RIMBAUD

              THE ORIGINAL ROCKSTAR.... "MA BOHÈME"

                    "they could have gone on forever, they probably did go round in circles once or twice, hand in hand, leaning  together or in Indian file, brushing past spider-pearled thickets of Travellers' Joy... It would have been paradise to go on forever, no need for a house or a home, sleep under a hedge somewhere with the stars rustling overhead..."
                                 Castles Made Of Sand, Prologue.

                    There's social reform, there's the artistic manifesto, there's the need for fame, but then again, there's the desire for the impossible, total freedom, which is the truth that the other two suppress, a hunger which for some, is unappeased by limitless excess, adulation or megastardom.
              Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and others.

 Que les accidents de
féerie scientifique et les
mouvements de fraternité
sociale soient chéris comme
restitution progressive de la
franchise premiere...

Arthur Rimbaud,

Illuminations
The chances of scientific magic and the movements of social brotherhood should be cherished, as the progressive restitution of our original birthright   
"People with manic-depressive illness and creative artists tend to share certain features: the ability to function well on a few hours' sleep, the focus to work intensively and the ability to experience depth and variety of emotions..."
                     Touched By Fire, Kay Reidfield Jamison (Free Press 1996) 

 "On the 28th August, (1870)... he was walking with his mother and two little sisters on the banks of the Meuse. Suddenly he left them, saying he wished to go home and fetch a book. It was not, however, home that he went, but to the station, and boarded the first train leaving for Paris.... He boarded the train without a penny in his pockets.... and for three weeks was a member of the National Guard, drilling with a broomstick like the others... "

                  October 1870 (sixteen year old Rimbaud runs away again)

 "Inspite of hunger and hardship, these two weeks of liberty, of untrammelled wandering, seem to have been the happiest that Rimbaud ever spent, the happiest perhaps in his whole life. There is no bitterness or coarseness to be found in the poems resulting from them; there is only the expression of celestial happiness, of joy in freedom, and of delight in mere living. The poem that best expresses his state of rapture is...."

                        From: Arthur Rimbaud, Enid Starkie, New Directions, NY 1961

    Je m'en allais, les poings dans mes poches crevées,
         Mon paletot aussi devenati idéal
         J'allais sous le ciel, Muse! et j'étais tout féal
         Oh! là là! que d'amours splendides j'ai rêvées

          Mon unique culotte avait un large trou.
          -Petit-poucet rêveur, j'égrenais dans ma course
          Des rimes. Mon auberge était à la Grande Ourse
          -Mes étoiles au ciel avaient un doux frou-frou

          Et je les écoutais, assis au bord des routes,
          Ces bons soirs de septembre où je sentais des gouttes
          De rosée à mon front, comme un vin de vigeur;

         Où, rimant au milieu des ombres fantastiques
         Comme des lyres, je tirais les élastiques
         De mes souliers blessés, un pied prés de mon coeur