WHEN JEAN NICHOLAS ARTHUR RIMBAUD was a sixteen-year-old schoolboy in
the Ardennes, in 1871, he announced his
intention to become a voyant, a seer, ‘to arrive at the unknown by a
disordering of all the senses’. He succeeded: before he turned twenty,
he had written visionary poetry that would revolutionise world literature. A
recent biographer credits him and his lover, the older poet Paul Verlaine, with
creating what came to be known as “the gay identity” with their public
carryings-on. Unquestionably, Rimbaud’s scandalous lifestyle during his teens
in Paris, Brussels
and London,
soaked in absinthe and perfumed by hashish, was the prototype of the artist as
bohemian rebel that dominated the twentieth century. The writers, painters and
musicians who have claimed him as their patron saint – or tutelary demon –
range from Picasso, Breton and Cocteau to Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Kurt
Cobain.
Rimbaud was never more prophetic than
when he wrote about his own life in the extended prose poem A Season in Hell:
My day is done;
I’m leaving Europe. The sea air will burn my
lungs; lost climes will tan my skin. To swim, to trample the grass, to hunt,
above all to smoke; to drink liquors strong as boiling metal – as my cherished
ancestors did around their bonfires.
He was nineteen when he wrote Une
Saison en Enfer. Soon afterward he stopped writing poetry altogether and
never took it up again.
In 1876,
after rambles in Germany, Switzerland and Lombardy, Rimbaud joined the
Dutch colonial army and took his leave of Europe.
For the sum of 300 gold florins (some US$3,000 in today’s money), he enlisted
for a six-year tour in the Dutch East Indies, what is now Indonesia. On
June 10, 1876, he shipped out for Java – about as far from Europe
as a European could go.
It’s hard to imagine anyone less
suited to the soldiering life than Rimbaud at twenty-one, a decadent misfit to
the point of sociopathy. It didn’t last long. After a sea voyage of forty days,
skin tanned and lungs scorched, Rimbaud entered the Sunda Strait, between
Sumatra and Java, cruised under smoking Krakatoa – its cataclysmic eruption was
not for another seven years – and arrived with his battalion at Batavia, the
capital of the Dutch East Indies. But this was not his destination. Another
ship plying the Java Sea took them to the port city of Semarang, from there by train to Tuntang, and
then they marched through the jungle to Salatiga, which was to be their post.
Twelve days later, Rimbaud deserted. From that point until he resurfaced at his
mother’s house four months later, the record of Rimbaud’s life is an enigmatic
lacuna.
Usually boastful about his exploits,
Arthur apparently said nothing to anyone about his tropical sojourn. There are
no letters, no entries by gossiping diarists of his acquaintance. He had good
reason to keep quiet: desertion was a capital crime, death by firing squad.
Later the ex-poet and wannabe man of adventure tried to enlist in the United
States Navy but was rejected. In Hamburg, he
joined a French circus; after a tour of Scandinavia
he deserted again. In 1878, Rimbaud sailed to Alexandria
and made his way to Abyssinia, where he led mercantile caravans deep into the
interior of Africa and dabbled in photography.
Diagnosed with a tumour on his knee, he returned to Marseilles in 1891. Doctors amputated his
right leg, but complications set in and he died on November 10 of that year. He
was thirty-seven.
* * *
Like many a seriously pretentious
adolescent, I started reading Rimbaud’s poetry when I was the age at which he
wrote it. In the late 1960s, when sensory disorder was all the rage, Rimbaud
occupied a high place in the hip literary pantheon with the likes of Hermann
Hesse and Jack Kerouac. Hesse and Kerouac didn’t remain on my reading list, but
there’s something addictive about Rimbaud – especially among writers, for whom
the notion of actually renouncing the vocation seems a gesture of incomparable
grandeur.
Nine years ago I moved to Indonesia in
what has proved to be a generally successful midlife crisis. Besides swimming
and trampling the grass, I intended to make a pilgrimage to try to trace
Rimbaud’s steps in Java, a quixotic adventure if ever there was one, given the
merest footnote of fact to guide me.
That he was actually in the ports of Batavia (now Jakarta) and Semarang, the train
station at Tuntang, and the garrison at Salatiga can be taken as fact. Beyond
that is conjecture, and the Rimbaud pilgrim must take the same approach to the
poet’s life that he himself did, and make it up as you go.
Indonesia, like most parts of Asia,
venerates the past in theory, but in practice change is the only constant. In
Jakarta, most people who buy old buildings do so with the intention of razing
them and putting up new, grander ones in their place; yet a few vestiges of old
Batavia cling. Sunda Kelapa, the port where Rimbaud landed, has been eclipsed
by the demands of today’s monster container ships, but it still serves cabotage
and the wooden schooners, phinisi, their jaunty profile unchanged for
centuries, which convey merchandise throughout the archipelago’s 11,500
inhabited islands.
The broad plaza in the heart of old Batavia (where Rimbaud
witnessed an execution of deserters by firing squad) is now a pedestrian mall
called Fatahillah Square.
Facing the old city hall, an imposing pile based on the royal palace in Amsterdam, is a bronze, Portuguese cannon known as Si
Jagur, brought to Batavia
as a trophy of war in 1641. Ornamenting its butt is a sculpture of a man’s
fist, the thumb protruding between the index and middle fingers – in Indonesia, an
unambiguous invitation to sex. In Rimbaud’s day, Si Jagur was worshipped;
today, women who want to get pregnant sit astride the big gun to enhance their
fertility. (For men, a kiosk in nearby Chinatown
purveys the blood of cobras – slaughtered in front of the customer – to be
drunk as an aphrodisiac.)
Semarang preserves
more of its colonial-era architecture than most Indonesian cities, even if in a
decrepit, mildewed state. It’s no candidate for the World Heritage List, but a
wander through the old town on a misty night offers the melancholy pleasures of
a decaying Baltic port. The city’s most venerable relic is Sam Poo Kong, a
vermilion pagoda built to commemorate a visit in 1416 by the great admiral
Zheng He. Pilgrims from throughout Asia come here to pay their respects to the
Muslim eunuch from Yunnan who extended Chinese
influence throughout the tropical archipelago and across the Indian
Ocean.
At the train station in Tuntang, I
began to sense a sulphurous spectre at my side. The Semarang-Magelang line,
Java’s first, had opened just a few years before Rimbaud’s arrival. The station
now operates as a part of a railway museum in the pleasant little town of Ambarawa. There, I rode a
diminutive train on the same narrow gauge that conveyed Rimbaud’s battalion
around a swampy lake where bugs with papery golden wings fluttered among the
reeds. Paddies glow emerald green on one side; on the other, small boys cast
nets for fish no bigger than a thumb to be fried and eaten whole. The ride
terminates at Tuntang station, a charming cottage straight out of Beatrix
Potter. It’s completely empty now, nothing from when Rimbaud passed through –
perhaps the silence is the same.
The Dutch garrison at Salatiga – and
here Rimbaud’s trail evaporates into tropical steam – survives as a part of the
modern city hall. The French ambassador to Indonesia in 1997 dedicated a
handsome granite plaque to commemorate the poet’s presence. Salatiga, a mainly
Muslim town with the Hindu god Ganesha as its municipal mascot, is now the home
of a Christian university – a typical conspectus of religion under Pancasila, Indonesia’s
unity through diversity.
* * *
Beyond Salatiga, the Rimbaud pilgrim must begin a speculative journey into
the thorny thicket of the poet’s mind. Java, then, was a threatening, alien
place. Eugène Sue regales in his best-selling potboiler of 1844, The
Wandering Jew: ‘Java! Magnificent and fatal country, where the most
admirable flowers conceal hideous reptiles, where the brightest fruits contain
subtle poisons, where grow splendid trees, whose very shadow is death’ –
exactly the way bourgeois critics and readers would later characterise
Rimbaud’s poetry.
Java offered everything the decadent
might desire – certainly opium, a major cash crop until the early twentieth
century. When Rimbaud arrived in Batavia,
the port was as well supplied with opium dens as grog shops. And it is rumoured
in Jakarta there are still opium dens hidden away in the city’s old quarter
that cater to elderly Chinese addicts, though as might be expected from this
treacherous smoke, the stories have the unmistakable whiff of urban legend.
Opportunities for buggery, which the
French deemed to be an English pursuit while the English contended otherwise,
would have been equally abundant. In the vicinity of Ponorogo, a town
seventy-five kilometres southeast of Salatiga, powerful wizards called warok
practised an exceptionally soft form of asceticism, shunning the temptation of
sex with women by keeping powdered, petted pretty boys ranging from the
prepubescent to the adolescent. Parents gave their sons under an arrangement
that travestied a wedding contract, receiving a cow in payment. The warok were
like samurai, continuously waging vendettas in the countryside – sometimes over
a pretty lad. Such “bizarrerie” would have appealed to Rimbaud more as drama
than sexual titillation; the only love of his life was Verlaine, ten years his
elder, whom he seduced into abandoning his wife and newborn first child to run
away with him.
Rimbaud’s affair with Verlaine was
spectacularly public – there is a marvellous scene in the 1995 film Total
Eclipse, where a naked Leonardo di Caprio as Rimbaud hurls his clothes from
a garret into the Paris
streets below. It ended only when Verlaine went to prison for shooting his
adolescent lover in the wrist after he threatened to leave him. After Rimbaud’s
death his biographers, beginning with a posthumous brother-in-law, tried to
heterosexualise him. His housekeeper in Africa is made to stand in as his
mistress, while Djami, a young manservant to whom Rimbaud left a bequest of
three thousand francs, is never proposed as a possible lover, presumably
because Djami was married and had a family, though he was prepared to abandon
them to follow his master to France.
I don’t say that Rimbaud had a sexual
relationship with either the woman or the young man, or both; such suppositions
always tell us more about the supposer than the object of speculation. The
fin-de-siècle makeover of Rimbaud as a doomed child prodigy in the mould of
Chatterton and Keats is a classic example of “Homosexual Panic”, the
submergence of the nascent gay identity in a synthetic heterosexual narrative,
most brilliantly elaborated in the later novels of Henry James and in Proust’s
great novel. It wasn’t until Graham Robb’s superb biography Rimbaud,
published in 2000, that the poet’s personal life was reconstructed on a
rational basis.
Nineteenth-century
Java’s most powerful affinity with the Rimbaudian mind was its intense,
all-encompassing mysticism. As a boy, Rimbaud read widely in the literature of
European magic and cast himself in the role of a literary magus. In A Season
in Hell, describing his growth as a poet, he wrote:
Poetic antiques played a large part in my alchemy of
the word.
I became
accustomed to pure hallucination: I saw quite frankly a mosque in place of a
factory, a school of drummers led by angels, carriages on the highways of the
sky, a drawing-room at the bottom of a lake; monsters, mysteries; the title of
a vaudeville show raised up horrors before me.
Then I
would explain my magic sophisms with the hallucination of words.
In 1876, there was no place on Earth
where magic played a more conspicuous part in everyday life than in Central Java. The warok culture was only the weirdest
expression of Malay magic; every aspect of life was controlled by mystic
powers. Curses and love potions – goona-goona – were commonplace, as they are
today. Although Islam officially forbids such practices, the Javanese
interpretation of Sunni law has always generously accommodated heterodox
beliefs – no one would follow it otherwise.
Approximately ninety percent of the
population of modern Indonesia
is Muslim, but it’s a mistake, all too common among foreigners, occidental and
oriental, to describe it as a Muslim country. A fundamental principle of the Republic of Indonesia, enshrined in the preamble to
its constitution, holds that all religions shall be treated equally. In Surakarta, the city usually called Solo, there’s a private
shrine created by a yogi that sheltered devotional images of a Hindu deity, the
Buddha, the Virgin Mary and Sukarno,
Indonesia’s
flamboyant, adored and apparently prodigiously endowed first president. Incense
burned before them all: Paths are many, truth is one.
Ancient temples spring up everywhere
you go in Central Java, sometimes in the
middle of rice fields. It is impossible to conjecture whether the fugitive
Rimbaud stayed long on Java or hopped the first boat out, but if he did his
inclinations would surely have led him to Borobudur, the greatest of Java’s
temples, forty-five kilometres southwest of Salatiga. This mountain of
magnificent stone was then in a dilapidated state, a shattered wreck being slowly
strangled by jungle. Rescued and restored under the watch of Unesco, Borobudur is gorgeous, but its ghosts have fled.
No, I think Rimbaud’s underground
flight across Java would have taken him to Candi Sukuh, a bizarre, mysterious
temple on the slopes of Lawu, a volcano thirty kilometres east of Solo. Sukuh
(candi is Sanskrit for temple) was Java’s last major Hindu temple, built as a
remote mountain refuge for a Sivaite cult in the mid-fifteenth century, after
most of the island had converted to Islam. The main structure is a stepped
stone structure that resembles nothing more than a Mayan pyramid. Topping it
out was a two-metre phallus, now protected in the National
Museum in Jakarta – an extravagant example of the
inexplicable obsession with fertility in a country where life of every kind
burgeons year-round.
Sukuh radiates the over-ripe and
faintly toxic atmosphere of libidinal irruption that soaks Rimbaud’s
hallucinatory poems. One remarkable relief shows Ganesha, the elephant-headed
deity usually depicted in a contemplative seated pose, dancing with abandon,
his sex organs flapping, as he swings a dog by the tail: quite why he is doing
so no one knows. A relationship between Sukuh and the tantric cult of Tibet has been
proposed, but it’s just a guess; no records of the rituals enacted there have
survived.
Rimbaud didn’t make some big
declaration that he was forever abandoning literature: he simply stopped
producing it. There is a Malay word in a late poem, fuelling speculation that
he may have written it after his visit to Java; more likely it’s one of those
linguistic anomalies, like the Roman coins that turn up in obscure places
they’re not supposed to be. It’s maddening to think that the most original poet
of his time lost the itch just as he experienced the lavish sensory disordering
of a season in Java. Maybe exposure to a land ruled by magic broke the spell
and he became disenchanted with the efficacy of the hallucination of words.
In A Season in Hell, Rimbaud
prophesied the dominant trend in western culture for a century to come with his
oft-quoted dictum, ‘It is necessary to be absolutely modern.’ Perhaps in Java,
he saw that, in fact, it isn’t.
For more information, visit Rimbaud in Java's web page.
Read Nick Ochwar's April 2012 interview with Jamie James in the Los Angeles Times
