Free Delirium by Jeremy Reed Page B

discovered at the right time.
                  Les Illuminations is full of references to the alchemical work; the transformation of the ego into the sublimated psyche. ‘Metropolitain’ concludes with an affirmation of the mystic’s power. ‘In the morning when, with Her, you fought in the dazzle of snow, the green lips, the ice, the black flags and blue rays, and the purple perfumes of the polar sun — your strength.’ The experience described here is analogous to that encountered in Rimbaud’s alchemical night ‘Matinée d’ivresse’. ‘We have been promised that the tree of good and evil will be buried in darkness, that tyrannical honesty will be exiled, so that we may flourish in our pure love: It began with feelings of disgust and it ends — since we could not seize eternity immediately — with a riot of perfumes.’
                  Rimbaud’s demand is one of immediate knowledge; his aesthetic doctrine approved of dynamic change. In his discourse with the work he had been promised that a new love would replace ‘the tree of good and evil’, and within the poem it had. Part of Rimbaud’s disappointment with poetry can be attributed to the time-lag he felt disrupted the action of conceiving the poem, and the failure of that vision to make good in the socio-economic ethos in which the poet lived. Rimbaud’s battle is fought within this tension field. He uses delirium to counteract temporal inertia. His poetic world is one of heightened colour, magnified sensory stimuli, a universe in which the imagination is sovereign. He constantly resembles someone who paints in a dream, and on awakening is distraught to find that the world is unaltered by his private action. He runs out into the street searching for his violet skies, black ice, green clouds, only to find a washed-out blue sky tenting the city, the ordinary day going on with its uneventful people. And by way of retaliation, the poet only further intensifies his intrinsic findings. He creates in order to contravene the natural order of things, the poem working in dialectical opposition to reality. Rimbaud’s genius is inseparable from attack. Failing to find the world altered by his vision, he sets about deconstructing the latter. There are times when Rimbaud reminds me of Jackson Pollock, whose drunkenness and physicality in his handling of paint demanded a brutal confrontation with his canvas.
                  During the autumn and early winter of 1872 Rimbaud and Verlaine struggled to survive in London. Verlaine was besieged by blue court papers dealing with his wife’s justifiable demands for separation and a claim for yearly maintenance of twelve hundred francs. But the undertones were worse. Mathilde had been advised to bring court accusations of homosexuality against her husband, an offence which at the time involved not only literary and social ruin but could also carry with it a prison sentence. Moreover, Rimbaud was still a minor. Verlaine could be accused not only of abduction but illegal sex: in a word, paedophilia.
                  In the poem ‘Vagabonds’ in Les Illuminations Rimbaud expresses an irritated compassion for his maudlin, intoxicated friend. Rimbaud had clearly outgrown the relationship; poetry had failed them both in terms of its providing for them in the material world. Rimbaud’s dream of discovering a universal panacea through his studies as a mage had resulted in acute poverty. His boots leaked, he slept in his clothes for additional warmth, and whatever money came to him he immediately spent on liquor and drugs.
     
    Poor brother! What terrible nights I owed him! ‘I had no deep feeling for the affair. I played on his weakness. Through my fault, we would return to exile and slavery.’ He believed I had a weird form of bad luck and innocence, and he added disquieting reasons.
                  I would reply by jeering at this satanic doctor, and would end by