Text
Editionsbericht
Literatur: Carnevali
Literatur: Rimbaud-Rezeption
Literatur: Others
[20] His life is an adventure of the gods; anybody who has not dropped his useless bundle and gone on a great adventure will not understand him. I have gone on a great adventure, and I may sometime personify a god I have seen for a moment. I would, as much as I could, personify him. If you do not believe in Youth do not utter vague blasphemies. Rimbaud is the Advent of Youth. Almost everything else in the world is unbelief in Youth: diplomats, statesmen, chiefs of all works, generals, they're all old, because they say queerly, old age is ripeness – as if an apple is ripe when it has wrinkles on its face! Almost everything else in the world, beside the poets, who have all believed in Youth, is a consecration of the error that life is from Youth up: it is from Youth down.
This paper will not be criticism. Critics are dead leaves lying still while the hurricane sweeps by high above. To utter something while enraptured in the hurricane, that is the only way to compensate to me my not being the hurricane; and the only way to criticise a poet.
Rimbaud said gloriously that the attainment of poetry is the attainment of life. To know my self and to possess it – the perfect image is the perfect sensation, and the perfect life. To have my self in the days of youth, with every inch of my body tense, looking and listening and interpreting, the dualism of body and soul and the dualism of life and immortality being then risible questions which are the appropriate doubt of people who have lost it (both things both times, forever: old people). To mould my self, then, through a "long, immense and reasoned upheaval of all the senses." Certainties of the age of seventeen and eighteen, certainties born of a perfect harmony of Youth's life and being, certainties of God.
[21] The old words woke from their death-sleep and sang again with the power that was theirs before cowards drugged them: "I want liberty in salvation," "I want to possess truth in a body and a soul." And for liberty, expression, poetry – the world found, the beautiful Genesis known. Who but God himself might have done this – "The fraternal awakening of all the choral and orchestral energies and their instantaneous application – the only occasion to disengage our senses." This is the consecration of the trinity, ethic-aesthetic-logic, which is godhead. To achieve liberty, to write perfect poetry, to sense perfectly, to love perfectly, to live – these are vague phrases, meaning to the great but one thing. And that thing, to me, to a man who has no sign from God otherwise than from books, is godhead itself. The querulous, fearful, fretful and rash god of Moses is not a more beautiful vision than the god of La Saison en Enfer and Les Illuminations. Rimbaud's judgments are saner. He sought to achieve, sometimes achieved beauty that would enable him to smite the world with absolute judgments. And some of his poems are absolute. If the eyes that see are clear, damned be the ugly and only the ugly. If the heart that beats knows its throbs, cursed be the dead and only the dead. Les Assis, the sitting men, is an apocalyptic vision: the irrevocable, ultimate, terrible judgment of beauty, judgment ethical, practical and utilitarian also – absolute. Use any of your standards and tests and tell me what is the end of any ugliness.
But here come the reporters, the doctors, the caretakers, the undertakers, the beauty makers (barbers), the pimps of the concubinage between God and the dwarfs of rotten flesh, the purveyors of death, "the hearts of filth, the mouths of stench." Each one carries a pall and each one came to cover Rimbaud's infinite body with his or her own rag and no other rag. On the palls, these inscriptions:
[22] HATER OF THE BOURGEOISIE
FREE VERSE INVENTOR
WHO DEVISED SYMBOLISM
WHO MENDED TECHNIQUE
ANARCHIST, INSANE, DEGENERATE
WE DON'T GIVE A DAMN
MESSIAH OF SEVENTEEN, pooh-pooh!
COLORIT OF LES VOYELLES
And there are as many of these as there are squinting or bloodshot or swollen eyes in the world. Let me say it, there are as many of these as there are cowards in the world. Indeed, I advise you, let an easy term of compromise make you forget him: he is the Youth you couldn't remember. Not even as worshippers could you do this. It is in a vase more beautiful than your soul that the fragrance of his may be held in the ineffable band of a flower: the flower being the only reason for the vase. Which of you would give up the life everyone of you hates, which of you would die in order to understand him – or any god, any way? Because you must die; not dwindle into a state of neutrality, as the aesthetic critics say, but die with long sorrow, through the genetic emotions. . . . Oh Jesus Christ, most beautiful, you have forever spoken the words of the miracle of interpretation.
"Ah, ah, "you laugh," this fellow is one more of the-religion-of-art." You laugh, and it would appear that you have placed me, for indeed I feel ridiculous – because of this pen and this ink and the need of writing readable English – which is harder for me than to shout with my friend, Louis Grudin, a living phrase into the upset amphitheatre of the stars. And because all your cowardly sophistication is in me and your laugh is a wound talking to a wound inside of me, all these things shame me. If I were sure no one were listening I would indeed cry out, I am a worshipper, who has died many times, for Dostoievsky, for Nietszche, for Christ, for Rimbaud.
In '71 he was a rebel of La Commune. He had written a project for a constitution. I know from Carlyle that revolution is sometimes the people producing poetry [23] en masse. Clear as the fire of even the things most rotten is revolution in the pure vision of the seer, the inspired man who wants revolution for the beauty of his eyes, for the beauty of his limbs, for the beauty of his heart – who wants and has long wanted the world to be his own body, cast infinitely, speaking.
Arthur Rimbaud was religious as all great men are. For himself, for the beautiful god he built out of his soul, he sought apostles. He found Verlaine, a splendidly sensitive soul, who could not understand him. . . Men do not wait for a saviour. Each man seeks drunkenness and forgetfulness and a hiding place. And the disease inherited from the centuries is perhaps one at last with a man's soul. As for me, I know Youth in love, I know Youth encountering the first men, I know Youth believing in the vision that arises, like The First Dawn, over the encounters. I know the first, valid, absolute axioms of godhead: "I love you, you beautiful, I will bring all the world to your feet." "I shall become beautiful for you." And the realization of a possible godhead, "I am not worthy of you." For this I believe in Arthur Rimbaud, and even in all the distorted and queer and desperate signs of godhead that Youths give the world as they pass.
As they pass. . . . He too, went away, having found no worshipper. Having heard no echo to his song, he doubted it. And if a god be no more than a conceivable being, then the way he abandons literature, the way he kisses the dream of godhead good-bye makes me think that it is still divine to know why one is not a god. The simple gesture, humble like a peasant of Tolstoy: "I have been idle like a toad, doing nothing, I managed to live everywhere. I will beg pardon for having fed on lies, allons."
The sense of loss proved only in abysses and woods by him who knows the language of abysses and woods; the gesture under a tremendously still sky: "Oh, I'm so forsaken that I offer to any divine image my efforts at perfection." "Oh witches, oh misery, oh hatred, it is you that I trusted with my treasure!" Or the doubt, infinite as the mystery of creation, the doubt of the god-contemplator, the certainty of a great Buddah sitting in [24] a sunset with all the earth like a cataract of opals and emeralds and rubies; the doubt that is like the certainty that would exist in beautiful trees and rivers if they were conscious:
"The friend not eager, nor weak. The friend.
The beloved not tormenting nor tormented. The beloved.
The air and the world not sought after. Life.
Was it this, then?"
Then? – in the beginning. Doubt of all life seeking, like almighty eyes, the beginning.
Rimbaud is, in me, a prayer to things more beautiful than I, the perfectly soul-less
things, the unconscious, beautiful things. Which are, as they were in the beginning,
the witnesses of man's original greatness, the eternal (soul-less, therefore
unchangeable) mirrors. The things which are not God and which are the only ones to
pray to. They which sustain a poet:
Bathe me in the vision of my youth, communicate
me
forever.
Do not let me go back with the rest to fornicate and
forget.
Let me accept the vision utterly, even to insanity.
Do not murder me with the drunkenness of you, do not
choke me with the words of the beauty of you when
I'm alone.
Let me accept, "the atrocious death of the faithful and
the lovers."
Erstdruck und Druckvorlage
Others.
Bd. 5, 1919, Nr. 4, März, S. 20-24.
Die Textwiedergabe erfolgt nach dem ersten Druck
(Editionsrichtlinien).
Others online
URL: https://modjourn.org/journal/others/
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006062262
Zeitschriften-Repertorium
Literatur: Carnevali
Brandmeyer, Rudolf: Poetiken der Lyrik: Von der Normpoetik zur Autorenpoetik.
In: Handbuch Lyrik. Theorie, Analyse, Geschichte.
Hrsg. von Dieter Lamping.
2. Aufl. Stuttgart 2016, S. 2-15.
Burt, Stephen: The Forms of Youth.
Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence
New York 2007.
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Emanuel Carnevali's Italian/American Writing.
New York 2019.
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Bern u.a. 1971.
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im Kontext der Krise des Lyrischen um 1900.
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Hrsg. von Károly Csúri.
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Correspondance posthume (1891-1900).
Paris 2010.
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Die französischen Symbolisten in der deutschsprachigen Lyrik der Moderne (1890-1923).
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Literatur: Others
Braddock, Jeremy: collecting as modernist practice.
Baltimore, Md. 2012.
Budke, Leah: The Definitive Editor:
Alfred Kreymborg and the Others Magazine-Anthology Duo
In: Modernist Cultures 15 (2020), S. 515-537.
Churchill, Suzanne W.: The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry.
Aldershot u.a. 2006.
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Hrsg. von Suzanne W. Churchill u. Adam McKible.
Aldershot, England 2007, S. 177-195.
Churchill, Suzanne W. / Jaffee, Ethan: The New Poetry.
The Glebe (1913-14); Others (1915-19); and Poetry Review of America (1916-17).
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Hrsg. von Peter Brooker u.a.
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The Making of Modern American Verse.
Urbana, Ill. u.a. 2012.
Kap 4: There Is Always Others:
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White, Eric B.: Transatlantic Avant-Gardes.
Little Magazines and Localist Modernism.
Edinburgh 2013.
Kap. 1: Contra Mundum: Others and the Transatlantic Village (S. 19-49).
Edition
Lyriktheorie » R. Brandmeyer