Chapter 5 Rimbaud's hell

Rimbaud's hell I was sent to hell by the rainbow, Happiness was my misfortune, my confession and my maggot: My life is too vast to be dedicated to power and beauty alone. —Arthur Rimbaud In the recently published "Complete Works of Rimbaud", I saw that the adventurer and past poet Rimbaud wrote to his family from the port of Aden, Yemen in 1884. He said: "My life is a real story here. Nightmare... I will soon be 30 (halfway through my life!) and I will not be able to run around the world in vain." I think, when Rimbaud said this, he must have thought of the first paragraph of Dante's "Divine Comedy? Inferno": "In the middle of our lives, I woke up in a dark forest, because I was lost in it. the right way.” (Perhaps he also recalled the poems of his youth, and his curses on his future in those brilliant poems).Although he was wrong in saying that he was not "in the middle of life" but near the end, he should have no regrets, because like Dante, he walked through hell and glimpsed the truth.

The French poet Artur Rimbaud, born in 1854, is a unique genius in the history of modern poetry—this is something that no contemporary poet can deny.The two famous poems "Vowlet" and "Drunken Boat" written by him at the age of fifteen not only fulfilled Baudelaire's dream of "Symphony of Feelings" and became an important representative of Symbolist poetry, but also created A free poetry style that explores the power of subconsciousness and fantasy has a great influence on the development of later modern poetry and has become a milestone in the history of poetry.In the same year, he put forward the concept of "a poet should become a clairvoyant" in his famous "Letters of a clairvoyant", which had an important influence on the later surrealism movement and even the stream-of-consciousness novels. At the end of the masterpiece "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", he alludes to his influence and pays tribute to it.

In 1871, he met another great poet Verlaine, who was deeply attracted by his genius, abandoned his wife and ran away with him, and the two lived a homosexual life in London and Belgium for two years. In 1873, this "bad love" ended because Rimbaud was shot and wounded by Verlaine because he wanted to return to Paris.A month later, Rimbaud wrote his most outstanding poem "A Season in Hell". Since then, he has closed his pen and completed his career as a great poet at the age of 19. What happened after that is unreasonable. Rimbaud left France, went to Southern Europe, Northern Europe, Asia, Africa, worked as a mercenary in the Netherlands and the United States (soon to become a deserter), a colonial overseer, an arms smuggler, a coffee exporter, Photojournalist, prospecting team... Later, they stayed in North Africa, West Asia and other places for 12 years, "living the most miserable life in the world", but they never returned to France.It wasn't until 1891 that the tumor on his foot deteriorated and he had to return to France for an amputation operation, but to no avail, he died at the end of the year at the age of 37.

There are many explanations for Rimbaud's crazy behavior in the second half of his life: some say that he is because of the loss of love, some say that he pursues worldly happiness because of Jiang Lang's changes, and some even say that he is an adventurer because he is greedy for money of.I think these people don't understand Rimbaud, and they don't understand him from the point that he is still a poet at heart.Yes, he did make a lot of money later on (he said in his letter that he had been wearing eight kilograms of gold francs around his waist for a long time!), but he wrote letters home about the misery of life in the wilderness, while He made up all kinds of reasons for himself and refused to return to France—what happiness could he have in Aden?Just like the saying in "Historical Records? Xiang Yuji" that "wealthy people don't return to their hometown, they are like traveling at night in brocade clothes", which is unreasonable. This period of hell cannot be explained from the perspective of ordinary people.

One of Rimbaud's poems is well-known because of a quote from Milan Kundera: "Live elsewhere!" He is also famous for two poems written on the barricades of the French student revolution in 1968: "I would be anyone" and "All or nothing!".These verses and "A Season in Hell" are the key to our understanding of his persistence and suffering in the second half of his life. Many of Rimbaud's early poems express his longing for wandering, adventure, and freedom, such as "Drunk Boat", the first sentence says: "Floating down the deep river, / I feel that I have There is no tracker to guide", and then there are dozens of lines of unconstrained singing about the fantastic rafting journey. He is intoxicated by the unexpected change of the itinerary, and he does not want to stay in any place at all-because "there is no other place". Beauty is always insatiable, and "living elsewhere" means eternal change.His poetic form is also in line with it, full of impatient calls and prayers, jumping rapidly from one image to another, and the flow of nouns and adjectives is dizzying.In the "Letters of the Visionary", he said: "If it (poetry) is born with a form, give it a form; if it has no shape, let it flow."—Later, he also chose for his life such a form.

In the collection of prose poems written before "A Season in Hell" "Colored Pictures" (published only a few years before Rimbaud's death), Rimbaud first experimented with his "I would like to be anyone" fantasy in words.In a small drama, the characters wearing gorgeous masks and colorful clothes take turns: wizards, actors, killers, wanderers, kings, elves, etc., are all the incarnations of Rimbaud himself; and in this flow He re-evaluated the beauty in the world and set a new standard for a clairvoyant—just like Nietzsche's "revaluation of all values" in philosophy, he also did it in aesthetics.

Twelve years earlier than Nietzsche, he put forward the call that "people must transcend". In the "Letters of the Visionary", he already said: "Poetry will no longer be synchronized with action, but should be ahead." "He (the poet) ) needs unwavering faith and superhuman strength...will be the great sick man, the great criminal, the great curser...for he reaches the unknown! He cultivates a soul richer than others!" It's like Nietzsche's Rastutra's great wish.In "The Coloring Book" and the subsequent "A Season of Hell", he made experiments again and again for this transcendence, and practiced it in his later life-the life he chose (mercenaries, weapons smugglers, etc.) , Exploration team members, etc.) beyond the imagination of ordinary people, and his perseverance is beyond what ordinary people can bear.This kind of madness can only be understood as his self-discipline and existential commitment to choice.

What really foreshadowed and established his "Hell Change" was his last work "A Season of Hell".This collection of prose and poetry in nine chapters fully presents the mental journey of a person who questioned the truth: first, he recalled how he went from the love of beauty to the worship of evil—this "evil" is not simply good and evil The evil of the theory, but an aesthetic state mixed with the rebellious desire of youth and the martyrdom tendency of an absolutist; He vacillates between purity and piety—and therefore falls into the constant, cruel torture of his own soul, but judging from his gorgeous and brilliant writing, he is intoxicated in this torture.He thinks about his love from a woman's point of view - he plays the two roles of lover and loved one at the same time. He finds that when he loves, he wears the double mask of Satan and Jesus. An angelic, mystical figure or object.

In the key chapter "Alchemy of Words", he reviewed his artistic creation: "I invented the color of vowels!" Phantom." Readers follow him to travel through his fantasies, enjoying the feast of senses and desires.In bliss he reveals the secret of his life: "I was sent to hell by the rainbow, happiness was my misfortune, my penitence and my maggot: my life is too vast to be dedicated to strength and beauty alone. "It was almost a foreshadowing of his life.In the end he understood: "I only know how to pay tribute to beauty now."—From here, his sinking hell chapter evolved into an ascending heaven chapter. In the following chapters, he criticized the mediocre life and kept Sublimating itself, the power of rebellion has become its opposite: the accelerated driving force of "respect", he even said: "My rebellion against the world is just a short torture... We will not lose eternity!"

But in the last chapter he restores the full sobriety of a poet.He questioned heaven, salvation: "I have been deceived... I have nurtured myself in lies. Let us go." His attitude is like that of the later existentialists: affirming one's own existence, robbing the existence of existence in this unfortunate existence. significance.He said: "Don't sing hymns again: stick to every step you take." Reality is cruel, but it means truth-and truth should be born from it. The life after poetry is the process of practicing and continuing poetry with his life.Look at the letters he wrote to his family at the end of his life, that is the real season of hell, there is no letter that does not lament the misery of life: "I can only spend the rest of my life in a wandering life of exhaustion and poverty, and the only prospect Just to die in pain." But later he asked: "Do you think I can find someone who is willing to travel with me?" After his foot disease worsened and he wrote to his family to buy medicine, he even asked: " Is it possible to serve in the army in my situation?" His sense of adventure was true until his death, and in his final days, he had a leg amputated, and he knew he was hopeless, but he hoped to return to North Africa. Died in Ethiopia.But he failed to do so, and his last words were: "Tell me, when can I be sent to the pier..."

This personal hell is both the curse of fate and the pursuit and commitment of man himself.Rimbaud said to himself: "I am the one who steals fire." There is a sentence that seems to explain the misfortune of the creator: "They are like people who light fire. When the fire illuminates them around, Allah takes away their light. , so that they can see nothing in the heavy darkness." But here is more of their own pursuit: in order to light the fire, they are willing to be in the dark.Ulysses in Dante's "Divine Comedy" did not go to hell because he cheated with a Trojan horse, but because he saw the mysterious mountain that he should not have seen in his last voyage—the truth.But on the other hand, if you can get a glimpse of the truth, it doesn't matter if you go to hell? Compared with the mysterious destiny, all these: poetry, fantasy, adventure may be futile, but this futility itself has meaning.Benjamin once said about idealism: "Only for those things that have no hope can we gain hope." I would like to dedicate these words to Ulysses, Rimbaud, Che Guevara and other fire thieves in hell .