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

work:
éternité, infini, charité, solitude, angoisse, lumière, aube, soleil, amour, beauté, inouï, pitié, démon, ange, ivresse, paradis, enfer, ennui….
    These are the warp and woof of his inner pattern; they tell us of his innocence, his hunger, his restlessness, his fanaticism, his intolerance, his absolutism. His god was Baudelaire who had plumbed the depths of evil. I have remarked before, and it is worth repeating, that the whole nineteenth century was tormented with the question of God. Outwardly it seems like a century given up to material progress, a century of discoveries and inventions, all pertaining to the physical world. At the core, however, where the artists and thinkers are always anchored, we observe a profound disturbance. Rimbaud epitomizes the conflict in a few pages. And, as if that were not enough, he impresses on his whole life the same enigmatic cast which characterizes the epoch. He is more truly the man of his time than were Goethe, Shelley, Blake, Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, Dostoievsky. He is split from top to toe in every realm of his being. He faces two ways always. He is torn apart, racked by the wheel of time. He is the victim and the executioner: when you speak his name you have the time, the place and the event. Now that we have succeeded in breaking down the atom the cosmos is split wide open. Now we face in every direction at once. We have arrived, possessed of a power which even the gods of old could not wield. We are there, before the gates of hell. Will we storm the gates, burst hell itself wide open? I believe we will. I think that the task of the future is to explore the domain of evil until not a shred of mystery is left. We shall discover the bitter roots of beauty, accept root and flower, leaf and bud. We can no longer resist evil: we must accept.
    When he was writing his “nigger book” (
Une Saison en Enfer
), Rimbaud is said to have declared: “My fate depends on this book!” How profoundly true that statement was not even Rimbaud himself knew. As we begin to realize our own tragic fate, we begin to perceive what he meant. He had identified his fate with that of the most crucial epoch known to man. Either, like him, we are going to renounce all that our civilization has stood for thus far, and attempt to build afresh, or we are going to destroy it with our own hands. When the poet stands at nadir the world must indeed be upside down. If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch. On the poetic corpse of Rimbaud we have begun erecting a tower of Babel. It means nothing that we still have poets, or that some of them are still intelligible, still able to communicate with the mob. What is the trend of poetry and where is the link between poet and audience?
What is the message?
Let us ask that above all. Whose voice is it that now makes itself heard, the poet’s or the scientist’s? Are we thinking of Beauty, however bitter, or are we thinking of atomic energy? And what is the chief emotion which our great discoveries now inspire? Dread! We have knowledge without wisdom, comfort without security, belief without faith. The poetry of life is expressed only in terms of the mathematical, the physical, the chemical. The poet is a pariah, an anomaly. He is on the way to extinction. Who cares now how
monstrous
he makes himself? The monster is at large, roaming the world. He has escaped from the laboratory; he is at the service of any one who has the courage to employ him. The world has indeed become number. The moral dichotomy, like all dichotomies, has broken down. This is the period of flux and hazard; the great drift has set in.
    And fools are talking about reparations, inquisitions, retribution, about alignments and coalitions, about free trade and economic stabilization and rehabilitation. No one believes in his heart that the world situation can be righted. Everyone is waiting for the great event, the only event which