Horrible Workers

In 1871 Arthur Rimbaud, still a teen-ager, wrote a letter to his friend Paul Demeny. In it he describes what he is attempting to do with his life and art in order to create a new poetry and a new language. Indeed, Rimbaud almost seems to be saying that he wants to create a new type of human being through artistic freedom.

Although most of the letter is characteristic of a schoolboy from a small town trying to impress an older and more experienced friend (name dropping and half-understood philosophies), there are some passages that attain a certain power and anticipate or point directly to several future developments in art and poetry.

Surrealism; dada; free verse; the marrying of beauty and ugliness to birth a new, sometimes quite humorous graffiti; using slang words to jar against the elegant ones, forcing the reader to read between the lines; re-inventing language that was inadequate for the goal of a new poetry; these are the gifts Rimbaud left behind in this letter and other writings.

Rimbaud writes (this condensed paraphrase and translation are mine– the whole letter in French can be found here): A poet becomes a visionary by a long, gigantic, rational dis-organization of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering and madness. He searches himself. He cultivates his soul and reaches the unknown. Then, bewildered with panic, he ends up by losing the intelligence of his vision; at least he has seen them! Let him be destroyed as he leaps through things unheard of, unnamable; other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has collapsed.

Rimbaud’s letters and work have been used by some to advance agendas on drug-taking or debauchery. Some of the translations in English have also not helped by using words such as crazed and derangement, adding to the myth that artists must suffer and debase themselves for their art.

My own feeling is that Rimbaud had asked himself, how can freedom be attained by a mind that has been conditioned by its oppressor and proceeded to answer with the letter, then by living out and writing down his attempts until he turned his back on poetry and concerned himself with more earthly matters.*

Keeping in mind the time Rimbaud was living in, he seemed to be attempting to escape some of the teachings of the catholic church and the constraints of his culture; he was trying to figure out a way to live outside oneself…trying to escape the building blocks of personality, of being, to get to the essence, the primitive or innocence inside oneself…the first, true man…

In a sense, his attempt at freedom is similar to the search for enlightenment in many spiritual teachings. The difference is that Rimbaud is using poetry as a means to attain this enlightenment.

Rimbaud died at 41 after having lived and worked for many years in north eastern Africa. The legend has him writing his famous A Season in Hell, then turning his back on poetry and art, but he actually continued sporadically writing until the demands of earning a living in a rough country wore him down.

Other horrible workers did come after him, continuing to use words to look for something else. James Joyce and his stream of consciousness writing, Breton’s surrealist manifesto and automatic writing, Philip K. Dick’s mix of psychology, conditioning and future technology, Kerouac’s bop prosody and Burroughs’ cut-up method were partly interested in getting underneath reality (or what we think is reality) to find the real story.

Here’s to all the horrible workers. I think you know who you are.

* For valuable insight into Rimbaud’s life and art I am indebted to Graham Robb’s Rimbaud: A Biography.

Other excellent works on Rimbaud are: Wallace Fowlie's Complete Works of Rimbaud especially as it has both the French and English translations of his work and selected letters.

Alain Borer's Rimbaud in Abyssina gives an excellent look at Rimbaud's days in Africa.

Henry Miller's The Time of the Assassinstells you more about Miller than anything else, but does have some insight into Rimbaud's works.