眩暈 Vertigo (from the poetic-oneiric archive)

*Read a poem by Arthur Rimbaud and was reminded of this from the archive—an old piece written more than eleven years ago. Rimbaud's poem to follow after Vertigo and image.


(Memories from a Subconscious Nightmare...)

It is the most lavish fragrance, the most devitalising. Does it make me want to kill? Or does it make me want to breathe. I could as if smell the flushes of crimson, and then they paled my hearing into avalanching silences. The silence was so poisonous, so decaying, so huge and hopeless; eclipsing all that was morally good or vital to my health—ceaselessly. It was my angel, my angel with waxen wings. "Was ascension such an unreachable dream?" Asked my angel. It was such a dark night, so dark that it blinded me. It blinded everything. The incandescence of the deepest night had burned the last speck of sombre stars with a lurid smile of bitter sarcasm. This humid and luxurious beauty, this lavish and choking fragrance, brought my extreme disgust and happiness into life and married them with the witness of my very own eye. May I shed my tears, which would never again be produced artificially? Or may I burst out laughing hysterically? If only I could cry out with the slightest sadness. Now this fragrance has turned its own veins into the most ecstatic earthly joy that seems so very vague, and yet so very real. Now this fragrance has left the residue in me the deepest grief. Could I have ever tasted an emotion as sharp? Or am I creating my indifferent tears woven so meticulously into my words—a world that can only be sensed visually but blindly, and can only be conceived of with such a harsh sound by an avalanching silence. I was about to woo, to woo this devitalising fragrance. And I was about to kill, to kill my angel after all the pleasure of worldliness has decayed to its core.

And now, I hear the river flowing in my body, with liquid so dark and polluted that I can hardly distinguish it from the unbounded night and the deceptively purified dream I am in. I have accumulated all my energy just to feel the retardation and inadequacy in me again, yet again. And now I hear your voice, my dearest pantomimist. Now I hear your voice, singing my song for me. You have given me a qualm, a qualitative change, and I can not even ask you to stay, to see me through the whole process—the whole process of passing. Yesterday we screamed together. I could almost feel your etherealisation, so beauteous you nauseated me. I wish I could cry, and ascend to the heavenly hell you have been presenting to me over and over again. Until I can no longer mumble, will I be led into a perfectly muted world, where I can only see your white sand dune, where I can only feel the flow of your words and murmurs of your voice crawling back into my blood, where I can only touch every single sound of your decaying petals by visualising my own pantomime. Now I see you bleeding, the sweetest nectar. Will I dream on? While you live on.

And the next second I woke up soaking wet. 

(Written on 28/June/2001.)

+++

Arthur Rimbaud, “Anguish”

Is it possible that She will have me forgiven for ambitions continually crushed,—that an affluent end will make up for the ages of indigence,—that a day of success will lull us to sleep on the shame of our fatal incompetence?

(O palms! diamond!—Love! strength!—higher than all joys and all fame!—in any case, everywhere—demon, god,—Youth of this being: myself!)

That the accidents of scientific wonders and the movements of social brotherhood will be cherished as the progressive restitution of our original freedom?…

But the Vampire who makes us behave orders us to enjoy ourselves with what she leaves us, or in other words to be more amusing.

Rolled in our wounds through the wearing air and the sea; in torments through the silence of the murderous waters and air; in tortures that laugh in the terrible surge of their silence.

(Translated by Louise Varese)