution to derange himself in the interests of poetry must have created a negative charge inimical to every hope of a positive future together. Dependent on Verlaine’s mother for money and whatever little they could earn by teaching French to English students, their lives appeared to be mutilated by an irreversible poverty. And Rimbaud had hoped for so much from poetry. While Verlaine was preparing his collection Les Romances sans paroles for his publisher Lepelletier, Rimbaud undertook his work without the incentive of publication. His writing was directed towards no public; its dynamic anticipated a still unrealized future. Part of Rimbaud’s impetuosity, his impatience with poetry as a form capable of containing his imaginative volatility, is reflected in his self-destructive behaviour at this time. He had overtaken himself; poetry was and still is trying to keep track with his fearless assault on the imaginal sanctum regnum .
                  ‘Peut-on s’extasier dans la destruction, se rajeunir par la cruauté!’ Can man reach ecstasy through destruction and be rejuvenated by cruelty?’) Rimbaud’s ‘Conte’ in Les Illuminations poses the question relevant to his own emotional battlefield at the time of his shared life with Verlaine. Something of Rimbaud’s state of delirium, induced by drugs and poetic tension, sounds like a drumbeat through these elliptical and often hermetic allegories in which his imagery crystallizes to a lapidary brilliance around physical shifts of landscape which impart to the reader the sensation of looking out of an aircraft window at the visible changes of terrain.
                  Throughout Les Illuminations Rimbaud uses hallucination as a means of seeing. And maintaining that pitch, whereby the psyche introjects sensory experience before it can be rationalized by interpretation through the external world, imposes an inflammable strain on the nerves. Its demands are those made on the dervish, and one suspects that Rimbaud would have found an exalting influence in the thirteenth-century Persian mystic poet, Rûmî, had his works been known to him. The transcendent vision that Rûmî cultivated was one in which the barrier between man and God was extinguished. Rûmî’s mystical illuminations find a correspondence with Rimbaud’s: both are poets intent on achieving a vision of truth through sensory intoxication.
                  In ‘Conte’ Rimbaud tells us that the Prince, who adopts Rimbaud’s sadistic persona, ‘amused himself by cutting the throats of rare animals. He set palaces on fire. He fell on people and hacked them to pieces. — The crowd, golden roofs and the beautiful creatures continued to exist’. In this passage Rimbaud accentuates the contradiction at the heart of poetry. What takes place as an imaginative reality activated by the poet’s nervous charge and directed towards a homicidal destruction is neutralized by extraneous evidence. The poet’s world is one of dualities. The transformations he causes to take place happen somewhere else; and nor is action on the inner plane parallel to that which happens on a temporal dimension. Poetry anticipates the future, but there is a time-lag. Things happen too quickly and too radically in terms of inner space. The poet can create or annihilate within that context; but in his lifetime he may not see his vision realized. Psychic travel moves at the speed of light and eliminates logical connections. The arc pursued by the poem is meteoric; it burns off excess in flight and earths itself in a place where it will be