This refusal to mature, as we view it, has a quality of pathetic grandeur. Mature into what? we can imagine him asking himself. Into a manhood which spells enslavement and emasculation? He had blossomed prodigiously but—to flower? To flower meant to expire in corruption. He elects to die in the bud. It is the supreme gesture of youth triumphant.
—Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud
Les couleurs propres de la vie se foncent, dansent, et se dégagent autour de la Vision, sur le chantier.1
—Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations
The first thing to remember about Rimbaud, as a poet, is that he remains a boy for as long as he is actively writing. It is only when he leaves poetry that he becomes a man. In other words, he is not Baudelaire. One of the main attractions, for writers, is the unfinished quality of Rimbaud: like Heraclitus, like Sappho, like any other writer who leaves us what are, in a sense, fragments of a larger body of thought, this boy poet gifts us new spaces to play in—not just for interpretation, but also for expansions, elaborations, elucidations, justifications, and the armchair rebel’s tacit agreement that what cannot be spoken of should remain beautifully unsaid. Yet while it is part of the writer’s task to leave certain things untold (because he or she must trust, at times, to the reader’s imagination), it is never his or her task simply to lapse into silence. Baudelaire understood this.2 The difference between Rimbaud and Baudelaire (or, for that matter, Rimbaud and Thoreau) is that Rimbaud took the first step necessary for self-transformation—la fuite, the dérèglement de tous les sens, the sojourn in “Nature” in which the solitary spirit disconnects itself from the societal yoke—but he did not move on to the next step—or rather, he did not do so on paper. As Henry Miller notes, “[T]he only law which is really lived up to wholeheartedly and with a vengeance is the law of conformity. No wonder that as a mere lad [Rimbaud] ended ‘by finding the disorder of his mind sacred.’ At this point he had really made himself a seer. . . . Why could he not have compromised? Because compromise was not in his vocabulary. He was a fanatic from childhood, a person who had to go the whole hog or die. In this lies his purity, his innocence.”3 That may be. But what Rimbaud failed to recognize—understandably, given his youth, his social background, and his times—was that the compromise, for the writer who continues to work beyond the voyant stage of his development, is not with society, but with himself.
“No one can flatter himself that he is immune to the spirit of his own epoch,” says Jung, “or even that he possesses a full understanding of it. Irrespective of our conscious convictions, each one of us, without exception, being a particle of the general mass, is somewhere attached to, coloured by, or even undermined by the spirit which goes through the mass. Freedom stretches only as far as the limits of our consciousness.”4 The problem of giving up the artist’s—the anarchist’s—vocation at the voyant stage, before the long discipline of coming to terms with what one has seen, is that the bad influence of societal conditioning (especially through the internalized figures of the parents against whom the seer rebels) lasts so very long. For the child, no matter how well he rebels against the more obvious elements of his conditioning, the stark gap in the emotional and sexual lives of his internalized parents, that pervasive and shaming disequilibrium, continues well into adulthood. Sometimes it is replicated, sometimes it is so fiercely rejected that there is nothing left to hold on to and work with. It may be, for many of us at least, that we never break free—or not fully. The sin of the parents is to demand that the child continue their lives for them.
It is, of course, unfair to compare Rimbaud with Baudelaire. We can never know what the former would have done, had he continued writing (interestingly, and rather amusingly, Miller compares Rimbaud to himself, saying that, in Rimbaud’s story, “I rediscover my own plight. I have never relinquished the struggle. But what a price I have paid!”). As always, Miller is the hero of any story he tells—and in many ways, Rimbaud (to whose work he was introduced by his young rebel friends, John Dudley and Lafe Young of The Air-Conditioned Nightmare), or at least, the Rimbaud who appears in The Time of the Assassins, is as much a romantic alter-ego for Miller as he has been for thousands of self-styled poet-rebels who have taken to the road, and the pipe, in pursuit of the seer’s life. For it is true now, and will remain so, that Rimbaud’s initial predicament is shared by any intelligent child growing up in a society whose main purpose is to prepare its young people for a life of work and being adequately governed. Henri Laborit is right when he says that the socialization process aims at controlling every aspect of our lives, from the way we walk, to our sexual preferences, to how we think, and even to how and what we imagine.
Initially, this process is left in the hands of the education system, though the etymology of that term, e-ducere (to lead out, to bring out an individual’s own gifts and abilities), is hardly commensurate with what actually happens in schools, youth groups, and the inevitable remedial centers that spring up to deal with the maladjusted and the maverick. Many a child who survives an industrial society’s education system may remember the one teacher who saw some spark of possibility in that child’s mind, a nub of stubborn creativity, a wisp of spirit, a hint of the true wild—but what that one exception does, all too often, is to prove the rule that, for the most part, the education system exists to impose approved societal standards, expectations, and limits more or less uniformly (though much depends on class and privilege, and occasionally luck). So, while it may seem cruel, and insufficiently appreciative of Rimbaud’s youthful achievements in poetry, I want to suggest here that Rimbaud is, overall, a perfect model of the youthful rebel who defies the system that would control him, sometimes with real elegance, real grace, but who eventually falls away, defeated, exhausted, lost. Thus, while Miller stands alongside Rimbaud as the hero of The Time of the Assassins, he is also his most perceptive—and kindly—critic. Speaking of both Rimbaud and D. H. Lawrence as alter-egos in their fight against “the mothers,” Miller makes the central point in any assessment of the rebel writer’s work:
All the rebelliousness which I share with them derives from this problem which, as nearly as I can express it, means the search to find one’s true link with humanity. One finds it neither in the personal life nor in the collective life, if one is of this type. One is unadaptable to the point of madness. One longs to find his peer, but one is surrounded by vast empty spaces. One needs a teacher, but one lacks the humility, the flexibility, the patience which is demanded. One is not even at home or at ease with the great in spirit; even the highest are defective or suspect. And yet one has affinities only with these highest types. It is a dilemma fraught with the highest significance. One had to establish the ultimate difference of his own peculiar being and doing so discover his kinship with all humanity, even the very lowest. Acceptance is the key word. But acceptance is precisely the great stumbling block. It has to be total acceptance and not conformity.
Miller then goes on to say, just a page later:
Rimbaud stressed the fact that he wanted liberty in salvation. But one is saved only by surrendering this illusory freedom. The liberty he demanded was freedom for his ego to assert itself unrestrained. That is not freedom. Under this illusion one can, if one lives long enough, play out every facet of one’s being and still find cause to complain, ground to rebel. It is a kind of liberty which grants one the right to object, to secede if necessary. It does not take into account other people’s differences, only one’s own. It will never aid one to find one’s link, one’s communion, with all mankind. One remains forever separate, forever isolate.5
Miller goes on to compare Rimbaud to Van Gogh, but I feel, still, that it would have been more rewarding to bring in Baudelaire here—for one of Baudelaire’s great achievements as an artist is to go beyond the desire for an illusory freedom of the ego, in order to accept himself as he is, in a communal, if oppositional, context and so find a historical link with all humankind. Baudelaire finds it in himself to object, but not to secede: by a supreme act of artistic discipline he came to a place where, standing alone, he nevertheless enters into a brotherhood of men that, in Miller’s words, “consists not in thinking alike, nor in acting alike, but in aspiring to praise creation. The song of creation springs from the ruins of earthly endeavor. The outer man dies away in order to reveal the golden bird which is winging its way towards divinity.”6 Though I am not sure I would, myself, stand by all of the language here (I would probably prefer an ordinary skylark, or a regular flamingo, to some firebird of myth) I do believe that, among the French poets, Baudelaire, and elsewhere, Rilke, or Montale (to name two Europeans more or less at random) were exemplars of a poetic discipline that, having passed through the necessary stage of être un voyant, returns to the common light of day with new vision and no particular need for the wings of angels.7
So why is it that Rimbaud is such an important figure for the rebel artist? Why does Miller choose to write an entire book—often incisive, sometimes repetitive, occasionally a little too busy with its own rhetoric—on this boy, rather than, say, the grown-man, Baudelaire? I think much of Rimbaud’s vogue, especially among the young, has to do with our retrospective knowledge of what was waiting to emerge from the European darkness. In the post-Auschwitz, post-Nagasaki, post-natural world we now inhabit, it can seem, at least by day, that all place is lost—that the living places of Being Beauteous, where life’s very own colors darken and dance and shift around the emerging Vision, are so few and far between that they have become mere curiosities. Perhaps they always were to industrial, “bourgeois” society. Paradoxically, however, the more depleted the life of the day has become, the richer the dusk has begun to seem, so that the night seems to be full of a truly pagan beauty and grace that must conceal itself in the darkness to survive the overall degradation of the developed world (and this, it seems to me, is key: this idea of the pagan, the life of the land, the nature, to paraphrase Rilke, with which we fall into harmony by choosing it). In that depleted world, it can seem that all real life has taken to the shadows, to the corners, to subways and cellar bars and underground tunnels, to the drug den, the freak show, the dark end of the fair, as the only venues where it may reveal its tainted beauty—a beauty that is both forbidden and accursed. This is the source of modernist nostalgia: this dusk. It would seem wonderfully ironic, then, that the rebel who passes through the search for “freedom” and emerges renewed into the common light of day may well arrive at another kind of nostalgia altogether, the nostalgia that informs the work of those writers who, in the twentieth century, really did illuminate our shared creaturely world—a nostalgia for the mysteries of a Wednesday afternoon, when tea is warmer than absinthe, and a stray wisp of smoke from the stove is more intoxicating than “le rêve d’un hachischin.” Is Miller one of that band of illuminators? It would be wonderful, given his image, to be able to say that he is—and in many ways, his best works, The Time of the Assassins included, would go a long way toward justifying that claim.