I met with Arthur Rimbaud on February 28, 2014 in the cafeteria of Le Bateau ivre, the prize container ship of his Arabica coffee conglomerate, Gentleman Savages Inc. He generously, if inconveniently, summoned me to join him on a transoceanic passage to deliver a shipment from Ethiopia to New Jersey. He doesn’t do phone interviews and doesn’t have the time to indulge in the erotic mechanics – his words – of sitting around some merdique hotel answering the merdique questions of culture salesmen. Well aware of his reputation for solitariness, general orneryness, and robust cynicism, I was naturally taken aback when I received his invitation. I nonetheless interpreted his mandate – come to Ethiopia – as somewhat of a geographical deterrent. Right. Off I flew to Dire Dawa International near the Gulf of Aden. The present interview was conducted on a series of afternoons during our journey. Generally, Monsieur Rimbaud would get around to “answering”, in his way, only a single question in a sitting. What follows is the tapestry of these afternoons, each panel joined as well as could be along a seam of thought. On these occasions we would mostly sit eating bread and salted butter and jam, drinking coffee, and speak about what humans and art could be and do and why these days he, for the most part, detests both. By way of preamble, a note on the interviewee’s brief but startlingly radiant pre-mercantilist career. The touchstone of generations of avant-gardes, Arthur Rimbaud was the punk wanderer par excellence, the poet of universal consciousness, tragic and mythic, the hobo god of gods, and I would argue a supreme, albeit, phenomenally nascent wave rider. He completed the works that would revolutionize the written word by the time he was nineteen, abandoning and violently repudiating it all when most kids are picking the last booger of their tidy, if slightly overpriced, little university degrees and smearing it to the under-brim those ridiculous tasseled square caps. Like all good bodhisattvas he was the herald of the adventure into (other)self(lessness) – the self being a middle/mediate term/mode at best, annihilation, and transformation. He killed all who followed him, after the hunt or libation. All followed him…
[Interview by Thaddeus O'Neil / Illustration by Hugo Guinness]
Thaddeus O’neil — Maybe you could start by telling us a little about yourself, where you’re from, etc?
Arthur Rimbaud — My life was nothing but sweet stupidities, unfortunately. The miserable incidents of my childhood. Charville! In all the world, no more moronic, provincial little town exists than my own. From my ancestors the Gauls I have pale blue eyes, a narrow brain, and awkwardness in competition. I think my clothes are as barbaric as theirs. But I don’t butter my hair. [pausing to relight his pipe, sucking and sending a spume of it toward me, obscuring him for what seemed seconds] The Gauls were the most stupid hide-flayers and hay-burners of their time. From them I inherit: Idolatry, and love of sacrilege - oh, all sorts of vice, anger, lechery – terrific stuff, lechery - lying, above all, and laziness. I have a horror of all trades and crafts. Bosses and workers, all of them peasants, and common. When I was still a little child, I admired the hardened convict. I used to visit the bars and the rented rooms his presence had consecrated. I followed his fatal scent through the city streets. He had more strength than the saints, more sense than any explorer. Drunk, petty thief, the best son of the world. God blesses all the merciful: and the world blesses the poets.
— Thanks. That was… quite thorough. So not a lot of love lost for your home or the people there?
— The popular mind is like one stupid, ceaseless itch. The things people say. Depressing. I detest my native land. I will wander far away, a vagabond.
— Well here you are now, coffee baron of the high seas. This is an adventure…
— Oh, wonderful world of adventures. I should assure you that I am living a really stupid, tiresome existence.
[There was not a hint of irony in him. Sensing his prolific cynicism redoubling, gaining momentum, I change the topic, hoping for greener pastures.]
— You abandoned poetry at 19. On the verge of great success and critical acclaim…
— Ambition! Such madness! Honestly it’s not useful. What do I care if I succeed. What is it good for, succeeding at that, for nothing, right? No, it is said that there is work for those who succeed. I don’t want work; I will be independently wealthy. Don’t bestir yourself! That is my principle, out-idling the sleepy toad. The best thing is a drunken sleep, stretched out on some strip of shore.
— But success is something right? Art’s strict utility is debatable, even undesirable and imminently incongruous, but isn’t success useful to some degree?
— All men of action are the toys of some grotesque raving. Action isn’t life, it’s merely a way of ruining a kind of strength. Morality is a weakness of the brain. You will always end up a self-satisfied man who has done nothing because he wanted to do nothing.
— You mean men who want to do nothing but to be ‘successful’, and that success in this domesticated sense is in itself nothing? [I’m not sure, but I think he nods, sort of, or was it a shrug? The gesture seems to imply that it is worse than nothing…]
— My life doesn’t weigh enough, it drifts off and floats far beyond action. You must set yourself free from the striving of Man and applause of the World! You must fly as you can.
— I think you underestimate how much your work has meant to people, fellow artists, how your experimentation with the word revolutionized what the word could do, how your poems upended language in the world and forever altered the poet’s mind.
— A song is so seldom a work, that is to say, a thought sung and understood by the singer. For I is someone else. This much is obvious to me: I am present at this birth of my thought, I watch it and listen to it. Universal intelligence has always thrown out its ideas. Author, creator, poet, that man has never existed! 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. The soul must be made monstrous. Imagine a man implanting and cultivating warts on his face.
— So we must be made ugly to ourselves, unrecognizable. The poet, the creator has never simply existed but we must create them, become them through a sort of willed suffering? Ok, so what should be done? What is worth doing?
— Perhaps you would be right to walk a great deal and read, escape from reality, seek secrets that would remake life a dark heaven in a paradise of sadness, a reason in any case not to be confined in offices and homes. Stupefactions have to be carried out far from such places.
— Stupefactions?
— 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. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessence. He becomes among all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the one accursed – and the supreme Savant! – for he reaches the unknown! He says: “We pronounce you, method! We have faith in the poison. We know how to give our whole life every day.” He reaches the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends by losing the intelligence of his visions, he has, at least, seen them. Therefore the poet is truly the thief of fire. He is responsible for humanity, even for the animals; he will have his inventions smelt, felt, and heard; if what he brings back from down there has form, he gives it form; if it is formless, he gives it formlessness. A language must be found, every word being an idea, the time of a universal language will come! This language will be of the soul for the soul, containing everything, smells, sounds, colors, thought holding on to thought and pulling.
— So it is a matter of constantly leaving yourself? Of abandoning at all costs even the idea of an identical, stable self?
— I devour myself, leave again and again, and then… it is recovered. What? Eternity. In the whirling light of the sun and sea, hold fast to desire, consider the mind’s disorder a sacred thing, lay about idle, envy the bliss of animals. Your memory and your senses will simply be the nourishment of your creative impulse. As for the world, when you emerge, what will it have become? In any case, nothing of what it seems at present. What was I in the century past? I only find myself today. Now is the time of the Assassins. Inventions of the unknown call for new forms.
— So am ‘I’ permanently provisional, split down the middle with time, the ‘I’ that receives the world through sense, and the ‘I’ as Other that thinks, creates, and synthesizes it, assassinates it over and over, continually killing it off and inventing it in another form?
— It is wrong to say: I think. One ought to say: people think me. I is someone else. Do not underline it with your pencil or too much with your thought.
— Ok. So what is art?
— Instantaneous application, the opportunity, the only one, for the release of our senses! And the noise and the movement and the future they make!
— So our senses applied spontaneously create the future?
— This future will be materialistic, always filled with Number and Harmony. Wild and infinite flight toward invisible splendors, toward intangible delights – and its maddening secrets for every vice – and its terrifying gaiety for the mob. For sale, the bodies, the voices, the enormous and unquestionable wealth, that which will never be sold. Salesmen are not at the end of their stock! It will be some time before travelers have to turn in their accounts.
— The seer is a sort of traveling salesman then? Everything is ‘for sale’, to be expended, and yet what they contain can never really be sold off…
— Poetry will no longer keep step with action. It will precede it.
[I was caught in the boggling eddy of his thought, swirling somewhere inward. nothing to put the breaks on poetic ‘reverie’, like politics, like dipping a hard-on in an ice bath.]
— What do you make of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or of pathological nationalism in general?
— The flag goes with the foul landscape, and our jargon muffles the drum. In the great centers we’ll nurture the most cynical prostitution. We’ll massacre logical revolts, at the service of the most monstrous exploitations, industrial or military, rabid for comfort. Let the rest of the world croak. This is the real advance. Marching orders, let’s go! Don’t forget to shit on La Renaissance, and shit on the season and courage.
[Oh, politics is such a bore, the same stupidities enacted ad infinitum - history, the old Hegelian slaughter bench, the chopping block with the well-worn blood-brown axe ruts… How about something perennially novel!? What about love?!]
— What about Love?
— I don’t love women. Love has to be reinvented. Sometimes I see women who ought to be happy, with whom I could have found companionship, already swallowed up by brutes with as much feeling as an old log. Do you see that lovely young man going into that beautiful, peaceful house? His name is Duval, Dufour, Armand, Maurice, whatever you please. There is a woman who has spent her life loving that evil creature; she died. When the endless servitude of woman is broken, when she lives for and by herself, man – heretofore abominable – having given her her release, she too will be a poet! Women will find some of the unknown! She will find strange, unfathomable, repulsive, delicious things…
[Ah Love, strange love, always a distance between Others without a self to start with, forget it, lets talk about something real, eternal. Lets talk about fashion…]
— Arthur, ahem, Mr.Rimbaud, I’d like to talk about Fashion…
— A monotony of pretty lies. Tricked out with nauseating luxury. What havoc in the garden of beauty…
— But people seem to care a lot about it. Look at the proliferation of magazines dedicated to it in various guises and avatars?
— Can addicts resist a bag of blow? As if butterflies take the high road, to avoid shitting on the daisies below. If decadent decoration is the answer that looms to prettify your pages, the larger question’s clear: Is this riotous, ceaseless vomitation of blooms worth a seagull’s turd or one candle’s tear? This sort of thing – so disgraceful – is bull. Heard of the notion of “keeping it real”?
— So I take it you’re no a follower of fashion. But dressing is basic and elemental to the human mode of being, at once formed by and forming it, a true becoming. As simple evidence of this, imagine walking naked into a stranger’s closet and coming out in their clothes. Here is the other, in immediate confrontation, covering your flesh. Fashion may be a bad bag of blow, but is there hope that we can reclaim that rudimentary and vital expression called dress from the dealers, that we can renovate this most personal experience of the world: our (dis-)play?
— An age of hell is now upon us. True life is lacking. We are exiles from this world. Elegance, science, violence! Unable to grasp this eternity, it ends in a riot of perfumes. Rack of enchantments! Hurrah for the wonderful work and for the marvelous body. Oh, our bones are clothed with an amorous new body. Ah! To return to life! To stare at our deformities…
— To celebrate ourselves, our grotesque ever changing idiosyncratic selves in a place and time, in Experience, in our art as experience, and to not have to scream “look at me, I exist!” through twitter and instagram and all that technorabble…
— I am unknown: So what? The neophytes are free to curse their forebears: it’s their party and the night is young. I am hidden, and I am not weakness or strength: you exist, that is strength. You don’t know where you are going or why you are going; go in everywhere, answer everyone. No one will kill you, any more than if you were a corpse.
— Our own Experience is our only hope in this technozombie hell.
— Hell is powerless against pagans. No hope, forever.
— No hope but revolt?
— I cannot understand revolt. My race has never risen, except to plunder.
— The poets of plunder!
— The battle for the soul is as brutal as the battles of men. I am born in reason. One must be absolutely modern. The world is good. I will bless life. The open road in every weather. And off I’ll go, hat, greatcoat, fist in my pockets and away. No more words, burn all the poems, shouts, drums, dance, dance, dance!
One does not finish a work, one abandons it.
– Paul Valery
and I shall be a fugitive and vagabond in the Earth
– Genesis 4:14
The author of Leaves of Grass wrote in his final year, 1891, that the strongest and sweetest songs remain yet to be sung. It was a distinct honor and privilege to catch up to him in 2012 and investigate further.
[Interview by Brian Hendricks / Illustration by Hugo Guinness]
— Where do we find the ‘truth’?
— Re-examine all that you have been told... dismiss that which insults your soul.
— Could you elaborate on that?
— I am too not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world. I exist as I am, that is enough.
— What is your main function as a writer?
— A writer can do nothing for men more necessary, satisfying, than just simply to reveal to them the infinite possibility of their own souls. The mark of a true writer is their ability to mystify the familiar and familiarize the strange. To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
— Are there still things worth writing about, issues that can instill real change and enlightenment?
— The strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung. That you are here—that life exists, and identity; the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. Oh, to be alive in such an age, when miracles are everywhere, and every inch of common air throbs a tremendous prophecy, of greater marvels yet to be. But besides that, a morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.
— You seem to have an elevated optimism that is perhaps not as common among the rest of us?
— I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Henceforth I ask not good fortune. I myself am good fortune.
— I appreciate that we may share the same enthusiasm but do you ever feel as though you’ve been blessed with a more active spirit?
— My spirit has passed in compassion and determination around the whole earth. I have looked for equals and lovers and found them ready for me in all lands, I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them.
— Do you ever feel depressed or even defeated?
— If the wind will not serve, take to the oars. To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle.
— How do we overcome the resistance of those who don’t believe in or support our creative efforts?
— Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?
— How would you define a perfect writer?
— A perfect writer would make words sing, dance, kiss, do the male and female act, bear children, weep, bleed, rage, stab, steal, fire cannon, steer ships, sack cities, charge with cavalry or infantry, or do anything that man or woman or the natural powers can do.
— Is there a secret to writing you could share with us?
— The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment—to put things down without deliberation without worrying about their style—without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote—wrote, wrote… by writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.
— What is it that keeps us going, keeps us motivated to invent and create new ideas and stories? What hope can you provide the artist from your own experience?
— Say on, sayers! sing on, singers! Delve! mould! pile the words of the earth! Work on, age after age, nothing is to be lost, It may have to wait long, but it will certainly come in use, When the materials are all prepared and ready, the architects shall appear.
— And writing as an extension of our life. What is the main key to living to the fullest?
— This is what you shall do: Love the earth and the sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.
— How do we reach our potential? How do we access our inner hero?
— There is no trade or employment but the young person following it may become a hero.
— Do we need teachers to guide us and steer us in the right direction?
— He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher. Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you. You must travel it by yourself. It is not far. It is within reach. Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know. Perhaps it is everywhere—on water and land.
— What is the basis of a life well lived?
— To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a little better place than we found it, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life breathed easier because you lived. This is to have succeeded.
— How do we gain the necessary knowledge, wisdom, to flourish and succeed in a world so burdened with information and choices?
— Wisdom is not finally tested in the schools, wisdom cannot be passed from one having it to another not having it, wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof.
— Could you provide any directions, a road map, that has served you well in that quest for wisdom? Something we could apply to our own journey?
— Not I—not anyone else, can travel that road for you, you must travel it for yourself.
