Extracts from Rimbaud

Genius is the recovery of childhood at will. — Baudelaire

The dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.

Love — no such thing. Whatever it is that binds families and married couples together, that's not love. That's stupidity, or selfishness, or fear. Love doesn't exist. Self-interest exists. Attachment based on personal gain exists. Complacency exists. But not love. Love has to be reinvented, that's certain.

I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I'd rather remain silent.

True alchemy lies in this formula: your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse.

A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness. He searches himself. He exhausts within himself all poisons and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men — the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed, and the supreme scientist. For he attains the unknown, because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone. He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them. So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable.

I have wept too much. I shed more tears than God could ever have required.

Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.

In the morning I had a look so lost, a face so dead, that perhaps those whom I met did not see me. Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.

The poet therefore is truly the thief of fire. He is responsible for humanity, for animals even. He will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to. If what he brings back from the beyond has form, he gives it form. If it has none, he gives it none. A language must be found — of the soul, for the soul — and will include everything: perfumes, sounds, colors, thought grappling with thought.

I'm intact and I don't give a damn.

You come from forever and you will go everywhere.

My turn now. The story of one of my insanities. For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes, and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable. What I liked were absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints, old-fashioned literature, erotic books full of misspellings. I dreamed of crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of. I used to believe in every kind of magic. I invented colors for the vowels — A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. I made rules for the form and the movement of every consonant. I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator. It began as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words.

But the problem is to make the soul into a monster.

On blue summer evenings I will go along the paths and walk over the short grass, as I am pricked by the wheat. Daydreaming, I will feel the coolness on my feet. I will let the wind bathe my bare head. I will not speak, I will have no thoughts. But infinite love will mount in my soul, and I will go far, far off, like a gypsy, through the countryside — as happy as if I were a woman.

I found I could extinguish all human hope from my soul.

You'll feel your cheek scratched. A little kiss, like a crazy spider, will run around your neck. And you'll say to me: find it — bending your head — and it will take a long time to find that creature, which travels a lot.

I witness the unfolding of my thought. I watch it, I hear it. I make a stroke with the bow and the symphony begins in the depths, or springs with a bound onto the stage. If the old imbeciles hadn't discovered only their false significance of self, we wouldn't have to now sweep away those millions of skeletons which have been pulling up the products of their one-eyed intellect since time immemorial, and claiming themselves to be their authors.

One evening I set beauty on my knees and I found her bitter, and I reviled her. But I've just noticed that my mind is asleep. Whose hearts must I break? What lies must I maintain? Through whose blood am I to wade?

As I descended into impassable rivers I no longer felt guided by the men. The wolf howled under the leaves and spit out the prettiest feathers. Like him I consume myself.

Now I am an outcast. I loathe my country. The best thing for me is a drunken sleep on the beach.

True life is elsewhere. The first study for the man who wants to be a poet is knowledge of himself, complete. He searches his soul, he inspects it, he puts it to the test, he learns it. As soon as he has learned it he must cultivate it. I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses.

Morality is the weakness of the mind.

Unhappiness was my god.

I want to be a poet and I'm working at turning myself into a seer. You won't understand any of this and I'm almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong, and be a born poet.

How funny it will all seem, all that you've gone through, when I'm not here anymore. When you no longer feel my arms around your shoulders, nor my heart beneath you, nor this mouth on your eyes. Because I will have to go away someday, far away. And in that instant I can feel myself gone dizzy with fear, sinking down into the most horrible blackness, into death. What am I doing here?

It is in these bottomless nights that you sleep in exile. My wisdom is as spurned as chaos. What is my nothingness compared to the amazement that awaits you?

And from that time on I bathed in the poem of the sea, star-infused and churned into milk, devouring the green azures, where entranced into a pallid flotsam a dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.

I could never throw love out of the window.

These poets here, you see, they are not of this world. Let them live their strange life. Let them be cold and hungry, let them run, love, and sing. They are rich, all these silly children, for they have their souls full of rhymes — rhymes which laugh and cry, which make us laugh or cry. Let them live. God blesses all the merciful, and the world blesses the poets.

In the great glass houses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning dress beheld marvels. The northern lights rose like a kiss to the sea. It was the voice of the mad sea, roaring immense, that shattered your infant breast — too soft, too human.

Once, if memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed.

In the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid cities.

Satan, you clown, you want to dissolve me with your charms. Well, I want it, I want it. Stab me with a pitchfork, sprinkle me with fire.

Is it possible to become ecstatic amid destruction, to rejuvenate oneself through cruelty?

I have stretched ropes from bell-tower to bell-tower, garlands from window to window, chains of gold from star to star, and I dance.

I spend my life sitting like an angel in a barber's chair, holding a beer mug with deep-cut designs. A thousand dreams within me softly burn. From time to time my heart is like some oak whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn. And then when I have swallowed down my dreams in thirty or forty mugs of beer, I turn to satisfy a need I can't ignore.

What an old maid I'm getting to be, lacking the courage to be in love with death.

It has been found again. What? Eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun.