Rimbaud & the Mystic Way 6

and the work and sufferings of physical life are driven by spiritual
need. His last sentence is: "il me sera loisible de posséder la vérité
dans une âme et un corps" (Oeuvres, 241).51 These are the words
of someone who has come through spiritual devastation, the Dark
Night of the Soul, without the safety nets of religion or even
society. He seizes the modern belief in the importance of physical
reality and translates it into a new spiritual project. In this he
exemplifies alienated, industrial humanity, and devises a way of
continuing on a spiritual path, although he is no longer part of the
mystic way described by Underhill. Instead, he dedicates the rest
of his life, unlucky as it continues to be, to escaping the "Occident"
by working through it.
He wrote no poetry after this, not because he renounced literature
in a grand gesture of disdain, but because he abandoned that
method of spiritual development. Poetry was a method of living
for Rimbaud. It put him in an illuminated mystic state for a few
years, and it reflected progress along the classic mystic way, as
evidenced in the poetry. But it was unsuccessful in stripping away
the entire self as preparation for the unitive life, partly because it
was an exploration of the unconscious rather than a route through
the superconscious, and partly because, working completely alone,
he had no generalized spiritual support from church or any other
social institution.
Rimbaud's experience is compelling partly as personal instruction
about spiritual development, and partly as general instruction
about the relation of the poet to the modern world: being
perpetually outside his culture, society and religion, he exemplifies
the complicated and arduous difficulties of spiritual activity in our
time. As Henry Miller forcefully perceives, "His language is the
language of the spirit, not of weights, measures and abstract
relations. In this alone he revealed how absolutely 'modern' he
was" (The Time of the Assassins, 57). Rimbaud remained
interested in publishing Les Illuminations because he remained
interested in spiritual problems. Une Saison is not a "farewell" to
literature, but the abandonment of an old and dangerous way of
coming to God.

© Dana Wilde 2008; Cauda Pavonis: Studies in Hermeticism, Fall 1995
_____________________________________________________

Notes
1 Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud (New York: New
Directions, 1956), 99; hereafter cited parenthetically.
2 See Enid Starkie's summary of these arguments in part two, chap. 6, 213-42, of
Arthur Rimbaud. Most of the biographical information given throughout this
essay is drawn from this book.
3 Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's
Spiritual Consciousness (1900; reprint, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1961); hereafter
cited, parenthetically.
4 Original quotations from Rimbaud, hereafter cited parenthetically, are from
Oeuvres, ed. Suzanne Bernard (Paris: Editions Garniers Freres, 1960). Most of the
translations are taken from Wallace Fowlie, translator, Rimbaud: Complete
Works, Selected Letters (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966); translations not
marked as Fowlie's are my own. Trans.: "Really, it's stupid, these village churches /
Where fifteen ugly brats dirtying the pillars / Listen to a grotesque priest whose
shoes stink / As he mouths the divine babble."
5 Trans.: I will be a worker: this idea holds me back when mad anger drives me
toward the battle of Paris ... Work now? - never, never, I am on strike (Fowlie,
303).
6 Trans.: Now, I am degrading myself as much as possible ... It is a question of
reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. The sufferings are
enormous, but one has to be strong, one has to be born a poet, and I know I am a
poet. This is not at all my fault. It is wrong to say: I think. One ought to say: people
think me (Fowlie, 303).
7 Trans.: Universal intelligence has always thrown out its ideas naturally (Fowlie,
307).
8 Trans.: The first study of the man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of
himself, complete. He looks for his soul, inspects it, tests it, learns it. As soon as he
knows it, he must cultivate it! It seems simple: in every mind a natural
development takes place; so many egoists call themselves authors; there are many
others who attribute their intellectual progress to themselves! But the soul must be
made monstrous ... I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The Poet makes
himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses
(Fowlie, 307).
9 Trans.: the black / cold puddle (Fowlie, 121).
10 Arthur L. Clements, Poetry of Contemplation: John Donne, George Herbert,
Henry Vaughan and the Modern Period (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press,
1990), 6-7.
11 Trans.: It's found again. / What? - Eternity. / It's the sea gone / With the sun.
12 Trans.: Duty is discharged / Without saying: finally.
13 Trans.: Agony's certain.
14 Trans.: It is the most delicate, the most tremulous of garments-this drunkenness
induced by virtue of that sage of the glaciers, absomphe (absinth)! In order to
recline in shit afterward! (Fowlie,315).

15 A category Clements borrows from W.H. Auden: see Poetry of Contemplation,
9-10, 174, and also Auden's "Four Kinds of Mystical Experience," in Understanding
Mysticism, Richard Woods, ed. (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1980), 379-99.
16 Trans.: I embraced the summer dawn.
17 Trans.: Nothing stirred, even in front of the palaces.
18 The Orphic Vision: Seer Poets from Novalis to Rimbaud (Lincoln: Univ. of
Nebraska Press, 1964), 226; hereafter cited parenthetically.
19 Trans.: I recognized the goddess.
20 Trans.: I lifted the veils one by one.
21 Trans.: I enclosed her with her mass of veils and sensed, a little, her immense
body.
22 Trans.: Dawn and child fell into the woods. 23 Trans.: When I awoke it was
midday.
24 Trans.: the unheard-of work and for the wonderful body.
25 Trans.: that superhuman promise made to our body and our spirit.
26 Trans.: so we would prevail in our purest love. It began in disgust, and
ends-unable to hold us immediately in that eternity-it ends in a rush of fragrances.
27 Trans.: burial in the shade of the tree of good and evil, transport away from the
tyranny of respectability.
28 Trans.: Laughter of children, mercy of slaves, sternness of virgins, horror of
shapes and objects here, you will be sacred through the recollection of this vigil.
29 Trans.: We affirm you, method!
30 Trans.: Little drunken vigil, holy!
31 Trans.: This poison will stay in our veins as when, the fanfare whirling, we will
have returned to the ancient discord. Now, worthy of these tortures, we fervently
collect that superhuman promise ....
32 Trans.: We won't forget that you have glorified each day of our ages. We have
faith in the poison. We know to give our life entirely every day.
33 Trans.: The story of one of my follies.
34 Trans.: At last, 0 happiness, 0 reason, I removed from the sky the blue that is
black, and I lived like a spark of gold of pure light. From joy I took an expression as
buffoonish and strange as possible (Fowlie, 199).
35 Trans.: Action is not life, but a way of spoiling some force, an enervation.
Morality is a weakness of the brain. (Fowlie, 199)
36 Trans.: My health was threatened. Terror came (Fowlie,201).
37 Trans.: I had been damned by the rainbow. Happiness was my fatality, my
remorse, my worm. My life would always be too immense to be devoted to
strength and beauty (Fowlie, 201).
38 Trans.: I possess every talent!-There is no one here and there is someone (Fowlie,
185).
39 Trans.: I should have hell for my anger, for pride and the hell of caresses; a
concert of hells. I am dying of weariness (Fowlie, 187).
40 Henry Miller, in The Time of the Assassins, suggests that society is as much to
blâme as Rimbaud himself for this isolation, and in this sense Rimbaud exemplifies,
or is for Miller, the essence of modern man and the true modern poet.
41 Trans.: Heavens! Aren't there enough of us who are damned here below?
(Fowlie, 203); since the declaration of science, and Christianity, man deludes
himself, proving obvious truth, puffing up with the pleasure of repeating his proofs,
and living only in this way? A subtle, ridiculous torture; source of my spiritual
meanderings. Nature might be bored perhaps! M. Prudhomme was born with
Christ (Fowlie, 203).
42 Trans.: The western swamps! (Fowlie, 203).
43 Trans.: Through the spirit one goes to God. 'What heartbreaking misfortune!
(Fowlie, 205).
44 Trans.: Am I escaping? I am explaining (Fowlie, 203).
45 Trans.: The spirit is authority. It wants me to be in the West (Fowlie, 203).
46 Trans.: Work of man! This is the explosion which lights up my abyss from time
to time (Fowlie, 205).
47 Trans.: I have forgotten how to speak! (Fowlie, 207).
48 Trans.: The three magi, the heart, the soul, and spirit (Fowlie, 207) Slaves, let us
not curse life (Fowlie, 207).
49 Trans.: A spiritual battle is as brutal as a battle of men; but the vision of justice is
the pleasure of God alone (Fowlie, 209).
50 Trans.: It's necessary to be absolutely modern.
51 Trans.: I shall be free to possess truth in one body and soul (Fowlie, 209).

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