“Forests and prodigious plantations where gentlemen savages hunt their news by the light they have invented.”
Perhaps we can start there just as the Lord did. With some light. But to claim the subject of this collection of half-formed grotesqueries to be light is a very strange choice. To read Rimbaud isn’t to experience a divine illuminating light, it’s to look into the pallid marble apse of a brand new cathedral and faintly make out streaks of shit graffitied between story-high stained glass windows. It’s then when you cast your eyes away from a Heaven that’s been profaned that you have nowhere else to look but into the deep chasm of a personal abyss. And there, deep within the void of the self is where Rimbaud was able to illuminate. Where we thought nothing could persist, the jewels and ornaments of fossilized shells lining dark cavernous walls lazily light up under his lantern.

The best to ever do it. One of my favorite books. Unlike a lot of other obscurantist poetry, I didn't feel like I had to "decipher" Illuminations to "get it." I just knew I was reading one of the most beautiful books in the world. "His Realism is built of things and visions and smells but all of them are tinted a shade darker by understanding that the paints that depict our world are created from pigments that are squeezed out of the guts of the atavistic images that float to us in our nightmares." Well said indeed.
Thank you — an extremely fun read