At the outset, I knew that the project that I proposed to do was impossible. Rimbaud was a genius, simply put, who responded brilliantly to the canon (at the time) of literature in the formation of his uniquely crafted poetic idiom. Unlike Rimbaud, I did not master Latin at the age of 7, as I am, in the words of George Trow, a “half literate son of rock and roll”.
As such, I find it difficult to articulate, or even summarize, just what it is that makes a Season in Hell so special, so applicable to myself. Only a diffuse glow, a sort of resonance seems to pervade the work, which can be found in its bewildering imagery, its abject, cathartic energy, and its undeniable aesthetic force. Perhaps it is because a Season in Hell does not lend itself to interpretation, that it seems to be so totally rooted in what it is-- essentially confounding the tongue, that I find it attractive.
I hate talk, I especially hate small talk, and that seems to be the hallmark of our petty media oversaturated culture. It seems apt that many artists today take pains to say that their work is “sexy”. Almost as though to say, “my work is sexy, therefore I am sexy”. And such sentiments underscore the idea that art is only fodder for talk, and in its slick and barren artificiality, it is “sexy”. That is, talk becomes sexy only when it becomes a veneer for something else— sexiness is a matter of interpretation.
Well, I mean to escape all of that. And I intend to do that by presenting my work in no other terms than what it is. It is a clumsy but necessary device, which parallels what Rimbaud said when asked by his mother about what A Season in Hell really meant, he said “it means what it says”.
While I cannot entirely repudiate my artistic intentions by calling this thing a termites mound, or the selectively ornamental bower of a bird—some mindless construction— I do say that I meant to thwart my original purposes. In a similar sense, if you were to build a castle in the air, you would find that as no cloud adheres to a given shape, so does the envisioned plan fluctuate according to unforeseen contingencies. I am about elevating an eccentric aesthetic—I am about philosophic burlesque. Eccentricity is great because its strength lies in its ability to throw the entire order out of whack— by its very existence an eccentric work is an aesthetic indictment. While it is not exclusively a punk project, disgust for the mainstream (or perceived mainstream) is a vital element in constructing a highly individualized artifice. And artifice is not like talk which just comes out, artifice is ultimately not very serious. And that’s the thing with talk, no matter how lighthearted or trivial, there is always an essentially incorrigible kernel of seriousness to it.
Or to put it another way, in the poem “Novel” Rimbaud uses the refrain “We aren’t serious when we are 17”—given that he was 15 when he wrote that, 17 is in a sense, a state of mind. We could say, merely that “we aren’t serious” because we will always be 17 in our minds, we will always hold on to that number because it represents innocence on the verge of awakening. And that’s where we want to be, on the raft just before it plunges down the waterfall.