"We have faith in the poison. We know how to
give our whole lives every day.
Behold the time of the Assassins."

Rimbaud, "Morning of Drunkenness"

I have been thinking about how Rimbaud stopped writing when he was still a teenager, how he went on to travel, running guns and dying of cancer, coming out of the African desert to be amputated.  I wonder how it would have been if he had kept on with his writing in all this, or instead of this. Seeing as how he so quickly reached a pinnacle in his poems that most never even come near, and to consider how his poems might have kept coming,  it makes me wonder if there is a line, or a cap on the limits of ways.  To get too far ahead simply does not happen, for whatever reason.  I want "greatness" to mean something other than what few come near.  

It's like watching a graph of columns jump and twitch while a song plays, each column is an instrument or a range of sound, some jumping higher than others, but all of them more or less maintaining the same levels.  How would the song go if something else were to happen?  Maybe some sort of equilibrium is working out its law when the prodigies get burnt out too quickly, the prophets snuffed out too early.  Averages are defeats too much of the time.

It's exciting to think that maybe Rimbaud kept writing through all the following years, poems blazing on discarded scraps, or kept anonymously in a chest buried in the sand, or simply composed in his mind while he passed from place to place.

I think about Henry Miller writing about D.H. Lawrence, calling him beyond his time, but also saying that only his time could have made him.  "What does my time make me?"  It's silly to think about. Not in the sense that you shouldn't, but in the sense that trying to see the present in retrospect is paradoxical.  I don't think I could become what I might be if I were to be so intentional all the time anyway. And also, it's not so much about becoming one thing or another, and looking back from that--it's experiencing the process of becoming more fully yourself, for as long as you can.  There is no final product or identity at the end of experience, there is just the sense that you could have gone further.

Anyway, reading Rimbaud is always wonderful to me.  I love that his language has that lyrical ornamentation of poems of the late 1800's, (and the overuse of exclamation points) and his light cuts through all the words.  I keep thinking about poetry as both something to face, and something that turns you toward what you should have been facing all along.  It's good.