The bells of St Denis were melted down for cannon

In my studies of the Gothic cathedral under François Bucher at college, when the gift of understanding was implanting itself as the ultimate experience of love, I heard that the medieval bells of the Gothic jewel were forged for cannon in the siege of 1870. It comes back now in a novelist's allusion - this was 1872, Rimbaud's eighteenth year, two years into his siege of the Muse. We've discussed Manet in passing, without mentioning his paintings of the catastrophe. But now in Rimbaud, who ignores the humiliation of France, the starvation of Paris and the butchery of the Commune in the moment he began to write?

What happens when the literal substance of the sound of peace is translated into that of war, we know as our transubstantiation of masculinity, itself. We appreciate how France's slaughter of its egalitarians would register as another radical contradiction in a youth, at least as intransigent as anything he met in Paris literary circles. 

The flag goes to the filthy landscape, and our dialect stifles the drum.

On to city centers where we'll nourish the most cynical prostitution. We'll massacre logical rebellions.

On to peppery and waterlogged countries! at the service of the most monstrous industrial or military exploitation.

Farewell here, anywhere. Well-meaning draftees, we'll adopt a ferocious philosophy; ignorant of science, sly for comfort; let the shambling world drop dead. This is the real march. Heads up, forward!

We read, we vote, we shape our own society, and our politics ordains what youth may learn. But they will know what the bells of St Denis are for, and who it is who calls for cannon. 

We are raising their Rimbaud, and they will need him. For now, the one we have is good enough, for anyone who wishes he would speak.

Bruce Duffy

Disaster was my God

  A novel of the outlaw

  life of Arthur Rimbaud

Doubleday, 2011©

Alistair Horne

The Fall of Paris: 

  The Siege and the Commune

Macmillan, 1965© 

Jean-François-Arthur Rimbaud

Les Illuminations

  Démocratie

John Ashbery, translation

op. cit.

Daniel Mendelsohn

Rebel Rebel:

  Arthur Rimbaud's Brief Career

The New Yorker

August 29, 2011©


iii  Mathias Lauridsen

For the bath they draw of peace

   always

   the other

   side of 

   the storm 

i   Figure of Greece

       in the Sudtirol

ii  Ivan Terestchenko

      La Soule

Does trapezius' hollow drain along the clavicle trench

We can admit, we don't remember how the bath's abdominal displacement framed the water with parentheses, but pooled somewhat more randomly at the sternum of which we've heard. Residual dapples at the throat or at the breast, innocuously scattered distributions, were on their own to find a likely channel or evaporate without remark. Siblings and spouses, parents and friends, classmates and cousins don't remember - and they'd like to, it would seem fitting - as all now mark the long-lost instant when they could have seized that one impartial fact they might contribute from their store of secret trifles. Does trapezius' hollow drain along the clavicle trench, or flush the breathy pillow as it sinks.

       

          Solid things dissolve,

          and vapours ape

          substantiality.

          You sensed him near you

          just now, but that's

          more like a nettle to

          the touch; and on your

          left Joe Donkin walked,

          where only weeds stir 

          to the night-gusts if

          you feel with your hand. 

         

David Michael Jones

1895 - 1974

In Parenthesis

  seinnyessit e gledyf ym

  penn mameu

1937

Edited and published

  by T.S. Eliot at Faber

New York Review Books, 2003©

If a storm can bring a frog

              

    just askin'

Two not unfrequented shelters from the storm

j'étais dans son âme comme dans un palais qu'on a vidé pour ne pas voir une personne si peu noble que vous ..

I lived in his soul as though in a palace which had been emptied in order to avoid the sight of someone so ignoble as oneself ..

Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.

When we pass a day of fear, we remember every second, ignoring those days which lengthen into years of illness. In the Piedmont, the tropical storm has brought (as one writes) continuing wind and rain, both comparatively dulcet, but for surges one would expect of such lengthy perturbation. There is nothing to recall surviving, here, but of treasuring, more than usual. My English dog was eased in the proximity he chose with me, as I turned to our uncanniest artist after Mozart, and to a gorgeously neo-Classicist poet of, I think, certain permanent importance. 

Rimbaud's sacrificial poetic struggle is pertinent, as is the interval of life in which he conducted it. And from the Greeks, gorgeously renewed in the work of Anne Carson, we find how their attachment to reality lies at the heart of Rimbaud's supposed debauchery. It's not a bad storm, which gives understanding of what we love, and of the things that honest people have said of it.

Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud

1854 - 1891

Une saison en enfer

1873

Translation Laurent

Anne Carson

Autobiography of Red

  From the Archaic to the Fast Self

Knopf, 1998©

Saturday commute xxxviii: Waiting for the hurricane

A darkness and quiet, with winds that heave without flickering, speak disarmingly of a coming of the sea, and but for their advice of pending inconvenience are more enthralling than disturbing. Everyone thinks to prepare his reflexes, but cannot. An authentic tropical storm is a seduction.

It's wonderful to take the storm without the hysteria of broadcasters, flogging us with hyperbole they wasted long ago. Nothing is more movingly a deliverance from the inane than a visitation of nature. Despite the widespread chorus, keening, why us - we'll never get away from these embarrassing teleologies - the earth is plainly in this with us, and nothing could be more conducive to calm. The storm's impartiality is so perfect, it's false to see it as its own; it articulates what it is without intention or volition. It has not been sent, it cannot be sent away; it will come and it will go, and it may not be easy. But it will be fair.

A cup we've sometimes tasted

for every man hath

business and desire

The conveyor belt of boys and girls into the snob system creaks on, I read, less than ever capable of denominating itself as, society. The Assemblies at which my ex-wife was presented, portrayed an al-ready shattered fairyland by the time of Bachrach's staged portrait of her, descending the staircase to the second floor at home. It would surface in the papers a second time, with the announcement of her engagement. I'd always rather study her in her jeans and a cranberry cable knit, on the jungle gym in Gracie Square, wearing the Cartier choker I gave her, hammered by a Vietnamese goldsmith. It is a heart, on open links, and she is ravishing.

But hasn't New York always been refreshed by both motives, Hercule, a day-time, night-time dichotomy reflecting its energies? 

So you may hear, mon vieux; but snobbery possesses no fecundity, but entropy; and to mount that on the backs of youth is no ordinary deformity, it is to aspire to a kind of usurpation to rival Gertrude and Claudius.

It's the Prince, you have in mind?

Certainly, Auguste, but what had sickened Ophelia, first? 

Had not the young girls always dreamed of their party, Hercule, and their mothers gainfully lunched in its planning?

You make a point, Auguste, that inertia has its energies. Have you been having D'Alembert's dream, as we napt?

You do put one in mind, Hercule, of Diderot's two ways of seeing the cutting up of bees - that they may fly off in liberated directions, or that they may never be freed, but only their clusters concentrated, as in a polyp.

There you go, Auguste, depicting the pertinence of consent.

                           

                        

Edith Wharton

1862 - 1937

A Cup of Cold Water

Scribners, 1899©

The New York Stories of

  Edith Wharton

New York Review Books, 2007©

William Shakespeare

Hamlet, I, v

1601

Cited in Wharton, ibid.

Denis Diderot

Le rêve de D'Alembert

1769

L.W. Tancock, translation

Penguin Books, 1966©

"So, what can the Pexident droo?"

Got me, Hercule. I suppose he can come out on the parapet one more night, and wonder aloud about what he might or might not really care about, unless it bothers anybody, of course.


I know, Auguste. Remember how he shafted Single Payer, in the same breath when he admired it?

                       Ah, but a fellow of in-
                       finite jest, Hercule, of
                       most excellent fancy. He 
                       hath bore me on his
                       back a thousand times,
                       and now how abhorr'd in
                       my imagination it is.

         Enough of that, now,
         gentlemen ~ you're
         supposed to be napping!


         [Memo to staff: No more
         unsupervised Shakespeare].