Delirium by Jeremy Reed Read Free Book Online

seen them! Let him die as he forces through unheard of, unnameable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one collapsed!
     
                  Rimbaud’s imperatives are unprecedentedly revolutionary. They demand a commitment to the work and a willingness to explore all facets of human experience, such as few poets have ever dared contemplate. If you need a fix of heroin, and Rimbaud’s demands are no less extreme, you may have to sell your body to pay for your habit. If you are a poet, you may have to steal to live. You become ‘the great criminal’, not only in the sense of aspiring to occult knowledge but in the context of living outside society. At the time that Rimbaud was formulating his belief in poetic dementia, and the fearless journeying to the interior where man must alchemically distil his emotions, extracting only what is of use to the experiment, poetry was comfortably in the hands of the safe. Banville, Hugo, Tennyson and Arnold, not to mention Longfellow, were all busy writing poetry that conformed to public sentiment. Rimbaud’s discoveries would have appeared an act of madness to their retrograde conformism.
                  Rimbaud strikes like a wolf aiming for the throat. Only Nietzsche would have understood his ecstatic celebration of evil as an objective contributory to creative vision. And the poet must be willing to accept death as the outcome of his Promethean raid on the inarticulate. The latter is a small price to pay for the incandescent immediacy of having seen and known the high points of visionary crystallization.
                  Rimbaud swallowed fire. He was a magician who used his psychophysical responses as a bridge across the universe. He was at this time an ecstatic savant. He was Prometheus inciting the retribution that comes from stealing fire.
                  At the time of writing this second May letter, ‘we found him too gloomy, too irascible; his movements were jerky, his manners crude. His mother was desperate about him: at one point, he seemed so strange that she thought he was mad’, writes Paterne Berrichon.
                  Rimbaud continues the letter to Demeny with growing excitement and a sense of corresponding intolerance.
     
                  Therefore the poet is really the thief of fire.
                  He is responsible for humanity, even for the animals; he will have to have his visions smelt, felt and heard; if what he brings back from down there has form, he gives it form; if it is formless, he leaves it like that. A language must be found; — Besides, all speech is idea, the time of a universal language will come! One has to be an academic — more dead than a fossil — to compile a dictionary, no matter the language. Weak-minded people, beginning by thinking about the first letter of the alphabet, would quickly go mad! This language will be of the soul for the soul, containing everything, smells, sounds, colours, thought contesting thought. The poet would define the amount of the unknown awakening in his time in the universal soul: he would provide more — than the formulation of his thought, than the record of his march towards Progress! Enormity becoming normal, absorbed by everyone, he would really be a multiplier of progress!
     
                  Rimbaud’s Promethean assertions which adhere to the romantic credo that creation is synonymous with death, and that one involves the other, are here translated into a context of total artistic revolution. Vision demands new sensory responses; its existence in poetry asks that it appeals to all the senses: smell, touch, hearing and so forth. These synaesthetic qualities, which will afford poetry a universal language, are achieved by a journey undertaken là-bas — down there. And Rimbaud had already spent a lot of time staring into the void. The poet carries the pit