‘Perhaps he has secrets for changing life?’
(‘Delires I’, Une saison en Enfer’)
‘Man hopes to spend three quarters of his life suffering in order to spend the last quarter taking his ease. Usually, he dies of poverty without knowing how far along he is with his plan!’
Since aloneness is the human condition, a fascinating example of this is the lone celebrated poet, a white man living amongst blacks, in obscurity, within a walled city, in a far flung outpost, in deepest Africa. A poet living amongst black illiterates, philistines, who don’t trust him, whose respect he has to earn to be a man. He is a solitary entrepreneur in a society of organised slavers. In a previous life he had been a genius poet; his head teeming with surreal imagery. A decadent prodigy who had kick started a new poetic movement, who had amassed a growing fan club in the dissolute dens of Paris where his teenage poems were now being seen as revolutionary. Cast away from home on foreign shores little did he know that his early poems had endowed him with cult figure status, but no one knew where he was. Was he dead?
‘From all sides we receive letters craving information on the poet; we are bombarded with questions. Indeed, several of our honourable correspondents are indignant to note that Rimbaud does not yet have a statue in Paris’
‘I is somebody else’
was now almost thirty, going prematurely gray, and noting accounting debits and credits in a thick company ledger; noting with thick stabs of the pen the weight and cost of elephant tusks and coffee sacks to be taken down to the coast by caravan. But his peculiarities set him apart; he’d learnt the local language, he’d become skilled in Arabic and held audiences in which he’d interpret the Koran. He hated the people. He found them stupid and indolent and full of treachery. Yet despite all this he stayed. No one knew what was in his heart, his ironies, his mutterings, and the fact that he was an expert in concealment. He denied his wealth; claiming to be poor and destitute; yet he stacked dollars and chinks of chunky coins. He always claimed that he was being cheated. He claimed he hated the weather, the stifling heat, the thieving locals who couldn’t be trusted. In one of his jeering letters home he paints a portrait of his life in Harar:
‘I still get very bored. In fact, I’ve never known anyone who gets as bored as I do. It’s a wretched life anyway, don’t you think? – no family, no intellectual activity, lost amongst negroes who try to exploit you and make it impossible to settle business quickly. Forced to speak their gibberish, to eat their filthy food and suffer a thousand aggravations…and there’s something even sadder than that – it’s the fear of gradually turning into an idiot oneself, stranded as one is, far from intelligent company’
But these self -portraits are tainted with the unmistakeable hue of someone happy with their life. The life of a contented misanthrope. He made a meal of his suffering (like all of us) – he complained even though he was rather enjoying it!
In Harar it seems he could be himself and not have to bow to the vagaries of life. Speak if he wanted to, ignore when he wanted to, be loud if he wanted, or a hermit if he wanted. In life we are trapped by responsibilities that stifle our creativity and potential. What Rimbaud had discovered was nothing other than a new Design for Life.
‘Man hopes to spend three quarters of his life suffering in order to spend the last quarter taking his ease. Usually, he dies of poverty without knowing how far along he is with his plan!’
(Arthur Rimbaud, to his mother and sister, 6 Jan 1886)
Since aloneness is the human condition, a fascinating example of this is the lone celebrated poet, a white man living amongst blacks, in obscurity, within a walled city, in a far flung outpost, in deepest Africa. A poet living amongst black illiterates, philistines, who don’t trust him, whose respect he has to earn to be a man. He is a solitary entrepreneur in a society of organised slavers. In a previous life he had been a genius poet; his head teeming with surreal imagery. A decadent prodigy who had kick started a new poetic movement, who had amassed a growing fan club in the dissolute dens of Paris where his teenage poems were now being seen as revolutionary. Cast away from home on foreign shores little did he know that his early poems had endowed him with cult figure status, but no one knew where he was. Was he dead?
‘From all sides we receive letters craving information on the poet; we are bombarded with questions. Indeed, several of our honourable correspondents are indignant to note that Rimbaud does not yet have a statue in Paris’
(Le Decadent 1-15, March 1889)
No he wasn’t dead. Though to his acolytes he might as well have been. The same poems they were hailing as masterpieces; with their dizzying visions and heady drunken verses were now the backdrops of his life. He was living and drinking from the the landscapes of his poetry:
No he wasn’t dead. Though to his acolytes he might as well have been. The same poems they were hailing as masterpieces; with their dizzying visions and heady drunken verses were now the backdrops of his life. He was living and drinking from the the landscapes of his poetry:
'I drifted on a river I could not control' he had written in his poem 'The Drunken Boat'
and: 'I have seen what men have only dreamed they saw'
But to the Africans this original was just another feranji in a shabby white suit, who barely spoke his own language except under his breath clouded in twitchy whispers. Who spent his time wandering the reeking market, watching the lepers importuning for alms besides the mosque, enquiring about the fly blown camel haunches hanging in the butchery. He even had a mistress in Harar, a local black women who was later to note his maps, his silences, his stash of coins, the letters he wrote home, his passion for photography, his secrets, his books, how he hated interruption and any talk of his past. She had no idea where he was from. She said he loved the desert. The poet who had once written:
‘I is somebody else’
was now almost thirty, going prematurely gray, and noting accounting debits and credits in a thick company ledger; noting with thick stabs of the pen the weight and cost of elephant tusks and coffee sacks to be taken down to the coast by caravan. But his peculiarities set him apart; he’d learnt the local language, he’d become skilled in Arabic and held audiences in which he’d interpret the Koran. He hated the people. He found them stupid and indolent and full of treachery. Yet despite all this he stayed. No one knew what was in his heart, his ironies, his mutterings, and the fact that he was an expert in concealment. He denied his wealth; claiming to be poor and destitute; yet he stacked dollars and chinks of chunky coins. He always claimed that he was being cheated. He claimed he hated the weather, the stifling heat, the thieving locals who couldn’t be trusted. In one of his jeering letters home he paints a portrait of his life in Harar:
‘I still get very bored. In fact, I’ve never known anyone who gets as bored as I do. It’s a wretched life anyway, don’t you think? – no family, no intellectual activity, lost amongst negroes who try to exploit you and make it impossible to settle business quickly. Forced to speak their gibberish, to eat their filthy food and suffer a thousand aggravations…and there’s something even sadder than that – it’s the fear of gradually turning into an idiot oneself, stranded as one is, far from intelligent company’
But these self -portraits are tainted with the unmistakeable hue of someone happy with their life. The life of a contented misanthrope. He made a meal of his suffering (like all of us) – he complained even though he was rather enjoying it!
In Harar it seems he could be himself and not have to bow to the vagaries of life. Speak if he wanted to, ignore when he wanted to, be loud if he wanted, or a hermit if he wanted. In life we are trapped by responsibilities that stifle our creativity and potential. What Rimbaud had discovered was nothing other than a new Design for Life.
