The Autumn Season and Rimbaud's Season in Earthly Purgatory

It is the cusp of autumn, and while the days have grown markedly shorter, the heat has intensified again and with it the humidity. We expect a campaign of thunder and lightning that will defuse the onslaught, but not tonight, yet. Russet tones are appearing in the maple leaves, golden clumps underneath the fresher foliage of the linden trees — which are also shedding a sap that renders the leaves that cloak their trunks chalky and glossy like the hardened silvery trail that is left underneath the passage of a slimy snail. Fat red and orange rose hips throng in the bushes, and the raspberry and blueberry and blackberry and strawberry bushes, as well as the peach and apricot, are shedding the last of their intensely sugary summer crop in the grocery stores. And the first husks and nuts of Turkish filbert and chestnuts that are planted along the street are falling to the sidewalks and bursting apart.

On Friday I made it out of the apartment early, ambling down the sidewalk through the late summer morning to the next train station. So, for once, I bought the New York Times's international edition from the kiosk down the street. It was thin in comparison to the newspapers I remember from ten years ago. But I enjoyed reading it in the train; it was fresh news, beautifully perfect in terms of its photography and writing, and reassuring. The black-and-white photograph of Lee Krasner standing in her studio bowled me over. Even manoeuvering the huge broadsheet leaves as the train became more crowded made me pleasantly nostalgic. Anyway, I was chipper.

On other days I've been reading Arthur Rimbaud: an essay on him, and extracts from his work. Of course the big deal with him was that he was a gay or bisexual man in 19th-century France, and lived with the famous poet Paul Verlaine, who appears to have been a huge piece of work and also shot Rimbaud in the arm with a bullet, and published breathtakingly original and rich poetry at a very young age before becoming exhausted and spending his twilight years in a desk job in the French colonies of the Middle East.

I stopped reading a volume of Paul Verlaine's poetry because the man sounded so ghastly in his private life. But although Arthur Rimbaud does not appear to have been a cozy figure, like Albert Camus's main character in L'Étranger I feel him to be weirdly sympathetic. Even when he was a jaded man of middle age who wrote what I thought were self-absorbed, jaded and acerbic letters to his friends and relatives. (Not that he didn't have indisputable reasons to complain.)

I don't know why, but I find it cute when French poets of the 19th century, like Rimbaud, think that they're dangerously mad and bad. In my understanding of God and humanity, after the millennia of men have existed, it must be hard to be impressively and uniquely venal at this point. And I don't think that turmoil or profanity are a sin, taking a religious viewpoint again, except perhaps toward one's own happiness. What frightens and depresses me is men's power to perform bad actions toward other men.

In that vein, it is another 19th-century poet whom I've been reading whom I find less endearing and more disturbing. I can follow Constantinos Cavafis's obsessions with the history of Alexandria and Greece and Rome, and his attempts to inhabit a private world outside of his desk job. But I detest reading Cavafis's 'love' poetry. He wrote it as an adult man in what I gather was the midst of an intense Victorian midlife crisis. The objects of the poems are always 'nubile men' (aged 17 to 23) who die young, in what I think is a metaphor for harmful sexual relations, or were just met briefly after a street pick-up. They are never people in their own right, only projections and ghosts of Cavafis's own lost youth, whose only distinguishing character trait is remoteness.

Since I have a romantic ideal of how relationships should be, I try to imagine that Cavafis had a reasonable attitude, based on consensus and mutuality, in his real-life relationships. But with all the evidence piling up on the other side, I keep giving up. It is just creepy and each poem is like a foul-tasting madeleine that reminds me of the few middle-aged men who chatted me up in the street when I was in my twenties here in Berlin. This type of harassment was at times almost the only social interaction I had outside of my family, and it was appalling after a lifetime of being around men and women who were protective of younger people and had rigid ideas of right and wrong, to realize that people could genuinely see other people as tools for self-gratification.

Maybe Rimbaud was not remarkably upright. Maybe he was just mostly the exploited young man in the equation, and that was why he does not come across to me as a creep. Whatever the cause, at any rate, I don't remember any poetic passage where he seemed what I'd call predatory, except when he campaigned to make Paul Verlaine backslide from his return to Catholicism. (I think it's wrong to meddle with people's consciences. But perhaps Rimbaud was mad at what he might have seen as Verlaine's use of formal religion for whitewashing his own drunken offenses against his wife, child, Rimbaud, etc.)

Rimbaud was obsessed with his idea of poetry and reaching his truths, i.e. his understanding of nature and religion, at high cost to himself, rather than with exploiting other people for status and gratification. Although his ethic as an employee during his final years was perhaps not grandly altruistic or devoted; at least, I had the impression from his private letters that he expected a large salary for his brilliant intellectuality and aimed to get it without great expectations of his own job performance. So I'm not sure if he didn't exploit people for his financial upkeep. But at least I find the first part (paying the emotional costs for his artistic vision himself) laudable, although I am a little unhappy that, in pursuit of his truths, he subjected himself to a vagrant life in Paris — also a hazardous place because the Franco-Prussian war was raging in 1870 and 1871 — as a teenager.

I am pleased if I grasped more than two tenths of each of Rimbaud's poems. The vocabulary is beyond my range; and at times he invented new words. Like Van Gogh's art, I had to view each bold brush-stroke in the broader picture to figure out what the subject was. I never grasp what he meant by the 'snowiness' of cobblestones or pavements, for example, and I might lack the experience of hashish and absinthe required to decode other poems.

Also: It was weird but enjoyable reading my grandmother's notes in the margins, in French and (rarely) in German. The jottings did help explain a few things and reading them was like attending a secondhand undergraduate lecture — at least I'm fairly sure she wrote these scribbles in a French course at university.

But I also found in Rimbaud an emotional kinsman to the French revolutionary period. It was a nice surprise because I'm obsessing about the Revolution as much as ever after reading fragments of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of the Inequality of Man. (After reading the Discourse I feel, immodestly, as if I have a key to the zeitgeist at last.)



Rimbaud wrote verse about the Revolution, so I have solid proof that he did think about it. I feel that he was like the revolutionaries not just in terms of personality but also of circumstances. He rebelled against the aristocratic-orthodox-reactionary milieu, and I think the Franco-Prussian war made him feel a besieged patriotism like the kind that was rife in the 1790s.

I do think that epigraphs at the tops of book chapters are a little pretentious. But I copied down a few passages from Rimbaud's poems that could become epigraphs for my never-ending French Revolution Story project. Also, I began to think that entire chapters of my project might be built around them — germs of psychology and plot.

Rimbaud's passages have made me think about becoming bolder and more imaginative about the events, characters, style and so on of the book.

I try not to be bold and imaginative in my writing, usually, because I'm afraid of not telling the truth. Ever since I was a teenager and felt that there was a gulf between the happy, whole worlds of the books I'd been reading, and the complex life that I'd begun to lead, I've wanted to describe just what I know myself. Which also puts me in the awkward spot of reading lots of books that end well but feeling like a liar if I put any blissful conclusions in my own stories.

In addition I don't like the idea of appropriating and exploiting other people's miseries for plot. It feels like watching St. Lawrence burn on the gridiron, then once he's taken off the flames, propping up one's feet near his smoking corpse in order to make one's toes feel nice and toasty. And making money by passing around the corpse to others.

In film and theatre acting, I guess that the fact that method acting and rote research of roles are in fashion, reflects a shift in social viewpoints: we no longer expect that one man (or woman) can or should intuit the whole depth and breadth of human experience. Nor do we expect one man to draw that knowledge from a bohemian lifestyle that brings him in contact with Dickens-like multitudes.

I guess that if we are able to draw from either fantasy or wild social knowledge — as long as we feel a thing genuinely, as much as a person might who lives it in reality — it is fair to write it. But reading Rimbaud or Wilde, or Edgar Allan Poe, it appears so harrowing to work in this way, that it is more logical to bless our own luck, if we are not able to draw from this wellspring.

Anyway, maybe all of this sounds pretentious and I hope none of it was 'oversharing.' I've been brooding a lot in general about life, and therefore over-thinking things and paddling in my own emotional depths (such as they are!) is kind of a hobby right now.