Rimbaud & the Mystic Way 2

Purgation
Underhill calls the second stage of the mystic way Purgation, and
we can see that Rimbaud engages in a spiritual purgation of his
own devising which is unlike Underhill's descriptions in form, but
has exactly the same purpose. She states that Purgation involves
"the drastic turning of the self from the unreal to the real life"
(Mysticism, 204); it is the stripping away of what needs to be
removed and the cleansing of what will remain. This is normally
accomplished in two ways, she says: through "Detachment," which
employs poverty, and through "Mortification," which is the
remaking of the self, adjusting from the needs of the old self to
those of the new.
Both ways are difficult, and both playa part in Rimbaud's program
for becoming a visionary, which he explains to Izambard and
Demeny in the voyant letters of 1871. For Izambard he
characterizes his "awakening" still more broadly, saying, "Je serai
un travailleur: c'est l'idée qui me retient quand les colères folles
me poussent vers la bataille de Paris ... Travailler maintenant,
jamais, jamais; je suis en grève" (Oeuvres, 343),5 referring to the
social upheavals of 1871. He expresses this rage against society in
general in a discussion of his social duty to make objective poetry,
as opposed to Izambard's subjective poetry, which Rimbaud finds
insipid. The point here is that he has awakened to the general
moral decay of society and is reacting to it.
His reaction is the beginning of the purgative way; moral decay
implies a spiritual decay which he feels he needs to escape, even
combat. He tells Izambard, "Maintenant, je m'encrapule le plus
possible," and his reason for doing this is:

II s'agit d'arriver à l'inconnu par le dérèglement de tous les sens.
Les souffrances sont énormes, mais il faut être fort, être né poète,
et je me suis reconnu poète. Ce n'est pas du tout ma faute. C'est
faux de dire: Je pense. On devrait dire: On me pense.
(Oeuvres, 343-44)6

In this letter are several indications of the nature of his project. It
is characterized, first of all, by a purgative quality. He is preparing
to turn from the "unreal" life of corrupt society to the "real" life
which in this letter is referred to as "l'inconnu," suggesting a desire
for spirituality at some level, although at this point it concerns
more his anger than a thirst for divinity. He indicates engagement
is an act of purgative detachment when he tells Izambard he is on
strike from working: he detaches himself from society, and
impoverishes himself by striking, as a means of carrying out his
greater duty to society, which he says early in the letter is to serve
up the "stupidest, meanest, rottenest things" he can think of, both
literally and poetically. One senses that he sees little difference
between his literal vulgarities and his poetic vulgarities.
Further, he speaks of the sufferings which will result from "Le
dérèglement de tous les sens," clearly pointing to Underhill's
concept of mortification. He is going to remake himself in the
most drastic and deliberate ways. This is born out by his
distinction between "je pense" and "on me pense." This implies the
understanding, in mystical terms, that there are two selves, the
personal self, or the ego, and the supra-self, or in other terms the
personal soul and the generalized spirit, or the individual psyche
and the collective pneuma of humanity. "JE est un autre," Rimbaud
says in the next paragraph of his letter, and he repeats this in the
letter to Demeny. He means that "je," or the self we all recognize
as ourselves, is not the real self of the universe, and he has shifted
around the perspective from which we might normally understand
this. That is, from our everyday lives we may think of any other
self than the one we recognize a self other than our own ego-as
being "un autre." But Rimbaud takes a characteristic mystical point
of view by calling the recognizable ego - the "je" - the other. "Je" is
not real, whereas "l'inconnu" is the realm of the true spiritual self.
This is the beginning of a quest for spiritual illumination and
divinity. He needs to purge himself of the world as he knows it.
Rimbaud details the poetic aspect of this project in the letter to
Demeny, listing poets who are writing insipid conventional verses,
and also poets whom he takes to be writing ground-breaking
poetry.

"L'intelligence universelle a toujours jeté ses idées naturellement," 7
he says, implying the generalized spirit:

La première étude de l'homme qui veut être poète est sa propre
connaissance, entière; il cherche son âme, il l'inspecte, il la tente,
l'apprend. Dès qu'il la sait, il doit la cultiver; cela semble simple: en
tout cerveau s'accomplit un développement naturel; tant d' égoistes
se proclament auteurs; il en est bien d'autres qui s'attribuent leur
progrès intellectuel! - Mais il s'agit de faire l'âme monstreuse ... Je
dis qu'il faut être voyant, se faire voyant. Le Poète se fait voyant par
un long, immense et raisonne dérèglement de tous les sens.
(Oeuvres, 346)8

The point, again, is that Rimbaud's spiritual project includes both
the conventional mystic process of recognizing the egoistic self in
order to transcend it to the greater self, signified by his "intelligence
universelle," and also a mortification which is not, outwardly,
conventionally mystical, at least as Underhill represents it.
Rimbaud will resort to every physical, social and moral monstrosity
he can think of to remake himself, from adolescent rabble-rousing
at poetry readings to prolonged intoxication. And again, the
spiritual project is couched inextricably in terms of creativity: the
remaking of himself is synonymous, as in the letter to Demeny, to
the remaking of poetry. By dismissing and praising his various
contemporaries, he is making a moral statement about the conduct
of an aesthetic, especially poetic, life. The problem is not merely to
lead the life of a poet as a social gesture, but to make the process of
visionary poetry the same process as visionary life. Personal vision
is poetic vision, and poetic vision is a universalized moral vision
with effects and implications for all humanity.

Illumination
The third stage of the mystic way is Illumination. Underhill
outlines three main characteristics: 1) a joyous apprehension of the
absolute; 2) a clarity of vision of natural phenomena (in which
everything appears as it is, infinite); and 3) an increase in energy of
the intuitional or transcendental self, as revealed in auditions,
dialogues with divinities, and visions (Mysticism, 240). At least
some of Rimbaud's poetry seems to reflect all three of these
characteristics, but the problem of the authenticity of his vision is
complicated at the stage of Illumination in several ways.
First, Rimbaud never explicitly says that he "had a mystical vision,"
and although there is circumstantial biographical information to
suggest he was indeed having mystical illuminations, as well as
reading widely in the occult and hermetic literature of the time, the
only evidence of his contemplative activity is in the poetry. Second,
Rimbaud's spiritual program is so unconventional that it does not
neatly correspond to the experiences of more religious or morally
grounded mystics such as (to take random examples) St. Augustine
or St. Teresa. It is bound up even more problematically with his
anger and bitterness toward society generally. His spiritual
awakening began with the awareness of moral decay, and his project
being to detach himself from all conventional morality, he then is
required to disrupt and disorder everything he knows of himself,
including all moral behavior - for better or worse - which he has
learned from church, mother and society.
Since he identifies his poetic activity with his moral responsibility
to the world (and to himself), then the poems seem to be authentic
markers of his own moral, and therefore spiritual, experience,
however violent or unconventional. In "Le Bateau ivre," written at
or not long after the time of the voyant letters, Rimbaud describes a
highly symbolic voyage from European harbors and commerce out
into "le Poème / De la Mer," where the protagonist of the poem (a
boat) is blown wildly from and through one bizarre scene after
another. These images seem to symbolize the state of a soul seeking
and encountering "l'inconnu," and by the end of the poem the boat
returns, exhausted by the experience, to "la flache / Noire et froide"
of Europe, a sensibility associated with a childlike desire to return
to the safe, if ennui-laden, known. In a way the poem prefigures and
describes Rimbaud's entire teenage life, as he would spend the next
two years intensely pursuing the unknown and eventually come
back to harbor, in his own way, after describing the exhausting
experience in Une Saison en enfer.

Notes

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