Shocky's Corner

Deranging My Senses - in the Absence of Absinthe

Photo by Sabina Sturzu on Unsplash

I had just gorged myself on a hillock of pasta at Original Joes and was fit for nothing but to sit on a small stepping stool in the City Lights Book store in San Francisco. I was pretend reading whatever nudged its way into my careless hand when Scattered Poems by Jack Kerouac, pressed against my fingers offering itself up to my indifference. I half-heartedly flipped through the pages, burping softly into Daydreams For Ginsberg and Lucien Midnight. Towards the end of the tiny book of freestyle verse, I came upon a poem called Rimbaud. All of a sudden my insouciance shifted.

Arthur! Kerouac begins.

On t’appela pas Jean!

What a confluence of counterculture icons, I thought; one of the first Beatniks of the 1950’s and the Wild Enfant Savant of the1870s, both rebels against societal norms, and both advocates for deranging the senses to get to the truth of their art. Kerouac follows with two more exclamatory sentences:

Born in 1854 cursing in Carle-
Ville (...)
No wonder your father left!
So you entered school at 8
- Proficient little Latinist you!

I couldn’t help but be awakened by the series of jibes thrown by Kerouac at this poet to whom I was introduced when I was a first-year university student. The American poet and author of On The Road describes Rimbaud as a youth;

he stares & stares & chews
his degenerate lip & stares
With gray eyes at
Walled France -

Kerouac goes on to talk about Rimbaud’s life in Paris where;

The Voyant is born,
The deranged seer makes his first Manifesto
Gives vowels colors
& consonants carking care
Comes under the influence of old French Fairies
Who accuse him of constipation
Of the brain & diarrhea
Of the mouth

As I read the poem in the attic of that bookstore, sounds of evening traffic and the couple squabbling in the alleyway faded. I was transported to 1985 and my first week of classes at UCC, where I encountered one of my most thrilling profs. She had long dark hair and wore Doc Martins with stripey knee high socks. She was young and transitory and full of theories that I had never considered before – a far cry from the wimples of St. Aloysius Secondary School. She asked the whole class to write one line of anything we wanted on a scrap of paper which she collected. Overnight, she compiled a poem which included all the student’s scribblings. I was already besotted even before she read Rimbaud’s, Le Bateau Ivre (The Drunken Boat), out loud.

The opening lines in English go:

As I was going down impassive Rivers,
I no longer felt myself guided by haulers:

From the first couple of lines, students’ minds, wrenched open by the imagery and title (it did, after all have the word drunken in it!), were hooked into a sea-faring tale. The rivers in the poem are impassive but the entity going down them is certainly not. It, the boat, is no longer guided by authoritative figures, the haulers, who we are told have been violently executed, their bodies stripped and nailed to “colored stakes”. Don’t you remember that feeling when you began third level education and no longer felt yourself “guided”? I certainly felt a thrill at the dangerous potential of such freedom. I soaked up every drop of Le Bateau Ivre like a thirsty first-year student after a night on the tiles. (It was highly likely that half of the class was hungover on first encountering the poem and was already experiencing the throes of “furious lashing of the tides”!)

Photo by Robert Clark on Unsplash

Rimbaud was just 16 years old when he wrote Le Bateau Ivre - a poem which still stands as a paragon of French symbolism poetry. He had spent a life, up to that point, with his stern, religious mother. He was practically fatherless as his father had shown no interest in his family and certainly not in his wife, Marie Catherine Vitalie, who he called “bouche d’ombre” (mouth of darkness). In the time he spent with her over a seven-year period, he never stayed longer than three consecutive months. Frédéric Rimbaud, managed to sire five children in that short time before dropping out of the family’s lives forever. Marie Catherine sent Rimbaud to school to save him from the degeneracy of the streets. He was a gifted student winning eight first prizes in French academic competitions in 1869 when he was 14 and seven first prizes the following year. Luckily for him as his mother would punish him by holding back meals if he didn’t succeed in his studies. But Rimbaud was plagued with restlessness and felt stifled in Charleville.

He aggressively threw off the shackles of his existence, the boredom of the Ardennes, and his mother’s narrowmindedness. He was the bateau ivre, violently throwing off his past, ready to bathe himself, “in the Poem of the Sea,”. There was no escaping la boue for Rimbard. He wanted it, relished to wallow in it, ached to get to the action of Paris. He tried to run away a couple of times, finally sending his poem, Le Bateau Ivre to French poet Paul Verlaine. Verlaine, who was 26 years old at the time, married to a seventeen-year-old and expecting his first baby, was a rising poet amongst the Parisian literati.

Verlaine wrote to Rimbaud telling him to, more or less, get to Paris lickity spit; “Come, dear great soul,” Verlaine wrote, “We await you; we desire you”. He sent him a one-way ticket to join him. It is disputed how soon Verlaine and Rimbaud began their affair but there is no doubt that Rimbaud and Verlaine’s spirits collided in a supernova of dangerous sparks. They eventually started a torrid affair when Rimbaud was 17 years old. Verlaine’s marriage was on the rocks. His wife Mathilde blamed her husband’s alcoholism and violence for their arguments. Homosexuality was not illegal in France at the time, it had been decriminalized in 1791. She had no idea that homosexuality even existed, she wrote later in life, until she read letters between the men. Running away to Belgium and then to London, the two poets lived together in an absinthe-soaked frenzy of love making, opium smoking and poetry writing.

Rimbaud had not yet experienced everything he wanted to before he met Verlaine, although he could still write about the life in which he was hoping to immerse himself in Le Bateau Ivre;”

And from then on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, infused with stars and lactescent,
Devouring the azure verses; where, like a pale elated
Piece of flotsam, a pensive drowned figure sometimes sinks;

We can imagine Verlaine being tantalized from afar by the verve of the poet. The writing is full of joy. The images full of symbols of the exuberance of divine, limitless youth. We see the poet as boat, heart bursting in ecstasy at the extraordinary beauty of its epic journey.

I know the skies bursting with lightning, and the waterspouts
And the surf and the currents; I know the evening,
And dawn as exalted as a flock of doves
And at times I have seen what man thought he saw!

However, midway through the poem there is a change in the language. We pick up on a foreboding, the writer slipping in words signalling an inevitable decay;

I have seen enormous swamps ferment, fish-traps
Where a whole Leviathan rots in the rushes!
Avalanches of water in the midst of a calm,
And the distances cataracting toward the abyss!
 
Glaciers, suns of silver, nacreous waves, skies of embers!
Hideous strands at the end of brown gulfs
Where giant serpents devoured by bedbugs
Fall down from gnarled trees with black scent!

After arriving in Paris and for the next four years, Rimbaud set out, as he put it in a letter to his mentor, Georges Izambard, to “encrapulate” himself as much as possible. His young self felt that the only way to make himself come close to the unknown was through a complete derangement of the senses. “The suffering is tremendous,” he wrote, “but one must bear up against it, to be born a poet, and I know that’s what I am. It’s not at all my fault.” He saw himself as some kind of sacrificial lamb in the name of artistic truth, “Tough luck to the wood that becomes a violin…”. He likened himself to “some man sewing his face with a crop of warts,” all in pursuit of the title Supreme Savant.

I cannot help but compare his words with those of Kerouac in On the Road…

“...the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”

Sadly, Rimbaud never made it to the full realization of his talent. He ran out of creative steam, the “blue centerlight” at the centre of his four-year comet tail of brilliance extinguished, and the hunger to continue as all-consumed and consuming poet and writer spent. Like some teenage oracle, Rimbaud foretells his future in Le Bateau Ivre, knowing that he will experience all of life in blinding technicolor; skies bursting with lightning, flowers panthers eyes, rainbows stretched like bridal reins, suns of silver, fish of gold, violet fogs. But the sixteen-year-old also prophesied that the extraordinary journey must finish. As the jaded boat nears its end, it implores for rest, begs to be able to sink and become one with the sea;

But, in truth, I have wept too much! Dawns are heartbreaking.
Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.
Acrid love has swollen me with intoxicating torpor
O let my keel burst! O let me go into the sea!

Rimbaud’s affair ended when Verlaine, in a jealous rage, shot him in the arm . Rimbaud wasn’t badly injured but Verlaine went to prison for two years for the assault. By the time he was 21, Rimbaud, like the drunken boat, had done all the fandango-ing he was going to do. He took out a massive mental scissors and severed the poet in him, opting instead to pursue a working life as solider, stone quarry foreman, coffee merchant and weapons runner. Eventually he died from cancer at the age of 37. Perhaps by the time he reached his twenties he was disillusioned with poetry having stretched his mental capacity to seek the all-elusive truth at the heart of art; or maybe he was sickened by his violent relationship with Verlaine. Regardless, he felt the epic adventure was over for him. A few short years after he first burst onto the scene Rimbaud wrote in his swan song, Saisons de Fer:

“I believed I’d gained supernatural powers. Ah well! I must bury my imagination and my memories! Sweet glory as an artist and story-teller swept away!”

It’s interesting how we read changes over time. When I first encountered Rimbaud’s writing, I was enthralled by the hedonism, the crazy bravery of the young man who threw himself body and soul into pursuing excellence in art, who “suffered” to invent new ways of expression. Now, I look back on his work with a mother’s sensibility and find myself horrified at the recklessness. I am mad at Verlaine for being ten years older than a young, impressionable young man and exposing him to so much dangerous behaviour. I lament the loss of what could have been a longer and even more illustrious writing career. Overall, I am sad for the older Rimbaud who was said to be a quiet, intelligent man, who lived a simple life and died too young.

Kerouac admired and was certainly influenced by Rimbaud’s rebellious quest to pursue freedom of expression and his attempts to invent new ways to write. I read Kerouac’s On the Road first when I was a teenager. It is a book that explores themes of freedom. On my top bunk, flanked by my teddy bear and school books, I was completely invested in the vagabonding of Sal Paradiso and Dean Moriarty. The story is deliberately wrought in a jazzy rhythmic beat without form or structure, and I was open to taking the pilgrimage with the two rebels. However, I reread On the Road when I came back from that trip to San Francisco and have to say the book didn’t age well, or maybe I didn’t age well and am now full of judgement and cynicism. The sexism went right over my 14-year-old head, however, to my middle-aged mind, Kerouac’s writing emanates from a sozzled, drug-induced, sneering, disappointed being. The characters are annoying, both narrator and protagonist horribly misogynistic. The writing now smacks of an attempt at banal existentialism, and I find myself agreeing with Truman Capote’s assessment that Kerouac’s words are “just typing not writing”.

My soul is still pulled towards the allure of finding my own personal truth through reckless abandonment as I might have done when I was that first year university student in UCC, but unlike Kerouac and Rimbaud I prefer to search today while in my sane senses. In the absence of absinthe, I go into the woods, find an out-of-the-way mossy log to sit upon and listen instead to the symphony of the forest. These days that’s all the derangement I need and all I can stand. One has practical responsibilities after all and hangovers are more harrowing with age…

Photo by Diana Krotova on Unsplash

p.s. I will be taking a wee hiatus from Shocky’s Corner for the summer. Hope to see you back here in August!