Excerpts from The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud (1956) by Henry Miller
Despite the denials of the men of science, the power we now have in our hands is radioactive, is permanently destructive. We have never thought of power in terms of good, only in terms of evil. There is nothing mysterious about the energies of the atom; the mystery is in men’s hearts. The discovery of atomic energy is synchronous with the discovery that we can never trust one another again. There lies the fatality–in this hydra-headed fear which no bomb can destroy. . . . Here God himself is powerless. We have put our faith in the bomb, and it is the bomb which will answer our prayers. (35-36)
One is tempted to compare Rimbaud’s act of renunciation with the release of the atomic bomb. The repercussions, though more wide-spread in the latter case, are not more profound. The heart registers a shock before the rest of the body. It takes time for doom to spread throughout the corpus of civilization. (36)
We must go through a collective death in order to emerge as genuine individuals. It it is true, as Lautreamont said, that “poetry must be made by all,” then we must find a new language in which one heart will speak to another without intermediation. Our appeal to one another must be as direct and instantaneous as is the man of God’s to God. The poet today is obliged to surrender his calling because he has already evinced his despair, because he has already acknowledged his inability to communicate. To be a poet was once the highest calling; today it is the most futile one. It is not so because the world is immune to the poet’s pleading, but because the poet himself no longer believes in his divine mission. He has been singing off-key now for a century or more; at last we can no longer tune in. The screech of the bomb still makes sense to us, but the ravings of the poet seem like gibberish. And it is gibberish if, out of two billion people who make up the world, only a few thousand pretend to understand what the individual poet is saying. The cult of art reaches its end when it exists only for a precious handful of men and women. Then it is no longer art but the cipher language of a secret society for the propagation of meaningless individuality. Art is something which stirs men’s passions, which gives vision, lucidity, courage and faith. Has any artist in words of recent years stirred the world as did Hitler? Has any poem shocked the world as did the atomic bomb recently? Not since the coming of Christ have we seen such vistas unfolding, multiplying daily. What weapons has the poet compared to these? Or what dreams? Where now is his vaunted imagination? Reality is here before our very eyes, stark naked, but where is the song to announce it? Is there a poet of even the fifth magnitude visible? I see none. I do not call poets those who make verses, rhymed or unrhymed. I call that man poet who is capable of profoundly altering the world. If there be such a poet living in our midst, let him declare himself. Let him raise his voice! But it will have to be a voice which can drown the roar of the bomb. He will have to use a language which melts men’s hearts, which makes the blood bubble.
If the mission of poetry is to awaken, we ought to have been awakened long ago. Some have been awakened, there is no denying that. But now all men have to be awakened–and immediately–or we perish. But man will never perish, depend on that. It is a culture, a civilization, a way of life which will perish. When these dead awaken, as they will, poetry will be the very stuff of life. We can afford to lose the poet if we are to preserve poetry itself. It does not require paper and ink to create poetry or to disseminate it. Primitive peoples on the whole are poets of action, poets of life. (37-39)
We have been thinking in terms of the past for several thousand years. Now, at one stroke, that whole mysterious past has been obliterated. There is only the future staring us in the face. It yawns like a gulf. It is terrifying, everyone concedes, even to begin to think what the future holds in store for us. Far more terrifying than the past ever was. In the past monsters were of human proportions; one could cope with them, if one were heroic enough. Now the monster is invisible; here are billions of them in a grain of dust. (40-41)
If a single atom contains so much energy, what about man himself in whom there are universes of atoms? If it is energy he worships, why does he not look at himself? If he can conceive, and demonstrate to his own satisfaction, the boundless energy imprisoned in an infinitesimal atom, what then of those Niagaras within him? (41)
The signs and symbols which the poet employs are one of the surest proofs that language is a means of dealing with the unutterable and the inscrutable. As soon as the symbols become communicable on every level they lose their validity and effectiveness. To ask the poet to speak the language of the man in the street is like expecting the prophet to make clear his predictions. That which speaks to us from higher, more distant, realms comes clothed in secrecy and mystery. That which is being constantly expanded and elaborated through explication–in short, the conceptual world–is at the same time being compressed, tightened up, through the use of the stenographic calligraphy of symbols. We can never explain except in terms of new conundrums. What belongs to the realm of spirit, or the eternal, evades all explanation. The language of the poet is asymptotic; it runs parallel to the inner voice when the latter approaches the infinitude of spirit. It is through this inner register that the man without language, so to speak, is in communication with the poet. There is no question of verbal education involved but one of spiritual development. The purity of Rimbaud is nowhere more apparent than in this uncompromising pitch which he maintained throughout his work. He is understood by the most diverse types, as well as misunderstood by the most diverse types. (55-57)
His medium is the spirit and his relation to the world of men and women is a vital one. His language is not for the laboratory but for the recesses of the heart. If he renounces the power to move us his medium becomes worthless. The place of renewal is the heart, and there the poet must anchor himself. . . . [The poet] would not be a poet in the first place if his instinct for life were as perverted as the scientist’s. But the danger which menaces him is the abrogation of his power; by betraying his trust he is surrendering the destinies of countless human beings to the control of worldly individuals whose sole aim is their own personal aggrandizement. . . . Rimbaud refused to become something other than he was, in his office as a poet, in order to survive. Our poets are jealous of the name but show no disposition to accept the responsibility of their office. They have not proved themselves poets; they are content simply to call themselves such. They are writing not for a world which hangs on their every word but for one another. They justify their impotence by deliberately making themselves unintelligible. They are locked in their glorified little egos; they hold themselves aloof from the world in fear of being shattered at the first contact. . . . Theirs is a womblike yearning for a world of pure poetry in which the effort to communicate is reduced to zero. (58-59)
How can he save others if he is incapable of saving himself? The classic answer. Irrefutable. But the genius never learns. He was born with the dream of Paradise, and no matter how crazy it sounds, he will struggle to make it realizable again and again. He is incorrigible, a recidivist in every sense of the word. He understands the past, he embraces the future–but the present is meaningless to him. Success holds no bait for him. He spurns all rewards, all opportunities. He is a malcontent. Even when you accept his work, he has no use for you. He is already engaged in another work; his orientation has shifted, his enthusiasm is elsewhere. What can you do for him? How can you appease him? You can do nothing. He is beyond reach. He is after the impossible. (72)
What Rimbaud’s imitators, as well as his detractors, fail to see is that he was advocating the practice of a new way of life. He was not trying to set off a new school of art, in order to divert the enfeebled spinners of words–he was pointing out the union between art and life, bridging the schism, healing the mortal wound. (93-94)
Every act of renunciation has but one aim: the attainment of another level. . . . Only when the singer stops singing can he live his song. (95)
What we create with hand and tongue is nothing; it is what we create with our lives that counts. It is only when we make ourselves a part of creation that we begin to live. (130)
One must pass through the flame in order to know death and embrace it. (131)