RIMBAUD AND THE MODERNIST HERESY

RIMBAUD AND THE MODERNIST HERESY

RIMBAUD AND THE MODERNIST HERESY

6

Yes, I’d like to believe in a sudden
religious conversion, in the discovery
of inexhaustible energy reserves, a grasp
of sex and politics – all I can remember
is a teacher who taught us some of what he knew,
planting rebellion in a book that snapped
shut, a desperate essay into drunkenness
and a dead poet burning like a virus,
tainting the pages of a thousand magazines –
here is a thin talent shrieking imitation, there
an old man, uneasy with a maudlin respect.
Too near, too far away, not American enough,
confused with an angry complexity,
as simple as a rhyme – here is the art
of counterfeiting in a single phrase,
here is an adolescent growing up crooked;
in the universities, a small profit in a great
decline. In the double journal – art and life –
that symphony begins where
hermetic secrets grow through discord
and resolution to hermitic silence.
Art in the bookshop, life in the bar
with the dancing girls, or vice versa,
when the audience piles up everything goes
quiet, waiting for poetry to happen.


7

Three times in one year I searched
Batavia (Jakarta) listening for the ghost
along the dull canal. Machine-guns
clattered in the avenues as he had planned.
Baudelaire, dwelling in his ‘too-artistic milieu’
could pander to the story of a voyage,
and lack the grit for further wandering;
Mallarmé could edit fashionable magazines
and imagine a Platonic Minotaur
behind the empty mirror, the moral being
that the Book, like great music,
falls short of our desire. You
talk about a theft of fire, you that are
consumed, and driven into dark. I drift through
tropic endeavours where deceit and betrayal
of temporal power is to be excused in favour
of a greater politics. Reading books.
I look for something generous,
beautiful, and profound. Rebel, Revolt,
Revolution – in these contradictions
there is a germ of peace, but at the cost
of war, and in that broil of horror
the possible gestures of love are shrivelled up.


8

Crossing the border of exile
you break off from the common spirit
in the certainty of torture. Where
is the reason in that? It is a lesson
where suffering may be seen to extend
into the rule of law, and blight others,
or tear out the roots of a milder rhetoric.
He shared with Baudelaire the circular belief
that there is no salvation without sin
and that no deed has strength without adversity;
so no vision wields a cutting edge
without the stone. Proof? History, where
the flowers of Monsieur Banville wither
on the slopes of a laughable Parnassus,
or where the poison spills out
to find its level and the theme a full
throat of harmonics in another field of poetry,
or proof in failure and destruction,
where the new metal
finds a dozen alloys in the flame.


9

The same sun blasts the burnt
volcanic cone of Aden, in a time when
British helicopters decorate the sky.
The tourist boat pulls up, and there you are!
A strong line can bring down a tradition
in flame, though no fabulous creature
stirs the ash in the cooling crucible.
Where your footprints lead me through
arenas of history, guns prop up the state.
I have business with a more subtle
oppression, not with this mechanical brand
of torture. I track the scholar through
the hagiographies and find him seeking
money, mathematics, engineering with
commendable excess and a lash of private agony
to keep the bookworms at a distance – the short
length of history, envy, imitation paddling
the shallows of a great talent – and fugitive
from those ghost images which shoaled the sky
at Harar, and which begged remembrance from
one well loved who moved
too far away, and always under the shadow
of a morbid and inexplicable shame.


10

‘A meteor that blazed across the sky
of poetry.’ A falling star, fallen angel,
child in love with drunkenness.
A shadow. A scholar, a teacher,
a mask for violent metaphysics.
A slave beats his master. Like an
allegory badly out of true,
an old song continues under the lamplight.
Somewhere far away a weary man finds
nothing under that sun which brands him.
He learns a pointless trade, and finds
a worthless bargain in the desert.
Back to the café, and the drinks.
In the end you come to realise
it’s not suicide, it’s just
‘giving up’. That’s not a meteor —
that’s an engineer! It’s terribly simple.