"I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom. I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients." Gustave Courbet

20 October 2015

Happy birthday, Rimbaud.


Arthur Rimbaud was born on this date in 1854.

I say you have to be a visionary, make yourself a visionary.

A Poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses.  All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences.  Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed–and the Supreme Scientist!  For he attains the unknown!  Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone!  He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them!  So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable:  other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!

. . . So the poet, therefore, is truly a thief of fire.

Arthur Rimbaud

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