Madness, Creativity, & Giving A God Its Due: An Homage To Poet Artur Rimbaud

Artur Rimbaud double vision

It has been found again! 

What? 

Eternity.

It is the sea mingled with the sun"

AH! I am so forsaken I will worship at any shrine impulses toward perfection. — Artur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

Like a good Zen student Mephistopheles
says, "Myself am hell."
So all the old accounts are mistaken.
We need to translate,
the meanings are turned around:
for his screams read, "Delight,"
and for the tortures he undergoes,
read, "he does not shut out
any part of himself."
--  from "Spell To Be Chanted While Dispelling Loneliness" by John Tarrant,  

"Il a'y aura pas de reposoirs." Translation:
"There will be no altars of repose." - a monk instructing visitors to the Abbe of Solemnes, France.

Entrance to the one of the oldest Churches in Mexico

. . . The old gods were and remain gods of possession and thus are still to be approached with caution, eyes open, alert, conscious, awake, else one can be outrun and overtaken. Such encounters are transformative, yes. But for the better it is not certain. Having had these dis- and re-orienting experiences via "l'abaissement de la senses" (derangement of the senses) Rimbaud was indeed transformed, awakened to the power of the unconscious which in his case resulted in a tremendous, ungrounded ego inflation from possession by an archetypal energetic tsunami, the inundating Greek god of ecstatic merger and dissolution, Dionysus (or Bacchus of the Romans), who can and does indeed "enthuse", meaning literally from the Greek word "entheos" - "inspire, become god-filled," also "shining, brilliant", all of which accurately describes Rimbaud's oeuvre; however, this shining god no matter His brightness, in the end wears one out, as in "down and out", drained of life.

After the shining, the shinola.

*

Shadow awaits on the other side. 

Poet Theodore Roethke writes, "The edge is what I have". 

It is the edge we all have. We dwell upon and within it, often unconsciously or, if conscious of it at all, we flee, or like Rimbaud, plunge headlong, body long, arts long, into it "come hell or high water" which did come to the poet through his dark deeds. Enthused, sundered, the Hell plundered poet, and plundering, purposely a'blunderer. worshiper/creator of "thunder", that and more his hope, was/is endlessly rent, surrendered to each reader for hopefully more clarifying while alive ends than waiting for it, rumored to arrive at "The End". Utterly. 

His poetry remains a flood-water mark ("high water" is still debated) in culture deeded to any who will have it, a great/grate legacy of youthful traumas, treasons, thefts of divine treasures, fractured facets gained at guarded though purposefully razored edges.

Out of the shinola, the shine.

For all the beauty Rimbaud opened up to, the terrible beauty, of dark and violent gods, the spectrum of worlds they create and inhabit with and within us, it did not prevent him from the slave trade and the narcotic numbing yet never negated, ever-inflamed nerve fires of conscience. Rimbaud helped to tear the personal and collective edges, Catholic in his day, which keeps repressed shadow at bay (in Hell), usually projected upon others, activities, places and more, thus giving the projected upon more power. Projected shadow gives the projector license to repress, to scapegoat and punish those others who become their and culture's "evil" purgatorial stand-ins and stunt men in perpetually pejorative/projective acts toward their own misplaced absolution and retribution. Thus the psychic necessity for scapegoats. Transgressors.

*

Transgressors serve. And are served up by the "righteous", the wannabe gilded guru-ic gossips, those glib spirit entrancers, those chin-charmers dime a dozen, those Metro-mancers who plant golden, mass produced flags in the "transformation" business staking their claims of imminent domain in the new gluttony that is now "Spirituality, Inc." from lofts to loony toons, the "enlightenment business" with TV talk show hosts proclaiming the latest best-selling "Secret and Esoteric Science" designed to gain material stuff and, of greatest value in that racket, projections of "Power" with money attached. There will be no dirth of these who so easily via magical thinking with no critical thinking whatsoever please the desperate, the greedy, the forsaken ready to "worship at any shrine impulses toward perfection" (Artur Rimbaud) which are promises for transcendence but most often dissociation and bypass of the problem of the shadow side of existence, of good and evil.

Transgressors bring that disowned shadow and underworld value, that which has been left out of official culture secular and "spiritual", of families, clans, cults, groups, communities, nations. They are scapegoated but at first usually ignored. Jungian analyst and writer, John Layard, said that the crime of Oedipus, whose myth our Western culture is built upon, is ignorance - ignore-ance (pg. xiv). Every rebel, maverick, criminal, rule breaker represents a lost value or a new value which has been ignored by the collective. They may be punished, they will be punished, but in the end the punished one will become wise or has the potential to become so and, that not happening, some child or two or three or more will be born or will arrive from some other shore having crossed a border legally or illegally and the old collective values shall fall to the new values brought in by the invader transgressors.

Sun. Petroglyph. Desert near Albuquerque, NM

Religion, myth, dreams, society historically and currently are full of those mythic transgressors who bring about a new value, a new order, or herald one to come. Jamake Highwater in his book, The Mythology of Transgression, speaks of two kinds of transgressions, theological, which is a breaking of the absolute laws of god, and mythological, which is "a metaphor suggesting a process similar to metamorphosis: an act that brings about transformation. The line crossed by a mythic transgression is a boundary of consciousness at the same time that it is a boundary of collective mores...such boundaries are called "reality" ruled by an ideology or theology or philosophy (all of which are believed to be absolute). Mythological transgressors are always perceived by the collective as theological transgressors and are always considered threats, criminals, and are punished. Highwater pointedly continues: "...transgression [from the theological eye] is generally understood to mean an action that is morally subversive. A transgression is closely associated with the religious idea of damnation...we reproach them as sinners. And the more "terrible" the transgression, the more we reproach them. We may ridicule them, disdain them, beat them, imprison them, banish them, or we may even kill them. But the worst of all possible punishments is doubtlessly our attempts to redeem them: to change them from their sinful ways to our blessed ways...Sartre said that "hell is other people." In matters of dogma [theological or psychological] he may have been right (pg. 42)." 

Pierced Flight, outdoor sculpture near Princeton, New Jersey

In sum, the mythological transgressor leaves the known, received and sanctioned "Walled City" of norms, of the socio-psycho-sanctimonious collective in order to bring about revelation and transformation. The archetypal hero's journey always leads to revelation and transformation. Eventually. Or some version that takes, makes or, yes, perfectly "breaks" to take new ground, to extend, meet psyche's demands to expand, recreate old-to new-land so that more and more can stake their claim to their endowed, "self-evident" place in the "volatile creative f-ruckus that is the citizenry, civil-enough, "rock n roll-us polis" "We-the-People" oriented State. 

Naiveté must go; maturer vision hold strong for stronger space allowing grace-enough for predictable manageable divisions roiling toward inevitable, dreamed of/at/for inclusive to-be-lived-presently vision, given weight, taken on, "pressed down, shaken together . . . running over" manifest "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité" born of/from good faith and of faith by faithful efforts trialed, tried, a hermetic enough seal on cauldron-State continually alchemizing e pluribus unum, an ongoing phrase as verb, dynamic, fluxing toward always ripening union.

Highwater says "the crucial turning point of any (hero's) adventure is that moment when a man or woman breaks away from the commonplace world in order to act out a sense of self. It is this decisive act of disjunction from the commonplace, of departure from the known world, that represents the essential act of crossing the line, of breaking the rules and trespassing beyond the familiar world. That trespass represents heroic (often choice is no longer optional) willingness to pierce the protective walls of the community. It represents the daring [and Promethean "gall"] to make a precarious passage beyond the walls by doing that "one thing" that is forbidden (pg. 41). 

***

I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences
And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses. —Robert (Bob) Fletcher, lyrics to "Don't Fence Me In" (music by Cole Porter)

"He is what he hides..." true of the man & "deus absconditus"

The Year I Almost Became A Catholic by Raul Voz

(translated from the Spanish by Warren Falcon) 

The year I almost became a Catholic
5 stars rose from your breasts in Spring.
My nest was a sudden disturbance in blue.

A veil

a floating head

bleeding thorns

adorned your white throat.

I fled from my boat after one 
long night of fishing only to 
arrive ashore with torn nets 
and apparitions upon my knees.

Without will my cursing ceased.

I discovered I was speechless.

I learned to speak with my hands.
Curious circular clouds surrounded
particular heads without logic.

Genuflections strange rearranged
the air in front of my chest while I
sat upon or hid my left hand.

Purple became everything dear.

Roses diminished before your 
bare feet treading upon a serpent, 
a tourniquet of gold each ankle 
entwining.

Virgin stars minus 5 surrounded
your curved shape defiant of robes
meant to convey the holy restraining
in my groin.

Odd collections mounted in the attic 
where I retired to cloister and wait.

Leaden pilgrimage up and down pointless
stairs accumulated distance.

My beard became a convention of lepers and bells.

Fingernail parings

clumps of hair

bits of flesh

sacks of ears

all were relics in the making.

I became an accountant listing and numbering each holy scrap.

I tried not to be critical but my eyes lied.

I could not confess except by pencil, 
leaving notes and grease stains
for the priest to interpret.

Absolution my hope, 
a mute vow was my prosthesis.

Then Spring returned.

My boat sank. All mended nets, 
a year's work, were lost.

Nothing to do.

I return to you, a parenthesis in the sea of loneliness.

Each star, each breast, you have removed
in my absence, mourning made permanent, 
scars upon your throat oddly fish-shaped.

Astonished, my voice returns, curses then caresses, 
withered left hand free to unravel regret nerve for 
nerve, the only net worth mending.

I reserve this one strange act from a year of orthodoxy, 

to anoint your feet with tears.

I dry them with my hair, your outstretched arms
a beseeching beyond emptiness, your chest barren
but for my hands remembering the uses of prayer, 
kisses but murmurs, rumored stars where swollen sails had been.

The Empress of Contrails Writes Upon Darkness

for Artur Rimbaud & Anthros Del Mar

'the labyrinths

that time creates

vanish.

(only desert

remains.)     

the heart, 

fountain of desire, 

vanishes.

(only desert

remains.)     ' 

-  from 'And After' by Federico Garcia Lorca

I, on the other hand, 

have lain down with

countless thousands.

My tent is worn out.

Stains mark love-cries, 

some blood where tongues

are ground down to root 

words, utterance hard 

pounded, soft tissue 

torn letter by letter, 

tender verbs opened to 

pain, that which is paid 

for more than alabaster 

embraces and this strangling 

of waists

My tent has drained more

of love's body than a mortuary.

Spikenard scented oils taint 

fabric folds and flesh. Rote, 

worn pillows are daily, sometimes 

hourly turned where I half expect 

to find teeth or coins hoping 

still for one true word for

love without name else it flies, 

moths repelled instead by flame, 

pillows revealing nothing.

But I turn them still.

Oasis and cloaca, 

love birds parched, 

now moves caravansary

toward heart's always

winking horizons.

There are many before

the sun rises.

Perhaps my name goes

before me, my press, 

Empress of Contrails, 

peacocks in tow, 

trailing tallies, scores, 

arrivals, departures, 

ejaculations, rejections, 

all faces hands have held, 

and yearning beyond possibility 

hesitant dawn's mourning doves.

Have I not spoken of tears

subtle parentheses of blame, 

brine outlines punctuated, 

thinly silked, easily taken

for wing-laced salt maps, 

tongue lick sighs grown

weary with enunciating.

Nightly misspoken, the

flagons are tossed down.

Recall how hot winds blow loudly 

as do I, billowing the tent.  Men 

cry, mad for my return yet burns 

no desert impervious to heat of 

all kinds, even human, excepting 

the heart, its capacities to startle, 

its dunes in vast stretches beat, 

beat for what moonlight can only 

suggest to scorpions in silver 

shadows, pitying serpents coiled 

smug in their ability to shed skin, 

unlike the veiled men.

Hide what cannot be unwritten

though this trail of brocaded

skulls in time returns to sand.

One cannot see this hand

waving goodbyes, the other

concealing tint and quill.

Through ages, upon human vellum, 

through cycles unending and same, 

what heart heat bids, I write best,

upon darkness, eyes closed, tent

open to all who may, supplicant, 

come wandering in.

APPENDIX (which is also PREFACE)

helpful for reading Rimbaud and Raul Voz

"The Saviors do not lend themselves to art successfully: they are outside the pale, beyond, as incomprehensible in their love as in their example. They have never become incorporated in the blood stream. Forsaking the world, they become as the idols they sought to destroy. This is human perversity. Throughout the ages it displays itself in the individual life, and now and then it bursts forth in cosmic waves of futility and self-destruction." - Henry Miller from last his essay on Kenneth Patchen, "Patchen, Man of Anger & Light"

The author, 26 y/o, on the way to South America, January 1979

photo by Lowery McClendon - compadre, poet

"Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind,"1 

I have been taken up into grief, the strange 
relief of clouds. Soon departed, I shall be 
once again returned to disquieted prayer, 
the proud monk to his rites rejoined such 
are covers for disjointedness. 

Adroit is the spoiled self touching only 
late that of Other, of Beauty, Adonais 
"dead then'" when Mr. Shelley, once young, 
now always, has clung 'moderne', as much 
as, as soon as he can deny, spurn, return 
a Vision "toward the vital air." 


He has the advantage of an Eastern detachment.

1 A Grief Earned - An Ode Beginning & Ending With Lines From Shelley [click the title], the opening verses to a poem in 3 parts - for Vajra, after Krsna - "and my comfort brown where I, once again, lost the blue accident of love"

Phrases with quotation marks are quotes from Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats by Percy Blyyshe Shelley

Met this fellow in the Cathedral of Lemieux, France

Immediately "knew" it was a clear encounter with a

daimon-as-dstiny....and the rest has been histor-ectomy

"to begin with a swelled head and end with swelled feet" - from Canto 81, Ezra Pound  

That one day the book shall be written, 
Odysseus come smiling through the door. 
That I shall live forevermore free of provisions, 
be delivered presently into good, rich life 
and unto the richer world, my Lover, so long 
turning turning turning in distance away from, 
yet to manage a caress, a smooch which 
neither dismisses nor fully embraces and 
it is I that is and shall be erased into this Love 
which shall then in time be erased as well 
in the greater Sun and that Shining too shall 
be erased. Then we shall all be scattered, 
or I shall be only, embrace by embrace, 
toward erasure no longer effortful. 

I soft sift draft by draft rough toward world 
now slowing in spite of parentheses these 
provisional postulations of 'the good life' 
to come. Eventually. There is only this that 
I am living now. And my hands feel, even 
perhaps are, strapped to this wheel that 
turns me as turns Beloved Earth, the Sun 
too each dreaming near to but apart from each. 

My reach is 
here on my tongue, 
in my fingers here 
grasping words from mind. 
I am ever behind in this chase, 
now am further from 
Love/Space than ever 
though my heart 
is swollen from 
wanting It. 

Still, world, accept my blessing. 

I send this message aloft on kingfisher wings.