Rimbaud in Space.

Verlaine and Rimbaud, the foolish virgin and infernal bridegroom.What got me into urban aesthetics, into thinking about space as a mutable ontological construct, was the poem ‘Les Ponts’ from Rimbaud’s hallucinatory, proto-modernist prose poems, the Illuminations. It was this poem, these ten or so lines that were most likely inspired by Rimbaud’s time in London with Verlaine, which made me realise one’s environment is not just a received notion, but a space that is fluid, animate and storied, an epistemological construct that can affect and be affected, redesigned, reimagined, in something like the spirit of Corbusier’s maxim that a house is be a machine for living in.

Here’s the poem, with an accompanying translation by AS Kline.

‘Des ciels gris de cristal. Un bizarre dessin de ponts, ceux-ci droits, ceux-là bombés, d'autres descendant ou obliquant en angles sur les premiers, et ces figures se renouvelant dans les autres circuits éclairés du canal, mais tous tellement longs et légers que les rives, chargées de dômes, s'abaissent et s'amoindrissent. Quelques-uns de ces ponts sont encore chargés de masures. D'autres soutiennent des mâts, des signaux, de frêles parapets. Des accords mineurs se croisent et filent, des cordes montent des berges. On distingue une veste rouge, peut-être d'autres costumes et des instruments de musique. Sont-ce des airs populaires, des bouts de concerts seigneuriaux, des restants d'hymnes publics? L'eau est grise et bleue, large comme un bras de mer. – Un rayon blanc, tombant du haut du ciel, anéantit cette comédie.’

Grey skies of crystal. A bizarre design of bridges, now straight, now curved, and others descending in oblique angles to meet the former, and these patterns repeating themselves in other bright-lit windings of the canal, but all so long and weightless that the shores, weighted with domes, sink and contract. Some of these bridges are still covered with hovels. Others bear masts, signals, frail parapets. Minor chords interlace, and fade; ropes rise from the banks. You distinguish a red coat, other clothes perhaps and musical instruments. Are those popular airs, snatches from noble concerts, the remains of public anthems? The water is grey and blue, wide as an arm of the sea. – A white ray, falling from on high, annihilates this comedy.

Late Victorian London, around the time Rimbaud was there.Suddenly the reality of buildings and bridges, harbours and streets and squares, stands newly clear as a construct that presses on the mind, leaving a trace that takes on a life of its own in the imagination as either beautiful or useful, terrible or strange. And then, wonderfully, one realises that this shadowy simulachrum formed in the mind can reciprocally affect the extrinsic reality, if the user chooses to look in a certain way, or add a piece of graffiti, or the sculpture of a cat on the wall, or a strange new building shaped like a boat or a whale or a bird in flight.