Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed. One evening I took Beauty in my arms – and I thought her bitter – and I insulted her.
The last fortnight has been difficult for me. I have been working too much to meet a project deadline. I’ve broken almost all of my own rules about how to work and to balance that with my personal life.
And so, I’m tired.
Not tired as in sleepy. I’m tired as in fatigued. Even on days off, I am thinking about work. I’m snappier than normal. My ability to follow a casual conversation, lesser. My general state of mind, not great.
There are books that you revisit, I imagine. I often revisit L’etranger by ALBERT CAMUS, for example. I also read FLORIAN ZELLER’s books over and over again.
Then there’s a whole array of long poetic works that I reread. For example, The Prophet by KHALIL GIBRAN.
In a class of its own, because it offers so little comfort, I read A Season in Hell by ARTHUR RIMBAUD.
Why do I read it so often? It’s probably partly the prose – which, for its time, was completely outrageous. But also for the man, or perhaps more accurately a child, who was also completely outrageous.
He was once a gun runner. Was shot by PAUL VERLAINE (his lover). Survived. Lots of absynthe. Big fan of Paris society. Deserted an army. So many interesting things in a time of relative boredom (the latter half of the 1800s).
But there’s one particular passage in Season in Hell that has always stuck out for me. I want to relive it for you now as my only excerpt for this week. I remember being knocked over when I first read this. It made my ‘whirling world stand still.’
Thanks for reading. Are you ready?
Marc
This week’s snippet
I’ve highlighted bits that I particularly love with bold text.
My turn now. The story of one of my insanities.
For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable.
What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints; old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children’s books, old operas, silly old songs, the nave rhythms of country rimes.
I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents: I used to believe in every kind of magic.
I invented colors for the vowels! – A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. – I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator.
I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.
Bonus
Fans who like Bob Dylan, also like this
In the artistic interpretation of Bob Dylan’s character I’m Not There, Ben Whishaw plays Bob Dylan in the guise of Arthur Rimbaud. There is at one point in the film where he reads the above passage. But I can’t find it online. So here’s this other great scene instead.
My mantra in the most melodramatic moments: Never create anything. It will be misinterpreted.