Finally, if I regretfully tear myself away from the romantic mirage of that golden belt, that attribute of Sardanapalus as though worn under a mamluk’s red waistcoat, I would also say that perhaps he stopped writing because he could not become the son of his works, that is to say, he could not accept their paternity. He did not deign to be the son of the Bateau ivre, of the Saison and Enfance anymore than he had accepted being the offspring of Izambard, Banville, or Verlaine.
I am looking at the comet. Belt of gold, milky way, beacons who art in heaven, images.
One last time I take up the Vulgate.
It is said that after Brussels, with Verlaine in Mons, well before the banana fields, Rimbaud returned to the fold; that in an attic in the Ardennes, in Roche, right in the middle of the fields and woods where the peasants of his maternal line had laid down their lives in vain harvests up to Vitalie Cuif, at harvest time, this appalling young man, this brute, this small heart of a girl, wrote Une saison en enfer; that at least if he started it elsewhere, in the land of Baal, in the metropolises where civilization had fallen into the clutches of Baal, the smoky, futurist clutches, he finished it here, in this highly civilized rural hole, in the clear and ancient light of the harvests. And when they entered the kitchen between two cartloads of sheaves, the brother, the two little sisters, the mother with her face of December in the middle of July, when for example at four o’clock in the afternoon they granted themselves a little shade, in the cool shade cut themselves bread into cool wine so as to take up their busy dance under the sun more bravely, those harvesters heard overhead the author of the Saison sobbing; and in those sobs for a century we have wanted to hear mourning, the loss of Verlaine, the collapse of literary ambitions, the lead received once and for all in the wing; also the mourning for seeing, for magic tricks to make the word appear, all the futurist mumbo jumbo that the Saison disavows in plain terms; but I wonder if those sobs, those cries, that fist beating the table in time were not, beyond all mourning, a very ancient and absolutely pure joy. If perhaps they were sobs of the grand style, that once in your life grace happens to let you spill onto the page: those that the right words tear from you when they pull you forward, those that shatter you when the right rhythm pushes you furiously from behind, and you, left dazzled in the middle, pronounce the truth, meaning, and you do not know how but you know that at that moment on the page is meaning, on the page is truth; you are the little man who speaks the truth; and you cannot get over the fact that in a sad hole in the Ardennes, at Terrier des loups, close to an old woman, dark and insane, meaning has made use of your brutish hand, your brutish mourning, your girl’s heart, to once again appear in its old castoffs of words. Its mantle of June. You burst into tears before that mantle. And the harvesters below, soaking their four o’clock bread in their wine cut with cold water, exchanging looks filled with consternation over poor sobbing Arthur, were entirely wrong: because what they were hearing was perhaps something like the echo here below of the triple sanctus that for eternity the kings of the Apocalypse tirelessly repeat tirelessly gazing at the glory of God; and nothing tells me that the kings of the Apocalypse do not sob eternally, uttering truly the triple sanctus. It was that great racket the harvesters heard. But however true the sanctus, of course Rimbaud was not contemplating the glory of God; because he was born and was writing at the appalling end of the nineteenth century; thus before him on the desk there was only the vain glory of the right words, from which God had been absent for a long time. Thus what the harvesters heard at other times, when for example at dawn they soaked their bread in the same bowl as at four o’clock, but it was filled with coffee and not wine, was the other voice, very old as well, ferrea vox, the voice of iron, vehement, authoritarian, despotic, the voice of the old prophets cast upon the wicked earth, full of resentment that their least word not be the triple sanctus, charging God to show himself, insulting him, crying only to the azure void of dawn. And when he was not the little king of the Apocalypse, the little Jeremiah in his attic made a great racket as well.
We do not know exactly what the Saison is; we think we know only that it is high literature, because those two voices, the voice of the king of adoration and the voice of the furious prophet, which are all of literature, are fighting there. It is more commented upon than the Gospels; between the celestial song and the blasphemy we cannot see very clearly; it is a renouncement that does not renounce; the yes and the no are not disentangled; and leaning over it in our silk skullcaps we are interminably disentangling that yes from that no. It is said that the entire West is halted by it; that all its contradictions churn there as in a mill wheel, shattering like water on the wheel, emerging again intact like water from the wheel. Like water in the wheel, we clearly see that exultation; we cannot decide if it puts an end to the West or once more relaunches it; but rightly or wrongly, we agree to consider it a miracle, at nineteen years old, in an attic in the Ardennes, to write this fistful of pages, hermetic as John, abrupt as Matthew, foreign as Mark, strict as Luke; and like Paul of Tarsus, aggressively modern, that is to say, risen up against the Book, rival of the Book. And of course something is missing: because that sheaf of pages has no evangelical model other than itself, its poor, empty self, which, though an other, was not really the other, the verminous, glorious one of Nazareth. Perhaps this Saison is an old-fashioned thing compared to the Gospel. What matters is that, now, it is one of our Gospels. The little Jeremiah won, he was stronger than literature even while remaining within it, he has caught us.
He wrote the Saison.
I can imagine him going out at night into the Roche courtyard when the harvesters are sleeping. He, too, has worked hard. It is July and the sky is full of stars; under the stars there are dark haystacks as in the story of Boaz. We do not see Rimbaud, who is there: his disheveled hair, wide eyes, big hands, all his features secret, guarded, as though postulated, in the cool shadows of the night. He is crouching against that haystack. We can hear him. He is saying sentences written in the daytime, with great emotion, incomparable to any other in the world since God left the human heart. And if there are powers in the air, if, as the poem of Boaz affirms, they particularly love to frolic during harvest nights, they recognize that great emotion which they heard in the past in Judea, Rome, and Saint-Cyr, everywhere where emotion has given rhythm to language. They know it. We know it as well, we know that it exists; but we do not really know what it is. We do not really know what is leaping in that willful man’s or girl’s heart, in unison with the words that roll from his mouth. The attentive, distracted stars twinkle. The voice in the dark says the Saison for the stars. The big hands close, the emotion builds, the voice gives way to tears. We know this emotion exists. Perhaps it is a joy of December. Is it power? Is it to be master over them all now, Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and little Banville? Is it war? Is it to have thrown down the device of twelve feet that kept us standing, to have defeated the old protocol and left us all without protocol, powerless and taciturn as haystacks in the night? Is it the bitter joy of having made of the poem this perfectly straight, dark, vain, taciturn thing, indifferent to men as a haystack in the night? Is it glory, far from haystacks and men, for the stars, as the stars? Is it June? Is it the sanctus? Is it the sweet joy of having found the new prayer, the new love, the new pact? But with whom? The stars are dancing through the dark leaves. The house is darker than the night. Ah, perhaps it is finally rejoining you now, embracing you, mother who does not read me, who is sleeping with closed fists in the well of your room, mother, for whom I invent this wooden tongue close to your ineffable mourning, your sealed enclosure. For I raise my voice to speak to you from very far away, father who will never speak to me. What endlessly relaunches literature? What makes men write? Other men, their mothers, the stars, or the old enormous things, God, language? The powers know. The powers of the air are this breath of wind through the leaves. The night turns. The moon rises, there is no one against the haystack. Rimbaud, in the attic among some pages, has turned toward the wall and sleeps like lead.