David Wojnarowicz, Rimbaud Mask, 1978

ARTHUR RIMBAUD

“Paul Claudel called Rimbaud “the supreme mystical visionary of France”; his wildly original poetry is inspired throughout by a vision of the alchemical power of words to transform reality by evoking and creating the divine truths latent within it. Rimbaud consciously thought of himself as a prophet and seer and “inaugurator of a new freedom.” Toward the end of his creative life, however, this sometimes vain vision gives way to a more authentically mystical understanding of the necessity for humility and charity. Rimbaud’s quest for a transformatory “magic” became a discovery of the transforming power of love and of the surrender to the mystery of God.

I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessence. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed - and the great learned one! - among men. - For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his own soul - which was rich to begin with - more than any man! He reaches the unknown; and even if, crazed, he ends up by losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die charging through those unutterable, unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where he has succumbed!

From Letters
The Essential Gay Mystics, Page 166 - 167