Rimbaud & the Mystic Way 5

leave. In the emotional disorder of the moment, Rimbaud in letters tried desperately to call Verlaine back to London one day, then a few days later coolly reprimanded him for his erratic behavior. When they met in Brussels in July, Rimbaud, exhausted and fearful for Verlaine, insisted he was returning to France, and Verlaine pulled out a gun and shot him. In a general sense, things had gone completely wrong, characteristic of personal events in the Dark Night.
The "mental and moral disorder" Underhill describes is particularly acute in Rimbaud because he had been cultivating these things as part of his purgative program. When he reached the stage of the Dark Night, he had constructed for himself an almost impossible situation in which he had achieved illumination by means of the disordering of his own mind, or in Bays's terms, unconscious, from which the Absolute is unattainable. One reason Rimbaud's biography is so compelling is his almost Faust-like insistence, for three years, on a spiritual pursuit whose methods seem almost fore-doomed to ultimate failure. (Interestingly, Rimbaud was reading Goethe's Faust during the summer of 1873.)
Une Saison en enfer, whose draft title was Fausse conversion, recounts the entire project. Particularly salient is Rimbaud's figurative analysis of his own weakness and imperfection, and especially of the imperfection of his method. Where in "Matinée d'ivresse" he extolled the success of the method ("Nous t'affirmons, méthode!"), in the section of Une Saison titled "Alchimie du verbe" Rimbaud recounts "L'histoire d'une de mes folies,"33 which is his life as a voyant. While this section is often interpreted as derision of his occult poetic, there is also a sense of his astonishment at the realization of the innocence with which he subjected himself to the sufferings of the project. The method did culminate in momentary sparklings of beauty and happiness: "Enfin, ô bonheur, ô raison, j'écartai du ciel l'azur, qui est du noir, et je vécus, étincelle d'or de la lumiere nature. De joie, je prenais une expression bouffonne et égarée au possible" (Oeuvres, 232).34
It was, however, also mixed with horrors. As the illuminations subsided, the sense of distance set in, and the method came to seem false to him: "l'action n'est pas la vie, mais une façon de gâcher quelque force, un énervement. La morale est la faiblesse de la cervelle" (Oeuvres, 233).35 The word "énervement" points directly to the nervous exhaustion Underhill notes. "Ma santé fut menacee," he says. "La terreur venait."36
Further, he expresses a profound sense of personal weakness when he insists that happiness and moral power are beyond him: "J'avais été damne par l'arc-en-ciel. Le Bonheur était ma fatalité, mon remords, mon ver: ma vie serait toujours trop immense pour être dévouée à la force et à la beauté."37 He could not muster the energy needed to sustain happiness, which is figured in "la force" and more significantly in "la beauté," which recalls "0 mon Bien! 0 mon Beau!" "Le Bonheur" is not what he imagined it would be, it is something larger and other than his personal ego, and unmanageable in those terms. His "immense" life is that generalized spiritual life which he had touched but, having plumbed his unconscious rather than his superconscious, could not sustain.
Similarly, through the chapter "Nuit de l'enfer," there is a sense of his own personal ego, his arrogances, where it is the persistent "I" which cuts him off from ultimate unitive experience. He calls himself a master of phantasmagoria: "J'ai tous les talents! - Il n'y a personne ici et il y a quelqu'un" (Oeuvres, 221),38 he says, and further on: "Je devrais avoir mon enfer pour la colère, mon enfer pour l'orgueil, - et l'enfer de la paresse; un concert d'enfers. Je meurs de lassitude" (Oeuvres, 222).39 These lines, which occur among others emphasizing the reality of hell, evoke not only a sense of enormous distance from divinity, but also that sense of ennui described by Underhill. He feels trapped in his own ego, here, feeble and unbearably imperfect.
He is describing, beyond doubt, a Dark Night perhaps even more intense and anguished than those in Underhill's examples. It seems more intense and horrible because, where most mystics operate inside the structures of a religious or at least a social background, Rimbaud put himself completely outside all spiritual, moral and social experience, and had nothing to fall back on in his agonies.

Although all mystics express a sense of abandonment and aloneness during the Dark Night, Rimbaud is particularly isolated because of his nearly total alienation.4o The difficulty Rimbaud has to grapple with at this moment in the mystic way is whether to proceed through further agonies-in the face of real despair-or to relinquish the project as impossible. He charts the apparent impossibility of the situation in the chapter "L'Impossible." His old attitude toward the world was to think '''Ciel! sommes nous assez de damnés ici-bas!,'" and further:

depuis cette déclaration de la science, le christianisme, l'homme se joue, se prouve les évidences, se gonfle du plaisir de répéter des preuves, et ne vit que comme cela? Torture subtile, niaise; source de mes divagations spirituelles. La nature pourrait s'ennuyer, peut-être ! M. Prudhomme est né avec le Christ.
(Oeuvres, 235, 236)41

In these lines a spiritual life seems to be hopelessly overpowered by the world at large, and he thought (previously) that everyone was damned in it. The world of western culture seems to present an impossible spiritual situation: "Les marais occidentaux!" 42 and the impossibility is precisely that "Par l'esprit on va à Dieu! Dechirante infortune!" (Oeuvres, 237).43

The Game of Love
But this chapter, which follows "Délires" (including "Alchimie du verbe"), indicates a turning point or a shift out of the darkest part of the Dark Night and a return to a more hopeful disposition. Underhill calls the play of hope and hopelessness, light and dark, presence and absence of mystic awareness which occurs through all stages of the mystic way, "The Game of Love." As Rimbaud works his way through his Dark Night, the Game of Love in "L'Impossible" resumes, and a kind of faith is restored. Notably, the Game of Love is played out not only internally, but also externally during the writing of Une Saison: the cursing and smashing heard by Rimbaud's sister is more than analogous to the sufferings he felt, it is identical to the act of writing; his spiritual work is literally his poetic work, a process of unfolding and recurrent illumination and darkness, nearness and farness of the Absolute, which in a few pages will translate into the more graspable moral and social ideals, truth and justice.
The faith which begins to be restored at the stage of "L'Impossible," however, drives him not toward the "being" desired by the great spirits Underhill speaks of, nor toward the desire for knowledge. (He says at the outset of the chapter: "Je m'évade ... je m'éxplique.") 44 Instead, thoroughly modern, he abandons the original method, which was poetic, and resolves to live in the fallen, corrupt world - the "Occident." A spiritual world, corresponding ideally to the Garden of Eden - or in "L'Impossible," the "Orient" - is impossible, not a reality: "L'esprit est autorité, il veut que je sois en Occident," he says in "L'Impossible." 45
In the next chapter, "L'Eclair," the new vision is characterized as an inclusive unification of worldly and spiritual work and suffering; the Occident is the necessary and legitimate place of spiritual work: "Le travail human! c'est l'explosion qui éclaire mon abîme de temps en temps" (Oeuvres, 238).46 His project now will be, not to disorder all his senses and suffer the foredoomed defeat of delving into the unconscious, but instead to work in the world. "Je ne sais plus parler!" he says in "Matin,"47 articulating the sense that the alchemy of words is behind him. He is still a spiritual being, but accepts the fact of his own body, his own physical existence: he speaks of "les trois mages, le coeur, l'âme, l'esprit" which are not
moved, or in more philosophic terms, unchanging, and ends the chapter in a validation of physical life in all its ramifications: "Esclaves, ne maudissons pas la vie" (Oeuvres, 239).48
Finally, the last chapter of Une Saison, "Adieu," expresses a belief in the reality of truth and spirit, and in the validity of work as a moral way. "Le combat spirituel est aussi brutal que la bataille d'hommes; mais la vision de la justice est le plaisir de Dieu seul" (Oeuvres, 241),49 he says. The well-known sentence, "II faut être absolument moderne" 50 reflects Rimbaud's acceptance, in modern material terms, of a kind of primacy of the physical world. In this sense the spiritual world and the physical world are interrelated,

Notes

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