"I understood that what I needed, to become the first poet of this century, was to experience everything in my body. It's no longer enough for me to be one person. I decided to be everyone. I decided to be a genius. I decided to originate the future."
In 2005, at the age of sixteen, this became the catalyst to cementing my future as an artist. Not because it lead me to the desire to draw, I had been playing with that “hobby” since I was capable of holding a pencil, nor did the quote open up some ideals that I could be a genius myself. It helped instead explain, and encourage, the emotional stampede that was running through my body every minute of the day. As a teenager, I refused to demand the attention my emotions needed, locking them up internally and letting them spillover ivory sheets of paper instead. Before I had begun to study the lifestyle of an artist, I had continuously restrained that very part of myself which would later enforce my voice as one. A naïve discovery, that would have remained unchecked, had it not been for an Arthur Rimbaud.
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a 19th-century French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best-known works while still in his late teens, which I related to at that time, feeling a sense of awe that one at his age could have such an impact in his field. Rimbaud influenced modern literature, music and art through both his writings and life, as he was known to have been a libertine and a restless soul, travelling extensively on three continents before his death from cancer just after his 37th birthday.
A decade before I would be introduced to his works, the 1995 film, Total Eclipse by Agnieszka Holland, documents Rimbaud’s most influential, though self-destructive, relationship in 1871 with his older mentor, Paul Verlaine.
The story follows their encounter together, stewed with absinthe and resentment, which begins with Verlaine abusing and later abandoning Mathiltde, his wife that ends with the two writers becoming lovers. Rimbaud's uncouth behavior disrupted the insular society of French poets, during that period, which Verlaine found youthfully invigorating, leeching onto it as a means to add excitement to his life and creativity with his works. There were reconciliations and partings with Mathiltde and partings and reconciliations with Rimbaud for Verlaine, until an 1873 incident with a pistol, sends Verlaine to prison, and Rimbaud to the hospital and an early retirement out of poetry.
Before I was hitting every bookstore for his writings, looking up countless articles, threads, and forums about his life and endeavors; attempting to suck up his life as a means to inherit his uncanny faith in his abilities, and dedication to his craft, I was introduced to his lifestyle through this movie. Though it highlighted his love affair, I found his countless internal struggles between his humanity, sanity, and inspiration comforting. With every slash of his childish misdemeanors, with each tantrum and outlandish remark, I felt a kinship rising within me and connecting me to the pursuit of his aspirations. I wanted to be a revolutionary artist, an independent thought stream, a unified experience to be rendered in art, and with Rimbaud as my guide, I felt for the first time that I could have my insanity and make something out of it.
“The first study for the man who wants to be a poet is knowledge of himself, complete: he searches for his soul, he inspects it, he puts it to the test, he learns it. As soon as he has learned it, he must cultivate it! I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All shapes of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself; he exhausts all poisons in himself, to keep only the quintessence. Ineffable torture where he needs all his faith, all his superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed one--and the supreme Scholar! For he reaches the unknown… So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, un-nameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!”
I began with my journey of self-awareness. From Rimbaud’s cues, I began to analyze each experience through my body, and documenting it; storing it into a section of my brain that I mentally configured as a “material’s” storage center. Every moment, spent alone or through interacting with others, became another piece of material that I could later develop in my work. No longer was I simply allowing time to pass by, unnoticed, having no more disregard for it’s existence than any moment that came before it or would follow it. With Rimbaud, I wanted to be a scholar on life, and so studied myself in ways that I couldn’t learn in a classroom textbook. Like Rimbaud, I reveled in my “flaws” as much as I did in my “perfections”, finding my self-worth lost in every area but through my work, and so I knew that to perfect my work, I needed to begin to perfect myself.
Now with five years of art classes under my belt, countless emotions drawn out on paper, and numerous experiences stored up in my head, I have learned to accept my artistic insanities as a means to achieve my own sense of “Rimbaudian Genius”
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