It’s a joy to get your dispatches from Rimbaud month. Pierrot Le Fou was how I first encountered “Eternity” by Rimbaud. The character Pierrot is a classic flâneur, whose voyage across France in 1965 is like the voyages of Rimbaud in A Season in Hell. It goes back further to Baudelaire as flâneur, who Walter Benjamin saw as a prophet of “the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.” There is a progressive darkness to the aubade of Rimbaud’s poem, culminating in stanza five, where he intones “nul orietur” in Latin: “it will not rise.” And yet, the opening of the poem, a sunrise, closes the poem, as if the poem (and the sunrise) is surviving the extinguishing of human hope. It is a paradoxical consciousness of the death of consciousness—the poem (and the sun) survives even when there is no eye to read it or ear to hear it. This apocalypse reminds me of Blake’s proverb of hell: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”
Godard was a poet of cinema. I still remember the first time I saw one of his films, Weekend, in 1968. His images flowed through me in the same way you have suggested we read Rimbaud. Meaning came later. Thank you for reciting Eternity and for including the ending of Pierrot Le Fou. Dots were connected that I didn't know existed.
'Anna Karina whispers' could be a poem...or a Velvet Underground song.
It’s a joy to get your dispatches from Rimbaud month. Pierrot Le Fou was how I first encountered “Eternity” by Rimbaud. The character Pierrot is a classic flâneur, whose voyage across France in 1965 is like the voyages of Rimbaud in A Season in Hell. It goes back further to Baudelaire as flâneur, who Walter Benjamin saw as a prophet of “the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.” There is a progressive darkness to the aubade of Rimbaud’s poem, culminating in stanza five, where he intones “nul orietur” in Latin: “it will not rise.” And yet, the opening of the poem, a sunrise, closes the poem, as if the poem (and the sunrise) is surviving the extinguishing of human hope. It is a paradoxical consciousness of the death of consciousness—the poem (and the sun) survives even when there is no eye to read it or ear to hear it. This apocalypse reminds me of Blake’s proverb of hell: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”
Godard was a poet of cinema. I still remember the first time I saw one of his films, Weekend, in 1968. His images flowed through me in the same way you have suggested we read Rimbaud. Meaning came later. Thank you for reciting Eternity and for including the ending of Pierrot Le Fou. Dots were connected that I didn't know existed.
'Anna Karina whispers' could be a poem...or a Velvet Underground song.