The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud by Henry Miller Read Free Book Online Page B

as an obstacle. One wants the comfort and security of her womb, that darkness and ease which for the unborn is the equivalent of illumination and acceptance for the truly born. Society is made up of closed doors, of taboos, laws, repressions and suppressions. One has no way of getting to grips with those elements which make up society and through which one must work if one is ever to establish a true society. It is a perpetual dance on the edge of the crater. One may be acclaimed as a great rebel, but one will never be loved. And for the rebel above all men it is necessary to know love, to give it even more than to receive it, and to be it even more than to give it.
    Once I wrote an essay called “The Enormous Womb.” In this essay I conceived the world itself as a womb, as the place of creation. This was a valiant and a valid effort toward acceptance. It was a harbinger of a more genuine acceptance which was shortly to follow, an acceptance which I realized with my whole being. But this attitude, of regarding the world itself as womb and creation, was not a pleasant one to other rebels. It only alienated me still more. When the rebel falls out with the rebel, as he usually does, it is like the ground giving way beneath one’s feet. Rimbaud experienced that sinking feeling during the Commune. The professional rebel finds it difficult to swallow such an attitude. He has an ugly name for it: treason. But it is just this treasonable nature in the rebel which differentiates him from the herd. He is treasonable and sacrilegious always, if not in the letter then in the spirit. He is a traitor at heart because he fears the humanity in him which would unite him with his fellow man; he is an iconoclast because, revering the image too greatly, he comes to fear it. What he wants above all is his common humanity, his powers of adoration and reverence. He is sick of standing alone; he does not want to be forever a fish out of water. He cannot live with his ideals unless these ideals are shared, but how can he communicate his ideas and ideals if he does not speak the same language as his fellow man? How can he win them if he does not know love? How can he persuade them to build if his whole life is spent in destroying?
    Upon what foundation is unrest built? The
“hydre intime”
eats away until even the core of one’s being becomes sawdust and the whole body, one’s own and the world’s, is like unto a temple of desolation.
“Rien de rien ne m’illusionne!”
cried Rimbaud. Yet his whole life was nothing but a grand illusion. The true reality of his being he never uncovered, never came to grips with. Reality was the mask which he struggled with fierce claws to rip away. In him was a thirst unquenchable.
“Légendes ni figures
Ne me désaltèrent.”
     
    No, nothing could quench his thirst. The fever was in his vitals where the secret gnawed and gnawed. His spirit reveals itself from the amniotic depths, where, like a drunken boat, he tosses on the sea of his poems. Wherever the light penetrates it wounds. Each message from the bright world of spirit creates a fissure in the wall of the tomb. He lives in an ancestral refuge which crumbles with exposure to the light of day. With all that was elemental he was at home; he was a throwback, an archaic figure, more French than any Frenchman yet an alien in their midst. Everything that had been reared in the light of common effort he rejected. His memory, which embraces the time of the Cathedrals, the time of the Crusades, is a race memory. It is almost as though birth had failed to individualize him. He comes into the world equipped like a Saracen. He has another code, another principle of action, another world view. He is a primitive endowed with all the noblesse of ancient lineage. He is super in every way, the better to conceal his minus side. He is that differentiated being, the prodigy, born of human flesh and blood but suckled by the wolves. No analytic jargon will ever explain