The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud by Henry Miller Page A

pass himself on the road he would not recognize himself. This is perhaps the last desperate way of tricking madness—to become so utterly sane that one does not know one is insane. Rimbaud never lost contact with reality; on the contrary, he embraced it like a fiend. What he did was to forsake the true reality of his being. No wonder that he was bored to death. He could not possibly live with himself, since that self was in forfeit. In this respect one is reminded of Lautréamont’s words: “I go on existing, like basalt! In the middle, as in the beginning of life, angels resemble themselves: how long it has been since I ceased to resemble myself!”
    One has the feeling that in Abyssinia he even tried to amputate the organ of memory. But toward the end, when he has become “the great invalid,” when to the accompaniment of a hand organ he takes up the thread of his stifled dreams, the memories of the past well up. What a pity we have no record of the strange language he indulged in on the hospital bed, his leg gone, a huge tumor blossoming on his thigh, the insidious cancer germs roving through his body like plundering marauders. Dreams and hallucinations vie with one another in an endless fugue—and no audience but the devout sister who is praying for his soul. Now the dreams he dreamed and the dreams he lived interfuse; the spirit, at last freed of its fetters, makes music again.
    His sister has attempted to give us an inkling of these unrecorded melodies. She remarks, if I remember rightly, upon their supernal quality. They were not, we are led to believe, like either the poems or the illuminations. They were all that plus something else, plus that something, perhaps, which Beethoven gave us in the last quartets. He had not lost the master’s touch; with the approach of death he was even more the genius than he was in his youth. They are fugues now not of clashing, discordant phrases however illuminated, but of essences and quintessences garnered through the struggle with the sternest demon of all, Life. Experience and imagination now blend to form a chant which is a gift and not a curse or a malediction. It is no longer
his
music,
his
magistry. The ego has been routed, the song and the instrument become one. It is his oblation on the altar of dethroned pride. It is the Apocatastasis. Creation is no longer arrogance, defiance, or vanity, but play. He can play now on his deathbed as he can pray, for his work as a sufferer is ended. The keel of his ship has at last burst asunder, he is going to the sea. Perhaps in these last hours he understands the true purpose of human toil, that it is slavery when linked to blind or selfish ends and joy when it is performed in the service of mankind.
    There is no joy like the joy of the creator, for creation has no other end than creation. “Let us refine our fingers, that is,
all
our points of contact with the external world,” he once urged. In the same sense God refines His fingers—when he elevates man to the level of creation. The thrill of creation is felt throughout all creation. All forms, all orders of being from the angels to the worms, are struggling to communicate with those above and below. No efforts are lost, no music goes unheard. But in every misuse of power not only is God wounded but Creation itself is halted and Christmas on Earth postponed that much longer.
“Ah! je n’aurai plus d’envie:
Il s’est chargé de ma vie.
Salut à lui chaque fois
Que chante le coq gaulois.”
     
    I transpose these couplets deliberately in the same spirit that I once mistakenly translated
“il”
as
Dieu
. I cannot help but believe that the fatal attraction to
le bonheur
which Rimbaud spoke of means the joy of finding God.
Alors—“Salut à Lui chaque fois que …”
     
     
    Why is it, I ask myself, that I adore Rimbaud above all other writers? I am no worshipper of adolescence, neither do I pretend to myself that he is as great as other writers I might mention. But