And this action – erotic, pagan, numinous – unites beauty and ugliness, grace and wine dregs, seduction and danger, as well as female and male. Rimbaud is turning a static block of prose and a static neoclassical myth into a form of action. To understand the scene, we should imagine Muybridge's photographs of animals in motion, or Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. How many legs does he have? In another affront to classical codes of beauty, the faun is commanded to move this thigh, this second thigh, and this left leg. “Sleep,” yet the poem awakens the pagan energy with the final imperative, "Promène-toi" (“Walk around”), rousing the creature and setting him into still more mysterious motion. Heart, stomach/womb, double sex sleeping. ![]() "Ventre," the word for stomach, is often used as a euphemism for womb, so the faun is felt as all the more intimately hermaphroditic. The mystery intensifies as we move down to feel the heartbeats, the life-energy pulse, in the stomach where the double sex sleeps. The disturbance grows: the creature's wine-stained cheeks are hollow, his fangs gleam, and as he comes more and more to life, we see him as a kind of ancient Greek stringed instrument-a cithara-whose vibrations circulate in the blonde arms, uniting corporeal and musical erotic excitement. If the classical faun and the classical paraphernalia of his crown represent an old ideal of beauty, the crazy movement of the eyes disturbs that ideal. But the movement begins in the head, with the surreal action of the eyes, which roll back and forth around the forehead crowned with blossoms and laurel. We move to a visceral core of energy that releases movement (“Walk around”). The poet invites us to contemplate the faun from the head down, moving from the eyes to cheeks, fangs, chest, arms, belly, genitals, legs. As the faun's anatomy takes shape before our eyes, however, the creature grows less mild and gracious, more disturbing and dangerous. This little faun, not Pan himself but a minor derivative, is "gracieux" – graceful, gracious – an apparently safe quality it would only be by pressing hard on the word "gracieux" that we might touch on any source of lively religious energy-"grace," pagan or Christian. The opening invocation sets off no alarms. What does he do with it? He brings it to life, awakening a myth. Here, the self-proclaimed poet of modernity (“We must be absolutely modern,” he had written in A Season in Hell) presents us with the figure of a faun: just the sort of neoclassical kitsch we'd expect him to despise. I made the whirling world stand still.Modernity always defines itself in relation to a past that it attacks and transforms. I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. ![]() I invented colors for the vowels! A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. ![]() I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents I used to believe in every kind of magic. What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children's books, old operas, silly old songs, the naive rhythms of country rimes. The story of one of my insanities.įor a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes- and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable.
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