The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud Read Online Free PDF Page A

Always seeking to gain a foothold in some ungodly place, always suppressing or exterminating the natives, always clinging to their ill-gotten gains, defending their possessions, their colonies, with army and navy. For the biggest ones the world is not big enough. For the little ones who need room, pious words and veiled threats. The earth belongs to the strong, to those with the biggest armies and navies, to those who wield the economic big stick. How ironical that the solitary poet who ran to the end of the world in order to eke out a miserable living should have to sit with hands folded and watch the big powers make a mess of things in his own garden.
    “Yes, the end of the world … Advance, advance always! Now begins the great adventure …” But as fast as you advance, the government is there ahead of you, with restrictions, with shackles and manacles, with poison gases, tanks and stink bombs. Rimbaud the poet sets himself to teaching the Harari boys and girls the Koran in their own language. The governments would sell them in slavery. “There is some destruction that is necessary,” he wrote once, and what a fuss has been made over that simple statement! He was speaking then of the destruction incidental to creation. But governments destroy without the slightest excuse, and certainly with never a thought of creation. What Rimbaud the poet desired was to see the old forms go, in life as well as in literature. What governments desire is to preserve the status quo, no matter how much slaughter and destruction it entails. Some of his biographers, in describing his behavior as a youth, make him out to be a very bad boy; he did such nasty things, don’t you know. But when it comes to appraising the activities of their dear governments, particularly with regard to those shady intrigues which Rimbaud inveighed against, they are all honey and whitewash. When they want to castigate him as the adventurer, they speak of what a great poet he was; when they want to subjugate him as a poet they speak of his chaos and rebelliousness. They are aghast when the poet imitates their plunderers and exploiters, and they are horrified when he shows no concern for money or for the monotonous, irksome life of the ordinary citizen. As a Bohemian he is too Bohemian, as a poet too poetical, as a pioneer too pioneering, as a man of affairs too much the man of affairs, as a gunrunner too clever a gunrunner, and so on and so forth. Whatever he did, he did too well, that seems to be the complaint against him. The pity is that he didn’t become a politician. He would have done the job so well that Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, to say nothing of Churchill and Roosevelt, would seem like mountebanks today. I don’t think he would have brought about quite the destruction which these estimable leaders visited upon the world. He would have kept something up his sleeve for a rainy day, so to speak. He would not have shot his bolt. He would not have lost track of the goal, as our brilliant leaders seem to have done. No matter what a fiasco he made of his own life, oddly enough I believe that if he had been given the chance he would have made the world a better place to live in. I believe that the dreamer, no matter how impractical he may appear to the man in the street, is a thousand times more capable, more efficient, than the so-called statesman. All those incredible projects which Rimbaud envisaged putting into effect, and which were frustrated for one reason or another, have since been realized in some degree. He thought of them too soon, that was all. He saw far beyond the hopes and dreams of ordinary men and statesmen alike. He lacked the support of those very people who delight in accusing him of being the dreamer, the people who dream only when they fall asleep, never with eyes wide-open. For the dreamer who stands in the very midst of reality all proceeds too slowly, too lumberingly—even destruction.
    “He will never be satisfied,” writes