Delirium Read Online Free Page A

psychophysical masturbation. In writing poetry one does not achieve the object of one’s desire; one compromises for an approximation. The end product is elusive, it evades the perceiver in the same way as the imagined sexual fantasy blurs in the act of retaining it.
                  Rimbaud’s poem ‘Au Cabaret-Vert’, written most probably on the road to Charleroi in October 1870, is impregnated with an autumnal calm. It is a poem of late sunshine. It expresses a mood one associates with Rimbaud that autumn. It is the calm before the storm; the achievement of a poetry which, while it disdains comfortable emotion or social acceptance, none the less expresses a containable tension within the poet. And a sense of placement: he has no need to counter-attack his line, for the poem follows his physical routing. And Rimbaud, who expressed such temerity on a spiritual plane, manifests an almost voyeuristic awkwardness in his real or imagined notice of girls encountered on the way. In ‘Au Cabaret-Vert’ it is ‘the girl with the huge tits’ and the obvious sexual experience — ‘a kiss wouldn’t scare that one’ — who serves him with the simple dish of bread and butter and ham. The simplicity of his needs, so unselfconsciously portrayed in the poem, right down to his beer-froth turning gold in the late sunshine, has the serene properties of certainty; something that sexual intrusion would have shattered. ‘Au Cabaret-Vert’ isolates a mood. It finds Rimbaud emulating adults; he is at ease in a country inn, although no doubt tongue-tied, occupying a corner by himself and viewing the company with modified paranoia. The money for his food may have come from the pockets of a dead soldier. Rimbaud would have appreciated that irony. But there is more than a mood to this poem: there is a flippancy and a customary shade of his familiar contempt. Tor eight days I’d ripped my boots up on the road,’ he tells us in the poem. And certainly his mother wasn’t going to replace them. When his clothes went to tatters they stayed that way. He cultivated lack of hygiene and a vagrant’s appearance. He seems all the time to have been going against himself, pushing his perversity to see how far he could injure the sensitive person within. He may never have intended to go to violent extremes, to follow to the end of the night in search of the midnight sun, but at some stage it got out of control. It was too late to reverse the syndrome. The I had literally become the other.
                  But it is still October 1870. Rimbaud wanted to change the world. The orthodox hegemony of material greed and the conformist masses subjugated to its ethic held little attraction for a young man whose life was already that of a poet. And it hadn’t changed in October 1990. The poet remains an outsider who threatens the capitalist ethos. The world of business, politics and journalism slams iron doors in the face of imaginative truth. Inner space is a proscribed sanctuary. It is thought to be dangerous to go there; man must compute his bank balance and raise his arm in salute to International Commerce.
                  But in those autumn weeks of ripping his boots up, taking in the last of the sun’s diminishing warmth, and writing poems which, while they hint at sex, remain on a level of mental curiosity, Rimbaud was marking time. In `La Maline’ it is again a servant-girl who he imagines teases him into kissing her. There is a pink and white peach-bloom on her cheeks. She too is a child disguised as a woman: ‘En faisant, de sa lèvre enfantine, une moue’ (`And pouting with her childish mouth’). He can feel comfortable in her presence, for each recognizes in the other the adoptive role of the adult.
                  The poem `Ma bohème’, from the same group written in October 1870, is an autobiographical finger-sketch of how Rimbaud saw himself at the time. `Je m’en allais, les poings dans