“Forests and prodigious plantations where gentlemen savages hunt their news by the light they have invented.”

Perhaps we can start there just as the Lord did. With some light. But to claim the subject of this collection of half-formed grotesqueries to be light is a very strange choice. To read Rimbaud isn’t to experience a divine illuminating light, it’s to look into the pallid marble apse of a brand new cathedral and faintly make out streaks of shit graffitied between story-high stained glass windows. It’s then when you cast your eyes away from a Heaven that’s been profaned that you have nowhere else to look but into the deep chasm of a personal abyss. And there, deep within the void of the self is where Rimbaud was able to illuminate. Where we thought nothing could persist, the jewels and ornaments of fossilized shells lining dark cavernous walls lazily light up under his lantern.

His work is not just one of casting light, but of illuminating as marginalia, the creation of an illuminated manuscript. Like a mad rambling monk holed up in a cloister in the 12th century, Rimbaud’s frenzied illustrations people the spaces in between the rigid and proper text of the social world. He is able to show the soul of the world and it is a strange cackling world that can only be laughed at in its ambitions for glory.

Rimbaud’s supreme undertaking is to debase and confuse the senses, to turn away from the material and the Real that were so fashionable in Paris’ 1850’s reaction to Romanticism and supplant them with a newer, realer Realism. Rimbaud laughed at the Realism that championed blunt everyday life and instead chose to look to the very heart of things, to rip out the symbols that make up the ancient befouled bones of the Real. He birthed a new art by understanding that the Real is not universal, it becomes twisted, mutated, and perverted through the macabre lens of the self when viewed at its core. His Realism is built of things and visions and smells but all of them are tinted a shade darker by understanding that the paints that depict our world are created from pigments that are squeezed out of the guts of the atavistic images that float to us in our nightmares.

His work led to Symbolism and Surrealism. But it only led to those new ideas through a deep and intense journey within himself, through an obsession with the idea of looking deep within and knowing his self so thoroughly that he could use it like a personal philosopher’s stone. He became a visionary, a seer—the translations disagree on which he wanted to call himself but he certainly succeeded beyond the ambiguity of translation. His search within himself yielded the future of poetry and art and the occult that has wound a path through the century and a half since he shunned his poetic gift. It was Rimbaud who gave us the mission of poetry that still lives today: “I is someone else.” I am grateful that this precocious child performed his comedic sideshow in life’s play.

Rimbaud's Illuminations

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