Delirium Read Online Free PDF

incisions.
                  Most people fear madness: they do not know what it com-prises, but something within instinctively warns them against any encounter with the ecliptic chimera. They have a premonition of what madness could be: an involuntary loss of control, driving with no hands on the wheel; a blank space in which no coherent thought leads to another.
                  Nerval’s journeys to the Orient and Baudelaire’s metaphysical voyages were starting-points to reach the other shore. The physical world was too readily exhaustible. Remonstrating against ennui, Baudelaire had proclaimed: ‘Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel qu’importe?/ Au fond de l’inconnu trouver du nouveau.’ (all now left to do/ is dive through the depths of either heaven or hell,/ and on through the unknown to find the new.) The emphasis here on finding the new — and Rimbaud would have construed this place as a psychologically constellated state — had for Rimbaud the effect of shooting up on speed. He would take heaven by storm; and if he failed, he would gladly turn to the dark. Interestingly, it is Novalis in his Hymen an die Nacht who anticipates the mystic expectation of the new world to which Rimbaud aspired. Novalis writes:
     
    Now I know when the last morning will be — when the light will no longer intrude on night and love — and when sleep will always become one uninterrupted dream. My pilgrimage to the holy grave was exhausting; the cross unmanageable. The crystal wave, inaudible to lesser senses, wells up in the hill’s dark hollow, at the foot of which the terrestrial tide ebbs, and whoever tastes it, whoever has stood on the world’s threshold and looked over into the promised land into the night’s dwelling, truly that person will not return to the ways of the world, and to the place where light is in a state of perpetual unrest.
     
                  Rimbaud had already renounced the ways of the world. As he kicked around that winter in the Charleville woods, smoking his short pipe with the bowl turned downwards, chalking Death to God on walls or park benches, or hiding out in an abandoned quarry shaft in a wood near Romeny and Le Theux, his mind was beginning to fire with the visionary impulse. The over-stimulus of adrenalin in his body — and it is physiologically arguable that a poet is characterized by adrenal debris not assimilated by the kidneys — took on in Rimbaud the nature of an excitable obscenity. He spoke of screwing dogs — whatever bitch strayed into his territory — and no doubt made similar boasts about fellatio. With his mind already flexing for new worlds, the body must have appeared as limited to him in its sexual functions as it did to de Sade.
                  If Rimbaud was formulating a literary theory at this time, and he gives the impression that systematic thought and mental schemas were of little interest to him (like Hart Crane he read for sensation and not knowledge), it was to evolve in the letters sent to Georges Izambard on 13 May 1871 and two days later on 15 May to Paul Demeny. Rimbaud had travelled a long way through mental space to arrive at his beliefs, and if he picked up snatches of alchemy and magic from the likes of Michelet and Eliphas Levi, and if his imagination was coloured by the works of Baudelaire, Hugo, Poe, Jules Verne and the contemporaries in whom he expressed interest, Banville, Demeny, Verlaine, Armand Renaud and Louis Veuillot, then his visionary quest is all the more original, for it is inspired not by a synthesis of literary study but by a rejection of everything that had come before him.
                  Poets of Rimbaud’s nature do not have time to read books in the meticulous way that scholars do. A poet makes a raid on the imagery, reads for sense stimulus and for whatever characteristics in the work that can be of help to him. This method of intuitive reading means that a book can be