Delirium Read Online Free PDF Page A

It is one of Rimbaud’s early poems in which one feels the subject has an external existence.
                  In the green hollow in which the poem exists, a clear stream crazily reproduces itself in silver tatters through the grasses. The valley bubbles with light. Rimbaud is filthy. He needs to wash his dirt-encrusted hands and he desperately needs money. It is not theft to steal from yourself. And this boy-soldier dead in the floating cresses is suddenly Rimbaud’s other. He can believe it in the frenzy of rolling down the slope to meet up with the stream, his fall broken with his customary exclamation of multiple Shits! ‘... la lumière pleut,’ he tells us. The light rains. The green, liquid refraction of the valley makes the light suggest that it is fluid. The soldier has his feet stuck in gladioli. At first, Rimbaud starts, thinking the person is asleep. He probably pulled up short of the dead body. But the angle of his mouth, which resembles that of a sick child’s, is unmistakably the loose-jawed expression which comes with death. Rimbaud is terse. ‘He is cold.’
                  Life and death are big issues to a schoolboy alone in a valley in which shots have been exchanged. And with his obsessive olfactory command, Rimbaud notes: ‘Les parfums ne font pas frissonner sa narine’ (‘There is no odour which can make the dead man’s nostrils quiver’). And if the soldier simulates sleep, one hand placed on his chest, there are still ‘two red holes in his right side’.
                  When Rimbaud made it back up the slope, still panting with shock and excitement, he had effectively buried the child in him. Who knows if, looking back in the course of his expansively undisciplined itineraries, he didn’t identify with this place? See it again in the diffused white light? But it is always later. He was soon to be someone else. He had lived and known the experience. It was time to clear off in the direction of madness.
     
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Chapter Two
     
     
    And madness is an actual place. It is a state of mind; but it is also a location. What goes on happens at a different speed, in a dislocated sequence, and is detached from time. Most poets visit that house. It may be a square, black building in the middle of the desert. A woman with her hair in flames and a sunflower between her legs reclines on the roof-top. Her hair will never stop burning. When a cloud drifts over, it is square like a building block. Two eyes stare from it as in the portrait of a rectangular face.
                  In less than a year after he was taken back to Charleville in October 1870, Rimbaud was to make further, more extensive flights to Paris. He was to be raped, he was to participate in the Commune, write ‘Le Bateau ivre’ and his extraordinary Lettres du voyant , and finally, in the late summer of 1871, to end up on Verlaine’s doorstep.
                  Poetic madness demands a cyclonic inner revolution. Poets who accept the external world as the singular premise for descriptive creation, live without ever generating the momentum necessary to take off into inner space. Poetry is like ballistics. The poem is a missile pointing from its launching-pad to the intergalactic archipelagos of inner space. And in the manner of a shaman Rimbaud used to slash his body with knives. Cuts into his chest both stimulated his senses and invited his usual curiosity as to how far he could go. Later on he was to have German-style knife duels with Verlaine, in which each would wrap a sharp blade in a towel with only the tip showing and aim at the other’s face or throat. A police report dated 1 August 1873 states: ‘These two individuals fought and tore at one another like wild beasts, just for the pleasure of making it up afterwards.’ One can imagine Verlaine drunk, hysterical, vituperative, and Rimbaud cool, obscene, lacerating — the more likely of the two to have inflicted